For years, B2B teams tried to make SDRs more efficient.
More calls. More emails. More activity.
Then AI arrived, and many teams tried to automate the same model.
But what if the problem wasn’t needing a faster version of the old playbook?
What if the real opportunity is to use AI to make people better at the things only humans can do?
That’s the question behind my conversation with Craig Rosenberg.
Craig has been gathering some of the best SDR and pipeline leaders in B2B through Scale Venture Partners’ Pipeline Council. What he’s seeing feels less like a completely new playbook and more like a return to fundamentals, with much better tools.
AI can help us choose the right accounts, recognize signals, research buyers, practice conversations, and move faster.
But the last mile still comes down to relevance, judgment, taste, trust, and human connection.
About this episode
Craig and I have known each other since the early days of B2B marketing and demand generation. I followed his Funnelholic blog back in 2008, and he reminded me during our conversation that my book, Lead Generation for the Complex Sale, was one of the first B2B GTM books he read.
Several things Craig had recently been sharing from Scale’s Pipeline Council brought us back together.
One of the big questions they’re working through is simple:
What does a high-performing SDR motion look like now that AI can do so much of the work SDRs used to do?
The answer isn’t fewer humans everywhere.
In fact, Craig is seeing AI companies hiring SDRs and experienced enterprise sellers as they move beyond product-led growth and into harder-to-reach markets.
Craig and I discuss:
- Why automating the old activity-based SDR model didn’t solve the pipeline problem
- How Glean uses AI to help SDRs get better at human conversations
- Why Craig believes the “last mile” of selling is still human
- What unmistakably human outreach looks like when buyers are surrounded by AI-generated messages
- Why AI companies are hiring SDRs and experienced enterprise sellers again
- How ICP and signals help teams focus on the accounts most likely to buy
- Why selling AI is becoming harder and business process may become the new software moat
About Craig Rosenberg
Craig Rosenberg is Chief Platform Officer at Scale Venture Partners, where he helps build and lead Scale’s go-to-market platform for software companies.
Before joining Scale, Craig was Distinguished Vice President in Gartner’s sales practice. He joined Gartner through its acquisition of TOPO, the research and advisory firm he co-founded.
Long before that, many B2B marketers and sales leaders knew Craig as the Funnelholic, where he built a following writing and speaking about demand generation, sales development, and B2B go-to-market strategy.
He also co-hosts The Transaction podcast with Matt Amundson.
Connect with Craig
Craig Rosenberg on LinkedIn
Scale Venture Partners
The Transaction podcast
Chapters
00:00 What Top SDR Leaders Are Figuring Out
04:41 How Glean Uses AI to Make SDRs Better on the Phone
09:09 The Last Mile Is Human
12:46 Why AI Companies Are Hiring SDRs Again
15:33 What Does “Unmistakably Human” Look Like?
22:06 Why Enterprise Prospecting Shouldn’t Always Scale
23:36 ICP, Signals and Choosing the Right Accounts
25:25 Why Selling AI Is Getting Harder
A few things worth taking away
- The old SDR model treated people like “human robots.” Automating the same activity-heavy motion with AI didn’t solve the underlying problem of relevance.
- The better teams are using AI to prepare humans, not replace them. At Glean, AI supports account selection, research, signals, and practice while SDRs focus on getting better at live conversations.
- The last mile is still human. AI can provide information and suggestions, but judgment, taste, relevance, trust, and relationship building still require people.
- Being unmistakably human sometimes means admitting what you don’t know. AI can help you understand a buyer’s situation, but it shouldn’t create expertise or experience you don’t actually have.
- AI companies are hiring SDRs and experienced sellers as they move beyond product-led growth into enterprise markets. As Craig put it, “The minute you want to talk to people that aren’t coming to you, you need people.”
- ICP matters more when data is abundant. Craig shared an example where ICP opportunities converted at 37% compared with 17% outside the ICP. Signals then help determine when to reach out and what may matter.
