The 3 O’s of Leadership (Rodman Likes)

Full transcript

Welcome back to the podcast, guys. Today we're joined by Rodman Likes. Rodman, welcome to the podcast. >> I appreciate it, Nicholas. Good to be here. Appreciate the invite. >> For anyone meeting you for the first time, what's your role today and what do you spend most time on? >> So, I'm the chief revenue officer at a PEback company called Green Shade Software. We focus on the payroll, HCM, and tax compliance business. We're about a 30 million net ARR company headquartered in Jacksonville, Florida, but most of the employees are remote and I spend a majority of my time just working on the business in terms of looking for efficiencies, how to run three revenue factories, ensuring that we are surrounding our customer and making them successful and driving as much business impact as possible. >> Okay. So, you've led SAS revenue teams for a long time.

Can you sort of identify the big chapters of your career that shaped how you lead GTM teams today? >> Yeah, I've worked for some worldclass sales organizations. If I go back to the start of my career as an individual contributor, I'd say I really kind of sunk my teeth into the opportunity to be in front of customers carrying a bag and just constantly being curious, asking a lot of questions, doing a lot of discovery, understanding what pains and challenges they were attempting to solve and ultimately what were the business drivers or the personal and business values or impacts that they were attempting to solve for. And I think that that just that process of just constantly being curious allowed me the foundation necessary to continue to transition into leadership roles and capacities. You know, there's nothing like a leader that has been there and done that, that has the scar tissue of being in the field and working with customers and having the accountability of carrying a quota. And and then if I look at the kind of trajectory of my career, I've had an opportunity to work for high cap publicly traded companies, smaller companies, VC backed companies, PE back companies.

And I think that lens across each one of those just gives me the ability to to do pattern recognition. What does great look like? So fortunate in my role and my capacity today as a chief revenue officer to essentially have full ownership over the entire go to market team which includes revops, pre-sales, our partners and alliances organization >> and then I uh work very closely with our cross functional teammates in marketing and customer success as well. >> And what's the difference between actually working inside a smaller company and then for example like a large enterprise? I think the biggest difference is the spotlight is always on. Uh there's, you know, you can't hide and you have to wear a lot of different hats. Uh and the crossf functional alignment with your teammates is so critical because you don't have the billion dollar marketing and sales budget necessarily that some of these big high cap publicly traded companies have. And you you just have to rely on open communication, continuous collaboration. you operate with a sense of urgency and ultimately you've got to re ruthlessly prioritize because when everything's a priority, nothing is.

And that becomes really critical to making sure that you're operating and focusing on the right things. >> And you talk a lot about repeatable execution and building these durable GTM engines. What are the boring fundamentals you obsess over that actually compound? So if you think about private equity businesses and recurring revenue organizations, what compounds the most is really leaning into customer success because for if you look think about you know customer lifetime value when you can make a customer successful and you align resources to ensure that their investment in your technology is resulting in the expectation of impact that they had hoped for during the sales process. Typically, those customers will continue to buy from you and as they grow and their business succeeds, then there's going to be more opportunities for you as a partner versus a vendor to continue to lean in and be a resource for them.

So ultimately while acquisition and new logos are super important and those ultimately become kind of the growth engine of the business, the compounding effect is really layering on investment in customer success and ensuring that your customers are getting the most value out of your your technology as possible. You've also posted about leveling up the partner ecosystem. What tends to make partner motions work in the real world? And do you see any traps that look good on slides but actually don't produce revenue? Yeah, you know, when done right, partners and alliances become a force multiplier for any organization. And in my experience, when leveraging partners and working very closely with partners, you typically see deal sizes increase and deal velocity increase as well. So partners typically will have access to information, resources, power decision makers because they have boots on the ground. They're doing things inside of that customers environment that vendors and other third parties are not getting access to. So when leveraging partners again, they can be a a force multiplier for sure.

And we're, you know, we're seeing that at Green Shades. We're very partner friendly. majority of our revenue, whether it's indirect or direct, touches a partner in some way, shape, or form. And I think it's you you have to treat partners just like you would a customer in in some regard. There's a lot of discovery to make sure that you have alignment with regards to mutual interests, that you're putting resources to ensure that whatever it is that they're selling, co-selling, reselling, or telling the ultimate buyer that it is consistent with the right outcome. So hopefully that addresses that question to some degree, but really like what we're doing in terms of our partner ecosystem today and I think there's definitely room for continued growth and expansion and leverage with regards to our partner allianc's ecosystem today. >> And what's the vision for green shades in the upcoming year? >> Well, we just had our revenue kickoff in Austin, Texas, the beginning of February. And one of the things that we all aligned on relative to our one word for this year is growth.

