Revenue Reimagined Podcast: Episode #1 Unlocking Sales Potential: The Key to Business Growth

The traditional 'growth at all costs' revenue model is broken. In this episode, Jen Allen and Kyle AC unpack why throwing volume and activity at a revenue problem no longer works. They argue that hyper-focusing on product features leaves sellers unprepared to address the broader business problems their buyers truly face. The guests discuss how misalignment between sellers, companies, and customers drives bad behavior across the sales organization. Kyle advocates for consumption-based models and aligning commission structures with actual customer value, while Jen emphasizes the dire need for deeper business acumen so reps can sell beyond the product. The conversation also outlines tactical shifts for modern sales teams. Leaders must revamp the onboarding process to prioritize industry knowledge over product features, utilize mutual action plans mapped to customer value, and systematically analyze lost deals to combat the status quo.

Discussed in this episode

Why the traditional volume and activity approach to revenue growth is fundamentally broken.
The urgent need to train reps on business acumen instead of just product knowledge.
How misaligned incentives between the seller, company, and customer lead to churn.
Transitioning from contract signed to successful consumption as the finish line for deals.
Using mutual action plans to align sales cycles with specific customer value milestones.
Extending SDR onboarding timelines to focus on executive problems before product features.
Crafting cold outreach that hypothesizes a problem rather than immediately pitching features.
Analyzing lost deals to specifically target and defeat the buyer's status quo.

Episode highlights

0:00 — Introduction and playful guest banter about showing up early
3:00 — Choosing alternative revenue roles like rev ops and sales
5:30 — Jen on fixing the broken volume and activity revenue problem
8:00 — Kyle on aligning the seller, customer, and company incentives
13:00 — Redesigning compensation plans for sustainable, long-term growth
19:00 — Why sales leaders are to blame for bad rep behaviors
23:00 — Creating mutual action plans focused on time to value
29:00 — Rethinking rep onboarding to improve overall sales ramp time
35:00 — Crafting better cold emails and pitching the right way
40:00 — Rapid-fire questions and closing advice for sales professionals

Key takeaways

Align compensation with customer success, not just signed contracts.
Business acumen trumps pure activity volume in modern selling.
Extend onboarding to teach industry context before product features.
Stop pitching in your first email; hypothesize a problem instead.
Analyze deal losses to systematically combat the status quo.

Transcript

Welcome to episode one of the Revenue Reimagined podcast. We wanted to kick the show off with a bang, and what better way to do that than to bring a little LinkedIn feud to real life. Dale and I are super excited to have both Jen Allen, Kauth and Kyle AC on the show today. Jen is the head of community growth at Lavender AI, former chief evangelist at Challenger and host of the Winning the Challenger Sale podcast.

She spent the last 18 years in a variety of frontline sales roles selling to CEOs, chief sales officers and chief marketing officers for small companies like Challenger, Corporate Executive Board and Gartner. So, I think she knows a thing or two about sales. And Kyle started as an SDR at Qualtrix, was rapidly promoted to a VP role, and after five consecutive President's Clubs as an AE, director and VP, he made the move over to Mongo DB, where he leads North America for high-tech acquisition, and is also the founder of Sales Introvert. Welcome both of you all to the show.

Thanks for being here. Oh my gosh, Adam Dale, it's so great to be with you too. Episode one. Woo.

I mean it's it's great to be with me. Let let let's be real. But it's it's all good. No, I All good.

All good. whenever Great great to see you, Adam. Great to see you, Dale. Jen here.

It's uh I I also am seeing you right now. So I'll I'll say that. So, it's a little behind the scenes for everyone. It's funny because both of y'all messaged me and said you might be about five minutes late.

And I texted Dale and I said, we're going to see who shows up first cuz the other one's going to give the person some shit, right? Now, I fully expected Jen to show up first. But she didn't. Kyle was here first and we were like just sitting here twiddling our thumbs waiting.

You know why? It's because I actually work and Kyle just writes posts on the internet about doing work. So it's a little bit of a different circumstance. No, Jen, I write posts about delegation.

