Episode #241:
Matt Gorman, Chief Revenue Officer at MSH, explains why the most significant barriers to sustainable growth are almost always internal rather than external. He shows how misaligned expectations, lack of internal trust, and weak revenue operations discipline undermine even strong strategies. Matt challenges leaders to define growth clearly, align risk tolerance, and protect their long-term plan from short-term decisions.
“If you’re not a master of your own home, it’s going to be very hard to be a master of somebody else’s. Too many companies focus too much on what the market and competitors are doing. It’s great to have awareness of those things, but it is not okay to be paralyzed by them that you forget that execution is the actual winning strategy.” — Matt Gorman
Matt highlights how internal trust, clear definitions of growth, and disciplined revenue operations determine long-term performance. He explains why companies struggle when they misread risk and reward, prioritize speed over alignment, or let short-term decisions override long-term plans. His insights reveal how mastering internal execution creates predictable, sustainable growth.
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[Transcript]
[00:00:05] Steve MacDonald: Welcome to the C-Suite Sales and Marketing Perspectives podcast. I am Steve MacDonald, your host, and today we have a podcast that, if it does one thing and one thing only, is going to change your perspective on how to grow your B2B business one hundred percent. You are going to nod your head. You are going to think it makes perfect sense.
[00:00:22] Steve MacDonald: Why do we not talk about this more often. We are going to do that today, and we will do that with Matt Gorman. Now, Matt, you are a three-time CRO, and if that did not already position you as somebody who likes punishment, you are a two-time CRO currently. You are overseeing right now MSH International and Aeon Hire, and I am going to let you explain what those two companies are.
[00:00:46] Steve MacDonald: You are doing double the work that most of us normally do as a Chief Revenue Officer right now. I think you are a glutton for punishment, because you are also very into wrestling and jiu-jitsu. You actually train kids and coach them on jiu-jitsu, which, I have to tell you, when my son turned fourteen he was taking Krav Maga, and he started to really use it. I was like a foot taller than him at the time, but I got scared and thought, hang on a second.
[00:01:14] Steve MacDonald: These dad-son wrestling matches were getting out of control, because you cannot hurt dad, so he was doing every move he knew on me. I am not sure I am a fan of training kids, or at least my son, to do that, but it was fun. It was great. It was great.
[00:01:30] Steve MacDonald: Here is the thing. You have a really interesting background. You call it a marketing background, where you have this really good blend of sales and marketing. You also have the perspective of being in the role to actually execute. You have quotas. You have a board that you have to report to, but you also ran a consultancy for a long time, so you were making all the recommendations that others had to implement.
[00:01:52] Steve MacDonald: Now you are the person, and have been the person, responsible for that. It is a really interesting smarketing consulting sales mix. I do not know what you would call it, but I think that positions you as an expert in this area. The topic here is why our greatest challenges to growth are internal, not external.
[00:02:15] Steve MacDonald: Before we get into that, I would love to have you expand a little bit on your background before we get started.
[00:02:22] Matt Gorman: Yeah, sure. One, thank you for that introduction. Hopefully, I live up to all the explanation of what everyone is about to hear, and thank you so much for having me. But yeah, three time CRO, currently a two-time CRO. I like to say I am competing for the pound-for-pound championship of CROs, giving me as much CRO work as possible.
[00:02:39] Matt Gorman: I love that we are using the term smarketing, because I have been using that for a long time. I came up as a traditional salesperson, but got into marketing a little bit later in the earlier parts of my career, so I feel like I have a pretty good understanding and perspective from both sides of that go-to-market mechanism there.
[00:02:54] Matt Gorman: I am currently CRO of MSH International, which is a talent recruitment and technology solutions business, as well as Aeon Hire and Hire, an interview enablement or hiring experience management SaaS product. There is a lot of work there and you are right. I founded a consultancy called Enhanced GTM, which started as a fractional CRO consultancy, but quickly spun up into a pretty big network of consultants in most of the go-to-market specialties, and we were working with staffing agencies and recruitment businesses all over the US.
[00:03:15] Matt Gorman: I have been around and seen some things. I can definitely tell you all the things not to do. I do not know if I can tell you everything to do correctly, but I can definitely explain some pitfalls and areas to avoid.
