{"id":358,"date":"2025-01-28T18:35:24","date_gmt":"2025-01-28T19:35:24","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/thereferralchoice.com\/?p=358"},"modified":"2025-05-16T15:41:58","modified_gmt":"2025-05-16T15:41:58","slug":"gtm-131-being-cmo-under-mark-benioff-of-salesforce-and-the-innovators-dilemma","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thereferralchoice.com\/index.php\/2025\/01\/28\/gtm-131-being-cmo-under-mark-benioff-of-salesforce-and-the-innovators-dilemma\/","title":{"rendered":"GTM 131: Being CMO Under Mark Benioff of Salesforce and the Innovator\u2019s Dilemma"},"content":{"rendered":"<div style=\"height:25px\" aria-hidden=\"true\" class=\"wp-block-spacer\"><\/div>\n<p>The GTM Podcast is available on any major directory, including:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><a href=\"https:\/\/podcasts.apple.com\/in\/podcast\/the-gtm-podcast\/id1369291464\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Apple Podcasts<\/a><\/li>\n<li><a href=\"https:\/\/open.spotify.com\/show\/2SA1dgQ2Yc5t4V5GcBLnD2?si=b9dcb3e53b2d4ad2&amp;nd=1\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Spotify<\/a><\/li>\n<li><a href=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=KyUVm57kpS4&amp;list=PLGXnz4Tyz3-SfJ5DPByHtUOQOFB3yJ6zZ\">YouTube<\/a><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<hr \/>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.linkedin.com\/in\/kraigswensrud\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Kraig Swensrud<\/a>\u00a0is the Founder &amp; CEO of\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/qualified.com\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Qualified<\/a>\u00a0where he provides crucial experience and entrepreneurial energy to create the future of enterprise sales tech. Prior to founding Qualified, Kraig founded GetFeedback which was successfully sold to SurveyMonkey. Kraig also led marketing as the CMO of Salesforce during very formative years of the company&#8217;s history.<\/p>\n<h2>Discussed in this Episode:<\/h2>\n<ul>\n<li>The parallels between the disruption caused by SaaS and AI<\/li>\n<li>How pricing strategies are changing for AI products<\/li>\n<li>Why SaaS companies need to earning their renewals<\/li>\n<li>The impact of AI SDRs on your pipeline<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p><em><strong>If you missed GTM 130, check it out here:<\/strong> <a href=\"https:\/\/gtmnow.com\/gtm-130-scaling-to-billions-how-docusign-hubspot-canva-built-winning-gtm-strategies-rob-giglio\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Scaling to Billions: How DocuSign, HubSpot &amp; Canva Built Winning GTM Strategies with Rob Giglio, Canva\u2019s CCO<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n<h2>Highlights:<\/h2>\n<p><a href=\"#s1\">13:26<\/a> The importance of product marketing in the growth of Salesforce<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"#s2\">20:17<\/a> Exploring the innovator&#8217;s dilemma<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"#s3\">25:59<\/a> The next generation of software &amp; building for non-human users<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"#s4\">39:05<\/a> Obsessing over your customers is key to success<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"#s5\">46:44<\/a> Using the V2MOM framework to drive company alignment<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"#s6\">50:43<\/a> The adage of &#8216;hire fast, fire fast&#8217; is bs<\/p>\n<p><strong>Guest Speaker Links (Kraig Swensrud):<br \/><\/strong>LinkedIn:\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/www.linkedin.com\/in\/kraigswensrud\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">https:\/\/www.linkedin.com\/in\/kraigswensrud\/<\/a><br \/>V2MOM Framework:\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/www.salesforce.com\/blog\/how-to-create-alignment-within-your-company\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">https:\/\/www.salesforce.com\/blog\/how-to-create-alignment-within-your-company\/<\/a><\/p>\n<p><strong>Host Speaker Links (Scott Barker):<br \/><\/strong>LinkedIn:\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/www.linkedin.com\/in\/ssbarker\/\">https:\/\/www.linkedin.com\/in\/ssbarker\/<\/a><br \/>Newsletter:\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/thegtmnewsletter.substack.com\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">thegtmnewsletter.substack.com\/<\/a><\/p>\n<p><strong>Where to find GTMnow (GTMfund\u2019s media brand):<br \/><\/strong>Website:\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/gtmnow.com\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">https:\/\/gtmnow.com\/<\/a><br \/>LinkedIn:\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/www.linkedin.com\/company\/gtmnow\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">https:\/\/www.linkedin.com\/company\/gtmnow\/<\/a><br \/>Twitter\/X:\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/x.com\/GTMnow_\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">https:\/\/x.com\/GTMnow_<\/a><br \/>YouTube:\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/@GTM_now\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/@GTM_now<\/a><br \/>The GTM Podcast (on all major directories):\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/gtmnow.com\/tag\/podcast\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">https:\/\/gtmnow.com\/tag\/podcast\/<\/a><\/p>\n<p><strong>Sponsor Offer:<\/strong><br \/>We recently became a Superhuman customer, and the response across our GTMfund community Slack and social channels was a clear testament to how Superhuman has been a game-changer for efficiency among leaders and teams.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>Superhuman is generously offering the GTMnow community exclusive access to 1 month free on the platform. If you add any teammates in January to your team, they\u2019ll get a free month too.<\/p>\n<p>To claim this offer, go to\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/www.superhuman.com\/gtmnow\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">www.superhuman.com\/gtmnow<\/a><\/p>\n<p><strong>The GTM Podcast<\/strong><br \/>The GTM Podcast is a weekly podcast hosted by Scott Barker, GTMfund Partner, featuring interviews with the top 1% GTM executives, VCs, and founders. Conversations reveal the unshared details behind how they have grown companies, and the go-to-market strategies responsible for shaping that growth.<\/p>\n<hr \/>\n<h2>GTM 131 Episode Transcript<\/h2>\n<p><strong>Scott Barker:<\/strong> Hello, and welcome back to the GTM podcast. As always, you have Scott Barker here, and thank you so much for lending us your eardrums each and every week. This is gonna be a really fun conversation. And I&#8217;ve, uh, as Many times I&#8217;ve been super excited for, for this one, uh, but I&#8217;m joined by Kraig Swensrud.<\/p>\n<p>Kraig, welcome to the show, man.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Kraig Swensrud:<\/strong> Awesome. Thank you so much for having me, Scott.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Scott Barker:<\/strong> Pumped to have you, man. And what an incredible career and entrepreneurial journey you&#8217;ve had and super excited to dive in. But. You know,<\/p>\n<h3>Introducing Kraig Swensrud, Founder &amp; CEO of Qualified<\/h3>\n<p><strong>Scott Barker:<\/strong> I like to start with a quick, quick bio for our listeners. So, uh, Kraig is what you would call a serial entrepreneur. Uh, he is currently the founder and CEO at Qualified.<\/p>\n<p>[00:05:00] Uh, previous to that, Kraig was the founder of Get Feedback, uh, which was acquired by SurveyMonkey in 2019. And then before that, he served as the CMO of Just a small company you may have heard of, uh, called Salesforce, uh, where he was responsible for driving really the whole global corporate and product marketing functions and led the team during a time period where Salesforce was really going through hyper growth.<\/p>\n<p>And you could say they&#8217;re still going through hyper growth, um, but really excited to, to dive into your journey. So. How many companies have you built now? What number is qualified?<\/p>\n<p><strong>Kraig Swensrud:<\/strong> Qualifieds number, number three,<\/p>\n<p>number three.<\/p>\n<p>So yeah, I&#8217;m old enough to have been around the industry for as long as kind of the internet has impacted enterprise software. So I feel like I&#8217;ve seen a lot and done a lot, but, um, starting a company is definitely hard. And we&#8217;re about seven years into. Into qualified.