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From Ops Leader to CRO: Making the Leap
What happens when a former operations leader takes the leap into the role of Chief Revenue Officer?
We had an insightful discussion with Karen Gallantry. Her story illuminates the power of balancing operational demands with understanding human dynamics. Karen shares her unique perspective on how diverse experiences across technology and operations can pave the way for leadership success.
The episode uncovers the intricacies of maintaining a well-aligned sales organisation in the throes of business scaling.
Karen helps us explore the evolving responsibilities of a CRO, especially within subscription models that prioritise long-term success and customer loyalty as much as immediate sales.
We debate different organisational structures, making a compelling case for integrating sales, pre-sales, and customer success under unified strategy and execution.
Our conversation takes a deeper dive into the psychological aspects of team performance and operations scaling. We discuss the importance of transparency and feedback loops in building trust and ensuring psychological safety within teams.
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elcome to get amplified from the amplified group, bringing you stories to help leaders in the tech industry execute at speed through the power of working together. Well, it's one of those sunny but chilly wintry days in uh south bucks today. Uh, where are we with the weather? In deepest dark stocks for chaviki oh, we're definitely in.
Vicky:It almost feels like we're in different countries, then, because there is not a single bit of sunshine here at all.
Sam:It is yes, almost wondering about mowing the lawn this afternoon oh, blimey well, no, no, no, definitely not here yeah, oh well, no, there we go, never mind. Hopefully the sunshine will wend its way up the M42 a little bit later. I hope so. Yeah, fingers crossed. So who have we got on the podcast today?
Vicky:On the podcast today we have an ex-colleague of mine from VMware, Karen Gallantry. And Karen I have been trying to get on the podcast for a little while because, as those of you that listen to the podcast frequently will know, I've got a bit of an obsession at the minute between understanding the operational side of sales and the customer facing side of sales. And Karen, a few years ago, made the transition from an operations leader who which is what I had the pleasure of working with her at VMware just absolutely phenomenal to becoming a CRO and just making that transition and makes you, karen, I think, a real pioneer, I'm going to say, in the way that you address selling to the customer. I think so. I'm so, so glad that you've made it onto the podcast with us today. So, yes, that's who we have, sam.
Sam:Excellent. Well, welcome, aren, thank you Sam. Our paths did not cross, I don't think, while you were at VMware, but nice to cross paths with you now. So do you want to maybe? I mean, that sounds like a hell of a career journey Do you want to maybe start by giving us a run through
Karen:Yeah sure, I'll give you a synopsis, but before I do that I'll just say and confirm that the weather in erkshire was sunny this morning and has turned very cloudy and gray. The gloom is back, so, but my career then? So if I go all the way back to when I was like a kid but I won't I won't talk too long about it. Foundationally, I've, I've always been pretty mathematically minded, so from a young age I always preferred numbers and logic puzzles to reading and quite naturally that led me to do a maths degree and then a very solid career in accountancy beckoned for me. So that's what like my foundations, but I'm not, I would say, the best accountant.
Karen:I think I found it, with all due respect to accountants part of it very boring and I was very fortunate to be qualified whilst I was in a technology company and I moved into some ecosystems and had a really good career there spanning 12 years and multiple roles, and that really got me into seeing many different parts of the business. I worked on a global role, regional roles at an EMEA level and locally at a UK level, and my job, like titles were from like project manager, financial systems implementer, financial controller for the channel, and then I left well, as I was leaving sun, I've been doing partnerships and sales for a number of years and that 12-year foundation, really at sun, and all the myriad of jobs I had there, along with my mathematical mind and wanting and designed to like find problems to solve, led me into operations quite naturally. I think, yeah, I was at VMware for nearly four years, which is where Vicky and I I met, and in my time there I worked with a career consultant which I can talk a bit a bit too later on. But I worked with a career consultant and sort of figured that I wasn't really in the right place for me and, like I recreated a vision, what I wanted and that led me to work for, and I recreated a vision of what I wanted and that led me to work for smaller companies as part of the vision, and transitioning to really small companies wasn't practical or possible. You know you work for VMware. People in startups don't really want to go and take a punt on you, but I was very fortunate to get a job at Okta doing what I knew well, which was in operations, but a company who they'd IPO'd, but they were scaling now in Europe and the market opportunity was massive, but the market was almost not quite ready for the identity in the cloud.