[00:03:35] Steve MacDonald: Here is how I would love to have us start out, because you and I just instantly hit it off when I asked you a question that I ask of every C-Suite executive that comes on this podcast. Hundreds have answered that question. What are the two greatest challenges for creating long-term sustainable growth.
[00:04:03] Steve MacDonald: Now here is the interesting thing. You answered very consistently with the rest of your C-Suite peer community, in that they were all internal challenges. We love to think of our businesses in kind of a traditional SWOT analysis, asking what our greatest challenges are with them, and it is that external factor that is affecting us, when really we are our greatest roadblocks to growth. We are going to unpack that in a big way today. So I want to start out with that.
[00:04:24] Steve MacDonald: If there were just freeform internal roadblocks to growth, why, from your standpoint, is that where we should be focusing first and foremost if we want to grow our business.
[00:04:39] Matt Gorman: You know, if you are not a master of your own home, it is going to be very hard to be a master of somebody else’s.
[00:04:43] Matt Gorman: I think, in earlier conversations that you and I had, it is internal. Too many people, too many companies, too many executive leadership teams, too many CEOs and founders focus so much on what the market is doing and what competitors are doing. It is great to have awareness of those things, but it is not okay to be paralyzed by them or to be so deep in the analysis of what market trends are forecasting and what your competitors are doing that you forget that execution is the actual winning strategy.
[00:05:12] Matt Gorman: Executing on the strategies that you put together, executing on the processes that you have consistently, and building a repeatable cycle over and over and over and over again. We talked a little bit about, and I do not want to jump ahead or jump around, but we talked about alignment and trust.
[00:05:28] Matt Gorman: Those are the two big areas for me that I think, if you were to ask me point-blank what the biggest areas are where B2B businesses are going to struggle with growth, it is trust and alignment.
[00:05:39] Steve MacDonald: So here is what is really interesting, because the top answers from the C-Suite community, the number one challenge to creating long-term sustainable growth is internal alignment.
[00:05:49] Steve MacDonald: Over seventy percent of the C-Suite executives said that it is just getting our own ducks in a row. Everybody nods, and I want to talk more about that. But here is where our conversation took a real right turn. It was like, I had not thought about it that way. Trust is typically seen by executives as an external trust issue.
[00:06:10] Steve MacDonald: And by the way, we have a lot of those. The latest LinkedIn Edelman Trust Barometer showed that, of thirty-two thousand respondents worldwide, sixty-one percent do not believe us. In fact, the way that was stated is that they think we are being intentionally misleading.
[00:06:32] Steve MacDonald: We wonder why they are waiting longer and longer to even want to talk to us. They are doing all their evaluation research, and by the time they do want to talk to us, they have their top one or two already picked.
[00:06:50] Steve MacDonald: So I came into our conversation thinking that, if we were going to talk about trust, we were going to talk about external trust, and you completely validated that. But you said, hang on, Steve, we are missing a whole level of trust here. The internal trust. Tell us what you mean by that.
[00:06:55] Matt Gorman Yeah, I definitely do not disagree that there is misalignment with trust externally. I think markets are saturated. I think everyone’s success stories say the same things. Everyone’s case studies say the same things. I think that a lot of times buyers do not trust what they are getting, because what they are getting is not inherently trustable.
[00:07:16] Matt Gorman: When we pivoted that to being an internal trust and we say internal alignment is the problem, it is not internal alignment, it is internal trust. It is trust in processes. It is trust in your forecasting. It is reliability in your rev ops functions. It is reliability overall in everything that we are asking anyone to do internally, and there is trust internally.
[00:07:42] Matt Gorman: So trust in the processes means your prospects trust your product or your service, because it is permeable. It is going to show up in every aspect of what you do and every interaction that you take, whether it is a sales call, a marketing call, a survey, whatever it may be. If it feels trustworthy, it eliminates your trust problems.
[00:08:04] Steve MacDonald: The way that I’m thinking about what you’re saying here is that communication has always been something over time that, like, we have to communicate throughout the organization from our overall, not only mission and vision and core values, how we fit into the market, our unique go-to-market strategy and everything, the more that we can communicate, but in a way that builds trust, that has buy-in behind it.
[00:08:26] Steve MacDonald: If people aren’t bought in, then we don’t operate as a business without high-performance teams. It doesn’t work. Like VCs, private equity companies, they invest in the people first, the idea second. So this idea of building trust internally was so important, but you slipped in a little something there that I wanna explore.
