Aviv Canaani on this episode
Aviv Canaani, Chief Revenue Officer and Chief Marketing Officer of Datarails, engineered one of the most remarkable go-to-market transformations in recent SaaS history. With a background spanning politics, IBM corporate infrastructure, and multiple startup leadership roles across Europe and the US, Canaani brought deep expertise in both marketing and revenue operations to Datarails four years ago as VP of Marketing, later expanding into the CRO role. The company's achievement of 90% new sales growth year-over-year while flipping from 95% outbound-dependent to 95% inbound-driven revenue represents the rare intersection of strategic brand-building and operational precision.
The core thesis: predictable revenue is built by treating go-to-market as a unified machine with defined inputs, outputs, and cost structures, rather than as competing marketing and sales functions. Canaani's counterintuitive insight challenges the conventional wisdom that account executives must prospect. Instead, he engineered a "waterfall system" that starts from annual revenue targets, works backward through conversion rates to calculate exact meeting counts, then determines headcount and budget requirements. This approach gained external validation when Forbes independently likened Datarails to "the Salesforce of the CFO office" without any company outreach.
The reframe: what appears to be a marketing versus sales choice (outbound versus inbound, meeting generation versus deal closure) is actually a structural and operational question. By hiring B2C-trained, data-driven user acquisition specialists; implementing near-instantaneous speed-to-lead protocols; leveraging multi-touch attribution across paid channels, organic content, and Gong call intelligence; and promoting top account executives into leadership roles, Canaani removed the friction and politics that typically separate revenue functions.
The episode explores how diversified go-to-market channels (paid social, Google, LinkedIn, organic podcasts, partnerships, and evolving outbound automation) stack into a scalable engine, why AI adoption is reshaping both finance operations and SDR productivity, and why yesterday's best practices—from HubSpot-era MQLs to universal AE prospecting—no longer work in a market saturated with commoditized tactics and attention-resistant buyers.
What we cover in this episode
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0:14
Forbes Validation and Unsolicited Positioning How organic brand perception led Forbes to compare Datarails to Salesforce without company involvement or pitching.
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1:26
Building a Predictable Revenue Machine The waterfall system that translates annual revenue targets into exact headcount, meeting counts, and budget requirements.
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4:47
The 95-to-95 Transformation Flipping revenue from 95% outbound to 95% inbound through paid media, organic content, and systematic lead generation.
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5:23
Stepping into CRO from Marketing Building credibility with skeptical sales teams and establishing unified revenue goals over departmental vanity metrics.
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6:12
Promoting AEs into Leadership Strategy of elevating top account executives to team lead and director roles to bridge marketing-sales cultural gaps.
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13:09
Why AEs Should Not Prospect Argument that filled calendars and specialized roles drive higher efficiency than universal prospecting responsibilities.
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18:27
The Waterfall Planning System Working backward from revenue targets through conversion rates to determine meetings, headcount, and paid media spend.
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26:15
Multi-Touch Attribution Across Channels Using forms, SDR interviews, Gong call analysis, and direct conversation to track true touchpoints across paid, organic, and word-of-mouth.
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32:31
Inbound Converts Better Than Outbound Data showing higher opportunity-to-close rates from inbound, driven by buyer intent and cost-of-acquisition efficiency.
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38:38
AI as Operational Force and Future Challenge ChatGPT driving deals, AI-powered SDRs masking identity, and the need for agile response to rapid AI-adoption cycles.
The lines worth sharing
We're one team. It's either we hit our revenue target or we don't. Everything else is just vanity metrics.
Aviv Canaani · 0:14
I want AEs to focus on what they do best: intro calls, follow-up, and closing. Why spend time on lower-quality prospecting activities?
Aviv Canaani · 13:09
Our AEs close four times more deals than account executives at our competitors because they have full calendars and focus only on selling.
Aviv Canaani · 15:00
You need to understand what works for your business. My strategy would be totally different if I were selling enterprise with a hundred-client TAM.
Aviv Canaani · 35:14
Common questions from this episode
How did Datarails flip from 95% outbound to 95% inbound revenue?
Through paid media campaigns on Google, LinkedIn, Facebook, and TikTok; building an industry-leading podcast; creating engaging organic LinkedIn content; and hiring B2C-trained, data-driven user acquisition specialists who could measure and scale every channel.
What is the waterfall planning system Aviv Canaani uses?
Starting from annual revenue target, back into required meetings using conversion rates, then calculate headcount (AEs, SDRs, solution consultants) and budget needed. This turns revenue targets into exact operational specifications and enables predictable forecasting.
Why does Aviv believe AEs should not prospect?
Filled calendars from marketing allow AEs to focus exclusively on selling, where they close four times more deals. Prospecting diverts high-value sales talent to lower-quality activities and breaks the efficiency of the go-to-market machine.
How does Datarails handle multi-touch attribution across channels?
Using forms, SDR phone interviews, Gong call analysis for organic mentions, and direct customer conversation. No single source is trusted; instead, patterns are triangulated to identify which channels truly drove intent and conversion.
What's the fastest way to lose a deal after a prospect raises interest?
Slow follow-up. Datarails SDRs reach out within five minutes and use Chili Piper to book high-intent demos directly. Speed to lead is critical because buyer intent decays rapidly and competitors may already be engaged.
How is AI impacting Datarails go-to-market strategy?
ChatGPT has become a referral source; their largest deal came via ChatGPT recommendation. AI is being tested for SDR productivity (4x efficiency gain target), and Datarails is positioning AI-powered financial modeling as a core product differentiator.
SEO meta description
Aviv Canaani, CRO of Datarails, shares how he grew new sales 90% YoY and built predictable revenue by flipping from 95% outbound to 95% inbound—and why AEs should never prospect.
Target keywords
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predictable revenue machine
waterfall planning system
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Read the full transcript · 59 KB · Aviv Canaani
AVIV CANAANII always find it weird that like in a management meeting, I can say, oh, I hit my target. I generated this amount of meetings or pipeline and the VP sales would say, oh, I didn't hit Michael. It doesn't make sense. We're one team. It's either we hit our revenue target or we don't hit our revenue target. Everything else is just, I don't know, just small vanity metrics.
EDDIE REYNOLDSWelcome to go-to-market science. There's an art and there's a science to go-to-market. And in this podcast, we talk about the science by interviewing CROs, private equity investors, and other sales and marketing experts, as well as talking about what we learn every day in the trenches helping to build go-to-market engines. Welcome to another CRO Stories segment. My name
RACHAEL BUECKERTis Rachel Buchert. I'm the marketing manager here at Union Square Consulting. And with me today is Aviv Kanani, the chief revenue officer of DataRails, which is a VC-backed financial planning and analysis platform. Thank you so much for joining me, Aviv.