Karen:You know 2017, cloud was really still quite nascent in the European time zone.
Karen:So it was a really interesting time for me. I learned a real lot, um at ota and and that role like enabled me to be found, I guess, for the next role, which was a general management role, and that was first time thinking I moved probably out of pure operations, i'll'd say, into a broader span and really I say the foundational part of my career and having gone through, you know, growth and redundancies at Sun enables you to know and understand what it means from a human perspective about growing as well. And you know, I became a general manager for a very, very small team in Europe and that was the vision I had. Obviously, it has a lot of operational aspects to it, but part of that was actually making sure we were doing deals, beginning to grow the business in Europe, enabling our customers to be highly successful within the European time zone. It was probably the first time I got really really close to the customer since I've been a salesperson in my later stage of my son's career, and then I became hief revenue officer from that.
Karen:It's quite the journey, yeah it's quite broad.
Vicky:Yeah, I missed out in the introduction that. You know you talk about having a maths background and being a problem solver and coming from an operational view, but I think the thing that really stands out for me in in watching how you work is just how important the human element is to it, which is, is we're about teaming on this podcast. So to have that as such a fundamental piece of your psyche and how you work with people, yeah, it's a real, and that's where the pioneer bit I think comes from, because to have that blend of all of that is quite special.
Karen:Yeah, and I think sometimes we don't appreciate ourselves, do we? And what probably our niche is. I think one thing that really drives me in the workplace and what I really value in the workplace is working with teams, but more than that, that actually helping motivate people to achieve their own goals as well as aligning those goals to the the team goal. And I've done that in a sporting sense, you know, as a many years ago I used to play field hockey and, like we had a, we created a vision and mission actually for our team and everyone's purpose was different and everyone's capabilities was different, but we actually came together as a unit and achieved those ambitions. And I think, taking those sporting analogies into the workplace, the same things can be achieved.
Karen:And certainly one of the aspects, particularly when I went into M Particle and a small team there, was creating the right dynamic to be successful. Altogether, we had a very small team in the UK Sales. We had SEs and we had a single actually customer success manager when I started Matt, who's doing tremendously well now, tremendously well now, um and it was really important that the cause and effect of how we sold was appreciated in terms of both how we could then become successful from a client perspective and in the actual after sales motion, but how that would feed back into what we were delivering from a like r&d and product perspective and building that ecosystem was important to me because I think, from a teaming perspective, it works really well when you get everyone aligned and I'm quite passionate about that and it's not. I like to be in teams that operate like that. I don't have to lead them, but I think it's fundamental to. I just think teams that work well together, that don't have prima donnas in it, are fundamentally going to win out, you know what's?
Sam:what was the the? I think it was maybe netflix. They had the phrase no brilliant jerks yeah, yeah, correct I guess. So, yeah, I haven't heard that I'm not sure they necessarily use the word jerks. Originally I think that was softened a little from the original terminology. But um, you know, though, I guess theu the thought that the team is more important than the individual, even if you've got someone who is ostensibly fantastic at their job. If they are detrimental to the team environment, then uh, that's yeah and it's the same in sport as well.
Karen:You know we had.
Karen:We had a one of the women in the team wanted to be like a first team player and she felt like she was above capability wise, above the rest of the team and for definite, from a school perspective, she was. Now that manifested itself in pitch. Sometimes she'd take the ball, try and do too much, yeah, yeah, and, and then we'd lose or whatever, and it became a point of friction. Well, actually, if you can break that down and go actually this is the goal we want to achieve and us achieving getting promotion will allow you to play in a higher league, but also if you're part of a winning team.
Sam:Yeah, better exposure for you, Correct, yeah? And that works really well.
Karen:It's about motivating that individual in the right way, I think, and that really well so.
Sam:motivating that individual in the right way, I think, and that's exactly the same in the sales environment.
Karen:Yeah, I agree with that. Tells people in the right way to make the money, but also for us all to be like growing the business yeah, totally.
Sam:You're a sports fan. Have you played as well as s as following then
Karen:Now I've been not doing more um triathlon, the last sort of uh, 14 years, I'd say, once I got to my late 30s. I couldn't guess.
Sam:Guess that's a that's a little bit more individual. Perhaps it is. You know, you still need a team around you when you're doing yeah, yeah yeah, of course yeah, interesting.
