Episode #115 The Jobs You Can't See ft. Andy Mowat

Hiring the wrong leader can kill your startup.
So why do GTM teams keep making the same mistakes?

In this episode of Bridge the Gap, we sit down with Andy Mowat, founder & CEO of Whispered (ex-Upwork, Box, Gated), who’s tackling one of the riskiest, most expensive parts of growth: executive hiring.

From scaling unicorns to building the largest database of unposted GTM roles, Andy shares why most teams build “backwards,” how to avoid wasting millions on the wrong VP of Sales, and what founders and executives should really be asking before they shake hands.

What You’ll Learn:
 • The #1 mistake GTM teams make (and how to avoid it)
 • Why “get the best people on the bus” is a broken playbook
 • How to evaluate CEOs & leadership teams before joining
 • Why executive hiring is not recruiting—and how Whisper flips the model
 • When to hire your first VP of Sales vs. CRO (with stage benchmarks)
 • The role of fractional leaders vs. full-time execs in early stage growth
 • How AI is reshaping org design & go-to-market strategy
 • Why most jobs are whispered long before they’re posted

Connect with Andy: https://www.linkedin.com/in/amowat/

PS - huge shout out to Sendoso for sponsoring our show.

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Transcript

This is Bridge the Gap powered by Revenue Reimagined, the podcast where we dive into all things revenue. Each episode, we bring you the top founders and go-to-market leaders to challenge how you think about growth and help you bridge your biggest go-to-market gaps. I'm Adam Jay. And I'm Dale Zwizinski. 

As always, thanks for hanging with us. There's a million ways you can be spending your time and we're grateful for you choosing to spend it with us. Be sure to check out our newsletter if you want the show notes and tactical advice on how to bridge your GTM Gaps. Let's get to it. 

Welcome back to another episode of the Bridge the Gap podcast powered by Revenue Reimagined. We have an incredible guest with us today who I've known for a long time. We'll talk a little bit about that. But Andy Moat, who has helped those companies like Upwork, Vox, Hulcher and He Build Gated, which is one of my favorite and most missed apps of all time. And now he's tackling one of the riskiest, most expensive parts of go-to-market executive hiring as the CEO and founder of the NISPR. 

The conversation is going to be a little bit therapy-sacred, a little bit teared down about how those companies think about talent and why go-to-market might need a NISPR network more than a Playlist. Andy, welcome to the show, man. It's great to see you guys. Awesome. 

Welcome to the show. Andy, the amount of companies you've worked in and helped try to scale multiple unicorns, one pattern you've called out often is GTM teams building things backwards. What do you mean by that? 

That's interesting. I don't recall doing that one. That may be a chat GPT make-up hallucination, but I'm happy to riff on it for sure. GTM teams doing it backwards. What do I get it wrong? I mean, I think I look at it as you've got to get the foundations right in GTM. You have to have aligned leadership and everyone's like, oh, that's the last thing, or let's just get the people and then we'll figure it out. And so I just can't tell you how many times leadership is not aligned. And so we do a lot of, it's funny, we've got our podcast where we, how I hire, where we talk to leaders, just about one thing, like how to make hire. And I can't tell you the number of people that they're really, really thoughtful about making sure. I always ask, how do you make your first executive hire? 

How do you do that stuff? And I've been in a lot of companies where leadership is not aligned. And then you have people that are running in a thousand directions. Everyone thinks they're doing the right thing. They're all playing, you know, none of us set out to execute in the wrong ways. But we just execute the way we think is best for the company, but if the strategy is ambiguous or changing, you're kind of fucked. And so I think a lot of people are like, let's just get the best people on the bus. But if you have the best people on the bus, but you don't unaligned city leadership, things aren't going to work well. Yeah. 

And I think that's where the conversation had led from in building things backwards. Like we just hire people because we think we need more BDRs. We need more salespeople. We need more, like they have some kind of formula calculated in their head versus, you know, what is the right strategy? How can we execute a strategy? 

What's the right product market fit? And then you back into it versus let's just go hire people, growth at all costs type of thing. And that's where a lot of GTM teams get it wrong. And then it is very costly for them to back out of that process. 

I couldn't agree more. I mean, we spend a lot of time, everyone thinks of whisper just as the Teebas database of unposted and throw to market roles. And yes, we are that, but we also want to help people make the right decisions on the companies, right? So I'd say a couple of factors there. One is trajectory of company and breakout. 

