The CRO Spotlight Podcast

Warren Zenna: Hey, everybody. Welcome back to the CRO Spotlight podcast. I'm Warren Zenna, founder of The CRO Collective. And today I'm really excited. I've got a great conversation queued up for you with Chris Billmaier. Chris is the EVP and GM of Agentforce at Salesforce, and that's a division formerly known as Sales Cloud. So if you're a CRO, there's a very good chance you're making your most critical decisions every day in a product that Chris' team built. Chris is real smart and, you know, he's certainly sitting at the center of what is now one of the largest transformations in the CRM space, maybe even the just general go-to-market space, given the impact that Salesforce has on everyone. So it was a great conversation, and enjoy it. See you next week.

Warren Zenna: If you don't mind first, it'd be great if you just sort of provide a little bit of overview of who you are and how you ended up where you are right now.

Kris Billmaier: Yeah, no. One, great to be here again. I'm really excited to talk about what we're building and what we've built. So I'm Kris Billmaier. I'm the EVP and GM of Agentforce Sales, formerly known as Sales Cloud, at Salesforce. I've been in this role for about two years now. I've been at Salesforce for about eight. Spent some time at Microsoft before that, about seven years, and then was a part of three startups. I ran BizDev for one, ran a product for another, and founded a third. So that's kind of me in a nutshell. And yeah, it's a really interesting time in how agentic tools are reframing the whole seller and CRO landscape and it's exciting.

Warren Zenna: Yeah, it most certainly is. I mean, this is the number one topic I have with all my clients right now, so let's get into it. So the first thing I'm interested in is, you know, you were a pretty solid baseball player. You know, you had the NCAA record in your batting. Was it, like, four... What was it again? It was, like, four…

Kris Billmaier: I don't know that I set any records, but yeah, in the postseason, I was pretty good. Yeah, I played four years at Notre Dame and it's great to look back on those.

Warren Zenna: And you played in... you went to the minor leagues after that, right?

Kris Billmaier: Yeah, spent a little time riding some buses in Florida. You know, it was... It's great. It's a great story. But yeah, about a year in the minor leagues, and then was told time for me to move on.

Warren Zenna: Yeah, I totally understand. Well, it's really cool. I mean, my son was a baseball player and it was really cool. I love sports. But it was a cool stat when I saw that you did that well in the NCAA. It's pretty exciting. So, now one interesting thing is you've never been a CRO.

Kris Billmaier: I've never been a CRO.

Warren Zenna: Exactly. And you build the tool that basically provides the dashboard for every decision they make. So I'm just curious what your thoughts are on that, 'cause it's fascinating, right? To be in a situation where you're building the tool, right, that all CROs use, and you never sat in their seat before. I'm just kind of curious how your perspective informs the tool and how you reconcile that distinction between the people who use it.

Kris Billmaier: Yeah, no, it's a great question. In my role that I sit in, I'm definitely not a CRO, but I'm definitely accountable to the overall business that I run. And so I do my weekly forecasting just like every CRO does and whatnot. But I spend a ton of time with our customers. I spend a ton of time with our CRO. I understand how he works and how his team works. And, you know, we have a number of OU leaders who are amazing sales leaders who are, you know, the CRO of their region or whatnot that I spend most of my time with. So I'm pretty well in-tuned to what they need, and I hope I'm well-in tuned to what our customers need so I can build the best products to support those outcomes. But yeah, it's a daunting job.

Warren Zenna: I can only imagine. I mean, I'd say, like, the number one thing that we find happens with all of our CRO clients is the first endeavor mainly is data cleanup, you know, data enrichment, data management, and the CRM sits at the center of that, and, you know, how to make sure that the data that they're being informed by is actually giving them the truth that drives the decisions that they make. So how do you make those distinctions on your end when you're building the product and you ship it out? Like, what's your relationship to the way in which you hold such an important and critical dashboard feature in the way in which critical revenue leaders make their decisions, and the amount of requirements they have to ensure that it's always being refreshed? And I guess on second top, how, in your view, do you see Agentforce being able to mitigate that stuff in a different way?

Kris Billmaier: Yeah, I think the answer's kind of the same. So I'll say that I think everything that we're building right now has to be reborn in AI. I don't think there's any option to that. So while we've built great SaaS tools, we're absolutely extending them and rethinking them in the world of AI. And to your point, great AI and great experiences come from great data. And so as we think about not only CRO and forecasting and dashboard experiences, but the rep experience, the overall SDR, BDR experience, all of those datasets need to come into play to generate the context of what a company looks at. And so having your data foundation is absolutely critical. And it's not just looking at, like, your apps data. It's looking at your call recording data, your email and engagement data, because when you're a CRO and you're forecasting, you know, you can go off gut and feel and have conversations with your best leaders. But what I'm seeing more and more is the conversations that are being had with customers actually inform the decisions on forecasts and on overall looking at how the business is performing and the confidence they're in, in a much more efficient and effective way. So the data foundation is critical.

Warren Zenna: So do you see, like, do you see the dashboard going away? Do you think, like, the entire front visualization dashboard interaction interface is going to disappear? Are we just gonna be querying Salesforce verbally and asking it to make determinations for us? Like, I'm just curious how you guys are looking at this. I know right now, it was recently the announcement that came out about the headless CRM, which I think, by the way, makes obviously perfect sense for a lot of reasons. But I don't know how much you can reveal. What's the sort of product path you see going down? And when you look at the future of CRM as a system, where do you see it's headed, particularly because of the influence you guys are gonna have on the way this entire sector of the marketplace takes place?

