Win More B2B Deals by Pitching Quantitative ROI | Ryan Milligan

Ryan Milligan, Chief Revenue Officer at QuotaPath, shares his unique perspective on transitioning from a RevOps leader to a CRO and how that background helps him build truly scalable revenue systems. He emphasizes the importance of aligning the entire go-to-market team around a clearly defined ICP and using compensation structures to strategically drive specific, high-value behaviors, such as securing multi-year contracts to improve NRR. Beyond compensation strategy, Ryan breaks down why modern sellers must pivot to pitching strict, quantitative ROI rather than relying on vague promises of "saving time" or "doing things better." He details how to build a bulletproof business case for a CFO by tying product outcomes directly to baseline metrics, gross revenue retention, and bottom-line impact. Finally, he shares insights on how to make SaaS products highly defensible in the era of AI by deeply embedding workflows and making them a collaborative team sport.

Discussed in this episode

• Transitioning from a RevOps leader to a CRO and how it shapes a focus on scalable revenue systems.
• Defining what a great customer looks like to align BDRs, AEs, and AMs on the same goals.
• Using compensation accelerators to drastically shift seller behavior and increase multi-year deals.
• Building a compelling CFO business case by combining revenue retention, commission offsets, and renewal tax.
• Debating the specific merits of consumption-based pricing versus traditional ARR models in B2B software.
• Tying Customer Success and Account Management compensation directly to early indicators of product value.
• The necessity of pitching quantitative ROI instead of relying on vague "time savings" benefits.
• Making SaaS products highly defensible in the AI era through deep partnerships and embedded CRM workflows.

Episode highlights

1. 0:00 — Ryan's RevOps to CRO transition
2. 3:00 — Defining a scalable revenue system
3. 5:30 — How compensation drives seller behavior
4. 8:45 — Getting CFO buy-in for accelerators
5. 12:20 — Incorporating Gross Revenue Retention into comp
6. 16:00 — Consumption-based pricing vs traditional ARR
7. 21:30 — Defining time-to-value for post-sales
8. 27:15 — Pitching strict quantitative ROI
9. 32:00 — Building defensible software against AI
10. 36:45 — Rapid fire leadership questions

Key takeaways

• Compensation plans instantly drive seller behaviors.
• Define "better" using strict quantitative math.
• CFOs value multi-year deals at a premium.
• Integrate software deeply to build defensibility.
• Stop conducting disjointed multi-stage discovery calls.

Transcript

You have to have a very clear like ROI laid out that the buyer agrees to as to like why what justifies the purchase of the product. Define what effing better means because better isn't going to help me get you to success. Is better three is better 10 is better 154. Like in order for me to know that I think sellers have to be leading with the quantitative ROI. Welcome back to another episode of the Bridge the Gap podcast powered by Revenue Reimagine. Today's guest is Ryan Milligan who's the chief revenue officer at Quota Path. He's an expert in building scalable revenue systems for high growth companies and followed what I like to call an untraditional path which we'll talk about. He is not a sales leader to CRO. He's not a marketing leader to CRO. He is a RevOps leader to CRO. And you all know how much I love me some RevOps. So, we're going to talk about this for a bit. He's helped companies align their GTM teams, create clear sales compensation structures, build forecasting models that link sales performance to business outcomes, and he's the man behind many of the systems that help organizations scale their revenue efficiently. Hence, RevOps to CRO, not sales leader to CRO. This episode's about building better sales performance systems, aligning revenue teams, and ensuring that activity translates into real measurable business growth. Ryan Milligan, thanks for joining the show.

Adam Dale, thanks for having me. I'm really excited to be here.

Yeah,

it was my decision, not Dale. Just thank me, not

Yeah, because he's such a RevOps nerd. He He's like, I I need to have someone else that I can talk with besides Dale because he doesn't know anything about RevOps. But

that's [ __ ] Dale pretends not to know about RevOps, so everyone else does his work. He knows deeply about RevOps and how to build it. He's just I don't know what's HubSpot.

I mean, if you can if you can pretend you're naive and the systems in place and you just have people go build it for you, it's a great system. You know, that secret to RevOps. Pretend you don't know how. No, I'm kidding.

All right. Sorry, I stepped on you.

So funny.

