The CRO Spotlight Podcast

Joey Gilkey Podcast Transcript

Warren Zenna: Hey, this is Warren Zenna, the founder of The CRO Collective. And we have a great guest today, I met with a guy named Joey Gilkey. He's the founder and CEO of a company called TitanX. And he's an amazing person, super smart, really successful, and he's got a great vision for why he's doing what he's doing and a really good perspective on the CRO role, which I found refreshing and unique. So I'm looking forward to it. So listen to this one. It's a really good episode. Thanks for tuning in. You have a really cool background. You know, you came from a really interesting background. Your dad was, if I'm not mistaken, he worked at Home Depot for like 30 years. Is that right?

Joey Gilkey: Still there, man. He refuses to give it up.

Warren Zenna: It's awesome. I love it. And it's one of my favorite places. I mean, I'm like, I'm there like every weekend. And you know, you also did something pretty cool, which is you managed to get a $27 million A round in like a year. So I'd like to hear about this. Like, walk through your career, and also tell us a bit more about this category you created, this sort of phone intent category. So shoot, go ahead.

Joey Gilkey: Yeah. So actually I started my career in capital raising of all places, which we haven't talked about. I had a bleeding heart for nonprofit full-time ministry coming out of college, so I went straight into capital raising for those organizations, which is where I got my initial, you know, brushed shoulders with high net worth people and selling and all that fun stuff. And in that process, I met some super well-connected great people, and they basically said, "Hey, if you ever leave this world, we got some places for you that would be interesting," whether it's a portfolio company of theirs or something like that. And ended up taking them up on that once I just felt called to go into this world. Got shot out of a cannon straight into a Fortune world, kind of skipped a couple rungs in the ladder, went straight into full cycle AE, more in their enterprise, so I kind of became an enterprise, you know, hired gun, if you will.

Warren Zenna: And what sector was that? Was that like tech or what?

Joey Gilkey: It was a crossover of tech, IT recruiting and IT services. And I worked on their global IT services division, mostly focused on healthcare. Ended up closing the largest deal in my first year in company history. They thought that meant I should be a leader of humans, and threw me straight up the ladder to a role I didn't deserve, didn't have the skill set for, didn't have the mentality for. Got it handed to me pretty quickly. "Hey, here's a $4 million Salesforce custom build budget. Go build this part out." And so it was good for me, 'cause it was humbling, but I realized pretty quickly the corporate world was not for me. Ended up leaving, going down to mid-market, taking a VP of sales role. Did exceptionally well there. Took a CRO role after that. Did very well there. The old adage or the old story you probably heard a thousand times, "Hey, if you produce, you get equity." You produce, you overproduce, you never get equity, you leave. At that point, I was like, "I'm making a bunch of people a bunch of money. I'm making good money, but I can go do this better myself." That was kind of my vision. That shot me into the entrepreneurial world about eight, nine years ago. At this point, I've run four companies, couple side companies, had a couple of exits, you know, done well financially. But it wasn't until about probably two and a half years ago when I acquired a company. So I was running a large, like, fractional CRO company. And at the time it was all services, it was draining, it was very much dependent on me. Went and acquired this intellectual property that we came across, you know, throughout serving customers. A company called PhoneReady Leads, which is this very obscure boutique, solved a massive problem, but it was really slow, it was really expensive. That company was never gonna scale, and I was like, "Well, I want it, so I'm gonna go buy it." So I went and acquired it. Fast forward, PhoneReady Leads was the moat, at least I anticipated it to be the moat around that services company. And the moat ended up becoming more valuable than the castle, and PhoneReady Leads is now what is called TitanX, which is what I run today. And so that's been somewhat my path, has been predominantly entrepreneurial. It's been all sales, predominantly tech sales, enterprise sales, mid-market sales. And then run a couple companies, sold a couple, and then bought a few at the same time. And that's what led us here. And so, yeah, to your point what you made on the Series A, we launched June 1st. So I acquired the company on August 23rd or August of '23. Though I'm gonna keep it all to myself. It's just gonna be a back-end internal tool we use to scale and create a moat. Realized that that's what made us special and realized that where the market is heading and the problem this solves is massive. So I decided around January of '24 that I'd like to potentially test the waters on making this its own standalone company and put a bunch of money into R&D. So I took a lot of my money that I had made in previous exits and things like that, and instead of taking on capital from someone else and being a poor steward of their money, I thought, "Well, if I'm gonna take the risk, I'm gonna take it on my money." I just have a conviction that I don't wanna take someone else's money unless I can nearly guarantee a return on it.

Warren Zenna: Mm-hmm.

Joey Gilkey: And so stewardship is a big, you know, cornerstone belief of mine. So I decided to take the chance on my own. Launched June 1st of 2024. We scaled it very quickly, bootstrapped or at least self-funded, and then about 18 months into our existence, we took on about 28 million.

Warren Zenna: Hmm.

Joey Gilkey: From Updata Partners January of this year.