Kris Billmaier: Yeah, you know, I think headless is absolutely the right move. I kind of made the statement a little while ago that I want to be where our sellers are. I think our sellers live in Slack, they live in ChatGPT, they live in their native Salesforce interface, they live in Teams, and they live in Gemini. So kind of anywhere our seller exists, we want to return intelligent results, and that can be query-based to return like Tableau dash, or a traditional CRM dashboard that you can engage with, or it can return data. But I don't see, like, the idea of the traditional dashboard that a CRO looks at going away. How you get to it is probably gonna change, 'cause right now you point and click in CRM to get to your favorite dash, you pin it on a page. But if you're living in Slack on a day-to-day basis and you want to understand, you know, "What's my forecast accuracy this week?" or "What's my projected attainment to quota?" if you're a seller, well, we can return that visually. And I think that's the beauty of the headless mindset is like wherever you are, we can be with good outcomes and good experiences.

Warren Zenna: For sure. So, I mean, I think one of the things that I'm also curious to hear about is what... 150,000 companies are using your system right now. You probably have the greatest data on CRO success and CRO failure as a result. What are the common things that you see are happening with chief revenue officers when it comes to data management, and also just in general, like forecast management, that you're actually utilizing when you develop this product, and how do you address those things? Like, give us some insights on your perspective on the CRO role from the Salesforce perspective and having, like, probably the greatest database of analysis than I think anyone could possibly have. What's the general idea or viewpoint you have on the role?

Kris Billmaier: Yeah, I think, well, one, I think you hit it. Like we have an amazing context of what makes great organizations, I would say sales organizations generally, how companies have success. I think that is absolutely spot on. The way we're learning from it is we're basically looking at best practices across all data sets and using it as we think about influencing our overall product. So I'll give you one example. We see a lot of companies now using conversational insights, so call recordings, you know, and email recordings as well to influence how you drive a deal forward and what stage that deal actually is in. And to me, the insights that are generated from those calls, from those emails, from those conversations are potentially even more compelling to move a deal to stage five or whatever than a rep going to that deal on a Friday and saying, "I'm doing admin Friday. I'm just gonna update all these records based on my recollection of the week," versus an actual log of the week. So if you think about that at scale, like if you're managing ten thousand reps and you're the CRO, it's all water falling up to you. And the better the insight can be at the rep level, the better we can aggregate it for the CRO to have a more predictable, kind of understandable forecast and overall revenue stream. The way I see it, there's a lot of companies that today are still, you know, having those conversations, "What's your gut on customer X, Y, and Z? How are we gonna move this forward? What's your mutual close plan?" when the data could be telling a very different story. So we're using all of that data to be way more predictable and actionable on, "Hey, this deal is going to fall through the cracks. This one's set. This is what your actual forecast looks like for the quarter, for the month."

Warren Zenna: Hey, everyone. I wanna thank you again for listening. I get great comments across LinkedIn and other channels about the show, and it's really gratifying to see that we're having an impact on you. Another thing I wanted to let everybody know is that we also produce events. About two and a half years ago, we started these CRO roundtables, predicated on the idea that... Well, two premises. One is that CROs are looking for other CROs to talk to, which is really true. It's a very lonely job. And how do we get a bunch of CROs in a room where they're not being, let's say, disintermediated by panel discussions and sponsorship events and demos and stuff, and really give them a chance to talk to each other? So we created a roundtable event that is essentially that. It's a three-and-a-half, four-hour discussion between 20 and 30 chief revenue officers, and these are amazing events. The format took off. People love them, and I get requests all the time as to when is your next CRO event? So to that end, I just wanna let y'all know that we have a number of roundtables coming up over next year, over the next, like, 2026, and I wanna share them with you so you can, if they're in your market, you can come. So the next one we're having is gonna be in London, actually, in February, February 24th in London. So if you happen to be a chief revenue officer in the UK or even in Europe and you wanna come by, you'll be hearing about it more on my website and LinkedIn. But put it on your calendar. And then following that, we're probably gonna be doing an event in San Francisco in March. There's gonna be one in New York in March. I'm gonna do another one in Chicago, probably in April. And then I'm gonna do an event in Boston. I'll do an event in Atlanta. I'm gonna do an event in Salt Lake City. I'm gonna do an event in Austin, and I'm gonna do an event in Los Angeles or the Southern California area. So those dates are to be determined, but they'll be going across all next year and these events are taking on huge momentum. They're the place to be if you're a chief revenue officer and you want to be in a room with no interruptions and have an opportunity to really share with each other in a sort of a private and confidential, open discussion about everything that you want to talk about as a chief revenue officer and collaborate with great people. So thank you and thanks for supporting the show and I look forward to seeing you at the events.

