Sean Lane 0:02
Today's episode is sponsored by the DevOps experts at full cast with me is their Head of Customer Success. Tyler Simon's Hey Tyler, revenue efficiency, sales productivity are everything today. How does full castes go to market planning platform help Reb ops teams achieve these types of goals.
Tyler Simons 0:18
Well, forecast lets you build better territory so that the right resources are always focused on the right opportunities. When reps are motivated and zeroed in on their targets, they'll be more successful and bring in more revenue.
Sean Lane 0:32
That sounds great. I do a lot of that planning and spreadsheets today. And I'm pretty happy with my spreadsheets. How is full cast any better than that?
Tyler Simons 0:40
You must get rid of the spreadsheets because spreadsheets create lag and errors with forecast planning and updating happen automatically all in one place. Best of all, it automates all common headache inducing planning activities like territory rebalancing, account hierarchies, routing, and more. So when you're faced with those go to market plan changes, which you know what they happen all the time forecast has your back. Alright,
Sean Lane 1:09
you got me convinced? Where do I learn more about forecast, our
Tyler Simons 1:12
website forecast.io.
Tom Wentworth 1:15
Three years from now, the world is going to be turned upside down, I can't predict what's going to happen and go to market. So like you're not thinking about it in that term, you're gonna be sitting there with you know, the equivalent of a Model T in an era of Tesla's?
Sean Lane 1:41
Everyone, welcome to operations at the show where we look under the hood of companies in hyper growth. My name is Shawn Lee. When we started this show, we knew we wanted it to be unabashedly for operators with expert guests sharing lessons from those people who had been there done that. And I think we've largely lived up to that for more than 100 episodes. But there's something new happening right now that kind of caught me off guard, a new purpose a new role that our show can take on. Not only can we be the place to reflect on the hard earned lessons our guests have to share. But we can also be the place where operators can come to brainstorm, to debate to hypothesize about what's to come. And today's guest, he helped me to realize that that guest and the voice you heard at the top of the show is Tom Wentworth. Tom is the CMO of Recorded Future the cybersecurity company. And his track record is wildly impressive having previously led marketing teams at Acquia, rapid miner and Optimizely. Being a marketing leader means that you don't just market your own product, you're a customer of a lot of software products yourself, and Tom is no different. As AI use cases explode, and new technologies emerge what feels like daily, Tom, like all of us is trying to adjust to the new possibilities available to him. But unlike most of us, Tom is already plotting where he and his team have recorded the future will take advantage of these tectonic shifts. In our conversation, Tom and I discuss the macro shift from best of breed tools to all on one platforms. He teaches me why datasets not features will be the differentiators of software products moving forward. And we both realized together that those previously fluffy product roadmaps may actually mean a lot more than they used to in the future. To start though, let's dive right into what Tom is seeing as new real innovation is causing a shift in the way companies go to market.
Tom Wentworth 3:49
So I've been doing this for a long time. All right, I may look like my hair is looking spiky today, it looks like a lot younger than I really am. But I've been doing this forever. And I would have said until very recently, that technology is the best as a best of breed game, like find the best combination of tools for your business, stitch them together, orient them around a central thing like Salesforce. And that's how you would build a stack. And the past six months, I've become more convinced than ever, that that's actually the wrong approach going forward. And that we are seeing now a shift to whatever we're going to call the new thing integrated suites platforms, buying a bunch of point solutions isn't going to get you to the promised land anymore. And I think we're in a new world right now.
Sean Lane 4:38
And so when you make that distinction between again, whatever you want to call them integrated suites platforms and your kind of previous view of Salesforce needed to be at the center of that. Can you expand on that a little bit? Because when I hear you say that, Oh, Salesforce is the platform and I'm just putting stuff in but you're saying complete replacement of that.