We can talk about that. Second one is the CEO. The CEO matters a lot. And we've kind of had the eight ways to pick the best, the CEO and one of the right questions to ask. We do a lot of like background diligence. And then people are, every time you go into an interview, you're, you can ask anything and you get to learn a lot. And so normally people historically have thrown that stuff away, but they're contributing that to our database. They've been doing that for four years, right? So we know the backstories on virtually every company out there of what's good leadership, what's bad leadership, how are decisions made at companies. And so that helps us really help our executives on the pro side make the right choices for their careers. Sure. Sure. 

So it's a balance, right? And I think you touched on this a little. Companies are looking for the right executive, right stage, right person, right time. I often say like, if you're, you know, a series eight startup, you probably couldn't go higher than DC sales and sales force. Probably not going to be the right person. But one thing that I don't think people pay enough attention to, and I think it's part of why we see the attrition that we see in startup land is, is this the right company for me? Not just the right comp plan, not just, you know, the right product. Is this the right company? Am I asking the right questions? And there's all sorts of gurus on LinkedIn who will tell you like, Hey, here's the guide of the 10 questions you have to ask in the minute. 

And you could have it for $39.99 and exchange my career. And like oftentimes those aren't the right questions with a dual sided marketplace, like how do you balance? Is it the executives that you're, you're serving to get the proper talent? Or do we lean on making sure that the talent finds the right company and stays, you know, longer than what is probably 12 months they have or 10% for sales? 

Yeah, it's a great question. So whispered, I think a lot of people see whispered and they say, Oh, you're another recruiter. Recruiters work for companies. We work for the executive. 

And I think that way on purpose because if you think about it, when you're a top and you know, I have a lot of good chats about this too, like when you pop your head up, you don't know where to focus. The companies that are breaking out are very, very different than the ones that are four or five years ago, especially in today's economy. Your network is stale. You don't know how the game is played. 

Rules aren't posted and it's lonely, right? So we built whispered not for the company, but for the executive. By doing that, now a lot of companies are finding us and they're saying, Hey, you've got rockstar executives in there. 

And so there's a post yesterday from the CEO of Unify like he just pinged us and we're getting things like daily now on like, Hey, can you help us with this to help us with this? There's a lot of things we don't do, right? We don't call people. We don't chase down candidates. We don't outbound the candidates. We don't hold their hands. We don't background reference. We are on the side of the executive, which means that if a company has a role, particularly this unposted and they bring it to us, it's free. And so that's why we very rapidly built the deepest database. I think to your point on like the, there are a lot of coaches out there that will sell you for a thousand dollars. 

Anything. Anything. How do you make your LinkedIn better? How to make your resume better? We have 98 playbooks on everything from what is the town part of how do they work, how to talk to what is the secret question, how to show up, how to research them. We've got 98 playbooks. They're all free. 

Anybody can come and look at that. Like our job is if there's a tactic that we know is working, we want to give that away for free. And we really focus on the pro side around 

the network to get the roles, the roles and all that. I think the other thing you talked on is marketplace. Everyone assumes we are in marketplace and there's some sort of supply and demand imbalance. There's no limit on the roles, but like we look at this, we're here to help the executive find and win and land those roles rather than just sort of match people. 

And so there's a lot more to it than to me. It's like, cool, you know there's a role at X company, but you have to be able to walk in the door. You have to get the network. You have to have the back door connections to be able to do that. We've built all that as well too. And so for us, it's not a, we don't have a marketplace problem. 

I'm looking, I'm peeking at the website now. We did a really good job with the website. Cause 

we can't focus on one thing at a time, Andy. So he's got to do multiple things at one time. 

I am very focused on what we're talking about, Dale. Thank you very much. Please ask your question, Dale. 

What are you looking at? App.whisperer .com. You'll see all the roles. We just talk about companies. So it's like, do they really have a database? They're all there. Yeah. Very cool. Yeah. 

Where do, where do a lot of leaders screw up the go to market or design Andy? Like what is the biggest problem you're seeing? 

I decision making. I literally was talking to a unicorn yesterday that has a three headed monster for GTM decisions. So if you think about it, if the CEO is having to make those decisions Dale between, between sales marketing and CS, that may not be efficient. Like personally, I would never go to a company where the CEO is the decider across GTM. 

I think obviously it like less than call it 10, 15 million. That actually makes sense. The CEO should be the decider. But at some point we reach a point when the CEO has so many other responsibilities, products, fundraising, living the company, the board, the culture of the company that if the CMO and CRO and CCO and Revox people all need to go to that CEO to make that decision, then you've got something wrong and decisions aren't being made. 

So I'm always looking personally for pushing that down. Now we had this guy, Mike Weir on our podcast, former CRO G2 now for now. He had this great comment, which was he went to talk to the CEO and the CEO said, no, I'm not hiring a CRO. I'm hiring a CSO. But it was an incredibly thoughtful answer around, I get it, but I need you not focused on renewals. 

