Episode #305:
Andrea Kayal, Chief Revenue Officer at Help Scout, shares how alignment, trust, and customer centricity drive sustainable growth. She explains why marketing must own trust-building, how product supports revenue creation, and why strong service-level agreements eliminate friction across teams. The conversation also explores enterprise value, AI, competition, and the evolving role of modern revenue leadership.
“Your job is really equity improvement. It really is about the enterprise value that you’re creating for the business. The CRO’s job is to figure out how we acquire more customers and keep them in a better, healthier version of the business.” – Andrea Kayal
In this conversation, Andrea shares how modern revenue leaders can create stronger alignment across sales, marketing, customer success, and product teams. She explains why trust has become the most important currency in today’s buying environment, how AI is reshaping customer expectations, and why enterprise value should guide every growth decision. The discussion provides practical insights for leaders focused on sustainable growth, stronger customer relationships, and long-term business performance.
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[Transcript]
[00:00:05] Steve MacDonald: Welcome to the C-Suite Sales and Marketing Perspectives podcast. I’m Steve MacDonald, your host. Today, we have a really interesting guest, Andrea Kayal. Andrea, part of what makes you very interesting is that you’ve taken a unique career path, all B2B tech. You’ve had a lot of marketing experience.
[00:00:24] Steve MacDonald: You’ve been a three-time CMO, but you’ve made the move and are now the CRO of Help Scout. You’re not only a CRO who oversees sales, but you also oversee marketing, sales, and customer success, essentially the entire go-to-market strategy. I would love to know a little bit more about that and how you coordinate across these teams because internal alignment is a very large issue.
[00:00:53] Steve MacDonald: But I just learned something really interesting. You worked with and were the assistant to Pelé, one of the greatest football, or soccer depending on where you are in the world, players of all time. I think that’s fascinating. If you would not mind, could you start with what I mentioned there or expand on your background a little bit, and then we will dig in?
[00:01:13] Andrea Kayal: Sure. Yes, you mentioned it, but most of my career has been as a Chief Marketing Officer. I find that role to be particularly complex, interesting, and challenging. There are over 12 disciplines within marketing, maybe even more depending on the size of the company you support.
[00:01:27] Andrea Kayal: Most of what I have been doing in my career as a marketer is figuring out how we go to market. How do we acquire more customers? How do we acquire the right types of customers? How do we think about their buying behavior? How do we do that as cost effectively as possible?
[00:01:41] Andrea Kayal: What kinds of strategies do we deploy to do that? One benefit I found in moving from CMO to CRO is the leverage it gives the CEO. There is basically one person to deliberate with regarding the go-to-market strategy instead of many, such as the Chief Sales Officer, Chief Marketing Officer, Chief Customer Officer, and Chief Product Officer.
[00:02:01] Andrea Kayal: I find those conversations for the CEO end up being a little smoother, and decision making moves a little faster. Also, to your point regarding internal alignment, with me being accountable for all outcomes related to go-to-market, each person who reports to me is responsible for specific inputs that contribute to those outcomes.
[00:02:21] Andrea Kayal: With centralized and aligned outcomes, I find there is very little friction across teams because they know what they are responsible for and where the handoff to the next team occurs. I do not find this to be a particularly difficult problem that I have had to solve in my career.
[00:02:39] Andrea Kayal: Maybe I have been lucky in that regard. I know you said that 70% of the people you have on the show cite this as one of their major challenges. But with tightly aligned outcomes, I find it does not become a problem very often.
[00:02:51] Steve MacDonald: Yes. It is the number one challenge, and I have found that in over 100 interviews.
[00:02:57] Steve MacDonald: I have talked to a number of partners in go-to-market consulting companies, and they describe how they enter a new client relationship and uncover all kinds of problems. There is never a shortage of problems to solve. What they most often do is start with an alignment survey to see where everyone stands.
[00:03:19] Steve MacDonald: I believe this was also studied by McKinsey. It was a survey that found well-aligned organizations have more than twice the revenue of non-aligned organizations.