Ah. Let's be Let's be clear. It's very, very good. So, now that we're starting with a little bit of controversy, I mean the show is called Revenue Reimagined.

So, for each of you, if you were in a particular role in the go-to-market function, the revenue function today, what is the other function in the entire go-to-market function that you would want to take on? Kyle, ladies first. If I I could do a full 45 minutes. If I could be in any revenue producing role, besides sales leadership.

Besides sales. Oh, I would want to be in rev ops. Ooh. Would love to would love to go set really unrealistic quotas, tell sales leaders why they are realistic, make 'em panic a little bit, roll out roll out comp plans that might convenience.

No, in all seriousness, I think um, Uh, rev ops has never been more critical. Uh, territory management, getting that right, getting the org set up correctly, I I think has an outsized impact now compared to before. So if I were to leave sales leadership, rev ops would be the place for me. Love it.

Jen, how about you? So, I'm going to currently in marketing, which is the first time I've ever been in marketing, in this community role. I would mine's an easy answer. I would go back to sales.

I still miss it. There are a lot of things I don't miss about it, but there are certain things I do miss, which is why I get pulled into it. Um But that's why you're a rock star marketer, cuz you know sales. Hey.

That's true. I just constantly think of what did marketing always used to do that bothered me and just don't do those things. So it's it's funny you say that, right? So I I figured you might go back to sales.

Kyle, I didn't expect rev ops and we'll we'll we'll dive into that in a minute and certainly the part about unrealistic quotas. But revenue's broken, right? Like I think it's it's safe to say that revenue that we've seen over the past, call it five, seven, 10 years, this growth at all cost mentality, just throw people at it, it's not working. So, how do we fix it?

And you both have two different lenses. Jen, you have like sales, but community marketing. Kyle, you look at it through a different lens, you know, having come from Qualtrics and now at Mongo. Like, what is the number one thing?

You're you're in charge. What are you going to do to fix what's broken right now? Do you want to take it first or do you want me to? And you can't fix each other.

Yeah, Jen, I'll I'll let I'll let you go first this time. Okay. This one is an easy one for me. I think and I've I talk about this a lot.

But I think the traditional way of throwing volume and activity at a problem, a revenue problem is largely why we are where we are. And it's not to say that volume and activity are never effective. They were highly effective when demand is really high. What I would do instead is I would take every single member of a sales organization.

I don't care if you've been there for 10 years, 15 years, five minutes, two days, and I would reground people in the principles of what it is that we are solving for, how those problems anchor up into higher order things, and what else we are competing against outside of just what we sell. I think the biggest problem that I observe today that like lights me up in a really bad way is we are so myopically focused on the thing that we sell and how great that thing is. And we're asking sellers to go and have really difficult conversations where they have little to no context around anything outside of what they are selling. And so, for me, I think you can bucket it under business acumen.

I think we have a big, oozing, gaping wound of business acumen today and that's why we default back to volume and activity. Good one. I like that. Jen, that was that was brilliant.

So I'm I'm shocked. Um I I mean it it's it's Kyle, it's almost the exact notes that you were typing in the chat telling her to say. I mean, but you couldn't you couldn't tell she was reading them. So, I got to give credit.

I got to give credit where credit's due. No, I'll I'll I'll go I'll go on a mini ramp here. I I think one thing that's broken and hasn't for a long time is alignment between seller, customer, and company. That does that all it works for.

So, if you think about the traditional SAS model, seller gets a contract signed. The only person getting value at that point is the salesperson. They get paid up front, they get paid their commission. The customer does not get value yet.

The customer realizes value typically months later as they implement the solution and if it works, which most don't, which isn't even guaranteed. And then the company the seller works for doesn't get value often times until the renewal happens because most companies are spending so much to acquire the customer, they're losing money up until the renewal and the payback period actually comes to a close. And so, you have these really bad incentives across the board, right? And so I I if I want to go realign and I'm cheating a little bit cuz this is a lot about what Mongo is doing, in a consumption world, is try to make sure that everybody gets value as close to the same way in the same time as possible, to make sure incentives are clear across the board.

