Why FP&A Fails at Supporting Go-To-Market and How to Fix it with Chris Walker
In this episode of FP&A Tomorrow, host Paul Barnhurst (aka "The FP&A Guy") sits down with Chris Walker to explore the intersection of finance, marketing, and sales. They break down why most companies struggle with measuring the return on go-to-market investments and how finance teams can step up to own and optimize this critical function. Chris shares his unconventional yet data-driven approach to revenue operations, highlighting how traditional marketing and sales attribution models are broken and what companies should do instead.
Chris Walker is a visionary in B2B go-to-market strategies. As the CEO of Pasetto and Executive Chairman of Refine Labs, he is shaping the future of revenue operations by integrating finance, marketing, and sales intelligence. With years of hands-on experience in sales, marketing, and finance, Chris brings a unique perspective to understanding and improving go-to-market efficiency.
Expect to Learn:
Why go-to-market investments are often misallocated and how finance can take ownership of optimizing them.
The biggest mistakes companies make when measuring marketing ROI and sales effectiveness.
How finance leaders can work more strategically with marketing and sales teams to drive profitable growth.
The importance of rethinking attribution models and revenue operations frameworks.
Why Chris believes that FP&A should play an offensive, not defensive, role in shaping business strategy.
Here are a few relevant quotes from the episode:
“Finance leaders need to stop looking at marketing as an expense and start seeing it as an investment portfolio.”
“Marketing attribution models are fundamentally broken because they try to divide credit rather than measure impact.”
“Go-to-market investments are often misallocated because finance and marketing don’t speak the same language.”
In this episode, Chris Walker delivers a wake-up call to finance and revenue leaders, urging them to rethink how they measure and optimize go-to-market investments. If FP&A wants to drive better business decisions, it must stop looking at marketing as an expense and start managing it like an investment portfolio. By adopting a data-driven, strategic approach to go-to-market, finance teams can help their companies grow more efficiently and profitably.
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In Today’s Episode
[01:35] - Introduction to the Episode
[03:33] - What Great FP&A Looks Like
[04:43] - Why Go-to-Market Efficiency is Broken
[07:23] - The Role of FP&A in Go-to-Market
[11:01] - Rethinking Marketing & Sales Attribution
[18:36] - The Shift from Growth-at-All-Costs to Efficiency
[26:40] - Chris’s Companies & Their Mission
[33:41] - Practical Steps To Better Understand Go-to-Market
[41:06] - Evaluating Marketing Investments
[48:10] - The Right Way to Measure Content Marketing
[53:15] - Content Strategy for Business Growth
[58:34] - Inbound And Outbound Marketing Strategies
[01:10:47] - Final Thoughts & Wrap-up
Full Show Transcript
[00:01:35] Host: Paul Barnhurst: Hello everyone. Welcome to FP&A Tomorrow, where we delve into the world of financial planning and analysis, examining its current state and future prospects. I'm your host, Paul Barnhurst, aka the FP&A Guy, and I'll be guiding you through the evolving world and landscape of FP&A. Each week, we're joined by thought leaders, industry experts and practitioners who share their insights and experiences. This week, I'm thrilled that we have a guest that's an expert in Go-To-Market, and it's going to be able to share some real great insights with us today. So Chris Walker, welcome to the show.
[00:02:08] Guest: Chris Walker: Paul, awesome to be on the show. I gotta say, this is the first true finance focused podcast that I've been on and I've been waiting for this day for a long time because I feel like I have a lot to offer to this audience. I know a bunch of people in the audience right now, especially CFOs and higher level finance. People are wondering, you know, how do I understand the impact of my marketing investments? Where should I spend more or should I spend less? Where should I spend it on? Do we have too many sales reps or should we have an SDR team or not an SDR team? There's so many different questions around, you know, Go-To-Market investments and the performance of those investments. And frankly, I believe that almost every company gets it wrong right now and leads them to the wrong. They ask the wrong questions, they use the wrong data and get led to the wrong answers. So looking forward to sharing my perspective.
[00:02:50] Host: Paul Barnhurst: I'm going to love to dig into that. I thought it was as simple as just hire more salespeople and there's always market.
[00:02:57] Guest: Chris Walker: Good point. Yeah.
[00:02:58] Host: Paul Barnhurst: Yeah. I've seen more than one company do that, and I just always shake my head going. We maybe a little more strategy here. So just a little bit about Chris. Give you a little bit of his background and then we'll jump into Go-To-Market here. So Chris is focused on building an ecosystem of complementary, highly specialized B2B Go-To-Market technology and managed services. He's shaping the future of B2B Go-To-Market strategies, is the CEO of Posito and the Executive Chairman of Refine Labs. So one question we'd like to ask all our guests. I'd love to get your take, because I know you have a little different perspective than the typical finance person. For you, what does great FP&A look like if you're in a company or you're looking at FP&A, how do you know it's great? FP&A what does that mean or look like to you?
[00:03:42] Guest: Chris Walker: You know, I've been the CEO of a $20 million business for a while, and we had a small, you know, finance and FP&A team in the company. And so for me, sitting in the CEO seat. The best part about FP&A was, and what I'm looking for is how do we figure out how to deploy investment strategically to be able to achieve our business objectives, which is not only growth, and having finance people that can, that professionals that can do more than just dump, you know, ideas or numbers into the Excel model and tell us what comes back, but have a perspective on the actual decisions and the strategy and why we do things and how to prioritize them. And we're spending more or spending less. I think that's what basically everyone is craving from this function. And I work with these people frequently now, and I think there's so much talent and so much skill and so much untapped potential that could be added to not only Go-To-Market, but the entire company from the FP&A function and the finance department broadly.
[00:04:38] Host: Paul Barnhurst: I appreciate that, yeah, definitely the CEO. I'm sure you see a lot of it and helping with those investment decisions. So one thing you mentioned there is a lot of untapped potential. Can you elaborate on that? What do you mean by that or what are you seeing that leads you to that conclusion.
[00:04:52] Guest: Chris Walker: So I'll focus on Go-To-Market for right now because that's where I understand the best. And so I see this angle from two sides right. So half of my customers, the CFO and CEO bring us in. And the other half the customers come from the CMO or the CRO. And all roads lead to us working with both of them at the same time. But the entry point is different. And when you look, you have chief revenue officers and CMOs that have a ton of experience in their specific specialty and function and oftentimes lack financial acumen, the ability to do FP&A, the ability to understand a portfolio of investments and how to scrutinize those investments. So they have great Go-To-Market and very little finance. And then on the finance side, you have people that really understand finance and really have tons of skills and modeling and looking at investments and being able to build that stuff out, but lack the practical experience of Go-To-Market to be able to properly weigh in and say, this model is wrong, we're going to do it this way, of course. And so they rely on whatever the CMO and CRO feed them, usually from a model or what they hear from Gartner or some conference or something like that. And so you have two functions that have important independent skills. And all the problems lie at the intersection of these two functions. And what are the problems?
[00:06:02] Guest: Chris Walker: Slower growth, higher cost of acquisition, lower enterprise value. Those are the core problems that are facing most B2B, SaaS and tech companies right now. And they are the most painful, expensive problem in a B2B company today. And the reason is because Go-To-Market investments in a B2B tech company are somewhere between 30 and the low end, and 100% of revenue for some companies that burn. And it's by far the biggest expense on the PNL, way more than product development, usually, and way more than R&D. And so when it comes to where is the opportunity to be and then Go-To-Market for the most part is also the driver of growth outside of product. So you have growth and, you know, cash and efficiency on getting net new IRR. And you put those two things together. And those are a great indicator of your enterprise value multiple is going to be. And yeah, many people have done that study. You have, you know, you have a five year payback versus a two year cash payback. And you look at public market companies, the difference in the revenue multiple could be, you know, a ten x for a low cash payback period on revenue and A3X for a high cash payback period. So we're talking billions of dollars, even hundreds of millions for a middle market or lower middle market company that are on the line here.