<\/p>\n<p>So for your [00:06:00] listeners out there qualified to pipe gen platform, and we&#8217;re kind of disrupting the status quo in marketing with, uh, with pipe gen using an AI SDR agent. We&#8217;ve got, you know, a few hundred employees, nearly a thousand customers, and it&#8217;s an exciting time to be around in the industry. But yeah, my first, my first company started back in 2006 and it was a crazy journey.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Scott Barker:<\/strong> I love it. Going for the, the three Pete. So your first, first company was acquired by Salesforce second by SurveyMonkey. Um, and it&#8217;s going to be interesting to see how qualified plays out well on, well on its way for either another acquisition or IPO or whatever you decide to do with it.<\/p>\n<h3>The genesis of Kraig&#8217;s entrepreneurial path<\/h3>\n<p><strong>Scott Barker:<\/strong> What kicked off your entrepreneurial journey?<\/p>\n<p>It&#8217;s always an interesting question to ask when we, we get guests, like you were just crazy enough to be like, I could build a huge, huge company or how&#8217;d that, how&#8217;d that go down?<\/p>\n<p><strong>Kraig Swensrud:<\/strong> No, no, no. You know, when, when everybody starts their first company, I think every entrepreneur [00:07:00] out there has felt this way that I don&#8217;t really know what I&#8217;m, what I&#8217;m doing. So when I got out of, uh, of college, I immediately went to work for Oracle and it was a time when the kind of like the. com boom was booming and the internet had just started impacting enterprise software and Oracle at the time was like the biggest enterprise software company.<\/p>\n<p>I think around the number two software company in the world. I also had some experience that I got right after that at SAP. So boom, like two huge enterprise software companies, um, made a run at a web services company that was super successful. And when that thing ran its course. I was like in my kind of twenties and I&#8217;m like, I should go to business school.<\/p>\n<p>I think that&#8217;s what I should do. And I had this also crazy co founder, Sean and Sean was like, what are you going to learn at business school? This is Silicon Valley. Like, let&#8217;s just start a company. What&#8217;s the worst thing that&#8217;s going to happen. We&#8217;ll get like six months into it and run out of money and then go to business school, but you&#8217;ll never get this chance to start a company.<\/p>\n<p>And [00:08:00] so we really came to the table at that time with kind of two desires. One is we had a, we had a specific problem that we had kind of uncovered in the market and two is we just had a desire to start a company. And so we&#8217;re like, let&#8217;s learn on the fly. And I think at that time. Everybody was learning on the fly.<\/p>\n<p>The first company that I founded was called Keaton and web services were emerging with, with SaaS apps at the time. And in go to market in sales and marketing, which is, I know, you know, the listeners of this show are all about go to market, like the number one service that was emerging on the internet with strong APIs with Salesforce.<\/p>\n<p>The number one, uh, marketing service that was emerging on the internet with strong APIs was Google AdWords. And so you had marketers spending a ton of money digitally. It was a huge shift. A ton of money was being spent digitally, specifically with Google. But if you&#8217;re a B2B organization, you don&#8217;t close your deals through e commerce checkout.<\/p>\n<p>You got sales reps. And so there had to be this connective tissue between this kind of new emerging marketing [00:09:00] platform, Google, and this new emerging sales platform, Salesforce. And we tied those two things together. And, um, that was kind of like my start as an entrepreneur. That was my, really my big start in cloud and SaaS.<\/p>\n<p>And it was like a super exciting time to be part of it.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Scott Barker:<\/strong> I love that. I&#8217;m going to make the assumption you never made it back to, to business school.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Kraig Swensrud:<\/strong> Never made it back to business school.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Scott Barker:<\/strong> I<\/p>\n<p>love it. I think you got three lifetimes worth of MBAs out of the companies that you&#8217;ve been a part of now though.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Kraig Swensrud:<\/strong> Yeah, just in the first year. I mean, there&#8217;s nothing like setting up shop in an apartment building in San Francisco and being part of the movement and being part of the conversations every day. It&#8217;s something that you, you can&#8217;t actually learn in business school and the market is moving so fast. And at that time, the cloud and SaaS industry was just exploding.<\/p>\n<p>It was going so fast and you almost just had to be. Part of it to know what was going on.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Scott Barker:<\/strong> Totally. [00:10:00] Okay. So your company Keyed In was acquired by Salesforce in, I believe it was 2006. And that was really. Really early days, I believe the app exchange, if I remember correctly, like landed in 2005, the year before that, and they were making a pretty big push into mobile, um, talk me through what was going on during that time period and what that acquisition was like, you&#8217;ve just built your first company and now this, you know, what looks like going to be the next big thing, uh, knocks on your door and wants to acquire you.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Kraig Swensrud:<\/strong> Yeah, I think it was more, it was, it was opportunistic. I think for both sides. Yeah. We launched the company at an event called app force. It was a Salesforce event, uh, here in San Francisco. And we were on stage demoing the software and like, you know, all the powers, uh, from, uh, from Salesforce were in the room and after the demo, we got a call and we&#8217;re like, Hey, come talk to us.<\/p>\n<p>And we had some pretty quick conversations about being [00:11:00] part of the journey with. With Salesforce, the reason I say it was opportunistic is I think that, you know, we were just getting our company off the ground and we, we had this huge opportunity to become part of this movement, right? The cloud and the SaaS movement.<\/p>\n<p>It was something that like you dream of actually being able to be part of an acquisition and being part of that movement. And I think Salesforce had the opportunity to, um. To be part of like building this ecosystem. And they, and they were, you know, basically showing that there was investment in the ecosystem with Salesforce ventures, there was M and A in the ecosystem that this like vibrant ecosystem could be developed.<\/p>\n<p>And then we were doing something really specific with Google. And at that time, Google was like the, uh, another major player in SaaS. It was like, you know, Google apps and Google docs and Gmail were just coming into the enterprise. And obviously as your listeners know, like the entire office suite is essential to go to market.<\/p>\n<p>And so you got like CRM and you got an entire office suite and these two cloud leaders and with kind of us in the middle. [00:12:00] So it was, um, it was obviously super memorable for me at the time, but like, that was really the start of. My true understanding of like, you know, the explosion of the SaaS industry, what we now look back on and call SaaS and cloud.<\/p>\n<p>People were calling all sorts of things at the time. And it&#8217;s hard to remember, but there was a lot of pushback at that time to move your enterprise software to the cloud. People were like, it&#8217;s not secure. You mean I&#8217;m going to put, I&#8217;m going to put my customer data on an app on the internet. That&#8217;s crazy.<\/p>\n<p>And so I think what we&#8217;re seeing with the. The rise of AI now and the skepticism and the hurdles that we have to jump through to like move into this next phase. I D I can draw a lot of parallels to what happened kind of back in that time.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Scott Barker:<\/strong> Yeah, I can remember that that time period and it lasted a long time, like from pre 2006 to like, at least like 2011 2012 people were still skeptical of like, [00:13:00] moving from on prem to cloud. And, yeah, I think we&#8217;ll talk a little bit later about kind of this. Innovators dilemma that, uh, we&#8217;re at now with, with kind of AI and the parallels between the, the thinking that had to take place if you were selling on prem software and this big transition into the cloud.