I need you focused on logos. And I'm willing to accept the responsibility of that stuff. I think a lot of CEOs are just kind of like, cool, all responsibility rolls up to me and I'm the decider and bring me all the decisions. And it turns into a shit show. 

So that is Adam Sneeze because I think he was so viscerally opposed to that. So that would be like, I spent a lot of time thinking about like, how do decisions get made within that? If you think about the roles I've played, I've always run like Rev Ops, which is one of the most massively cross-functional things. And it could be like mind boggling if you have to get everybody's decision on this stuff. I mean, I had one where I had like nine months to bring people along and something that should have been like a five minute thing. 

I talked to another VP at Rev Ops today. She's like, it took me like six months to like convince everybody that we needed this one thing. And I'm like, God, that should be like a five minute decision. Right. And so clarity of decision making at the company level and where does Rev Ops report into? 

I don't care. I care. Honestly, I've reported to finance. I've reported to COO. I've reported to CRO. I've reported to Chief Growth Officer. It does not matter. What I care about is A, can you get the air cover? B, just the person to understand that function. Like I think a lot of people, podcasts and talk about SDR needs to report here or Rev Ops needs to report here. It's like, I could chair less on these things. I'm like, the actual reporting. 

Maybe the better question is of those people or type of roles that you've reported into, who's given you the most support and air cover to be successful in your role? 

But it's not by function. It's by people. Like, so it's like, it's also reported to CFO. It's like, you know, it's like, it does not matter. Right. Like it's the, how connected is that person and can you manage up to that person in the right way and can they use data? 

Like it's, I can care less who it is. I mean, if I had my preference, the ideal is CRO owns all of revenue. Rev Ops reports to CRO has appeared ahead of sales, ahead of marketing. But you've got to remember that like some works are more marketing driven or sales driven. You know, some are more product driven. So like every culture has their thing. I think I, I kind of look at what's where the piece is on the ground right now and our decisions being made well. It's not like there's one standard template that needs to be put into place for companies. Sure. So getting a job is hard, right? Yeah. 

Both on the recruiter side and on the candidate side. There's recruiters out there who we all know that say that they're the best at like everything it is they do. And recruiting has been broken for a long time. 

I think executives are executive hiring, whether you are the company or whether you are the candidate, like it's been broken. What made you believe that whispered is actually the right way to go about this to tackle the talent box? Cause this is a vastly different approach. And I do agree with, and I'm going to paraphrase your tagline that most jobs out there are whispered long before they're ever posted. What made you say I'm going to build a platform? 

Yeah. So first I would say I don't necessarily believe recruiting is broken. I think people got to remember that recruiters do not work for you. Period. Full stop. I think so many candidates, this is something we actually start with people like I don't need you. I'll just call some recruiters, but here's the reality. Like you can't call that recruiter back every week and check in with them and stuff like that. And so recruiters have a job, I mean I see this convo, every recruiter, every talent partner has this convo probably 30 to 40 times. Nice to meet you. You got a great background. I don't have a role for you. So right now our biggest source of things and people, I mean people are here in this every day. I signed up somebody the other day that had four VCs and two recruiters. 

They're like nice to meet you. No role. Go check out whispered. It's amazing. And so that's been our biggest source. So I don't believe recruiters are broken. And so I didn't start to solve recruiters. What I think the problem that wasn't solved was there's nobody on your side. 

It's lonely. So I had had, I think everyone gets punched in the face in their career at some point. Right. It's the day when you can't follow your boss, when nobody's calling you to pull you out and you've maybe left that job or you're scared shitless. 

Right. So I've had that three or four times in my career. Most people get punched in their face. Maybe in their late 30s, early 40s. 

That's really hard. I got punched in my face at like 25 when I graduated from Stanford Business School in 01 and there were no jobs. There was nothing. And so I had to, I was like shit. So for six months I was unemployed. I had to get really, really good at networking really fast. I had to figure out how to explain myself well. And I ended up working for this billionaire family that was just an amazing family, but they were like not in tech. 

And so I had to like, I ended up talking my way into working directly, running BD and RevOps for the CEO of Upworkers. Coming from a family that ran movie theaters. Right. So that was, then I was running a outsourced virtual assistant company and I ended up talking my way into box running post sale ops, post IPL. Right. And so it's like, and I'm not a card, I was leaving Gated and I was able to take over RevOps there, right. 

At a $450,000 company. So like you need to be able to explain yourself clearly. It's scary. You're like, I don't know who the recruiters are. And you know, recruiters move every couple of years. 