AVIV CANAANIThank you so much, Rachel, for having me. Excited to be here.
RACHAEL BUECKERTYeah. And I'm super excited about this conversation. So to give our listeners a little bit of background, from what I've seen, the DataRails brand has grown quite a lot in a relatively short period of time, to the point where I read on your LinkedIn, Aviv, that Forbes actually likened DataRails to Salesforce, saying, quote, where CROs have Salesforce, CFOs have DataRails. That's a pretty big deal, huh?
AVIV CANAANII was super excited when I saw it. It wasn't something we pitched or we never spoke with a journalist. It's like, I think there's the Jeff Bezos quote. So your brand is what people say about
AVIV CANAANIyou when you're not in the room. So if a journalist from Forbes compared us at Salesforce, seems like we're doing something good with our brand.
RACHAEL BUECKERTAbsolutely. And a lot of this growth from what I've seen has happened after you became CRO. So I'm really excited to like dig into your journey so far and what it's been like behind the scenes, some of the things that were done and changed and go to market to get you guys to this point. So just as like a teaser for this audience, what's kind of the biggest takeaway you're hoping listeners might get from this conversation?
AVIV CANAANIYeah, I think it's really about the power of marketing, building a brand and how to really build an effective revenue machine. That's what we call like predictable revenue, which is my main focus. And I'll happy to go into detail on how we did it and how we connected marketing and sales to build this kind of machine where we know how much money we're going to spend and how much money we're going to generate in an almost predictable way over a quarter for the past few years.
SPEAKER_24Awesome. Excited. So let's start off with your career journey so far. So what's happened
RACHAEL BUECKERTthroughout your career to get to be where you are today?
SPEAKER_23I've been in marketing for 10, even 15 years, depending on like what you count as marketing.
AVIV CANAANII actually started my career in politics. I was advisor to a minister and the government in Israel. Then I moved to the U.S. I did my MBA at Duke, worked for four years at IBM, first in New York and then in Austin, Texas. So I learned how it's like, you know, working in a big corporation. Later, I moved back to Israel to join the startup scene, been to a few different startups, always leading marketing, both in IBM and other startups. I was always like head of marketing or VP of marketing. And what happened was about four years ago. I was approached by one of the co-founders of Data Reels on LinkedIn, just a random outbound request. So I looked him up, seemed like an interesting guy, already built a $1 billion startup, which is WalkMe, that went public and got sold to SAP. And I decided to take the leap and join a new company, Data Reels. And him, Eyal, and the CEO of Didi told me back then, it's like the company was just a couple of million dollars in ARR. The company was 95% outbound with SDRs just getting on calls in 2021, trying to book meetings. They both told me, try to build marketing. Let's see what happens. And fast forward four years later, 95% of our sales come from inbound for marketing. So a couple of years ago, they also asked me to take over sales. So now I'm like the CRO. I manage everything, you know, from lead to closed one. The main problem is now I have no one to blame. I could blame sales for not closing my amazing lead. And as you know, the head of sales, I can't blame marketing for all these crappy leads. So you need to find like the right balance. And yeah, it's been going good so far. Like we've been hitting our targets in the past few cores. We're growing a lot. So yeah, happy to dive
AVIV CANAANIin into each one of these different parts. Awesome. So did they, how did they find you? They just,
RACHAEL BUECKERTthey just saw the work that you're doing and reached out or how did that work? Oh, they just reached
AVIV CANAANIout to me on LinkedIn, you know, like sometimes you get 20 outreachers on LinkedIn that you just ignored. In this case, like, you know, I learned that you need to actually check out who's sending you the outreach and it just worked out. I'm just happy. I was able to respond.
SPEAKER_14So you're telling me I need to check my inbox more often. Got it.
AVIV CANAANIYeah. But it's, there's a lot of crap out there, especially now. And you can talk about like with
AVIV CANAANIAI and all that, like, of course we're trying to use it. Everyone else is, but it's like, you never know even what's personal DM, what's not. It's like, it's, it's impossible.
RACHAEL BUECKERTYeah. And it's going to just get harder too. So what kind of environment were you inheriting when you stepped into the CRO role at data reels? So back then, like, so I already built this kind
AVIV CANAANIof marketing engine that generated a lot of leads. It was right after like 2022, when there was a challenge, like I would say, like in the whole tech industry, we also had to do some layoffs because it used to be like growth at all costs. And now we actually had to be efficient. So when I stepped into the role in 2023, I was given the role by one of the co-founders. The main challenge was really building respect amongst like the sales people. They knew I'm like the guy for marketing. And it took some time to do it because, you know, at the beginning they were thinking, maybe I'm only going to be focused on how many meetings or opportunities we generate. I would try to convince them, like convert more things to opportunities. And it took some time to explain to them and really show them and prove that what I really care about is revenue. I want them to make a lot of money. I want them to sell a lot. I promoted, like my home was my first day. One of the account executives to be a team lead promoted another one a few months later. And I think that I understood that I don't know everything, especially like not in sales, but if I can take some of our best AEs that also have great interpersonal skills and promote them, they would be the ones giving me the guidance in terms of how to sell. I can be the one looking at, you know, the full picture and how to build this kind of revenue machine. But with everything that has to do with sales, like they will tell me what to do. I'm not going to go in through their calls and say, like, you should have said that or you should have said this. And yeah, one of those team leads is now the VP of sales. Now she manages 27 people. The other one is a director. Yeah. And we got to promote like more people with time. And yeah, it's really, it's really exciting to see like their own growth. And again, I couldn't have done that without them.