I'm seeing this improve the sales cycle because you're thinking about customer success, not contracts signed. I'm seeing it work out for profitability because the company is getting valued before they pay out commissions and everything comes together to align all stakeholders in the sales process much better than the traditional try to sell as much as possible up front. The customer ends up getting screwed, they may or may not get value, they churn. Reps may may make money or they may not close any deals at all because the customers don't trust them, but it breaks alignment across the board.

So that's what I would look at. That's super interesting because I think the other part is like the metrics that go across each function in revenue may be conflicting, right? And I think that's what you're saying like if we get alignment on the metrics, and I think what happened with this whole like kind of mini crash or crash that we had, is it enables NDR or NRR or however you want to describe it versus ARR. So like the focus is like kind of shifting to profitability and like Kyle, super impressed that I have I don't hear many sales leaders actually think about CAC or think about profitability.

They're actually thinking about ARR, closed deals, and numbers at the top of funnel versus all the way through. So, super awesome. I I love that answer. I mean, I'll say just really quickly, like as a as an AE, someone who's on the front line for as long as I was, um and I caught myself emphatically agreeing with Kyle by nodding my head.

I had to stop it. But as someone who was an AE for so long, first time ever. Yeah, exactly. Well Jen was typing in the notes to what Kyle would say, right?

But I never thought about profitability for like my first 10 years, because I never had to. All I was measured against was a was an annual target, right? So if I had to discount it down, like no sweat off my back. Right.

I was lucky enough to work for a sales leader who then spent a lot of time with other team saying, you might think this is a win, it's actually a loss for a business. But I think that that problem that Kyle mentioned is so, so bad because if you got people out on the front line doing things, not recognizing the harm they caused to the business, of course we're going to be in the situation that we're in. I I remember fighting, excuse me, with sales leaders about this. So I started my career in health care, right?

Where cogs, cost of good sold, is something we talk about all the time. This device costs us whatever, 900 bucks, we need to sell it for X. And I remember my manager, you know, Kyle, would tell me, well, it it doesn't matter. Sell it for $700.

Like, we just need the closed deal. Period the end. We need to put that number up and then I made great money. And I think that is what is created a lot of the problem we have now.

But I want to I want to push back on you for a second. So I agree with you this needs to change, but today's generation of sellers is and I I'd love it if you could speak to how you're addressing this at Mongo. Today's generation of sellers is so used to, I close the deal, I get paid. Arguably, I better get paid that that same month or next month, cuz if you tell me I have to wait until the next quarter, I'm going to go find another job elsewhere.

How do we change that mindset to get the sellers bought in to what healthy business should look like? Yeah, that's a really fair point. One of the challenges has been finding the right compensation plans and looking at different milestones that you pay out. And so we have a very blended comp plan.

I'm not going to go into extreme detail just so Mongo doesn't like fire me. But uh you you have to you have to look at different gates that happen earlier in the sales. Lavender's hiring. Jen is not getting me through that door.

Right now. Um, so that that is a to gates to recognize before they're at full spend is big. And so you're actually in some ways paying more commission rate, higher commission rate than traditional because you're paying on the consumption piece. I think though it's also a mentality shift because two years ago, even a year ago, reps were taking outrageous OTEs, getting massive pay raises, and then they all got laid off, right?

And so I think a lot of smart sellers are now saying, you know what, maybe it's not all about the OTE, maybe I really should look deeper at product market fit and sustainable growth. When I'm on recruiting calls, I'm talking about the sustainability of Mongo, where we're going long-term. I'm not I'm saying like if you're looking for the best place to go make as much as you can in the next couple of years, maybe, maybe not, I don't know, it's a hard job. Doesn't exist.

Like that doesn't exist. Like we should just. That is where everybody Like it it doesn't right now, I don't think, but I'm not going to want to. It's a lottery ticket.

It's a lottery ticket, right? So that that's the trade-off, Adam. There there is there is a point where it is a compromise for the seller. However, I'm really bought in to you should be selling for a company where you believe in the long-term and you should buy into a compensation plan that is good for you and the customer and the company.