[00:07:10] Host: Paul Barnhurst: Yeah, it makes a lot of sense, right? I mean, if that tack is really attractive, you're going to get a much bigger multiple because your revenue is worth a lot more. You don't have to spend near as much to get it if you're keeping those customers right, I get it. What I'm curious is right. You mentioned how, hey, you got the great Go-To-Market, you got the finance. What can FP&A do in this discussion to kind of better help Go-To-Market with, with the knowledge that many of them don't have that Go-To-Market knowledge. Is it: do they need to FP&A people look to learn more in that area? I mean, how do they challenge? What do you recommend to make it, you know, to maximize that relationship?
[00:07:49] Guest: Chris Walker: I think that and I don't know enough about this. I might be speaking out of turn here, but I know that a chief revenue officer and a, you know, chief marketing officer are very accustomed to using part of their budget to hire an advisor, consultant, expert to help them and look from the outside and help them understand things and make better decisions. I think the CFO needs the same thing related to Go-To-Market, and they're not getting it from rev ops. They're not rev ops doesn't really understand. They've never been a sales leader before. They've never been a marketing leader before, they've never been a finance leader before. But all of a sudden, this tech admin specialist is responsible for telling all these C-level executives what to do. It's just a total mismatch between skills and experience and job role responsibilities or expectations. And so I think that finance like that's what my company does in a lot of cases, like we advise CFOs around how they're measuring their marketing investments, what their model looks like, what the top level KPIs should be across the Go-To-Market, whether those things are going up or going down, what that means, how they should think about planning with the holes in the plan are. And we've just seen it with a lot of companies. And so that experience can be really helpful to be able to bring in. And many other sea level executives will use something like that. I'm not sure whether CFOs do that frequently or not.
[00:08:57] Host: Paul Barnhurst: Yeah, I mean, I think there's times, but yeah, in general, I remember I don't think we ever brought in an expert to look at any of the stuff that sells gave us. We sat down and worked with them and we had the conversations and they may have brought someone in. But, you know, I can't directly think of finance really bringing somebody in on the sales. But I get what you're saying is being able to have that voice that can really kind of look at it and speak to it beyond just, hey, I can look at the numbers, I can run the model, I can do all that. But do I really understand enough to weigh in here?
[00:09:32] Guest: Chris Walker: If you really look at the root of the issue, the framework and the process is the problem. It's the way of thinking that then drives what data do we look at? Why do we look at it? What decisions do we make from it? It's actually that part. That's the broken part. And it's very difficult to be able to because I went to a CMO CRO school event last week just to see what are these people learning about this stuff. And they get taught, oh, what we should do is we should try to divide the credit between marketing and sales and SDRs and partners, and we can plan our revenue and we can analyze our revenue and ROI based on that model. And that's what every C-level revenue leader is being taught right now. And it is the number one problem of Go-To-Market dysfunction, because those departments each do completely different things in what I call a revenue factory. You have the people that put the wheels on the car. You have the supply chain, you have the incoming inspection. These people are doing different things in the factory, measuring them all the same way and saying, these people are good at this thing, and these are the only people that made this car. No, everybody helped make the car. And so the way that they define credit based on the department is the root of the problem. It's the perpetuated problem. The reason they do it is because finance only tracks by GL code and what department spent the money. So it's the only way that they can go back and scrutinize the investments about which department spent the money. And we need a much more sophisticated, well thought out way to look at why are we spending this money? What is the purpose of this money? We want to know who spent it, obviously, but that is the least effective way to try to decide whether these investments are effective or not.
[00:11:00] Host: Paul Barnhurst: Yeah. So let's jump into that. You got to the Go-To-Market team. You got finance. You're the one who has to measure all this. Ignore the GL, throw out the P and L whatever traditional method you want. How do you recommend? I mean obviously a lot of people use attribution. I know you've talked about that. Some use, you know, KPIs, but how do you think that should be measured to make sure you know how performance is going and you can really hold people accountable?
[00:11:28] Guest: Chris Walker: Yeah. So just to be clear, attribution is the means to get to that, that number of which department did it. So the whole thing is based. And then with attribution you attribution. You can say, oh, marketing did that because they came through our website. And then underneath that you can try to say our Google ad did it right. So that's the objective. But at the top level they're trying to divide it by department. And then once they divide it by the department then they see oh like marketing plan by 7%. And then when that happens then they look in deeper and then they scrutinize the marketing stuff.
[00:11:59] Host: Paul Barnhurst: Yeah, exactly. Go down and look at Google and okay, Google brought us this many leads or whatever. Or we went.
[00:12:03] Guest: Chris Walker: Exactly.
[00:12:04] Host: Paul Barnhurst: Yeah. I've done all those analysis before.
[00:12:06] Guest: Chris Walker: Precisely, yeah. Yes, exactly. So I have myself as well. And I think over time I've just figured out better ways to do it. So that's all I'm sharing here. Like, none of the things that I'm talking down on, I haven't done myself, just to be clear. And so the way that I like to look at it is, first off, the department level structure is the wrong set. And the reason if you narrow in on the problem, the actual problem is that a company can easily manage and measure from when the opportunity gets created by sales until when it gets closed. One you can build an easy financial model. You can say, this is our PRP, what the conversion rates need to be. Every finance team can do that. The root of the problem is that everything before the opportunity gets created, you have no visibility, no data, no framework. And what actually happens is that the amount of pipeline that you need to have appropriate quota coverage to manage that process, you don't get enough of it. And that's why your sales team has a lower quota coverage. And the reason is because you don't have visibility in a process to measure that, that thing in the same granularity as you do from opportunity to close one, that's really the problem. And so and when you look at the marketing investments or if you look, I like separating it more based on if you think about it like a revenue factory and setting it up based on the stages of the factory, then we think about it as you have part of the factory, which is called pipeline creation.
[00:13:31] Guest: Chris Walker: You have another part of the factory which is closing the pipeline? Yeah. You have another part of the factory which is renewing customers. And then you have the last part of the factory which is expanding accounts. And so there's a four stage simplified process. And then we underline underneath that we actually break it down into nine stages in our more complex model. But let's start with the four for now. And so when you look at creating pipeline, part of creating pipeline doesn't fall into typical marketing budgets, which is called prospecting and prospecting for 6,070% of companies is owned by sales, but is really part of the pipeline creation process. And they want to do it because, oh, our you know, if we train our BDRs to become our future new reps and we'll have a pipeline of people, that's why they go under sales. But it creates this total misalignment between the pipeline creation engine, between the marketing, and then the SDR is falling under sales. And from an investment standpoint, then you have the SDRs trying to go out and get pipeline so they can get credit for it against the marketing stuff so that they can get credit for.
[00:14:32] Guest: Chris Walker: And you have this credit fighting between SDRs and marketing that's totally useless and unproductive and doesn't help you at all. As a sea level leader, to look at the data and make a decision about what to do after that. And so I just think that whole thing needs to get thrown out and providing the solution for it. So anyway, whether you organize with your SDRs on your sales or marketing, it's a pipeline creation expense that should go with many of the marketing expenses. But inside of a marketing budget, there are tons of different things that you spend money on, and they all have different objectives, time horizons, purposes. Let me just break down a couple of examples for you. And we analyze this at a bunch of companies, and we break down every single line item down to like the $30 receipt at a trade show for a couple of drinks. Some money that you spend in marketing will go to your user conference or to customer marketing, and it'll be to increase expansion and renewal. Right. So and then so we can't measure that or we shouldn't measure that against pipeline creation. Part of it might go to analyst relations and thought leadership and messaging and sales enablement and things like things like that actually have benefits across the whole customer life cycle. Being in the top of the Gartner Magic Quadrant impacts renewal and retention arguably more than it does new logo acquisition.