RACHAEL BUECKERTThat's awesome. Yeah. I've had a lot of conversations with Warren Zena from the CRO collective and he works with new CROs and how to like succeed in the role and stuff when they're first starting out. And he always says, when you're first stepping into that CRO role, a lot of like politics go on. You're trying to like figure out what people think of you and what you want them to think of you and like get on the same page and aligned with everyone's goals and stuff like that and have them all on board with what your vision is and what you want to do. So that makes sense to hear that. Yeah. Warren is great. Like I went to some of his events and I
AVIV CANAANIalso, when I rose up to be a CRO, I got to meet Warren a few times and- Oh, nice. Yeah. I did some good advice. A small world, hey. But that's cool that being a first time CRO
RACHAEL BUECKERTand being able to align with their team and seeing through like the really, really strong players and saying like, you know what, you should have like a promoted role. I need you to be like an even more prominent figure in this. I think that takes a lot of vision to like see that in people and be able to create your team in that way. Definitely. I think at the end of the day,
AVIV CANAANIit's all about the people. You do the same thing in marketing. You know, you hire the right people, promote the right people. You want to hire people that are better than you in each one of the different functions. So I think the same goes with sales with our account executives. We also promoted different people like in our solution consulting department, also a part of the sales organization. And if you have the right people, everything becomes easier. You just need to know how to listen, to prioritize, how to give them the right support. Yeah, it's about building a team. It's not that I have all the answers. Yeah. And so when you inherited the role, what was
RACHAEL BUECKERTgoing on also like on the operational side in the sales department, revenue department? How did you, can I get up to speed with, with all that? Yeah. So I had to, to learn a lot about like the
AVIV CANAANIdifferent processes and everything. I used to know more about just what happens after, you know, a meeting is set. So I joined like a few different sales calls. I listened to it and I just asked a lot of questions. It's just a student trying to figure it out, especially like one of the main questions I asked was, what do they need? Whether it's a competitive Intel or different trainings and so forth. I wanted to show them like I'm invested in them and I want to give them all the tools and support I can to help them be successful. And usually like when you ask people, what do they need? You learn a lot from it and you can also show value. So like they ask for something, I learned it's important and I actually provided them what they needed. Like I give them like amazing guy training. We did like P club for the first year and we do like a few other things and we got some other like freelancer to help us with a closed loss research. So whatever they needed, I wanted to show them that I'm there to support them. And it's not like I'm just trying to be the marketing guy, trying to convince them to be more like marketing or like if something doesn't work, sales. No, it's like now that I'm in this new role, it's even, it's like I'm treating everyone fairly, whether it's marketing or sales and we can only win together. It's not that one team can win and one team can fail. No, I can actually add about that. When I was VP marketing and we had a VP sales like about four years ago, I always found it weird that like in a management meeting, I can say, oh, I hit my target. I generated this amount of meetings or pipeline and the VP sales would say, oh, I didn't hit my goal. It doesn't make sense. We're one team. It's either we hit our revenue target or we don't hit our revenue target. Everything else is just, I don't know, just small vanity metrics. We feel the same way here at USC too. Like I'm marketing, I'm on the marketing side,
RACHAEL BUECKERTbut I don't like count my successes and in leads gained or meetings or leads to meetings converted. It's revenue, right? If I'm hitting my goals or exceeding my goals in, in leads coming into the pipeline, but none of them are turning into the revenue, that doesn't really mean much to me. It means that I'm actually not hitting my goal of good leads and that's the actual goal.
SPEAKER_51Exactly. Exactly. And it's just, I think in revenue, in SaaS, it's a team sport. You can't win
AVIV CANAANIalone. So yes, sales is very dependent on the leads they get for marketing. I know it's a hot topic, but I have a very strong point of view where AEs should not prospect because we want to build this kind of machine. And this is what we did where we fill their counters with meetings so they can focus on selling. So they're not going to be successful if marketing isn't successful. The same way when, you know, they do their demos, they work with solution consultants and they have also have to win together. It's a team sport. Like any other like sports team, like you can't have like just one player making all the shots and saying, okay, I mean, like, I don't know if it's NBA, like I made like 40 points, but my team also, I won. No, you can't do that. It's like only if the team won and just everyone in the team has, you know, their own role. And by the way, it's not that I think one role is more important than another. Marketing does their part, sales, solution consultants, SDRs, and so forth.
AVIV CANAANIAnd every role is equal. I want to go back. So you mentioned you guys don't believe that AEs should prospect. And I love that
RACHAEL BUECKERTpoint because it's very counterpoint to the stance that we've had at USC for a while, that AEs should always be prospecting. So I'd love to dig into that with you. When you got into the CR role, what was happening like in the sales organization and your revenue situation where I'm guessing AEs were prospecting at the start?
AVIV CANAANINo. So actually when I joined the company already, we built this machine via marketing where they wouldn't have to prospect.
AVIV CANAANIOh, okay. So when I stepped in, maybe it made it a bit easier because they already came from a team that was giving them full calendars of meetings. So I think that really helped build that credibility. It just that, again, like I see the kind of revenue operations, like let's call it like a go-to-market machines the same way as like a Henry Ford factory. Everyone needs to do their part. I don't want AEs, and maybe it's because they don't come from the sales background. I don't want AEs to spend their time in lower quality activities, especially if they're not experts in it, like trying to prospect. I want them to do the thing they do best. They do best that they do intro calls, they follow up, they know how to close deals. The same way I don't need a solution consultant to be in pricing negotiations, and I don't need a marketer to actually know how to sell and be great at negotiating. Everyone needs to do their part. Of course, I want them to know what others are doing because at the end of the day, it's collaboration. I think if you know what others are doing, you can be better at your job. But yeah, like I think it's a different maybe generation, different like systems of what you can do today with marketing. And if AE has a full calendar with meetings, they don't need to prospect. Like why? Just for the sake of saying that they prospected? No, it's not the best use of their time. I want
AVIV CANAANIthem to sell a lot. And our AEs close four times more deals than AEs at our competitors.
RACHAEL BUECKERTThat's awesome. Nice. So what I'm hearing is, so this change kind of happened before you were CRO. It was when you were doing marketing at DataRails. I saw from your LinkedIn that you moved DataRails from 95% outbound to 95% inbound. So this happened before the CRO era?
AVIV CANAANIYeah. Okay, cool.
RACHAEL BUECKERTYeah, that was when I was like a VP marketing. The way we did it, it was mostly in terms of paid and
AVIV CANAANIorganic. So in organic, you build like the leading podcast in our industry. There was no like dominant podcast when I started. We also built like a very fun and engaging LinkedIn page with like funny memes and thought leadership from a page that barely got any engagement. Now we get like hundreds of likes or thousands of likes, hundreds of comments for some of our content. We even have now, by the way, a TikTok channel. You wouldn't expect that of a company selling to CFOs, but we just had something that got like 40,000 likes and TikTok. You can check it out. Kind of crazy. And on the other hand, and that's like really what accelerated our growth. We built an amazing user acquisition team in terms of paid media that run campaigns and Google, LinkedIn, and also Facebook. That's also something surprising for some. Facebook, Instagram worked amazingly for us. Also TikTok. And with paid channels, we actually are able to estimate how many meetings we can generate. So we can say, let's say, I'm just making up a number. I'm not sharing our own numbers, but like, let's say a meeting we know is going to cost us a thousand dollars. So we know like with a hundred thousand dollars, I can generate like a hundred meetings. And, you know, we know how it scales. Of course, you know, it's much more complicated than that. We have like Excel spreadsheets and that, you know, we work with it to do like all these kinds of estimations. But that way, when we have this like waterfall system, I know, let's say the target based from my CEOs, let's say, we need to get to $10 million. Now, okay, $10 million with this conversion rate. I know this is how many opportunities I need. This is how many meetings I need. Based on the number of meetings, I know like every AE can take, let's say, 40 meetings a month. Then I know, okay, the total number of meetings they need to do is, let's say, 3,000, I know how much I need in my paid media marketing budget to generate that amount of meetings. And it's been proving successful over the past few years. Of course, like you need to do collaborations and some changes, but that's like the way we operate.