[00:08:48] Steve MacDonald: You talked about rev ops. Tell me, why is rev ops an important part of building this internal trust?
[00:08:55] Matt Gorman: Rev ops is the trust center of your go-to-market team or of your organization. And I’ve definitely heard it said on this podcast, and I’ve heard it said across the board, but I think in practice it’s very different than verbalization.
[00:09:08] Matt Gorman: A strong rev ops team, a strong rev ops leader specifically, is going to create the trust that you need internally and externally, and here’s why. Alignment. Let’s come back to that word ’cause I’m gonna use them interchangeably. Alignment for the go-to-market team always meant meetings and updates. We have a meeting, we get an update.
[00:09:30] Matt Gorman: All the team’s there, marketing’s there, sales is there, operations is there, finance is there. We have our meetings, we have our updates. Everyone’s aligned, we move on. The problem is not everyone’s reading the same story. With a strong rev ops team, it’s data before story. Instead of these meetings and these updates being essentially finger-pointing, a strong rev ops team doesn’t allow for there to be finger pointing ’cause everyone’s looking in the same mirror.
[00:09:55] Matt Gorman: You can’t point a finger without pointing at yourself when you’re looking at good, clean rev ops data. And for me, rev ops is the Switzerland of the organization. And I think that’s the cliche I think a lot of people say now, but it’s really a discipline in the organization as opposed to a department. It doesn’t align.
[00:10:14] Matt Gorman: It’s not something that reports to sales. It’s not something that reports to marketing, and this is something that I’ve seen happen time and time again. Rev ops is a secondary function of sales enablement, or it’s a secondary function of marketing and operation enablement and delivery, et cetera. It has to be a completely separate item on your org chart.
[00:10:32] Matt Gorman: It can’t have any bias towards any department. It has to be like the single source of truth. And this isn’t scraping your CRM or, in staffing side, scraping your ATS and making sure the data is there. For me, the teams that I run and the teams that I work with, if there’s a process problem, I want people to go to the rev ops leader before they come to me, and that’s how I know that the trust is building, because when we are able to forecast and predict reliably time and time again.
[00:11:03] Matt Gorman: Teams trust in what they’re doing. They trust in that what they are doing is leading to the end goal and the big goals and the big rocks that we’re trying to push uphill here. They understand how all their activities fall into it. And with rev ops, I also think that people defer to, they’re the KPI police.
[00:11:19] Matt Gorman: They’re the ones that make sure everything’s in Salesforce and make sure everything is in the ATS and all the boxes are checked and that your KPIs are hit. But it’s a strong rev ops leader and a strong rev ops team. It takes KPIs from a task to a compass. It’s scientific. It’s a proven formula to the success that everyone wants, and that’s executive leadership.
[00:11:43] Matt Gorman: That’s how we present to a board. That’s how we present to our CEOs and that’s how we present to our delivery and our sales team. So for me, the trust epicenter sits within revenue operations.
[00:11:55] Steve MacDonald: Very few of us would say we are against making fact-based decisions. We’re not gonna say that, but in reality, what happens?
[00:12:04] Steve MacDonald: I’m imagining life without the rev ops in that single source of truth. And then guess what happens? We’re all left to be really experienced, smart people running our different departments and C-suite individuals, and we know how to make decisions. We didn’t get to where we were at because we didn’t know how to make a decision, so we will.
[00:12:26] Steve MacDonald: But we’ll make them independently without a single source of truth. There has to be something that unites us all together or else that’s the key. Misalignment is typically most often cited as marketing and sales, and there’s tons of reasons of why. And this could be a whole podcast just about that. And in your marketing point of view, I’d love to have, maybe that’s the next in the series, but am I reading this right?
[00:12:48] Steve MacDonald: Is that what’s lacking? Is a single source of truth that drives misalignment internally? So we have to create that single source of truth. And what you’re saying is it’s rev ops. Is that like a good takeaway?
[00:13:05] Matt Gorman: That’s a hundred percent accurate. That’s exactly what I’m saying. I compare rev ops to oxygen, and I probably use this all the time, and I’m sure my team is gonna listen to this and be like, “Ugh.”