Warren Zenna: Gotcha. Great. So there's so much I wanna talk about with that intro. So this whole thing you talked about, you know, being thrown into the deep end you're not ready to swim in. You know, it is unfortunately an old story, right? Anyone that can sell becomes a manager, and you and I both know that's—and you could be a good one, but it just may not be the right time, or maybe you just were never gonna be one. You know, it's one of those two things, right? And the problem too is that, you know, if you get thrown into a managerial role as a seller and you don't do well at it, then you're branded as someone who can't manage, when in fact you probably could be a genius at it. It was just you didn't have the right training for it, so.

Joey Gilkey: Yeah, it was not a muscle I'd ever exercised.

Warren Zenna: Right. And if you did.

Joey Gilkey: It wasn't like I was given two or three people. It was, I was given 115, you know?

Warren Zenna: Yeah, that's.

Joey Gilkey: You know?

Warren Zenna: So there's that, which is then, you know, on the corporate side, which you and I seem to share another point of view, which is, you know, working for these big companies can be really crazy. I'm just more learned about this stuff 'cause there's a lot of people listening to this that are at companies where they're dealing and frustrated with a lot of these really crazy decisions that are being made. What do you think it is? What are some of the diseases you think affect the way companies make these kinds of decisions? Like, what is it? Is it just ineptitude? Is it laziness? Is it too fast? Is it a committee? Is it indecisiveness? Like what, is it all the above?

Joey Gilkey: I was about to say I'd love to check the box on all the above, I think. But some of the big drivers is money makes the world go round. Oftentimes the money's coming from one centralized or a handful of people at the top, usually either private equity or venture capital. And their incentives and goals are not necessarily always aligned with the companies. And so they are looking out for their LPs and their funds predominantly. They're looking out for the institutional investors predominantly, and you are an asset that is to produce a return on the investment on a certain timeframe that is advantageous for their pro formas that they raised money off of, right? And so I think because of that, you find the pressure comes from the top, the CEO, the CRO, the CFO, they all feel the pressure at the board meetings. That pressure then gets put on, let's just say, the CRO, and the CRO then has to apply pressure below them. The other challenge is if you're publicly traded, you are very publicly scrutinized on a quarterly basis over and over and over again. So it forces you to make short-term decisions because you have to produce for this quarter, because otherwise you're gonna have egg on your face. I think rushed decisions create poor outcomes in my opinion. At the private equity level, of which I guess I am in now, I guess it's growth equity, it's not necessarily the same as private equity, but very close, is the same thing. They're looking for a 3X multiple on their funds, and they want you to produce that. They have a three to five-year hold period, and are the same thing as quarterly public markets. Even though you're not getting egg on your face in the markets from a quarterly earnings report, you're still having to report to a board every quarter, and the CRO is usually the whipping boy of the board.

Warren Zenna: Mm-hmm.

Joey Gilkey: Or girl, for that matter. They take a lot of the lashings, and so they have to make quarterly decisions, not, you know, annual or multi-year decisions. So I think that's the largest thing that I think creates the issue. And that creates all the other issues underneath it.

Warren Zenna: Yeah, I completely agree. And you know, you just sort of very well articulated the thesis of our business, which is how do you solve short-termism, right? When you have a job that is long-termism, right? So I'd be interested in your thoughts on that. We certainly have a lot of them. But you know, now you're about... So this is an interesting thing, right? You're entering into, I don't know what stage you're at in your own business right now.

Joey Gilkey: Mm-hmm. We're low, we're low eight figures. We're two years old as of last month.

Warren Zenna: Right. So you have ambitions to get bigger. You will eventually. You'll increase the size of your organization. You'll develop more complexity. You've already taken on some investment. So how does TitanX not fall prey to the same thing? You have a CRO. What's the way that you now know this can hopefully create a different environment where this stuff is not as prevalent?

Joey Gilkey: You know, I'm in a fortunate position where we still have majority control in our deal, so we're not, I'm not the minority voter on the board. I own the board. I own majority of the votes on the board. And so I can tell the board whatever I want to, right? So I'm fortunate. So if you're in a position where you do have majority voting power on the board, I would say that ideally, the CEO and the CRO work together to align on what is the long-term narrative and vision of this company, and what is that going to mean for near-term, short-term decision-making we have to make. There are going to be decisions you gotta make today. I think oftentimes companies will build for where they are at today, the milestone they're building today. However, that creates the infrastructure that is not compatible with where you wanna be in the future. And so if the goal is we're thinking on a quarterly basis and we're going for a 30% year-over-year growth, then we will tend to make decisions to hit that. But that doesn't necessarily align with the long-term three, five, 10-year goal that you might have. And where you find yourself is building systems and infrastructure and architecture around today that will facilitate the goals of today, but you have to tear it down and rebuild it for the future. And so I think the biggest thing that I do to manage my board is I think I have to set the long-term vision of where we're going. And I'll give you a perfect example. So a lot of growth equity tends to invest in more capital responsible founders who have, they're capital efficient founders, so therefore they are managing a P&L maybe more towards profitability than just scale at all costs, et cetera. But on the other flip side of that is they invest in you expecting a 3X return in three to five years, right? And so it's, there's a tension there you have to work with. And so I'm very aware of the 3X, but I'm also very aware of what they bought us for and where we're coming from, which is very capital efficient and near profitable when they bought us, or at least bought a percentage. What I have to communicate to them is, "Hey, we came from this world of being capital efficient and bootstrapped, which means I had to make decisions sequentially, not simultaneously." Meaning I might have had three great things to invest in. I've got capital for one of them right now, so I'm gonna do one. What's my best one? Then I move on to the next one. Well, when you get $28 million dropped in the account, I can now make simultaneous decisions, and so I'm gonna now get to and have to invest in different categories, departments, initiatives, whatever, all at the same time, and I don't have data to support my decision yet. I'm going to spend money to get data to then support a decision in the future.