[00:03:30] Andrea Kayal: Yes. And just to be clear, Steve, it is not that I do not have problems inside these organizations. Solving problems is actually the job.
[00:03:39] Andrea Kayal: I simply find that alignment has not been my top problem in organizations, despite the fact that it is an ever-evolving conversation and requires ongoing work. There will always be a certain set of problems related to it. I just find that it does not end up being my number one challenge.
[00:03:58] Steve MacDonald: I think that is probably because you are doing some of the right things. I would love to hear more.
[00:04:03] Steve MacDonald: You touched on it briefly, but I would love to hear more about how you ensure alignment between teams because that does not happen naturally.
[00:04:12] Andrea Kayal: No. I find that very clear SLAs, for lack of a better term, service level agreements between each team, are essential. A very formal documentation process is required.
[00:04:24] Andrea Kayal: I will give you a very specific example. At Electric, we had a service level agreement that the Chief Sales Officer and I worked on. I was the Chief Marketing Officer at the time. It basically said, “Which five things does this meeting need to satisfy in order for your sales team to agree that it is an opportunity worth pursuing?”
[00:04:47] Andrea Kayal: We workshopped that for two weeks straight with sales teams and marketing teams. We really focused on who that ideal customer was, and it needed to meet those five requirements. When it met those five requirements, it was accepted into the pipeline, and win rate ownership moved to the Chief Sales Officer.
[00:05:06] Andrea Kayal: We were very clear about marketing’s requirements. We would also verify everything. We would listen to calls and make sure it was not the sales representative who missed something or failed to ask a question. We had a very tight process for confirming exactly where the handoff occurred.
[00:05:28] Andrea Kayal: That allowed me to say, “Marketing delivered X amount of great pipeline to you. Now it is on your team to win that at 30%. We are going to call it a day.”
[00:05:39] Andrea Kayal: Then we stopped all conversations around it and moved on to the next alignment issue. We were very tightly aligned on what success meant for each organization, and a lot of noise disappeared from both teams.
[00:05:47] Steve MacDonald: What I love about that is that you have gone even deeper than defining an ICP because many teams have very poorly defined ICPs.
[00:05:57] Andrea Kayal: You are right. It is not just a matter of asking whether a company is in a particular industry. We had very specific requirements for what met that criteria, and I will give you an example.
[00:06:06] Andrea Kayal: We needed to make sure the company used Microsoft Teams or Slack because we would be a terrible fit for any company that did not use those tools. It was not only about whether they matched the psychographic and firmographic profile. It was also about whether they operated their business in a way that made them a good fit.
[00:06:28] Andrea Kayal: If they did, the opportunity was accepted into the pipeline. At that point, it was on you, Mr. Sales Representative or Mrs. Sales Representative, to go close the deal.
[00:06:36] Steve MacDonald: So now that you’re overseeing marketing and sales, and I am sure you have SLAs between the different departments as well, there is an area you could call a gap in most B2B companies. Often, the deals marketing brings forward, the leads we bring forward, are earlier stage.
[00:06:59] Steve MacDonald: They are not always BANT qualified. Most sales organizations are built around compensation packages that benefit short term attainment, closed deals this quarter or this month.
[00:07:11] Steve MacDonald: So how do you design for the middle? How do you design for someone who is on our list? We all have lists. These are the companies we want to do business with.
[00:07:20] Steve MacDonald: In this day and age, we know we have to build relationships. You cannot simply decide that because you are seeing a lot of intent signals, now is the time to build trust and relationships.
[00:07:39] Steve MacDonald: This is a longer process. Typically, there is a marketing and sales function that has that gap in the middle. I am wondering how you think about that gap. Maybe it is marketing nurturing longer, sales engaging earlier, or changing compensation structures. I have heard many different perspectives, but I would love to hear your point of view on what you do with that gap.
[00:08:05] Andrea Kayal: As you were talking, I was thinking about our current SLA and where I think that gap might be.