[00:13:13] Matt Gorman: Saying it again, it’s like oxygen. You don’t notice it when it’s there. You don’t pay a lot of attention to it. But when it’s gone, nothing works. Nothing works. And single source of truth, I think that’s probably a term that gets used a lot. Our CRM is our single source of truth, and our ATS is our single source of truth.
[00:13:30] Matt Gorman: And rev ops, from a forecasting and a pipeline perspective, is the single source of truth. But what I tell my rev ops leader is you’re the single source of truth when it comes to this. But you’re also, and this is a weird term and I’m happy to explain it, you’re also the historian of our strategy, because all the data that you produce.
[00:13:49] Matt Gorman: They’re cross-functional. They have to understand the implications across the business. So a lot of times we can see data and we can see repeats in data, and we can see trends. And guess what happens with all the really smart people in the room? They defer to the same strategies and different variants on a move-forward basis.
[00:14:05] Matt Gorman: And what I look for with the rev ops team is to say, we’ve seen this trend before. We’ve had very similar conversations. I think this is what we did last time. Here’s the reasons why this didn’t work this time. Here are suggestions based on cross-departmental specialties. What do you want to do? Because I don’t look at them just as data point collectors.
[00:14:24] Matt Gorman: I wanna collect data points before I start collecting judgments, but I 100% want my rev ops person to be able to interpret data and present to me in a way, like I would present to a CEO and say, okay, let’s work together on what this is. And when we tie that alignment back to it, like we talked about sales and marketing.
[00:14:45] Matt Gorman: Where’s the misalignment? It’s always, we don’t know which leads are producing actual revenue. We don’t know what long-term growth comes from specific campaigns. Everyone feels that their aspect of, is it more important or what they’re contributing to it is more important. And there’s no, like, attribution across the board when rev ops has that in the most humble format for everybody.
[00:15:09] Matt Gorman: There’s no way around it. We’re now talking about what exists as opposed to what was supposed to exist and what we hope is going to exist. This is what exists today and how do we move on with the information that we have, and when everyone is looking at the same playbook, there’s no alternative interpretations to what’s happening, or we’re at 80% forecast.
[00:15:29] Matt Gorman: That can’t mean something different for sales, marketing, and finance. It has to mean the exact same thing. Otherwise, very uncomfortable monthly and quarterly conversations at the ELT meetings.
[00:15:41] Steve MacDonald: So nobody externally is telling us, this is how you gotta run RevOps. A hundred percent our decision, internal decision for a single source of truth.
[00:15:50] Steve MacDonald: Here’s another one. You talked about one language of growth, and I remember in our conversation you said, Steve, what. Define growth, and it’s, oh, hang on a second. There’s a lot of different ways to define growth. Again, nobody’s telling us how to define growth. We get to decide how we want to define growth.
[00:16:09] Steve MacDonald: Tell me a little bit about this. The one language of growth,
[00:16:13] Matt Gorman: I think for CROs, when you sit in these executive leadership meetings, you meet a new CEO, you’re starting a new partnership, or you’re in three, four, or five years into that partnership, growth means something different every year. You can break it down monthly and quarterly, but growth means something very different year over year.
[00:16:31] Matt Gorman: So example, we want to grow 50% year over year this year. What does good look like there? So I call that a wiggle. What does good look like? Are we a business with the infrastructure, the commitment, and the tolerance for risk that it takes to grow 50% year over year? Unless you’re a very early stage business, 50% growth year over year, even 25, 25 to 50% growth year over year.
[00:16:58] Matt Gorman: Is it attainable? Of course. Is it easy? No. Is there a very small percentage of companies that can actually obtain that? Yeah, it’s all doable, but are you comfortable with the levers that need to be pulled to be able to do that? So I think with, good CROs, or just really any CRO who’s looking at their, we’re going in, we’re in Q4 now.
[00:17:19] Matt Gorman: Q1 projects are well in, in flight. Everyone is sitting, they’re scrambling, they’re putting it together. Their forecast and their pipeline. They don’t want to overcommit, but they gotta keep everybody happy. If I’m looking at something and say, we want 50% growth year over using big round number, are we okay with the operational changes that are gonna need to happen to obtain this?
[00:17:37] Matt Gorman: Are we okay with jetting service lines? Are we okay with jetting? People and teams because in order to obtain 50% growth, you have to operate like a very rapid growth, high growth business. And in order to do that, there are unfortunately like strong risk levers that you can’t un pull. So one thing that I always like to do, and again we circle back to RevOps and this ’cause they’re really important in it, is any growth projection that you put in or called a growth plan you put in.