So everything that we're doing from marketing to customer success to product to finance to HR from the CEO down across the entire go to market organization we are all aligned to growth and we can't grow unless we make our customers successful unless we're driving impact and business outcomes for our customers. So, while that growth is important and that's our one word and that's our goal for this year, at the end of the day, it's all about making sure our customers feel the success and and what we're aligned to do and help them drive. >> And if you could give some advice to a person in the same field that is also maybe a CRO, what would you say to them? >> Surround yourself with really good people. That is the common denominator that I've seen time and time again across every organization where I've been a part of.

If you can surround yourself with great people that have similar interests, that have motivations and drive and tenacity and grit and they want to succeed just as bad as you do. Those are the people that you want to have on your right and your left. That is a force multiplier for sure. One of the things that's been really consistent for me over the course of my career is focus on three things. And I call it the three O's. They're ownership, openness, and optimism. Ownership is all about accountability. Do what you say you're going to do. Commit to it. Do it. And if you see a change in course based on what you committed to doing, then raise your hand and be the first to admit it. Number two, relative to openness is it's being a people leader. It's a servant leader. We are fortunate in our positions as head of sales, head of go to market, chief revenue officers to have a lot of people that rely on us to show up every day. And for me, it's being collaborative.

It's having an open door. It's ensuring that I'm constantly communicating and managing down just as much as the rest of the team is managing up. And just having authentic uh conversations with folks. And then optimism for me. There's a lot of things out there in the world today dating back to we'll call it COVID or the financial crisis kind of late 2008 2009 and if you focus on the negative then typically your mindset is not going to be in a place where you can lead with inspiration and optimism and so I tend to focus on just knowing that when we collectively have inspiration or a concept in mind that we're all putting the ore in the water and rowing in the same direction that we can accomplish whatever we set out to do. And having that optimistic mindset of we get to do this, we get to show up, we get to work together, we get to serve these customers, we get to help solve their challenges. To me, that is uh that's a gamecher. So to summarize, it's openness, ownership, optimism.

Those are the three O's that uh that have served me well from a leadership perspective over the years. >> Where did you find those? Did you invent it? >> I wouldn't say I invented it. I think as a senior leader, if you don't have kind of your principles from a from a leadership perspective, really do some self inspection. Write it down. Determine what it is that set you apart from others. And I probably leaned on those three O's for the last 15 years. >> Where does AI come into place in green shades? I would say we are early in our journey, but we're very optimistic and we are bought in relative to AI. Across the organization, there are what I would consider pockets of of different projects leveraging AI in some form or fashion. Um, I know from an infrastructure development perspective, they're leveraging and inserting AI into workflows to increase productivity across the entire organization, especially development, engineering, back office, front office.

We over the last couple of months, we're doing a tech stack optimization exercise right now where we've upgraded some technologies. We've leaned into some additional technologies. We're treating these technologies as part of the system of operation. We, you know, we've aligned to HubSpot as our CRM consolidating systems of records. So, we have a single pane of glass relative to the customer. And then on top of that, layered on Gong from a revenue intelligence perspective, and we're using Gong both from a forecasting and just a platform to really understand conversation and conversational intelligence. We are leveraging clay. And we have a couple folks in the organization that are really solid when it comes to understanding how to put signals and treat propensity to buy information so that we can just really hone in on our core ICP and ensure that we are understanding intent and sentiment analysis in the market. And we've seen some really impactful and powerful things in the short time that we've been leveraging clay on top of our other technologies.

>> Clay is great. I also use it when it comes to >> uh actually enriching the data. Well, if there is someone that wants to check you out, where should they go? >> If they want to check me out, they can certainly go to my LinkedIn profile and do a search for Rodman likes. I think I'm the only one on LinkedIn with uh that first name and that last name, so it won't be hard to find. If there are others of me out there, that must be an AI clone of some sort. If they want to check out GreenShades, then I would suggest just going to greenshades.com and that's a great place to find a lot of information about our solutions, who we are, how long the company's been in business, and all that fun stuff. >> Okay, great. I will add links, and thank you guys for watching. We'll see you in the next one.