So, you know, as you probably can appreciate, right? 'Cause you're correct that there's an incredible amount of other contextual data that gets mixed in with the CRM data that tells the whole picture. And, you know, obviously you guys are very heavily involved in the competitive third-party platforms that plug into Salesforce that provide those things, you know, Gong, of course, being one of the big ones. And I know you guys are trying to... Are you looking for more of a full end-to-end solution where you're managing all the pre, post, during entire conversation sets, or is it still really more requiring that the seller, as it were in this case, be required to kind of enter in all the data? 'Cause I think that, as you probably know more than me, I'm sure, one of the biggest issues that we have with sellers is the efficiency they have and how much time they're actually spending selling and how much time they're actually interacting with these tools. And as you probably can appreciate, I'm sure you know, Salesforce became an extremely complex piece of software over the years, and they can spend, you know, 30, 40% of their time just trying to fill it in, and it becomes a whole other metric for them to measure themselves against. And to be able to remove that reliance would be obviously a great benefit. In fact, I suspect that's probably one of them. I'd like to talk through that, like what's the way in which you see removing people from the task of having to feed the beast in order to get the information back out of the beast again, and what Salesforce's sort of vision for how you're gonna kind of reduce that?

Kris Billmaier: ...to forty percent of their time on non-selling tasks. I'm gonna argue that it's actually seventy percent of their time.

Warren Zenna: Okay. I, look, I was trying to be nice here, you know? Okay. I'm sure you're right. Yeah.

Kris Billmaier: ...state of sales report and that's kind of the metric that we came back with. So…

Warren Zenna: That's amazing.

Kris Billmaier: It's amazing and it's like, wow, think of the efficiency we can actually give back if we're able to just let a seller do what they want to do, which is get in front of a customer and close business. So a couple of things. One, I'm not really calling it a CRM anymore. I think of our tool as agentic revenue orchestration. So we, like so many of the people in our ecosystem, also build on top of the datasets that we have from leads, accounts, contacts. And I think the sales cycle really is about growing pipelines, growing deals, and growing revenue. And the way I think about that is very significantly changing. And so when I think about what a rep used to spend their day doing, it was, you know, cold prospecting, going through LinkedIn, you know, spending hours going back and forth with a customer trying to find a time to book a meeting. Building copious account plans, and then to your point, like updating CRM based on all of that data that you've gathered. I think that's really a thing of the past and we're shipping pretty fast. So we've introduced several products that help streamline that overall. We just shipped an agentic prospecting tool where you basically define your ideal customer profile in natural language. We go out and we bring back new prospects or we enrich existing. That's a huge time save. Once we do that, you wake up to a hot lead list every day. You can assign those to an agent that actually learns and contextualizes all of the data that they know about that customer and that they know that you fed it and they reach out and they email back and forth with the goal of qualifying the lead and booking a meeting. Now, I think like the things of booking manual meetings, I think that's now a thing of the past. And imagine all of the data that we have historically from your CRM, but all that we've learned through those conversations with a customer and an agent or just we've learned from the knowledge of the web or 10-Ks or whatever, that all feeds the account plan that we've auto-created for you. So your job now as a seller is to walk into a meeting with your account plan in hand and understand the customer or the prospect on day one like it's day one hundred. And from there, from all those conversations, we're actually gonna move the pipeline along for you. We actually give you suggested next steps. So I'm really excited about the efficiencies that we're gonna drive because it's also gonna drive growth.

Warren Zenna: Yeah. Well, I could see it all happening and, you know, there's already ways in which a lot of these things you're describing are sort of being cobbled together through, you know, various tools. The rev tech space is just ridiculous right now what's going on. I'm talking to probably like 10 different new AI-based rev tech platforms a week at this point. Everyone doing, you know, call recordings and post-call recordings and, you know, intelligence layers during the meeting and all that stuff too. The other part of it too, of course, is the first-party data you need to get to be able to make sure that your instances are up to date and that they're correct. Are you gonna be providing that as well, or are you gonna continue to rely on the Zoom infos of the world and stuff? Like, where's your role gonna expand the aperture on how wide you're gonna go across this? And are you gonna sit still squarely in just information management? Or like, what's the ambition you guys have of closing the entire end-to-end deal flow?

Kris Billmaier: I think we have to drive horizontally. As it pertains to the data vendors, we've got great partnerships with ZoomInfo, the DemandBases of the world. So I don't see us going into that specific space. I think we absolutely have great partnerships there. But the end-to-end deal cycle that I just outlined, we're absolutely gonna play in that end-to-end horizontal. And we've made a couple of acquisitions recently. We bought and launched an agent prospecting tool called Bluebirds, that we've just relaunched. We just recently acquired a company called Momentum that does call recordings, revenue orchestration, and insights. So, you know, we see it end to end. And I would say we're solving role by role. The first role we solve for is the rep in the agentic world, to where I believe now a rep is managing or should be managing, a team of agents that all have the same goal, which is "burn down my quota over the time period that I need to burn it down and do so intelligently." The next role we're really focused on is the CRO. And to me, that's really exciting because I think all of the things that we've done for the rep are gonna make what we're doing for the CRO so much more efficient, and so much more streamlined because every detail that you get from those reps and every deal they close and every point that you can make that is like "I have confidence in my quota,"

Warren Zenna: Hmm?

Kris Billmaier: ...we're just gonna cascade that up for the CRO and make it really efficient for them.