[00:18:06] Matt Gorman: It has to be what people will break it down to milestones or what it takes. Okay, what are the milestones to get to this? That’s fine, but what does that growth actually entail? It entails making these difficult decisions, these relatively innocuous decisions. But any miss any. Real miss in that growth plan on a high growth, 50%, 25, 50, whatever it may be, it’s detrimental to the long-term vision of the business.
[00:18:32] Matt Gorman: That risk very rarely gets talked about. We say we want a 200 million enterprise value in five years. We want 50% growth year over year. It’s okay. Do you understand what it’s gonna take to be that type of growth organization? And when you really break it down, what you find out a lot. Especially from CROs or CEOs and founders is, well, not really comfortable with what it’s gonna take.
[00:18:55] Matt Gorman: Okay, then let’s realign what this growth strategy is going to look like. So that one, everyone’s comfortable, and I don’t think we should be completely comfortable. I think you should definitely be uncomfortable sometimes, but you have to be comfortable with the risk you have to. And if you can’t articulate what that risk really is, not just the financial risk, but the risk to the culture of the business, the risk to trust, we’re circling back to trust and alignment.
[00:19:17] Matt Gorman: You set big goals. You don’t prepare the teams, you don’t prepare the processes for what it’s gonna take if you do get there, but work, if you don’t get there, you lose that trust really quick.
[00:19:29] Steve MacDonald: I keep thinking what is playing over in my mind. I’ve, I’ve asked a number of CROs why the word no is so important to their job and the success of the company because there’s a.
[00:19:42] Steve MacDonald: Call it ICP creep, like ideal customer profile rate, and it’s, oh, look at this deal. We could bring in and I got this quota, and if it’s not quite what we’re looking for, but look at the revenue you start putting on 25%, 50% year over year growth. Guess what happens? That plan makes it down into the compensation structure for everybody in the sales department, and now they’re looking to bring in revenue like there’s no tomorrow.
[00:20:08] Steve MacDonald: And so you’re incentivizing by default activities that may be. Short-term gains. But if we bring those people in and we’re not really set up and resourced to handle them, it’s gonna drain our resources. They’re gonna churn. It’s gonna ruin our NRR. We’re gonna be not just back to where we were, but we’re gonna be behind.
[00:20:32] Steve MacDonald: ‘Cause we weren’t chasing after the deals that were long-term sustainable growth. So it’s, it really is an important question. Is it growth at all risk for this quarter to make our numbers? Or is it really long-term sustainable growth and being and saying, Hey, no, these are really the way that we’re gonna create a foundation.
[00:20:51] Matt Gorman: Most CEOs, most. Executive leadership teams, they’re actually looking for the long-term sustainable growth. Everyone has to focus CROs. We have to focus on the short-term wins. We have to focus on what happens right now, and we have a balancing act that always has to exist between what happens right now, this quarter, this month, this quarter, versus what’s gonna happen in two or three years.
[00:21:11] Matt Gorman: But getting that wrong doesn’t just set you back to where you started. It sets you back two to three years. On your forecast for the business because not only are you circling back to where you started, but things have changed. The organization has changed the infrastructure, the operating systems, they’ve all changed, and you can’t unspin that once it’s spun.
[00:21:31] Matt Gorman: So now resetting all the operational procedures and the processes and rebuilding that trust, you’re not a year behind on a bad year plan. You’re three years behind on your 10 year plan. It’s pretty aggressive when you break it down that way, but it’s also true. And you’re saying CROs, why is No, I, I feel like I say no more than I’d like to admit.
[00:21:49] Matt Gorman: I definitely say no a lot, but I had a, someone say something to me a long time ago that stuck with me and that is red flags don’t look red when you’re wearing rose colored glasses. And it’s a great phrase. Ever since I’ve heard that, I’ve been able to sit down in front of an opportunity, like you just mentioned.
[00:22:04] Matt Gorman: Look at the revenue projections. That’s got a lot of red flags. Most, not most, but some CROs, some sales leaders, marketing leaders, C-suite leaders, whatever, will look at it and say, yeah, look at this revenue opportunity. Let’s crush it. You’re looking through rose colored glasses, you’re not seeing the red flags, or you’re purposely not looking at them.