[00:15:39] Guest: Chris Walker: And so those investments also should not be scrutinized against pipeline creation. Then inside of it then you have advertising and different strategies around advertising. Most of it is lead generation, but some of it could be for brand building, as people will call it. And then you have your event things, and some events are for leads and other events are for brand. And none of those are really defined within the investments or things like that. So you have this. The point I'm trying to make here is that you have all these different investments with all these different purposes, and then what everybody tries to do is say, oh, now we just put one model on one model against this and say. And that model is going to tell us what things are working and what things aren't. And I'll give a great finance example for these people. What is that pipeline creation investment that set of investments. It's just like an investment portfolio. And some of your investments are for growth. Like you bought the Nvidia stock. Hopefully you didn't buy it yesterday or two days ago or whatever before it went down. But some of the investments are for growth and for value. And you're going to buy it and you're going to hope the stock goes up and you're going to measure the success of it against whether the stock went up or not and how much you gained.
[00:16:41] Guest: Chris Walker: Other investments are going to be for dividends, and you're going to buy it and you're going to say, did I get my 5% dividend or not? Or what was that? Some of them are going to be for risk mitigation. You're going to buy it to diversify your portfolio and mitigate risks. Other things are going to be like massive, like a penny stock or like cryptocurrency. And it's going to be like this one little investment, if it pays off, could make the difference in our entire company and value. And if you took all those investments and you said, no, I'm just going to measure them against whether we got our dividend or not. That's what you do in scrutinizing marketing investments right now. And so what does that do? It pushes all the investments to one category called lead generation and performance marketing. And then all the investments get measured off that. And then you apply your multi-touch attribution models and all the different stuff on it, and then you sort it by department and the whole process is broken. And so the first step is acknowledging we have different investments, just like a portfolio. And those investments need to be measured in different ways. And one blanket model is not going to fix not going to be our solution.
[00:17:38] Host: Paul Barnhurst: Yeah, I mean that makes a lot of sense. I like the portfolio analogy and I get what you're saying. I do marketing with different vendors now as part of my business and often have that conversation. Look, if you spend money on this type of advertising here or on this influencer marketing, it's really brand awareness. It's not primarily lead gen. If you do something here, this is really designed to be lead gen. You're going to end up with those emails and trying to help them understand that, you know, not every marketing dollar is going to go to lead gen depending on what that activity is. And definitely that's something I wasn't near as aware of when I worked in FP&A. You know, I mean, I understood the basic ideas and I got it, but I have a much greater appreciation when you're actually having those conversations now with vendors and you're seeing it and you're like, oh yeah, there is a lot more to this than just throw that attribution model on it and away we go. And so, you know, I'm curious obviously you've worked in this for, for, you know, several years. Why do you think for so many people it's broken that we struggle to get the Go-To-Market engine going. Obviously you said, hey, I think, you know, we do a lot of the reporting wrong, but what do you think is the root problem? Why do you think this happens? How do we companies kind of, you know, step back and get this engine going better because it's the common problem everywhere. Yeah. We just didn't sell enough. Okay.
[00:18:59] Guest: Chris Walker: Let's break it down. Just for reference, most of my experience is in, you know, venture or private equity funded tech and software companies. Okay. So basically if you go back until most people started their career, all like, you know, dot com bubble all the way to 20 mid 2022. That whole time no revenue leader was ever asked about unit economics. They were never asked to measure the effectiveness in ROI. All it was was get the result. How? How much money do you need to get that result? And then the CFO and the CEO will figure out how to raise more money in 18 months, if that's how much we burn. And so you have a, a whole generation of C-level executives that have never been asked by investors, by executive teams, been taught at schools or anything like that about how do we measure unit economics and deliver an efficient Go-To-Market process? Never. And on the finance side, all finance was responsible for was trying to figure out what is our cash right now. And then it was a much easier time pre 2022 to go back and raise money every 18 months. And so the finance team has never been asked or driven to do the same thing. And then a big thing happened in the middle of 22. If you haven't heard called SAS Winter when the valuation of tech companies dramatically changed. Salesforce stock bottomed out in December of 2021, and then it took six months to trickle into the private markets.
[00:20:33] Guest: Chris Walker: The faucets shut off for venture capital and private equity and companies were forced, okay, we're not going to be able to raise money in 18 months. We need to figure out how to stop burning ten, 20, $100 million a year, whatever the number is, based on the scale. And so they had to figure out, okay, now how do we get more efficient? And I put that in quotes for the listeners. Okay. And then for the past two years, companies have been lowering Go-To-Market costs. They've been cutting costs, they've been improving EBITDA, they've been getting more profitable, but they have not been getting more efficient in Go-To-Market and Go-To-Market. Efficiency gets measured on the difference between Go-To-Market expenses and the total net new IRR that's gained, which becomes a ratio. And if you look at the 80 publicly traded software companies that are tracked on this metric. That number is still going up. It's been going up since the middle of 2022, and it continues to go up today. And if you look at the private markets, it's even worse. It's the same trend, just more dramatic and worse. And so cost cutting is not a path to Go-To-Market to getting more efficient, because what they're doing is just blanket cuts across, okay, we'll just cut 20% of sales and we'll stop doing 20% of events. And they're not being smart and methodical around what are the lowest performing things across the whole thing that we should cut, that have the lowest return in our portfolio? And how do we keep doing all the stuff that have the highest return? And so the core issue is that nobody's been forced to do this up until the middle of 2022.
[00:21:59] Guest: Chris Walker: And the people that are now trying to teach and address this solution are just the people that worked at the companies that happened to be successful seven years ago, and they're just teaching, oh, this is what we did before HubSpot Ipo'd it'll work for you now. And they're perpetuating outdated, ineffective knowledge. The investors do the same thing. The investors go back and say, oh, let's just keep doing the same marketing strategy or the same KPIs that we had with that. My company, that was the unicorn, and they bring that from 2017 into this 2025 series, a company and the technology vendors that are deeply integrated into the stack have no vested interest in changing the total quality of their product. It would be way better for them to continue to be more profitable in the world, to stay the same for their business to work. And so they're not incentivized to totally reinvent their product and figure out how to bring in finance data and blend all this together, and then retrain the entire market on how to do things. The job that I have is hard. Nobody wants it. Sorry, I don't know.
[00:22:58] Guest: Chris Walker: We're supposed to swear on this podcast. You're all right. It is super hard. Meaning that I take something that everybody needs, that nobody wants. And that's what I'm telling people right now. And it's way easier to just find something that people already think that they need and think that they want and just sell them that stuff. And so that's what most people are doing. That's what most people do right now. But the core of it is that nobody's been forced to do it until 2022. And now at this point, it's only been two years. Like we're I think we're the farthest ahead in the game that there is. And it's almost like you have to be a brand new startup to do it from a, from a technology or advisory standpoint. Otherwise you'd be cannibalizing your existing business to switch over to this model. And just enough time hasn't played out. And if you are in one company, a sample size of one, let's say you're a CFO or a CRO or a CMO, you do not get the reps and experience across a lot of companies to see the patterns of the things that work and the things that don't work across a lot of companies. So all you do is get the sample of it if it's working at my company, and then you attribute it to the model or the things that you're doing, which is unlikely to be the reason why you're successful. So it's a complex situation.
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[00:25:12] Host: Paul Barnhurst: Yeah. No. And I get what you're saying. Definitely the, you know, 2022, 2021 as all of a sudden money was no longer free. Interest rates all went up and the whole market shut down. And. Right, I think all we heard is all of a sudden, instead of grow at any cost, now you need to balance growth and cost. And especially in SaaS and tech, that was something that a lot of people didn't know how to do. So you'd go to those that had done it, at least got it public or showed good numbers and implement those models versus somebody who's really done all the scientific studies dug into this, and there's this logical playbook that makes sense.
[00:25:53] Guest: Chris Walker: It's difficult to find somebody or a group of people that have deep expertise across both of these things. Sure. I've sold $40 million worth of deals. I've run probably some of the best marketing in B2B marketing that drives that $40 million in sales. I've not been the finance director. I've been the CEO of a company that's $20 million inside of the PNL every day, planning and managing that stuff. It's hard to find somebody that has all that level of experience. And then secondarily, it intersects between these two functions, which makes it very difficult to sell to a company and very difficult for a company to do. And so there's a lot of interesting business reasons why people aren't solving this problem.
