Warren Zenna: 04:55
Sure. Thanks. So as you mentioned, you know, I had a career in what essentially became ad tech. It really was started in marketing. It migrated from probably more consumer based marketing all the way up through business, marketing, whatnot. And then when I was at my last big role was at Havas and I was involved with the ad tech community, which, as everyone remembers in like 2015, 16, 17, 18, you know, ad tech was just this juggernaut of it was it was a really great business, really just a really unique place. It was a really incredible amount of tech that was being built at that time in ad tech space. So there’s a lot of startups and there’s a lot of funding. And because I sat at the seat at this agency and I had a budget, I was being pitched by a lot of these ad tech companies, and I became an advisor to a couple of them. I sat in the board for a few of them, but mainly what happened was I was being sold to by them now, you know, and here I sold for, I don’t know, 25 years.
And long story short, I started to kind of realize there was a problem I was seeing in the way companies go to market, particularly tech companies, which it doesn’t surface just on those companies. But this is just a good example of what I was seeing, just this a silo ization of the way the go to market was working. The word go to market wasn’t even in existence back then. No such no such thing as that. And, you know, you had a sales organization, a marketing organization and a customer success organization. And they were all three basic three businesses in one. They didn’t even have any relationship to each other, frankly. And you could tell as a buyer that there was this disconnect and sort of being so much involved in all these different business sectors, it sort of occurred to me that it was stupid. It didn’t make any sense. It seemed like the, let’s say, the revenue leadership model was antiquated, needed to change.
And this role, this chief revenue officer role, seemed to be this sort of serf like offer, this huge opportunity for companies to solve this problem, which is to increase the scope of the role and make it much more of a revenue leader as opposed to a sales leader, which is the way it was originally intended, frankly. And I thought, you know, there’s no advocate organization for chief revenue officers. There’s no training for chief revenue officers. In fact, at the time, and probably still to some degree, the definition of a chief revenue officer isn’t even remotely clear. You have like eight different definitions of it. And as a result, CROs are floundering. They last around 17 months. People don’t get the value out of a CRO and they shouldn’t be that way. It should really be actually the most important role. So I thought, I’m going to create an organization that solves this problem.
So we built The CRO Collective with the intent to bring more precision to the definition of the role, codify it, so to speak, create more, you know, standards and best practices for AES operate, build out the right way for companies to appoint a chief revenue officer and inculcate that role into their organizations and build revenue engines that are designed specifically for singular leadership. And it took off. You know, my ideas got validated by a lot of people that are a lot smarter than me. And so we built this whole thing. And over the last six years or so, turned this into, you know, a pretty nice consultancy where, you know, we’re like the go to guys for chief revenue officers. And we do a lot of different things for CIOs within that lifespan of a chief revenue officer as they navigate through the role.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 08:08
I’m wondering if you could walk through how people typically engage with you. Right. And some of the monetization models, right. I know you do roundtables. There’s a lot of, you know, ways people and companies engage with you. And maybe from the beginning, how did you, when you set out to do this? What was the, I know, offerings evolve throughout. What did start off as and talk about the evolution of that?
Warren Zenna: 08:32
Yeah. So the first thing we did was we created a course like the first sort of CRO course. We created the first one, right? So it was interesting, was somewhat similar to the way you’d hear stories about someone who, like, founded a tech company that became really big. You know, they started in their basement sort of thing. It’s kind of like what we did. You know, I wrote this entire curriculum. It took me about a year to build all this content. I wrote, wrote. It was crazy how much writing I was doing about this, just really thinking a lot about frameworks and different things.
So I built out this entire curriculum, and I asked four of my colleagues to be my first guinea pigs and take the first course for free so I can test it out. And they really liked it and I refined it. And then the next one, I charged for it. And then I kept doing it over and over again. We’ve had probably about 150 people go through the course now. It was initially designed specifically just for what we call aspiring CROs. These are people who are revenue leaders, usually sales leaders, marketing leaders who want to become a chief revenue officer, but really don’t know what the way to get there is. So we built over them. And then what happened over the course of the course, it became really a combination of aspiring CROs and existing CROs whom are struggling in the role right there. They’re about to lose their job. We can get into that a bit more. Why?
