Last month, Utah Business partnered with Entrata and Fullcast to host a roundtable discussion on strategies for chief revenue officers (CROs). This conversation was moderated by Brian McLeod, founder of Highlander Media.
Are you seeing shifts in the balance between inbound and outbound success? How are you adapting?
Nate Kimmons | CRO/Senior Advisor | Degreed
Our balance between inbound and outbound has always been a little bit more outbound, driven by an SDR [sales development representatives] team feeding leads and appointments to outside sales reps. Over the last two years, it’s definitely shifted and the BDR [business development representatives] team is almost becoming more full-cycle marketers trying to do more discovery and content creation versus just set appointments. … The biggest trend that’s impacting our business and the sales cycle right now is just consolidation.
Brennen Creer | VP, GTM | FlexFactor
Buyers are more educated now than they’ve ever been. They have access to more intel via AI than ever before. … We’re leveraging AI to try and educate our reps as much as these buyers are being educated on their own as well. … [With outbound], you can’t just blast emails or cold calls and get anywhere. It’s about really understanding your repertoire. … There are a lot of different arrows in our quivers to make sure that these reps are going into that battle with as much as they possibly can, knowing the buyers are more advanced than they’ve ever been. … You have to figure out how to get through the noise and be really memorable.
Shane Starr | VP, Sales | Pclub.io
We’re living in a new era of selling. Three, four years ago, it was zero-interest policies. It was very different. It was demand positive. Things have shifted. Our sellers are less experienced. They’re working from home, remote. … My stance is I want to leverage AI to superpower the humans I have and make them five times as productive as they otherwise could be. And it’s not just BDRs and SDRs. For us, it’s AEs [account executives] as well. It’s leaders.
Tanner Lacey | Sr. Director, Sales & Partnerships | Sendoso
For the longest time, e-gifts and gift cards were the top [choices for gifting]. People were sending out Starbucks cards, Uber cards, and we’ve actually seen a big decrease in that and an increase in physical spending. We’ve seen that each of our customers is starting to spend more and more on average, and almost all of that is shifting to something physical. People are trying to find creative ways to land on doorsteps, to land in offices, and people are going back to the office. They’re trying to get things more in the hands of the individual.
What’s your process for evaluating and integrating new sales technologies without overwhelming your teams?
Tiffany Thweatt | VP, Sales | Sonic Healthcare
When we look at adopting new sales technology, we know there can be hesitation, especially among pathologists who may worry it could replace them. Our process is built around showing that the technology is here to level them up. It extends their reach, enhances efficiency, and equips them with tools to be stronger in the market. That same message resonates with our dermatology partners, who see how our technology can elevate their practice, increase efficiencies, and streamline their workflow so that day-to-day operations become easier with the new technology in place.
Pete Shelton | CRO | Fullcast
The data says 60 percent of research is done on you before you ever get an inbound. For my team, if customers are going to be pretty up to speed, I expect them to use AI and know everything they possibly can about that customer. … If 60 percent of research happens before you ever get involved, we as organizations have to have way better third-party visibility so that the information’s out there for people to consume.
Terrance Jesclard | Owner/Operator | Les BBQ
We’ve got an interesting business in that barbecue is designed to be extremely slow. And so having AI — having some of these tools [that are meant] to, I suppose, improve our processes — it’s been a really unique challenge because the ways of barbecue go back generations. We’re having to break some generation cycles. … ChatGPT is a very foreign thing for a lot of our guys.
Christy Clifton | CRO | Cisive
[Since I’ve been in build mode at Cisive, I’ve been] bringing in new sales technology. … For me, it’s not a budget issue. I don’t want to overwhelm my sellers; I don’t want to distract my sellers. I’ve been slowly introducing new technologies. Generally, I’ll pilot them, and I’ll really closely monitor success and uptake.