Warren Zenna: That's good. Let's talk about that a bit. So first thing, let's make sure we're on par with the kind of definitions. So the CRO in our world, right, as I'm sure you might be already probably aware of this, is someone who oversees all the revenue aspects of the business, right? End to end, right? From acquisition all the way through marketing, through the sales cycle, the pipeline, customer engagement, customer success, renewal, maybe all the way to advocacy. If I'm a chief revenue officer today, and the way we approach it is you're coming in, you're the architect of the entire revenue system, and you're building an end-to-end solution that identifies the ICP, refines the ICP, pulls that ICP into your world, gets a sales funnel going, gets that conversation started, gets the customer to close, et cetera. Do you see the CRO the same way? And if so, how do you see Salesforce's context changing around widening the aperture of the way the CRO operates? Or is this still really mostly a sales-focused endeavor for you guys?

Kris Billmaier: So I... A couple of things. One, you used a term that I've been using a little bit, at different stages of the sales role. You said revenue architect. I think that is exactly what a CRO is for the company. And I think revenue architects are what our actual reps turn into for their patch or their accounts. So I totally agree with that. I think the interesting conversation is, are sales and marketing coming together a little bit more? Because what you just outlined kind of blended the two.

Warren Zenna: It does, and I think that they should be at this point for, in B2B obviously, not consumer marketing. But in B2B, I think sales and marketing should be two sides of the same coin as opposed to two separate organizations with different leadership. In fact, I think that's a big part of the breakdown that we're seeing. I would venture to say that even worse would be the customer success organization, where I'm sure you agree that customer growth and customer expansion and customer advocacy is a much more efficient way to grow your business than trying to get new customers. But too often, the customer success organization is off in some other faraway land and sales tosses it over to them and hopes to God that delivery does a good job. And I think a CRO needs to bring all these things together, and the sales and marketing functions are clearly the area that can be easily patched together. And I think given what you guys are doing, I see a huge opportunity for that to become much, much more integrated as part of a solution for a chief revenue officer.

Kris Billmaier: I think we're absolutely getting there. I would tell you that, you know, the way we think about products at Salesforce is, you know, kind of what we've called cloud by cloud. So we have a sales cloud that I run. We have a service cloud which a peer runs. We have a marketing cloud, which another runs. But the work that we're now doing internally, I can tell you for the last several months, my teams have been working hand in hand with the marketing cloud team to build, you know, account-based marketing, to think about high scale campaigns that are two-way conversations, all of these things that can be done by one or the other. And we're building that because we do see kind of a merging of the mindsets, if not the role. So I think it's a super interesting time for that.

Warren Zenna: Thanks again for listening to the CRO Spotlight podcast. We're excited about all the great guests we have, and more importantly, we're excited mostly about you for being avid listeners and supporting the work that we do here. Feel free, please, to share the CRO Spotlight podcast with any of your colleagues. We just think there's a great wealth of information here, and wanna get the word out to as many people as possible, and your support of the show is really appreciated. I wanted to share information about a program that we offer called the CRO Masters Council. The CRO Masters Council is a bimonthly group of six seasoned chief revenue officers who are looking for a chief revenue officer board of directors, so to speak, that they could share what's going on with them, collaborate with ideas, get some feedback on what's going on in their current role, and these are great conversations. I facilitate them. The CRO Masters Councils, again, they're twice a month, and they last for at least six months to a year. So if you're interested in having your own CRO suite, your own board of directors of chief revenue officers, it's a private, confidential conversation that we have. It's infinitely useful. Imagine having a room full of other chief revenue officers you can talk to and say, "Hey, I'm working on this," or, "Have you guys figured that out?" Or, "I'm having this issue right now with my business or my results." These are just invaluable conversations with chief revenue officers. Chief revenue officers have a very unique role. It's a very lonely job, and only other CROs understand what you're going through. So that's why we created this program. So if you're interested in being a member of the next CRO Masters Council, which we have a number of them being put together right now, just go to my LinkedIn and DM me Masters or Masters Council, and I'll follow up with you and set up a call or send you some more information about it. Looking forward to seeing you there, and thank you.

Yeah, so that's really interesting because the whole reason that we started this entire endeavor six years ago was CROs were relegated to being sales leaders almost exclusively, which created a lot of silos in the way that the entire revenue engine was being, you know, pushed forward into the marketplace. And that created all sorts of problems. So the idea of the revenue architect being this leader, and I like this idea too, of the idea of like a sales rep actually being their own revenue architect on an account basis. That's a really wise way to look at it because two things happen. One is you're engineers in a way. As a rep, you're more like an engineer. You're engineering a series of data sets and different conversation intelligence and different layers of data that allow you to kind of carry conversation through much more intelligently and much more efficiently, and you're allowing other technologies to carry through some things for you. But also what it does too is it creates more opportunities for sales reps to train themselves early on to become CROs, as opposed to being stuck in one segment of the marketplace, which is a problem we're seeing today. So I'd be curious to know where you see revenue operations fitting into this conversation. Do you see that sort of becoming like an ether or is it still a segment? Is it still a function? What, when you think about RevOps, what do you think?