<\/p>\n<p>But before we get there, um. So you,<\/p>\n<h3 id=\"s1\">The importance of Product marketing in the growth of Salesforce<\/h3>\n<p><strong>Scott Barker:<\/strong> your company gets acquired, you then go in and you spend almost five years as SVP of product marketing that ends up culminating into a promotion, uh, to CMO in 2011 and. I mean, you&#8217;re the CMO of Salesforce. They, they are now this SaaS cloud, darling. Um, I imagine all eyes are on you to deliver.<\/p>\n<p>Uh, what did it feel like stepping into a role like that at a company like that during that time?<\/p>\n<p><strong>Kraig Swensrud:<\/strong> Yeah, there were, there were two big roles that, uh, to [00:14:00] be honest, I wasn&#8217;t really qualified or prepared for it, but I guess my experience in digital marketing and SaaS, like that was kind of the major qualification. At that time. And the first one was running product marketing. So originally I was a product manager and then kind of like, I got anointed to run product marketing and product marketing is like kind of the core of the Salesforce engine.<\/p>\n<p>How do we take these product capabilities and explain them to the world in a way that they can understand them? First, it was Salesforce automation and people thinking of cloud computing, like a utility and accessing apps over the internet that was like. That was like groundbreaking at the time. And then it went into like other areas.<\/p>\n<p>Like I mentioned, office and Gmail and docs and this whole system tied together. And of course then Salesforce expanded into customer service, which is, I think maybe now their number one revenue line, the service cloud, and it was a whole legacy set of apps and the whole legacy set of call centers and infrastructure that was going to move to the cloud.<\/p>\n<p>And then it went to marketing and all, you know, on and on. [00:15:00] And, uh, you know, my memory of that time was, wow, like I got the opportunity of a lifetime because I think Marc Beniof is actually the best enterprise. Product marketer. That&#8217;s like ever lived at probably Steve jobs is like the number one consumer product marketer that&#8217;s ever lived.<\/p>\n<p>So to have had the opportunity to even like work together alongside a person like that was insane, but because, because that individual is so good at what they do, naturally what happens is like other great enterprise. You know, marketers want flock to that, like being in that, in, in, in that world, and I was one of them.<\/p>\n<p>So we were surrounded by 20 or 30 of like probably the best enterprise software marketers. You know, on, on the planet and we all work together and we all learn from one another and we all push the industry forward together. So it was kind of the opportunity of a lifetime. Um, when I was kind of ultimately kind of promoted to, to, to CMO, there was a whole nother world that I inherited around corporate marketing [00:16:00] and PR and demand gen and pipeline, and that&#8217;s kind of where I can actually tie why I started qualified, like back to my moments as CMO there, but wow, like what a wild ride it was kind of like.<\/p>\n<p>You know, the thought leadership around cloud computing, cloud computing really in, you know, 15 years ago or so had really kind of just crossed the chasm and hit the mainstream market. And there was a flock to enterprise SaaS and cloud computing. And it was just, it was, it was an incredible ride, but I remember thinking that no matter how fast you&#8217;re growing and no matter how much of a leadership position you had, one of the things I learned from that is like.<\/p>\n<p>You can never rest on your laurels. Like there&#8217;s always the next company that is going to disrupt you. There&#8217;s always the next startup out there. That&#8217;s going to do something. And I think, I think because of what Salesforce did to Siebel, which is like, they just came along and talked about what they were publicly doing, but Siebel.<\/p>\n<p>The old CRM company that probably very few of your [00:17:00] listeners have ever heard of or used, like they used to be like the dominant CRM company. And so there was always this feeling of like, there&#8217;s going to be the next company. And so there was a feeling in marketing of like, we need to have a nonstop drumbeat of relevancy.<\/p>\n<p>What made us relevant last year is not going to make us. Relevant this year. And that&#8217;s, I think why you, why you see from Salesforce and all the executives there, this, like this event road show and, you know, product marketing and demos and this feeling like, man, we maybe we&#8217;re in front of the pack, but we need to constantly being.<\/p>\n<p>The thought leader.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Scott Barker:<\/strong> Yeah. I mean, I think Salesforce has done such a good job throughout the years of keeping that drumbeat going. Like there&#8217;s always new, new things happening. And I don&#8217;t know if you&#8217;re feeling this. As well, but certainly with open AI and Google now that drumbeat now with the acceleration of AI [00:18:00] seems to be.<\/p>\n<p>Getting exponentially quicker. We&#8217;re now like, I can&#8217;t remember what the snare drum thing, but you&#8217;re, we&#8217;re rolling now, it feels like every day there&#8217;s now these like fundamental, not just small announcements, like huge announcements. Um, do you think we&#8217;re going to just. Continue that trend. And that drum beat is just going to get faster and faster in order to stay relevant.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Kraig Swensrud:<\/strong> I think so. But we, we talk inside our company about AI years being like dog years. It feels like we, you know, we, we just worked for the last year. And I&#8217;m like, Oh my God, it feels like seven years. And in like this period of time, this like continuum of innovation in enterprise software, there was like, at first there was kind of the SaaS movement, as you mentioned.<\/p>\n<p>And then there was like the mobile movement, like everybody, everything&#8217;s going to have an app on your phone. And people like what enterprise software is going to have apps. And now you see it rampantly. And then there was social media, right, which had a huge impact on enterprise SaaS. Like you can&#8217;t log into an app now without seeing your profile picture.<\/p>\n<p>Right. And, [00:19:00] and you&#8217;re engaging with other users in the app that was like groundbreaking at the time. And then of course there was like the internet of things and connected devices. And you got manufacturing companies, like car manufacturers, like with their automobiles connected to the internet and people like what is going on.<\/p>\n<p>And, you know, here we are through a number of these innovations and here we have AI. And it&#8217;s like moving faster than ever. And I think that makes it really hard for. Older established companies to keep their eye on the ball, because once you have, once you have customers and you have like, you know, legacy product, it is so hard to keep up with the pace of innovation.<\/p>\n<p>And I think that&#8217;s, what&#8217;s pretty awesome about our industry is that no matter how big or how small you are, you always have a shot because if you&#8217;re a brand new startup, you know, what, what you have going for you is you have focus. You don&#8217;t have, you don&#8217;t have a huge team. You don&#8217;t have a ton of money.<\/p>\n<p>Nobody has a lot of time, but what you do have is the ability to focus. And then you don&#8217;t have the baggage of like 15 years of, [00:20:00] of code and 15 years of customers that you&#8217;re carrying into the future. So everybody&#8217;s got a shot. That&#8217;s what I think is so exciting about Silicon Valley right now.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Scott Barker:<\/strong> Yeah, it does feel like that. It feels like this great leveling of the, the playing field. And yeah, let&#8217;s,<\/p>\n<h3 id=\"s2\">Exploring the Innovator&#8217;s Dilemma<\/h3>\n<p><strong>Scott Barker:<\/strong> let&#8217;s kind of get into this idea of the innovators dilemma. I think you, you teed it up pretty well. So drawing on the example of, you know, uh, Siebel systems and, uh, Salesforce. I imagine, you know, there was a point in time.