[00:26:39] Host: Paul Barnhurst: Yeah. And so, so talk a little bit. I mean, obviously you're trying to solve this problem. Talk a little bit about the two companies you have, because I know you're trying to say, hey, I really want to fix this Go-To-Market problem. So maybe talk a little bit about kind of what you're doing in your companies to help solve this problem. I'd love to kind of know a little bit there.
[00:26:57] Guest: Chris Walker: Yeah, I think some people might find this interesting. Ever since 2017, I have been somebody that says I'm never raising venture capital, especially early stage. Maybe I'll take growth equity and take secondary at some point. But I'm not raising, I'm not riding the VC train to be a unicorn, because I just worked in those companies and said, the culture sucks here. The companies don't hit their targets. The cap tables are underwater. That stuff was happening in 2015, 2017, and so I just didn't do that. So I decided I'm going to build companies, I'm going to build tech companies in a new way. And the way that I decided was, number one, I'm going to build a service, managed service or professional services business that works with these companies, characterizes the problems, understands the problem deeply, solves the problem, manually, generates cash flow and enterprise value, and then using that asset to then fund the product, which I just did all the R&D on inside of the service business. And so my first business, Refine Labs, was a demand gen agency and analytics agency. And we work with, you know, SaaS companies that are between, you know, 10,000,000in revenue and a billion. And we have different services for, you know, the different sizes and stages, and we do advertising and content creation and the measurement of that advertising and CRM and data analytics. And that company is an eight figure revenue company. We have about 45, 50 employees. And, my business partner runs that business as of January 2024. So Megan Bowen, my business partner, has taken over as CEO of that business so that I could work on my passion, which is this other business.
[00:28:37] Guest: Chris Walker: And then I started Pasetto. I've been working in the background for several years, but in January 2024, we officially launched it. Being a bootstrapped smart company, the first year of the company was as a consultancy. So we were a consultancy and then we, you know, took the data in, in spreadsheets and we took Google Sheets and we asked for exports and we put them all together, and it would take us three months to come up with conclusions. And over time we figured out, here's what we need to ask for. Here's what tools we integrate with. Here's how we process it, here's how the database works. And now we have an MVP product. And we're positioned as an advisory service that's enabled by technology. And then in the next 6 to 12 months, we'll be a pure product play where our customers run and use the product on their own. And so that's the product. And what does that product do? It does top level Go-To-Market analytics. You can create and standardize data so it takes your expenses. It standardizes all the expenses into our proprietary taxonomy. It takes your CRM data, does the same thing, blends all the data of expenses and revenue by customer and CRM data altogether, produces you top level analytics in terms of like your cost of growth, your growth rate, our cost of acquisition. But then the valuable stuff for the finance team is going level a level lower and looking at the investment allocation across the customer lifecycle, the ROI of those investments across the customer lifecycle, and being able to give the whole executive team one place to look that says, this is how we decide what things are working and what things aren't.
[00:30:00] Guest: Chris Walker: We're right now marketing's got their own deck for the QBR. Where does that deck come from? Seven different micro tools and reports that don't have expense data, accurate expense data or accurate finance data. It rolls up to marketing. It goes into the QBR deck. None of the data works. Nobody trusts the data is a better way to put it. And they shouldn't. It's poor, it's poor. It's made by manager level people that don't have the right acumen or visibility to draw those conclusions or make those decisions. And so I figured out a long time ago that executives need a stream of data that they can use to make decisions which should be fast, easy and simple and easy to get alignment on across the team. And right now, the bottoms up manual reporting structure, or even if you try to do it with AI garbage in, garbage out, it doesn't matter who's doing it, whether it's humans or not. You're going to not have the right, the right process to draw the conclusions. So I'm trying to help executives be able to have the data to get aligned and make smart, easy decisions.
[00:31:00] Host: Paul Barnhurst: So it sounds like obviously you may start consulting. You've got the MVP and you're looking to release a product that really kind of takes all that data and allows the company together to really understand, Go-To-Market where they're looking at it in a similar way, and they're seeing the data the same, and the analysis and the reporting so that you don't run into the conversations. We've all been there. You get in a meeting and everybody has six different numbers for KAC.
[00:31:27] Guest: Chris Walker: Yeah. That would be one of the easiest problems to solve. Sure. Yeah.
[00:31:31] Host: Paul Barnhurst: Yeah. I like to start easy.
[00:31:33] Guest: Chris Walker: Yeah. Yeah. Same. Yeah. But we integrate with CRMs like HubSpot and Salesforce and Sage and Sweet and NetSuite Intacct things like that, and bring all the data in and process it. And really, I think part of it is the separation between the data and information that C-level executives need to run the business out, change strategy, allocate millions of dollars in one direction or the other, versus what a manager level needs to needs to be able to optimize their SEO strategy to get 1% better every month or every quarter. And right now, those two things somehow get blended into one set of QBR decks and reports. And it's really two different streams. You have a strategic transformational data stream that executives need, and most other people in the company shouldn't have access to it. From my perspective, I'm being honest. And then you have a tactical stream that people should use to make incremental, ongoing improvements to the things that they're doing, and the executives don't need to see that stuff.
[00:32:30] Host: Paul Barnhurst: So I'm curious, you know, you talked about the platform that this tool would kind of have both the tactical and the strategic. You're trying to kind of show both those data and separate them. Or how do I think about it?
[00:32:41] Guest: Chris Walker: Step one is just acknowledging that they're two separate things that right now most people blend into one. So that's the first step. At the moment, we because there's a ton of tools at the bottom that are going to, you know, your campaigns, your everyone plays in that little space. Nobody plays to build for the C level executive. So we just see the opportunity to build there. And so yeah we're building there. And then the difference is most tools try to go build bottoms up campaigns tech you know campaigns and attribution and touch points and try to build up to the top. And that process never works. And so we've just, you know, come up with this crazy innovative idea to try to build bottom or from tops down. And then as you build down, you just get more granular, but all the data levels back up to the top. And all it starts with is growth rate and cost of growth. Those two metrics which cost of growth just for reference, is like cash, but also includes the expenses and revenue that come from post-sale and expansion and then can get broken down between new logo and expansion at the next level.
[00:33:41] Host: Paul Barnhurst: Yep. And so kind of, you know, stepping back a little bit, we've talked a lot in Go-To-Market. And let's say you know somebody new in this area you get a lot of, you know, switch industries. I remember my first kind of SaaS type company. What would you say to them? Is there somebody going into that situation? Any advice? Is there trying to understand Go-To-Market and just get to know it better. So not necessarily advice on, you know, getting into the deep metrics, but what are some things they can do to start to understand Go-To-Market. If they're put in that position and just educate themselves so they can have those more intelligent conversations.
[00:34:18] Guest: Chris Walker: So I'll offer a couple of different ideas and all of these ideas I've done myself. And maybe they were five, seven, ten years ago, but they're still just as valuable today. And this could apply to the people that are listening to this podcast, but really can apply to anyone in the company. So, who wants to operate at a more strategic level? So number one, a CMO should do it and a person should do it. A CFO should do it, a CEO should do it. Be your SDR for a day. What are you going to find? It's a total waste of time. Most of the people you talk to are total garbage. They don't want to talk to you, they said, I never filled out that form and you can find the patterns. Where are the people that are good that come from? Where do those and you can play the role? For a couple of days, it took me eight calls to realize that everything that was coming in the company, I did this for eight phone calls to that connected, to realize that all the stuff that was coming from marketing was total garbage, because people said, I don't remember filling out that form, I don't want to talk to you, and you call a couple people that come from certain places and they say, oh, yeah, I was really interested in your stuff. And you can see the pattern and you can play the role and like that alone. I am so surprised that most CMOs have never done that. Most CROs do not do that. And if they did for one day they would realize all find a lot of the problems that exist in their Go-To-Market engine right now. And a finance leader, you want to build credibility when you go to the table to go and have that discussion around the effectiveness, go do that for a day and then you can speak to your experience around it. I think that's a massive unlock.
