Transcript: The CRO of the Year & CMO Talk Growth & Alignment

Podcast Guests: Shawn Conahan and Tristan Barnum

Host: Steve MacDonald

Watch or listen to the full episode.

Introduction to Shawn Conahan, CRO of the Year, and Tristan Barnum, CMO, both at Wildfire

Steve MacDonald: Welcome everyone to the C-Suite Marketing Perspectives podcast for B2B companies. And today, we have, when I say unique conversation, this is a conversation that I have not read, seen, or had not before. This is a conversation with the CRO and the CMO of a B2B company. 

And how do we solve this problem? That’s been an age-old problem between marketing and sales regarding alignment and how you partner. And Sean and Tristan, I will let you introduce yourselves and briefly about your career. But I will say that Shawn, I had the pleasure of meeting when he was anointed CRO of the year a couple of months ago.

So, that gives you some extra credit credibility. We have some points to get added to the credibility stage here for you. Shawn, I’ll let you maybe kick it off in terms of just giving us a little bit more of an introduction, maybe even a full name, and what you’ve done throughout your career and what you’re doing right now before we get into the subject matter that is at the heart of how do we solve this alignment or misalignment between marketing and sales?

Shawn Conahan: Okay. Well, thanks for that, Steve. That’s right. We were both at the Sales 3.0 conference and sat together at dinner that evening. And I really enjoyed that conversation because it was about the relationship between CROs and CMOs. The speaker, gosh, his name escapes me now. Steve, it might come to you.

There was a wonderful speaker who did a fireside chat about the relationship between CROs and CMOs. And his perspective was there can be only one, and the CRO is ultimately responsible for that. And if you’ve got a CRO and a CMO, you will have some conflict.

And then that turned into our conversation, why we’re here today. So that was set up for the audience there. A little bit about Wildfire, first. Wildfire is a white-label loyalty platform that rewards consumers with cashback and coupons when they shop online. People are often familiar with Capital One Shopping or Honey, Rakuten, and that sort of thing. We do that on a white-label basis for everyone who isn’t in those three companies. 

So as their CRO, my job is to fill the pipeline with those white-label partners. We refer to them as partners. We’ll get into that in a bit. And we have a classic B2B2C model, which is we’ve got a platform. You never see the Wildfire brand.

We bring it to our partners. It could be a bank, FII, other types of companies, that sort of thing. And they give to their customers as well, make money. My background has been that of a serial entrepreneur. I’ve started some companies. Some have done well, maybe, somehow. Tristan and I have worked together and previously started a company together.

In fact, it’s a quirk of this company’s entire management team that everybody on the team has worked together in some combination in previous companies, going back 24 years. So, I’m going to introduce Tristan Barnum, who is our CMO. And she can do the rest. 

Tristan Barnum: Hi. Thanks. As Shawn mentioned, we’ve known each other a very long time.

I started my career at a company called mp3.com, and out of MP3, we forged many friendships that have come back to allow us to build what I think is the dream team that we have today at Wildfire. Yes, I’m our CMO. So, I am responsible for not only the marketing of the Wildfire brand and getting new partners into our programs and our pipeline, and helping those partners once they do sign.

So, Shawn goes and closes deals. It is also coming back to me sort of on the back end because client success rolls through me, and a big part of that is our client marketing and helping them with strategy. So, once they’re working with Wildfire on a white-label basis, it is also my job to ensure they are successful with it.

And that is critically important because our company operates primarily on a revenue share model. So when they are successful, we are successful. And so you can tell we have to have a lot of alignment on how we market the business, sell what we have, and make clients successful.

And then additionally, through some quirk of being a serial entrepreneur and having a lot of hats in my hat bag, I also run operations for us. So keeping the trains running on time and insights for our business that are actionable sort of all of that stuff feeds back into marketing, our deals, and everything else. So, that is me in a nutshell.

Steve MacDonald: In our past conversations, I didn’t think you were wearing three hats: marketing, customer success, and operations. I’m tired just thinking about that. 

But what I want to do is I want to start off because there are four or five key areas. You guys just touched on one: that you trust each other. You’ve worked together before, so there’s a level of commitment to each other and working together that you have that can be fostered, right? It’s not the only way to work successfully is to work with somebody you’ve worked with before, right? We’ve all had relationships that can be reciprocal and work very well together. 