Tom Wentworth 4:56
I'm saying that 10 years ago, everyone owns Salesforce. So you'd go by HubSpot or Marketo, you would buy a CMS, you would buy some sort of reporting tool, you'd buy outreach SalesLoft, or you buy Yesware. See, I told you, I'm old, you buy one of those tools, right? You start stitching these things together, Salesforce serves as the center of gravity, but everything plugged into Salesforce later on you by drift, Salesforce, the center of gravity, but you'd stack together all of these things. And like I said, I think 10 years ago, five years ago, two years ago, even a year ago, that was a good strategy. But now we're starting to see whatever we call these platform companies, like everyone wants to be that center of gravity. And that would have been impossible to me. I think now, it's inevitable.
Sean Lane 5:46
According to Tom, things are changing, and not just the technology available to us. But the actual tech stack design itself, where we used to just latch every tool we bought onto Salesforce and Salesforce sat at the center, the approach to building your tech stack to picking that platform that can serve as the center of gravity. All of that is shifting, and will continue to shift. So if everyone is competing for the same real estate in a sales reps day, or marketers day, and features are starting to be commoditized, across different vendors, how does Tom see this evolution for vendors playing out?
Tom Wentworth 6:25
Yeah, it comes down to data. So that's where I've seen this this shift. Right? So Salesforce has a pretty impressive data set right there your system of record for what really matters, which is how you make money, how you support your customers, like pretty important stuff, that's not going to go away. But you think about the data sets that are being aggregated by people like HubSpot. They're being aggregated by people like sixth sense, they're being aggregated by drift, you have an amazing dataset at Drift, I think now the battle is being fought on who has the right dataset, because now that we have these big AI models we didn't have a year ago. Turns out the data matters more than ever and the things that you can do with that data. So it's like whoever has the best data is now I think, going to win. And I think there are few vendors that are really have a chance to emerge as the platform at Jason's sitting next to Salesforce.
Sean Lane 7:18
And the interesting thing about that data point is before most if not all of that data was just from Salesforce, right? And I think we need to expand the definition of the bucket of data that you're talking about. Because you could plug your tool into Salesforce and like, yeah, I've got opportunity data, like so does everybody who plugs into that opportunity, right? And so how do you view kind of the net new or the novel versions of what these tools or platforms can do with data? So
Tom Wentworth 7:49
think about someone like Gong, right? You've got Gong and Clary, who are now going after each other through outreach in the mix outreach wants to record calls, Gong wants to send emails, like everybody's doing everybody. SalesLoft right. So why can Gong do it credibly? Because they've been capturing call recordings forever, they understand the meaning of those call recordings. And they're able to apply those learnings that dataset to this new novel problem of how do we send better emails, that's really cool. Clary knows more than anybody about how to find pipeline that converts and how to like really understand how your business is performing, they're going to be able to use that to drive use cases, that frankly, even Salesforce probably can't drive. So I think you we have these vendors now who have these really unique datasets, who can then apply their unique data to these all of these problems we've been talking about. And, and we're already seeing that happen. Like that is the change that has happened in the past six months. And it kind
Sean Lane 8:51
of seems like that data will then be the key to the differentiation of how you solve a problem, right? The problems are not going to be unique, even maybe what you would call the features or the use cases might not be unique, but it seems like your angle or the data that you have to solve that problem or to fulfill that use case. Is that going to eventually be the differentiator.
Tom Wentworth 9:14
100% Right. Like you saw yesterday, Mehta released threads. Are you on thread,
Sean Lane 9:21
I just joined yesterday. Yeah, I
Tom Wentworth 9:23
had zero followers at 1130. Last night. Now I have like 14, you're on
Sean Lane 9:27
my list. Tom, I'll get you on there. Let's go.
Tom Wentworth 9:30
But like think about it, they can go copy Twitter. metas got enough engineers. They can copy Twitter's UI, they can copy their feature function stuff. Like there's zero moat for meta to copy Twitter. But there's a tremendous moat for someone to copy what Clary is doing, what Gong is doing, what outreach is doing, what drift is doing, what six cents is doing. These data sets have been curated over years and sometimes decades and longer. In order to do that, those two As datasets are the modes, and when you start to apply datasets and large language models like GPT, and others, holy moly, the things that you can unlock, it's really incredible. And back to my original thesis, I think that's why things now will inevitably come together. Because the data is so powerful, that you're not going to want to get email from here or call recording from here and conversational marketing. From here, you're going to want a single vendor to kind of do all of this for you and apply their unique data set to the sets of problems that you have.