[00:35:48] Host: Paul Barnhurst: I love that one. I found my people were much more effective when I had him sit on the phone for a day. You know, it might have been a call center, might be with the SDR salespeople trying to figure out a way to go along on a ride for sales, you know, somewhere in that area. So you at least start to get appreciation a little different than necessarily sit with the SDR for a day. But that idea is just invaluable of go sit in their shoes and see what's going on.
[00:36:13] Guest: Chris Walker: Sure. And I, I don't really because some people do this of, oh, we want to have empathy for our SDR because their job is so hard. That is not what we're after here to see how broken the system is, to listen to what your customers say, to look at the data and find that's what we're really doing for here. Everyone's like, I just sat in a, I did a speaking event the other day and it was, oh, we like the 30 minute presentation of here's what our SDR team does. Their job is so hard. You know, they have to call these people and they're building the pipeline and rah rah, good for our SDRs. That's not what it's after. It's to look for the problems. Another thing that you could do. I've done this as a marketer and it goes in the same vein. So maybe if you tell me if it's redundant, we can move on. But go and visit your customers and go and visit. Pick the ones that are either on the verge of churning based on your data, or have already churned recently, and go and visit them in person at their place of business. I know a lot of people are remote. If you can go in person, especially if not everyone sells to remote tech, right? Manufacturing facilities, financial service. There's a lot of people that still go to an office.
[00:37:16] Guest: Chris Walker: Go and visit the bottom a couple in the bottom 5%, and then go and visit a couple in the top 5 or 10% and see what the differences are. And then you can weigh in on ICP. You can weigh in on why people are leaving, why people are staying, why people love you. What are the things that are working? What are the things that are the same about the people that are good and the same about the people that are bad? Have a way, way more greater perspective on that. I think that's also a really big one. If you notice the pattern, it's having finance people start to do the jobs of Go-To-Market or at least get exposed to the jobs. And as an outsider, all those people will think this is normal. Right there. In there. This is what we've been. This is what we do in Go-To-Market. As an outsider, you can go in and say, what are we doing here? Like and this doesn't even make sense. And so sometimes just a fresh set of eyes can be really valuable in going, going over in that direction. And it doesn't mean you have to be a rocket scientist to look at them. The problems are very obvious to see. And most of it are stem from a misalignment between what the company does and what the customer wants.
[00:38:17] Host: Paul Barnhurst: And so often is right misalignment. That's almost always a problem. Somewhere down the line you're not aligned and that's why you have a problem. But I really like how you said do it. Not, you know, from an empathy obviously good to have empathy but do it from a what's broken, what's not working, what is working, really analyzing it from a okay, what can I learn about the process and where it's effective or where it's a waste of time? Like you said, you might be getting leads through your website and those might be pretty good. All the other ones coming from these events might be total waste. And you're going to know that 1015 calls, oh, the three I did came from, like you said, came from this area. And they actually talked to me. The other 12 told me to buzz off like, there's probably something to this. Let's dig in a little further.
[00:39:05] Guest: Chris Walker: Yeah. And it's like, yeah, you can like eventually you might have large scale data that tells you that story, but you can literally figure out in one day just doing that.
[00:39:15] Host: Paul Barnhurst: FP&A guy here and I want to tell you about the Planning and BI showcase. Gone are the days of juggling multiple platforms. Now with business intelligence tools, you can integrate planning directly into your BI system, the same system your entire company already uses. Join me on March 20th for the Planning and BI showcase, where industry leaders will demonstrate how top BI tools are reshaping strategic planning. See firsthand how modern FP&A solutions can drive real value across your enterprise. The event features live demos from leading BI solutions. Whether you're a CFO or an FP&A professional, you'll discover the tools that can help you deliver more value across your enterprise. Don't miss out! Register today at www.accelevents.com/e/Planning-in-BI-Showcase and take the first step towards smarter, data driven decision making. Yeah, it's amazing how often talking to people will help you realize a problem quicker than the data will.
[00:40:35] Guest: Chris Walker: Because data is more of the data is always a confirmation of what you experience in real life. Qualitatively, it should be.
[00:40:43] Host: Paul Barnhurst: Should be. No, it totally makes sense, right? If you, you know, business is doing really, really well, when you get to P and L, you should be able to see that it should be a confirmation of that. If it's not, you're like, okay, either I didn't understand something or the numbers are wrong. And you go talk to the accounting person and hope the numbers are wrong. So that makes a lot of sense. So we'll talk a little bit. Also, I know you've done a lot of kind of content creation. You talk about your prior business and some of that. How do you see just the content side of marketing? You know, how does finance kind of weigh in and make sure it's being used well and think about like, you know, some companies say, hey, we should do all content marketing or we should do all events or all, you know, SEO or paid. How does a finance person look at that? And outside of just saying, hey, here's the returns, here's what we think is going to happen and kind of sense check it and go yeah, this makes sense. Okay I think a content strategy is right here. Any advice on kind of how to make sure you're having good conversations with marketing versus either just rubber stamping it or saying, hey, I just want a better return because that, you know, we really want to be advisors.
[00:42:01] Guest: Chris Walker: Well, we're going to open a big can of worms here. So we have enough time.
[00:42:04] Host: Paul Barnhurst: I Like that work.
[00:42:06] Guest: Chris Walker: Okay, cool. So first off, content marketing is an incredibly broad term that encompasses different distribution channels, mediums, formats. And so like just saying should we or should we not do content marketing is not the right question. And then the second part of it and I'll get into this a little bit. I also believe that marketing is a terrible categorization of that function and objectives, which include short term and long term brand building and lead gen, tactical and strategic and vision and story and science. And it's all over the place. And so I'm recommending not necessarily an org structure change, but instead a mindset and thinking change around the subcategories that go into the marketing department or what I'll view now is the pipeline creation team.
[00:43:02] Host: Paul Barnhurst: Yeah. The four buckets you talked about before.
[00:43:04] Guest: Chris Walker: As actually quite a little bit different there. So just stick with me here. All right. Yeah I wouldn't bring us down the same road. So part of it is what I'll call business strategy. You have product marketing, messaging positioning, competitive intelligence, sales enablement, analyst relations, PR. You have all this different stuff at the top, which is a lot of art and messaging and has an impact across the entire customer life cycle. So you have that part of it and then you have demand creation, which is we have these target accounts and we want to get them. We them. We want to shorten the time between them and them being engaged with our company. So we're going to go out and get them, whether it's through outbound advertising, we're going to get that and shorten the time. Then you have the supply chain, which is getting customers, no matter where they came from, a qualified customer that comes and is ready to be prospected by the prospecting team and ideally high quality signal, high quality account, doesn't matter whether it came from Zoominfo your website, an event just put the finance people should get this marketing and sales leaders don't get because they've been playing the credit game for way too long. Just put them all together. Who cares whether it comes from Zoominfo or your website? We want to have that data so we can make better decisions long term, but it's not for crediting.
[00:44:14] Guest: Chris Walker: And then lastly you have the prospecting engine. Okay. And so the reason that I say that is because content falls across all those different things and has different objectives across the things. And so it's more about deciding what is the purpose of this content than not. Is it a video or a post? Did it go on LinkedIn or a podcast? Sure, it's not about the channel or distribution or the medium. It's being really critical about what are we trying to do with this thing? Okay. Sometimes it has, you know, very like sometimes it matches the channel and there's some consistencies there. But the reason you run a LinkedIn ad, there's a million different reasons that you could run one and the medium and the format and could be different than organic and things like that. So when you think about content, the way that it can. The way that content breaks down is in three different areas. The foundation is the message and the perspective. Like what are you saying? Is it valuable? The strategy. If you say it, even if you have, you put it in a beautiful video and you put it in an ad where everybody has to see it. If that sucks, nobody's going to care, right? So that's one place where it can break down. The next place it can break down is in the format. Right? Like maybe we take this podcast and we and we translate it with AI and we make it a blog post and it's a trillion miles long.