- AI is also changing software competition. As products become easier to build and replace, Craig believes companies need to expand from TAM to “Total Available Problem” and become deeply embedded in customer workflows and business processes.
A few lines that stuck with me
“The reality is the most important thing now is trust building, humanity and relationship building.”
“It’s that last mile, which is the human.”
“The minute you want to talk to people that aren’t coming to you, you need people.”
“Getting into AT&T doesn’t scale.”
“There are accounts that are the absolute best fit for you right now. Why would we spend time on anything else?”
“We’ve moved from TAM to TAP, which is Total Available Problem.”
Listen and subscribe
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Transcript
Brian Carroll: Welcome to The B2B Roundtable. I’m Brian Carroll, and I’m excited to have our guest today, Craig Rosenberg.
Craig is the Chief Platform Officer at Scale Venture Partners. What Craig’s doing is helping them build their go-to-market platform so that they can bring this expertise to help software companies drive growth.
I’ve known Craig quite a while. We go way back in terms of what we were doing in the early days of B2B marketing and complex sales. I started following Craig’s blog, The Funnelholic, going all the way back to 2008.
Craig first shared a Pipeline Council they’re doing with some of the top SDR leaders in enterprise and software sales. And then Craig did a post with Jason Vargas talking about the “taste layer” and bringing that to the SDR rep.
What I’m excited about, Craig, for us to talk about is, you know, the more things change, the more they are the same.
What’s coming up in the Pipeline Council that the rest of us aren’t talking about yet?
Craig Rosenberg: Well, first I thought it would be important for the audience to know that, yes, you found me through The Funnelholic, but everyone found you through your book. Was it Lead Generation for the Complex Sale, I think was the name?
Brian Carroll: Yeah, yeah, it was.
Craig Rosenberg: And that was like the book.
I mean, Brian, you were the OG out there with the book and talking about it. So I think that’s amazing to bring up.
And even the fact that you brought me here because you saw these posts, for everyone who’s wondering if it’s important for you to share what you’re working on and thinking about on social, I mean, look, that’s how I met Brian in the first place.
He had a book and was doing the speaking circuit. I had a blog. And then recently, he brought me back here after he read one of my posts on social.
So there is a lesson in your intro in and of itself.
Brian Carroll: That is true. And you also do a podcast, which is awesome.
Craig Rosenberg: Thank you.
Brian Carroll: So let’s go back to what’s coming up in the Pipeline Council that the rest of us aren’t talking about.
Craig Rosenberg: I have two councils. I’ve got one where I brought together the folks that have figured it out. I’ll talk about that in a second. Then I’ve got my regular councils, which bring together people who are still trying to sort this out.
Brian, from our conversation before, I’ll just go on the negative side. There was a moment where SDRs were basically human robots, right? They were basically conveyor belts of information.
It was about how many emails could you get out, in some cases how many calls, and then the messaging was sort of one message. It was all about output. Or I think you said they were activity-based, right? They were machines.
So we had that moment.
We had to come out of that and sort of accept that the original iteration of AI here, and the way people thought AI would work, would be to somehow automate that motion, which was a highly generic, activity-based motion.
We had this run of SDRs being these human robots and delivering activity. And frankly, let’s face it, they got meetings.
Then everything changed and it got really hard. Then we said, “Well, we’re going to solve it by using AI to deliver what they were doing as robots,” and that didn’t work.
Everything got really confusing. That’s why I put the Pipeline Council together at the Rosewood, so I could start learning more.
I work with a woman named Christina McMillan, who I’ve worked with for years. She was at TOPO with me, but she was an SDR consultant for years.
I said, “You know what? We don’t know anymore. We’ve got to go figure this out.”
So we bring together the Pipeline Council, and it’s really interesting because we actually do know.
The reality is the most important thing now is trust building, right? Humanity and relationship building.
What we missed for, call it eight or ten years, was that, because we didn’t need it.