Yeah. No. Um, and you and what Adam was talking about in your intro is building scalable revenue operations. So, you've been at the forefront of scaling web operations for for companies. What does a scalable revenue system actually look like?

Yeah, it's a great question. I think the the biggest piece of it to me is that everybody in the organization knows what great revenue looks like. I think that's the biggest challenge that orgs face is if you don't have a clearly defined ICP with a clearly defined problem they're trying to solve and what a great new customer looks like that the uh board is celebrating your sales leader celebrating your account management and like post sales teams are all evenly celebrating that this is a great customer for us to bring on and land and expand that is like the fundamental piece and I think you know I'm I'm a little bit biased but comp plays a very big role in that like how do you motivate uh broad components of a team across your BDRs, AES, AM to all care about the same types of customers and all bring them on and expand them. So the the fundamental architecture, we'll get more into it for me is you all know what a great customer looks like and you know it when you see it and that is the type of customer you're building around uh to improve you know expansion network retention for the business.

So talk about the comp for a second. We we say a lot that comp drives behavior, right? I I think I post about it no fewer than a dozen times. Dale's posted about it no fewer than a dozen times, but I actually, oddly enough, had a sales leader push back on me last week when I made a very similar post about compensation driving behavior, tied more to CS actually than it was to sales. I think we're very used to this in sales. How do you bring that across the board and get executives to really buy in and lean into the fact that to get the behavior you want, compensation is going to have to drive that?

Yeah. I think there's a couple things that I typically think about. One is sharing a lot of the data we've done from experimentation with customers. These kind of pre-post uh what percentage of your revenue was great revenue before you ran some sort of accelerator and after. And that's a lot of the work that we do here at Quotapath. So um I I lead the go to market teams here at Quota Path and we try to help you use your comp plan to drive better performance from your reps right we save you time calculating paying commissions but the unique thing is hey let's help you use your comp plan to actually drive changes in behavior and so we try to show some of these stories that you know prior to using a tool like quotath and accelerating the commission rate for let's say multi-year deals we had one customer we were working with had 15% of their new business revenue in multi-year deals and we said hey let's run a test double your your commission rate you're going to pay on a two-year deal because on the total contract value it's effectively a wash and you also don't have to pay the AM to renew it. So, it's actually slightly cheaper for you. Double the rate. You're not going to do that forever, but double the rate for a quarter. Set aside 50 grand. Let's test this and see. And what happened was this customer bumped the percentage of their new business contracts in multi-year uh contracts from 15% one quarter to 75% the next quarter because the rep saw how much more lucrative it was for them to go close these longerterm contracts. Now you have to explain to the rep, hey, we're going to spike and decline, right? You're not going to always earn 2x the rate, but take advantage of the comp plan and take advantage of the business basically uh to show that we can like change the shape of this revenue and then kind of like shade it off over time. And from a CS perspective, I think the same thing rings true. It's CSM and AM are in these renewal negotiations and they want to know what the gifts and gets are for the business and they want to be aligned from a compensation perspective to those gives and gets that they're more excited for longerterm renewals or renewals with testimonials or other things that they can fight for even if they're getting uh in a little bit of a challenge on the the total commercials. And so having the AM aligned with that as well to try to secure a win for the business and then a win for their wallet. You rarely have that opportunity in, you know, these days and that's that's what we've seen a lot with our customers.

So I want to click into that for a second. So I I don't think it was you. Maybe it was. So someone posted about this on LinkedIn the other day um about um doubling comp on multi-year deals or three-year deals, etc., etc. And there was a good amount of push back in the comments of oh I'd love to see the CFO who approved that and you know how do how does that play into CAC and like how do you gain CFO buyin for that? like how much modeling, especially as a rev ops leader, Ryan, how much modeling do you actually have to do to go and say, "Listen, like yes, you're absolutely going to pay more." And on the surface, this makes no sense whatsoever. But here's why. And I like what you're talking about, right? Like at the end of the day, there is a dollar figure associated with going and having to renew this. H how do you balance that? And how do you model that?