[00:45:35] Guest: Chris Walker: It's the same information in the wrong format, and the format is why it breaks. And then lastly is you have the distribution, right. And then so okay now we have this video. And maybe if this video was like perfectly cut and clipped and me and you here looking so good and we put it on LinkedIn perfectly and organic and it just hits like that's where it's meant to be. And matching the format with the distribution, with the dynamics of the distribution channel. And so you can see the pyramid of like if you break at the bottom or you break at the second layer, it doesn't matter what you post at the top. And then second. And then when you think about that stuff, like you could put it on your website, on LinkedIn, through your email, or do a live event like this, whether there's people live or you're post recording all the different social channels, is it paid or organic? When you look at the permutations, there's hundreds or millions. And so the thing that I think finance people should be able to weigh in on, or at least my perspective on this, is that we should not be scrutinizing the ROI of the content. We should be scrutinizing the ROI of the distribution channel.So really kind of seeing the distribution channel and how the ROI is for that channel. So your maybe email as a whole, as a channel or TikTok or YouTube or, you know, social media in general versus trade shows. Right? Is that kind of think it is really understanding that channel versus the content that you push through that channel.
[00:48:10] Guest: Chris Walker: Yeah. And then just another recognition for people is that the generally the creation of the content is like a minimal cost of the overall thing. Right? Like, I can produce this podcast every single week for a year, and it's still going to cost less than your cheapest trade show booth. Like, it's very inexpensive. And so the content creation is not where the costs are. It's in the advertising costs and the distribution and the people that manage those things. That's the real cost, not the content creation part of it. And so and when I've just been I've encouraged you to Go-To-Market leaders. I've been screaming as loud as I can around it of like focus on the places where the most money gets spent first and focus on those areas and figure out how to measure them properly. And that's how you get the biggest gains in terms of insights. And meanwhile, they like, buy all this technology to measure 5% of their investments that they put toward brand. And it's like right here sitting in front of you is 95% of your investments. And you can't measure those. Why don't you start there? And I think the same thing goes as finance through the same thing. I think the same principles apply, like start. And when you look at it, the cost to actually create the content is relatively low. And so that would be some of the things obviously maybe it's not obvious. So, when you match and you have a message that resonates with your target customer, that goes through a medium that fits the distribution channel, that's put on a distribution channel where your target customers and current customers see it frequently and actually consume the message. And you have those three things together on an organic distribution channel.
[00:49:42] Guest: Chris Walker: It is by far the highest ROI thing that you can do in marketing, because the costs are very low and the impact and trust and credibility is incredibly high. And so that's like that's what you're aiming for long term. And that's what I aim for every time I go for it. And then after that, when it's worked, when I have those three layers working and people love my content, then I take the content they love and I start running ads against it to the exact people that I want to see it. And so the difference between organic and paid is just simply, can I guarantee that the people that I want to see it will see it organic? No. Paid. Yes. And so like organic goes more broad. But it proves that the content works and the medium works and the format and message work. And work. And then once it works, then I move it to paid. Most companies take their organic and paid team and split them apart, and there's no synergies around it. And the organic team posts about their company picnic and like celebrating Valentine's Day and bullshit like that on their company organic social media. And the paid team runs like, here's our e-book, come download it, come get a demo. We'll give you a gift card if you have a meeting with our sales team. All this performance marketing and they spend $1 million and don't get an appropriate ROI on it. And really, it's the blend between the two. But I think you should make organic. You should force organic content to work first, and then just use paid to boost the awesome organic content to exactly who you want to see it.
[00:51:00] Host: Paul Barnhurst: I mean, to me, that makes a lot of sense, right? Because you're doing it at a much lower cost to confirm it works, then you're just making sure the right people see it seems logical.
[00:51:10] Guest: Chris Walker: Yeah.
[00:51:11] Host: Paul Barnhurst: Yeah. I mean, the way you explain it, it seems very logical. I mean, obviously those I do marketing often trying to find the right people. I really haven't done any paid for my business yet or very little. But as I'm sitting here and as we're talking, it makes me think of some more of those paid areas of, okay, I really should go find more of my tribe, so to speak.
[00:51:31] Guest: Chris Walker: Yeah. And it stems from the siloed, outdated thinking that comes from the marketing department, which is like, oh, we do organic social media for brands like, oh, we that's why we talk about our company picnic and we like promote the holiday that we're doing. And we talk about shit that our customers don't care about and nobody likes, and we don't get any engagement on. And then we have the demand or the performance marketing team over here, and they're just supposed to get leads, and then they just go over and they pound. They pound leads. And it's like, if you just rethought the whole thing, you would come to the same conclusion that I did prove out. Our customers love this, and it's focused on what our business, what they need to hear to to either buy or renew with our business and then make that be able to work and then just use it on paid. And the reason is because most companies run paid advertising on content that isn't tested. And when you do that, you don't know why is the reason this isn't working is because the content sucks. The message wasn't right. It was the wrong format or medium. We didn't target the right people. It was the wrong distribution channel. There's a million variables as to why the advertising doesn't work. And you don't know because it's not tested. And when you prove the content works, there's only two variables that can go wrong. After that, when you move it to paid, we didn't give it to the right people or we didn't. We didn't run it against the right objective.
[00:52:49] Host: Paul Barnhurst: Yeah. Makes sense. I mean, it goes back to right a lot of marketing, we do testing. It's testing it in the right order so you can control those variables because we all know how many variables any experiment can have. It's so hard to experiment in the real world because you're like, okay, did it fail because of this or that or this or that? So the more you can remove variables, reduce cost, you've reduced risk. I mean, that makes a lot of sense to me.
[00:53:15] Guest: Chris Walker: And I got one more thing for the finance department, because a lot of the particular on this topic, and the and the reason is because, most people that I talk to are like, how much pipeline are we getting from our podcast, right? Or like, how many leads do we get from our podcast or replace podcast with whatever, you know, brand organic channel. And that's the same question that gets asked. And I'd like to offer a different perspective from my seat, which is that the reason that I do this is not because of pipeline and leads. It's because it drives my business strategy, and I can talk through why and how it impacts it. And pipeline of new, new customers just become a byproduct of the things that I'm getting and doing so, especially early stage. But this can work across all stages. You need someone that is an expert in your industry, that has trust and credibility with your audience and has significant financial interest in the business succeeding. So if you can match those three things, You got the person. If you can't, you got the wrong person. Okay, so I work with customers in my business, and I did when I ran the $20 million agency, too. So I'm working with customers. I'm seeing what's working and what's not. I'm seeing what problems they're having, what questions they're asking, what things they're trying that aren't working. I see the patterns, and then I take them and I start talking about them on the podcast, and I talk about them and bring them up and, you know, share what people are trying and how it's not working. Most of the time I invite a live audience.
[00:54:46] Guest: Chris Walker: I just did it an hour ago, so now there's 50 or 100 people that are the right type of person that's going to buy from my company or refer people to my company. I'm sharing the information. Then they come back and say, oh yeah, but I can't get this to happen in my company because of X. And they bring up objections, they ask deeper questions. They say, I didn't get that. Can you explain it to me differently? And all of a sudden, I'm basically getting incredible market insights every single week about exactly what's going on with my customer. And then I can start to architect the product, the sales message, the marketing strategy based on what I'm hearing from these people. And you can see the whole thing. So that's the reason why I do it. And then it just so happens that 165,000 people like what I'm saying, because I'm actually in the work with my customers, fixing the problems. And so I have 165,000 followers on LinkedIn and I get ten or let's see, how many episodes do I do a year? 150 times 10,000. So 151.5 million 150,000. Whatever the math is on that listens to my podcast every single year. And that has driven for my businesses more than $50 million in new revenue between that one thing. Listen to it. Listen to what customers are saying and doing. Talk about it on a live event. Make the live event a podcast that gets published once 1 to 3 times a week, and then post the videos from the podcast on to LinkedIn. And that's been our main acquisition channel for the past 5 or 6 years.