<\/p>\n<p>Where Siba looked around and they were like, okay, you know, it is looking like cloud may be the inevitable future. Like, I&#8217;m sure there was meetings like that as, as you mentioned, like. In order for them to make those shifts, they are a huge company. They have to cannibalize a lot of their business. And that is just so hard to do.<\/p>\n<p>And it&#8217;s like this sunken cost [00:21:00] fallacy. We&#8217;ve done all of this. We know this motion. We&#8217;ve got these customers, they&#8217;re still paying us. They&#8217;ve signed on for another year. Who knows about the year after that, but how do we stop and reset everything? And that&#8217;s where the advantage goes to these startups and younger, nimbler, focused companies.<\/p>\n<p>Um, and I think we&#8217;re seeing the exact same thing now, uh, with some of these sort of incumbent players in. Name X category of SaaS. Um, they&#8217;ll have to maybe change their pricing completely. Um, they&#8217;ll have to restructure and rearchitect their software from the ground up, and it feels like that trade off is just really difficult for, for people to make.<\/p>\n<p>Um, and would love to hear just kind of your, your take on what you&#8217;re seeing and some of the parallels between the, the shift we had from on prem to cloud.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Kraig Swensrud:<\/strong> It&#8217;s so hard to cannibalize your own company. [00:22:00] And you know, my, my experience just comes from, I worked for three of the largest enterprise software companies in the world and I&#8217;ve started three companies with, you know, two guys and a dog, you know, in a tiny apartment. So, and I&#8217;ve seen kind of everything in between and the innovators dilemma.<\/p>\n<p>There was a book written about it. Clayton Christensen was the author. Um, and it&#8217;s, it&#8217;s what has just been so relevant to me in the last two years that I like, you know, went, went, went back and read it, or you can listen to it. And the idea is really simple. And that is like when there&#8217;s a major platform shift, the incumbents are very likely to like eat their own lunch.<\/p>\n<p>Like there&#8217;s so many forces in play inside of these companies to just keep things. Status quo. And it feels like overwhelmingly hard to think like a startup or even like fun to start up inside of your own company, whose entire goal is to eat the lunch of like your cash cow. And so there are so many forces in play that companies don&#8217;t, don&#8217;t do it.<\/p>\n<p>So, I mean, think back to the rise of [00:23:00] SaaS, we all. Probably don&#8217;t even remember that there used to be a dominant HR provider called PeopleSoft or a dominant CRM provider called Siebel and people for their corporate email, they use something called Lotus notes and they would do file sharing with something called SharePoint and like.<\/p>\n<p>All these companies in these products are gone, right? Or they&#8217;re let&#8217;s, let&#8217;s call them not gone or not relevant in today&#8217;s world. And today we got Gmail and office three 65, and we got slack and we got rippling and workday and Salesforce and everything else, right? But why didn&#8217;t these companies that were in these leadership positions, like.<\/p>\n<p>Get there, like how come they couldn&#8217;t transform and that&#8217;s the innovators dilemmas. It&#8217;s so hard to do that. Well, guess what? Fast forward to, uh, to 2022, the beginning of 2023 and you have AI. Okay. So it was like almost what, two years ago, almost to the day that chat GPT became the fastest growing app in the history of apps.<\/p>\n<p>And [00:24:00] so on that day, if you&#8217;re leading a software company or you&#8217;re a CEO in the industry, you got to think, how is the world going to transform? How does my software need to transform? Is AI going to eat my lunch? And if so, I better be the guy to build it than to watch another startup do it, or to have some other competitor actually do it first.<\/p>\n<p>So it was almost like a call to action at that moment. To change. And that&#8217;s what I felt as a CEO. I felt this like crazy pressure to change. And it was right as we were all going into this B2B recession. I&#8217;m sure many of your listeners to your show have felt the pain of this B2B recession that we&#8217;ve been in for the past couple of years where VC money dried up.<\/p>\n<p>Inflation. Spiked, everybody was cutting costs. They were cutting heads. They were cutting seats. They were cutting software at the exact same time, like this huge platform shift and this innovators dilemma happened with AI. So to be in this world of the last two years as a software company has [00:25:00] been like nothing, like I&#8217;ve ever seen actually, since the.<\/p>\n<p>com like heyday and implosion, and now we&#8217;re kind of on the other side of that and we have this new platform with AI, but the innovators dilemma, like that&#8217;s what&#8217;s shaken up our industry now, like that&#8217;s what. Gets me up every day and fires me up is the opportunity to build the next great company because the people maybe that should have their eye on the ball, the incumbents, maybe they don&#8217;t.<\/p>\n<p>And maybe that&#8217;s like opportunity for a whole new set of startups out there to win.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Scott Barker:<\/strong> Yeah, we&#8217;re, we&#8217;re seeing it firsthand and, you know, you can even look at again, going back to, to Salesforce and some of the things that they&#8217;re doing with. Uh, agent force and things is that you could look and be like, Oh, that&#8217;s, that has the potential to disrupt all this other parts of your business, but they&#8217;re, you know, being bold enough to, you know, take a stance and not pretend that shifts aren&#8217;t happening.<\/p>\n<p>Um,<\/p>\n<h3 id=\"s3\">The Next Generation of Software &amp; Building for Non-Human Users<\/h3>\n<p><strong>Scott Barker:<\/strong>[00:26:00] do you see. A world in SaaS, I think like one of the easier, uh, places to look at potential disruption is just, uh, pricing and, you know, these companies that are on the traditional C pricing, um, may struggle when new innovators come up and they&#8217;re like, no, we&#8217;re actually going to do usage or better yet.<\/p>\n<p>Maybe it&#8217;s outcome based, um. How do you look at that, that shift? And if you were to predict the future pricing model of, of SaaS, what does it look like for you?<\/p>\n<p><strong>Kraig Swensrud:<\/strong> It&#8217;s really interesting question because when you, just again, like drawing parallel to the route, to the rise of SaaS and cloud, it was an entirely new model. Software as a service that never existed before on premise software was typically bought in a perpetual license with maintenance. And you had to invest like, if you wanted to stand up like Siebel, that the old [00:27:00] CRM system before Salesforce, you&#8217;d like spend a million or 2 buying the software.<\/p>\n<p>Then like you owned it, so to speak, and you paid for like updates. And then the SaaS model came and said like. There&#8217;s a whole lot of risk in that. Isn&#8217;t it better if you just like pay as you go and then it should be on the software vendor to deliver the value to you and earn your renewal. Like that was game changing at that time.<\/p>\n<p>And here we are now at another paradigm shift with AI and people are wondering the same thing, but as a software vendor, two to three years is. Um, is all it takes for a whole new set of vendors to come in and emerge. So, so many software companies I think are sitting around like operating slowly going like, Oh, we got, we got a year to figure this out.<\/p>\n<p>Or we got like. You know, a couple of years, but you&#8217;re going to blink. And then the next set of companies are going to like all of a sudden have a stronghold in so many of your customer accounts, and they&#8217;re going to be looking to them for these new, like the new technology, [00:28:00] they&#8217;re going to be looking to them for the innovation.<\/p>\n<p>They&#8217;re going to be looking to them for the new pricing model. So as a CEO, I feel this like sense of urgency. Like to move pricing is one of those things. Now, if your company happened to sell a lot of seats, which a lot of SaaS companies did for 10, 15 years, you&#8217;re immediately exposed. If there&#8217;s going to be an AI worker or agent, who&#8217;s going to perform some of that work.