Warren Zenna: Mm-hmm.

Joey Gilkey: And so what I had to come to the board and say is like, "Hey, we're not budget first. We're growing first right now, and we're growing first, meaning that I'm not going to hold to the strict budget of, well, where am I gonna pull the money from if I wanna invest in this thing versus that thing?" You need to believe that I'm putting money in and watching what I'm putting it in to then make decisions for the future so that we can hold ourselves to a budget in the future. That's on a smaller scale. Again, I'm not a multi-hundred dollar or $100 million company or publicly traded, but that's something I have to do. But I do think, just to give a more succinct answer on a very long-winded answer, CROs specifically, since that's the predominant audience, I think you need to get really good at communicating the near-term benefits of long-term thinking. You need to build a, you need to know how to tell the story and the narrative of why we're investing in what we're investing in today, why we're making the decisions we're making today, 'cause it may not lend itself to the next quarterly earnings report looking as good as what this year's gonna look like 12 months from now.

Warren Zenna: Yeah.

Joey Gilkey: Think storytelling's a big piece of the CRO.

Warren Zenna: Percent. You gotta know how to manage a board. There's no question about it. You gotta know how to package your message properly. You have to understand how your board thinks. You have to find your champions on the board who you know you can talk to that listen to the stuff. There's usually more sane members of a board, like anything, right?

Joey Gilkey: They need to trust you, you.

Warren Zenna: Yeah. Trust, the whole.

Joey Gilkey: I've done very uniquely with my board as I produce a scorecard for myself.

Warren Zenna: Hmm.

Joey Gilkey: I share how my president and COO scored me as a CEO. I share how my CRO scored me as a CEO, and I give them the same opportunity and say, "Hey, I want you guys from your vantage point to score me as the CEO." That builds trust. It also builds a partnership where eventually we'll probably recap and some other larger private equity group might scoop us up three, five, seven years from now. I want them to be my biggest advocate for this is a great asset and a great leader of an asset that you can trust is malleable and coachable. But I think instead of the board being ambiguous or you wondering how they feel about you, you should be forward or forward-looking and say, "Hey, I want you to score me because I wanna know exactly where you're at. I wanna know where I'm dropping the ball." I don't think many people do that. I didn't really grab that from anyone as inspiration. I just felt this is the right thing to do, stewarding their money is important. You gotta realize as a CRO, you are also a steward of their money they invested. In a publicly traded company, you're a steward of a lot of people's money, even just common folks like you and I. And so how can you build trust with your partners in such a way that I think allows them to say, "Hey, I'm coachable, I'm malleable, but I'm also looking long term and I wanna grow"?

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 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, 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.

Warren Zenna: So agreed. And I would say too that the other challenge we have is the fact that, you know, many CROs are not necessarily hired in ways that are consistent with growth, right? They're constrained, their authority is constrained, their scope is constrained. There is a, I'm sure we discussed this too, there's a very loose, unfortunately, definition of what a CRO is. I'm curious to know what you think that is and the sort of competencies that go into a good CRO. And I would frame it this way, right? 'Cause obviously you and I both know it's a different job based on how big the company is. But when you think about a chief revenue officer at, let's say, you know, the first, let's say three core stages of a business, let's say from startup to growth to maybe early enterprise, what are the sort of things that CROs need to be thinking about, and how should a CEO appoint one when they're looking at that role?

Joey Gilkey: I think in the earlier stage, I think one of the biggest issues in the early stage is, at least the first one we see is making sure the front door is wide open and that we focus all of our efforts on lead gen and top of funnel and generating business. I think what's actually more important is focusing on post-sales. I think that a CRO should spend the first 90 days just talking to customers personally. What is the voice of the customer? What are some of the gaps in your post-sales process, customer success process, your retention? What kind of upsell motions do you have? It's much easier to acquire customers than it is to keep them, in my opinion.

Warren Zenna: Mm-hmm.