Sean Lane 10:34
If you've had to evaluate software tools at any point in the last decade, Tom's thesis would lead to a sizeable shift in how you undergo those evaluations. If everyone ends up with similar features, or use cases, it's no longer about comparing a side by side list of features with checkboxes, it becomes about which companies dataset is best suited to solve your particular business problems. So how do you even begin to do that a company's data set as a differentiator is pretty hard for me to effectively kick the tires on at least right now. So how do we tell the difference between a commodity and a differentiator in Tom's new world, it's
Tom Wentworth 11:17
even more important now. Because you buy these platforms, I would expect you want to live with them for a year, two years, three years. So the decision you make today could have a three year plus impact on your business. And while you watch everyone else, go do some innovative stuff, you pick the wrong vendor, I think the consequences are higher than they've ever been. So I think it's actually more important than ever, that you really try to understand, not what the vendor can do today, like this is goes opposite against everything I've ever learned in software, right? Don't buy in the future, don't buy in the roadmap, you gotta buy what's on the truck now. But that's not I think things are moving too fast for that, like I want to understand. All right. So if I'm going to talk to a vendor, like six cents, Clary Gong, drift, whoever, I want to know. Okay, so let's talk about your view of of AI your view of of the data informed things that you can do, I would take that part of my evaluation as seriously as how do you integrate to Salesforce, show me how you set up cadences, show me how you set up a chat bot, like, we have to evaluate these vendors on where they're going to go, we have to look at their companies and assess like, I'm a sixth sense client at Recorded Future. And what we have to think about what you know, we know what their dataset is, we know they're an AI company. So I feel very confident that their data, they're going to have a unique data set. And they're gonna put unique analytics on top of it, like I know, that's what their whole business is. But I want to look at the other vendors in my portfolio, and make sure I'm confident they have that same vision, like I would not buy another technology without really trying to understand exactly what their roadmap is going to look like. And then I have to assess whether I think they can get there.
Sean Lane 13:02
The Roadmap thing is so interesting, because to your point, most of the time, in the past, it's just been this like, kind of smoke and mirrors hand waving exercise of like, this is all the exciting stuff that's coming. And what you're basically saying is like a company's track record and their ability to deliver on those promises. It's not just about the promises anymore, it's being able to say, Hey, this is what you said. And then this is what actually came true over the course of our three year commitment together, it's going
Tom Wentworth 13:29
to be a while next three years, like you think about what's happened in the past year, with just chat GPT and large language models. We're just getting started computers getting better and cheaper. You got more and more big companies putting huge amounts of efforts into this, like we're just getting started three years from now, the world is going to be turned upside down, I can't predict what's going to happen and go to market. So like it's, you're not thinking about it in that term. You're gonna be sitting there with you know, the equivalent of a Model T in an era of Tesla's it's interesting, but it's also frightening how fast stuff is going to evolve. Like look at a real example. Marketo let's pick on them a little bit nothing against Adobe love Marketo I won the Marketo revenue award and 2014 revenue award winner a long time ago, literally nine coalition's.
Sean Lane 14:19
I'll put that in the bio, within the bio,
Tom Wentworth 14:21
it's on my LinkedIn profile. But like, what is Marketo do differently today than they did nine years ago when I won the award. Literally nothing Pardot remember Pardot at the sale, whatever they call it now, that hasn't changed in 13 years, HubSpot changes and good good for them. They're the only map vendor that seems to put any investment in their product. But Marketo and Pardot haven't changed at all right? That like that's not going to fly anymore. You're gonna see these things evolve. And again, you see it with Gong, Clary outreach SalesLoft drift. You see the the rapid pace of evolution now. Like we're seeing massive improvements every Aren't it's insane?