[00:08:11] Andrea Kayal: One way I think about that, Steve, is that I actually do not think it is a gap in the middle. I think that is still a marketing problem to solve. It is on the marketing team to make sure that by the time we hand someone over to sales, they have expressed intent to see the product and want to talk to a sales representative.
[00:08:30] Andrea Kayal: That journey, the nurturing journey, the intent journey, and the trust building journey are marketing’s responsibility.
[00:08:36] Andrea Kayal: This is why, again, no criticism of my sales counterparts, but the marketing function, the CMO function, includes the 12 disciplines I mentioned earlier. All of those disciplines support the entire journey we just discussed.
[00:08:52] Andrea Kayal: That is why I do not think it is a gap between teams. It is a problem for marketing to solve completely before handing it over to sales. The handoff should happen when the person says, “I want to speak to a sales representative.”
[00:09:06] Andrea Kayal: Again, at Help Scout, and even at Electric, we did not do a lot of outbound prospecting from sales representatives because that meant prospects were still too early in their journey.
[00:09:17] Andrea Kayal: Marketing is actually the better touchpoint until they are ready to engage. Then we send them to sales.
[00:09:22] Andrea Kayal: That is where I think the unique value proposition of a sales organization comes into play. Marketing built the trust. Sales now needs to convince them why us. That is where each team should focus, rather than thinking about a middle stage. In my view, it is really all on marketing.
[00:09:40] Steve MacDonald: What is interesting is that there have been a couple of things marketing has had to evolve beyond. You mentioned one of them. Marketing is no longer about generating an MQL and throwing it over the wall to sales.
[00:09:52] Steve MacDonald: We have to stay involved much longer. In fact, I talk to CMOs all the time who say, “We are involved all the way through the process, even beyond the closed deal and into retention.”
[00:10:01] Steve MacDonald: But that has not always been the mindset. For a long time, the mindset was how can we automate absolutely everything, which in some ways runs counter to the idea that it is all about relationships and building trust.
[00:10:18] Steve MacDonald: If you are saying that is not really a gap and is instead the responsibility of marketing, then there is almost a CRM function that marketing needs to have.
[00:10:28] Steve MacDonald: There is nurturing, relationship building, carefully designed sequences, and many other things that need to happen. How do you see that taking place without simply relying on automation?
[00:10:46] Andrea Kayal: Yes. We certainly have plenty of automation, and AI is obviously making that much easier.
[00:10:52] Andrea Kayal: But no matter what tool you use or what type of communication you send, the trust building remains the job to be done. Marketing’s responsibility is to create enough trust and affinity for the brand so that when someone is ready to engage with a sales representative, they already believe in the company.
[00:11:11] Andrea Kayal: That is also a fundamentally different view of marketing today. People are going to ask an LLM, for example, which company is best, and they are going to trust that answer completely.
[00:11:24] Andrea Kayal: Whether they use an LLM or not, trust is the thing marketing has always tried to build. Whether you achieved that through automation or something else, trust and brand affinity remain the core job.
[00:11:34] Andrea Kayal: I still think the role of the sales representative is to say, “Great, you believe we could be a solution for you. Let me show you exactly why. Here are all of our capabilities.”
[00:11:47] Andrea Kayal: That is more of the down funnel responsibility. If marketing does not believe that building trust from beginning to end is part of the job, then that is probably where the mindset needs to shift.
[00:11:58] Andrea Kayal: Ultimately, it is all about making sure we can connect with a person in a way that feels more like a B2C experience, so they are ready to buy a B2B technology solution.
[00:12:09] Steve MacDonald: I love your phrasing that marketing’s job is building trust end to end. I think it was right before the beginning of the year that Forrester came out and said, “2026 prediction, it’s all about trust.”
[00:12:23] Steve MacDonald: Trust is the currency.
[00:12:27] Andrea Kayal: By the way, this is why SEO started to evolve this way and why LLMs started to evolve this way. Again, we can debate all day how much to trust an LLM, but that LLM is still being fed information from the internet, sources that have all been written to suggest a particular tool or solution in the first place.
[00:12:46] Andrea Kayal: It is an aggregation of all those sources. You should apply some level of your own judgment when receiving information from Claude, OpenAI, Gemini, or any other platform.