Because if it's completely one-sided to the seller, guess who gets chopped when things get hard. Yeah. Yeah, but then but then companies need to be more um aligned, like be more aligned to the selling as well. Because if they know it's a long-term strategy, like you can't just be like, okay, you don't hit your number in two quarters you're gone, right?

So you like we have a we have a systemic problem at the leadership level to make sure that we're we're putting proper targets on. You said something about being in rev ops and setting bad targets and or setting unrealistic targets. Like, that comes from the top down. So if you actually set it up so they understand long-term, then maybe you get more activity at that long-term or you get the the behavior that you want at the long-term.

Hey, you got to play the long game. You got to develop and you got to look at the context behind the numbers. But the behavior and the activity are it. And Jen, to go back to what you were saying, you know, it was this mindset of let's just hire people.

We're going to pay them a shit ton of money, right, Kyle? We're going to give them this OTE and they're going to make all this money and it's going to be great. And we could go down a whole tangent about product market fit and how much you should believe in what you're selling and not just work someplace for the money. But then they would come in, Jen, and they'd be hired and they'd be told, just go reach out to a hundred more people, or let's just go hire 20 more people, or go make 25 more phone calls and all that stuff.

And that activity model, it it's broken. It doesn't work. Talk to me about that a little bit, cuz you you you got lit up when you were talking about that. How how do we change that?

How do we create that change? It's funny, we the people at the front line often take the hit for it. We see it all the time on LinkedIn, you hear it all the time, it's my sellers suck, my sellers are order takers, whatever. Because it is so much easier to point the finger at the people who are executing on the strategy versus the person who built the strategy.

And so, behind every bad, not every, behind many bad emails, behind many bad like cold calls, unprepared calls, terrible discovery calls, is a leader at the top who believes that sellers are coin-operated activity-makers. And I think we've gotten really far away from looking at sales as a profession. Like, when I think of the word profession, I'm like, it's something to be proud of. It's something that is hard to replicate.

And as much as I give Kyle a hard time, Kyle is a true sales professional that is also a leader. And so, I would imagine the experience of working for Kyle is extremely different than the experience of someone who moved up because they happen to be on the right side of demand for a long time and just said, hey, this play worked for me, let me go make everybody else do it as well. And so, again, as much as I make fun of Kyle, what he's teaching, I think is very rare. And I think it's why we default to what is easy.

And what is easy is to tell people to do a bunch of activities, and then to look at a dashboard that has a bunch of green on it and pat ourselves on the back and be like, we're doing the right things, maybe it's the wrong people. I remember very early in my career, Jen, um being very frustrated at measurements from metrics because it's like, look, I can go make 80 calls to a sales list and look productive, but get nothing done. And so I decided very early on as a sales leader that I would have very specific outcomes I wanted to drive, but I'm going to give AEs flexibility in how they get there based on how they best operate. And then coach and give input to make sure they're going in the right direction and course correct where needed.

But I have never in my career ever given any AE a specific volume target. I I worked for a company that shall remain nameless, um many years ago. And we it was very activity-focused on calls for our BDR team. And we had not one, not two, but three BDRs that had these like 800 numbers they would call and they would sit and listen to the recordings just to rank up their.

You're all nodding your head because it happens, right? To skew up their call time. They didn't close shit, but boy were they doing great on the metrics and boy did they get complimented for doing the metrics. Tying tying this in.

So Kyle, you I've I've followed you in sales introverts for a long time. Um and you talk a lot uh talk a lot about buyer psychology. How do we weave this in to getting reps to actually utilize psychology to sell the right way? So it goes back to the alignment where I was talking specifically about the customer getting value at a very different time than the sales person getting value.

When a salesperson runs a deal cycle with the contract signature as the end point, they behave very differently than if deal cycle ends when the customer successfully uses your product, right? It's just by changing the marker for when a deal is actually won from paper signed to successful consumption and it forces better rep behavior. Because if you go sell something that doesn't work, and they don't have success, then they don't consume, you don't get paid, nothing happens. And then what the buyer understands that your criteria for them is not again, my success is not contract signed, it's your success.