RACHAEL BUECKERTIt seems like it takes a lot of confidence in the data that you have to be able to forecast all that out. How did you guys get to the point where you could make those calculations confidently to know that if we do this and this, it'll equal this?
AVIV CANAANIYeah. So I think it's a lot of trial and error. And also the fact that, especially in the user acquisition side, we hired a lot of people that come from a B2C that is much more data-driven
AVIV CANAANIbecause you can really measure like every like app download or like whatever you do and it's big numbers. So they were able to build this kind of system for us. And with time, especially after you do it month over month over month, you know, you start seeing like different trends, you start seeing what works and what doesn't. And of course, it's not exact science. It's a mix of science and art. But going back to the point we made before in sales, the same thing as in marketing, it's all about the people. We were able to build that system using like tools like Funnel.io and all that to really track it. We know exactly how much budget we spent every day across every channel, how many leads it generated, how many opportunities it generated. We know like the conversion rates from one part to another and the difference between one campaign to another or from one channel to another. Yeah. It's interesting. Like when I present my like user acquisition team to sales, they always think, oh, we're going to see all these like creative marketers, but it's mostly like data people. They are just very smart and data-driven people. Of course, we also have a great team of creatives, but the campaign managers, they're a number of people. This is how they're successful. Okay, cool. Let's break this down a little bit. So you mentioned kind of like segmentation. How did
RACHAEL BUECKERTyou guys figure out, you know, the processes that you needed to create to segment properly in all of your different marketing channels to target effectively enough to create this forecasting? Yeah. So when we started like our main three channels where, as I mentioned, Facebook,
AVIV CANAANIGoogle, and LinkedIn, it's important to mention what we do. So we sell an FB&A solution to the office of the CFO or SMBs and mid-market, even lower enterprise for all industries. So it's like practically every company has someone that needs it. So our target audience is anywhere from like companies of 50 employees to 2,000, 5,000 employees. So it's very broad. So like all of the things I'm mentioning now can work as opposed to let's say a company, if it was super niche and they had only a hundred companies in my target audience, it might not work. This is why like mass kind of paid media can work. So we just started with like equal budgets in each one. And based on the success each month, we either increase in LinkedIn or in Google or in Facebook. And if everything works, you know, we increase in all of them. And with that, we saw like all of them, you know, we were able to scale and we started, like I mentioned to doing also TikTok and YouTube, Tabua and a few other channels. And we're just like playing with it, like every month. And like based on the results, like we're changing, like what we're doing. So it's based on also like what's happening in the industry as well as like the quality of our creative, especially in social. So sometimes we have great creative, sometimes the creative isn't as successful. Mm-hmm. How did you know that you had broken the segments down small enough to be sure that,
RACHAEL BUECKERTyou know, success in one segment actually meant that, you know, this is working and it's not like, oh, we were going to make this campaign focused towards, you know, maybe like the health sector. And then that does really, really well. But if you looked closer, it was because there was one part of that segment that was really pulling the whole thing and another smaller part that was doing very poorly.
AVIV CANAANIYeah. So the thing is, is that we barely segment, important to mention, because we find that the
AVIV CANAANIroles we're selling to like CFO, VP finance, FP&A director, we kind of have the same struggles across industries. So our campaigns are very broad. The goal is to create this kind of interest and intent. And, you know, once they come into our process, they ask for a demo. Then like in the sales process, of course, we're going to tailor the right solution for them. But because like our total addressable market is that big, we can do these very wide campaigns that are not as segmented. And then it's more of like within the team of the user acquisition team to understand that attribution and see what worked, what they're in, because they wish it was that simple to just say, okay, this was Facebook, this was Google, this was LinkedIn. Because, you know, sometimes, for example, we look at a few different points of attribution. So for example, our system, our marketing system can say, okay, this was a lead from Google. But we also ask, that's one thing. We also ask them on the forum, how did you hear about us? So they can say, you know what? I saw Facebook ads. And then the SDR also calls them. The SDR asks that question. And they might say, you know, to the SDR, like, oh, I read about you, I don't know, let's say in Forbes, like you mentioned before. And in addition to all of these three, we also listen in Gong to all the calls. And we have trackers to see if they mention something. So despite like, even the example now, I share like three different ones, it comes down to like a fun conversation with an account executive. And then they say, oh, you know what? I just see your ads and TikTok all the time. So maybe they were, you know, afraid of saying TikTok before, or they were afraid to lose face, but like, and we have, like our team needs to really figure out what works and what doesn't.