<\/p>\n<p>Okay. So this could, this is like, maybe like hurting people&#8217;s minds a little bit, but imagine there&#8217;s an AI logging in it&#8217;s doing the work. That&#8217;s actually what&#8217;s happening, but there&#8217;s no like UI, there&#8217;s no UX to the software, right? But the AI is doing the work that a human formerly did, and you don&#8217;t need to log in and buy a seat if you&#8217;re going to have AI do it now, the question is. How much of that work can be done by AI? If the answer to that question is a hundred percent, like you, you better not be on a C based pricing model. If the answer to that question is like [00:29:00] 50%, okay, well you kind of need to change. Now the challenges with the kind of these new pricing models is they&#8217;re scaring.<\/p>\n<p>People just the way software as a service kind of scared people. So you have one model where you like pay for outcomes. That&#8217;s an, that&#8217;s an example. And you have one model where you pay for consumption. That&#8217;s kind of like a popular one right now. The problem in my experience in the last year of bringing, uh, AI agents to market is that buyers are, they&#8217;re kind of scared actually of some of those models, not because they don&#8217;t want to like pay for the outcome or pay for the consumption, but it&#8217;s hard to fit within their budget. They don&#8217;t know, like, what am I going to be paying a year from now? And like that level of uncertainty is like needs to be capped, I guess, in some way, so we can get to that level of comfort, the, the, the bigger trend that like I&#8217;ve personally, personally witnessed in the last year. Is just like the idea that I&#8217;m paying for digital labor, instead of paying for human labor, like a seat was like [00:30:00] a human sitting in a chair, right?<\/p>\n<p>That&#8217;s why we called it a seat. It&#8217;s a human sitting in a chair. Well, if you have digital labor, then the question is like, how does, how does the, the digital labor potentially offset the cost of the human labor? And then what can the digital labor allow your team to do with the software that it couldn&#8217;t do with human labor in, in my company, we, we, we, we bring to market an AI SDR agent.<\/p>\n<p>Her name is Piper. She generates pipeline. And so she, she does two things. One is she offsets the costs of humans on, on the team, performing work and allowing them to move on to other activities or higher value activities or, you know, and number two, she generates pipeline in a way and at scale that humans.<\/p>\n<p>Couldn&#8217;t. So when you think about you&#8217;re delivering a certain amount of value, you&#8217;re offsetting some human labor costs. How do you price your software in a world where customers want some level of certainty? So we&#8217;re all experimenting with these kind of like digital labor pricing [00:31:00] models, these consumption pricing models, and in some case, outcome based pricing models, I think inevitably, like that&#8217;s the trend it&#8217;s it&#8217;s not seats unless you happen to sell a product for which AI is not going to impact kind of the human usage of the software.<\/p>\n<p>Which is probably not that many SaaS companies.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Scott Barker:<\/strong> Yeah, man, I could, I could geek out over this for quite some time. So you. You kind of breezed over something there that I want to dive, dive into. Cause it did sort of break my brain when we were having our initial discussions. I think it was about a month ago and I genuinely have been thinking about it, you know, every, every day since is this idea that the next generation of software companies.<\/p>\n<p>The human might not be your user any longer. Uh, you could have an AI agent logging into your systems and then the per seat pricing [00:32:00] completely, you know, goes away and also how you design products, how you think about UI, UX completely fundamentally changes. Um, can you. Talk through that a little bit and, and, and give some color to that.<\/p>\n<p>Cause I think that&#8217;s, that&#8217;s a world that&#8217;s very interesting, right? You could, you Piper could be logging into your CRM. It could be learning from your enablement solution. It could be doing all these, these different things and doing just as much work as a human, or maybe 10 X, 20 X as a human, um, And so you need to think differently if you&#8217;re that software provider that now has agents logging in instead of humans.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Kraig Swensrud:<\/strong> Yes. And in fact, the AI Piper, she&#8217;s always logged in. She&#8217;s always logged in and always learning, uh, and always working. And so the question is like, what is, what, what are you setting her loose to work on? So for, for anybody out there, who&#8217;s like, you know, created a product and sold a product or been part [00:33:00] of bringing a product to market.<\/p>\n<p>There was pre AI, you know, that you&#8217;re designing it for a, you know, some, some person that could be like an HR professional for an HR app or an employee portal, or it could be a customer portal, or it could be, um, it could be a sales app or a forecasting tool. Like ultimately you&#8217;re thinking of like, who is the person that&#8217;s using, who&#8217;s the person that&#8217;s buying my software.<\/p>\n<p>Who is the, who are the people that are using my software and how do I set the software up so that the user can maximize the value they deliver to the, to the company. And then the buyer of the software can understand like, what&#8217;s the ROI on my investment? Am I getting value from the software? And so you kind of had, uh, a lot of software products that were designed, the UX was designed around a human, and then the reporting and analytics was designed around like.<\/p>\n<p>Being able to justify the costs and the, and, and the return for the, for the customer, now we&#8217;re in an entirely new world and most software that was built before, you know, 2022, you have to [00:34:00] design that software for the AI and for the human, because you&#8217;re still in a world where you have humans, right? And so you have like the digital labor working alongside the human labor and the software has to accommodate that in some cases, if the software can do a hundred percent of the, uh, of a task.<\/p>\n<p>Doesn&#8217;t he have to be a whole job function, but a task, then the software needs to be designed to just be set up by like an administrator. One person that oversees the AI effectively in, in my world. It&#8217;s like, who&#8217;s Piper&#8217;s manager? Well, Piper&#8217;s manager, what does, what does Piper&#8217;s manager needs need to do?<\/p>\n<p>She needs to onboard Piper. She needs to train Piper. She needs to give it the rules of engagement. Hey Piper, don&#8217;t do this, do that. She needs to be given a ton of information. Hey, memorize my CRM database, memorize all my outreach sequences, know everything that&#8217;s going on on my website. And then she has to be like put to work.<\/p>\n<p>And then the work that she&#8217;s doing could be having conversations on the website. It could be converting visitors. It could be booking meetings. It could be sending email, whatever it happens to be. Piper&#8217;s job is now to generate pipeline. And so the administrator, [00:35:00] the person setting her up needs to ask the same questions that any manager would ask.<\/p>\n<p>Hey Piper, what did you do today? Hey Piper, how many customers did you work today? Hey Piper, how many meetings did you book today? Hey Piper, how much pipeline did you generate today? And so the software then has to have the ability to. Basically monitor what the AI is doing and be able to ask questions of why did you do this?<\/p>\n<p>The way that you did it needs to be able to be given feedback like, Hey, Piper, do it like this in the future. Not like that. And of course the administrator, the manager, the person who buys the software needs to know what&#8217;s going on and be able to, again, justify the value of however, the pricing model. Has been set up, but it&#8217;s a, that&#8217;s a pretty different way of thinking than the way we&#8217;ve been thinking about SaaS for the last 15 years.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Scott Barker:<\/strong> It&#8217;s incredibly, incredibly different. And. Yeah. Your, your job then becomes more just, yeah. Understanding the outcomes that the agent has driven similar to how, if you were running like a [00:36:00] BDR team and you would see, okay, this, this rep is really good at maybe qualifying, uh, but not so good, you know, on, on followup.