I don't know which of the hot companies. And so what I did when I wrapped up Gated at him, I was scared. I was like, dude, I'm 48 years old or 49. 

I'm like, am I ever going to be unproclaimable again? And I'm like, fuck, okay. So I got to do this different. 

So I called all my friends and I still didn't have a pretty deep network in RevOps. And I said, two things. One is when you interview with a company, what do you do with that information? 

I need to know who the hot companies are. And so they were like, I don't know. I have a Google sheet. I'm like, cool. Can you throw that in my, in this, in this form that I have every time you meet a company. So I started rapidly building this database map. And then I said, like, every time a recruiter calls you and you don't want the job, can you call me? And so that's how this started. And so I built it for me. And then I'm like, oh shit, like I'm seeing amazing data and amazing insights. So I kind of took the job at CARDA. 

I had a really fun run, get to work with great people, but I kept it on like a low burn and the data just started flowing it. And people have always built my entire career. I think because I got good early at networking, everyone's like Andy, you're the most network person. I didn't do it because I'm like, I want to be networked. 

I was like, I got burned early and it worked. And so I see a lot of people now, I mean, like Oracle just did a huge layoff. I'm seeing a lot of people that like 17 years at Oracle, I'm like, shit, you just got punched in the face for the first time ever. 

Right? Like that's been a really, really, really sting. And so it's lonely. I mean, it's like, I don't know who to reach out to. I've only ever had one node in my career. 

How do I find those unposted roles? And like that's what we built it for executives. Now what we've found is talent, partners and recruiters absolutely love us and we collaborate insanely well with them in some really cool ways. And I'm probably to talk more about that. 

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As a followup said, do you think the best GTM teams of the future will be built in public or in private networks? 

I think that if you are hiring director or below, you should post. I think as you get to VP, if you are in a hot company and you post a VP level role, welcome to 3,000 applicants, 299, 195 are wildly unqualified. And so then your talent team has to spend months either ghosting those people with people like, fuck that company. I can't believe OpenAI ghosted me for the VP or whatever. 

So that I'm not qualified. We had a great guest in our process. He's like, you might have been CRO, but have you been CRO this and this and this? 

And we all know, I'm not just looking for, did you have CRO on the title? Of course, I see something like VP of X at OpenAI pop up and I see people like, I can do that. I'm like, oh, you can't. And so do you have the self-awareness and not everybody does? So imagine if you're a company and you're dealing with that. I mean, I had a friend at another Unicorn. 

He posted a director level role. I got 40 pings from my network like, hey, can you ping that person and help? And I pinged my friend and he's like, dude, you're like a brother to me. 

And I've had 55 other people just like you. So even for the, we all know the front door of applying online sucks. We all know the tactics of go use your network for the back door. 

I think the back door is even getting fucked now. Like if a role gets posted, everyone knows like, go find your network and do that. So then why is a company would you post a role? 

Personally, I will post, like I had some great experiences at part of where I posted director slash senior director roles and I found candidates I wouldn't have expected. But I think you get to a certain point when it's less, it's more about cultural fit. It's about specific skills and backgrounds where you actually want to be outbounding to it. And so like, but these roles are also unique. So your talent team, your talent team is going to really excel at like, I see manager, director, but you get to like VP, like the talent team doesn't do all the time. So then you're faced with a decision of, do you hire, you know, somebody amazing as a recruiter externally that does this all time? 

Do you call whispered? And, you know, we're very clear, like we're not going to be a full service recruiter. If we can't do it, we'll send you a quick pass on amazing candidates quietly looking. That's all we do. And then we'll refer you to one of the great recruiters. And so I'm a big fan of the I personally would not post a VP plus. 

Yeah, we whispered. Yeah. I could be your marketing VP. I'm wildly unqualified. But if someone thinks they could be the CRO of open AI, I could be the VP of marketing for whisper. 

I think you actually could whisper because our bar is a little lower than opening. When you get passionate about something, I'm going to start really talking about it, which is fun. I mean, I spent a lot of time thinking about it for him, right? Like this is not Andy's recruiting agency. This is I remember when I saw the tagline come across, I spent like five hours on chat. And it's like your next role will be posted. It'll be whispered. I was like, oh, crap. I need to go buy that domain. Yeah. 

Good. I'm so passionate. Let's go. 

It's funny. So the past two episodes, I've been called out on that like Dale could tell when I'm in and when I'm not. And he messaged me in the last episode. He's dude, I love seeing you so hyped up about this. 

Because otherwise you turned around and ordered a coffee from the guy behind you if you're not pumped. Right. I was like one of those podcast that Adam wasn't pumped on. 