And then that expanded into advisory work. And how do we help people who are in the role do better? How do we help advise them on different frameworks and ways that they can navigate the unique situations in their jobs? And then that evolved into a master’s counsel program where we have a group of CROs who are in the job, and we conduct a dialogue every couple of weeks together to help strategize and build a long term dialogue between other peers. And then that jumped into the events, which are a CRO roundtable. Did the first one in New York around four years ago. It was a huge success. And then we built a model around it.
And now we do, you know, all over the country we do about ten a year. And those are great. Those are just like small, very well structured conversations that we’ve designed that are designed to get CROs talking to each other about things and solve their problems in a room with each other. It’s really great. And then that expanded into something that we created, which was the CRO readiness program, which is really our kind of Cadillac, as it were. I mean, this is the bigger problem is companies don’t know how to hire a CRO, when to hire a CRO. And so we help them become what we call CRO ready? We actually kind of created this entire notion of CRO readiness and what that means. And we developed this entire program around that. So now we have a program for transitional CROs going from one job to another. And, you know, it’s been quite interesting how this has evolved.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 11:09
It is interesting to hear about the evolution and journey. I’m curious early on, Warren, feedback, what was really valuable feedback you got on the course, which probably shaped all the other things, right? The roundtables, the, you know, the advisory and everything.
Warren Zenna: 11:28
The main thing we heard when we first started doing the courses consistently was, this is right. This makes so much sense. I can’t believe you’re the only person talking about this. Why don’t people do this? Why is nobody talking about this? You know, the main thing I hear from people, I mean, now it’s sort of table stakes. But back then it was like, you’re reading my mind, you know, like, you know what I’m going through. It’s amazing how, you know, you’ve really constructed a program that speaks directly to my experience and what I’m what’s going on, and also give me a way that I can work through it. That’s the main thing. But as I said before, I spoke to some really smart people.
I mean, I’m not the brightest guy in the world, you know? So for me, it wasn’t that hard to find. But I found some really, really smart people, you know, like people that were really, really, really up there high in the echelons of the revenue community. And I got in front of them with this idea. And I mean, to, to the letter, every single one of them was like, yep, this is correct. This makes perfect sense. You know, good for you, you know, so the encouragement was really great. You know, I got an incredible amount of due diligence, feedback from people before I really took this to the level. I wanted to make sure that I wasn’t nuts, even though I kind of knew I wasn’t, but still. So that was really encouraging for me. It remains to be that way.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 12:45
Any constructive feedback to help shape it?
Warren Zenna: 12:48
Oh my God, so much. I mean, like first thing was, you know, you got to stop making it all about you. You got to make it more about the brand. Good. Really good point. It’s really hard when a founder, you know, has to try and expand a business and remove themselves from it. I’m still struggling with that.
Another one was, you know, you need to expand more. You know, your programs are great, but they need to be more in depth or you need to be talking about this type of sector or this type of business. You know, your courses should have more interactivity. Your courses should be, you know, more applicable to the real world. I mean, just think it’s overwhelming, you know, how much feedback I get constantly. And I love it, by the way.
I mean, I’m like a, I’m a seeker of it. I love the red teams that tell me what’s wrong, what’s not working. That’s my saving grace, frankly. And I’m good. I got a lot of people around me who are, without any question, very willing to give me good feedback and, and I’m open to anything because I truly haven’t figured it out. You know.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 13:48
You mentioned, Warren, about why CROs lose their job. Talk about that.
Warren Zenna: 13:54
You know, interestingly, you know, it’s a double sided problem, right? So you got the one thing that we’re trying to solve is that the role has evolved and it’s become much more complicated. And the original profile of a CRO is always a sales leader. And because that sales focus is very functional, it doesn’t apply itself well to a strategic fixer or builder role. You know, so one thing is, I think CRO is coming into the role. They come in expecting to be a C-suite executive that runs a sales organization. And if they do that, they’re probably fine. But then when they’re asked to sort of open the open the aperture up around what their responsibility is, all of a sudden this is when they fail and when they start having to deal with dealing with a board, a board has much different expectations and metrics that they use than a sales organization leader does, right?