[00:12:59] Andrea Kayal: Why are people turning to LLMs? Because they would rather use an aggregate of what is happening across the internet. LLMs also prioritize sentiment.
[00:13:07] Andrea Kayal: How is a brand showing up on review sites? How is it being talked about online? They use those signals directionally. That is why people go to an LLM instead of clicking the first search result, because there has often been a team of people trying to make sure that result appeared first. It can be very self-serving.
[00:13:25] Andrea Kayal: It is showing up in every data point. This continues to reinforce the idea that when someone trusts the source, the information, and the brand, they are more likely to request information or demonstrate intent toward that brand.
[00:13:36] Steve MacDonald: I would love to ask a little more about the competitive pressures happening in the marketplace today. You talked about rising competition and how it is easier for new market entrants to emerge.
[00:13:49] Steve MacDonald: Especially with any kind of SaaS product, we are all looking over our shoulders these days thinking, “Oh my gosh, everyone is writing code at lightning speed now.”
[00:14:00] Steve MacDonald: How much is Claude going to do that we are already doing? How does competition impact today’s environment when it comes to building trust, building relationships, and closing deals?
[00:14:16] Andrea Kayal: I think the barrier to entry for a market entrant to create and develop technology is pretty low. That is what has been democratized.
[00:14:27] Andrea Kayal: Recreating all the trust a 14-year-old SaaS business like ours has built in the market is much harder. That is where there is still a significant barrier to entry. It is not impossible, but there is a wall you have to climb.
[00:14:42] Andrea Kayal: Speaking specifically about Help Scout, there are 14 years of well-executed thought leadership that the company has put into the world. We have helped customer support leaders do their jobs better, learn tips and tricks, and navigate difficult conversations.
[00:14:58] Andrea Kayal: The actual Help Scout product is also very well done. People love it. It is priced appropriately, it solves the problems it is supposed to solve, and sentiment around it is very positive.
[00:15:10] Andrea Kayal: Those two things together mean that when someone asks an LLM which solution they should use, because this is increasingly how people discover products, we show up very high in those results.
[00:15:23] Andrea Kayal: We will continue to prioritize human-developed thought leadership and content, along with a very human approach to our brand. I think people can still recognize the difference today, and they value it.
[00:15:37] Andrea Kayal: I believe that is where trust is being built. I do not yet know exactly how AI-native companies are acquiring customers in this new market.
[00:15:50] Andrea Kayal: Certainly companies like Sierra and Decagon are not having any trouble doing it. They are much further upmarket than we are, but they are AI-native and growing rapidly. They clearly have their own secret sauce for how they think about growth. It is simply different from our approach.
[00:16:05] Steve MacDonald: It is interesting. There is almost a whiplash effect happening.
[00:16:10] Steve MacDonald: I talk to a lot of CROs who tell me, “Steve, I am buying plane tickets again. I am getting out to see customers and meet prospective buyers. I was not doing that before.”
[00:16:24] Steve MacDonald: Whether it is because of AI or something else, there is a renewed focus on trust building and relationship building. We have heard those concepts forever.
[00:16:36] Steve MacDonald: It is easy to say, “Yes, of course.” Just like the word value. Of course we have to provide value. These ideas are fundamental and have existed forever.
[00:16:47] Steve MacDonald: But there is a reemergence happening, and there is a direct correlation with declining trust. If you look at the Edelman Trust Barometer, with 32,000 respondents worldwide, 68% believe business leaders like you and me are intentionally misleading people.
[00:17:05] Steve MacDonald: At 68%, you begin to understand why buyers are waiting longer to speak with us. They are turning to LLMs, their peers, and other trusted sources first.
[00:17:16] Steve MacDonald: This is not only an AI issue. It is also geopolitical. Trust overall is lower than it was one year ago, two years ago, or ten years ago. It brings us back to the fundamentals.
[00:17:31] Steve MacDonald: Another thing happening is that buyers are waiting longer and longer before they want to speak with a sales organization.