I am. So I run a 49 inch monitor at home. I'm traveling now and I'm on my laptop. It's like Dale will call me out and he'll be like, dude, I see you looking at your slack and the top left of your screen. 

Like when you pay it, will you pay attention to the podcast, please? I want to shift gears a little bit, just because you've spent time, obviously, in some very large companies, and now doing what you're doing, we're talking a lot about hiring a VP of sales, or hiring executives. When, in your opinion, is the right time to bring in a VP of sales? 

This is a debate we have. We see it on LinkedIn all the time. We have it with our clients all of the time. When do you bring in a VP? 

When is, like, no, Mr. or Mrs. Founder, like, you need to be selling, or you need some fractional help to build the foundation? What's the right flow based on your experience? 

Not only that, we have a playbook on exactly that with a table of for every go-to-market thing, for every stage, when you hire. I will consult my... I'll send it to you guys, stick in the notes, at whispered.com .com. 

Please. With proper credit, if you'll let me, I'll even throw that in the newsletter as well. 

Oh, totally, I would love it. Yeah, so we get asked this all the time. Before I answer your question, I'll just kind of, like, somebody will show up and they'll be like, I want to be CMO. I'm interviewing to be CMO at a C-stage company, where, like, holy shit, alarm bells need to go off right now, because either you're totally don't know what you're doing, or the company doesn't know what they're doing, but, like, run away. 

And so we have, we built this table to guide people, because a lot of people don't understand this stuff, right? And so you asked about CRO or VP of Sales, because I'll answer it differently depending on the difference. VP of Sales. Yeah, so VP of Sales, I'm generally looking at, like, more than $2 million in revenue. And it's kind of at, like, the channel market fit is really where you're focusing in, not on the product market fit. 

I say CRO comes more, like, $15 to $25 million of sales, when you really want to push it down there. So we think through, like, I'll see if I can find this one and drop it to you guys, because I think it actually could be a really fun discussion. From Riverside, you can probably share this stuff. Chat? Aha, okay, here we go. 

Full of done. Yeah, we think a lot about this, and you guys, I'd love to have you guys tear it down. We probably sat with 30 talent teams at venture firms and asked this question. And I think it's, I tend to think, you know, we try to correlate their stage, their employees, their funding amount, their revenue, and all of these different things. 

And so, yeah, you can rip it apart, but that's at least our current belief. I think it is changing a little bit with some of these AI companies, right, where they're just hitting the ground, going so fast and scaling. But this is kind of the current guidance we've got. 

And Andy, are you seeing a bigger, or a change in market from hiring somebody full time that may or may not be the right fit versus kind of some of the stuff that we're doing, which is a fractional world? We've done it a lot. We've seen a lot of different things. And so, it'll be a fractional start to get the foundation laid, then hire the person to just run the execution. 

Yeah, I love that. I mean, I think that's kind of coming in at seed slash early A, Dale. If you're talking about the sales side, I think there's a lot of founders that don't know sales. I think there's always, we talk about, like the founder needs to sell the first, like, maybe it's not a million, but they need to sell the first, like, 500, 600,000. I'm sure you guys are saying, like, I've seen a couple great folks where, you know, they basically say to the founder, like, send me 30 gone calls, and we will be able to tell you the 10 mistakes you're making. And I think that's insanely valuable. I always try people. 

I'd be curious how you guys got it. But if you're at that stage, like, don't just bring in some salesperson, expect them to solve your problems. Yeah. Figure out what is repetitive in your motion. Start to identify what those repetitive pieces and get junior people taken off the repetitive pieces. And eventually the whole sales process becomes repetitive and you figure out how your top of funnel works. And then you're off to the races with a great VP of sales. I think where you screw it up is you're like, I'm going to go hire somebody, set the farm on them, let them hire three AEs when we don't really have a motion. 

And that's where I love fractionalism. Every day. Yeah. That's really where, you know, we built this motion called the go to market gap. And what we realized when we started doing this was people have started to do what you're saying, like you have a product founder, operational founder, got to a million dollars in ARR. They feel like they have product market fit. They may or may not. Then they're like, we need more top of funnel. 

I need to go hire three BDRs. And then they're, because of what they've done, they're not necessarily in the space of knowing how to hire a VP of sales. So like, then it could put your whole company back to a bunch, right? 

So, Oh God, it's, it's, it's more than that. It's like, it's, it's killing the company. Right. Like if you're at that stage, you think about the way VCs are right now. It's like, if you hit a call, you're no longer the sexy girl at the party. Yeah. 