[00:22:23] Matt Gorman: That’s a different conversation for me. I’ve always been very keen to these red flags are stuff that we don’t normally. Take on. So we’re going to say no. Oh, but it’s X millions of dollar potential. Sure, it’s $2 million for us to make, or it’s $10 million for us. To backtrack, which one’s more important to you and like having a refined ICP?
[00:22:46] Matt Gorman: Like at definitely buzzword people say it all the time, but they exist for a reason. There’s a reason that every CRO is gonna tell you that the ICPs. Utmost important. And yes, they can change. And yes, you could be, should be looking at market trends, and you should be listening to the voice of your customers and following the breadcrumbs of your business that’s needing you down a different path.
[00:23:03] Matt Gorman: Back to that example of a speedboat and warship. If you’re jumping ICPs and you’re blending ICPs. You are gonna have problems. You set them for a reason, you did the research, you have the data. You know this is what it’s, and yes, are there outliers, and so you take chances of course, but those have to be calculated to the utmost degree.
[00:23:24] Matt Gorman: So that. Even if there is a miscalculation, it’s not a catastrophic setback for me, unfortunately, turned down big revenue opportunities quite often. But because I know that the short-term sacrifice is not worth it, and yes, it’s some big commission and yes, it’s a good revenue bump for the business, but it’s gonna drain our resources.
[00:23:44] Matt Gorman: It’s gonna crumble some of our infrastructure. It’s gonna require personnel transfers, like all these types of things. Unless it’s sitting within the plan that we’ve already agreed upon and set. Let’s get back to that internal external stuff. We internally agreed this is what it’s, and we gotta stick to it.
[00:24:01] Matt Gorman: ‘Cause if we don’t stick to what we set, who’s gonna tell us what to do? Everybody else. So yeah, I guess that’s the phrase. Red flags are red if you’re wearing rose colored glasses, but. Good phrase, the robot.
[00:24:13] Steve MacDonald: You keep throwing things in that sound like little things that are big things like Rev Ops and stuff like that.
[00:24:19] Steve MacDonald: You threw a little thing in there called the voice of the customer. And this is another one of these internal things. Nobody is telling us how to listen to the voice of the customer. Nobody is telling us how important it is or how to operationalize it. Tell me in your words though, because this sounds like another one of those internal obstacles to growth. It is not understanding the voice of the customer, the highest voice of authority in our business. We are all going to say, like with Rev Ops, we are like, yeah, no, we are not fact-based.
[00:24:51] Steve MacDonald: We do not make decisions based on facts. Nobody is going to say that. Nobody is going to say we are not customer-obsessed, we are not customer-first, we have to wing it. In your mind, a customer-obsessed, customer first organization and the need to listen and understand deeply that voice of the customer. How important is that?
[00:25:09] Matt Gorman: So for us, we are a staffing business at the baseline, so customer obsession.
[00:25:15] Matt Gorman: We break it down two ways, customer excellence and customer and candidate excellence. What that means to us is we do not always have to win. We are not going to be the biggest firm. We are not going to have all the resources, but we will one hundred percent be your favorite firm to work with. All of our process and our operating procedures are behind that.
[00:25:38] Matt Gorman: The CEO here gave a quote in one of our quarterly meetings, and I actually think I want to attribute it to the quarterback of the University of Alabama. He said, we are going to prepare like we have never won, and we are going to present like we have never lost. That has become a moniker. It has become a quote here over the last month or two.
[00:25:56] Matt Gorman: Back to that favorite component. Again, if you have trust in your organization, you have trust in your processes, you have trust in your product and your services, it is very easy to be excellent with your customers and your candidates because you have the data, you have the content that helps them. We encourage our teams to say, hey, we cannot help you, but we know someone who will.
[00:26:18] Matt Gorman: We know someone who can, and we would be happy to facilitate that. Twenty years ago, when people said be a trusted advisor to the business, be a trusted advisor, I think that got washed out years and years ago. Or at least the terminology just got old and people stopped listening to it or working behind it.
[00:26:36] Matt Gorman: If you are that trusted advisor, so let us take trusted advisor out and call it industry expert. If you are that industry expert to them, you will always be their favorite. We provide data that is not asked for. We provide industry trends that are not asked for. We will sit with new clients and say what you are trying to do is against industry standards.