[00:56:11] Host: Paul Barnhurst: Got it. No. I appreciate you sharing. I love how you kind of broke that all down. And it really started with, okay, understand the problem. Talk to people about the problem. Put it out there in the right channel and watch people start to talk about it. And eventually generating, you know, leads and business from that.
[00:56:31] Guest: Chris Walker: And the most surprising thing for me recently is that I found that it has a greater impact on customer success and retention than it does on pipeline.
[00:56:40] Host: Paul Barnhurst: The podcast, the podcast.
[00:56:42] Guest: Chris Walker: Yes, that my customer, I'm single threaded in a customer. Right. So I'm just working with the CMO, or I'm just working with the CFO or the CEO or whoever, and they share the podcast with their chief revenue officer or some other C-level executive. And then all of a sudden this person now says, oh, this makes a ton of sense. And then they renew with us for another 12 months, or they take a month to month contract and sign it for annual. Or they say, hey, we need your help. In the marketing side, I know you're helping finance. Let's double our retainer. And work with you over here. And like, that type of stuff doesn't get. And the only reason I know that is because I sit on the sales calls and the customer says, hey, I was listening to your podcast. I shared it with my chief revenue officer. Now he wants to know it's the only way that you would know is if you sit on the sales call. And so I think that is also very especially for most developed businesses, when you're above definitely by 50 million RR, you're going to get more growth from your customer base usually than from your new logos. Or you should. And so at some point like that becomes a scaled, highly cost effective way to bring your message and drive your customers to share it. Have more people aligned with your message to renew more frequently? Rather than having a CSM, try to get a meeting and do a QBR and you should do both, right? But it's just about where do you get the most return on your time? And having one of your smartest, most educated, most credible people talking in a way where millions, there's no constraint on how many people can listen to the information. It just creates more scale than having one sales person pitch or having one CSM do a meeting. There's more scalability to it.
[00:58:17] Host: Paul Barnhurst: Yeah, no. For sure. When you can take a whole room at a time and then distribute it, then push that out to, you know, lots of people with that same problem. It was a lot quicker than one sales guy trying to hold 100 meetings to get that same distribution or same reach.
[00:58:33] Guest: Chris Walker: Exactly. Yeah. And let's do one more thing on content, because you can break content into two other areas. It's a different dimension. And this maybe is more on the distribution side, but there's content where you wait for somebody to come and find it, and then there's distribution where you say you need it. I'm going to go out and get it to you. And so most companies have lived in this world of search engine optimization where they just build a blog, and then they hope someone searches the term where the blog pops up, right. And a lot of people that search the term that the blog popped up are not qualified to buy from your company. And so yeah, you have five, you know, 5000 searches and you get traffic from that keyword. But the keyword is like free business template. You know what I mean? And like it's like, okay, we're selling 100 K SAS. Like the people that are searching for this term and downloading our template are not qualified to buy from us. So you have people where you sit around and wait for people to find you best strategy for companies that have a freemium model, product led growth, low ACV, can't afford sales reps, need some high volume self-service motion typically.
[00:59:39] Guest: Chris Walker: And then you have the places where you're going to go. I know who the people are. I have this piece of content that they need to see. I'm going to go out and get them. Great. For higher ACV deals where you can afford advertising, you have enough room of cost of acquisition. You have a well defined account list of 110,000 somewhere in that range of accounts that you know are the right people to sell to. And instead of waiting for those 10,000 to hopefully, like, stumble upon you, why don't you just go out and get them? It's actually when your account list is defined. The cost to go out and get them is actually quite affordable relative to every other expense in the Go-To-Market. And so having that distinguishing tool, which is basically a function of Tam and ACV, which are generally correlated as well.
[01:00:21] Host: Paul Barnhurst: I love what you said there. Hey, when you know who you can go out and target, it becomes much, much more efficient from a cost standpoint, right? If I have that list of here's the thousand that are most likely to buy and I know how to target them, then go do it. You got to make sure the content works and that message is there. First. Don't just do it without having done the testing is we kind of talked about it earlier, but you know, yeah, it makes sense from a cost standpoint. There's a lot of good advice for, you know, finance professionals marketing everybody just I think the more finance, you know, talks to the marketing people, tries to understand these things, the easier it becomes to sit in those meetings and understand what they're doing and to Into at least weigh in at some level. Obviously, we're never going to be the expert or we wouldn't be in finance.
[01:01:06] Guest: Chris Walker: I don't.
[01:01:07] Host: Paul Barnhurst: Know a general.
[01:01:07] Guest: Chris Walker: Rule. I actually disagree with that personally.
[01:01:10] Host: Paul Barnhurst: Go for it. Tell me, why do you disagree? I'd love to debate this a little bit.
[01:01:15] Guest: Chris Walker: Yep. So, every single revenue leader. Not maybe not every single. Maybe I'm exaggerating. Most revenue leaders that I talk to that are saying that they have a problem with this. They want to get, they have three questions they want an answer to. What are my highest performing investments and how can I squeeze more juice out of them?
[01:01:33] Host: Paul Barnhurst: Yep.
[01:01:34] Guest: Chris Walker: Number two where should I invest my next dollar to drive the most growth in efficiency? And number three, what are my lowest performing investments that I should cut or stop? And when you look at those three questions, the thing that connects them all is that it's a measure of return on investment.
[01:01:52] Host: Paul Barnhurst: Yep.
[01:01:53] Guest: Chris Walker: And frankly, CMOs and Chros don't know how to process finance data and data and calculate return on investment. They don't have a good process for it. Most of them don't have the acumen for it. I'm not talking down on anyone, it's just the truth. And so I've come to the conclusion that this is. And when those questions all revolve around ROI, that this is a finance problem that negatively impacts marketing and pipeline creation, and then sales needs to live with that problem and deal with it. And so if you look at it that way, I think personally that finance could step up and own this problem. And I think that they are the best equipped in the company to fix it. And I believe that not being weighed down by the ten years of nonsense that marketing leaders and sales leaders have been taught and executed for the past ten years is a strength, not a weakness. And I think people with fresh eyes would see the flaws and the assumptions that people have that are totally like, just out of this world. Like I walk into it, I'm like, what are we doing here? And so I'm trying to and yeah I'm trying to put this empower finance leaders that. Yeah you maybe you're not going to be the expert in how to run advertising. Maybe you're not going to be in Presidents Club selling deals. But when it comes to measuring the return on investment, I think that you could be the people that are the best at it. I think that you could be the function that changes this for the company.
[01:03:22] Host: Paul Barnhurst: And I get that, that, that makes a lot of sense when you explain it that way and I can I get what you're saying. Yeah. Being that expert on really helping measure the ROI and help ensure we're really doing those things that every CFO wants, knowing where to invest, where not to invest, and how to get better results out of our investments. Right? We all we all want that. And the better we can help measure things and really understand it so we can have those measurements, the better we can ensure good decisions are being made, because that's what I think everybody wants. From FP&A. I heard someone say, it? You know, finance should help the business make better, faster decisions.
[01:04:00] Guest: Chris Walker: Love that. Yep. Better. Faster. More confident decisions. I'll just give another hint on this pursuit. Don't listen. Be curious and understand what those people are doing. But do not listen to what the revenue leaders say about how to do this. You will get led in the wrong direction 100% of the time. This requires a complete rethinking of the process. I gave you some hints along the way, but as like just thinking, oh, these people are good at marketing and they figured out how to run sales. I guess they're going to be able to inform me about how to measure the ROI of things. You will be sadly disappointed. You should start with a blank slate. Understand what is happening today as context and then find all the holes in it today. I pointed out many of them for you on this episode.
[01:04:41] Host: Paul Barnhurst: Yeah, no, a lot of great advice. I know we're kind of coming up near the end of our time to wrap up, so I want to ask kind of a couple standard questions we ask just to get to know you a little bit better. And also a couple around FP&A. So this is one we ask all our guests just to see the different kind of answers we get. I'd love to get your perspective. Not being a finance person, what do you think is the number one technical skill that FP&A professionals need?