Joey Gilkey: And so I think where CROs usually go wrong is they usually come from a more sales forward or sales first motion mindset. And we tend to focus too much on top of funnel and acquisition and not enough on post-sales. So I think the genetic makeup of a CRO is one who knows how to manage a P&L. Again, if you're in more of a high growth, you know, like you are with ours where we're not sure, we've not spent money on everything, so we don't have data to support every decision in every category we could spend. I think one is learning how to manage a P&L and monitor bets you take early on, right? Like the future state, you've got a CFO, you've got a strategic finance team, you've got all these things that help support you. But I think that early on you need to have a bit of a finance chop. Not to be a finance person, but you need to understand a P&L and understand how to monitor and measure bets you take. And what should you double? What should you kill? I think you have to be very decisive as a CRO early on. I think as you grow, I go back and forth on this, like how much marketing, demand gen, sales, post-sales does a CRO need to own? I'd love to get your thoughts on this because again, I've not, I've been a CRO at a smaller mid-market, call it mid eight figures company. I've not been to one of the large companies. I deal with them all day. I get to work with them.

Warren Zenna: Yep.

Joey Gilkey: But I think you, oftentimes we bring CROs in at companies that are way too large that are just focused on top of funnel as well. You know, I think that's a big issue, it's a very sales focused thing.

Warren Zenna: Yeah, it.

Joey Gilkey: Yeah.

Warren Zenna: No, it's great. I, we're seeing similar things. I mean, having kind of focused on this exclusively now for like six years or so, we've got some interesting data on this issue. And you're right. I mean, when you first start a company, everyone's all hands on deck, everyone's selling. You're right. You gotta get as many customers in the door as possible because that's gonna prove out your model and give you enough data to show how the product needs to be built and all that, the obvious stuff. You need to show the market that there's demand and that there's money being exchanged that shows that there's a real opportunity here. There's a point at which, and, you know, there's no science here, where, as you know, the company reaches a level of complexity that, okay, we have a product, people are buying it, right? To your point, maybe we're losing too many customers, so you're correct. We have to focus on why that is and all that. But now, in my view, and this is how we feel about it here, is that you really don't need a CRO, chief revenue officer, at that stage. You need someone who runs a sales organization, builds playbooks, and knows how to run a sales org and build one, and all that stuff goes with it. Now, I would venture to say I agree that sales is as much of an expansion as it is an acquisition modality, right? It's not just to get new people, it's to keep them. I completely agree. That, I think that probably unfortunately came a little bit later in the game than it should have. I think that we almost acquired machines for 20 years, and that's kind of maybe built a lot of big businesses, but I think that's a big losing game. And you're correct, the right focus of the right person comes in and thinks about what keeps people around. Did they get value? How did we know we delivered value? What was the ROI and return on what we sold them? And that goes to the product. What's the CRO's relationship to this person who builds the product? Is there a collaboration there or not? Am I at the mercy of a developer or am I helping shape it? All that stuff, right? And there's a point at which we submit that a true chief revenue officer is needed when complexity is such that now you really need someone who's gonna build a true future engine for this organization, think more systemically about this organization, and marketing is less of a cost center, but really more of like an actual part of the engine. And this is a different person. So, you know, if we're looking at our clients who are at 30, 40, 50 million in revenues, they need someone who can think more systemically, and to your point too, financially about this whole thing. And a sales leader who has had decades, let's say, of success at building sales teams and making their number may come in with a myopic view of the way business works, because that's how they've been rewarded and that's the skill set they've developed. So to that point, I'm curious to know what you think is the sort of future or maybe modern version of a chief revenue officer, given the fact that I think we also agreed earlier that a sales-focused CRO, while beneficial, may have too much of a functional point of view on the way a business is being operated.

Joey Gilkey: I'm gonna take a little bit of a controversial take on this. I think that it actually, if I was to zoom out, I think that it's more about org design than anything else, because I think that the bigger a company gets, the more we have departmental hierarchies and the more seriously we take our titles, the more power structures start to form inside of an organization. I truly think the most nimble, high-growth, intuitive CROs of the future are going to look at org design far more like a flat organization. And I don't mean flat in the sense that there's no authority, there's no final sign-off, et cetera. But I think that building a culture around what I would call, like, temporary scaffolding is really interesting, and I've seen it work really, really well. So temporary scaffolding is, what is the mission of the project at hand, and what does the org chart need to look like for that project? And to build that temporary scaffolding, you need to be really good at mobilizing people, identifying skill sets and building and architecting scaffolding that exists for that one mission. And then once the mission is complete, you tear the scaffolding down, you move it over to the next one. And why I say that is because I think that because of the power structures, we tend to let it all bubble up to the CRO to make the final call. And I think that in this more temporary scaffolding model, it might mean that the CRO plays a second, third, fourth level person in this temporary scaffolding, which is really counterintuitive in today, but I think it's the only way you keep innovation strong. You put people in the right seat. And I think that it's also, CROs aren't gonna have the best skill set for every project at hand and every initiative at hand. And so knowing your players super well, knowing who needs to be kind of like the pilot in charge for that particular project and submitting yourself to where you need to be in that temporary scaffolding or temporary org chart. So I don't know if that answered your question, but.

Warren Zenna: It's interesting. I like, let's talk about that. I love that. That's cool. I think that's a really fascinating idea. I like the nimbleness of it. I see it will be difficult to manage. You need to build a culture around this, but let's take that into account for a second, as if it's been done. What type of projects are the ones that you're looking at? Is it kind of like a new market? Is it a product feature? Is it like all the above?