Now, the truth is, from watching you, reading you, and listening to you for a long time, you would say, “Wait a minute. That’s what I was talking about back then.”
But the truth is, I think we kind of lost sight of that.
There were some really interesting things I learned from the Pipeline Council.
I’ll give you an example. This guy Joey Lopez, he’s at Glean, and this guy amazed me. So I’m just going to give you this example of what he does.
Most everything is AI and automated. Who they’re going to talk to, what types of companies, those things are served to them.
Because, by the way, Brian, one of the things that was also happening during the SDR-as-robots phase was they were choosing their own accounts. They were going into ZoomInfo and just downloading names and sending emails.
There was no thought process on who we should talk to.
The AI will research the company, help them identify both educational information and signals. The AI actually sends emails for them.
What he believes is: Can I focus on one thing?
His choice is to focus on the phone, which is a highly converting channel for them. So they train and they practice this all the time.
But ready for this?
He’s a football, wrestling guy. Every day the SDRs come in and they huddle like a sports team.
He’s like, “Look, you don’t just practice before the game. You get in the locker room and you go through the game plan.”
But they actually practice.
Let’s say that day they’re going to call CIOs. They all get trained on the CIO persona: what they care about, what their challenges are, day in the life.
They get trained on the type of messaging that works under different scenarios.
Then they go practice. Then they come back and huddle. Then they all spend the whole day calling CIOs, and that’s it.
Then they optimize against it.
It is just brilliant, right?
Brian Carroll: It is brilliant.
Craig Rosenberg: I’ve never heard anything like it.
I told him, “Look, that is better than what me and Brian used to do.”
In the practice, they’re using sales simulations where they can practice against the CIO persona, which is AI.
Everyone asks me, and I’m like, look, I’m in a venture firm. We love AI. But it’s that last mile, which is the human, which is the thing that we’re learning.
Brian Carroll: That’s right.
Craig Rosenberg: He trains them on the human, and they go in and have these conversations.
Then they listen to calls together, maybe like a halftime, and they optimize. That day, they just do really well with that type of person.
I thought that blew my mind. It was incredible.
The other things I saw were highly personalized direct mail. There are these groups where they’ll actually create custom gifts for someone based on what they care about.
An example would be, if developers have a high predisposition for Legos, there are groups that do personalized Legos. Or they might know someone is way into archery, so they’d send them something around archery.
It was these highly personalized gifts.
And the conversion rates are the most important thing. We have to live by the numbers, even if it’s a great idea.
Sometimes I have a great idea every week that doesn’t work.
Brian Carroll: Sure. I mean, that’s part of life.
Craig Rosenberg: Now that we’re our age, we can relate to this.
But the conversion rates are really high. Everyone says, “Well, that’s a gimmick.”
No, it’s not a gimmick. It’s personalized.
If you send me a stress ball, that’s not going to work.
Brian Carroll: Mm-hmm.
Craig Rosenberg: But if you show me that you know me, then that’s going to be infinitely more effective.
The other thing that was surprising to me was there was a guy in cybersecurity, which is one of the hardest markets to email, and he improved email reply rates to 6%.
We haven’t seen 6% since 2021.
What he did, again, was make the emails more relevant, more personalized.
He tore everything down and rebuilt it in a way that was more highly relevant and highly personalized.
So if I had to leave a theme, there are some really fun channels and tactics that I learned about, but at the end of the day, I think the key is that last mile.
And I think that’s what leads you probably into the taste layer.
Everyone wants to know what humans are going to do.
Well, the humans are there to make sure that we’re building a relationship, that we’re being relevant, that this is something tasteful that we would send to someone.
That’s what we saw. We went around the table, and that’s where we learned all those things.
That Joey Lopez example, what do you think of that? That was incredible.
Brian Carroll: I love that.
Going back, Joey took it to another level. When I was running BDR teams, I created something I called “How to Talk to Me,” which was doing what Joey was doing.