[01:05:05] Guest: Chris Walker: First off, I do consider myself a finance professional in many ways and I think that I have a lot of skills. Well, I didn't mean that. I know, I know, I'm totally joking with you.
[01:05:16] Host: Paul Barnhurst: Give me a hard time. Find that way out.
[01:05:19] Guest: Chris Walker: I think that there's some combination of curiosity combined with curiosity can drive. Am I curious about what my, the other teams in the company are doing? Am I curious about what our customers are doing? So I think that's one big one. I think that is going to get totally changed by AI. Like, how do you figure out how to be a leader in your company around.
[01:05:46] Host: Paul Barnhurst: A whole episode without an AI discussion? I was almost there. Actually, I was just actually thinking in my head. I was like, well, I've even taught AI.
[01:05:54] Guest: Chris Walker: Not, there's no way. We just can't. It's all numbers. It's literally all numbers. It's going to be. Yeah. And it doesn't mean the functions going away. It means you're going to get a trillion times better at doing the most important things, because you know how to use it. I like it. So that's a good number. Yeah. So I think that it's undeniable that something's going to happen there in this function. And I think that I'm not getting the right word here. So I'll say it for lack of a better word, but like, like aggressive, the things that frustrate me as a CEO about the finance leaders that I've interacted with is that it's very risk averse and it's very safe. And I think, obviously we need a balance. I think that FP&A plays in a different space and the people that are responsible for risk mitigation in the company, I think FP&A is more equipped, not aggressive playing offense, let's call it that. There's some people in finance that need to play defense. FP&A I want plain offense at my company. I want ideas, I want new routes. The angles that I haven't considered, those are things that I want.
[01:06:58] Host: Paul Barnhurst: Got it? I like that. So make sure FP&A is offensive. I mean offense.
[01:07:02] Guest: Chris Walker: Offense. All right.
[01:07:03] Host: Paul Barnhurst: And then what's the soft skill we need? You're gonna say a softer human skill.
[01:07:07] Guest: Chris Walker: I think curiosity is one that I'm working on myself, but I think that curiosity is an important one for people like us. Like, I consider myself like finance. I think in numbers, I think in logic. Oftentimes I see it of like I've gotten better at this over time, but a lot of times it's black, like black and white. The numbers 1 or 0. You know what I mean? I think there's a lot of gray in the real world.
[01:07:29] Host: Paul Barnhurst: Definitely a lot of gray. And I love the curiosity because you can't be great in almost any job without being curious. And that requires a lot of thought and strategy. I mean, if it's a process oriented job and all you're doing is the same thing, okay, sure, you could be great. But you know, the jobs we're talking about. Right. So we'd love to get to know you a little bit more. Kind of personally, Chris. So tell me, a favorite hobby or passion? What's something you love to do when you're not working?
[01:07:57] Guest: Chris Walker: I have I'm, I don't know, it's weird. I'm struggling to answer the question because my business life and personal life are now like one and the same. I've run businesses, I'm an entrepreneur. I've run businesses for six years. I make my own schedule. I have my own team. If I go on vacation, if I'm posting on social media, it's personal and parts business. It's just, I don't know, it's just like all blended together. But something that I'm passionate about is like sharing the wins and the losses and the lessons of my journey as an entrepreneur in hopes that I wish that I had someone like me telling me all this stuff six years ago, I would have avoided a lot of mistakes. Things that were, you know, painful. But with pain comes a lot of important lessons. So I don't regret anything. But yeah, I have shared a lot of vulnerably recently, share a lot of the things that I haven't gotten right in my companies and where I messed up and what I learned. And I have a lot of passion for sharing that with people that are where I was 5 or 6 years ago in their entrepreneurial journey. I speak, do speaking events, produce content on, you know, this is like sort of buttoned up for the C-level executive. But I also produce content in other channels that's, you know, in different areas and more vulnerable for the, you know, entrepreneurs doing 30 K a month or 50 K a month and have one employee, you know. So, that's been somewhere where I get a lot of energy and a lot of passion. I'll have to work out. And I love to travel.
[01:09:15] Host: Paul Barnhurst: Cool. Yeah. I know when we started, you'd mentioned you'd gone travel here recently, so I knew you enjoyed traveling about one more. And then we'll wrap up here. If you could have dinner with anyone in the world. Could be dead or alive. Who are you taking to dinner? Who are you picking?
[01:09:31] Guest: Chris Walker: A lot of people aren't going to like this answer. And like, it's not it's not groundbreaking, but. Well, maybe there's two. I'll just go with the one that came to me. I. I would love to go to dinner with Tom Brady just because I think it would be. I've. I grew up since I was like eight years old, going to those games, seeing them win Super Bowls, I just think it would be cool. Like there's not. Yeah, nothing more like, oh, he's going to say something that's going to change my life or I'm going to learn. Maybe I probably would learn something, you know what I mean? But, it's more so just because of. Yeah. I was just a kid watching him win 7 or 8. I think it was seven Super Bowls.
[01:10:03] Host: Paul Barnhurst: So who's winning this next Super Bowl? This show will come out after. So we'll see your predictions.
[01:10:08] Guest: Chris Walker: Are great I just wouldn't I never I'm not a betting man but I'm not betting against Patrick Mahomes.
[01:10:15] Host: Paul Barnhurst: I'm with you. I'm not a betting man either. But I'm not taking the other side of that bet.
[01:10:18] Guest: Chris Walker: I got Chiefs for the three peat. I think when it comes down to it, Patrick Mahomes makes the big throw, makes the big play Andy Reid they have a great kicker. Like I think they just have the things they need to win. They just won the close game by three points in the last game. I think they just have what it takes to win the close game, and that's why Tom Brady won seven Super Bowls.
[01:10:35] Host: Paul Barnhurst: No, I'm with you. They got a fabulous coach and a great quarterback. They know what it takes to win close games and it's hard to bet against that. I'm not doing it. I like my money. All right, so the last question: if our audience wants to learn more about you or potentially get in touch, what's the best way for them to do that? Is it LinkedIn or.
[01:10:54] Guest: Chris Walker: Yeah, probably LinkedIn. If you liked what I said and you're interested in about how my company can help you, feel free to visit. www.passetto.com. There's a place where you can book a call with me. But yeah, if you're just interested in learning more, you want to send me a question? You just want to tell me the episode was cool or that you hated it, or just give me some feedback? Feel free to shoot me a message on LinkedIn. You can find me Chris Walker. The URL is Chris Walker 171. But you can just search Chris Walker and find me.
[01:11:17] Host: Paul Barnhurst: All right. Well perfect. Thank you Chris. Appreciate you carving out some time. Enjoyed chatting with you today and good luck with your message around. Go-To-Market. I know I learned a lot. I look forward to kind of listening back to it because there are a few things I'm like, I gotta listen to that again. I hadn't heard it that way before, so thank you.
[01:11:31] Guest: Chris Walker: Awesome. Yeah, thanks for having me on. I hope I get it exposed and invited to more finance podcasts. I think this is fun. I think the blend between these two is really important. So thank you for being the first one to invite me on.
[01:11:44] Host: Paul Barnhurst: Well you're welcome. I'm glad to be first. I, you know, do what I can finance podcasts for fun for me. What can I say? I'm a nerd. Thanks, Chris.
[01:11:51] Guest: Chris Walker: Thank you. See you later.
[01:11:53] Host: Paul Barnhurst: Thanks for listening to FP&A tomorrow. If you enjoyed the show, please leave us a five star rating and a review on your podcast platform of choice. This allows us to continue to bring you great guests from around the globe. As a reminder, you can earn CPE credit by going to earmarkcpe.com, downloading the app, taking a short quiz, and getting your CPE certificate to earn continuing education credits for the FPAC certification. Take the quiz on earmark and contact me, the show host for further details.