Moving Beyond Sales Quotas

Steve MacDonald: But there’s one area that I want to talk about because this is where the conflict between marketing and sales typically happens, where typically the CRO runs sales and sales has short-term quotas. So compensation drives a short-term mentality where, typically, on the marketing side, we need to be very revenue-minded. We need to be focused on the short-term pipeline penetration all the way through and into your point, the outcomes on the other side. But we have to have a longer-term focus.

We have to build the brand of the expertise. The company is a trusted advisor, somebody that should be listened to, all of those good things that come from thought leadership and all of that. You have figured this out, but yeah. I want to turn it over, and whoever wants to start it off, I would love to have you. But I think one of the keys, and there are many we’ll get into here, one of the keys is the compensation structure that is put together and in place inside your company.

Who wants to take a crack at explaining that?

Shawn Conahan: Let me start one step before that. Okay. So, Tristan predates me at this company by about a year. And when that small team was sitting around the table saying, Hey, it’s about time we need a BD guy. Who’s the best BD guy in San Diego? We know that guy wasn’t available. So they called me, and I got the job. 

But the first thing that Tristan and I did was sit down and create the pipeline structure together. So this is like setting up your CRM, what those phase gates will be. And what we quickly realized was that where the sales process starts, you know, prospecting, go, you can open a deal, put them in the top of the funnel.

As that partner moves through that pipeline, it very quickly overlaps with the client success function because, remember, our model is to partner with these companies and make them successful over the long term. And so when a deal is closed, we don’t walk away. That’s really just getting to the starting line.

And then client success takes over to make that partner more successful. This is why we put client success under our CMO because the best way to help those partners be successful is to help them with marketing. 

And so, to your question about incentives, none of the salespeople or the client success reps have a commission-based incentive plan. In other words, what we’re trying to say is we don’t want to incentivize closing a volume of deals. We want to focus on closing the right deals that will be the most successful because of shared risk and reward. So those incentives for us as individuals are very long-term based instead of short-term based.

I’ll let Tristan talk about how she incentivizes the client success team and how marketing impacts that. 

Tristan Barnum: Yeah. So, the client success team, Shawn mentioned, has no formal structure for commissions and things like that, but we offer bonuses for very specific wins. The client success team is tasked with continuing those relationships. If marketing brings a deal sort of into the top of the funnel, we have to have set that expectation correctly for that recipient. We’ve got a visitor coming in, and we want them there for the right reasons. 

Because if they make their way into, all right, now we’re trying to make a deal work, and they were, I don’t want to say misled, but they misunderstand, or there’s a misalignment of what we offer and what it is they’re looking for, we don’t want to cram those two things together. Because what happens once they get into the BD process? Yes, there are checks in there to make sure, again, we’re not selling to two people who are going to be not thrilled with what we have and not successful with what we have. 

And everyone is thrilled with money. We want to make sure that what we’re doing is helping our partners make money. But then, at the tail end of that, when they finally go live with our product, that client success team is incentivized to continue to look for opportunities where they can be even more successful.

So you might start off with a white-label Chrome extension going live. And by the way, client success is watching your numbers grow for your mobile application. And by the way, we have a solution for that. Let’s get that integrated to double the revenue coming through this. And so when those deals continue to close within our current partners, those are the types of things that my team is intrinsically motivated to want. We have very tenacious and intellectually curious people who want to solve these things as a puzzle, but they are compensated for some of that. 

Steve MacDonald: So, what you have done is you have formalized what every B2B organization should be doing.

A Customer-Focused Process

Steve MacDonald: If the B2B company is focused on client outcomes, it is the best way for the company’s growth. The success of your customers is equivalent to your success, right? Having customer success under marketing, having that focus, and having compensation in that direction is an insight that everybody who’s listening to this podcast should be thinking about and should be writing down right now.

Tristan Barnum: And even the names, you see that the names of our deal milestones are all client-focused. They’re all partner-focused. These are just the language that we use in these things. And you talked about sitting down and formalizing this. It didn’t feel very formal when it was happening. Shawn rolled over one afternoon at 4 o’clock. We cracked open a bottle of wine, pulled up two monitors and some great big paper, and started writing down and building what we knew. It should be a business development process, a sales process, that would turn into successful deals on the back end that inform the marketing.