So sure, a board wants to hear about pipeline and all. What they really want to hear about is like, what’s your net revenue retention? How much does it cost us to get a customer? When do we make our dollar back? You know, things like this that a lot of sales leaders don’t really have a good eye on. They don’t know how to measure and they know how to build machines that way. So they fail for that reason.
But the main reason CROs fail is because the system that they inherit, they don’t have the authority to fix it. They’re actually asked to run a broken system, but they think that it’s not the system. They think it’s them or the people in the system, but it’s in fact the way the system is designed for the people, the way they’re incentivized and structured are doing things that the system, in a weird way, not intentionally, is designed to fail. And so if I’m a CRO, my job is to run a broken system, but I’m not given the authority to fix it. It’s a pretty big conundrum. And this is the big paradox of the chief revenue officer, which we fix.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 15:35
Can you give me an example of one of those cases where, so people can kind of chew on it, where someone comes in and there are certain things that they maybe wanted to change but couldn’t because they didn’t have the authority to do it?
Warren Zenna: 15:48
Well, it’s pretty much all the cases, frankly. There are very few CROs that come in with that authority unless they ask for it, unless they know how to set themselves up for it. So any chief revenue officer, I would even maybe qualify that a bit, I’d say, and I’m happy to say, and whether or not I had a hand in this, I don’t know. But I’d say probably right now, somewhere between 15 to 25% of CRO roles actually do want to give the CRO that level of authority. Most don’t. Most are like somehow there’s certain areas of responsibility that are cordoned off or they’re sacred cows and they don’t give that level of authority. And that’s the first red flag.
And so every one of my clients, this is the main problem they have is that they’re look, I’ve been doing this for a really long time. I’m a really good revenue leader. And I’m looking around and I’m seeing exactly what needs to be fixed, but I don’t have the authority to do anything about it because I’m sort of cordoned off into this one sector of the business. And if I step outside of my lane, people pat me on the back and say, you’re a good little boy. And I go back and, you know, do your job. And, you know, it becomes very frustrating. And so either people leave because they’re just like, I can’t do this anymore. This is ridiculous. Or they get fired because they’re quote unquote, a troublemaker, you know, or whatever that might be. And, you know, this is a problem with organizations is they’re unwilling to reevaluate the way they’re structured, and they don’t understand that the system they built is really the thing they should be looked at.
So when my clients come to me and I can give you a number of examples, one in particular was working at a company when they first met me, and they took my course and it was a really bad situation. You know, it’s a typical sort of CRO situation. All the, you know, symptoms of all the worst situations. My boss this, the organization that, I can’t do this, can’t do that. But I’m being asked to fix it. Right? So it’s like one hand, like fix this, but not giving me the resources to do it.
So there’s four things that you need to have as a CRO to succeed. You need authority, you need autonomy, you need resources, and you need runway to do the job. And if you don’t get all four of those, you’re hampered. You know, you can’t take three. It’s not like it’s a, it’s not a maybe. It’s an all or all or nothing thing.
And it was a really bad situation. And in the middle of my course, he ended up leaving the job and taking another one. But this time because of the knowledge that he was a for a given from the program, he started that interview process on the right foot, and he vetted this role in the way that he was trained, and he was able to ascertain from the beginning what might not work about it, set the expectations, build the credibility with the prospective hiring organization to shape the role in the way that would work, by providing them with the level of data and insights that proved his model would make more sense for the business, so that they gave him the authority, autonomy, runway, and resources to do the job. And he did so, and it’s become very successful. He brought us in, actually with him for the first, like six months of the job to help actually bring our expertise to help him build out that engine. And it was a really great undertaking, and it turned out to a real success story. This is not uncommon where we have this happen a lot, but that’s the sort of thing that usually ends up happening.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 19:17
Yeah. We’re not. We’ll get into why and when do companies need a CRO? But you said something I just want to highlight, which is expectations. It’s so important. And even from a client perspective, anyone who’s a client, clients come in with expectations, and if things aren’t set or at least set up front, you know, it. It makes, I think, for just a honest, good relationship going forward. If people understand expectations and they’re clear about them.