AVIV CANAANIAnd it's not exact science, but we're trying. That's awesome. I mean, I can see how all these processes layer on top of each other to be able
RACHAEL BUECKERTto like feed your AEs, not just a lot of leads, but leads that are, you know, already kind of enriched in a way or qualified in a way. So by the time they get to them, they know like, okay, this lead came from, you know, TikTok because of this campaign that we run. So I already have an idea of what they're interested in. Yeah, definitely. And I should have mentioned that in our process,
AVIV CANAANIwe do all these ads. You can sign up for a demo. After you sign up for a demo, in most cases, you
AVIV CANAANIalso go to an SDR. So they have to qualify it. They ask a few more questions just to make sure it's a good use of the AEs time. So we want to make sure at least like 50% of our meetings are going to be qualified by the AEs. So we're not selling them like crappy leads. So it's more or less, you know, it depends on the specific campaign, specific AE and so forth. So we have this whole system of how we, you know, how we do it and how we try to create the best experience, not only for our people, but also for the clients to make this as seamless as possible, less friction. So, you know, the moment they decide that they want to set up a meeting, I want to make sure that an SDR is going to immediately call them or they're going to have the opportunity to book a meeting within a day or two. That's something they have to wait for two weeks. And after they meet an account executive, they can immediately like go to the next step. So despite the fact we're selling a product that can cost 30, 40, 50, $60,000, some times our sales cycles can even be a week. Like in most cases, it's like a month or something like that. But we know how to work efficiently when we want. And again, like I think if you compare it to the industry benchmarks, we saw like a third of the time it takes in other companies because we created this kind of very sleek, like operation with like different
SPEAKER_77tools. That's awesome. Yeah. We talk a lot about speed to lead and like having really fast follow
RACHAEL BUECKERTup because I think we read some studies and we did some content on this a while ago, but I can't remember the exact numbers, but it's something like even an hour, you know, after a lead has reached out for a demo, you know, if you don't respond to them even an hour, the percentage of them actually ending up choosing you, the likelihood of it drops significantly. Yeah. Yeah. We can really geek
AVIV CANAANIinto this. So I'll give you an example. Our team, the SDRs have to reach out to the prospect that asked for a demo within five minutes. So we built our whole SDR team in the Philippines so we can move faster and we hired like more SDRs. And also we created, we were using Chili Piper. So if we know that the lead is high quality from the beginning, based on what the answer in the form, we can immediately book a meeting with the AE even without going to an SDR, only if we're not sure it goes to the SDR to double check a few things. And we also in our operation have a system where we want to make sure that the calendars of the A's are open, at least for the next day or two. So no one comes into, you know, asking for a demo and the next up your ability is two weeks from now. We want to be able to move fast because again, this is how people think and operate. Like if they're asking now for a demo, they want to speak with someone or they want to sign up. If you're going to call them after, like you mentioned, an hour or a day, they're not even going to remember, they're going to be buried in something else. So I really agree with like the speed delete is critical. Yeah. Or their competitor
RACHAEL BUECKERTwas faster and now they're talking to them and they're already in the competitor sales process. Exactly. Exactly. So that's a part of like our operational systems. Like I'd always rather
AVIV CANAANIerr on the side of having a few more AEs or a few more solution consultants just to make sure we can move fast. Because even like it's, you think about it really as a factory and as a machine. And even if like they book a meeting immediately with the account executive, but then they want to do like a demo with a solution consultant. We had times like about a year ago, we didn't have enough solution consultants. So the account executive would have to say, oh, you know what, like let's do a demo, but we can only do it two weeks from now. We would lose deals because of that. Yeah. So we want to make sure like if someone's ready to move fast, we have people ready. Because based on that, we also see it really improved our conversion rate. One of the reasons our conversion rate improved is the fact we can
SPEAKER_80move fast and we are available to meet the client where they want us to be.
SPEAKER_14That's awesome. And so on to the AAE thing again as well. How do you make sure that you have enough
RACHAEL BUECKERTleads to feed all of your AEs if they're not prospecting on their own? Do you ever run up against a time where you maybe have too many AEs for the amount of leads that you have or maybe even too many leads? Yeah. So it's not exact science. Like we try to plan it. We try to say, okay, we need to generally say a
AVIV CANAANIthousand meetings this month and based on that higher enough AEs, but sometimes it happens. So, but that's where like, we know there's a problem with our machine and it happened to us in the past where we're like, there's no availability in the calendar. And then I'm pushing, you know, the HR team and VP sales. Like we have to hire fast. We have all this demand. Let's make sure like we create more availability. Sometimes we have to create, you know, creative ideas of maybe that will allow, for example, an account executive from the US to take a meeting in Europe or something that just so like we can fully maximize the machine. And yeah, sometimes the other thing happens where like a marketing campaign isn't working. We're not generating enough meetings. And then it's like, we're going to slow down the account executive hiring, but we will figure it out eventually in terms of how to generate more meetings. It's not easy. But, you know, as you become more efficient, like you can do that. And I'll give you the example. When I took over the sales team, there were six account executives. And I was telling them, listen, like now we're about to grow again as a company and hire more people. And they were very concerned that there's a limited amount of leads. And now within a few months, I'm going to tell them now you have to prospect. I was hoping that our system is going to work. And then eventually luckily it did work. And now we were like 27 account executives and we can still fill their calendars. Nice. With a cell like high quality leads. But, you know, it's a lot of trial and error and sometimes you need to make changes as you go. I wish it was as simple as just to click a button and you generate
AVIV CANAANIthe amount of meetings necessary. But this is what makes this real fun. Yeah, that's awesome. I love the amount of trust that your team had in you and that it like it paid
RACHAEL BUECKERToff for the for the better. So when you switched from data rails from 95% outbound to 95% inbound, we already talked about the how. What about the why? What was going wrong with the old system? Why did you feel the need to change it? So one of the challenges we face, and I briefly
AVIV CANAANImentioned it, especially in 2022, the whole market crash in tech. And what we noticed is that we just had like some marketing back then, but we saw that the conversion rates from opportunity to close one were much higher inbound because we're talking about people with intent as opposed to outbound, where maybe they agreed to go on the call, but they don't maybe have a sense of urgency in buying. And with time, it became apparent that even when the outbound team, and we still have an outbound team, and they still generate a good amount of revenue. But in outbound, it just the conversion rate is lower. So with time, we saw that the A's also preferred to get like the inbound calls. It's more efficient in terms of cost of acquisition. And I fell back for the outbound team because they were hitting their numbers in terms of meetings, in terms of opportunities. But from opportunity to close one, the inbound leads would close better. So, you know, it's just like a force of nature. We had to tilt more towards inbound. We're now investing a lot in outbound because again, it's, you know, you have to look at all the numbers and we still see a lot of value there. And we're increasing like the outbound team a few years later now. But you want to see like what the numbers tell you. Back then it was very clear that the efficient way to grow and scale fast is with inbound. Also, it's easier because it's a button you click is how much budget you spend in inbound as opposed to outbound where it's actually human beings that you have to hire. But I really believe in like diversifying. You have to have like a right amount, like an inbound or outbound or partnerships. And you want to make each one of these channels successful. And just we figured out inbound faster than we figured out other things.