Kris Billmaier: I think it... that's a really good question. Nobody's asked me that question yet. I think it's still a function, but like all functions as it pertains to the overall sales cycle, it's automated or it's augmented and augmented in certain ways we haven't really built around yet. But I think about deal approvals, things of that nature. You know, being more, I don't know, it feels like it's just gonna get more and more streamlined based on the guidance that you can give and set and say, "This is how the company operates. This is what we think is passable and this is what we think is objectionable." But I'd be curious to get your take 'cause you obviously have a…

Warren Zenna: Yeah. I have a strong point of view on this, and I think like, you know, it's interesting with RevOps, 'cause I have a lot of respect for that particular domain. You know, it was such a necessary thing for a period of time, probably like a good seat of like 10 years where revenue operations became the brain behind the revenue engine, right? It was somebody or some group that just really understood how to manage data and metrics in ways that were able to kind of cross across all streams of this funnel that you and I are talking about. And I think that over the years, as you know as well, that, you know, these revenue RevOps engineers, RevOps consultancies, RevOps optimizing organizations are really prolific right now, and they go out and they go and they do all the diagnostics, and they fix up all the holes in your system through one centralized intelligence layer, which then there is then a person, like an analyst, who's a RevOps leader, whose job is to manage that, right? And kind of look across all streams. And in my world, that person would report into the chief revenue officer as like the brain of the organization. I think that's still, generally speaking, a good model. But, you know, as now all of us, myself, my partner and our, the delivery model that we've adopted, we're seeing that the RevOps issues are largely addressed using AI in the initial analysis. They get sort of fixed, you know, in the way that you automate agents, right? It's baked into the model more than it being like a function. And I tend to be a bit more less on the, like, "Let's build another function," mainly because I think that when you're building functions, you're unintentionally building more bureaucracy, because you now you got another function which has, you know, their own metrics and their own, you know, measures and their own incentives. And that's what I think happened with revenue operations in general, as there were just too many separate agendas inside of a system that should all be enclosed. And I think RevOps could be more of a competency or a distinction or a context as opposed to a human and a department. Mainly because if you can build systems that all communicate with each other agentically across the entire thing, the RevOps stuff sort of gets solved in that way by virtue of the way that you build it. And so I don't necessarily have a strong point of view yet as to whether or not I think RevOps is going to go away, but I think it's going to be solved in the way that we connect things together because everything's gonna sort of, you know, relate to each other more the way that we're doing things today.

Kris Billmaier: It's really interesting. It maybe brings up a little bit of a, I wouldn't say broader point, but maybe a little, maybe I would. That the notion of observability as it pertains to the entire, you know, revenue cycle, is something I think we will continue to need pretty significantly, right? I mean, the way I think about it is every agent that you build and introduce into the organization is a new junior employee that you have to train, that you have to observe, that you have to continue to critique, and, you know, tweak and update and, you know. Some self-learn a little bit, but, like, the observability and the "are you doing the job that you were intended and are you hitting the goals" is something that somebody has to manage.

Warren Zenna: Yep.

Kris Billmaier: So maybe we're moving into a world where across all these functions, like I've said about the rep, a rep managing a team of agents, you know, maybe RevOps is similar. Maybe it's you're managing a specific function that agents do a lot of the heavy lifting, but you're in there, you know, observing, catching errors. You're kind of the overall... You know, I think that's kind of a mindset that we'll have to get into is like these things are junior employees that still need a lot of adult supervision.

Warren Zenna: I agree. And again, I don't, I, so I'm not a soothsayer and I can't see the future. I just think, I'm assuming logical, like kind of like, you know, first order thinking here that what we're seeing is if you and I have this postulation which we seem to land on and we agree with, that this revenue architect, this CRO is responsible for the entire end-to-end customer journey, and that now because we have the tools to do it, we can connect all that data. That means that what's gonna happen is that our ICP is gonna be constantly refined. We're always gonna learn more and more and more about what the precision of the people we want to sell to and the precise ways in which this problem they have and how we can go to work on solving that problem and how we can affect it and the business outcomes we can create. And that gets passed over to the sales function and the marketing function, who then now goes to identify just those people, so there's a lot more specificity. Then the sales organization is much smarter about the way they talk to those people and diagnose those people, and how they deploy the solution to those people. And that's connected right now as just, as we're talking that way, right into the customer success organization. It's now engineering a value creation, you know, model around how they're gonna reach those ROI and how the business outcomes are gonna be produced, and how long is the business impact gonna happen. And that can be measured when it does. And so then that, that information gets looped back to the beginning again to marketing, and it just gets smarter and smarter and smarter. And I see the RevOps organization sort of like living inside of that wheel, but not being a separate thing. But then, you're correct, there needs to be someone who analytically has oversight over how that stuff is being interpreted because things change, right? You buy a new company, you get an acquisition, the market changes. All of a sudden, you know, new data needs to be entered into the system to update it. So I'm not saying it's gonna go away, but I just think it's everything to be much more fluid as opposed to departmental. And the CRO is sort of orchestrating the way that that circle is being built out. I really kind of think that's where we're headed right now.

Kris Billmaier: I think you're right. And I think it's interesting 'cause you hit on something I've been having as a conversation with my product team, which is what do we need to know about a rep or a CRO to actually make them successful? Well, I probably need to know their ICP. We need to know what they're, what they're selling. We need to know what their quota is, or their target is, and we need to know the duration in which they're gonna hit it. And if you put that out there and you said, "Okay, well, I'm gonna need X number of leads to close, to qualify at this rate, at this dollar amount, at the median," and, you know, then it just becomes a math problem. It, and it's a cycle. It's like, okay, I now know how many leads I need to get into the system, whether they're marketing generated or sales generated, in order to get to that point where you know you're gonna hit however many million you need to close in that 90-day window. And I think that's kind of true for CROs and for reps. And if you think, you think about your revenue architect comment, like that's the mindset and flow to be in with quick tweaks in between. And everybody's job is just to show up for the customer. Quality.