But with the role-play, we didn’t have AI to do role-play. It was our best educated guess on a persona.
We did focus on just calling that persona because people would be reaching into multiple people within an organization.
I just think getting that level of specialization matters.
In sports, you need to get reps in, but they were practicing the reps before they talked to a live person. Then they were able to go deep, which I think is brilliant, because that’s how people get good: having that focus, having the understanding.
It also helps younger, less experienced people who haven’t had the life experience, maybe calling an executive, to actually know how to talk to them.
Craig Rosenberg: Yeah, for sure.
By the way, one thing on the experience-versus-not thing. It’s a challenge because we do typically use less experienced SDRs in this process.
But, on the other hand, it was interesting. We had a really successful leader. He’s not allowed me to talk about who he is ever. It’s a long story.
He’s got a highly successful SDR team that’s scaling, let’s say, a hundred. Remember when everyone told us they were dead?
Brian Carroll: Yeah.
Craig Rosenberg: His issue with the experienced folks is that they couldn’t approach the buyer the way he wanted to, which was in a much more personalized way.
If you think about it, if someone was highly successful during the SDR robot phase, are they really more experienced?
I don’t know.
Brian Carroll: Really, they aren’t.
They’re experienced being repetitive and doing activity. But when it comes to actually connecting with people and being relevant, that’s something you need to train.
It’s a skill. It’s something people need to develop, and it doesn’t just happen.
Craig Rosenberg: Yeah, for sure.
I was going through the numbers everyone was giving me. I’m like, “Who’s hiring?” Everyone raised their hand.
It’s nuts because everyone told me SDRs were dead.
Brian, I think we’ve seen this before, though. There was a moment where everyone tried to kill the SDRs.
They keep trying to kill the enterprise sales reps, saying, “No, those old guys, they don’t know anything.” And now they’re getting hired at prices where, I mean, they’re unaffordable.
But it’s the same thing. It’s your same theme.
You need AI to help everything go faster for the human, but at the end of the day, that relationship is built with these people.
We’re seeing that across the board.
These AI companies came up through PLG. Some get to a billion without hiring go-to-market.
But guess what?
The minute you want to talk to people that aren’t coming to you, you need people.
Brian Carroll: That’s right.
You had shared something, I think this came from Adam Schoenfeld, about 39%, and maybe it’s higher, of AI companies hiring SDRs.
Everyone thought these companies were building the technology that’s supposed to replace SDRs, supposed to replace salespeople, but they’re still hiring.
So what do you make of this?
Craig Rosenberg: First of all, you are right. It’s probably higher because that was six months ago when Adam did that.
He looked at 150, I think a little more, top AI companies. Thirty-nine percent were hiring SDRs and SDR leaders.
A year ago, I was talking to experienced SDR leaders who were crying because they weren’t going to hit their mortgage. Now they’re getting paid more than they ever did.
Those top AI companies, frankly, look, I’m in venture, but you see their numbers. It’s extraordinary.
They’re doing it by people catching fire from a brand perspective very early on, people coming to them, and typically a PLG motion.
I’m all in favor of that.
What we’re seeing now is that whole cohort is trying to get into enterprises, new markets, even mid-market that didn’t necessarily come to them.
At a certain point, you have to do this.
And they’re not just hiring SDRs. They’re hiring, like I said, experienced sales reps that were supposedly dinosaurs and out of the business.
The second thing, though, is what we just talked about.
I actually do believe there was a moment where SDR leaders were running the same playbook and they failed. Then they went to the next place and they failed.
So in defense of the sort of fall of the SDR, the SDR leaders had not adjusted.
Now they’ve adjusted, and now you’re seeing folks starting to share successful implementations.
It was a return to humanity in many cases.
But I will say AI is predominant in their systems and how they cue everything up. There’s the ability to provide information SDRs have never had before, the ability to give them both educational information and signals that tell them when to reach out to someone and how to be relevant.