<\/p>\n<p>And then you, you kind of make little tweaks and you would just let Piper know, Hey, the outcomes here aren&#8217;t exactly what we wanted. Why don&#8217;t we test doing it like this? Um, and then you can run these. Crazy fast iterations of these tests and get to the outcome that, that you desire. And then it&#8217;s not crazy<\/p>\n<p>to think you could have over time, once you&#8217;ve done that enough, an AI manager managing the AI agent, and then you&#8217;re overseeing all of that.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Kraig Swensrud:<\/strong> who knows where we&#8217;re going to go, but you know, I think that, I think that a huge value prop of, of AI and these agents and workers is. They don&#8217;t leave your team. So for example, my product Piper, she works the marketing funnel. It&#8217;s the inbound SDR function. So it&#8217;s not the outbound stuff. [00:37:00] And in this inbound SDR function, it&#8217;s usually you hire young professionals, like right out of school.<\/p>\n<p>They sit in that role for what a year, like max. You spend, you spend four months training them and onboarding, then you set them loose. And it&#8217;s really hard for them to do their job and their young kids. And it&#8217;s hard to get them to like. Show up to the office or like show up to work. Then the good ones, the amazing ones, they get promoted in like nine months.<\/p>\n<p>Some people decide, Hey, sales marketing is not my jam. So they leave and they do something else. You&#8217;re constantly training and constantly onboarding and constantly recruiting. It&#8217;s this like revolving door of people. And you&#8217;re like, I could have an AI that&#8217;s actually, I can just keep tweaking and changing and tuning and making better and better over time.<\/p>\n<p>She&#8217;s never going to leave me. She&#8217;s going to work nights and weekends. So the value prop is really compelling, but coming back to kind of your original question of like how you need to design your software, we&#8217;re operating in an entirely new world, which is why going back to the innovators dilemma, [00:38:00] like who&#8217;s going to bring this new world.<\/p>\n<p>You know, to market, is it going to be a new set of startups that are kind of on the, like the, the younger side of their lifespan, or is it going to be an older set of startups that are in their kind of middle age or however you might want to call it. And that&#8217;s why it&#8217;s really exciting right now. And that&#8217;s why everybody&#8217;s looking to a lot of these new startups.<\/p>\n<p>Now, I think Salesforce has done a phenomenal job with agent force. Their message is super clear. Like they&#8217;ve given a promise actually to bring a billion agents to the world. They&#8217;re helping to educate with hands on workshops. So I feel like, you know, Salesforce is one of those companies that like they could bridge themselves to the other side because they&#8217;ve got technology and they&#8217;ve got a vision.<\/p>\n<p>But those of us who are out there and go to market, what we all really want to know is like how to do it. Like what are the playbooks? How do we implement software? How do we change our go to market organizations to be ready for this new world to operate in this new world?<\/p>\n<p><strong>Scott Barker:<\/strong> Yeah. [00:39:00] Which leads me nicely to kind of some of our, our final questions.<\/p>\n<h3 id=\"s4\">Obsessing over your customers is key to success<\/h3>\n<p><strong>Scott Barker:<\/strong> And I love asking this question. I call it the. The silver bullet question, although, you know, if we&#8217;ve been in this game long enough, you know, there&#8217;s no silver bullets, but you know, what is one tactic or strategy that is working for you right now at Qualified?<\/p>\n<p><strong>Kraig Swensrud:<\/strong> Yeah. I mean, I would say the, the tactic that&#8217;s really working for us is, the momentum that comes from the obsession on our customers as a, um, as an entrepreneur, as One of the co founders of qualified, I chose to be our first customer success manager, right? When you&#8217;re like a couple of guys sitting in a room, you got to divide and conquer.<\/p>\n<p>So I raised my hand and said, I&#8217;ll be the first one to implement our customers. And when you&#8217;re a small startup and you&#8217;re acquiring your first 25 customers, you&#8217;ll literally do anything for them because you need them more than they need you And when you&#8217;re going from like 1 [00:40:00] million to 10 million in revenue, you have to obsess on your customers because you need them more than they need you.<\/p>\n<p>Like you need to know how to get product market fit. You need someone to take a sales reference. You need someone to take an investor reference. And then on and on and on, what happens is most companies actually, they like stop obsessing on their customers. Cause they. For some reason they&#8217;re trying to reduce costs or they find product market fit in there.<\/p>\n<p>They turn their sights on something else. But like I vowed when I started qualified and I, I felt that that emotion, which is like it&#8217;s life or death as a startup. I need these customers more than they need me. I&#8217;m never going to forget how important the obsession on customers should be to a software company, because it should be our job to earn the renewal.<\/p>\n<p>It should be our job to show them the value. It should be our job to show them the ROI. That&#8217;s SaaS, like subscription means you have to work for your customer to earn every single renewal. And so that feeling of customer obsession, I think like we&#8217;ve turned that into something that&#8217;s a huge advantage for [00:41:00] our, our company.<\/p>\n<p>So I have this graphic that I talk about in, in kind of all of our all hands calls. It&#8217;s called the momentum flywheel. And it starts with customer success. And if you can make your customers successful and you do it at all costs, you just go above and beyond most software companies do not go above and beyond.<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;ll tell you that having been in the industry, they just don&#8217;t, they sell you the software, they implement it, they take off. They show up at renewal with a little presentation that says, I think you got some ROI, like, but they don&#8217;t sit there and guide their customer into the future and make sure they&#8217;re successful and just go above and beyond.<\/p>\n<p>And if you can do that, your customers turn into the raving fans, right? They give you the references. They write the five star reviews. When they leave their job, they go to the next job and they want to bring. You in, and they tell you where the product is deficient and that makes its way into engineering.<\/p>\n<p>And then you pump out the new features and capabilities. That&#8217;s ammo for marketing that builds awareness into the market that helps you sell the next deal. And then it helps you make the next customer successful. It&#8217;s this [00:42:00] like flywheel. And if you can get it going by focusing everybody on your, in your company on customer success, it can bring you through a B2B recession, like we&#8217;ve just had in the last couple of years.<\/p>\n<p>And it can be the thing that it, it accelerates you in a time of growth, which is what we&#8217;re in right now.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Scott Barker:<\/strong> Totally. And every crank of that flywheel, it just grows stronger and stronger. It, uh, reminds me of a conversation I had with the chief customer officer of Canva. And he said, uh, If you&#8217;re in SaaS, you&#8217;re not looking to make the sale. What you&#8217;re really looking for is loyalty. And that&#8217;s very true, you know, it&#8217;s, and that loyalty does not come without customer obsession, uh, on, you know, we are here to solve the problems that you&#8217;re experiencing every day<\/p>\n<p>about<\/p>\n<p><strong>Kraig Swensrud:<\/strong> A hundred percent. Now, I think a lot of people say that. And so for example, I wanted to show our company that we were different. So we made like eight foot tall neon sign. We [00:43:00] went to Las Vegas and hired the company that makes all those huge neon signs in Las Vegas. And there&#8217;s a huge neon sign hanging into our headquarters.<\/p>\n<p>When you walk in and it says what it says, whatever it takes, which is like the mentality that like, I&#8217;ll just do whatever it takes to help my customer. And I think that&#8217;s a big part of what we&#8217;re trying to do here is we&#8217;re trying to make sure that our customers are able to be successful on what we promise them in the sales cycle.