SPEAKER_80And that's why it's failed. Nice. Do you feel like maybe, and this is what I'm feeling like right
RACHAEL BUECKERTnow talking about this, maybe inbound potential is sometimes missed with more sales focused CROs or CROs that grew up on the sales side of things? Sometimes, you know, it really depends on the
AVIV CANAANIorganization. Maybe I haven't been in one of these organizations, but I feel like speaking with other
AVIV CANAANICROs and CMOs, sometimes it seems there's like unnecessary competition between marketing and sales, having this attribution discussions of over this like marketing land or marketing influence deals or not. It's like, who cares? Like the goal is to generate as many sales as possible. And even now, when I have like a VP growth under the marketing department, yes, we have a goal of how many meetings to do and opportunities, but their main goal is revenue. And as far as I'm concerned, all the credit goes to them. I don't care if it like, by the way, I put also the SDRs under them, if it's outbound or something else, they need to do like their own math and see like where they should invest the next dollar. But there's no internal competition. It's not either the partnership team one or the content or outbound or inbound or whatever. We all went together. Yeah. So I think like in other organizations, sometimes like sales wants to show like, oh, we generated our leads. We sold them themselves. And marketing is like, oh, but they saw an ad six months ago. Why aren't you giving us the credit? It's like, it's not worth it having like these discussions. And also it's like a bigger topic where you see like some CROs that grew up from sales, like it seems like we have this thing of, oh, we used to prospect when we were younger. So you need to prospect as well. And I'm like, I don't care. Like A's can do whatever is efficient, but it just, at least in our model, it's not efficient. So I don't want to do it. Like they only need to do the way I see it, things that they're great and things that help make our machine efficient. And in this case, prospecting is just not efficient. And I think it's also much more difficult than it was four years ago. I think that's the beauty of all different companies are unique, right? And some
RACHAEL BUECKERTthings that work for one company aren't going to be as efficient for another company. And it's just like how you run and how things work for you guys. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. I think you just need to
AVIV CANAANIunderstand what works for that business. That's why I even mentioned like we're selling SMB,
AVIV CANAANImid-market, huge total addressable market. If I would be now like a CRO of enterprise selling company with a hundred clients and our total addressable market, each client that was worth like a million dollars, my whole strategy would be different. And like, I might not say that like, I want to fill their calendars all with paid crazy campaigns on like Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok. It's like, you have to adapt. Yeah. I mean, if there was one playbook or one blueprint that every company could
RACHAEL BUECKERTadapt and like, or adopt and like just absolutely win and crush it every single quarter. I mean, I feel like every company would be a unicorn by now. Exactly. And I see sometimes like online people
SPEAKER_83are complaining. It's like, oh, why marketing is now being evaluated just based on like pipeline
AVIV CANAANIand revenue. Like what about like building brand? What about like all the things that used to work in the past, like MQLs and downloads of eBooks? It's like, yeah, that's a problem. Like everyone thinks that there's like one major playbook and everyone does the same thing. So it's not working anymore. So like what HubSpot used to do 10 years ago was great back then, but then everyone copied it. So now it's harder. And now like, you know, there's AI and other things that you have to understand and be good at. And that's why, you know, like you said, like we can't have everyone being billion dollar companies. But again, this is what makes this whole role like more challenging
AVIV CANAANIand interesting that you have to figure it out. And I feel like, you know, you can know that brands
RACHAEL BUECKERTwinning when revenue increases, right? If you're doing a whole bunch of brand campaigns and you're focusing a lot on brand, you will see the results of that in revenue if it's working, not in your white paper downloads or your leads, but in the actual revenue one, because you're kind of like, like, like in volleyball, you're, you're serving sales and sales is doing the strike. I'm not a volleyball player, so I don't know what the terminology is, but, but marketing, like you're serving it up and then your sales team is doing the strike for you. So you'll see it even if you don't see it in, in white paper downloads or anything like that. Yeah. The way I explained to some of my like other VP sales friends or CROs
AVIV CANAANIis like investing in a brand is the same way as like a VP sales can only like work with their existing team. They have to hire and train new AEs. Okay. So it's like a long term benefit. So of course, if you want to hit only your target now, we can put all of our budget and paid media direct, request a demo now. And that would probably work. But long term, we're not like building the right brand. We're not grading the affinity. So I have to invest now in brands. So eventually I get the results. Same thing on why a VP sales needs to invest 20, 30% of their time or whatever it is in hiring new account executives and training them. So once the targets grow in a few quarters, they have more people that can generate that revenue. So, so it's a mix. It's not like either, or like you have to do
AVIV CANAANIboth and you have to find the right balance. And so for the future, are you guys planning on,
RACHAEL BUECKERTyou know, trying to hone in outbound more and scale that function to be as lucrative as inbound or what are the plans there? Yeah. So we're investing now a lot of like an outbound. We have like a really good outbound team
AVIV CANAANIand we're trying to buy and leverage different tools, AI and other things like we discussed before to make outbound even more effective. We want to be ahead of the market and we have like some cool tricks in our sleeves now. Like, you know, we're working on same thing with partnerships. We're heavily invested in that team as well. You want to diversify. You don't want to put like all your eggs in one basket. So I think if you really want to build a billion dollar company, you want to make sure like everything you're doing, like you find the best practices. So I think we find something really good in paid media inbound brand. Now we want to figure out outbound. We want to figure out partnerships. We want to figure out, you know, whatever else is going to help us scale and grow. So yeah, it's a lot of just, like I mentioned even before about brand. If I know I want to be successful in a few quarters, I need to invest now in outbound and partnerships because I know there's a limit about just how much I can just rely on paid media ads. Yeah. What do you think might be like the
RACHAEL BUECKERTbiggest bottleneck right now with outbound? I think with outbound, I think it just became
AVIV CANAANImuch more challenging because of technology. For me, I think I have a Pixel phone for the past half year or so. I have a screener that like actually tells me if it's like a spam call. I know like now an iPhone, it came out. People don't pick up their phones as much. People don't answer their emails as much because you get so many emails. So it's just becoming more difficult. So, you know, like you have different methods, LinkedIn or through like, I don't know, dialers, somehow to call like multiple people at once. You always want to be on top of like, you know, the technology that works or trying new things. And yeah, it's not obvious. I wish like I had, you know, the specific recipe and how to do it.
AVIV CANAANII just, I think trying a lot of different things and just seeing what works.
RACHAEL BUECKERTYeah. You mentioned you have like some strategies or tricks up your sleeves to try out. Are you able to divulge one of those? Yeah, we have like automations go like in LinkedIn from me and like
AVIV CANAANIother executives like we're outreaching to people. We're trying to use like some AI to like do initial
AVIV CANAANIlike emails, you know, to prospects, at least, you know, give, try to automate as much as we can from the job of the SDR. Like my holy grail, I think in terms of outbound SDRs is make it as efficient as we made our account executives. I mentioned before our account executives close about four times more than they close at our competitors. And we know it because a lot of account executives from competitors joined us. So what they do here in one quarter, they used to do it in a year in a competitor. So if an outbound SDR schedules, I don't know, 10, 15 calls a month, I want to be able to build the right kind of operational backend for them with AI and automation so they can schedule 50 calls, 60 calls. We're not there yet. But that's where I want us to be. So it's not that we're not going to have SDRs, we just want to have like the existing SDRs be even more efficient, then we can actually scale it. That's awesome. That sounds similar to, we had this piece of call, I'm pretty sure it should be out by
RACHAEL BUECKERTthe time this podcast is published on, I can't remember, the 10 million AE or the 1 million AE or something like that. It was using AI to like do exactly what you're talking about, right? To create like kind of an AI team for outbound. So that's really interesting. I'm excited to see like where this goes. And also a little apprehensive because it's like, I don't know, I like AI. I think it's very cool and can be a very, very helpful tool. I think it needs to be definitely used responsibly. So it always makes you a bit apprehensive when new AI functionality and power comes out.