Those things are real.
The fact is, what we need is that last mile to be people.
That has been the breakthrough.
Brian Carroll: You’ve said this a couple of times, bringing humanity back.
What would you say “unmistakably human” looks like now, today?
Craig Rosenberg: Man, that’s a really good question.
Brian Carroll: I read probably a dozen things on LinkedIn where someone’s saying, “How not to sound like you wrote by AI.”
And I’m like, why not try writing?
Why not try actually writing yourself in your voice?
Because there’s a backlash happening too, you know.
Craig Rosenberg: Yeah. I know. You’re right.
I think there have been two moments that turned people off to generic messaging.
There were SDRs as robots just flaming the market with emails. Then there was, like we said, “Well, we could solve this with AI.”
Even today, I got emails this morning that were clearly not written by a human.
We’re surrounded by AI messaging all over the place. And so when we get a human, that’s something that’s really relatable.
I’ll give you an example. You said try writing.
I use AI every day. I originally tried to have AI write emails to folks, and then I said, “Okay, well, that doesn’t work.”
Then someone said, “Well, it’s easier to be an editor.” And I used to say that.
Then I tried editing it, and it was too hard.
So I went the other way.
I use AI, let’s say I’m prospecting, to tell me what kinds of things work. It can help me with the structure or the rubric of an email.
What types of things work in the first sentence? Stuff we train on.
It can look and say, “Hey, the best reps are doing this at the top.”
That helps me a lot.
I ask it for ideas in bullets. That’s my new thing.
I get these great ideas, but then I write it.
So I’m still faster, but more importantly, I’m better. AI does help me a lot, but I just couldn’t have it write it anymore.
If it’s AI-patterned or templated, it just won’t work.
I’ll give you an example of humanity.
I was just talking to John Barrows, and he said, well, a young SDR gets this signal about a merger. He’s never seen a merger before, and he goes and writes about it.
I’m like, “Dude, you can’t do that. I’m not going to answer.”
So it’s like, you want to use AI?
Well, tell me what happens in a merger. Tell me what things might be happening at this organization.
Now I’m going to take it and write something more heartfelt.
I might have even written, “You know what? I don’t know a ton about what happens in mergers. But I do know, just having experienced this, that this, that, and the other might be happening in your business. And that’s why I feel like we might have the ability to have a conversation about this use case.”
Just being humble and approaching it that way might have worked.
The other way is to do your own research and be okay with not being perfect.
I thought that was a really good example from him because that would be an example where we’d use tech.
We’d say, “It’ll identify if there’s a merger, then it’ll put together a message.”
It’s like, yeah, but that person got 200 messages that all look the same.
That shows zero understanding of that person and what they might be going through.
So what’s your differentiator? How are you going to do it?
I think when we talk about humanity, we have to be able to tell the buyer, “Look, it’s worth talking to me.”
And that actually has to be done by you, the person.
It’s one of the reasons I’m surprised people answer their phones, because I certainly don’t. But we’re seeing the data, and it does work.
It works when you connect because ultimately that’s two humans connecting, having a conversation, and being able to talk it through, which says, “No, I’m not talking to a robot.”
Brian Carroll: Yeah, and I think there is a lot to what you’re saying.
My first job as an SDR, I was calling to set up appointments for sales training. My first day, I knew nothing about sales.
I was frustrated in the week, and Julie, the manager, said, “Brian, just be people with people. Why not own the fact? You’re 22 years old. You don’t know anything about sales. And the irony is you’re setting up appointments for sales training.”
The point being, the admission of who you are and what you don’t know can open up possibilities.
I could talk about, “I’ve learned so much in the sales training already.”
I think there’s this point that we still need to go back and learn what is unmistakably human and do more of that.
I wanted to go back to when you did the meeting at the Rosewood. Was there anything that surprised you the most or was counterintuitive that you came away with?
Craig Rosenberg: Counterintuitive?