[00:17:40] Steve MacDonald: Within your go-to-market strategy, are you surfacing people from other parts of the organization as resources buyers can talk to, learn from, and engage with? Is it becoming more important that everyone be customer facing, not just sales?
[00:17:57] Andrea Kayal: I think this relates back to the thought leadership discussion we had earlier.
[00:18:02] Andrea Kayal: We have a podcast and newsletter called The Supportive. Obviously, it is something we invest in, but you would not necessarily know that it is a Help Scout property because the brand is not plastered all over it.
[00:18:15] Andrea Kayal: We have one of our employees, someone deeply experienced in customer support, interviewing other customer support leaders about what is working for them and what is not.
[00:18:27] Andrea Kayal: When you think about building trust, we have no incentive other than helping people learn more about trends and best practices within the customer support industry.
[00:18:39] Andrea Kayal: Of course, we have an incentive to create thought leadership, but you would not necessarily know that The Supportive is a Help Scout product. It is ours, but the focus is on helping people.
[00:18:51] Andrea Kayal: We invest in educating the market on how to become the best customer support professional possible.
[00:18:58] Andrea Kayal: By the way, this individual sits within the marketing team, and we invest marketing dollars into the program. But when it comes to content and thought leadership, it is all created by people who are not sales-oriented individuals.
[00:19:01] Steve MacDonald: And you had said in our last conversation that you thought B2B feels increasingly more personal.
[00:19:08] Andrea Kayal: Yes. I think it needs to. I do not know if it is already feeling that way, Steve, but I think it needs to feel increasingly more like B2C.
[00:19:18] Andrea Kayal: Maybe it goes back to the statistic we were discussing, that 68% of respondents feel business leaders are being intentionally misleading or not telling the truth.
[00:19:31] Steve MacDonald: Intentionally misleading.
[00:19:34] Andrea Kayal: Yes. As sad as that statistic is, I think it is why more companies need to start positioning their brands to feel more human and helpful. Not every interaction should end with an ask.
[00:19:47] Andrea Kayal: Instead, provide information that is genuinely useful. Then hopefully people can navigate toward the outcome we are looking for, which is that they agree we are helpful and eventually purchase the platform.
[00:20:01] Andrea Kayal: The path to that outcome is creating a human, consumer-like experience rather than presenting ourselves as a large company that is not there to help. That is not the case at all.
[00:20:13] Steve MacDonald: The term hyper-personalization has been used for a long time. You talked about being customer-centric and turning customer insights into action.
[00:20:24] Steve MacDonald: The more we know, the more we can build the personal relationships you are describing, where customers feel that we truly understand them and their challenges.
[00:20:38] Steve MacDonald: That is what they want to know. They want to know that we are not vendors trying to sell something.
[00:20:46] Steve MacDonald: If we can move from being vendors to being peers, that is the goal. So how do you think about customer-centric alignment and turning that into go-to-market action?
[00:20:59] Andrea Kayal: I will give you the abridged version because it is embedded in everything we do, from top to bottom. We constantly think about how to make the brand feel more human.
[00:21:11] Andrea Kayal: We had a large town hall today, and one of the core elements of our positioning at Help Scout continues to be this human-centric brand.
[00:21:20] Andrea Kayal: We hope we do not feel like we are selling. We hope we feel like we are educating the market about customer support.
[00:21:28] Andrea Kayal: As I mentioned earlier, hopefully that eventually leads someone to request a demo or take the next step. But if it does not, that is okay too.
[00:21:37] Andrea Kayal: We want to be seen as the company that is the leading provider of customer support education.
[00:21:44] Andrea Kayal: This shows up everywhere. Most of our advertising focuses on how we have helped customers achieve specific outcomes. We tell customer stories.
[00:21:53] Andrea Kayal: We recently launched a major page on our website focused entirely on how our platform is impacting current customers. That is part of the walk-a-mile-in-their-shoes approach.
[00:22:04] Andrea Kayal: We also hosted several events last year where the invitation was not “Take a demo and get a gift.” Instead, it was simply, “Join us for dinner.”