Joey Gilkey: It's all the above. I think it's market expansion. I think it's product and feature driven. I think it's post-sales, like a reorg on the post-sale side, right? It doesn't mean that everything has... I think you have to separate strategy from factories, right? So factories are things that are set in stone and they operate like an assembly line factory, right? Well, we have to think strategically to build the correct factory. And so whenever you think about factories or specific projects, I think you need to look at it from that lens of what is the strategic thinking that goes into building this thing. That might mean that we have temporary scaffolding to build that. So if I'm doing a post-sales expansion play and our current one isn't working that well, I need to bring all the best thinkers in the room that are the best for the job. I need to assign who the pilot in charge is for that. And I need to, as a CRO and the leader who knows all my talent, understand how we're gonna set up the bench for that, who has access to this person, who gets this RevOps resource and so on. I think that the practical way of thinking about it is through the lens of strategy versus factory. Yeah, I mean, that's as good an answer as I probably have.

Warren Zenna: No, it's good. I wanna play with this a bit 'cause it's cool. I sort of look at it like this, where I see businesses, institutions, organizations are more different than organisms.

Joey Gilkey: Mm-hmm.

Warren Zenna: So there's a bit of a, sort of a reptilian part of a business, right? Like you and I aren't thinking about our breathing or our blood flow or our heartbeat right now. It's just happening, right? And if I'm handling everything optimally, those things are working well. Like, I'm not tired right now, I'm not sweating, I don't need to drink water all the time. I'm not gonna take a nap. I feel like I have energy because I've got that machine running well. And that keeps the foundational components needed for those other projects to be built on top of, right? And I believe that the CRO sort of is the stasis person to build the engine that makes all those things hum clearly. 'Cause on top of all those projects, there has to be some underlying, you know, homeostasis around just how the company operates, right? All these things happen, you know? People come into the office, they're doing things that are coordinated enough that the engine runs every day. And then I can put projects on top of it. And our thesis is, you know, the CRO is the engineer of the machine, right? So, you know, there's a point at which, and you said it well, you're correct, as a company gets bigger, those C-suite roles become more coveted and they create more power, and there's all the tension that.

Joey Gilkey: Things get looked at as my resources and you.

Warren Zenna: Precisely. My KPIs, my goals, my number, right? And I think the CRO's job is to sort of orchestrate, and I do see him as a coordinator, a conductor of sorts of an instrument, groups of instruments. And by doing so, there is someone who is responsible for the coordination across things, and it maybe won't remove it, but it'll certainly help the inertia that comes with that stuff. That's one thing. So then a good CRO, in my view, given your model, which I like the idea of, this idea of this kind of temporary scaffolding is, okay, great. So then the CEO comes and the board says, "Look, you know, we're seeing X, we're seeing Y data. We need a better customer success process." So that needs to be built, but it needs to be built on top of this existing engine that's running smoothly, and I think the CRO's role is to kind of make sure that's always happening in a way. That's why we here promote the idea of the CRO sort of having a bit more, I would say, the word authority sounds wrong 'cause it does create that vacuum, but it's just more like operational decision-making and authority over how that engine runs, as opposed to which we see happen. You know, you get the CMO, the CSO, the CRO, and you have a committee of C-suite executives who, like you said, are all grabbing their own version of survival power, et cetera, that create things that don't work. So, you know, again, given that what we're seeing now is that sales leaders don't necessarily fit that mold as well as a RevOps leader who's thinking more of like things just generally systemically. It's a different brain type thing. And there are people who have all these skills. But it's just interesting that with AI in the mix, which I wanna talk to you about, it's created a whole other swarm of problems and solutions that are still disrupting the role quite a bit. So I mean, again, that's the general thesis that we're operating under.

Warren Zenna: 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.

Joey Gilkey: No, I totally agree. Yeah, I mean, I think, if I was to look at the future of the CRO with... Let's take the scaffolding thing out of it. At a macro level, I really think that the CRO's job is to promote and create simplicity in the org. I think that one of the things that I see as companies get bigger and more bureaucratic is they also get more complicated, and as you probably know and probably promote, that simple scales, complex fails. And so I do think that there's an element of there has to be a... I think being a sales-led CRO or a sales-focused CRO gets you only so far, and I think that, I mean, if we're being honest, like it's a true CRO that is just a crazy performer is somewhat of a unicorn, the bigger.

Warren Zenna: Agreed. They're hard to find.

Joey Gilkey: Hard to find. They're hard to create, and I know that's why you exist. But you need, not only do you need a good team, but you need to understand the seats on the bus a lot better. And I think that there's gonna be a lot of power structures and a lot of opinions in the room, and clearly, if you've got a C in front of your title, you've been around for a while, you have a lot of opinions on how things should be done. I don't think that's a CRO's problem. I think it really comes down to the CEO.

Warren Zenna: Yep, agreed.