So, I think there's a couple things. One, you look at your revenue retention every time you have a renewal and you say, "Okay, how much revenue am I typically losing when orgs are renewing?" And so you're taking that like your GRR shave off and putting it in the accelerator as like one real dollar impact because these these customers are renewing. Then you're figuring out what you're paying your AM your director of AM and potentially your CRO on these renewals. The less renewals you're running, uh you're paying less commission on those and that's going into the new business or even the the AM's comp for driving a longerterm renewal, right? And then you're going through and figuring out the overall tax that going through a renewal process is having from a cost perspective outside of just the commission like how much time your AM are spending. And you're presenting those three things together to your CFO. And then you're asking how much happier would you be if how much would you value all of our contracts in these long you have the you have the quantitative

quality of life like from a mental standpoint.

Well, it's a quality of life, but it's also I mean it's a board narrative conversation. You're improving gross and net revenue retention. um how much how much healthier does your revenue present, right? And then uh how much do you value this? And and what we tend to see is the average CFO values a two-year contract 40 50% more than they value a one-year contract. Yet they're only willing to pay a rep 10% more on a two-year deal. And so those incentives are disaled, especially when the rep is discounting two-year deals much more than they're discounting one-year deals, shaving into that incremental earnings. Yeah. And

so that's the piece that I play around with the CFOs that I talk to is if you if I could tell you overnight all your deals would be two-year deals, how much would you pay for it? And they say they say much more than a 10% bump in the commission rate for me.

Sure. Sure.

Absolutely. And I think that's the story. And the the other the other so I had a quick question going a bit off topic as because this is happening as we speak as we talk with a lot of clients in comp plan building is are you putting GRR in sales comp plans versus CS comp plan.

We hear it a lot. I think that there's a couple things you have to keep in mind. One is there's a distance between selling the deal and the act of renewing. And so it can feel quite punitive if you're, you know, you're closing a deal today and the you're measured on are they renewing a year from now or ideally two three years from now. That gap from a cause and effect perspective is challenging. What we see more orgs doing is they'll do an early signal of success. So they'll do they'll comp on implementation complete or they'll comp on uh you know an early call scheduled or or something that's like a little tighter to show that or they'll they'll comp on they're using the product effectively in the first 30 days because you want the comp plan to drive the seller to change their behavior and have that immediate feedback loop. And if the feedback loop's not a year or two years from now they're not going to you know it it doesn't change how they're operating. if the Jones account that I closed in 2024 churns in 2026 like I'm a whole different seller than I was two years ago and that's where

so before Adam goes because I can see him winding up um

you know me so well

so one of the problems that I'm seeing is that and this is this is a growth at all cost mentality that is kind of like a a lingering issue from a couple years ago

is not selling into the ICP um and you may not see that in the first 30 60 as you're implementing, but as you're getting towards renewal, like that value proposition that you promised in the sales process, whether right, wrong, or indifferent, is not being held. So, um, I like where you're going with it, but I think we need to extend it out a little bit more into like are you really selling into our ICP, which to me becomes a leadership thing versus like a compensation thing.

Well, then the other thing I would say is do you do you know your ICP in a completely binary perspective? And if you do most

and so like we do for example so I can tell you hey this percentage of our business is ICP and this percentage is not and can you accelerate the commission rate for ICP or decelerate for nonICP or have something be in the middle um where at least 50% of your contracts have to be ICP in order to earn your full commission rate or something like that. So I think there's things

and then the question is like when your ICP changes do you know enough that your ICP is changing 6 months from now because the problem the problem with ICP or buying persona or any of these things as market changes shifts as comp plan I mean as features change and shift as competitors change and shift like your ICP is probably going to change and people are like oh I did an ICP work 12 months ago. I'm like it's outdated. Well, you should I mean with all the tooling we have today, you should be doing that much more frequently than every 12 months. But

how frequently how frequently should you be looking your ICP? I'm going to sidet track and then I do have a question to get back to.

No, it's great. I mean, we try to run it quarterly to like assume that we have the proper assumptions in place and and it's it's it doesn't have to be far too complicated. It's look at your your markers of ICP versus non ICP. What are your gross and net dollar retentions of those? Is there a gap that you expect there to be? Uh and how do your win rates differ? and overall product adoption and just like does that pass the overall like sniff test of like this is a a very distinct group of people who are getting a lot more value than these other customers and if not then it opens much deeper you know speculation and investigation but really I think people over complicate ICP candidly I think it's who are the people who are the most successful in your product and show that with their usage and their dollars and if you don't have a clear distinction between your ICP and nonICP performance then that warrants like a rearchitecture, but most times I I don't think it tends to.