Well, I actually would say the most surprising thing was that I wasn’t surprised.
I mean, that’s cheating, but I think everything ended in the same theme that we just discussed.
I’m surprised people still answer their phones. They do. There’s tech to go do that.
By the time we got to, let’s say there were 12 people in the room, when we got to number four, I was like, “I got it.” Then they kept going, and I’m like, “I still got it.”
I’ll give you another one that was big.
The SDR thing kind of blew up a year and a half ago. Now it’s back, and it’s like, what were the things that we forgot?
Well, one, they want to get promoted.
One of the people in the room was like, “One of my keys is that I have about 70% of my SDRs get promoted into sales.”
I’m like, “Okay, that’s amazing.”
And she’s like, “Now more talented people come. They stay longer because they know they’re going to move up.”
I was like, my gosh, that’s an old theme that’s come back.
Maybe the thing to say is that what’s old is new again.
A lot of the fundamental things that we used to discuss with SDR team building, that I kind of forgot about, came back.
Brian Carroll: AI has allowed us to scale activity. It hasn’t allowed us to scale relevancy unless you use it properly.
Craig Rosenberg: Yeah.
I actually do have a fun one for you.
Brian Carroll: Okay.
Craig Rosenberg: A fun one and one that we already knew, but is really important.
The fun one did not come from the Pipeline Council. I like to just talk to people.
These hot companies that are sort of breaking down doors, I just want to talk to whoever’s doing it.
There’s a company in New York called Attention, and one of their highest-converting channels is the SDR taking a gift and walking in the doors of their target account.
Brian Carroll: Wild.
Craig Rosenberg: So I called him. He’s like, “Yeah, it’s the field SDR.”
They also get a LinkedIn message saying, “Hey, the Attention guys just brought that.”
It’s that motion because, guess what? We give donuts. It has our name on it. Or we could give whatever.
But the fact that we made that personal effort, having the person who’s trying to reach out to someone show up at the admin’s desk and hand them that, that’s the ultimate in conversion.
Now, you can’t scale that.
But look, you and I, you’re the complex sale guy. I’m the enterprise guy.
I keep telling people, guess what?
Getting into AT&T doesn’t scale.
You have to find your way in, then find your way across, and continue to do that.
That was a surprising channel for me and really interesting.
The other thing, though, that I did not mention before, that people are doing a lot better across the board, is ideal customer profile work.
I knew this at TOPO, and people didn’t believe me because everything was about meetings. They didn’t care what.
I kept saying, “Forget the term account-based marketing. Don’t worry about it. The most important thing is there are accounts that are the absolute best fit for you right now. Why would we spend time on anything else?”
It was funny. When I’d go in and they’d say, “Can I look at the forecast?” I’d say, “Well, let’s run it against the ICP.”
It was obvious.
You’re getting a 37% conversion rate against the ICP and 17% against other accounts.
That should tell you everything.
What we see now, with data and the ability to do this, is that a lot of these successful teams are doing a way better job of choosing the accounts.
The second part is, with signals and these things, you’re able to figure out when to reach out to them and what to say.
Those two breakthroughs are huge.
Brian Carroll: Yeah, and I think back, you brought up my book.
By the way, it’s coming up on 20 years since that book came out.
Craig Rosenberg: No way. I’m getting old, man.
Brian Carroll: Yeah, I can’t believe it either.
So 20 years ago, in 2006, there wasn’t an abundance of data.
We now have an overabundance of data. It’s: What do we do with it?
We can move from thinking ICP is how you build a list to, no, your ICP is how you know who’s relevant, and you focus on just those.
You aren’t trying to build the biggest list possible. You’re trying to build the most relevant list.
It makes perfect sense.
Craig Rosenberg: Yeah, I know.
Brian Carroll: What are you seeing right now, as you look across your portfolio, that a lot of us might miss?
Craig Rosenberg: Well, I’d say to everyone, you’ve got to stop firing your CMO just because things are tough out there.