<\/p>\n<p>And when you can do that, like what I&#8217;ve realized is very few enterprise software companies actually do it. A lot of people talk about it, but there&#8217;s very few companies that are that committed to seeing and working hand in hand with the customer all the way kind of. Through the process. But as we all know, in, in, in the enterprise, it&#8217;s all about people say business transformation, but it&#8217;s like companies have to evolve and we&#8217;re in the age of AI right now.<\/p>\n<p>So who&#8217;s going to help them do that? Who&#8217;s going to like give them the, the, the playbook and the roadmap and guide them to the future. And of course, that&#8217;s something I learned from my earliest days at Salesforce, which is like, you have to have trust. Trust is the number one thing. And if your [00:44:00] customers trust you, like they&#8217;ll give you a lot of leeway and, and you&#8217;ll be the one that they call with their hard questions.<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;m trying to get from here to here. My board&#8217;s asking me to do this. How should I do it? And what are the vendors they trust to get them there?<\/p>\n<p><strong>Scott Barker:<\/strong> Yeah, I think it was, uh, Benioff quote is he, he says, trust is the currency of of business, uh, which I, I love and yeah, I think. It&#8217;s part of why it&#8217;s such an exciting time. And I think we keep coming back to this, but, um, again, with, with the, the parallels to the, the cloud shift from, from on prem, certain companies were really seen as like a transformation partner, take my hand.<\/p>\n<p>And I&#8217;m going to walk you into this new world. And then that was how you were seen as like a good software vendor. There was a lot of people were scared. People didn&#8217;t know what the future looked like. [00:45:00] So you got to be this, this partner that ushered them into the new era. And then, you know, maybe there was a little less.<\/p>\n<p>Innovation, uh, over the last, you know, decade or so. And then we&#8217;re all fighting for these like incremental gains and you saw it change kind of go to market a little bit. And it was more like a volume game. And we forgot that, that trust piece. And now I think as we go on this next huge transformation, it&#8217;s going to be those software companies that.<\/p>\n<p>are seen as a true trusted partner to walk us into sort of the unknown, which is, it feels like we&#8217;re going into a big unknown again.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Kraig Swensrud:<\/strong> And so many, so many buyers are calling BS on our sales pitches. And they&#8217;re calling BS on our marketing. They&#8217;re calling BS on like our, our supposed product screenshots in our, in our slide decks. I think now&#8217;s the time when people need to see real. Software and it&#8217;s about the use cases. So as a software company, like that&#8217;s what I&#8217;m doing as a CEO is [00:46:00] like, I&#8217;m focusing, focusing on highly specific use cases with real software that I can demonstrate to a prospect and say, this is the piece of your go to market.<\/p>\n<p>Then I can automate with AI for you. And now I want to educate you on how we&#8217;ve done it and how we&#8217;ve thought about it. I want to show it to you working in your environment, as opposed to like what a lot of software companies have done over the last couple of years is. Slap AI on their homepage and fill their pitch decks with AI and put out like kind of fake demo videos.<\/p>\n<p>But like, here we are, it&#8217;s 2025 and the rubber&#8217;s meeting the road. And I think our buyers are pretty educated and smart at this point in time. And we need to go like get down to brass tacks and show them the use cases in the real software.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Scott Barker:<\/strong> Absolutely. Absolutely. Um,<\/p>\n<h3 id=\"s5\">Using the V2MOM Framework to drive company alignment<\/h3>\n<p><strong>Scott Barker:<\/strong> so this is usually the part of the episode where I bring in a, uh, a question from the listeners, but I&#8217;m going to hijack the question, uh, because I&#8217;m just super curious. And I think we got to one, but, uh, my question is. What [00:47:00] was kind of the biggest learning that you had from Marc Beniof when you were working directly under him?<\/p>\n<p>Uh, I think you mentioned one, which is trust is the currency of business. What are some other learnings you had from, from Mark?<\/p>\n<p><strong>Kraig Swensrud:<\/strong> Probably, um, other than trust is alignment. It&#8217;s how we run our company. And one of the things that, um. I kind of copied from him was an alignment framework called the V2 mom. And another thing that, um, that I saw in the two thousands, Google actually had an all hands call every other Friday, they called it TGIF.<\/p>\n<p>And what they tried to do is they just said, our company is moving and changing so fast that a basic alignment framework is not good enough. We need to actually realign everybody like every other Friday. Because everybody goes off and they do work. And like the, the industry changes and the market changes and the product changes and the competitive landscape [00:48:00] changes.<\/p>\n<p>And we hire new people and boom, we got to realign like fast. It can&#8217;t be the end of a quarter. It can&#8217;t be just like company kickoff once a year, Google was like, we got to do it every two weeks. So the alignment framework, um, from Salesforce and Benioff is called the V2 mom. It stands for vision. Where are you going?<\/p>\n<p>What&#8217;s your North star in a year values. What&#8217;s important as you go on that journey. Together methods, which are one of the priorities of your company in the next 90 days, obstacles, what&#8217;s going to keep you from getting there and measures, which is how are you going to know if you&#8217;ve been successful or not?<\/p>\n<p>And what I&#8217;ve seen using that framework is it works for tiny little startups and it works for Salesforce, the largest enterprise software company in the world with close to a hundred thousand employees and that framework of alignment. What I have found is it like, is it helps motivate. The employees, if the employees know where we&#8217;re going and what the priorities are, and everybody in the company can see how they ladder up and connect to like what we&#8217;re all doing [00:49:00] together, it feels like we&#8217;re on one team and we&#8217;re trying to accomplish the same goal and then transparency.<\/p>\n<p>Right. Transparency is actually what breeds trust, trust with your customers, but also trust with your employees, the transparency to articulate every other week, like Google did, like, how are we doing against these? Why again, why are we doing this again? Let me reeducate and let me handle objections and questions from the employee base.<\/p>\n<p>So that framework has been crucial to the success. Of qualified. And we started using it when we were 10 people in a little room and we&#8217;re using it today as we have hundreds of employees, and that&#8217;s going to be the thing that we use as the company continues to grow. So it&#8217;s the combination of like the V2 mom combined with these regular all hands meetings where you&#8217;re completely transparent.<\/p>\n<p>With everybody in the company.<\/p>\n<p>basically what, what you end up with is if you can align and point everybody in the same direction, you get the maximum value of cranking that flywheel, right? If you can keep your employees educated and motivate [00:50:00] motivated, it means they&#8217;re going to deliver the, you know, the most for the company.<\/p>\n<p>So it&#8217;s all about like showing up to work every day and align. And that&#8217;s how we create the most value together as a team.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Scott Barker:<\/strong> that&#8217;s great. And we&#8217;ll try and, uh, find some material on the V2MOM, uh, framework and we&#8217;ll put it in the show notes. And if it doesn&#8217;t exist somehow, maybe we&#8217;ll, we&#8217;ll collaborate together on a GTM newsletter and write it out. But that was, uh, that was great. So it was vision, values, method, obstacles, and measures.<\/p>\n<p>Is that correct?<\/p>\n<p><strong>Kraig Swensrud:<\/strong> Yep, exactly.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Scott Barker:<\/strong> I love that. Um, all right, Kraig, this has been awesome. Thanks for, for sitting down with me. Uh, I just have one final question and this is kind of the, the hot take question. Um,<\/p>\n<h3 id=\"s6\">The adage of &#8216;hire fast, fire fast&#8217; is bs<\/h3>\n<p><strong>Scott Barker:<\/strong> what is one widely held belief that revenue leaders or founders, uh, still believe to be true that you think is bullshit or at least no longer serving us?