[00:22:14] Andrea Kayal: The overarching point is that we want to be helpful, useful, and focused on giving rather than taking.
[00:22:22] Andrea Kayal: By the way, this is how personal relationships work. My wife and I talk about this often when we think about our own friendships.
[00:22:30] Andrea Kayal: The best friendships are those where the debits and credits feel balanced. It feels mutually beneficial. Neither person feels as though the other has taken more than they have given.
[00:22:42] Andrea Kayal: That is how a vendor should operate as well.
[00:22:46] Andrea Kayal: How much have we given to this prospect before we ask for their business? That relationship-first mindset is a strategic principle we discuss at the highest levels of the company.
[00:22:58] Steve MacDonald: Tell me your thoughts on this. When I ask C-suite executives what their two greatest challenges are in creating long-term, sustainable growth, I have never had a single executive say that product was one of those challenges.
[00:23:13] Steve MacDonald: We know the product is important. Nobody is saying the product is not important. I am a two-time SaaS founder, so I understand that completely.
[00:23:24] Steve MacDonald: But it is interesting because product has never come up as a go-to-market challenge. I am curious about your perspective. Within a communications, marketing, and trust-building strategy, how does product fit into the go-to-market motion?
[00:23:43] Andrea Kayal: Interestingly enough, in this role, I have a product leader who could not be a more aligned partner in the go-to-market journey.
[00:23:52] Andrea Kayal: This person deeply understands the revenue challenges related to both customer acquisition and retention and is incredibly engaged in those discussions.
[00:24:00] Andrea Kayal: That is somewhat unusual for a product leader. Not because they do not understand that revenue is the ultimate goal, but because product development is often a winding journey of deciding what to build and what to prioritize.
[00:24:14] Andrea Kayal: When I think about how product fits into our go-to-market strategy, we meet monthly and review all of the commercial requests.
[00:24:22] Andrea Kayal: What are we hearing in deals? What are customers asking for? We now have many tools that aggregate this information, which makes those conversations very data-driven and much easier.
[00:24:33] Andrea Kayal: We prioritize those requests based on major customer needs and whether they fit into our broader product strategy.
[00:24:40] Andrea Kayal: We also look at what it will take to win new business. More recently, as product and engineering teams have learned how to build and ship faster, we have started thinking much more about product monetization.
[00:24:53] Andrea Kayal: What are the different bundles of capabilities we can sell to customers?
[00:24:58] Andrea Kayal: That has been a very exciting evolution because product is now supporting marketing in new ways.
[00:25:04] Andrea Kayal: I can now say, “I believe these three capabilities will increase our average contract value if we sell them separately.”
[00:25:13] Andrea Kayal: I am no longer waiting three or four years for that strategy to materialize. The conversations are evolving much faster because AI has accelerated what is possible.
[00:25:24] Andrea Kayal: Product has become a significant lever in our overall revenue strategy, and that has been incredibly exciting.
[00:25:13] Steve MacDonald: You know, it is interesting. AI has come up a number of times in this conversation. It comes up in every business conversation now.
[00:25:21] Steve MacDonald: I remember talking to a vice president at Google, and he said, “There is never a meeting we have where AI is not a part of it.”
[00:25:31] Steve MacDonald: But there is also an expectation that comes with AI. You talked about moving from a three-year timeline to three months. That entire shift in expectations is built on the belief that AI can help us do things more efficiently, at higher quality, and much faster.
[00:25:48] Steve MacDonald: Our clients have the same expectation. They expect the value we deliver to be faster and of higher quality. There is an expectation that greater value can be delivered in less time.
[00:26:01] Steve MacDonald: How have you seen that impacting go-to-market strategies and the level of expectation that comes with it?
[00:26:01] Andrea Kayal: We have not felt that pressure yet. We receive customer requests all the time, but we have not experienced a situation where it has completely derailed our vision.
[00:26:13] Andrea Kayal: We have a strong product vision and a strong set of products and features on our roadmap. If we needed to move faster on certain priorities, we could.