Sam:Yeah, that's quite quite a journey. I've always thought that anybody in a senior position CXO, director sort of level needs to have some sort of sales ability about them. The other thing that's true is that anyone in that senior position also needs to have some understanding of a financial background, and which clearly you had from the early stage of your career. Was that route to CRO deliberate, or were you just sort of not necessarily making it up as you go along but playing every, playing, each ball on its merit, to use a cricketing analogy?
Karen:uh, so definitely it wasn't. I definitely didn't have this great ambition to be a chief revenue officer. It wasn't on my agenda. What I envisaged when I worked with a career coach was really helping a team be successful in a tech environment and solving business problems. So job title was irrelevant to me and I think the ultimately the reason or the how or the why I got that role was out of necessity. You know, middle of the pandemic, um, and I spoke with my COO at the time and felt that we needed a coordinating function across parts of our business. We were growing relatively well in Europe. I actually didn't put myself forward for it, not deliberately, but I said this is what we need and I'll help you hire the person. And Michael did the interviews and we interviewed a number of candidates and, um, ultimately the business need was, was was meant that I was offered the role was was for a person with your, your quite unique skill sets a bit of that.
Karen:But contextually, I knew the business very well so I could understand what was like what was necessary. Now, from a long-term perspective, it was. It was, you know, the company's, based in New York. Most of our C-suite we were hiring were on the west coast. Yeah, um, and from a personal values perspective, it was okay for me to be doing it then. But long term, yeah, a vision of me traveling the world, you know, yeah, I value my own home life better than that. So, um, it was always going to be a slightly, you know, non-long-term thing.
Karen:Yeah, yeah, but in doing it I probably burnt myself out a little bit um, yeah my boundaries out properly and you know the pandemic I think did us all over in in a different sort of way. So but honestly, I learned a tremendous amount my time at M Particle in the leadership function I had there, um, and and will be forever grateful for, uh, you know, the founders of that company bringing me on when they did and taking the risk on me and me. I guess me taking the risk on them a little bit, but yeah, yeah, no, that makes sense.
Sam:So what, what's the r as opposed to a, you know, sales director or chief sales officer or something like that is it, is it?
Karen:yeah, I think the encompass marketing more or sort of.
Karen:There's a lot, I think the thing is yeah, it's a good question and, sorry to interrupt, I think there's a lot of discussion about what it is and what it isn't right on social media and I think the the hub, my perspective of what it ought to be, and someone ought to have the. It doesn't matter about the job title, but someone in the company ought to be understanding the interactions of um the life cycle, like from a customer perspective, of taking the product to market, marketing it, selling it and achieving success with it. Doesn't matter what that product is, whether it's tech or not. Um, architecturally, from a business perspective, those things work symbiotically with one another.
Karen:Yeah, if they get out of kilter and you don't have the right vision that keeps people guided, then weird things happen in business and that's when businesses that are scaling either hit a stalled point or they sort of go off in random directions and typically, what can happen? That? I've seen in a couple of companies, in fact. I look back and it's happened a lot during my career. Seen in a couple of companies, in fact, when I look back and it's happened a lot during my career, whether it's massive at sun or vware or, more recently, um, you can have this, this pull of customer feature, one demanding so high from maybe one very well-known brand that you commit to, and suddenly your product roadmap goes bonkers and you're not optimizing for breadth of market. You're, you're, you know you're creating too much of a focus on one feature for one customer and sales will do that, because sales will you know, sell the revenue, try and get the money in.
Karen:Um, yeah, be kind of like, I think when I own particle, we definitely did that a couple of times, but we did it in a coherent fashion with the cp and cto on board, like when we and the customer, actually when we knew we were trying to do something from a customer's perspective that was a little bit off pace, shall we say. Everyone did it with their eyes wide open.
Vicky:I think when trouble happens is when you have a function like optimizing for its own outcome, not the customers and not the business as a whole so I've been to breakfast this morning with a cheap revenue officer and the first thing he said to me was you're bang on with how you're positioning amplified group because you're talking about breaking down silos and that's what you're doing because if those like you just described there, karen, if you've got a function that's just optimized and just focused on achieving its own goal, yeah, that's where urbanizations break down and if you don't?
Vicky:have that at the very senior level. If you haven't got goals aligned there, trying to do it field up is so, so difficult yeah, I think we, I think everybody knows this, but still happening. And repeat, we're seeing history repeat itself over and over I guess, does it come culturally from you know?