Sean Lane 15:01
We hear the same thing from a lot of our customers about the MVP stuff like, it's almost like sacrilegious to think of building a demand gen or marketing or without one of those, but people are thinking about it right. And people are yearning for it. Yeah,
Tom Wentworth 15:17
what's going to replace them is going to be, I don't know how much I should disclose about things I'm allowed to share or not. But there are more tech vendors out there right now who are gunning for people like HubSpot Marketo. And what they're going to do is they're going to take a conversational AI approach to email and and emails are going to behave like humans. And you're not going to need to set up that ridiculously complicated workflow in Marketo, and HubSpot, you're just going to have aI going back and forth with people until they raise their hand and say, Hey, I'm ready to talk. Like that's going to happen. And that's going to be done in months, not years. I'm more worried about, like outreach and SalesLoft. In tools that make BDRs more productive. There's a future there AI is going to help them that's already happening. But the whole map space like low value, highly automated emails, I don't know, man, I don't know what's gonna happen there. If that feels like the perfect thing for AI to automate.
Sean Lane 16:12
This episode is sponsored by fool cast a company that helps operators build better sales territories. Their platform focuses the right sellers on the right opportunities, making them unstoppable. And the cherry on top, forecast automates common go to market activities like territory, rebalancing, account hierarchies, routing, and more. So the plan is always in sync with operations. With forecast, say goodbye to go to market planning, headaches, and hello to your own personal planning assistant. Learn more about forecast today by visiting forecast.io. Okay, back to Tom. Before the break, Tom was stressing the new longer term thinking that go to market leaders need to employ in order to keep up with what feels like a daily shift in the technology available to us. And luckily for us, Tom is actually someone who finds himself in exactly that position. As the CMO of Recorded Future, he has to make these really tough bets. So what should the rest of us do? Do we sit out the next six to 12 months and just wait to see where the dust settles? Not Tom.
Tom Wentworth 17:20
This is what I love. Like I'm a tech nerd. I'm a product nerd. So like I do this with much love and admiration. But yeah, it's my job to make the big bets that are going to put us in the position, one year, two year, three years from now to like, I can't, I'm not going to win by spending more money, I'm not going to win by hiring more people, the way I think I'm going to win the market is by being more productive and smarter. And so it is my job to equip the team with tools that I think will allow Recorded Future to have a better go to market than our competitors. And technology is going to be a part of that. Not the only part of that. But if I can find a tool that lets me do the proverbial more with less, especially these days in this economic environment, you kidding me? Of course, I'm gonna do that. And that's going to be a win for me, I'm going to watch all my competitors, manually doing stuff that I can automate big win for Recorded Future.
Sean Lane 18:14
And so make that real for people like, can you give me a use case of what you would want that technology to do for your go to market team that maybe wasn't possible six months ago.
Tom Wentworth 18:24
I mean, here's the here's the simple thing, right? Remember three years ago, when we had unlimited access to capital, and we as companies could go raise as much money as we want. And we would give that money to people like me and CMOs and say, Go spend as much as you want to go acquire new customers. And then this pesky little recession thing happens, and money dries up. And all of a sudden, we're told we've got to be profitable. And we don't have unlimited money to spend yet we still want to grow. So like the balance of profitability and growth is tricky. But if you can't figure that balance, you're never going to have the kind of exit that all of us want as private, whatever venture funded companies. So the real thing for me is I gotta grow. But I've got to do it responsibly. And I think the tools are a big part of that strategy. Like, I can't, I can't scale my marketing team at 40% every year. So I've got to find ways to scale more profitably, I can't scale our BDR team as fast as revenue. So I've got to find ways to scale more profitably. And I think the tools used right are the only way that you can do that when you get to a certain amount of scale. I can't spend more on AdWords, I can't spend more on my thread advertising, or whatever, pick your whatever your channel, you pick, like I got to find tools that let me take novel approaches to things. And I think there's an early adopter advantage if you pick the right sets of tools. And for me, drift was one of those, like I was super early drift user before everybody used drift. And it was an advantage because like, what's this thing? I'm going to try this thing out, and that thing drove a big chunk of my pipeline. Five years ago, I think people are using chat GBT right now aggressively have an advantage in the market. I think people that are early adopters, if they buy into the right stuff have a huge productivity advantage in the market.