Joey Gilkey: You know, and so I think as a CRO who's picking your path and your future, like attaching yourself to a CEO that has that in mind of like they are the truest of orchestrators of this whole thing, and they're setting people on a singular vision and a mission. I see a lot of orgs where everyone has different goals. They're all part of the same company with different goals. So that's really challenging. I don't know how you overcome that at that scale, and I don't know if you're too far beyond fixing it or repairing it. I don't know, you.

Warren Zenna: Yeah, it's a good question. We run into this, which is why it is that our ICP tends to be more in the $25 to $100 million range, because that's where there's still a nimble opportunity to get things coordinated. If you're past 250, 300 million, your problems are really endemic. They're difficult to solve. You can solve them locally, but not globally. At least you can, but it's really hard. Particularly this problem we're trying to solve, right? But as a CEO, this is interesting, so the perspective that some of the listeners may have is like, okay, so you're now, you've appointed a CRO, you have someone in the seat. What's your thought on how do you approach the management, development, and expansion of your current CRO's role so that this person is set up to succeed as the company grows and expands? What's the way that you manage that and look at it and view it?

Joey Gilkey: So I think it starts at the highest level of making sure that we're very clear on the one strategy or the one vision. We have this thing internally we call the one, whatever comes behind it. So we have this thing that we started off with, this is the one doc, which is every leader across every function has to document everything they're working on in one doc. And then from there, the reason we do that is because oftentimes you have people who are doing duplicated efforts. You have people that are doing some crossover of some things. You've got knowledge over here that would be helpful over there. You've also got people that are working in opposite directions and creating tension where there doesn't need to be. And that moves into the one strategy, and the one strategy is, okay, well, what is the one thing, the project or the scaffolding needs to be created to attack this one problem? And we go sequentially on the problems that we try to solve. So I think the first thing... And all that bubbles down through what I would call like the lens, right? Or the vision. And the lens is pretty simple, we don't say no to everything, right? But we only say yes to things that fit within the lens. And so if the lens is insert goal, right, or insert target, or insert mission, or whatever, every decision that we have to make as a leadership team and you specifically as a CRO has to be looked at through this lens. And if the answer is no, it doesn't fit inside this lens. No, it doesn't lend itself to this. No, it isn't a priority compared to other things, then it's a no, and it's a clear no, and it goes into a parking lot, or it goes into the graveyard. So I think one is focusing on the main thing. Two, I think there's a massive amount of coaching that needs to go into a newer CRO. So my CRO is new, and something I have to constantly remind him of is simplicity, right? Simple scales. It is your temptation as the CRO who has a lot of pressure from the vision being too big or the board or whatever might come your way. And I think it's enabling... One, it's giving them the freedom to really operate in a place where they can do their best work, but also simultaneously realizing that because they are a CRO with not as many resources as a $300 million company, a lot's gonna come up, and when a lot comes up and we're not focused, complexity likes to make its way into the back door. And so it's constantly helping him remind him that we have to eliminate complexity at all costs, and we need to look at what is the simplest first principle way of thinking about this. And I think the other thing too, depending on the size of the company, is ensuring that they are equipped with all of the metrics that matter for the company. I see it all the time where CROs are somewhat flying blind on, "Okay, we set these big goals, we set quarterly targets," whatever it might be, but they're not armed with enough of the data on the back end that helps them make sound decisions. That was our problem. You know, we're coming out, right? Being someone that's fast-growing, we made a lot of decisions that maybe didn't lend themselves to giving us the clearest picture. But I do think that from a leadership perspective, I think a lot of it also has to come back to identity. Like something that I really harp on with my leadership team is our identity.

Warren Zenna: Hmm.

Joey Gilkey: Like, who are you at the end of the day? 'Cause when shit comes your way, I don't know if I'm allowed to cuss, sorry, stuff comes your way.

Warren Zenna: Curse all you want. Yeah.

Joey Gilkey: When stuff comes your way, what are you anchored to, right? 'Cause this job's not gonna be easy. In fact, I'd argue that you have one of the hardest jobs in the market being a CRO at a fast-growing company that has funding, and there's a lot of pressure coming from a lot of directions. Being reminded of who you are, I think, is super important. One, being clear on who you are, and two, my job is to help remind you of who you are. And I think that's missing a lot. Like, there's this shepherding that comes from the CEO of the flock, if you will, the flock being the leadership team and the people underneath them. And I think there's an aspect of like the human side is these are people, and they have identities, and I need to remind them of their identity 'cause it's not hard to lose your way in this world, especially in this tech world, especially in this funded tech world. And so that's probably not the answer people wanna hear, but it's.

Warren Zenna: Good one. So when you say who are you, you mean not organizationally, but more who are you as a person? Like, what's your sort of like, how do you, what's your profile? What's your persona? What's your fingerprint? That sort of thing?