How do I get people into this pipeline? All of it was just developed with the partner in mind, which has permeated the entire organization from marketing all the way through the product itself.

Shawn Conahan: Specifically, if you want to double-click on what that process entails, we realized early on that we’re selling to very large organizations that aren’t really in the business of buying stuff. They might have systems and processes set up to buy a bunch of monitors, seed licenses, Microsoft products, and that kind of thing. But they’re not really set up to buy stuff. And so, Tristan and I wanted to come to our process with a defined framework to buy our stuff. And there are very specific steps that we take with them, all designed to give our partners all of the inputs they need for their business case that they need to develop internally, that they then run up the flagpole and get approvals for and share their matrix team and that sort of thing. 

So, things like the financial inputs, what are the costs? What’s the unit economics? What’s the opportunity overall? What’s the marketing lift going to be? For instance, what’s required as a commitment to marketing to make this successful? All those inputs are from product, customer success, marketing, and engineering. Everyone is involved.

I mean, you hear it often, everyone sells. In our case, that is true. And what we end up with is a very efficient process that gives our customers what they need to the extent that, and we talked about this in a previous conversation, to the extent that if we get through that process and there’s a misfit at all, if it doesn’t look like it’s going to work, we feel that it is our job as a trusted advisor to that potential partner to walk away from the deal and find them a better solution if there is one. And we have done that.

Steve MacDonald: That is amazing. I definitely was going to round us around to that point. So I’m glad you brought us here. There’s a rare company that actually has the gumption to do that and say, we’re not right for you, right? We will leave some revenue on the table because it’s not the right cultural fit.

And that’s one of the things that just impressed me so much is you have a culture here from right down to calling clients partners, that puts a different mindset on who they are. And Shawn, one thing you just said there: I want you to translate for others watching right now. When you talk about how you will help your customers purchase products, you’re basically going to help them work with you. 

How does that translate to any other SaaS or B2B company out here? Because that’s helping the client do what you want them to do makes them more successful. It helps us be more successful. This is something that we all should be doing.

What’s the thinking behind that is learning for everybody that’s watching here today?

Shawn Conahan: Okay. Anybody who is watching or listening has run into, excuse me, they’ve run into a deal that has gotten stalled at some point. Usually, what happens when a deal is stalled is that their contact, the person at the company that has the will, they want to buy your product, but they don’t know what the next step is, right? 

They’re operating in perhaps a large, certainly a matrix organization. Multiple stakeholders must chime in, provide approvals, et cetera, et cetera. And they may not know if someone says, Oh yeah, it’s in purchasing. It’s not in purchasing, right? They’re just trying to buy time to figure out what’s happening by recognizing that they don’t have a set process for doing this. They don’t have an incentive to move through the funnel, necessarily, through your funnel. And they don’t even know what your funnel is. 

If you are transparent about it and say up front, here’s what we will do. We have this defined process that will walk you step by step. You give me three one-hour sessions with the right people. I’ll give you all of the inputs you need to make a clear decision. And now I’m acting as your partner. I’m on your side of the table with you to help you do this. That is the most effective thing a CRO, anyone in a sales leadership position right now who has run into stalled deals, could do differently. Just bring a process, and they will absolutely appreciate you for it.

Steve MacDonald: What do you have to add to that?

Because that’s amazing, I have three follow-up questions, but I want to get your point of view on it.

Breaking the Marketing and Sales Silos

Tristan Barnum: My point of view is making sure that I am there to understand what’s stalling those deals and supplying anything, any input, that can help. Prevent the stall in the first place from a marketing perspective.

It could be a little shift in the marketing that we do to a certain segment and to make sure we use certain language that is not normal for us, but it’s totally normal for them and unlocks them past something. So, constantly listening to avoid the stalls and understand what inputs Shawn’s team may need.

Beautiful slides, beautiful case studies, whatever it is that will help get them through, we are there to support all of that. Because if we can get the right deals through, we get to take them on the back end and make them super successful. So it’s really a supporting role, but it comes from understanding what’s happening in the first place. 

And so I am frequently involved in many of those discussions about stalled deals. I sit in on those meetings every week to talk about deals in the pipeline and what might be happening with them. And I’ve always got my ears perked up for ways to help get deals through.