So, you talked this is the second time or third time you mentioned um time to value and I think that that's something really important. Manny Medina posted this weekend um on LinkedIn um about time to value and switching to uh consumption based pricing and value based pricing and how everyone everyone needs to stop talking about ARR compensating on ARR from the board level down to the C level down to the IC level. How does that Ryan affect well first off do do you align with that? I'll start there. Do you think we need to stop talking ARR and start start talking value and consumption? And then I'll

I'm a bit torn on this. I'll be honest. I think the challenge that I have with a consumption based pricing model is for some businesses it makes a lot of sense where the value is a function of their consumption. For others, you're trying to force this con like this trendy consumption based model into a business that doesn't necessarily derive or like get a lot of value out of a consumption based model. Plus, I don't think gez my phone's going off. I don't think the average uh

you can answer

uh plus I don't think the average CFO from a buying perspective is super excited to buy consumption based pricing software because they can't model out the cost of that in their business. I think it's very fruitful for a business to have consumption based pricing but for a buyer a customer of consumption based pricing it leads to many headaches in terms of modeling cost of these tools you're using over the long term. Um, so I I think there are certain businesses that certainly benefit from consumption based pricing or that make sense because the more you use it, the more value you're getting out of it. There are other tools that you're actually not using all that much, but you're getting a lot of discrete value when they're being used or there are certain moments of time in which they're being used that drive a lot of value where I think we're forcing consumption based pricing onto models that don't necessarily require it.

So I think that makes a ton of sense. I I I agree with you. I I don't think there's a one-sizefits-all for hardly anything in life. So, I I think it's very difficult to say, "Oh, consumption or oh, ARR," and I I think they all have their place. Um I I think I could look at a lot of businesses that I've worked with or even know of where if you tried to do consump like I just don't even know where you would begin. Here's something I keep seeing with sales teams I work with. Generic sequences don't work anymore. We've all gotten so good at turning out the noise that even your own buyers are ignoring you. The problem isn't your reps. It's that your sequences are static and your signals are somewhere else entirely. That's why our clients use Nooks. And the thing that stuck with me is that their sequences actually stay fresh because the signals update them automatically. Right buyer, right moment with no manual babysitting. If your outbound feels like it's shouting into a void, go check them out at nooks.ai/bridgeidgethe gap. Um, and then I look at others where it's like, yeah, you're right. ARR doesn't make sense. We have a client that's in the services space and they keep calling it ARR and like I think Dale and I are both like this is not annual recurring revenue. No matter how you look at it, how you slice it, there's no way this is ARR.

Sure.

Um but when it does come to whether it be consumption, whether it be value, like how do you build a comp plan or an accelerator based on value? Because I I do love that for the CS side. So my wife leads a CS team of almost 100 people. Um, and one of the big conversations that they have all the time with comp is time to value, right? We have to get people in the product doing whatever it is they need to do by x amount of time because we know if they don't do this within x number of days, they're going to turn within y number of days.

Sure. How do you build that comp plan and drive that behavior so that your CSMs understand the importance of it other than what I find to be the normal conversation which is Ryan listen like we know that you know Billy Bob needs to go in and do these three actions within the first month. So it's really important that you go get them to do that like go go go.

Yeah it's interesting. I think that it really depends on what the role of each person is within the organization to define how to lay that out. I think a lot of times time to value I tend to see a lot more tied to these like implementation or like CS initial adopter types of roles where maybe the CSM is responsible for implementation and the AM is responsible for like the commercial relationship potentially. And in a lot of those I do love hey uh you're completing implementation in X period of time or they're running X action. And so like for quotath major signal of value and you're getting uh your variable comp as a function of that and you can have a quota that is implemented dollars that did x within y period which I love and so you're you're totally owning are you like deriving that value and are they getting value early on in the process. I think the one thing you have to be careful of in the full cycle, so you know, if if an AM is responsible for both implementation then ongoing value is making sure that you're not having too many variables that confuse an account manager who's responsible for both up and running and longer term, you know, gross and net dollar retention. And so what I typically advise there is those those upfront signals like time to value or getting up and running the product in X days are a early indicator of their likelihood to renew and expand over some period of time. And so you're coaching your way with your AM through a lot of that making sure they're up and running so that they know the correlation between will they renew in six to nine months time.