That Yep. Gets alignment early and often. Yep. The discovery questions change, the demos change, the business value case building changes, everything changes to to drive something that looks a lot less like a pure sales engagement and a lot more like a sales and CS and customer partnership.

Yeah, one one of the things I do with my teams is I call them joint engagement plans because that's what we ended up calling them with other companies, but mutual action plans. But the mutual action plan is kind of like when you're starting to build the proposal out and you're you're figuring out what the buying cycle is and what the buying process is. But you map it all the way to value, kind of what you're saying. So like contract signature is kind of like in the middle and you you go all the way to value because you have to understand the customer has to understand, what are the things I'm going to get to when I'm going to get value?

Is it two months after the contract sign? Is it a month after? And then you can have the CS team um have the joint engagement plan and you guys can all be on the same page. So we can start getting CS involved in driving value for the customer in the sales process near the end of it.

So as we're building proposals, as we're going through some of those pieces, if everyone agrees that, yes, we're going to sign the contract in August, but we're looking for value in October because we have some board meeting or we have something else that we have to deliver. This is on the customer side. Then we can all be aligned in that joint engagement plan. Uh I love that Kyle, I think that's super smart.

But so many buyers and so many founders and so many sales leaders. Like if you say what's your time to value, you're going to look at you like you have six heads. Like I I remember the first time I said that to a founder, like in an interview process, like, so what's our customer's time to value? They, I I won't out who they are, looked at me there, what's time to value?

how how are we not talking about this, right? Like, and I I think it's interesting and I'm curious both your all's thoughts, this is great. Can this be applied and will this work with early stage startups whose goal is, well shit, we just got to get the customers to I mean to go get funding. Jen, please.

Yeah, I think so I work for an early stage startup. It's my first time. I'm not acting like I'm the world's expert on like early stage startups, but it is something we are constantly talking about, not in pockets. And I think that's the key.

Like, every Friday we have a meeting with engineering, sales, marketing, operations, the entire company because we are an early stage company and we can do that. And one of the key focus areas that we talk about is how many seconds, how many minutes, how many hours like, what are those intervals at which someone starts to experience that moment of delight or like, man, I'm glad I bought this. Or on the other side, like where are those moments where we're breaking that down? And I think one of the things that I've seen in other organizations that I've worked with is it's it's a leadership conversation or it's like it's a customer service conversation or it's a this conversation and it happens in silos.

And so what we failed to do when that happens is we failed to bring all of the voices that might be able to add a unique perspective and look at the problem. And we also failed to make it a a significant priority. So it just happens to be on like somebody's KPIs down here, but not a true organizational one. So I would actually say like your early stage companies are the places where that should be thriving, where we can collectively come together and talk about it because we don't have 700 people on a Zoom.

You've got 20 or 30 at best. But does that How how does and I want to tie into lavender, right? So lavender, I've used it forever. Um I think it's great.

Shameless plug for you all. But it starts when when you start selling this way to what Kyle's talking about and what you're talking about, it starts with that initial outreach to the customer, right? It starts with how you're framing what it is you do, what your goal is, what it is you're selling. You are certainly amongst us, Kyle might disagree, but I'll call you the email expert on on this podcast.

Um I love you. How how how does it start from the top? Yeah, I think it starts from being intentional about why we're reaching out now and to them. So, I mean, that's not a new philosophy that's been around forever, but it is so frequently disregarded.

And I think it goes back to an earlier problem, which is we're talking about time to value for a customer, but one of the other big like misfires I think we make is time to performance or whatever you want to call it for a new SDR or seller. We are so freaking eager to get them to a point where we're like, look, they're performing, that we push them to do things that they're not really prepared to do. Like I would argue for most sales people, particularly new sales people, if your only onboarding for them is throwing them into here's our internal systems, here's who your manager is, here's like your tech and here's what we do and I'm going to talk to you about it for four days, we cannot be surprised when they pick up the phone and write emails and just talk about what we do. We've taught them to do that.