Karen:sometimes I think beckoning go up what's your vision and mission and I know everyone does okrs and whatever to death. But it kind of a little bit comes down to like not putting those in paper service but saying this is what the company's vision and mission is and this is our guardrails. And creating those guardrails of, like, functional alignment is really important because you know you shouldn't have to have the salesperson thinking about the cause and effect. They should be, like, really geared up to be successful in what they're doing and optimize for their own personal wealth outcome. Because, let's face it, what people want to do, they want to win deals, they want to win um, but you've got to have the guardrails around that success.
Sam:And I wonder, I do wonder if the advent of the CRO as opposed to the sales director is in part around the transition to subscription type agreements, in that a sales director responsible for sales and a number is easier to operate within a you know, a project based or a more transactional environment, whereas a cro could well encompass customer success as well as pure sales, which obviously is then more about long-term. Long-term revenue creation as the customer grows their usage of a product, or ensuring people renew, as opposed to you know, here's, here's five million quids worth of tin. Right, I'm off to go and do the.
Vicky:Do the next deal does that make any sense?
Sam:not that I want to. You know, demean the skills of of sales directors that you know. I'm sure that's a good place from which to become a CRO but and I've known some fabulous sales directors in my time but that feels to me like it could make sense as a bit of a delineation between the two.
Karen:Sometimes I think maybe the CRO is just like another made up job. I agree it never used to exist until relatively recently. Yeah, yeah, relatively recently. Yeah, yeah. So like what existed before, was someone who commercially still like commercially across the business had a thought process about how do all these strategies interlink and how do I create the feedback loops. Now, I don't know where that used to exist in in these sass days, but you have to have a commercially, I think, architecturally someone who's going to architect that commercial way of working that creates success at every node but without the detriment of one node exploding out. You can't drive a car if you've only got three wheels on it, unless it's designed to be a three-wheel car, sort of thing.
Vicky:My experience what you've just described there, Sam as well, though, though, is very often the chief revenue officer does not have customer success reporting into it.
Karen:It's it' not no, it's.
Vicky:Sometimes they don't, in which case, I would argue, they're not the cf, the cro, though they're just, they are cs, they're head of sales, yeah, but only the only, the front end, and we're still seeing we're seeing lots of different ones that You've got just responsible for winning new customers yeah, and then you've got customer success almost sitting separately, taking over once those new customers have won. So that's one model. Then you've got more mature organizations that are still hybrid SaaS and on-prem, and where does customer success? So I still think it's being worked out, but for me, best practice is, yeah, it all sits under a cro, so I think for me that's where it should be, but there's a lot of organizations that haven't got that right yet sales, pre-sales customer success yeah, still yeah, yeah, and you know some some sort of deal desk or big desk, if your business uses that maybe yeah, I think a lot of it is.
Karen:You know, it's the psychology of where you want people to operate and and how they can be successful in the job they're doing, across multiple layers of a company and without shadow of a doubt, you know bigger companies, egos comes into play and job titling comes to play so, and that's just human nature, isn't it, unfortunately?
Vicky:yeah, it is I. I have seen, though, some organizations that are starting to get this right and realising that actually in fact I'm going to quote him Jim McCready at Dynatrace. He's the APAC leader. He said if the cross-functional teams are not a part of the planning process to start with, then they're on the bench to use your analogy, karen from yeah the, yeah, the sports one, and so they need to be included from the start, and so he's got a super joined up approach. Yeah, all the cross functions. There are no silos, and it's really, really refreshing to see yeah, it's actually one of the things, um, at Okta that.
Karen:Look, we did um when I, whilst I was there. It Okta, when I got there, um, in my view, was very siloed in Europe. We had, you know, great people, but the, the thought process and the motivations, or what if it was coming from top down, from California downwards? Yeah, and you know, we had a task of really growing the business quite aggressively, um, but the planning was going vertically upwards. We weren't like a like until I sat everyone down the room and there's a lot of people that were stakeholders and we're like, okay, all of you, whatever you know, whatever we do in sales, like you need to, like how many sdrs you need to make that work and like, by the way, we're gonna hire all these people. Recruitment, head of recruitment how many? How many recruiters does that mean you will need because all these things have to be?