Sean Lane 20:14
The companies that make those early bets will have a huge productivity advantage in the market. I really appreciate that. Despite most of our conversation being about tools and technology, what really drives Tom is winning his market, he's trying to put his team in the best position to win, which is really what technology should be for in the first place. It's not about the logo, you get to say you're using or your friend who works at the vendor that's competing for your business, it's about which horse is going to get you and your team the most yield. It's as simple as that. What's helped me think about though, which is not as simple is how do we quantify the value we're getting from all these new technologies, or to use his differentiator from earlier from these unique datasets, pricing ROI, these concepts are going to change a lot. So how do we begin to ascribe the value of AI to these tools?
Tom Wentworth 21:11
I think a lot of it comes down to we have recorded future AI, we're an intelligence company. So we are out there gathering intelligence from all sorts of sources, from open sources, to dark web, to technical sources to very bespoke Russian criminal hacker forums and everything in between. And our job is to gather all these signals, and help our clients understand what it means for them so they can do something. So like, if you know that your leaked credentials are out being sold on some Russian criminal forum, you should probably expire those credentials in your VPN, right? Things like that. But we use AI to summarize all the signals, hey, here's a simple sentence of all these things, and what they really mean to you. So we have you know, my company in cybersecurity, we have to be able to articulate our value and a lot of it comes down to productivity, right, you have a bunch of analysts who are overworked, they're seeing more cyber incidents than ever, they're having to deal with these really insane hackers from Russia, China, Iran, North Korea, and like it's hard to do their job. So anything they can do to make them more productive, is very valuable to that organization, in terms of like sort of FTE is right. Normal, like what Recorded Future is providing is letting me do the job of two or three people. So those two or three people can go do something else. I think in our world, I think it's the same thing. I think it's if I can start automating things like if I can have email that a technology like sixth sense can automate how I do email outreach, that would have been done by three BD Rs in the past, like pick my bad content, syndication leads, put them into something that can just automatically outreach and have a conversation and then bubble up the good ones that just saved my BDR is a bunch of time they can go spend on prospecting into accounts that we really want to break into. So I think it's a productivity savings. It's an opportunity cost story. It's like everything with AI, outsourcing the lowest value stuff, so that you can focus on the higher value things like I don't want to have to write, I can have chat GPT to a lot of the commodity writing that I would spend 15 minutes and now it doesn't 10 seconds, I can go to something more valuable with my time.
Sean Lane 23:29
The other thing I'm taking away from your description there is like, regardless of the pricing like this will just be table stakes. Yeah, yeah. Like if you don't have this, you're not even in the Congress relevant 100% relevant.
Before we go at the end of each show, we're going to ask each guest the same lightning round of questions. Ready? Here we go. Best book you've read in the last six months and
Tom Wentworth 24:00
put up by Frank sloop in the go. Have you read that before you read that book before? It's it's literally incredible? That's a good one. I just reread it recently. And that do you like he just clear why snowflake and ServiceNow were so successful? Normally, I
Sean Lane 24:18
ask people favorite part about working in OPS, I consider you an honorary operator. So I'll say favorite part about working in ops or with UPS? Yeah,
Tom Wentworth 24:26
I was so much to the chagrin of my fantastic ops person, Jamie theory and I have admin privileges to everything. I'm her worst nightmare. And you know, I'm a former computer science major. So like I can write code. Like I'm dangerous and I'm also not afraid I'll go write Apex triggers. I've literally written an APEX trigger before in Salesforce like so. Scary. I guess my thing is, I apologize. I'm sorry. And like all screw things up every once in a while. Like, you know, I accidentally touched 200,000 Salesforce records sorry. worry about that
Sean Lane 25:00
might make the next one a layup for you least favorite part about working with or in OPS trying
Tom Wentworth 25:05
to get trying data wrangling trying to get multiple data sources to make sense. Stupidly difficult. How hard is that and second one, this is a little minor one but you're gonna love this one. It's insanely stupid that Salesforce has Leads and Contacts dumbest thing ever. It's literally the dumbest thing ever that like kill leads leads have to go Benioff. If you listen to this podcast, you got to get rid of leads the dumbest thing ever and makes things so complicated. So
Sean Lane 25:33
first of all, I'm with you. But the wildest part about that take is that there are people who vehemently disagree with you on the other side.