Joey Gilkey: What are you internally motivated by? Like, what are you, you know, we have this phrase of who do you be? You know, there's humans, we are human beings. What are you being? And from who you are is what you do. And so reminding people or reminding especially, you know, like my CRO is like, "Who are you as a person?" If you are externally motivated, meaning I'm motivated by the board, I'm motivated by the market, those are all factors that will constantly move and they will constantly change. And if you are anchoring yourself to external motivation, you are going to be tossed to and from by external things. So what do you care about? Who are you as a person? What's meaningful to you? And I think it's kind of the North Star that helps align people a lot more and recenter themselves because otherwise they're gonna start feeling pressure from things outside of them, and they're gonna put a lot more weight on those things than inside. And then at the end of the day, you're gonna find yourself making decisions off of someone else, not off of what you believe to be true or right or good. And so, yes, who are you? What at your core, what is your identity? What is your DNA? What makes you tick? And why are you doing this, right? You can go to any company, you can go to any job. You're obviously very talented. Why are you here specifically? What is it you wanna see at the end of this road, however long this road might be? What do you wanna say you accomplished outside of the money you made?

Warren Zenna: Hey, everyone. I wanna thank you again for listening. 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. Now, 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. I wanna share them with you so you can... If you're in, 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 throw 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 wanna 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. Bye.

Warren Zenna: Hmm. Yeah, I would agree. And unfortunately, I would agree that that doesn't sound like a common preoccupation, but most companies talk about that sort of thing, which I wholeheartedly agree is important, because at the end of the day, we all have a mission, we all have our own motivations, and I think knowing that stuff and also having everybody else know that, it's kind of good to know where everybody's at. You know, anyone that's run a sales team really well, you know all that stuff about your team. You know why they're there, because you've listened and you're okay, you know? That being said, you know, I guess it's like the other question is like, what are you, I don't want, maybe you don't want to talk about this stuff. I don't know if you can or not, but like the ambitions of the organization, is it like, are you looking to just continue to grow this thing until it reaches its next thing organically, or do you have like an actual destination in mind for the company, and what's your thoughts on how you lead based on that? Like, how do you evangelize where everyone's headed as an organization so everybody knows? 'Cause I say that because this, as you said earlier, right, if I join an organization, this happened to me, where they tell you, "Well, we want this thing to be sold in three years," that's a different business than a company that says, "We want to be the best at this in 20." It's a different business, right?

Joey Gilkey: Yeah, so our vision's not so much financial. So I'll talk about, I am financially free. I'm good to go. I could disappear on my farm and not work another day and financially be set, and my kids will be set, and my kids' kids will probably, maybe, likely, hopefully be set. And so where I come from as the leader of this company is not from a place of I'm trying to obsess over a financial target and make financial decisions. I just know that finances are gonna be the byproduct of the true vision. So for me, I want TitanX to be a household name that is known for, this sounds crazy, that is known for saving sales development, and I don't mean sales development as in SDRs. I think we're on a very interesting path right now. I'd argue the dangerous path. I want to be the catalyst in the market where private equity groups and venture capital funds say, "We have to invest in business development, sales development in this particular type of way." And you know, part of that has been a long-term vision of mine of the problem I've seen in the market and where we've been. You know, we did another acquisition in January, where we're taking the product to solve this problem, 'cause there's a lot of people's livelihoods at stake in this space. I sit in CROs and residents at private equity groups and go-to-market, you know, value creation people in all these big private equity groups, and the same question keeps coming up, which is like, "What do we need to be doing outbound the way that we're doing it today? Does the sales development role need to exist? You know, is there an ROI on it?" And so I think that what we can do for the market is to... One, we have to help the market be honest with itself. The market is not honest right now with itself. If we keep going down the path, we're gonna go ahead and write about our future, which is not a very positive one. Again, and I target the outbound world, so outbound sales, sales development, business development, full cycle account executives. AI is coming. We can argue and talk about what that's gonna look like. I don't think it's as jolly as people think it is, and I also don't think it's as dismal as others do.

Warren Zenna: Hmm?

Joey Gilkey: But I think that our vision is we want to completely transform the more specifically outbound go-to-market space entirely, and we want to move the market in the direction of precision, not volume.

Warren Zenna: Mm-hmm.

Joey Gilkey: And I want there to be a very distinct decision that organizations have to make between, "Are we gonna go the volume playbook route and keep throwing headcount and activity and, you know, throw the morale out the window, or are we gonna go the precision route, which is less headcount, but more strategically thought out headcount, less activity, more outcomes?" And I think that a lot of the tooling and technology and AI is lending towards the former camp, which is the volume playbook, and I would like to create an alternative option that I think is a far superior path.

Warren Zenna: And to that end, the TitanX platform, it's, I know there's a technology, but there's also a service involved, right? Am I correct? Is it Titan TV? Is this, there's just two parts of this business? What is?

Joey Gilkey: Yeah, that's a totally free resource. Yeah, our, I mean, we are a SaaS company like many others. We come at software very differently than most. So we're not Stanford computer science degrees. We don't all come from Silicon Valley. I live on a farm in Tennessee, so I'm not the typical cut from the fabric of Silicon Valley. And my background has historically been in sales and being a CRO, but also consulting and services. And so we take an element of that consulting and services to our... You know, like a lot of people are coming around to this whole thing like forward deployed engineers and things like that. All that really means is exceptional customer service. And so we take the consulting element of what our backgrounds are, and we put them and attach them to a software. So we make money off software, but we keep money through consulting and services. And so we're a SaaS, we'll stay a SaaS, but you're not just buying software with us. Oftentimes you're buying rep capacity, and you're buying how do we get outbound right without destroying everything else around it.