[00:26:27] Andrea Kayal: At this point, it is more of a prioritization question. It no longer feels like a limitation. Instead of building four things customers ask for, maybe we can build six.
[00:26:39] Andrea Kayal: We have not yet felt pressure from customers saying, “We are going to leave, cancel, or churn if you do not build this tomorrow because we know you can.”
[00:26:52] Andrea Kayal: But I do think expectations around feature development will continue to increase. If a large customer comes to us and says, “We need this,” we will probably figure out how to make it happen.
[00:26:57] Steve MacDonald: Definitely. We have talked about so much today, and I wanted to give you one final opportunity.
[00:27:05] Steve MacDonald: Our human brains can only remember two or three things at a time. If there were one takeaway you wanted your fellow C-suite executives, the people listening to this podcast, to remember from our entire conversation, what would it be?
[00:27:22] Andrea Kayal: Perhaps it goes back to one of the first things we discussed, setting the rules of engagement between teams.
[00:27:30] Andrea Kayal: It is completely reasonable to draw clear lines and create more formality between teams. Sometimes it is viewed as adding too much process or creating a process problem.
[00:27:42] Andrea Kayal: But by simply creating those guardrails, you eliminate a tremendous amount of internal discussion, uncertainty, and back-and-forth between teams.
[00:27:53] Andrea Kayal: I would strongly encourage organizations to create formal service level agreements between departments so that everyone is very clear on expectations.
[00:28:03] Andrea Kayal: I think it frees up a significant amount of time.
[00:28:07] Andrea Kayal: Another thing we have not discussed is what I believe is one of the most important lessons I have learned as a CRO. It probably started during my time as a CMO and continued into this role.
[00:28:21] Andrea Kayal: Your job is really about equity improvement. It is about increasing enterprise value for the business.
[00:28:30] Andrea Kayal: You should not think about it narrowly as simply making the company more money. The CRO’s job is to figure out how to acquire more customers and retain them in a healthier, stronger business.
[00:28:43] Andrea Kayal: The faster you can identify a framework for what enterprise value means within your company, the better. I like the Enterprise Five framework.
[00:28:53] Andrea Kayal: Too often, CROs view the role too narrowly. They focus on things like new ARR, NDR, or other input metrics.
[00:29:02] Andrea Kayal: But there are larger themes that a CRO needs to think about collectively.
[00:29:09] Andrea Kayal: I use the Iconiq Enterprise Five framework. I would be happy to share that link afterward, Steve, and include it in any materials that go out.
[00:29:21] Andrea Kayal: These are the five metrics they identified as the most important indicators of enterprise value among their highest-valued portfolio companies.
[00:29:31] Andrea Kayal: Year-over-year growth is one of them. Net Dollar Retention is another. There is also the Rule of 40, ARR per FTE, and Net Magic Number.
[00:29:43] Andrea Kayal: Collectively, those five metrics indicate that you are creating real enterprise value.
[00:29:49] Andrea Kayal: If I were earlier in my career as a CRO, one of the first alignment exercises I would conduct would be making sure everyone was crystal clear on which five metrics matter most to the board and the business.
[00:30:02] Andrea Kayal: I would want alignment around the question, “What does great enterprise value look like for this company?”
[00:30:10] Steve MacDonald: I feel like we need another one or two podcast episodes because that is a whole topic on its own.
[00:30:17] Steve MacDonald: I love your perspective, your background, and your experience. The mission of this podcast is to bring together C-suite executives from around the world to share stories, experiences, successes, and lessons learned so we can all learn from one another.
[00:30:34] Steve MacDonald: If we can do that, then it becomes the rising tide that lifts all boats. You were an amazing part of that rising tide today.
[00:30:44] Andrea Kayal: I am happy to share and give back because I listen to podcasts like this myself.
[00:30:50] Andrea Kayal: I try to stay curious, keep learning, and learn from others. I look for the people who are doing things exceptionally well in the moment, then learn and grow from their experiences.
[00:31:02] Andrea Kayal: Thank you for having me. Hopefully this conversation was helpful.