Tom Wentworth 25:41
They're insane. They're wrong.
Sean Lane 25:42
I agree. Let's
Tom Wentworth 25:44
do this turn that find women they are let's do a three way podcasts next episode, I'll tell them how wrong we'll do. We'll do a debate of contacts are the way to go like contacts are just a better object in Salesforce. You could do more with contacts leads or leads are dumb. Like you can tell it was an afterthought. They don't make any sense. No, who didn't fall into that trap is HubSpot. HubSpot CRM that don't make any sense didn't fall into that trap. And God bless. Yes.
Sean Lane 26:07
All right, someone who impacted you get into the job you have today. Oh,
Tom Wentworth 26:10
gosh. It was a long, long time ago. It was a sales guy named Ray Picard who I used to I was at SC for the first chunk of my career. And this ray guy said, you're pretty good se but I think you'd be good at this thing called product marketing. Why don't you go figure out what that looks like. So with his support, I got put into a role called Field CTO, which isn't a real role, but it's like you're a product marketer, but you work in sales. It's kind of funny. But yeah, this guy Ray saw that I was more than just the sales engineer. But which by the way, is the best job in tech. I miss it dearly. But he got me into marketing. In a strange way.
Sean Lane 26:48
That's awesome. Last one, one piece of advice for people who want to have your job someday
Tom Wentworth 26:52
don't have a playbook. Let me this is going to be another hot take here. Like all of this stuff. But like I talked about to CMOS, who like they have a playbook. And every time they join a new company, they run their playbook. And if they get lucky, their playbook works. And when it doesn't, they're the ones who lose their job in a year. I have no playbook. And I don't think you could have a playbook. My playbook is every business is different. Every GTM is different. You got to come in and study you got to quickly learn what makes each company unique. And you've got to come in with no predispositions about what's going to work and what's not going to work. I think if you come in and say, Well, this is how I did it, the size structure the team, this is how I spent my budget events worked for me before, so they're gonna work for me here, like that is the fastest path to failure. Assume you know nothing when you come into any new company, no matter what your role is CMO or specialist, like come and learn the business and you do that. I think it's like the difference between buying something off the shelf or like building something that's unique to what you're trying to do.
Sean Lane 27:59
Thanks so much to Tom Wentworth, for joining us on this week's episode of operations. Also, a special shout out to Jamie Sloane, who Tom called the best marketing ops professional in Boston. If you recognize that name, it might be because Jamie was featured on our show back in episode 45. And so if you missed that one, go back and check out who Tom calls up the best marketing ops pro he's ever worked with. If you'd like to hear from our show today, make sure you're subscribed so you get a new episode in your feed every other Friday. If you like video better than audio, check out our new and improved YouTube channel operations with Sean lane you can search for it on YouTube or check it out in the show notes. subscribe there. Also if you learn something from our show today or from any of our episodes, please leave us a six star review on Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts six star reviews only. Alright, that's gonna do it for me. Thanks so much for listening. We'll see you next time.
Today's episode is sponsored by fool cast your go to market planning platform. If you've ever spent hours or days building territory and quota plans only to have them be out of date. The second the reps hit the street, you need to check out forecast. With forecast you set intelligent rule based policies that automate all of the time consuming manual tasks that hit Reb ops teams throughout the year. with virtually no effort operations will always seamlessly align with your plan. Learn more about forecast today by visiting forecast.io
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