SPEAKER_09I have a funny story I'd like to share with you. Like a few weeks ago, I got this call. Usually
AVIV CANAANII don't answer, but I happened to answer and this woman was talking with me. She seemed like super
AVIV CANAANIeloquent, knew exactly when to say what. Every time I said something, it took her like a second to respond. So after like 30 seconds, I asked her, excuse me, but are you AI? And like, she was like laughing.
AVIV CANAANIIt's like, oh, this is like, you're so funny. Like, how do you think I'm AI? And it's like, of course I'm a human being and all that. Anyway, you know, it was a nice exchange to call and went nowhere. But a week later, I went on a call with a vendor that that's what they do, AISDR. So, you know,
AVIV CANAANII was thinking about it for our business. So I was speaking with them and they explained to me how this technology works. And then we asked them, but what happens if someone asks that AISDR, are they AI? What do they do? So they said, they laugh. It's like, oh, no. It's like-
SPEAKER_116Oh, I just got chills. Now I don't know who I spoke with.
AVIV CANAANIOh my God. Are they allowed to lie? Are they allowed to say like, oh no, I'm human?
RACHAEL BUECKERTI think there's no regulation. That's like what's, there's a lot of opportunity here,
AVIV CANAANIbut it's also super scary. There's absolutely nothing there. It's like, yeah, AI is starting
RACHAEL BUECKERTto make me feel like kind of like an invasive species almost. Like there's no checks and balances. There's no, you know, nothing kind of like regulating it and keeping it in check. It's just kind of like the wild west right now. Yeah. It's like a race for our destruction as human beings.
AVIV CANAANIOh my God. Yeah. They're trying to make as much money as they can beforehand.
AVIV CANAANIYeah. But yeah, it's a problem. I think there's no regulations at all, but yeah, I think the world is going to change a lot. Now, here's another example. You know, I mentioned most of our sales come from Inval. We just closed a month ago, the biggest sale we ever did in the company's history. A month ago. So I was like, oh, there you go. So I was looking at it. I went to research and understand, what did we do that was that successful in terms of marketing? I saw that person came organically to the website, the CFO of a huge enterprise. And when we asked in our forum, how did you hear about us? He wrote ChatGPT.
AVIV CANAANIWow. Now, I don't know what even to do with it. Just like the world has changed, but it's not going to impact. Like, I don't know what I need to do now,
AVIV CANAANIyou know, in order to sell more of that. But that's like our biggest deal ever. ChatGPT sent our way. That's crazy. That is something to look into. And you know what, that's not the first time that I've
RACHAEL BUECKERTjust kind of like heard people being recommended by ChatGPT. I've seen like things on LinkedIn floating around, like, you know, make sure that ChatGPT knows your company's name. So because people use ChatGPT now to ask like, you know, if I need this service or product, where do I go? Right. And they kind of, a lot of people use ChatGPT kind of like the Oracle, the all-knowing, all-seeing eye that's going to give them the most perfect answer. So it's almost, honestly, probably as good as social proof or might become as good as social proof. Exactly. I think people are now relying on ChatGPT
AVIV CANAANIfor everything. It's like what to eat, how to exercise, and how to pick like a software solution.
AVIV CANAANIAnd yeah, it's like, I think there's no going back. This is where the world is going. And you know, there's all these consultancy now and all this online material about like how to be better like GEO and, you know, appearing more in AI, but I think we're all trying to figure it out. And I think it also changes like every week where like change something in the algorithm. So just want to be quick. Yeah. It's hard to do content on AI too. Cause like, as soon as something gets published,
RACHAEL BUECKERTyou know, a month later, it's probably obsolete. Yeah, definitely. So, you know,
AVIV CANAANIyou just need to be fast. I'm telling my team that, you know, our competitors can always copy what we
AVIV CANAANIdo. There's nothing like we can do that they can, but like, I think our advantage, our motive is the fact that we can execute fast. Like we come up with an idea. We're like, okay, let's take it live in a few days, as opposed to like bigger organizations where it's, you know, run by committees and legal, and you have to check this, check that. You have to move fast. I think in this economy, because the best practice of something that might work amazing today and bring us a lot of leads and sales be completely obsolete in a month. Yeah. Literally right after this interview,
RACHAEL BUECKERTyou're going to be speaking on the SaaS Metrics Palooza 2025 panel, right? The state of AI and finance. Yeah. And your benchmarks report. That's crazy. Like literally right after this interview, you're going to do that. So by the time this podcast is published, it'll be long over and the recordings will be out. But can you give us a little detail and like, what does your talk about?
SPEAKER_61Yeah. So because we're selling to the office of the CFO, we partnered with Benchmarket. I love
AVIV CANAANItheir reports also for marketing that they just compare different SaaS companies and like,
AVIV CANAANIwhat are the best practices. So we did a research with them to find some really interesting results. The one that I find the most interesting, we asked like finance executives, CFOs, VPs of finance,
AVIV CANAANIFP&A directors and so forth, different questions of AI adoption. So what we noticed, the main thing that really surprised me was we asked them like, who is leading AI adoption in the office of the CFO? Yeah. And most of them said the CEO, not the CFO themselves. And that's like a main point like I'm making like in this presentation was like the CFO needs to decide, are they going to be in the driver's
AVIV CANAANIseat or the passenger seat? Because the CEO, you can understand they want to be efficient. They want to move fast. They want to cut costs and they want to get better insights. And the CFO wants to play it safe. But if they play it safe too much, it's not really that they can stop having AI and get into like their day-to-day work. It's going to happen, but they should probably be the one leading it as opposed to being the ones being led. And you see like other results that really show you that like most finance leaders already have used AI in one way or another. Most of them already see positive results. So it's not like something in the future. It's already here. Like it's happening. And again, like I mentioned in marketing, it's the same thing in finance. You want to be quick to market. You want to figure out things before others do because it's already here and things are going to change a lot every few weeks, months, days. Awesome. And you guys, you have like a whole benchmark report on
RACHAEL BUECKERTthis, right? Like you did a study on these findings? Yeah. Yeah, exactly. You can find it both on our
AVIV CANAANIwebsite as well as in the benchmark website. So you can go to datawithals.com, you know, resources. When this podcast goes live, it's going to be there and you'll be able to see like all the questions that we asked the finance executives about AI adoption and what they're doing. And you'll be able to read the full report. Yeah. And of course, you know, I have a shameless plug of like we're an AI-powered FB&A solution. So I'll just give like one example. Like in software we're selling, finance leaders can ask it. Let's say you're working in manufacturing. So you can say, let's say the price of copper goes down by 10%. How is that going to impact our bottom line? Yeah. Stuff like that. That's cool. It's something you have to do now like manually in Excel, or you can ask, you know, the impact of, you know, these tariffs coming in or other things. And I think, you know, everyone's trying to figure it out. We're in the FB&A space and cash management, a few other things. Other companies do other things, but you want to take demos, learn about what's happening in the industry. Again, whether you're in finance, sales, marketing, HR, AI is taking over and buckle up. Yeah. Absolutely. I feel like it's just been exponentially growing in the last couple of
RACHAEL BUECKERTyears. I remember just two years ago, I was a copywriter before I did the marketing at USC and AI was just kind of like a whisper on the wind a little bit. Like other copywriters weren't too scared, you know, as long as you're like a good writer and you had consultative specialty as well, and you weren't just putting words on the computer. No one was really scared. But now I'm like looking at my, my copywriter peers and everyone's just like having to pivot jobs or they're panicking. So it's, it's moving fast. It's moving very fast. Yeah. So you've pivoted, I think, to marketing.