Love it. 100% makes sense. I do think you know one of the things really interesting is probably two three or like I don't know four or five years ago there was this rise of CSM and versus AM and and the notion was these CSMs should should not be commercially measured right they they they are they are the the good guy bad guy relationship with the customer right

I'm going to mute when you're done with this because Dale feels strongly about this and I know he's going to have a lot to say

so there was this whole notion of okay the AM is responsible for like the commercial relationship they're the person basically trying to get you to paid more money and then the CSM is like your buddy who's not trying to get you to pay more money just wants you to be happy and there was this weird like overall tension and I felt it buying a lot of software where I'd work with the CSM all the time and have a great relationship and then an AM would come over the top and try to get me to expand or you know buy some other package or something which felt very clunky and disjointed. My take is that everybody needs to be very compensated. Like everybody in the org needs to be measured on how well the customer does and they should care about how successful the customer is in a CSM role, in an AM role, what have you. And so my push in these conversations always is if you have somebody who's working with a customer who's not variably compensated, then how are you measuring in a quantitative way how much value they are deriving or giving to the customer? And I'm glad we're I feel like we're shifting past that, but it was a very big Zer era thing to have these like good guys CSM situations involved.

You're on mute, Dale. You sound amazing. Best you've sounded all morning.

I think there's fundamentally a challenge with like the CSMs have always been running, which have been like project manager type based people. They've been the friendly people. they like we get into this a lot and like how do we educate them? How do we educate them on revenue? Do they even want to do revenue? Um so that's that's part of the problem. Um, and if your organization is big enough to have salespeople, AM and CSM, like it feels very clunky anyway, unless you almost split it up where you have, you know, AM's being responsible for expansion and you have CSM being responsible for retention and renewal. And so you have like you can start targeting them on like GRR versus NRR and like you kind of work that whole process through. Um, we're working with clients right now and like doing deep dives in the GRR. You see NRR going up like this and you see GRR like flattening out, going down. It's a very difficult world to kind of like play those two together. Um, I wanted to go back one piece though when when you were talking a little bit about time to value values within the CSM. I think the biggest challenge that we have in that space is that it's not set up properly from the sales team. the sales team is not really articulating what the value should be or what the the customer can derive because they're afraid that they're not going to deliver what whatever the challenges or they're going to screw up the deal or whatever it is. But if the CSM isn't aligned with the salesperson and the customer in the sales process, so pre-sale before you close it and we all align on like what we're trying to align on value. We were just talking with a a group on some of our podcast stuff and you know one of the questions is you know what does value look like for you and that's the best question because it's like if we can't define that in the pre-sale like it's not going to get defined in the post sale. I don't care what this because what's going to happen is the the people that you're selling to the buying committee on the pre-sale side is not the same people like 90% of the time are not the people that are doing the implementation work. They probably don't even know what the real problem is because they're diagnosing a symptom versus what the real problem is. And then like you're starting to do the implementation work. They're like, I know you were told like this is the problem, but our real problem is ABC. And like now what do you do? Like now you got to go back to the salesperson, the buying committee. So I actually think that value or that impact we do a lot with spiced what the impact is on the front end needs to be established and if it's not then you are not going to you're not going to re

Yeah. I think the question in the in the sales process, I mean, I completely agree. The question in the sales process has to be in six months, what would what would make you like really happy and excited to continue using this product? And and for us, I mean, we have a pretty clear, hey, I want to I want to build the complants. I want to calculate the commissions. I want my reps to be excited, but I try to have the new business team basically.

But that's but that's very that's not like you got to get real specific on the value of it. like you're they're going to pay whatever amount of money for it. So, not only do they want to be able to use it, but they have to like in my mind, you have to correlate to some revenue value, whether it's decrease in expenses, increase in whatever, blah blah talking to the you know,

no, I mean, you you have to have you have to have a very clear like ROI laid out that the buyer agrees to as to like why what justifies the purchase of the product, right? And I think what's what's been really interesting to me is

you don't see that a lot though. Yeah. And it drives me crazy.

That's the problem.

You get random things like I want I want to do something better. It's like, okay, what does better mean?