Karen:almost an element of commercial finance, which obviously but it's just getting the people in the room start talking right and say this is the goal that we want to. Same thing like this is the goal we're aiming for. This is a three-year goal, that target we've got, and everyone's eyes, like, literally the bubbles blew out their eyes. It was aggressive. It's like this is what we are, this is our aim, are we do? We believe we can do it? Because, fundamentally, you have to, you know, believe in the madness, um, and if you believe in the madness like, what do we need to do, like, in order to make that successful across the business? Across the business?
Vicky:So what do we?
Karen:have to believe in. Where are we now? Oh so what do we have to do next? So I go back to the sporting analogy. We had like several things, one of them which was fitness. Not every single person in that team or that squad was going to run an eight minute mile. Everybody could improve. So what our aim was to get the team average down, um, and everyone could contribute to that, doesn't matter how fast or how slow a runner they were.
Sam:Yeah, that makes sense yeah.
Karen:So if you take that into the work environment and say, okay, we have to believe, we want to be doing this growth, what do we have to believe in or what do we need to do in order to believe that can come true? And I had the same sit-down talk at a different scale an particle in Europe. You know, we were three and a half million and I was like I want to get to 20 million in three years, I think. I think I'm a bit crazy with that ambition, but this is why I think it's possible. Um, what do you think people do the business a bit longer and what do we need? How are we going to do it?
Karen:and it was a we, not me, it was a we yes and and the people that sat down with that planning were the, the sales leadership, customer success leadership and the se leadership locally. And then I had to deal with anything like from like from a product perspective. One of the things we absolutely needed was data localization in europe because that would unpick the market for us. So that was on me, because that's what I could go and influence with the CTO, the CEO, and the rest, they say, is history.
Sam:The rest, they say, is history Interesting. You've had some fun challenges with scaling companies. Anything particular to think about with all the scaling of those organizations?
Karen:I would go to before, like most importantly is um, well, there's two things I think, and when you're scaling is one three uh, transparency right, um, and with that I mean particularly with the sales team. Be really it's week three. Transparency right, and with that I mean particularly with the sales team. Be really ultra transparent about what you're carrying in pipeline. If I'm a bit harsh when it comes to pipeline, I'd rather not see it in there and create a problem for the business of realisation. We haven't got enough coverage, and it's not a case of you need to have 5x coverage or otherwise you're fired because that's just a false positive.
Vicky:Yeah, really yeah, because people just stuff the pipeline. It's a false positive, because your conversion rate is the same.
Sam:Well, it incentivises or pushes the wrong behaviour, doesn't?
Karen:it. It totally does. Yeah, and you're fooling yourself in the short term because you think you've got a good metric, but actually your conversion rate is lower. Lay it down think you've got a good metric, but actually your conversion rates lower. Later down we'll just go down through the floor, most likely.
Karen:Um, I'd rather understand what the problem is, which means, like, let's have a really transparent view of the pipeline, and things that aren't happening are not opportunities. Let's get them out and be really truthful about what we're looking at, because if there's a pipeline problem, it's not just a sales problem, it's a business problem, and so let's look at what that is and what we can do to affect it. If you're a salesperson that continually bumps up pipeline, you actually you know you might feel more safe because you've got a number there, that's, but actually you're more insecure because your conversion is going to go and actually not making the problem someone else's and it should be a team problem so, before you go on to two and three, how much do you think having psychological safety and trust impacts what you just talked about, that and that transparency?
Karen:I think, like build building trust is really the number one thing. Yeah, it is about um with that and doesn't, you know? Each function's got the, the things that they need to achieve, and with sales, the need to achieve and win deals is like, obviously, like the most paramount thing In building trust. I think you know I'm very direct and I'm very transparent most of the time, and not most of the time that sounds awful all the time, and not most of the time that sounds awful all the time. Um, and I and I act well, I know I do what I say I'm going to do because I think that's the most important thing. And, um, you know, when I've started, I ask people to trust me and it's really difficult. So why the hell should they trust this new person coming in?
Karen:Um, but your actions, speak, do speak volumes, right? So when you you go in and say to the sales team that your pipeline is build, your respect it's a bit crap. You know you haven't had an engagement with this bank for six months. I don't know why you think it's an opportunity there, but it really isn't. And the fact you put it at stage three is just, you know I get why it maybe got there six months ago, but it's not there now. So let's get rid of it and I and trust me that if it comes back around, you'll still get the opportunity. Yeah, go somewhere else. Yeah, and that's actually what's the important thing. To the salesperson, they said they have the opportunity to sell to the client that they've been prospecting.