That is literally the playbook we're teaching them. So, I am a big proponent and we did this at our last company of extending the onboarding timeline so that before I ever teach you about the product, I'm teaching you about the executive, the problems they solve, the alternative things they might do, the status quo that they might be okay with, why, all of that so that by the time I put you on the phone, yeah, it might take a little bit longer, but you actually know what the hell you're talking about. And so then from to go back to your original question, when I am starting that touch point with you, I'm not sending an email that's like, yo, Lavender's a cold email tool and I see you have, you know, SDRs on your team. Do you want to try it?

I'm actually being able to say I can pick out an observation of what's happening in that company, hypothesize a problem, and show up with a point of view. And to me, that's what great selling is. It's not slinging our stuff and hoping someone gives a shit. Well, and I think there's a framework like you guys, uh you know, at Lavender, you guys have the scoring piece of it, but if if if you take Lavender out for a second and you just talk about how reps are thinking about it, even in presentations, emails, it's like us, us, us, us.

And if like I always set a framework up of like, what about the customer that you know of? Like anything that you can figure out, even if some of it is guessing, because then you get them to start conversing with you on like the first slide, like you think they have some problem and then you articulate that to the industry. So you start at their problem, get to the industry problem, so they don't know so they know they're not alone. And then you go into how you solve the industry problem, then you can solve their problem.

So if you think about that small little framework of like, their problem, industry problem, then how you solve those problems, I think we get away from like my widget is the best widget. But this isn't just tech. That's the so I'm working with a client who is non-tech and going through their cold emails, the first email I read was, hi, my name is such and such, I'm your account executive at such and such and we offer you such and such. You can't send this shit to people.

I mean, you can, but it's the the problem's going to keep going and going and going. This is where I think What what what would the Lavender score be on that? Boo. It would be boo.

It would be like not a good score. But this is like the we can't fault the seller, right? Because the seller is doing that because the product's what they know. I just did an email coaching session yesterday and I had this really thoughtful debate where everyone's like, but I can't explain everything we do in 50 words.

So I can't write a 50-word email. And I was like, why do you think you need to explain everything you do in the first email? Like when you meet someone on an online dating service, are you walking through like your high school GPA and your college major and your activities? Like it's a weird thing.

They don't. I I always say you need to have the Twitter, the the value proposition, the Twitter headline. 40 characters, 140 characters or less. Can you do it?

Not many can. I I can't get into Twitter, but you're right. It's I had this conversation with a founder about an elevator pitch, right? Their their elevator pitch was a paragraph and a half.

I'm like, that's not a damn elevator pitch, like it's crazy. So we're we're talking about value, um and and giving value. And one of the things that we believe in very strongly, um collectively is giving more than you get and giving back to our audience. And both of you have been so kind to offer up something to give to a member of our audience.

So I'm going to go to Kyle first. Um chat about what you're uh what you're going to share with us. Yeah, so I uh I've put together a collection of the the top frameworks I've used as a sales rep, sales leader over the years. Uh I've had a lot of people use it effectively and I'm going to offer a free copy to a member of the audience that that uh Adam you and Dale select.

I love it. I I I purchased said frameworks for everyone listening. Um like wasn't given them. I actually gave Kyle money.

Um these That's why he came on the podcast. it might be. Um, the these are worth it. You you want these frameworks, I promise.

So Jen, you know when you said nobody's ever bought any of my frameworks, you were wrong. I am the one person, damn it. I have a customer. I'm proud of you.

I think that's your picture in the background, Adam. Over there in that frame. I'm on I'm on Kyle's screen saver smiling. He's like, I have a customer.

Jen, what about you? You you had something pretty cool also. Yeah. I am going to give away one year of Lavender Pro.

And so I've sat here and harped on about how important our communication is in sales and I love the idea of giving a gift to a listener. So the listener you pick will get to use it and help them write emails that set them off on the right foot um in a sales process. I love that. And Lavender kicks kicks ass, so.

It does. Awesome. We're wrapping we're getting near the end. We're getting near the end.

So we're going to do some rapid-fire questions for you guys. You guys are not totally prepared for this, but let's uh let's start it off. What's the first one, Adam? We never are.