Perfect example. And like not to sidetrack, but like Ryan, we we were on the show. We on the show. We were on a call. I don't want to say being pitched, but we were on a sales call before this. Um, and I thought Dale that Rachel did a really good job like uh like I kept kept saying, "Oh, you know, we want this to be better." She's like, define what effing better means because better isn't going to help me get you to success. Is better three is better 10 is better 154. Like in order for me to know that we're hitting your objectives, what is better? So to your point in this conversation, I don't think a lot of people do a really good job of great this is going to solve the problem for you and want this product. What does success actually look like to you? Other solve the problem is way too vague. Well, and I think sellers have to be leading with the quantitative ROI. So, if you think about quota path, right? Um, we help you save time calculating paying commissions. We save time from your reps who are shadow accounting and like checking the math in their Excel spreadsheets. You then have repetition problems.

Reps do that.

You have repetition problems with the cost of losing your top rep if you pay them incorrectly. And then we're driving better performance, right? Even those four sentences aren't enough. You have to say, I'm going to drive like an average admin spends eight hours a month at a hundred bucks an hour calculating paying commissions. An average rep spends and you quantif like quantitatively lay out this will drive 18x ROI for you because here's all the money you're saving. Here's the extra lift in attainment we typically see. You know, see a 1 to 2% quoted attainment lift in the first six months. All of that stacked into your team size divided by your costs. That better be 5x if not 10x or more. uh or else you're not like making a quantitative case. And it's amazing how many people won't go to just the numbers of that. They'll just say, "Oh, we're going to save you time." It's like, "Okay, well, how valuable is time?"

Which is the weakest value prop ever.

Yes. Exactly. Which is why we we agrements and like driving better behavior because it's a much stronger value prop because what are you going to do with that time? Like, you know, I I could just work that more out. That's that's what I was going to say like like okay so you're going to play with Claude 10 more hours like like what are you going to do with the extra time that you have right and I I think that becomes a slippery slope and then I think people do get stuck on the other side is like

you don't have the avail you don't have the ability to change everything that happens in that process either so like you may be only one small part of the overall like better like attain like ca attainment type of Right. So like you have to get really into like the measurement pieces of it.

Yeah. But I I do think these orgs have to set loftier goals for like for how they're being measured within an organization. And so what I push my reps for a lot is

we're not solving the process of calculating and paying commissions because if that's all you're doing, right,

you go build a clawed tool tomorrow that will just calculate commissions a better, faster Excel. We're trying to help you use your comp plan to drive the right type of revenue that your business needs in order to hit revenue targets, do fundraising, like do it like you have to ladder up all the way to Quotapath helps you achieve your revenue goals for long-term success. And if you don't get there, then a buyer is not going to be able to make the case for you. And so that's where I try to ladder up with with our reps to say, you're not saving time. You're

fundamentally changing the shape of the revenue of this business. And like we've seen that within our own business. Our customers have too, but it it requires a lot more work to like justify that ROI for sure.

And and you also have to like put your I I think you have to push your your buyers because the other challenge I see a lot is you can calculate what the ROI is essentially, but they don't have a baseline. Like there's no baseline. So they're like, I want to increase this by 10%. And that'll generate X in revenue. Okay, where's our baseline? Well, we haven't really measured that. They're like, oh, you know, it's like this is the amount or this is the amount and it's like some range. It's like, what's your average deal size? I don't know, from 10 to 80K a year. I'm like, okay, that's not an average deal size. Like, and so I find very difficult difficult when you're selling conversations or when we're working with our clients is like what's the baseline and how are you going to attack the baseline to impact?

Yeah, for sure. No, it's uh it's a really important point. for sure.

Comp drives so much and so many people get it wrong. Um, I love, listen, I'm a huge quotath fan. Um, I love what you guys do, but I think you nailed it on the head, right? Like, we're not building you a compl. Um, anyone could build a comp calculator. I mean, I I could build Excel spreadsheets now that I never would be able to before because of Claude. So could anyone else, right? Like, if it's just comp,

um, wrong tool. But I think what what you just said applies to Quotapath and everyone else. Like we've talked a lot about comm driving behavior, but in the age of AI now and being able to vibe code anything you want, your product has to be more defensible than ever before. And I think a lot of people are failing on that. So wi with our last few minutes before we go into rapid fire like talk to me about some of the changes you guys have had to make and where you think other people have to make changes to make that product defensible in the world of AI where it's listen if we're just a calculator or if we're just a call recording tool or if we're just a insert it here go build that in cloud because everyone now thinks they could go build a tool in cloud other than enterprise security and I'd argue that you need more than enterprise security that cloud can't give you either.