Warren Zenna: Mm-hmm. And your platform, it basically predicts phone behavior. It knows people who are more likely to answer, correct? That's essentially what it does.

Joey Gilkey: Yeah. If you're aware of buyer intent, 6sense, Demandbase, ZoomInfo signals, you know, signal-based selling, all they're doing is they're taking digital breadcrumbs that we all leave online through the websites we visit, the ads we click on, and so on, and they're formulating an opinion based on those breadcrumbs that say, "This person's considering buying. They're aware of this particular pain, so therefore we should prioritize them from a selling perspective or an account selection perspective." We're not that. However, we use that same framework around the phone, which is, the phone is, in my opinion, and I think many people's opinion, especially nowadays versus three to five years ago, the phone is the most powerful channel because it generates bidirectional conversations with our market that we can take and use in other parts of go-to-market. However, the headwind is very strong, which is that connection rates are low, people aren't answering, there's spam issues left and right. And so we're taking digital breadcrumbs or telephony breadcrumbs, and we are formulating an opinion on whether or not someone's likely to answer a cold call or not. And so instead of having a 3 to 5% connect rate, when I make 100 dials, I talk to three to five people, I can make 50 dials and talk to 15, 20. Our average connect rate is 25%. And then the product we're launching in September will somewhat close this whole loop that we've been inside of, but not owning the entire loop. And so our objective is to solve more than just the intelligence layer of knowing who's likely to answer. But how do you actually attack the four pillars of outbound, the flywheel, if you will, of list, messaging, rep, and follow-up, on a platform and a surface in which reps can actually operate out of.

Warren Zenna: Gotcha.

Joey Gilkey: More on what that is 'cause we're doing a big launch around it, but that's the general sense of what we're building.

Warren Zenna: That's amazing. So, and I agree with you. I think that we've reached peak nonsense when it comes to outbound, and anyone that can solve it is a good thing. I myself, like you, I've shut myself off to most inbound because I just can't deal with it anymore. But the signals that make it through are really super smart and really focused, and they make a difference, and I applaud people who can get through that. If you can do it, then it's a, it's.

Joey Gilkey: It's tough.

Warren Zenna: It is.

Joey Gilkey: As I always say, outbound is simple, it's just not easy.

Warren Zenna: Yep. That's for sure. So, well, thanks. It was great. I have a couple other questions. The last one, which is a good one, is, I mean, you kind of already answered it in a weird way 'cause you kinda really don't have to do this 'cause you have fortified enough capital that you don't. But if you weren't doing this, what would you be doing?

Joey Gilkey: I used to be really good at answering this question. I'm so focused now, I try not to. I mean, realistically, I think the next frontier that if I was to tackle one is probably in the blue-collar space. Again, like I mentioned, I live on a farm. I'm in East Tennessee. I'm surrounded by incredible blue collar people that are all suffering under some issues that we're seeing in the market and economically. And I think that there's a talent issue, I'd say a talent availability issue in blue collar. So I'd probably go build blue-collar companies and work on exceptional human skills alongside just the trade skills, and ideally create a lot of opportunity. You know, I come from, I mentioned I started my career in the more capital raising nonprofit world. More specifically, I was looking at and spending a lot of time in the inner city, so I was usually in impoverished parts of the country. And I don't think we have a race issue in this country. I don't think we have a lot of the issues that the media purports to have. I think we have a classism issue, and I think that... And I came to this conclusion having spent a lot of time in the inner city. I used to come from the camp of more like social justice and there's a race issue and there's an oppression issue. I don't think there is. I think that it's a classism issue because if you go into rural Appalachia, you see the exact same issues as you see in inner city St. Louis, you know? And so for me, it'd probably be something that's an intersection of helping folks in the lower end of the socioeconomic ladder and combining that with blue-collar trades, which can be incredibly financially rewarding, and creating true career paths and training true skill sets both in their craft, but then also in how do you lead a successful life and build families. And you know, I'm a huge proponent of family building, and I'm a traditionalist in that sense. And

Warren Zenna: Yep.

Joey Gilkey: You know, for me, I'm a Christian. I live on a farm. I'm raising two boys with my wife. Ideally, I have a big compound one day with my kids and all their families building their families on my farm. And I would love to play a role in seeing that become the heart of America again.

Warren Zenna: Well, God bless that, man. I hope you do. It's needed. So, but thanks. This was great. I really appreciate you joining me and getting a great vision, and it sounds like you got a really amazing company. So Joey Gilkey, thank you so much. Great conversation. And Again, TitanX, folks, if you're looking for an opportunity or a way that you can break through the noise, titanx.io or.

Joey Gilkey: That's right, an IO, yep.

Warren Zenna: Thank you.

Joey Gilkey: .com leads you to a manufacturing company, so you'll not find us there.

Warren Zenna: Okay. And looking forward to seeing you later in September.

Joey Gilkey: That's right, brother. Looking forward to hosting you.