Vicky:Yeah, so you have to earn that trust, then don't you?
Karen:kind of do, but it's actions. You know, I speak louder with it, you have. It goes a little bit of both ways and, and I think, um, you know, the first is to ask, ask the trust and then, and then, by your actions, it will come yeah, yeah, so sorry to distract.
Vicky:So that was number one transparency. Transparency Number two on scaling.
Karen:Well, I think the other one is I allusion to that like creating that psychological safety which is I'm you know, I'm allowing you to get rid of all your pipeline Like, well, let's get rid of all the pipeline that's not relevant, right, so we can focus on the right things to win deals. And, honestly, salespeople will hate that because without much pipeline, people feel very exposed and think they're going to be up for a lot yeah, very vulnerable.
Karen:Very vulnerable and so you have to ensure that you are dealing with that vulnerability and acknowledge it, because you know if you've got a a business conversion problem of pipeline conversion, it's actually a pipeline problem for everybody.
Vicky:it's not, it's not like the sales problem yeah, fatigue, they're not on their own and, no, on their own. For me, that's what creates psychological safety yeah, yeah, and not thinking, oh god, I haven't got pipeline, I'm going to be out the door exactly and honestly it.
Karen:That's what happens often, isn't it? When you're a salesperson, you go through that ringer all the time. I haven't achieved my number. I'm going to be fired, but I would. You know the person who operates a sales cycle and is not successful but has operated on a really great. You know you can be lucky in sales, without a doubt. You'd much rather have the person that's going to be consistently doing the right things all the time, all the time. Yeah, because they will be successful, more likely than the person who gets a bluebird in and they've just got lucky. Yeah, yeah.
Sam:I used to see that loads in Softcat, you know, particularly with new starts you know you might have a new start who would absolutely blow their first or second target out of the water because they happened to stumble across a big deal. Yeah, and almost without exception, they then thought oh well, this is easy, it's easy, yeah.
Karen:Yeah, oh well, this is easy.
Sam:It's easy, yeah, yeah, and you know, stopped doing the 27,000 cold calls a day or whatever it is.
Karen:Yeah, there's always a thing like the same with the game of sports the more you practice, the skills the more you become second nature. Yeah. So the best people would just want at-bats. So one chance to like you know I had people would can want at-bats. They want chance to like you know I had people would. Can I just go through your presentation? Yeah, absolutely. If you want to dry, run, dry, run it through me. That's absolutely brilliant. Thank you, um. The more you can do that, you know, the more successful you're going to be.
Sam:Yeah yeah, I mean I would say to those people look, you've got a massive opportunity here because the pressure is off you for a, you know, a quarter or two quarters or something like that. Yeah, you know you, you don't have to worry about dragging in business. What you can do is stuff, stuff your pipeline with genuine opportunity yeah, really get out, there, yeah, yeah yeah, exactly interesting what's number?
Vicky:what's?
Karen:the number three, karen the thing. The third one, I think, when it comes to like the scaling, is just getting that feedback loop going, taking risk when everyone's on board rather than no one on board. I think so and we've touched on it to begin with. But you know, closing revenue, particularly when you're scaling a company, you want to just be beating the revenue target all the time. So, and especially when you're trying to land in a new region, as we were then Particle it's really easy to say yes to the wrong type of deal where your customer and also like we were. You know you could argue we didn't have product market fit, we were trying to really find it. So you're trying to.
Karen:You're more likely to say yes to a deal that is not necessarily a great fit for your business in the in the sort of like want and desire to close revenue that can then like create all sorts of problems to your customer success team. You know it takes them three times as long to onboard the client. They are actually on difficult calls all the time, so their job goes down. Clients not happy, your product team probably have some sort of extra burden to do so. They become like not disenfranchised but they're like why I was going to do this and now I've got to do that and suddenly your like roadmap gets impacted. Um, so I think you know I've done this in both my role, in my, my last role at Airbox, but also when I was at Emparticle.