Warren Zenna: Yeah, I agree. I think it's a really interesting find. I think it's, if I would add another layer to it, it's not just how many leads do we need, 'cause I think that was the mistake that we fell into for many years, just like, just get more leads and fill more leads, and we're playing this percentage game, and it wasn't really about what is a lead. Like define that lead for me. And maybe your TAM shrinks, but it's a better TAM because it's more, got more potential, right? And now, how does our marketing focus become more precise so that we can get those people. So, you know, it's a weird thing, like in the early SaaS days, it was like, let's get as much... like your business in particular, right? I mean, the Salesforce business was legendary for this, so pretty much any company could be a CRM owner, right? Who wouldn't need this, right? So let's just go after everybody. So you create this massive business and as a result, because of the largeness of your TAM, if you get percentages went up, you make a lot of money, but business is not the same anymore. It's become a lot more specific, and if the TAM is too big, all you're doing is throwing a lot of shit at people and no one listens anymore. You guys made all your money because you were doing it at a time when no one else had that sort of marketing power, and people weren't being overwhelmed with all the inbound they're getting today. You can't do that anymore. So I think what we're seeing is businesses are getting a lot more verticalized, right? So that the TAM is more precise, and I think a tool like yours can help bring a lot more precision, so you need less people doing the right work for the right people at the right time. And I do think that's gonna change also the way businesses are created, because I think more people are gonna realize that verticalization is probably a better way to go for those reasons. And this is where I think we're seeing, we're seeing a big shift now, is how CROs are being evaluated. Like what makes... I'm curious to know what your thoughts are. What is today's chief revenue officer? Like, how would you define one and the characteristics and the competencies that they possess that makes them a great one in your world?

Kris Billmaier: I mean, I look at, one, I agree with everything you just said and efficiency around a target. And going back to something we both said earlier is like the data that drives that and the data that you can capture is so critical in order to make decisions on who I need to talk to. I'll give you a great example. We just launched this agentic prospecting tool a couple days, a couple weeks ago. Do you know what the number one signal that is missed that indicates the hotness of the lead?

Warren Zenna: What's that?

Kris Billmaier: "Follow up in six months. I'm not in my buying cycle right now." That's recorded in a call or never recorded and that nobody follows up on. But if you have that insight, boy, it's pretty easy to do. Anyway, that's just the power of data and how we're putting the overall system together to make that point exactly.

Warren Zenna: I, if you don't mind, I just wanna touch on that, 'cause I love that, what you just said. And here's what we see, folding on top of that. The reason that the reps don't follow up, has to do with quarterism, is that if I'm told by somebody that I'm selling to them that they can't buy for six months, they're off my list because my quota can't be attained by continuing to talk to this person. So now they're like, based on my incentives and the way in which I'm put to market, I've disqualified that person because they don't fit into the way in which I'm being asked to hunt. Whereas in fact, you and I agree that that person probably down the road will become a customer, but I'm not incentivized based on the way I'm being managed to follow up with that person in six months. So I just don't, you know, they become like a memory for me. And I think that's an incredible piece of insight that these... have the company or have a CRM automatically reach out to that person within that six... Like, make that an automated thing so that you remove the my incentive bias out of the equation, and that the organization does it anyway. 'Cause we're seeing that this is a big problem, because the way that a company is managed tends to drive the behaviors of the organization. This is a precise example of why that'll never be pursued in today's marketplace. I mean, it should change, but a machine can do it.

Kris Billmaier: Machine could do it, or machine could give you the insight to do it if it's a hot enough lead and you still want to... you wanna go after them. Anyway, I think that's a super insight. The CRO role, the ideal CRO role I think now is a strategic thinker who is a coach player of his or her team, and seen as a strategic advisor to their customers. I really think we're in a world where the motion of getting in with a customer and talking about specifically how agents and how AI are deployed, how as a CRO you are using them, how they are affecting your business, and being kind of the advocate for how you change what scenarios you go after. That strategic advisor relationship that you need to have with your customers, I think is paramount for CROs today.
Warren Zenna: I agree... doesn't happen enough. You know, when I'm working with our clients, with chief revenue officers, we're developing, we're training them, and we're deploying them, what we tell the CRO is, "You should be thinking about people as future advocates for your product,

Kris Billmaier: Mm-hmm.

