We are excited to revisit this episode of Selling the Cloud. featuring Paul Melchiorre, a legendary Silicon Valley Chief Revenue Officer at leading Saas companies like Ariba and AnaPlan. Paul's unique perspectives on scaling high-growth companies, the role of a CRO, and the impact ofProduct Led Growth remains just as relevant today.

Over thirty years, Paul has had the change to be a part of industry leading, high growth companies beginning with SAP where Paul was an early executive for their entry into the North American market.

Paul then in 1998 joined Ariba, an early market entrant and ultimately the acknowledged leader in indirect procurement automation. Paul experienced a unique journey in early stage, venture backed companies by staying at Ariba for over 15 years, including being the Global Sales, Services and Partner top executive for the majority of that time.

Paul shared why, in the Chief Revenue Officer (CRO) role that being responsible for marketing, sales and customer success is a critical element for success. Several reasons that this is so important is that the customer lifecycle has been changed by the SaaS industry, including the growing importance of existing customer expansion revenue in the evolving "Land and Expand" customer acquisition model.

The growing trend of Product Led Growth (PLG) as a customer acquisition motion will continue to increase the importance of an integrated approach to customer acquisition, retention and expansion. This need for an integrated approach to the customer lifecycle is further highlighted when up to 50% of revenue growth is generated by existing customers.

Paul also shares how investing in himself, including earning his MBA in Finance in the middle of his career journey was critical to being a well rounded, CRO that could build credibility with the CFO.

Paul further explored how PLG also impacts the need for product management to become a more integrated part of the revenue generation team.

Another variable discussed is how the stage of the company impacts both the CRO role and the profile of the CRO. Being able to identify CRO's that have hands-on experience in both early stage, Product Market Fit (PMF) to Minimum Viable Repeatability (MVR) and then from MVR to Minimum Viable Traction (MVT) to true scale is a hard find, but more CRO's like that exist in 2021 than every before.

If you have just become a Chief Revenue Officer or have the aspiration to become a CRO in a SaaS or Cloud company, this is a great listen.

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As the landscape of B2B marketing and sales continues to grow, it's the perfect time to revisit this insightful conversation and Michael Pollack’s perspectives on optimizing your data strategy for more effective customer acquisition.

Moving from data driven to metrics informed decisions and what does this mean for customer acquisition professionals?

This was a primary topic of conversation on the latest Selling the Cloud podcast with Michael Pollack, Intricately CEO

Data is like water - it's really important if you don't have any but what if you have TOO MUCH? Water's value increases exponentially when you process or distill it into higher value outcomes (coffee vs water). This applies to B2B Marketing and Sales by evolving your data strategy from "contacts to context" - creating marketing & sales intelligence

CRM, Martech and Salestech platforms contain and create a lot of content (data) - but not enough context such as:

- What to say and/or what content to share

- When do you share it and how

- How do you say it or how do you message the content

Marketing can add more value to revenue growth by REDUCING the number of leads and moving to a "disqualification" versus "qualification" orientation. Disqualifying low fit leads, contacts, and prospects increases time invested on high quality leads & opportunities

We all know the buying journey has changed - but why are we still using techniques from 10 years ago?

Mike has some interesting insights and ideas that he shares in this episode.

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As we near the end of Q3, we thought it would be a great time to re-listen to "Transforming an Enterprise Sales Organization - with Cathy Minter, CRO at R3"

Cathy shares her experiences in taking over the role of the CRO in an early stage pioneer in applying Block Chain to enterprise level application development.

The need for transformation was initially based upon the original formation of R3, which was founded as a consortium of large financial service companies exploring how Block Chain could impact and be leveraged in the banking industry. Initially, R3 was more a consulting company and think tank comprised of investment banking professionals and not an enterprise software platform, with an enterprise sales organization.

Cathy's initial challenge was to build the processes, infrastructure and organization required to evangelize the opportunity that Block Chain provides to application development of the future.

Becoming a "Customer First" company started by getting the executive team aligned on building a customer centric culture that would serve them well over the long haul. It was then translated into the sales process that transitioned from product/feature/function to a solution, business value centric methodology. The use of "Proof of Technology" phase "0" programs to ensure both the business benefit and technical fit was used while embracing a "land and expand" customer acquisition and expansion strategy.

Marketing and Sales alignment was discussed as a key responsibility of a CRO. When marketing and sales became part of the same reporting structure to Cathy at R3, that was when alignment became integration. A critical inflection point happened when marketing made all of their "goals" yet sales and the company missed their revenue goals...it was time to align marketing and sales to the same outcome based goals and integrate the processes, platforms and organizations to the end to end customer buying journey.

Lastly, Cathy shared how to identify enterprise sales candidates for the traits of resilience. In fact, she linked the candidate question "tell me about the last five deals you lost and what did you learn from those" as a way to understand both resilience and a candidates ability to accept responsibility and learn from those experiences.

If you want to become a Chief Revenue officer in an enterprise sales environment, and especially one where the need is to transform the company to a customer first, solution sales methodology, this is a great listen.

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