Karen:It's like A stop over-committing to customers stuff we don't do. Let's just stop that but let's commit to stuff that we're prepared to do that fits our roadmap and our vision. Or, if it doesn can say, let's do it with eyes open, with a customer understanding that we are all taking a risk together. Yeah, and then you can combine that teamwork really well and really comprehensively. And when it does work, everyone celebrates. But what it doesn't, it's not detrimental to the business. Because you tried, you did it with like thinking. You know from a customer perspective, we're doing something new.
Vicky:We're all down this pathway and we know and we're committed to the risk we're taking, but we're doing it with our eyes open yeah, if, if, um, if this was being videoed and we weren't just having the audio of this, you could see a massive grin on my face, because you're just such a great example of teaming in a commercial organisation, I tell you.
Karen:It goes to the customer as well. The best example I can give you of teaming without naming there's a really big retail client of ours. So you can imagine the scene as the pandemic was coming. We're being through a POC with this client successfully. It was March 2020. And we were looking to convert that to a six figure recurring revenue deal was really important to me in Europe. It was one of the biggest deals we were going to do at the time and a marquee client in terms of the logo going to do at the time and a marquee client in terms of the logo.
Karen:Yeah, we had the purchase order come through in the morning and the signature was on the west coast. By the time he woke up, the order had been taken back out of DocuSign simply because there's no, you know from a business perspective and make. I'm not going to complain about it because I think you know from a business perspective and make. I'm not going to complain about it because I think you know from the cash flow pandemic. Retail stores were closing. They stopped everything that was out. So it was like it was pretty devastating for me and the team. Um, it's actually pretty devastating for the procurement team in the client side as well, because it was like, really we didn't get told, we just went to counter sign it and gone it was. You know it's pretty dramatic, but you know, in the aspects of teaming, wanting to get to success from a client and us perspective, you know the ceo and myself were on calls for the next two weeks trying to figure out a way of um us getting the cash that we needed. You know we're a scaling company. We've just raised a series d but you're still like wanting to make sure you've got cash flow coming in. Yeah, um, but recognizing that as a big retail store that we're just shutting everything and having to put everybody on furlough, that a the people that might have been using the tech were going um, including the procurement people about to be furloughed as well. So we had like a really difficult negotiation to try and figure out what we were going to do, because everybody wanted to proceed but we couldn't do it without money. We already owed money um, but they didn't want to do a big commitment, which is understandable.
Karen:Now we negotiated successfully um, a sort of let's call it an extension, with payment terms which were very good, and that client became um continued. We had a continuation when the stores reopened. Yeah, we just had to negotiate ourselves out. We didn't have to be like we, we didn't go for an AAR deal, we just tried to create success for the client. You know, yeah, listen to their needs and they listen to ours. And it wasn't easy, it was very emotional, but it was a really big learning for me and you know, I learned a lot from my CEO that in that negotiation because I was, you know, a bit threaded, to be honest, with you, but we were, like, all wanted the same thing at the end of the day, which was to work together. Yeah, it was very collaborative and it is still a collaborative partner of Emparticle today. What a great example Powerful story.
Sam:Really interesting. I think we've covered everything that we wanted to talk about there. You've been actually, karen, you've been really good at bringing stuff in before I've had to ask the relevant questions. So I've been. I've been been coasting today. It's been quite nice, um.
Karen:So maybe, as we bring this towards a conclusion at the top of the hour, perhaps you could summarize our conversation today with two or three takeaways for our listeners yeah, I think, um well, firstly, from a just a general um teaming perspective, and even at yourself like oneself, the most impactful thing I mean I've done leadership courses and I've I've, you know, had my own like reservist experience which, you know, going through Santa's probably enabled me to be the leader part, partly that I am today, but the biggest impactful thing I've done in my career is actually having a career coach at that at that time probably some would say probably late in life. That enabled me to really think about my own values and what it what I wanted to, not not achieve in terms of title, but what I wanted to achieve in terms of feeling and being in a business. And that work I did with a career person left me to leaving VMware very quickly at the time, recognising it wasn't the right place for me and it certainly wouldn't enable me to feel the way I wanted to feel in the job. So working with a career coach was really important, actually, because that enabled me to understand my values, understand what gave me a buzz really at work and helped me create my future for myself, and that laid the pathway to some of the best experiences I've had in the work workplace, to be honest with you.
Karen:Secondly, in terms of like creating, like alignment within teams, it's really about ensuring people understand the combination and the cause and effect of working together and that if you want to achieve something great as a whole, each function has a reliance on the other, like you do in a sporting team, in order for yourself to be successful.