Warren Zenna: ...not future customers," right? So if I wanna get more people into the funnel, and I wanna get the right people in the funnel, the first thing you should do is you should be talking to everybody who's renewed. It's your first conversation. And ask them, "Why did you buy from us?" And then, "Why did you renew?" And I would wanna capture all the data that led up to all the conversations that they had that related to them making the purchase and when the value was created for them and that they renewed. And I would loop it back over to the marketing organization and say, "What's common about all those people? What made them buy and made them renew?" identify those people and find more of them. And I wanna talk to them, and I wanna find out why people didn't buy and why they walked away. There's no better data than that. And I should be talking to customers all the time because I have a sales organization that's talking to prospects, and they should be trained in knowing how to pull them into the funnel. But it's the people that are using the product that either leave or rebuy that will give me the best insight. Which means, to your point, and I'm agreeing with you, I need to have an amazing relationship with our customers, and they need to think that we're batting for them and that all we're doing is thinking about them. And I just don't think that for a very long period of time that that was enough of a context. It was more like just get more deals, and if we churn, we'll just go get more deals. Build a better efficient engine of deal capture so we can kind of replace lost customers. And it's very obviously, as you can appreciate, an extremely inefficient way to go to market. If I'm a CRO, I'm thinking about that. That's a much larger context. And I also think it's not somebody that just came from a sales organization whose job was to go out and try and get more deals. It's someone who's more interested in revenue, getting it done more efficiently, making more money per dollar per customer, and having to spend less money to get those customers because you know what's going on with them so well. That's the engineering of it that I think, and I agree with you. It's a very people person kind of role.
Thank you so much again for listening to the CRO Spotlight podcast. This podcast is an important plank in the CRO Collective communication strategy, and we're really thrilled to have such great guests on here. So listening and sharing the podcast with other people is really vital because we wanna get as many people listening to this great stuff as possible. A couple things to note, if you're an aspiring CRO or a recently hired CRO or even an old salty CRO, and you're looking to either become a chief revenue officer or improve your chops and gain some more insights and improve your competencies as a chief revenue officer, we offer the CRO Accelerator course. It's five years now. It's the first CRO-focused course that was out there. It's a 15-week course that is populated by aspiring chief revenue officers and CROs. We're pretty selective in terms of who can be a member of the CRO Accelerator course. It's people who are probably more ready to be a CRO right now. They have a number of years under their belt as a revenue leader, whether it be a sales leader or a marketing leader or even rev ops leader, and they either wanna move into the C-suite or they're CROs that wanna just make sure that they win in the role. So if you are interested in being a member of the next cohort, please just write me a note on LinkedIn. Just DM me CRO Accelerator, and we'll set up a time to talk, and then I can send you more information to give you a brochure of the course. So again, CRO Accelerator course, 15-week program for aspiring and newly hired CROs. Take advantage of it. It's been great, and you'll see some more information about it on the website. Thanks.
Kris Billmaier: I think you made this point earlier, but it's like, it's much easier to retain a customer than find somebody new, which is churn is like something we focus on as a company daily. Like make sure we have happy customers. And also, you know, you talked about finding lookalike customers, finding those white spaces where, "Hey, this customer did this, and that's related." I think that's amazing. I also think that in the world we're in with AI, customer stories and proof points are mission critical for sellers. If you can tell a confident customer story and have a customer stand up for you, I mean, that's your proof. And I'll tell you, as somebody who leads a pretty big product, that's the thing that I value the most, are those customers who, you know, we've had success with that are so staunch in their belief that Salesforce is helping them and helping them grow their business, that they're willing to stand up for us in the media, at Dreamforce and other places. That's the true sign of an amazing customer relationship that should influence another customer more than any seller ever could.

Warren Zenna: Yeah, you know, we have a number of advocates that are really like, or had amazing outcomes from what we do. And we occasionally actually bring them onto sales calls.

Kris Billmaier: Yeah.

Warren Zenna: And they say, "Yeah, look, I'm a customer, and I'll tell you right now," you know. It's great to have an advocate who's willing to take the time to say, "Look, I would absolutely tell people about this because it works so well for me, and I'm more than happy to do it." And you wanna create relationships where customers will advocate for you that way. And I think a CRO needs to think that way. And I think the original chief revenue officer when I first started doing this was someone whose job was to build a sales organization. And I'm not at all eschewing the value of being able to do that really well. I'm just saying the system has become much more complex in the way that customers are buying and the way that they, the decisions that they make and the complexity of the marketplace has required a much different thing. So I'd like to just switch gears a bit here, and if you don't mind, I'd love to hear a little bit more specifics about the rollout, like how Agentforce is being deployed, and if you could also give us a window into the future of what you see happening over the next, like, let's say, you know, six months, and what your relationship is like with the large language models, like, you know, the Clods and the ChatGPTs, and what degree to which are you relying on those, and how much of it is dependent. I'm really fascinated to show the guts and the engineering and the rollout of these things.