The movement there has been extraordinary in terms of people getting shipped out.
There is a point there, which is messaging matters.
I think it’s really hard right now.
It’s been a killer. CMOs who are pretty good are fighting with the organization, trying to find the best message and not getting there.
Look, I work with startups, and it’s hard to run marketing at startups. It’s really hard.
The good news is everyone wants to talk about AI.
The bad news is everyone’s selling AI.
AI is not the same as SaaS.
Everyone says, “Well, yeah it is.”
No, because SaaS you could load it and go. AI has to integrate with your data. That’s why you see this sort of forward-deployed engineer thing.
To really understand it, you have to be able to get it in and get your data moving through the system.
So it’s different.
If you think about it, everyone’s pitching AI.
Everyone knows they need to go to AI, but now everyone’s afraid of it. There’s also a whole naysayer element in the buying committee that makes it even harder.
But more importantly, there are so many more products out there.
You’re selling into your category, where there may be 35 other companies.
Then you have horizontal AI companies like OpenAI and Anthropic coming at you from the other side. You’ve got other AI companies coming in and tangentially touching your message and your value proposition.
That makes the ability to distinguish yourself really hard.
Here’s the big thing.
For AI companies, many of them come into the market as a wedge. They found a hole in the market and they filled that hole.
In the SaaS era, if you found that wedge, you would be able to run with that wedge, go raise lots of money, and dominate by focusing on that wedge.
Now you can’t, because it’s too easy to make software and it’s too inexpensive.
We like to joke that four kids in Brooklyn will create your product in a month and be coming at you.
If you sit on that wedge now, you’re actually asking to get flanked.
That’s an incredible challenge.
A company today has to go in via its wedge, and then the things that used to happen eight years after a company existed, you have to do now.
We have an investor here who said we’ve moved from TAM, looking at the biggest market, to TAP, which is Total Available Problem.
We have to expand the problem set as fast as we can.
Brian Carroll: Wow.
Craig Rosenberg: The other thing is moating.
Moats are really hard because, like I said, it’s the same problem. Building software is easier than before.
Then you’ve got the threat of the frontier labs. Anthropic can take you out in a night and not even know you existed.
Your moat now is integrating yourself into business processes and workflows as fast as you can, because that makes you harder to pull out.
It’s funny because everyone’s talking about CRM and whether there are new CRMs.
Except the reason SAP and Salesforce don’t die is because they become the business process.
Tearing them out means you’re tearing down your entire business process.
Everyone thinks it’s the data.
Data moves now. You can move data in less than a day.
It’s actually the business process.
There’s a lot to learn there for these companies.
The faster you can become integrated into their business process and become the business process, the stickier you are and the bigger your moat can be.
But if you don’t do that, then you’re easily replaceable.
I talked to a RevOps leader I’ve respected and known for years.
He said, “We look at our tech stack every month, and we’ll tear stuff out every three months.”
I’m going, “Is that good?”
He’s like, “Yeah, because guess what? I can always look at what’s better.”
Ripping and replacing is actually not that hard unless they’re dug into my business.
Those are things I think people may not know about that are really important to take in and think about.
How you sell, how you message, what you do in the sales process, and what you do in the post-sales process are different.
There are big challenges today. There are different approaches to how you think about things.
If I had to give you anything that I’ve learned, that’s more of what I’ve learned from the investors looking at the market that I’ve found fascinating.
Brian Carroll: Well, Craig, I just want to say thanks for the conversation today.
It’s been so great catching up with you and hearing your perspective.
The more I listen to you, the more I’m remembering how aligned we are in so many ways.
So I just want to say thanks for joining us and being on the show today.
Craig Rosenberg: Yeah, thanks for having me.
It’s great to see you and talk to you again.
I’m going to have to flip through your book again. That was one of the first B2B go-to-market books I ever read.
So it’s really cool to catch up.