Warren Zenna: 19:45
Yeah. Well, that’s the whole thing. We see a lot with particularly executive roles. And I say this with empathy and understanding, not criticism. You know, if I’m, if I’m an executive and I’m interviewing for C-suite executive roles, these are very difficult roles to get. There aren’t that many of them. If I’m in the running for one of these roles, you know, understandably human nature, you’re already starting to, you know, vision yourself sitting at that desk and having that kind of payroll and doing all the things that are afforded you when you make a job, get a job like that, all the accolades that come with it, right? The exposure and all that stuff. And then being able to, you know, it may sound base, but like even imagine yourself going home and telling your family how excited you are. You got this great job.
I mean, there’s all the stuff that’s very tugs on you emotionally when you’re interviewing for a job like this. So it ends up happening is it’s really easy for somebody in that situation to see a lot of things about the role that don’t make sense or don’t seem great, but they ignore them because they want the job so bad. And the other part too, is it’s not so much that they’re sort of like putting blinders on. They also they don’t want to be a problem. You know, they don’t want to be perceived as like someone who’s going to be a problem for us. You know, they want someone who’s cooperative and a team player and all this nonsense. It’s really stupid. Like, to be frank with you, that doesn’t make sense. That’s not really the right way to approach this. You know, being a team player doesn’t mean, you know, bending over.
You know, being a team player is creating something that’s going to win for the organization. And if you’re an expert at this point in your career and you know how to like do this job properly, if you really understand this process, you can come into an interview and you can be the expert that they meet, you know, of all the other people that are going to say, yes sir, no problem, sir. I can do that, sir. No problem sir. Oh, watch me do that, sir. As opposed to like. Well, why do you want me to do that, sir? Explain this to me. Like, walk me through this. Give me this note. What? Answer these ten questions and the right company will want that person. They’ll want the person who comes in and says, teach us things. Show us how to do this because we never did this before. And if you can do that properly, you’ll end up being the candidate that gets hired.
And then through that trust, you’ll be able to say, well, here are the conditions under which a CEO needs to succeed. Here’s a list of those things that need to happen. Let’s walk through them together and understand and have a process for how to analyze not only their responses, but their objections and the resistance that comes that you can work it out. And if you don’t have that, you’re going to end up in a job that’s gonna not work for you. It happens all the time. We’re really, really good at this. We’ve constructed a very specific way that a CRO can navigate this process successfully, to make sure that they get the job in the way that they can ensure that the company succeeds, not just that they succeed, but the company does. That’s a very key thing.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 22:17
I’m wondering, Warren, from your standpoint, what resources have helped you get to where you are? It could be a podcast, it could be books. One of the things when you talk about that, it reminds me of the book Crucial Conversations, right? I had Joseph Grenny on the podcast. And it’s not easy to do sometimes, at least for me sometimes. Right? Yeah.
Warren Zenna: 22:41
It’s not, it’s not. It comes naturally for some people. I mean, maybe you can sort of tell, you know, I’m a New Yorker, you know, give a crap, you know, say what’s on my mind. It’s a good thing and a bad thing. But overall, it’s been a benefit because, you know, by being up front about things and not being afraid to say things, I usually end up finding out more than someone who’s a little bit more of a wallflower type. And, you know, if you’re in this job, you can’t be one. You know, if you’re in a job like this, you really, really, really have to be very vocal about things because you know, you’re going to have to be vocal anyway. Like if you get this job, you’re going to have to like manage up and manage down and manage across. And you have to be someone who really has a lot of conviction, right? I don’t know what is going on here. And so if you don’t, if you don’t do that, you’re sort of in a tough spot, you know? So I think that’s important.