Steve MacDonald: That’s not happening in every organization. I’ll tell you that right now. But here’s my simple takeaway from this. We actually even wrote a meme about this between marketing and sales. And it was the CMO saying, I have a great relationship with my CRO. Do you know how many MQLs I throw over the wall?

What you two are describing here is typically in the sales department. There is an end goal: the sale. And then the sale is thrown over the wall to customer success, right? Distinct silos that are all in the same organization. And what I’m hearing is Shawn, you’re saying, no, there’s an actual plan.

Sales has a set of expectations where the close of the deal is the start. And it’s treated that way. And I hear you, Tristan, say we’re trying to help. If there is a plan that is a process like that, we’re trying to help set the right expectations, and we’re listening, and we’re trying to support that so that there isn’t this kind of disconnect at the end that we don’t know what’s going on, right?

So that is absolutely brilliant. That is, all three departments working together. Now, customer success is under you. So this is the two of you coming together. This is not something that can’t be done in any organization, with or without a bottle of wine.

Sales vs. Business Development

Steve MacDonald: But tell me a little bit, I want to go back and Shawn, something right before we hit the record button, you were basically alluding to the fact there’s never been a salesperson alive that wants a quota, that wants to be compensated based on commission, right? 

So tell me about how you train and mentor your sales team to have a longer-term focus. Because I imagine they’re coming from different organizations where they’ve had quotas. There’s a mentality, there’s a mindset that has to be dramatically changed. But you tell me, how does that process work?

Shawn Conahan: We make a pretty hard distinction between sales and business development. The former is more akin to what you described before, where I have a product I’m going to sell, and once the sale is done, I walk away, and someone else deals with servicing that client in whatever capacity. Business development, to us, is about establishing a long-term relationship.

And the way that we structure the team is not just a salesperson closing a deal and then handing it off. In fact, we overlap those functions such that when we get to the starting line with a partner (client), we stack an entire team against that deal, including the business development person. You don’t walk away. You’re still part of the deal. You’re the relationship manager ultimately responsible for that relationship’s business side. 

There’s a dedicated customer service person or people who have ultimate tactical control over the relationship. Product, engineering, marketing, something we haven’t touched on yet, but now is as good a time as any, is that under Tristan, there is also a partner marketing group that does nothing but help apply best practices and other learning to each of our partners from the many dozens of other partners we have to make them more successful. So, rather than having a serial relationship between our departments, we have a much more cohesive, overlapped relationship, and we work as a team to make our partners as successful as possible to your point about commissions. 

That means that for the people who work directly with me on my team, we are incentivizing them in the long term. That’s the best way to put it. There is no monthly or quarterly quota, even annually. We don’t think of our deal cycles in terms of quotas. We don’t want a certain number of deals. 

Yes, Tristan and I, along with our CEO, Jordan, are looking at revenue, right? As a completely rational goal. But the way we get there is much more of a, in sales terms, it’s much more of a slow dime than a quick nickel, right?

And so the comp plans for everyone involved in generating revenue look more like long-term incentives and stock options. Yes, there are bonuses. Those bonuses are largely subjective. One of the subjective criteria is the quality of the deal, not necessarily the quantity of the deals you closed.

Steve MacDonald: So this is a question for both of you. How does this system impact employee morale and employee productivity? Working under a system where, because we’ve all heard it, right? Living with a quota over your head is a constant threat, right? Nobody enjoys that. So, if you change the dynamic of how you’re compensated, do you have happier teams?

A Culture that Impacts Morale and the Bottom Line

Tristan Barnum: It’s not just about the compensation. I think our team and they would be fine with me speaking for them and the whole team, the company itself. We have incredible morale. We have a wonderful culture. We root for each other. We celebrate each other’s successes. We have so much invested in keeping this culture as lovely as it is.

When we interview new people that we’re bringing on to the company, and we have been growing a lot lately, they do a lot of asking around because that sounds a little too good to be true. And there are just fans inside the company, and I love it. And every little decision we make, whether it’s the compensation structure or the transparency between the executive team and the rest of the company, we do all kinds of things that create this culture.