AVIV CANAANII did. In the right time. I think copywriters is, I think it's going to be tough now.
AVIV CANAANIChatGPT and all that. So I think now it's like about the people that can orchestrate it, whether it's like the finance executive, marketing leaders that know how to leverage, like all these tools and could just move faster, especially if you have the copywriting background, all that, you know how you'll probably know better than others, like how to create a high quality content and just like much more of it. So you personally would become much more effective.
RACHAEL BUECKERTYeah. I feel bad for the new generation of copywriters that are being like raised on ChatGPT, because you never really learn what looks good before it became like the ChatGPT standard. You know, it's a lot harder, at least, because there's too much of a crutch now. Yeah. Now it's all in bashes.
SPEAKER_127Yeah. But I wanted to ask this other question. We're running a little bit on time, but I wanted
RACHAEL BUECKERTto know a little bit about how you guys do annual planning at data rails. So going from like marketing to the CRO role, you probably didn't do much with like annual planning for the year when you were still in marketing. That's just an assumption. So now that you're in the CRO role, how are you using data to create your plans and monitor throughout the year and pivot when you need to pivot? Yeah. So we start with really with the end target of where we want to reach, you know,
AVIV CANAANIin terms of ARR by the end of the year. Then we break it down to how much is going to be like new ARR,
AVIV CANAANIresources, you know, upsells, how much churn is going to be, downsells and so forth. And based on that, like I mentioned before, I'm going to build like the budget. So I would say, okay, if we need to generate this amount of meetings and I would say, I know I have a 10% conversion rate, you know, for meeting. So I know how much meetings I need to generate each quarter to get through that revenue amount, how many opportunities, how many account executives I need, solution consultants, SDRs, marketing people, and so forth. So I really have this kind of waterfall system where it's like, it starts with the target. Then it like breaks down to like meetings opportunities, you know, headcount. That's what I use like for headcount planning. And then I come back, you know, to the CFO, the CEO, it's like, okay, this is the budget that we need. That's, you know, like some back and forth, like figuring it out. Maybe they're going to say, okay, it's too expensive. Let's have like a better cost of acquisition. So maybe if the targets are a bit lower, we can be a bit more efficient, but you know, it's like finding the, you know, the right system. And again, it's, it's very far from exact science, you know, like we sell to finance pros. So I know that, you know, the forecasted in the beginning of the year is the chances of that being like the real results at the end of the year are slim. But I have to say that like three quarters in this quarter, like we're exactly where we thought we're going to be. Hopefully we reach exactly our target by the end of the year. Again, a lot of things could happen like maximum, whatever. But I really hope, like, I think it's going to be a great testament for not only our marketing and sales capabilities, but also for planning capabilities. In the beginning of the year, we said, this is the goal we set and we actually hit it in the right, like efficiency. I think that also builds a lot of trust in venture capitalists, like investing in us saying like, okay, they know what they're doing. This is predictable revenue. It's not like, you know, something random that might not work or might not work, not work.
SPEAKER_80Awesome. That's so cool. I love your story. It's like a, what a great case study of someone coming into
RACHAEL BUECKERTa CRO role and like really succeeding with it and like hitting home runs and stuff. It's great. Thanks. I really appreciate it. And I have to say, like, I came from the marketing background,
AVIV CANAANIso it's more like numbers based, but I think like everyone can do it for the CROs listening out there
AVIV CANAANIthat are like sales executives. Nothing bad to say about you. I'm sure you can be an amazing CRO coming also from sales, but I think whether you come from sales or marketing matters less. What matters is that you own the full like revenue machine and the way it works with me and the CEO. And I think that should work for every CRO and CEO relationship is that we just have two metrics we talk about. What is the growth that we want to achieve and how, how much it's going to cost us. And the fact that like the CEO can just work with one person on that, as opposed to both the VP sales and a VP marketing, I think makes also like their lives of CEOs lives easier. And yeah, that's, that's all I need to do. Simple job. Yeah. If you could go back in time to right before you started as CRO and give yourself
RACHAEL BUECKERTlike one piece of advice or something that you wish you knew when you first began, what would that be?
AVIV CANAANITake the time to really understand sales and try to take a few calls yourself. Like I think putting yourselves like in their shoes, I don't think I need to be a sales person, but you know,
AVIV CANAANIlike experiencing it a bit, getting burned a bit, getting, you know, the experience of people not getting back to me after a demo or not being able to close the deal or losing to a competitor. I think that's something that, you know, could have helped me even more. That said, it's like, I think for everything it's like, you know, you don't need to know it to some degree, but the most important thing is that you have the right directors, VPs, leadership team to support you. Because just like in marketing, like I came from a marketing background, it's not that I'm the best product marketer out there, content marketer. I run the best campaigns in like Facebook or LinkedIn and so forth. You need to find the right people. You need to have a good understanding of, you know, what they do. So if you can play with it again a bit, it helps, but not too much. Yeah. Awesome. This has been a wicked conversation. Thank you so much, Aviv. And if anyone listening
RACHAEL BUECKERTwants to find you and follow you, where can they do that? I think the best place is LinkedIn for free to connect with me on LinkedIn. I try to post every
AVIV CANAANInow and then. Always happy to answer DMs and chat and share best practices. I know there's a lot I need
AVIV CANAANIto learn, you know, from other people and always happy to chat. Awesome. Well, thank you so much, Viv. This is great.
SPEAKER_10Thank you so much, Rachel.
EDDIE REYNOLDSThanks for listening to the show. If this resonated and, or you'd like help with anything we talked about in the show, please reach out to us. You can find us at UnionSquareConsulting.com, and the info will be in our show notes. We'll be right back.