But in terms of who inspires me, you know, honestly, it’s funny. I do read a lot and I listen to it, just a crazy amount of podcasts. But it’s one book I read. It sort of doesn’t seem like it makes sense in a way, but it was just so well written. It just really gave me an incredible amount of insight, which it’s a book by this guy named Blair Enns. It’s called The Win Without Pitching Manifesto, and it’s just an incredible book. In my opinion, is the best business book I’ve ever read. It’s just really incredibly well written, and it has to do mainly with consulting firms, right? So this is an interesting thing, right?
So again, the reason why this is interesting to me, strangely, you know, even though I worked in the tech sector almost my whole future, my like that latter part of my career, I don’t really care much for SaaS businesses. I think they’re interesting, but I like more service businesses and consulting businesses because I just like that sort of thing more.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 24:15
Is this it right here?
Warren Zenna: 24:16
Yeah. It’s it, it’s an incredible book.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 24:17
Cool. Nice.
Warren Zenna: 24:18
And, you know, I find for some reason, like creative services, consulting services, where you’re actually solving problems. You know, consultants get really bad rap, you know, and I think some of these big, huge consulting firms maybe are responsible for that because they get charged crazy amount of money and they just come in and they give you all this bad, bad news and then they walk away. But there are so many really, really, really amazing consulting firms that solve problems and they really get in the weeds and they’re really, really good at being able to. It’s an extremely difficult thing to do to be able to know how to do that. And this book just it speaks to me because I didn’t think of myself more really as a consultant than anything else.
And just the way that he lays out this entire sort of manifesto about how it’s for creative professionals, but it’s really not. I mean, you can read this and you can extrapolate it for any type of consulting business, but it just really gave me the backbone. And not only that, but it gave me a framework. The main takeaway, aside from 100 things is it’s about specialization. It’s about you must specialize. And the reason why you have to specialize is because if you don’t specialize, you can’t be an expert, right? I mean, someone’s an expert at something. It’s because, you know, like they bake cakes, right? Or they work on a certain type of, you know, they’re, they’re like a mason and they only build walls. Right. Or you’re an amazing, you know, plumber, right. Or you’re an incredible writer.
You know, people who have a really fine pointed specialization, they’re the ones who trust about something, you know? And I think that what happens in business is we sort of want to do everything. A lot of times, particularly when you’re a consultant, you want to kind of want to consult on everything. We just bring our consulting to anybody. We bring our thinking, and you probably can do that, but you’re not going to be a specialist, particularly if you don’t say, well, we only consult for the dental industry, right? Or the medical industry or law firms or something like that. And I just thought it’s just so grew and there’s nothing more like when you get to the point when you’re the expert in something, then you don’t really have to sell anymore. You know, people come to you because they want that expertise and you feel like you’re narrowing your aperture on how many people you can get. And it might be true, but you’re going to get all of them because you’re the best one at it. And that’s a much, much better position to be in.
And it completely changed the way I think about things. And I’ve always felt that way, but it sort of landed it for me. And that’s another reason why The CRO Collective is so powerful for me, because it’s one thing, it’s the CRO role. That’s it. We don’t focus on any other go to market role. It’s like, this is the role. We’re the guys, we’re the ones to talk to about this. There isn’t anybody that knows more about this than us. There’s no question about this. So, you know, if you’re a chief revenue officer, we are the people to talk to about it. And you know that to me, it gives us a lot of confidence and a lot of market power. And it’s a lot of fun, you know, so I don’t do much. I don’t do much selling anymore, you know, as people call me and we talk. And that’s a really cool place to be.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 27:18
Warren, you have a CRO readiness program too for people to de-risk their CRO hire. And so maybe talk about why and when do companies need a CRO? I’ll pull up the page so people can check it out. You know as well.
Warren Zenna: 27:34
Yeah, sure. So this is a really important question I get asked pretty much by everybody I speak to. And the question is when should you hire a CRO? Maybe even more importantly, why. So this is probably where I think the biggest mistake is made. And it’s about stages, business stage. So stage dynamics is a huge part of this job. But I mean, when I say that is, you know, we all know the way we track organizations is what stage are you at? Right? You’re a startup. Are you a growth stage? Are you like a, you know, enterprise?