Yeah. The second, so what we're, so we have stabilization foundation, repeatability, because everyone wants this repeatability stage, but they have no foundation and like, they're like, I don't know if I have the right sales team. Like, so we always try to like stabilize them. 

Like how do we stop the bleeding? How do we get some of the deals closed? Then let's build a proper foundation with a hub spot sales force, getting some of that motion. Like I call it momentum. Like you need to get into a momentum stage before you can get to a repeatability stage and then out the scalability. But the biggest challenge I think people have is that the investors are now pushing them or they were, I think this is probably 12 months in a rear, they're pushing them to go higher of VPS sales because that was the old playbook. 

Now people are realizing that's not really necessarily the right playbook. You can iterate faster with someone that's done it. But what I'm seeing now is investors asking these CEOs, like what's your AI strategy and charter and where are you going with that? Now, whether once again, whether the investors even know what they're talking about, another whole conversation that we can have on a separate day. 

But so what we're starting to work with our founders on is like traditional go to market or AI augmented go to market. And so the problems are still the same. I still need top of funnel. I still need to move things through the deal. I still need to quote like those things aren't different. It's just the way you solve the problem can be different if you build a strategy. So we've been doing a lot of AI charter work with people above go to market. So it's not like AI is not a go to market thing. AI is an organizational thing that could 

be a good word. I think a lot of investors and CEOs think sprinkle matter. I've heard so many times friends have been like, just just AI, you'll be fine. And you're like, no, it's like, it probably will end up being a show as the MIT study showed. 

They're experimenting. Like the way I like to categorize it is you're experimenting with AI and you don't have an AI strategy. If you want to be AI or administrative or native, you need a strategy that you execute on just like a go to market strategy. 

You do. A lot of people do just go start blasting messages out, but you're not going to get what you're not going to get the ROI on what you're paying for. 

Couldn't agree more. Yeah. 

I mean, that's your outbound strategy now. I'm guessing you guys focus on specific stage. You know, it's like you're probably very tuned to our sweet spot for our values here. 

And I deeply believe it. Like there's a stage where people haven't started. You can see in our table, when you start building out your VP level ranks at like the B and the C, and then you start hiring your C level at like the C and the D. It's like, but before that, I think people should absolutely be leveraging something versus like you're practically betting the company on your wrong sale hire. 

Yeah. 100%. Yeah. Absolutely. 

Andy, as you look out, you know, call it two to three years. I don't think you could really go three to five. How does hiring and org design evolve over the next couple years? 

I mean, I think we're seeing streamlined, senior level folks in many of those functions. The obviously the CS support function is probably, I mean, ideally, there's always kind of a human in the loop type of thing. I was waiting, I was listening to, I think it was the CF Tech, the other day, talking about that. 

It's just like, just fully AIing it, like SDR or CS or anything like that. It's going to be a doomed loop. But everyone should be more data enabled with AI supporting them. So I think you're going to see more efficient functions. I think if you are a leader and you don't know how to use AI, you're probably going to be left behind. And so like we literally are, it's high demand. 

I just have to do it. It's probably like one of our many execs that are on the bench right now. Come on in and just teach like a clay class to the execs that have never played with that stuff before. I think I try to bring in guests to our member huddles that can help people understand AI and how to think about that as well too. 

Do you think the the CRO role is going to splinter or do you think it's going to consolidate? 

I mean, I think you need someone that owns revenue and can drive the decisions across that. So I don't know, I don't know how it would splinter. I don't know how it would consolidate. 

Right. Like if there's a head of revenue, I mean, I think of CRO, obviously the title is used in many ways, but to me, CRO is the head of revenue. I think some people in the marketing side will level over that, which is the CMO needs reports to CEO. But then you've got that CEO CRO dynamic. I mean, I had somebody pay me yesterday and they were like, I saw this VP of marketing. I hope it reports to the CEO. 

And I was like, I hope it doesn't. And so I mean, it's an ego thing. Like that's just a pure ego thing. 

Well, I do think the CEO is, you know, for good or for bad, like has strong opinions on marketing. And so if you have to go through a CRO to do that, I understand that point, right? But it's also like you get what you pay for kind of thing. Or it's like you accept the bargain that the CEO may send you in while this chase is or not really understand marketing, whereas ideally a true CRO is just as that one, as Mike Weir talked about, which I just love this quote was, the true CRO owns revenue. And he's got her stand marketing at a deep level. 

A cheap sales officer knows how to close business. And so I think both can work. I'm a big believer in the power of brand and great marketing and over-investing in marketing. 

Or maybe we're just not comping marketing in the right way. Like maybe marketing needs to be seen as a revenue generator through qualified top of funnel. 