In fact, Shawn wrote a great article about our culture recently that was a highlight reel of how we made the culture we did. Because it was deliberate, and it was nice to see it enumerated. But you see alignment between the CRO and the CMO and truly within the entire organization: head of product, the CEO. We have the head of engineering, all of these people come together and see the company through their own lenses but have the same picture.

And it’s always surprising and delightful to me to see when we come together as a group every six weeks or so, we get together in person, and we report on what’s working, what’s not working, and what’s next. And we’re all always seeing the same thing from a different perspective, and that is keeping the culture, the mood, and the morale good.

It is because of that alignment. It is critically important for us.

Shawn Conahan: So culture is something that every company wants, but it can be elusive. Let me give you some brass tacks to put just a framework for the audience here. We have a culture of freedom and responsibility. Not every company has that, but we tell our entire team on a periodic basis, remember that you have the freedom to do whatever it is that you want within the constraints of what we’re trying to accomplish here, right?

Successful clients, a growing business, all that is true. That can be difficult for people who have come from an oppressive organization. It’s hard sometimes for them to spread their wings, but we encourage them to do so. The other side of that coin is with great freedom comes great responsibility.

You have the responsibility to act in a way that will move the entire team forward. And we encapsulate this in, I’m now envisioning this slide deck that we use to communicate this, but there’s one page in there where it says, good decision, good. Bad decision, good. No decision, bad.

And so what we’re telling our team is that this is a safe environment. We expect everyone to fail periodically. How else are you going to learn? We learn more from our failures than our successes. In a culture that is oppressive, you’re not going to see that. You’re going to see people living in fear of making a mistake or something like that.

We embrace those things. We learn from them, and we move on. And those are the underpinnings of the culture that Tristan’s describing that any company can put in place. That is an easy thing to do to trust adults to do their job well. Completely reasonable thing to do. But as companies grow, it gets harder for them to do that for various reasons. But we do not have such a problem.

Steve MacDonald: You know what this all means to me? Anybody that’s worked in the startup environment? And I’m a SaaS founder myself, and we have to go through the rounds of raising funds and everything. And what you’re trained in is that one of the most important aspects of getting investment is the team.

You’re going to have the best tech roadmap, right? You can have the best plan. Here’s how we’re going to dominate our TAM. But the investors want to invest in the team. What I’m taking away here is that not only have you put together a team that has worked together, but you’ve put together a culture that fosters a team. A true team that supports each other.

In light of that perspective of investors that will put their dollars right there, investment in trying to get multiples in return from a team. Why don’t we spend more time strategically thinking about what you’ve done here? And how you build a team that’s going to create success.

Shawn Conahan: You’re right. Having a great team de-risks an investment significantly because, to some degree, it ensures the success of the company. I think that most people are hired into a job, they’re not hired onto a team. And when you discuss the bifurcation and sometimes a contentious relationship between people with the letter C in their titles, you know, CMO, COO, CRO, that sort of thing, I think a lot of that comes from the fact that they think that they have to stay in their lane.

It may not even occur to them that they could, as Tristan says, come over to my house. We’ll crack a bottle of wine, we’ll sit down, we’ll just collaborate on this. It may not even occur to them that that’s even within the job description, but it’s absolutely what you can do. And if a couple, three people, at or near the top of any organization, I don’t just mean people with C’s in their title, but if you’re an EVP, an SVP, or if you’re just a group leader and you’ve got 10 people on your team, you can do this inside of your work at any level.

We just encourage it at all levels. We happen to do it. It’s really not that difficult to figure out. It’s just a philosophical shift in mindset. Really, that’s all it is.

Thoughtful Investing in the Team

Steve MacDonald: So there was, and I forget which previous discussions it was in, but you have a reward system, Shawn, that you give something out. I can’t remember when you gave it or what it was, but I was really impressed with whatever it was. I know you know what I’m talking about. 

Shawn Conahan: So, yeah. Tristan was alluding before to all of the ingredients that go into our culture. One of them is we can and we have the budget to buy each other gifts.

And it could be for no reason, you just like someone who works on your team. They’re doing great work. Great. They’ve had a rough day. I remember I drizzled a guy a six-pack of something, I forgot what it was, it was a while ago because he was having a rough time. And he appreciated that.