[00:27:00] Matt Gorman: Here is why. We are happy to work through the process you have laid out, but we feel that if you went this way you would have a better outcome and it would be easier for your team. Do they take us up on that? Sometimes. Not all the time. I can promise you that goes a very long way toward customer excellence when they feel like they have a sounding board and they have someone who is in the fight with them.
[00:27:23] Matt Gorman: Because too often now it is transactional, and I hate saying that. It is a vendor relationship. No offense to people in this line of work, but I have always used this example. If you run a large manufacturing plant and you have soda machines in the cafeteria, you probably do not really care if it is Coke or Pepsi.
[00:27:40] Matt Gorman: You just want to have the soda machines for the team because they want soda machines in there. If you want to be a trusted advisor to the business, you cannot operate and treat the customer like you are managing their soda machines in their cafeteria. You have to be impactful. The words that you say matter.
[00:27:58] Matt Gorman: One of the trainings that we do consistently here, we call it Triple Bs, which is Better Business Conversations. If I had to judge your interactions with customers based on how you have affected their business, what would I say? A lot of times it comes back as we found out what they needed, and we delivered on what they asked for.
[00:28:16] Matt Gorman: That is great, and that is definitely an impact to the business, but that is what is expected of us. It is expected that we effectuate what we are being hired for. How have we helped their business operations? How have we helped them as a business person? What business conversations have we had? So we do a ton of training on Better Business Conversations and what cues and triggers we can take from customers and come back and say here are some things you may find useful or helpful.
[00:28:43] Matt Gorman: That is where marketing for us absolutely shines. Voice of the customer. Because what is good for the goose is generally good for the gander. We take so much information and follow these breadcrumbs and say you are in, we are working with a private equity firm here, and they are seeing this and this has been helpful.
[00:29:00] Matt Gorman: Then all these private equity businesses that we are working with should benefit from the same learnings we have just had. If you want to be someone’s favorite, those are some of the operating procedures you have to have. They are not hard. It is laborious. It requires a lot of effort, but it is not hard to do.
[00:29:18] Matt Gorman: I will keep circling back to revenue operations. When you have a strong revenue operations team and all of this is aligned and easy to digest, and you have a team that truly focuses on excellence called a high-performance team, I like to say excellence because you can be high performing and not operate as an excellent person. But if you are a person of excellence, you are always putting customer first, candidate first, team first. And it makes a difference. Rev Ops sits at the center of this. But yes.
[00:29:50] Steve MacDonald: I have to tell you, I am going to try to do my three-sentence takeaway from what you just said. When I asked about the importance of the voice of the customer, you said A one. About eight months ago or so, I think it was maybe a little longer than that.
[00:30:05] Steve MacDonald: A three-time B2B CMO said, Steve, here is the way I think about it. In today’s market, the number one point of difference is not my product. I have ChatGPT writing code. I mean there is a lot of competition in the market, more competition than ever. He said here is what McKinsey said. They did a big study and concluded that the number one differentiator in the market for highly profitable B2C and B2B companies was CX.
[00:30:32] Steve MacDonald: The experience that we create for our customers. He said if I know my customer better than my competition, I am going to be that industry expert. I will create that experience where they feel like I am impacting, now I am using some of your words, I am impacting their business. This to me seems foundational.
[00:30:53] Steve MacDonald: We all know we need to understand the voice of the customer, but we do not operationalize it. You said it is easy to do. It takes work. We have to do the work in order to come into a meeting and not be the vendor selling but be the peer, the colleague who is talking about them and their business and having the kind of conversation we are having right now.
[00:31:18] Steve MacDonald: We both had different points of view. We are sharing and adding to the industry conversation. That is my takeaway from what you just said.
[00:31:27] Matt Gorman: I think you nailed it. And whoever that CMO was that you talked to eight months ago, I would love to talk to them, because that sounds fantastic. But yeah, it is true.
[00:31:35] Matt Gorman: And I go back to excellence and being the favorite and not being the vendor. And I tell our sales team, I tell anyone who is client facing, do not go in worrying about the sale and the outcome. Go in worrying about being able to provide them something that they do not have right now. If that is an insight, if that is market research, if that is just, “Hey, I have worked with businesses like yours and these are the experiences that we have had.”