All right, Kyle, what song would best describe your revenue strategy? Oh no. Oh my goodness. Oh jeez.

Um Kyle, I've got one if you need a lifeline. Jen, lifeline. Like a prayer. Please.

Mine. Kyle Kyle phone a friend. Mine would be Juvenile Back That Azz Up because most problems in a sales process start in the beginning, not in the end. So that's what I'm going with.

That's awesome. That might be the best answer we've ever had by the way. And that makes no sense since your episode one, but we have recorded other episodes. That's awesome.

Kyle, we'll go back to you. If you had a crystal ball and there's one revenue trend that you think is going to take center stage the next 12 to 18 months. What's that one trend that you still see sticking around in 12 months? I think I think companies are going to look a lot closer at sales productivity and they're going to do a whole lot less of increasing head count, increasing targets to hit numbers and more around increasing sales productivity with their best reps.

Great one. Yeah. I love it. Jen, anything to add there?

Anything different? I mean, it's the stupid two letters that I don't really want to say, but we have to. I think it's going to be AI-izing every little bit. And I think we're going to see a hype cycle just like we do with any new technology where we try to use it for everything, we get smarter, we realize it's not meant to solve all the world's problems, and then we back up and look at ways we can use it for quality, not just quantity or efficiency.

Just like Juvenile said. Yeah. There you go. Juvenile back in action.

Jen, if you um if you could only choose one, would you focus on customer retention or customer acquisition? Oh, customer retention because great customers will bring you new customers. Awesome. Kyle, one lesser known tip that may be surprising, may may a surprising difference in revenue outcomes for you.

That you can give to the group. I mean, I think I think I'm going to piggyback on what Jen talks about earlier around onboarding. I I think onboarding being sometimes slower will actually improve rep ramp time, right? And so having learning product through the lens first of not just here's our product, but what would our customers care about this part of the product.

Requires a different order, a different timeline, but will actually improve rep ramp time despite onboarding taking longer. We're seeing that right now, my group at Mongo and I think that's actually a really astute observation by Jen. Awesome. I love it.

Do you have the last one? Uh, all right, I I I I'll try it. So this one's for both of you. Um, I'll start with Jen.

Jen, earlier in the show, uh you said that if you were not in community and marketing, you would go back to sales. So it's tomorrow morning, you are now a VP of sales. What is the very first thing that you're going to do? Mm Mm.

Hire Kyle. Not hire Kyle. Gen. Gen can't afford me.

Oh. Excuse. Um, so the first thing I would do, it's July. We run on a calendar fiscal.

I'm pulling a list of every opportunity that was worked in the first half and I'm sitting down and understanding was this deal lost to status quo? Was this deal lost to competitor? Was this deal lost to price? What is the root of why we're losing?

And then start making some decisions around what are we going to test to stop losing to those things. I don't even think I'd probably have to pull it. I would assume it's going to be status quo because status quo is killing everybody, but I would make sure that we have a very intentional strategy to defeat status quo as opposed to just like, let's hope things get better in the second half. Hmm.

Good one. Great point. Great point. Wow.

I cannot believe 45 minutes has gone by. Uh, I could sit and banter with y'all for hours. I want to thank you both, um, seriously from the bottom of our hearts. Thank you so much for coming on the show.

Shameless plug time, where can people find you? What's the best way to engage with you? Jen, you get to go first. Um, I am active on LinkedIn.

Very active on LinkedIn. I'm not active on threads. I only pick on Kyle on Twitter. It's the only reason I have a Twitter account, so I'm not even going to tell you.

So LinkedIn's the best place and Lavender's at lavender.ai. Love it. Thank you.

Kyle. You you can find me just trying to get away from Jen. So wherever Jen is, I'm not. Um but other other than that, LinkedIn, I'm very active on LinkedIn.

and then sales, my website is salesintroverts.com. Look out for a new website and a new rebrand coming soon. So.

Ooh, drop dropping the hints. Guys, thank you so much. It was a pleasure. We uh look forward to chatting with y'all soon.

Thank you.