Yeah. So I think there's been a couple areas we've focused. One has been in the depth of partnerships. So uh Graham Collins who runs our partnership has done a great job of of getting chief of staff, right?

Yes. Yeah. So stepped into partnerships role um and has done a great job embedding quota path in the system where our reps and our orgs are. So we are the only tool that pushes commission calculations and forecasting back into HubSpot for example. And so you know or we push uh commissions directly into rippling for payroll. And so the stickier you can get in embedding your product that you've built in these other products, you know, you can build a cloud tool that pulls from your CRM and calculates the commissions, but that tool is not then going to push this data into your next payroll run. It's not going to push into uh CRM for your reps to see. And so that like level of connectivity with other tools steps beyond what you're going to calculate in a or build in a in a tool like Cloud. Um the second thing is we want commissions to be a team sport. So like the model of okay

hey I'm gonna build a tool that allows me to download data from my CS or CRM throw it into this cloud tool and calculate commissions that works if you're just you are singularly responsible for the act of calculating and paying commissions. What we are trying to do is actually use the comp plan to drive change of behavior. So it needs to be front and center with the reps. The reps need to see how much uh how many deals they have in pipeline. They need to forecast hey if I close this deal versus this deal this is how much more money I'm going to make. I'm gonna make this much more money because it's a two-year multi-product deal versus a one-year single product deal. And even it may be a cheaper like it may be a lower ARR deal, but it makes me more money because it's better for the business. And so,

yes, could you go build a tool and claw that calculates commissions? Absolutely. But what we've really focused on is the depth of partnerships and pushing that data to the places where reps tend to be and then making commissions this team sport that's actually driving a change in behavior that you can't provision and do in a tool like a cloud. And so those are the two places where we've seen a lot of like unique differentiation.

I love that and I think that that's a great place to shift into rapid fire but not just for quota path for everyone. If your tool isn't making things number one a team sport, number two adding value, um, and number three really showing how and why your tool solves X problem very specifically, you are going to find yourself out of business. Now, that said, I think we see a lot of [ __ ] on LinkedIn of Claude just killed every SDR ever and Claude just killed every Claude's going to kill QuickBooks. Listen, folks, Claude ain't killing QuickBooks, okay? I think Claude could do some pretty good accounting things, but Claude is not killing QuickBooks. But I do think we live in a world, whether you're Quota Path, QuickBooks, Revenue Reimagined. Pick pick your poison. Adopt or die, y'all. Um because AI is coming for you and you have to be defensible. Um with that, let's move into some rapid fire. So here's the rules. 10 words or less is the goal. What is one sales metric you think that companies overuse? Uh, pipeline coverage. Man, I wish I I wish we could go into that. I agree.

A tool you can't live without in RevOps.

Gone.

Spicy. I have a spicy take on that, but uh, another story for another time. Uh, Ryan, what's the most important trait for a RevOps leader? Empathy and curiosity. Love those.

Now, let's flip it. One leadership trait that every CRO must possess.

Willingness to get in the weed

can't be the same.

Okay.

Yeah. You don't

CRO are they they try to sit too high and they don't spar deeply enough with teams.

I love that. What um what's one thing that sales teams should stop doing immediately? You come in, you're the new CRO. What are you telling them to stop disjointed discovery calls?

[ __ ] Adam

like BDR disco then AE doing the same disco then more disco like then the demo then another disc. Yeah,

exactly.

Lot of dancing happening. Awesome. Last one. Ryan, uh dream vacation destination?

Japan.

Nice.

We've never been.

We're getting a lot of Japan lately.

We're trying to go. It's our 10-y year wedding anniversary in uh in September. So, we're trying to go in the spring is the goal.

Nice. Happy anniversary, man. Happy anniversary.

It's on my list as well. Ryan Milligan, thanks for joining the show. Y'all go check out Quotapath. Listen, I am not

a sponsor. I am not a paid promoter. Um I am however a a big believer and big fan um of what Ryan, AJ, Grant, and team are building over there. Um if you are trying to solve your comp problems, and let's face it, y'all are um go check out Quotapath. Follow Ryan on LinkedIn. Ryan, thanks for joining the show, man.

Thanks so much for having me. Really enjoyed it.

Thank you, sir.