But anyone who is not directly on the BD team, who helps us close a deal, gets a – oh, I actually have one here. Where’d it go? There we go. One of these handmade copper flasks from Jacob Bromwell. It’s not a cheap gift, but it’s well appreciated when it happens.

So again, having a culture that encourages people to break down the barriers that I think are put up when you’re conducting so much of your life over Zoom and humanize them by addressing them in 3D and a gift shows up on your doorstep. That buys a lot of goodwill.

Tristan Barnum: Yeah. And it often shows how much we’ve gotten to know each other, right? This might be someone you’d never worked with on a project before you went through the trenches together on something over the weekend, and everyone’s exhausted, and you got to know each other. And when a candle shows up at that person’s house, that’s the smell of their favorite hotel at Disney World that they love, that you’ve gotten to know that about them, they’re delighted. And it’s, it’s wonderful. Everyone feels good about it. 

I don’t want this to sound like an artificial tactic, either. I wish I could get all of these people who do so much good in my life gifts all the time. And the company believes that that’s worthwhile enough to fund. And I love that.

I’ll have to tell you this. And maybe this isn’t something I should actually say publicly, but about a week ago, my wife had a really hard day the day before. And I got up on Saturday morning. I got up at six in the morning. She was still in bed. I went, and I got her a pumpkin spice latte at Starbucks. I came back. It’s just a Starbucks. That’s all it was. 

And she started crying. She said nobody does things for me. But it’s the gesture, right? It’s that you put that time and effort and you actually thought about somebody. And it was the gesture more than the flask. The flask is nice, right? Yeah. But it’s the gesture. It’s the thinking behind it. 

Stay on the Road, Don’t Stay in Your Lane

Steve MacDonald: I will give you each a chance to do one of two things. I know you choose whatever it is you want. Okay. Choice A is if there was one takeaway that people should have from this conversation, what should it be? Choice B, what is it that we haven’t covered that is part of the important ingredient in the successful recipe that you’ve created?

And whoever has the idea to go first, jump on in. A little healthy competition here. 

Tristan Barnum: I have a thought. I totally have a thought. So, as far as takeaways are concerned, I think this is something critically important. Respect that you can develop for other people, their jobs, and what they’re trying to do.

And if we’re talking about tension between a CRO and a CMO, understanding what Shawn does and why it matters, and what his challenges are involves actually getting to know what those jobs are. You can’t get that in an email. You have to get in the trenches a little bit. And so, I think the takeaway is don’t be afraid to not stay in your lane.

We should all be on the same freeway, headed in the same direction, and changing lanes all the time to get to where we need to go. So, I think that that is what develops that respect and helps us understand each other and how we both contribute to the success of the company or the failure of the company if we messed up.

Right? These types of things keep us moving in the right direction.

Shawn Conahan: I love that. Yeah. I would be a little more prescriptive to anyone listening who may be recognizing that they’re in a siloed organization. In a leadership position, you can change that tomorrow, right? It takes very little effort to say, Hey, I feel like we could be doing better.

Maybe everything’s going fine, but I feel like we could be doing better if we started to collaborate and overlap our roles in ways that were meaningful to everyone. And you can come up with a framework, a piece of paper and a pen is enough to say, I do this. You do that. Here’s the Venn diagram overlap.

How can we make that not necessarily a perfect circle but make that overlap more valuable in the center going in both directions? That’s what Tristan was saying. If I understand and have empathy for what you do and how what I’m doing could make you more successful, then I absolutely want to do that because that helps the team.

And that is probably the number one lesson that we try to teach our entire company is that there are no individual winners on our team. We’re not competing individually for glory on any given partner or product or whatever the case may be. We are trying to all win as a team together.

And the way you do that is by helping each other. And that’s what we’ve done. And like I said, not hard to do. You’ve just got to be thoughtful about how you will implement it. 

Steve MacDonald: So I’m going to break my promise only to ask one more question because I want people to understand from your point of view the importance of the culture, the process, and how you’ve put together this team. That it can be done.

Does Success Come from Product or Team?

Steve MacDonald: This can be replicated if another team had your same technology, your same product, the same opportunity to go to the market, right? So a certain amount of the success of the company is obviously going to be rooted in your technology. How much of the company’s success that you’re having, you’re growing quite dramatically, or how would you just articulate everything that we’ve discussed today?