Matt West | VP, Strategic Accounts & New Markets | MX
The lowest hanging fruit is that you can probably get 10X output out of BDRs when they use AI for both research and for more personalized emails created by AI, as long as you have good data feeding the AI so the emails are right. We’re probably all using this: AI in your Zoom calls or whatever tool you’re using and getting those notes automatically into Salesforce. You don’t lose data, … you have the real content, the real takeaways, the real action items from every call right there in Salesforce. … If you’re not doing that, it’s really easy to turn on.
Brennen Creer | VP, GTM | FlexFactor
I feel like it’s my responsibility to make sure I’m not implementing something that’s going to add to more unproductivity. There’s a stat out there that … 28 percent of a seller’s day is spent on selling. So, 72 percent of their day is not productive — just statistically. If I can leverage AI to increase that productivity, that’s immense for our output from a revenue standpoint.
Tanner Lacey | Sr. Director, Sales & Partnerships | Sendoso
I actually built a custom GPT that I feed what I’m finding and have it create courses for my reps. Then, I can feed it what’s more industry-specific. … It’s easy to change quickly. It’s not as structured as having an LMS or a course format, but my teams loved it.
Ryan Rich | Co-Founder & CCO | Accord
We’re past the trough of disillusionment, where at first we thought [AI] could do everything. They are figuring out what it can do well and what it can not do so well. We haven’t brought a training course per se to our team, but what we’ve done with the executives at Accord is whenever we learn something new or we find something interesting about a workflow that we ran in the GPT, we will post it in Slack. … We turn it into a contest. Whoever can find the next cool thing, we’ll post it, and the team gets really excited about that. I found that it coming from the top down has allowed the rest of the team to get into it.
Todd Handy | CRO | Disruptive Impact
I do a lot of deep research in ChatGPT and it will still hallucinate and give me quotes that are not right. If I were to take that and give it to a site, that could really be a problem. So what we need to be thinking about is controlling the narrative for ourselves like we learned to early in SEO and SEM. … We need to fully control a narrative of what every one of these engines is seeing about us and make sure that it’s correct.
Seth Ellison | Director, Partnerships | Thumbtack
I have an email tool that’s AI and it’ll read my email and it will pre-draft responses, but I don’t let it just automatically send that out. We’re finding that it’s all about quality. I’m on the opposite side of this, where I’m being reached out to 30, 40 times a day. … If it was AI-generated, I’m not responding. If it wasn’t worth two minutes of their day to write a custom email or response to me, I’m not going to take two minutes out of my day to respond back.
Bryce Winkelman | CRO | Typeform
Right now, sussing out the signal is mission-critical for us as an organization. We are heavily relying on data and our data team to be able to say, “What is the signal that is predictive of outreach? Who should we be talking to? How should we be talking to them? What paywalls are we hitting? What does usage look like?” That’s a big growth driver for us as we go into 2026.
What other types of growth are you exploring?
Shane Starr | VP, Sales | Pclub.io
Our ICP [ideal customer profile] is heads of sales and sales leadership. It seems like revenue per rep is a metric that they’re talking about a lot. It’s not just revenue per rep. … They look at revenue per employee, but it seems much more interwoven into that on the other side, which is net revenue retention. A… Those are almost north star metrics right now for sales leadership, which are way more about efficiency than they are about growth.
Jim Sbarra | VP, Sales Productivity | Freshworks
When you’re truly high growth, you tend to focus on what’s coming at the top and you forget about what’s falling off the bottom. And when you get into a downturn, if you’re not protecting that bottom and continuing that retention, you’re not focusing on that, your NRR [net revenue retention] gets killed. … We also had a parallel strategy to build the partner side of it. We were very weak in the partner channel. … You have to have a partner network. You’ve got to have people who speak on your behalf. You can’t be everywhere.
Rick Johnson | Head of Sales | Agero Inc.
Ecosystem is such a key element to helping you have sticky revenue. It keeps your NRR up. It’s what your customers want. … They want to see what incremental value you are adding rather than what you’re doing today. When you’re able to partner with another organization that already has your shared customer as a client and you bring that incremental value to the equation, that drives so much value to what you are offering that customer and just drives stickiness.