And you know, these stages are driven by the two things, right? One is the revenues that they make. The revenues are more of a proxy for the level of operational complexity that they’re undergoing. Right? So a company that’s at 10 million, as you could probably appreciate, has a lot less operational complexity than a company that’s 150 million. That’s obvious. Right? So the operational complexity really is the more important factor. And the reason why is because the chief revenue officer, given its scope, which we hadn’t talked about yet, but a CRO oversees all revenue functions, meaning marketing, sales, customer success probably has a dotted line to product and also has a rev ops organization underneath them. This is someone who doesn’t really make sense to be in an organization until the company has enough operational complexity, where that role would even be able to work appropriately in the organization.
So one mistake is hiring a CRO too soon. And that happens. I see CROs, where a company with like $1 million in revenue, it’s kind of crazy to me. There’s no reason to have a CRO, and I can give you a lot of reasons why they have that title at that stage. And then there’s also hiring one too late, which is like you’ve already gone through all these iterations of too much complexity, and now it’s so complex that the system is so complicated that a CRO could very difficult for a zero to come in and try and turn that revenue engine around, because there’s a lot of legacy technologies, processes, people, politics that make up that broken system, and undoing it would be a daunting task. So I think the right sweet spot is between 30 and 50 million in revenues. I’ve seen at 100, it can work. I think 100, in my opinion, is probably a bit too complicated at that point, but I’ve seen it. But anything you get beyond like, in my opinion, like around 50 million in revenues and you don’t have a CRO yet, I think you’re dangerously getting close to overcomplicating your organization and it’s gonna be very difficult to undo that, you know, so that’s sort of like where we see the sweet spot.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 29:57
Talk about the two early, the million dollars. You said, the mistakes you people make, why, why they.
Warren Zenna: 30:05
It’s a lot of, it’s vanity. I do think like we see this happen a lot. So one of the things I see us, it could be a founder who, you know, feels that even though my company is small, I kind of want it to look big. So I’m going to hire people and give them C-suite titles to make my company seem a bit more, you know, it’s like, you know, when you go to those virtual addresses and you get a Fifth Avenue address, you know, it’s sort of the face on the organization makes you people feel like you got a little bit more real estate than you do, and I get all that.
But there’s a lot of so many problems with this. So, the first one is, first of all, that that CRO is not one, it’s not a CRO. It’s probably someone that’s a single salesperson at that point, just out there running around trying to get business, not a chief revenue officer, not even close, not even a VP of sales yet, you know. Other problem with it too, is that it sets the organization up for an incredible amount of problems. I see this happen down the road.
So if I have a CRO at $1 million in business and then all of a sudden now I’m at 5 or 8, 10, it’s highly unlikely that that original CRO is still going to be there, you know? So I go find another one. So now I got to get another CRO. And my memory of a chief revenue officer still is like embedded in my older, like model, the one that I had. And I’m probably going to use that lens to hire the next one. So I’m probably going to hire like 3 or 4 CROs at that point. They’re all not going to be the right fit for the organization. I’ve sort of trained myself to not really think about this properly. So it’s kind of crazy.
And the other thing I think too, is there’s this sort of like a Tesla in the driveway sort of thing. I think that sometimes people just want to see a CRO in the company, because it sort of sets an image, or maybe it’ll get a certain candidate that quality, right? So these are the sort of things that we see happen quite a bit.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 31:52
You know, how is AI affecting CRO?
Warren Zenna: 31:55
Massively, massively. It’s a completely different world now. I mean, I think that this role is going to be so profoundly, it’s already changed. Like it’s already different. Right? But I’d say even in the next six months. The traditional sort of let’s look for the sales leader who becomes a CRO is going to really start to become really not necessarily the first way that they view the role. I think it’s really more like a rev ops focused role than anything. It’s a weird hybrid because rev ops people, you know, God bless them. I love rev ops people. They’re amazing, but they tend to be much more, you know, metrics driven, you know, numbers people very analytical.