[00:32:01] Matt Gorman: Do these line up with what is going on with you? And if they say no, you have immediate actionable information for them, and for you, it is an experience you had a few months ago. For them, it is insights they do not get freely. We sit in a beautiful position as talent acquisition, recruitment, and staffing professionals.
[00:32:19] Matt Gorman: We work with so many businesses and so many C-suites across almost any industry that the learnings that we can share would take huge market research teams to be able to pull the stuff that we just fall backwards into every day by operating our business. So how do you operationalize that? You have strong feedback loops.
[00:32:41] Matt Gorman: You have a RevOps team that keeps these breadcrumbs trickling in and that they are going from sales to marketing. And what marketing is learning is going to sales. And for me, that sales and marketing feedback loop is really how you take that from a friction point, which it generally is, to a feedback loop, because.
[00:32:59] Matt Gorman: If they are operating in silos, the only people that lose are the customers or the prospects. If they are operating in silos, the team is gonna have friction. There is gonna be, hopefully, healthy friction within the organization, but the true people that suffer are the people who are supposed to be getting the most value from your product or service.
[00:33:16] Matt Gorman: Again, I will keep going back to RevOps. I might as well call this like the RevOps podcast, but Revenue Operations keeps those trains moving on time.
[00:33:25] Steve MacDonald: So you just answered my last question. So here is the question, but I would love to have your 30-second synopsis answer to this, and that is that we have talked about so much here.
[00:33:35] Steve MacDonald: Our poor human brains can only retain about two or three things at a time. For the executives that are tuning into this conversation, if there was one thing, the 30-second version of what you want them to take away from our entire conversation, what is that?
[00:33:53] Matt Gorman: It is a great question. Takeaway, treat Revenue Operations in your business like a discipline and not a department.
[00:33:59] Matt Gorman: It is a discipline of highly functioning, high performing teams, and it has to be treated that way. I heard someone say this to me and it stuck with me a long time ago, so I would love to say that I created this one, but I did not. And they said that trust is the currency of your organization. Yep. RevOps is the mint that allows you to print at scale.
[00:34:23] Matt Gorman: And again, I did not create that. I wish I did. I wish I could take credit for it, but I heard it in, I believe, a webinar that I was in maybe a year or two ago, and it really stuck with me because, again, we come back to trust and alignment being one of the biggest challenges to B2B growth. If you have that RevOps discipline, trust and alignment fall in place.
[00:34:42] Matt Gorman: Now, you can make bad decisions with good data. Sure, that happens all the time. But again, hopefully you are surrounded by a team that is doing their best to make the best decisions for the organization. I would say most of us say that everyone around us, we hope, are those people. So yeah, one takeaway, I think I am a little over 30 seconds, but treat RevOps like a discipline, not a department, and watch everything grow.
[00:35:06] Steve MacDonald: Here is one thing I know. I can feel the future questions coming in from this podcast, and is it okay if I give a link out to your LinkedIn profile that people could reach out and ask questions?
[00:35:16] Matt Gorman: Absolutely. Big networker. Love talking to people. Love talking to CMOs, CROs, COOs. We do not talk a lot about those roles, but COOs as well.
[00:35:26] Matt Gorman: Love jamming, travel a lot. A lot of times I can host events and be in different places and meet a lot of really cool people. Yeah, I would love to engage with anyone who is interested, and honestly, it is the way I learn the most, is meeting really smart, capable people who I can learn from as well.
[00:35:41] Steve MacDonald: I gotta tell you, the mission on this podcast is to take different perspectives and unique insights from experiences that not all of us have gone through.
[00:35:50] Steve MacDonald: And if we all share those, then I always call it the rising tide that lifts all boats. And what surprises me, we are like over 250 of these episodes, I cannot believe how many times I am like, “I did not think about it that way. That is a new thing I gotta now incorporate into how I think about growth.” And this podcast was full of those insights.
[00:36:14] Steve MacDonald: I just want to say thank you, Matt, for coming on today. Truly.
[00:36:17] Matt Gorman: Yeah, very much appreciate you having me. And for someone who has listened to a lot of those 250 plus episodes, I can tell you, and hopefully for anyone who listens to this, if there is just one line or one minute of any of these podcasts that challenges something that I have thought or gives me an idea about a notion that I already have, it is just a massive win, and being able to share those at scale is incredible.
[00:36:39] Matt Gorman: So I really appreciate you having me. It was really exciting for me to be part of this. So thanks again.