Kris Billmaier: Sure. Sure. Yeah. So, you know, traditionally Salesforce had been what we call a three release roadmap company. So you ship three times a year. And, you know, we realized that the way the market is moving, we needed to be much faster than that. So my team and many of the teams at Salesforce actually ship on a monthly basis now, or, you know, bi-weekly even at times. So I think the speed of innovation is getting much greater, both based on the needs that we see in the market to meet the demand, but also because of the tools that are coming from, you know, folks like CloudCode and Cowork and Cursor and others. So the overall velocity of the build has sped up. We continue to look at the overall sales cycle and say, "Where can we make this streamlined and simple for our buyers?" And, you know, the biggest volume of our buyers right now are buying for reps. So that's where we really started. But again, it's trying to solve for that overall agentic workflow, where we're looking, you know, from pipeline to close and saying, "How could we augment this deal cycle to take that seventy percent of time that our sellers spend not doing sales related things, putting them back into sales roles?" And so that's kind of the overall way we're thinking about it now. How I'm thinking about it down the road, is just continuing to be more efficient in those processes. 'Cause I'll say most sellers, and CROs want us to be more assistive in nature right now. And the way I think about it is, like assistive and autonomous, they sit on the same spectrum, but what we need to do with our customers is build trust in the tools. And so we see a customer using, for example, our pipeline management tool. This is a tool that listens to all of your calls and understands all of your emails and moves an account or a deal along accordingly to the next step. Most of the time, our customers start out in assistive mode. So they're saying, "Okay. Yeah, show me why I should move this deal forward." And it's like, "Okay, because of this call, because of this email, move forward." Great. Click the box. Well, that can be flipped into autonomous mode. So how many of those things do we have to get right before a seller's like, "You know what? I don't even need to worry about that anymore. It's just gonna move deals ahead for me." I see us moving much more into the autonomous mode for kind of surrounding the customer meeting. So building pipelines, building account plans, you know, going forward, negotiating agents. But those engagements with the customers, I think will remain the very human thing that we do, and then surround you with all the data from all the sides. So I think that's where we're going in the next, call it three to six months. I think we're moving very fast and moving fast 'cause there's a lot of noise in the market as well. And you mentioned the LLMs. You know, I think we have a great relationship with, you know, the frontier models. You know, we had a great event a couple weeks ago with Slack and Anthropic. So, you know, great relationship there. We think they're helping us power what we do best, which is extend the sales process, and make it streamlined.

Warren Zenna: Do you think that the sales rep is gonna disappear? Or what's the role of a sales rep gonna be? Like, if it gets shrunk down, like there's like, like that really thin layer of efficiency you can get that, you can get that person working a lot more. Like for example, I mean, like the SDR, you know, the BDR, do you think these things are sort of gone? And what's the future of that sales organization structure look like now?

Kris Billmaier: Actually think it grows because it is more... I think the sales organization grows based on demand, but also improves efficiency and growth. I think we could have like some 10X sales teams coming through, and I'll give you an example of how, one of the ways we use our tools inside of Salesforce. So we have a team of SDRs that look at our lead score one through five. And ones and twos, they had in the past gone on the cutting room floor. Nobody followed up. The threes to fives all were given to an SDR to qualify that lead to book that meeting. What we did was we said, "We're gonna take our engagement agent, our SDR agent, and we're gonna apply it to all those ones and twos that had never been touched." And so over the last eight months, we've generated over a hundred million dollars of pipe based on things that were left on the cutting room floor. And the individual who leads our team of SDR agents has told me, "To manage that volume of leads, that would've taken me hiring an additional four hundred people, which I just don't have the budget to do." So I think what happens is these leaders manage hybrid teams, teams of people and teams of agents, and teams of people managing teams of agents as well. So I think that's what the role has evolved into, and I think we all need to be pretty creative in how we look at these tools and how they can help our efficiency. Because at the end of the day, I think these agents, whether customer-facing or background or employee-facing, should all be attuned to the same goal that the seller has, which is driving their overall quota. And I think if we do that, we can drive massive efficiencies.

Warren Zenna: I agree. And we have, we're mapping out this thing right now on our end about sort of like a pod or team-like, a pod-like grouping of people inside of a revenue organization. So to go in line with what we were talking about earlier, instead of having like a marketing team and a sales team and a customer success team, we'll have like groups of people that all work together among those disciplines, but as a pod with agents that are managing those outcomes for them, and that each one of those agents is smarter. And then there's a kind of a compounding of the data that goes across the pods to make them all smarter as you keep on sharing more and more. So if one pod seems to be working better than another, well, then that information can easily be ported over to the other ones to make sure they all get smarter and smarter and smarter as a result of everyone's compounded data.

Kris Billmaier: I think you make a really good point there because I think these agents need to be coached like junior employees at the start. They need to learn and need to be... And I need to have goals. And as teams, we need to have goals for our agents because... And they need to have specific use cases. So in your pod, I'm sure your agent's gonna fulfill a specific use case and have a specific goal, and you're gonna hold it accountable for that. And if it's not meeting it, you're gonna retrain and retrain and retrain. That's what needs to happen.

Warren Zenna: Yeah, it's incredible. Well, look, I appreciate this conversation. This is great. And, you know, I'm really excited about this. I... when we saw the announcement from Benioff, about the headless CRM, my partner and I were like, "Okay, it's happening." Everything that we were talking about is happening now, you know, 'cause this is obviously... You have such influence over the marketplace, given the place you have, that it's gonna drive a lot of this stuff, and we're really excited about it. But I really appreciate you coming on and talking to us about this. And anything else that anyone, you want everyone to know, or any things that are coming up that are important that the audience want... you can tell them about that, maybe an event that's coming up or some, you know, updates or anything that you're looking to get them to do, any…

Kris Billmaier: We got Dreamforce in September, so it's a little ways off, but I would say keep attuned to what's going on on salesforce.com. Follow me on LinkedIn. We're always announcing new stuff. And the thing that I wanna make sure of is that we don't get ahead of where our customers are, and they always know that the things we're building for them, and the things that are gonna have the most impact. And we're trying to be as outward as possible in everything we're doing. Headless has been the latest announcement. But we're just really excited with where the market's going and our place in it. And I really appreciate you having me on here today. I think it's been a great conversation and yeah, this has been awesome.