We can do a whole separate show on this. 

I mean, to me, the proper place, I don't think you limit the conversation from the CMO to the CEO. Like you still got to have those conversations. But like you're saying as you're growing, someone needs to make a decision that is not the CEO on everything go to market. And so if we tie compensation or revenue across the marketing sales and CS world, you get in a much better place. 

I guess and I'd say, I think everybody wants to make marketing point operated. And like great marketing, what then ends up happening is you spend all of your marketing dollars on stuff that has short term ROI and you can measure. 

But I think great marketing, you know, you need to have 20, 25%, which is listed. Like, I mean, think of like what Udi did at GOM, right? Like they did amazing stuff and you can't measure that stuff. 

But it fundamentally changed like their positioning versus chorus. And so like, I think if you truly are like every dollar of marketing needs to be measured, you're going to end up with shitty vanilla marketing and great. And then you end up with bad brands. 

And so I think I personally, you know, I advocate for like 20% experimental, like do really crazy things, right? Like ramp came up with, I mean, now they're like, how many podcasts are you on where ramp is not a sponsor? Right? Like it's like 1%. You guys are probably sponsored by ramp as well too. 

We're not. We'll reach out to the next. 

Okay. 

We'll have that media can't go out today. 

I'm talking to tomorrow. They're trying to sponsor us too. So it's great. They're good people. Yeah. So no, I mean, I guess it's like marketing, I guess Dale is my key point. There's marketing needs to be free to experiment because I've seen too many where it's just, I mean, I know that I can jack up things by boosting more pay dollars, but we all know pay. If you don't have a strategy beyond paid and SEO and events, like you don't have a great top funnel. 

I'm always like, yeah, I'm just, I'm just visually opinionated around like being only measured on MQL. 

Oh, okay. Yeah. I mean, to me, marketing and sales need to meet in the same place. We learned that really early in the box, right? Like it's, it's pipeline. It's not MQLs. Qualified pipeline. 

Yeah. I remember one company where I showed up and I will name the company, but they were like, we weren't allowed to rule out a scoring model because it would have made us look worse from a marketing standpoint. You're just like, oh, no, it's qualified pipeline. Pipeline coverage is where marketing and sales meets. It's absolutely is the case on that. But it's like, don't just treat marketing like salespeople and coin operators. 100%. Yeah. 

Yeah. So, in public this is remarking on MQL should be shot. So, I can tell you and I will not name names. We have, we're having this debate with multiple clients right now. Where I was on an executive meeting last week and if marketing got 497 MQLs last month, well, you changed the fucking criteria to make yourself look worse. Like an MQL means nothing to me. Zero. Like, yes, I want to track where it's coming in from, but saying you've got 497 MQLs and you're the best marketing team, it's like, no, where's the pipeline? Whole separate. 

To me, the pipeline, I've written a fun article on like the power of pipeline coverage. It's actually a hard metric to get, but it's like every, but if you have it, it creates the right force tension, right? Which is, we did it at one company and, you know, it was like that the covers is really good. And then sales like, oh shit, like my pipeline is not clean. And so they get there, then they can hold marketing accountable. And then marketing can hold sales accountable is like, are you keeping the pipeline clean? And then vice versa, like, do I have enough? And that should be the discussion. 

And it's also like, say an opportunity gets created, would they close a four months, four quarters out, and then we never get to that quarter? That's never really counted because it wasn't really rapid, right? It wasn't really by- I can't. 

I can't. All right, we are coming up on time in a typical Adam and Dale form. We have some rapid fire for you. We know the last question Dale is going to ask, but we'll try to keep him from asking it. 

Maybe. And if I should have read something and known these notions of this, I don't know, so I'm totally prepared for it. 

You absolutely should not have. What's a better first hire? Revops or demand generation? 

I'm trying to give you a really good answer. I know where my gut goes. I think it depends upon your good market model. It totally does. There is no right answer to this question. If you are a PLG with high inbound, it's Revops. If you are an enterprise sale with a heavy ABM and really high ACV, it's dementia. That's a good answer. It's not one size fits all. 

Who's your favorite operator to follow right now? Molly Bodenstein. 

Oh, I love Molly. I didn't know you knew Molly. I spoke to Molly yesterday. 

Oh, Molly, a Whisperer alum. She's hired three or four people off of Whisperers. We helped her make the decision on engines. So Molly actually coded up a good portion of our initial data infrastructure at Whisperers. So Molly is a very close friend. 

That makes me very happy. She's an incredible human being. Andy, who's one hire you've made that changed everything for you? Either role or person? 