Jonathan Leaf | CRO | BambooHR
We’ve dedicated ourselves to partnerships, and we would refer to those as growth partners or referral partners, reseller partners, which is a whole different channel, and strategic partnerships that can help build product and joint go-to-market with one another. … When I think about our BDR and our outbound AE organization, we’re not talking about masses of people, we’re talking about tens of people. We need to really help them prioritize themselves, and propensity is a way to do that.
As you lead into that sales kickoff meeting next year and start to prep those pipelines and budgets, what are the big things on your mind?
Matt West | VP, Strategic Accounts & New Markets | MX
We’ve got to do a pretty significant rebuild in the revenue organization. … We’ve got a small team. It’s too small. We need to grow in quality. We need to up-level the people we have, and I don’t have enough high-quality enterprise reps to handle the really amazing opportunities we have. … It’s a great problem to have.
Bryce Winkelman | CRO | Typeform
The No. 1 way to be successful in a role like that is to have great people. It is 100 percent about the people. You’ve got to build your roster the way you want. For my leadership team, they know that their No.1–10 job is to get their roster on the floor. And if they do that, they’re going to be ultimately successful.
Jim Sbarra | VP, Sales Productivity | Freshworks
What becomes very successful is when RevOps and CRO are together. … Every CRO that I’ve worked with in this capacity, we were one and the same — I was in the meeting when he wasn’t in the meeting type of thing. We spoke for each other. And if you build that really good trust with that individual, you can then, as a CRO, kind of let them … handle a lot of sales stuff too on your behalf. Maybe not the customer stuff if you don’t want that, but internally and to help bring the teams grow, there is no substitute for that relationship.
Jonathan Leaf | CRO | BambooHR
With all the change that is occurring, some things will always be the same and it’s sometimes just good to anchor on the things that’ll always be true. [There’s a] need for great people being tried and true in sales methodologies and unifying languages in the company cross-functionally with customers. That will not go away, ever. And the value exchange that customers expect will never go away.
Curtis Call | Executive Sales Consultant
Right now is the time to decide: Do you have the right people on your team for the goals that you have next year? Because these next few months are your opportunity to onboard and ramp them up so that you can hit the new year running. AI is a critical piece of growing people. Is AI going to replace some jobs? Probably. I don’t know that it necessarily can replace the whole sales process because so much of it is relationship-based and people-based, so you might as well leverage it to grow your people.
Rick Johnson | Head of Sales | Agero Inc.
Investing in your people is so critical. … I want to make them better people and better humans through helping them become the best they can be in their craft. If I can teach them principles and guide them in a way that helps them take some of those principles into their personal life, it drives such a commitment that they will run through walls for you.
Dale Zwizinski | Chief GTM Officer | Revenue Reimagined
Going into the next year, we should actually take a step back a little bit from AI. There’s this whole idea of a productivity paradox where we think we’re more productive than we really are, and it’s telling us we’re more productive, but we’re really not. … You can spend a ton of money and not get what you’re expecting, then be six months down the road and have to go back traditionally.
Ben Davis | CRO | Lendio
One of [my roles] is I’m the chief storyteller and the other one is I’m the chief integrator. And they tend to be really distinct paths. … I think about the storytelling role and how that impacts people. I have to rally cross-functional people around a common vision and a common goal. … When I’m in chief integrator mode, I’m in a very different place. … If you are not a developer of people in sales, you can’t stay in my world. If you can’t put that storyteller hat on, if you are just transactional, I haven’t seen that work.
Seth Ellison | Director, Partnerships | Thumbtack
Planning for 2026 is continuous. We are revisiting, revamping and redoing. If your RKO [revenue kickoff] or SKO [sales kickoff] is where your plan ends, that will become your anchor for the rest of the next year. And then on the topic of people, everyone needs three things to be successful in their role. That’s autonomy, … complexity and a balanced effort-reward. If you have all three, you’re going to have someone who will follow you anywhere. If you have two of the three, you’ll have someone who will be with you for a while. One of three, you’ve got a flight risk.