None of it was about the technology, right? How much of that secret sauce we talked about today is responsible for the success of the company versus the actual technology, and a whole other team was brought in to take it forward, the traditional kind of method.

Shawn Conahan: Well, look, we have definitely hit product market fit, right? So, for any company that is before that step, it’s a little bit hard to give advice on how to get to product market fit. But if you are a company that has proven to the market that there’s a need there and you’re starting to go into growth mode, I would say that that will probably take care of itself. That’s a product function, get a great product guy. You’re going to do fine to answer your question. 

Therefore, what ends up driving success is everything else. And that is what we do. And again, I’m more of a brass tacks kind of guy. What we haven’t mentioned yet is the way that we enforce all of this is very comfortable and casual. We have a daily standup by a business unit. So there’s the tech guys get together, the product people get together, the CS team, the BD team. We all have a daily standup where everyone knows what everyone is doing that day, then it’s 10 minutes.

And there’s time to say, Oh, wait, you’re doing that. I thought we were doing that. Okay, fine. Well, that’s good. Okay. Good to know. Let’s just take this offline. We can go figure out what we’re doing from a management team perspective. The few of us get together. Same thing right after all those standups, we get together. We reinforce what we’re working on, and what our priorities are.

We set these things on a very, very granular basis. And that does a few things. It keeps everyone apprised of what everyone else is doing in the most efficient way possible and takes any shadows away from the corners. There’s really nowhere to hide. You’re sitting there in front of your 60 or 25 other colleagues saying, Here’s what I’m doing today. You’re going to do that because other people are relying on you. And it reinforces the fact that we’re all in this together, as a team. 

We furthermore get together like Tristan mentioned, on a periodic basis. Every two weeks, we have a demo day. Our tech team works in two-week sprints. And so every other Friday, we have a display of all of the new things that have been worked on during that sprint. The whole company goes to that, and understands what’s going on on alternating Fridays. We do effectively the same thing from a business point of view, so everybody understands what’s happening on the business side, how the pipeline looks, what interesting things are coming down the pike, et cetera, et cetera.

It may seem like over communication, but like I said, it’s actually quite casual to us. We wouldn’t have it any other way. It’s not overhead. It’s not onerous at all. It just helps us preserve the culture of communication that we have and keeps everyone apprised of what the goal is, right?

And keeping everyone moving in the same direction. 

Steve MacDonald: Tristan, I’m going to let you have the last say here in terms of how do you attribute, it doesn’t have to be percentage or anything, but just how do you think about the success of the company based on the secret sauce that we’ve been talking about here versus product market fit?

Tristan Barnum: Well, a lot of startups fail. And some of them never reach product market fit. But plenty of them get there and can still be crushed under competition. Their own issues that are happening internally. And I think that it’s maybe more than 50 percent of our success can certainly be attributed to the fact that we are a very functional team.

We work hard, we love what we do, and we are all working towards similar goals. These stand-ups that Shawn talks about, the demo days, the things that keep us in communication. It’s not just about what we’re doing but why we’re doing it. And so it becomes very obvious that the team understands what we’re all up to, why we’re doing the things we’re doing, and why their work matters. 

It keeps people fulfilled, and it keeps people engaged. It keeps people working hard. I work very hard. I work all the time. But I love it. And I think that when you have a team that doesn’t feel that way, maybe not going to be as successful because you don’t have as much skin in the game. You don’t have that desire to win for the team absolutely, you know? And I think that we have done a very good job at building the team that has made this company successful. I don’t think we would be nearly as successful with a different team operating it. The same technology just isn’t the same in other people’s hands.

Steve MacDonald: From what I’ve heard, I would a hundred percent agree. I kind of feel like I’ve gone through a Harvard Business School lecture, and I want to send the guys with the clipboards in to follow you. Eyebrows raised and like, oh, look at that. So, if there are follow-up questions, would it be appropriate if I sent out with the podcast links to your LinkedIn profiles? Is that okay? 

Tristan Barnum: Sure, that would be perfectly fine. 

Steve MacDonald: Thank you very much for coming on and sharing. And this has been more than a delight. It has been incredibly insightful. Usually, there’s one or two really good nuggets to take away. I think there might be a bag of nuggets we’ll take from here.

So thank you.