And it’s not common that you see people that are like that, that are also incredibly gregarious and can speak to people and be persuasive and run big teams. You know, this is all very outward job. You know, you’re not sitting around behind a desk as a chief revenue officer and you’re out front, you know, you’re like the big guy. You’re the person that’s running the whole thing. And it’s a combination of a really powerful, like front, front line leader who knows how to build a vision and orchestrate, build a system and can visualize complex systems and knows how to build one, and also has an analytical mind that knows the way in which all these things fit together from a process and metric standpoint. So that’s much more the type of person.
And so with AI, it’s also interesting because a lot of the work that you put people to do are now going to be able to be done by agents in really powerful ways. So it’s going to lean the organization up quite a bit. You know, as the CRO is not going to have as large of an organization anymore, they’re going to have a lot more technology. A lot of the busy work that your people are undergoing today is going to be stripped away, and they’re going to be able to be doing more work, which means you’re going to be able to identify people faster. If they’re good at what they do, they’re not going to be able to hide by administrative work. They have to be exposed where they actually can, like do the human parts of their job. And I think that it’s going to be a much, much faster job. You’re going to get things done quicker. And I think the expectations are going to be higher because people think that because you have these tools, you can get things done. And it’s really changing. Like it’s actually pretty remarkable what’s happening right now with this. With this role in particular. We talk a lot about this right now in our work.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 34:13
Warren, you in the organization? Are you playing with any AI tools? If so, I do.
Warren Zenna: 34:17
All day long before I got on with you, I was playing with them. I’m in them all day. We have a very sophisticated system that we have. Oh, I mean, I would say the brain of it right now. And again, it’s not by necessarily because I think they’re the best or anything. They’re just the best that we have today happens to be the Claude, you know, platform. But that could change at any moment, as everybody knows. And it probably will, you know, I mean, there’s a lot of people spending ridiculous amounts of money on this. And I think that as much as I love whatever tool I’m using today, I have no belief that maybe even by the end of the year, I’ll still use the same one.
But today it’s Claude, you know, I think it’s really incredible how they’ve leapfrogged ChatGPT in terms of their capabilities and what it’s done and what they built in terms of its connectivity and analytical capability is really fascinating. And, well, we don’t use Claude specifically. We don’t dig into it. We use a third party system that gets really wonky if I get into this, but it’s a system that sits on top of it and we use it. It’s really pretty amazing.
And I happen to have like a really, really lucky. I have a preposterously brilliant human being who’s my partner now. His name is Derek Sather, and he was the chief revenue officer of Winning by Design. And now we work together on this. And it’s he’s, you know, he’s just really incredible. And together we’re building systems that I never thought was possible. So it’s turned our business really into an engine. Now that we can do so much. It’s really remarkable, frankly. And at times we look at each other like, this is crazy, you know? So yeah, AI is a big part of my life. I mean it all day long right now.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 35:58
I know you’re busy. A lot of different things going on. I’m curious from a productivity standpoint. Are there any specific apps you use either desktop apps on your phone, Chrome extensions, software that helps you manage things and be more productive? I don’t know what maybe the tech stack internally what you use for communication.
Warren Zenna: 36:15
Really good question. You know, I’d say the whole thing shifted over to AI now, you know, so it’s all plug-ins and stuff, right? But basically what I do is I have my system plugged into all my systems and I just have that one thing to remind me. I mean, obviously we use Slack and stuff like that. And, you know, we use Skool for our courses, which we’re probably going to redo all this. I think we’re going to build our own stuff, frankly, because we can now. Right.
But I’ll tell you something, you know, I also, I don’t talk about this, which I should, but we have a marketing agency, a separate business called Zenna Consulting Group, and it’s an organic marketing agency. I’ve had it for about 20 years. It’s really successful. We only do organic marketing for organizations, and we built an AI platform that solves a really interesting problem for companies, which is again, I don’t want to get into a whole big thing, but it solves a really unique problem that people have with their outdated blog posts, and it helps update them immediately. And it’s really fascinating.