Ben Levenski. I interviewed him to run my data team at Kulturen. He came in second. He was living in Sweden. Now he's an interesting cat. He was married in Australia. So he really wanted to work at Kulturen. But he just kept on me. And so then I hired him to run Mops. 

And he actually rocked it. Then I gave him SOPS and we just kept moving around. And then he's easily. But it's the kind of guy that I remember having a convo with Ben like 30 days in. I said, dude, you are one of the smartest guys I've ever met. But I'm going to have to fire you if you can. Like slow down. 

Because he's like, he took the feedback really well. It was a really interesting convo. But like he was always bringing the ideas every time. He's like, if you've thought about it, but they weren't like, here's some random thing. But he's like, we can go do this. It will drive this. It will drive this. And so Ben learned to channel and deal with the kind of the ruffling other feathers. 

And then you take that superstar power that he had along with a more nuanced stativeness. He was amazing. I mean, we took Kulturen from $5 million to $150 million. And Ben was a key part of that for sure. Yeah, love that. What's the most over you? I know I know everybody lives in Australia right now. 

Yeah, he's probably down under. Nice. What's the most overused phrase in GTM hiring today? 

We only hire great talent. We only hire great talent. OK, tell me how to accept that. Like it's like, we are, does anybody not hire great talent? 

Does anyone say hi? I want to hire shit. 

I did talk to a talent partner and we always send them talent teams are like A plus people. And they're like, we want to see all of your talent. I said, why? 

Well, we have some B companies too. And I said, OK. But that being said, and I do think it's like, not everybody is top 1% talent. But it's also like certain people are top 1% for the situation. 

And you need to understand that. But I think these like, I hear some of these podcasts which are like, we only have that great founder. So like what's a great founder? Right. Like a great founder, somebody is like up into the right in the products there. 

Like is that a shitty founder if they just couldn't find product markets fit? No. Same thing with talent, right? 

So much people like blame the talent. This is great quote. I just got to read it. 

Bear with me for a second here. This is the quote that was like told me why I was building this business. By Elena Berna, who's now running the market level. Every company, oh, hold on crap. 

I just see a something here. Every company bullshit something in the process. Nobody tells you the actual problems. They say everything is great. It's butterflies and unicorns. 

We have so much opportunity to come join us. When you sign those online and six months in, they say, fuck you. You are not performing. And guess what? 

They just moved on to the next shiny thing that they think will solve all their problems. But you're stuck with it on your resume with a failure point. But you have to explain for the rest of your professional career. Why not work out of that company? It's perceived as your fault, even though you were not given the right transparent information. You weren't potentially even set up for success in that role in the first place. Adam, we've talked a little bit about this. I know you felt. 

Oh, yes, we have. I'll call it out by name. Falcon.ai, baby. I was hoping you wouldn't call it out by name. 

But I was referring to that. They're out of business. That's okay. No one's familiar with them. No, but it's like this is why we built RISPR. When I saw that quote, I was like, man, it is more than just a job. I need to help you make the right decision on this career. 

And that's why we started Revenue Reimagine. All of us have been pitched. Like we're investors and you get in there and you realize like, if you were just honest with me upfront, we could have put a plan together to execute on or know what the challenges are. And so now we have that opportunity because we do an audit that you really should be, we do a full go to market audit that anyone that's getting hired for these big roles should have the ability to have the information before they make a decision. 

I agree. But I mean, let's be honest, haven't we all like hired somebody and know we're on the way out the door? Yeah. I just agree with you. You're a great hire. 

I just need to get you in the door. Like that's totally true. I mean, I've got a candidate right now who had a five day interview process from Meet to Offer. They blew away the entire benchmarks and gave more. There's like four or five screaming red flags, but still it's a rock star hot AI company. 

And so this candidate will probably tick the rule. And they're going in eyes wide open, but like, I don't know. It's just like, we've all kind of said like, man, that candidate is just so good. 

I just need to get a man and you move from evaluating them to selling them. And you, you know, I say, you know, Carter, I knew I was wrapping up when we hired the amazing head of enablement. Like I couldn't be like, hey, hey. And but at the same time, like I made sure she was really set up for success before I departed. So it's hard, right? Like you can't tell people everything all the time. Yeah. 

And the present. Andy Moat. Thank you so much for joining the show. If you're looking for a job, go check out whispered because you're not going to find it on LinkedIn. You're going to go, you're going to apply. You're going to get sucked in the ATS of this. There's 7,000 other people who've applied. 

And by the time it hits LinkedIn, the job's probably already filled. Andy, thanks for joining me. Thank you, man. This is a blast. Thank you. Thanks so much for listening. We hope you enjoyed the conversation as much as we did. 

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