<\/p>\n<p><strong>Kraig Swensrud:<\/strong> Yeah, it&#8217;s a, it&#8217;s a really good question and I&#8217;m sure, uh, I&#8217;m sure [00:51:00] other guests on your show have said this before, but the one that is so top of mind for me right now, Is this age old saying called hire fast, fire fast. And I happen to be, you know, leading a company where, you know, we&#8217;re, we&#8217;re going to grow 50 to a hundred percent next year.<\/p>\n<p>And what does that mean? I&#8217;m scaling my go to market team. What does that specifically mean? I want to put more quota on the street and I want to hire. Amazing account executives. Now, if we had the belief that, that we should hire fast and fire fast, what that basically says is we&#8217;re not looking for like the best of the best.<\/p>\n<p>Candidate we&#8217;ll, we&#8217;ll actually trade off like certainty on somebody who&#8217;s an exceptional fit for our company with somebody that like, I don&#8217;t know, we haven&#8217;t put them through all the paces. Remember, cause we&#8217;re hiring fast. So like a butt in a seat is more important than finding the right individual, which is going to take longer.<\/p>\n<p>But I just wanted to maybe articulate like how I think about that as the, as the CEO, and I think about, okay, so let&#8217;s say we hire [00:52:00] somebody fast and we&#8217;re not, you know, the probability of them succeeding in our company is not a hundred percent. It&#8217;s not 80%. It&#8217;s more like 60%. Okay. So we put somebody in seat faster, which means we can get quota on the street faster, but if you actually take a look at what happens, if you get that decision wrong, it&#8217;s number one. First, you give them the job offer. They sign it. You have to wait for them to start. That&#8217;s usually a few weeks. You have to onboard them, right? That&#8217;s like a few weeks from your HR team. Then you got to send them through like sales bootcamp.<\/p>\n<p>That could be like 30, 60. 90 days at some point. And then you&#8217;re like certifying them on your pitch and your messaging. And then you, you start to ramp them into quota. And what happens is you start giving them pipeline, the pipeline that your company paid a ton of cash to actually generate, and maybe they&#8217;re not phenomenal at handling that pipeline, or maybe they don&#8217;t work the way that like you sort of expect, cause you skipped a couple of those steps in the interview process.<\/p>\n<p>Well, like what&#8217;s the cost of hiring the wrong person? Will you give them four months of. Opportunity before you realize, Hey, [00:53:00] we might have a performance problem. And then you go through a couple of weeks of coaching. Then you&#8217;re on like a 30 day PIP. And when you separate, you&#8217;re then paying them like six weeks of severance.<\/p>\n<p>And then you&#8217;re going back to recruiting and saying, please source me a new candidate, but what have you lost? Sure. You&#8217;ve lost a ton of money, but you&#8217;ve lost a bunch of time from your sales leaders who need to be like focused on, on execution in the market. And there&#8217;s the opportunity cost because what else could you have done in that six to nine months, if you just slowed down a little bit and made certain you were hiring The right person.<\/p>\n<p>And I think I probably, you know, stole this from somebody else. I read in a book or something, but it&#8217;s like, if my opinion is, if you&#8217;re on the fence about hiring somebody, if you say, I think we can get them there, then just stop right then and recognize that it&#8217;s probably not the right fit for your organization.<\/p>\n<p>And hiring slow and hiring deliberate means you&#8217;re probably going to increase the probability of success. For many of these candidates and everybody&#8217;s got a different [00:54:00] hiring profile. But since we&#8217;re talking about go to market, that&#8217;s just the thing that&#8217;s top of mind for me right now. Is our company scaling in the next year?<\/p>\n<p><strong>Scott Barker:<\/strong> I think it&#8217;s a great, great call out. And, uh, you know, as someone in, in venture, we are all obsessed with this idea of the power law, right? And it, it doesn&#8217;t matter if I take. 500 meetings and I haven&#8217;t done a deal in four months, but I just wait, wait until the right company comes and you find that. And then it doesn&#8217;t matter that you spent three months to find it because you know, it&#8217;s going to drive an insane amount of the returns or the outcomes.<\/p>\n<p>And I think thinking. Of the power law in terms of talent is a good way to think of it too, you know, and if you&#8217;re losing out on a potential hundred X higher, because you just feel like you need to get a butt in the seat, like the opportunity cost is just, is way too [00:55:00] high. Um, so I think it&#8217;s, uh, a great call up, uh, well, Kraig, um, I guess before I let you go, are you currently hiring AEs?<\/p>\n<p>I think some listeners might, uh, might want to know that<\/p>\n<p><strong>Kraig Swensrud:<\/strong> Yes. It&#8217;s 1000% . We are hiring. We are hiring, uh, AEs. Uh, we&#8217;re hiring ses, so you can, uh, you can contact me, Kraig@qualified.com. You can go to our website and apply, or you can find me on LinkedIn and I&#8217;ll respond. It&#8217;s. It&#8217;s crucial to us right now. We&#8217;re hiring everywhere in our go to market AEs and SEs specifically.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Scott Barker:<\/strong> Beautiful. Any top 1 percent AE listeners out there go work for this man. Go work for this team. thanks for, for jumping on, man. This has been super fun.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Kraig Swensrud:<\/strong> Scott, thanks so much for having me. Really appreciate it.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Scott Barker:<\/strong> Beautiful. And to all our listeners, I say it every week. Listening is one thing, executing is something totally different. Hopefully we spurred some ideas, tactics, strategies that you can go and implement in your own company. And, uh, we will see you all next week.<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>The post <a href=\"https:\/\/gtmnow.com\/gtm-131-being-cmo-mark-benioff-salesforce-innovators-dilemma-kraig-swensrud\/\">GTM 131: Being CMO Under Mark Benioff of Salesforce and the Innovator&#8217;s Dilemma<\/a> appeared first on <a href=\"https:\/\/gtmnow.com\">GTMnow<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The GTM Podcast is available on any major directory, including: Apple Podcasts Spotify YouTube Kraig Swensrud\u00a0is the Founder &amp; CEO of\u00a0Qualified\u00a0where he provides crucial experience and entrepreneurial energy to create the future of enterprise sales tech. Prior to founding Qualified, Kraig founded GetFeedback which was successfully sold to SurveyMonkey. Kraig also led marketing as the [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":333,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[9],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thereferralchoice.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/358"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thereferralchoice.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thereferralchoice.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thereferralchoice.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thereferralchoice.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=358"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/thereferralchoice.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/358\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":359,"href":"https:\/\/thereferralchoice.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/358\/revisions\/359"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thereferralchoice.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/333"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thereferralchoice.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=358"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thereferralchoice.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=358"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thereferralchoice.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=358"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}