So, you know, I’m experimenting with these things a lot and how can I make things go faster? How can I do things quicker? And how can I have like my systems constantly being reminded, like, for example, this, this platform called Howie, which is a scheduling platform, and I have all my stuff plugged into it, and I don’t use it for every single one of my meeting requests, but it does keep me very up to date on my calendar and really interesting ways. And it gives me a lot of updates on things that are going on. And my, the system that I talked about gives me incredible amount of insights about meetings I’m about to have.
I use Fathom to record all my stuff, but then I have Granola connected to it, or granola automatically connects to this system and it always feeds in there. So I can go into my system anytime I want. I can say, hey, give me some feedback on this thing that happened last week, or what am I missing that I didn’t? It’s really quite incredible. And then it also can do other things for me. Aside from that, it’s more proactive. Like it’ll say, hey, you know, based on that conversation you had with this X, Y, and Z, you know, here’s something else you could think about. And it’s quite incredible, like how forward thinking these things could be.
I also have an IP Bible, like every single thing. I’m like, you, right? I’ve got and reams and reams of things we’ve, I’ve written and videos I’ve made and conversations I’ve recorded on my podcasts and my book and all the frameworks we’ve done, and every single course curriculum and all the course materials. I mean, it’s overwhelming amount of stuff. And so I basically have this system that I built that has it as a brain. And anytime I speak to my system, it does a really, really incredible job of being able to know how to kind of triangulate across all that stuff and give me answers that are extremely relevant to it and frame it just for me. So I have a very uniquely bespoke and specified system of communication with my tools because it’s not general, you know, it’s always based on what I’m doing and everything. And it’s been really pretty incredible how quickly I can get things done.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 39:12
Warren, we’ll talk about your book, why you wrote it. But first, I just want to make a quick comment on this. I think based on our conversation before we hit record, they wrote this headline just for you on Granola. It’s like the AI notepad for people in back to back meetings. So I guess I could see why you use it.
Warren Zenna: 39:28
Yeah, it’s great. It really works. I mean, what’s nice about it is they did a good job of connecting it on the back end to all these different tools. So the connectors work with it so you can loop it through and it’s, you know, when you find stuff like that, it’s really, really cool. And there’s something new coming out every day.
So the book, so I mean, you know, I’ll be frank with you, I probably could have wrote a better book. It’s okay. There’s a better book in me. You know, I needed to get it out of my system. I knew I wanted to write a book about this. I think it does a really good job of kind of walking through the entire like business model. And more importantly, it talks like why it is that CROs are stuck in the situation that they’re in. It really breaks up in a lot more detail. The things we talked about on this podcast and a lot more detail and some of the ways in which they can be solved.
But, you know, I wrote the book probably about a year ago and like the world has changed already so much. I think that like, it needs to refresh. Like, honestly, I think it would be good. So I think it’s a good thing to read, but I would say like the next one that we’re going to write, which is my partner and I is going to be really quite in depth. It’s going to really have a lot of meat in it, because at the time I had accumulated five years worth of content, and I knew that I needed to write a book about it, and I got it out of my system. And I feel like it was like, okay, good. So I made my first pancake and now I’m the next. Pancakes are going to be better and better and better. And that’s sort of like how I look at it. Humble, humble answer.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 40:50
No, I love it. I mean, it’s when I was looking at it. It’s obviously very in depth. I mean, you, you spend a lot of time living this and thinking about it. So yes, it is a humble answer, but no, I appreciate you sharing your journey. It’s been pretty interesting to hear how it all came together.
I want to just encourage people to check out TheCROCollective.com. There’s a lot of resources there. You can go to the resources, events. They have round tables and as Warren mentioned, courses and other content there. So Warren, I just want to be the first one to thank you, I appreciate. Everyone check out more episodes of the podcast and we’ll see you next time. Warren, thanks so much.
Warren Zenna: 41:31
Thank you everybody. Jeremy, I really appreciate this conversation a lot. Thanks for having me on.