Karen:You know, sales will not be successful if sales alone are running the shop because they absolutely need to have the right product that fits the right market to enable them to sell to it. Customer success will not be successful if sales do not sell to the right kind of customer that wants the product in the time they want it and is going to create selling the right value to that customer. And these things are all linked in and and if you don't have those feedback loops of like product, listening to why, why is that what sales feel is seen in the marketplace, not just about the customer, but what, what's the pushback sales are getting, you know, why are they not winning deals? Because sometimes you can fool yourself that you've got the best product in the world but actually it's not fitting the marketplace because the market isn't ready for it. Yeah, it's a different issue, isn't it absolutely, you know?
Sam:I'm sure there's a book somewhere called or sales as a team sport or something like that. I'm sure.
Karen:I'm sure I've read that as a tagline quite often yeah, maybe yeah, maybe maybe I used it a lot and actually michael and I talk about like it is a team sport yes, and we talk about being one team in front of the customer and I remember a particular client that we worked with years ago.
Vicky:They had all the different functions of the business. They had a chart with all the different functions of the business around the outside. Yeah, middle was sales and I said, no, hang on, where's your customer? Yeah, they went. Oh, yeah, good point, they did change it really quickly, yeah, but it was.
Karen:I was like oh, that's a miss, yeah, yeah, if you haven't gone to you, don't think about your customer, yeah, and put sales in an equal position with customers, because everybody's all it's a.
Vicky:It's symbiotic, isn't it?
Karen:it's totally yeah yeah, yeah, um, I'm sure there's a third one there, but I can't remember now but.
Vicky:But what you get is it counts for three for sure.
Sam:Yeah, yeah, I'll take that. I'll take two for the price of three or something, or three for the price of two, whichever way around it is, yeah, fabulous. Thank you for that, and are you a reader? Do you have a book that you'll recommend to us?
Karen:Well, being a mathematician, I have to say I'm not the world's best reader. However, yeah, okay, maybe an excel spreadsheet.
Sam:You can excel spreadsheet.
Karen:I think that I do try and read, so I think that's where, like, I do learn. It's just that I'm not, um, my partner is like a reads for fun and I watch tv for fun, um, but I think, when it comes to like there, I think there there's one book that I've read which I think it's just an amazing book, which is 4,000 Weeks by I'm looking at the thing by Oliver Berkman. I think it is 4,000 Weeks. 4,000 Weeks, yeah, that's about how long a person gets to live on this planet. Wow, Okay.
Karen:Yeah, it doesn on this planet, wow, okay, yeah, so it doesn't sound very much when you. It doesn't sound very much so when I looked at it, so I've gone, I've got about a thousand weeks left. I think I've got less than that yeah so it's like, but it creates urgency in what you're doing actually yeah actually, am I doing the right thing for me at this moment in time?
Vicky:yeah, I need my daughter to get that, so she gets out of bed. Do you know how many weeks you're losing?
Karen:well, no, I'll tell you what your daughter should read. There's another book that I'm in the middle of reading, which I've read I'm gonna talk about it before it's even finished, but I'm loving it and that is called intention the surprising psychology of high performers intention there you go that's very inspiring thank you.
Karen:This is by ross truston and I'm gonna mispronounce that pilot. I'm gonna say p-i-l-a-t, but it's a lot. It's very much on the psychology. I've got into psychology, I think a lot more. So, yeah, um. And then that takes me to the final one, which is actually a sub stack which I get um.
Karen:So I'm better at reading bite-sized chunks, as you can imagine that makes sense, yeah and there's a lady called and I'm going to absolutely misrepresent her name and laurie uh, and this labs is her sub stack and I think she's just released a book and she's a psychologist, um, but hers is fascinating and I think I think when you look at you tie up human performance and team performance, an awful lot of psychology with it. And I'm not a psychologist, I'm not a trained in that field, but there's, there's a lot probably that it resonates with me, and particularly this intention book is quite interesting very good, thank you.
Sam:Well, there you go vicky buy that, for I know for brooke yeah well, that was.
Vicky:That was fascinating, so thank you well, there you go, vicky buy that for I know for brooke.
Sam:Yeah, well, that was. That was fascinating. So thank you for that, and it just remains for me to say thanks for listening to get amplified from the amplified group. As always, your comments and your subscriptions are gratefully received.