Walnut CRO Catie Ivey on this episode
Catie Ivey is the Chief Revenue Officer at Walnut.io, an interactive demo platform for go-to-market teams. She brings 15+ years of B2B SaaS revenue leadership experience, having held roles at Meltwater, Salesforce, Marketo, Demandbase, and Pendo before joining Walnut in her first CRO position. Her career spans both hypergrowth organizations and more mature enterprises, giving her a rare vantage point on scaling revenue operations at different company stages.
The core insight Catie emphasizes is that frameworks, not rigid playbooks, are what transfer across companies—and even frameworks must be adapted to fit each organization's unique context and market conditions. While her tenure at Marketo during the Vista Equity Partners acquisition taught her the power of operational rigor and standardized metrics (like a unified definition of demand creation), she's learned that no two sales organizations are truly identical. Her transition into her first CRO role at Walnut forced her to unlearn the assumption that there's one right way to scale revenue.
The episode centers on the challenges of building go-to-market functions in nascent or ambiguous product categories. Walnut operates in interactive demos—a space where customers haven't yet defined what "great" looks like. Catie's approach has been to become intensely customer-obsessed, internally use the product across multiple use cases, and work closely with product and marketing teams to co-create category standards. She walks through her discovery process: meeting every team member, asking open-ended questions, and pattern-matching across customer data to identify signals—like the realization that Walnut's broad TAM required two distinct sales motions (volume/velocity) rather than one standardized approach.
The conversation also covers the human side of change management. When Vista arrived at Marketo, Catie's job as a frontline sales leader was to buffer operational noise while her team continued executing. She learned to protect culture, maintain consistency where possible, and communicate the "why" behind shifts. This framing shapes her current leadership at Walnut: clarity on process, relentless customer feedback loops, and patience with incremental progress. The episode closes with candid advice for first-time leaders: you know enough to do the job, but give yourself grace to learn, ask better questions, and listen more than you might assume you need to.
What we cover in this episode
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2:15
Accidental entry into sales Catie's unexpected stumble into a sales role that launched a 15+ year career in B2B SaaS revenue leadership.
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5:45
Marketo and Vista acquisition Experience navigating operational transformation during private equity ownership, from buffering change to implementing efficiency frameworks.
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10:30
Frameworks vs. playbooks The distinction that playbooks rarely transfer across companies, but frameworks for process, alignment, and metrics are universally applicable.
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16:00
New category challenges Building go-to-market in interactive demos where customer expectations and competitive standards haven't been established yet.
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22:45
First CRO role at Walnut Transition to owning marketing, sales, and customer success in a high-growth startup with undefined processes and evolving product category.
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27:30
Volume and velocity motions Identifying and codifying two distinct sales approaches for different customer segments and deal complexity profiles.
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34:15
Positioning and messaging overhaul Root-cause analysis revealing misalignment in core problem statement and customer framing, not just surface-level marketing execution.
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41:00
Customer-centric leadership Embedding customer feedback loops across product, sales, marketing, and CS to validate assumptions and iterate on strategy.
The lines worth sharing
If I had joined a small company competing in marketing automation, you know exactly what great looks like. In a new category, you don't know all of those things.
Catie Ivey · 16:00
Playbooks are pretty much never plug and play. Frameworks are very much plug and play.
Catie Ivey · 10:45
You absolutely know enough to do the job. Parts of it are going to be harder than you expect. Give yourself grace and time to learn.
Catie Ivey · 42:30
Change is always chaotic, even if it's the right change. As leaders, we spend a lot of time buffering the noise at the top.
Catie Ivey · 7:45
Common questions from this episode
What is Walnut.io?
Walnut.io is an interactive demo platform that helps go-to-market teams orient their entire customer journey around product experience. It allows B2B brands to expose their product earlier and more effectively throughout sales and post-sale engagements.
What did Catie Ivey learn from the Marketo Vista acquisition?
Vista's playbook brought operational rigor, standardized metrics, and process clarity. Catie learned to buffer organizational change for frontline teams while implementing efficiency frameworks around segmentation, territories, and demand creation definitions.
How does Catie distinguish between frameworks and playbooks?
Frameworks—building blocks of process, alignment, and metrics—transfer across companies. Playbooks are specific tactics and execution details that rarely plug-and-play. Every company needs its own playbook built on a consistent framework foundation.
What are the two sales motions at Walnut?
Volume (quick, transactional deals with minimal friction) and Velocity (complex, enterprise-style sales cycles requiring deeper discovery). Reps use checklists to quickly identify which motion applies based on buyer type, problem scope, and executive priority level.
What was Catie's biggest insight in her first year as CRO?
That positioning and core problem framing, not just surface marketing execution, were misaligned. Creating a cross-functional tiger team to revisit positioning helped clarify Walnut's category narrative and set a stronger foundation for all downstream go-to-market work.
How does Catie lead customer-centrically in a new category?
She meets every team member, solicits broad feedback, internally uses the product across multiple use cases, and involves product teams in co-creating customer expectations. She captures usage data even from non-customers to pattern-match and identify unmet needs.
SEO meta description
Catie Ivey, CRO of Walnut.io, shares how frameworks (not playbooks) drive go-to-market success and the unique challenges of building revenue engines in new product categories.
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Catie Ivey
Walnut.io
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go-to-market strategy
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interactive demos
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sales frameworks vs playbooks
Read the complete conversation
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Read the full transcript · 53 KB · Walnut CRO Catie Ivey
CATIE IVEYIf I had joined a small company that was competing in marketing automation or something that was much more well-defined, you know exactly what great looks like. And we know what a great customer experience looks like. And you know what the best products are doing and what the trade-offs are if you're going to use a less expensive product versus a more expensive product. Most of that is well-defined. In a new category or a category that's not even really clearly defined yet, you don't know all of those things.
SPEAKER_03Welcome 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.
SPEAKER_05Welcome to CRO Stories, where we interview brilliant chief revenue officers to see how
RACHAEL BUECKERTthe best in the biz are helping B2B SaaS companies grow. So I'm your host, Rachel Buchert, the marketing manager here at Union Square Consulting. And with me here today is Katie Ivey, chief revenue officer of walnut.io, which is a fast-growing interactive demo platform for go-to-market teams. Katie, thank you so much for joining me today.
SPEAKER_07Thanks so much for having me, Rachel. I'm looking forward to the conversation.
SPEAKER_08Yeah. To start off, why don't you give us a little history of your background and where you started in the SaaS industry?
CATIE IVEYHow much time do you have in terms of kind of how I would summarize it up as short as
CATIE IVEYpossible? And like many folks that are in sales or sales leadership, it was very much an accident earlier in my career. So I stumbled into a sales interview, not knowing it was a sales interview. And 15 plus years later, I'm obsessed with all things B2B tech and leading revenue teams.
CATIE IVEYIt's been a great ride. It worked for a mix of just some incredible companies. So I got my start at Meltwater, which is very much a grind. I stumbled into a BDR role and ended up owning Full Cycle, stayed there for a long time. But I've worked at places like Salesforce, Marketo, Demandbase, Pendo. I've been at Walnut for just a little bit over a year.
CATIE IVEYSo I'm in my first CRO gig at the moment. I think you just, you said something like brilliant minds and a brilliant CRO. I don't know if I get to be in the brilliant CRO bucket yet, but I'm working on it. So that's the very high level.
RACHAEL BUECKERTAlso, well, I think you're doing a great job. I mean, from what I've seen, how Walnut's been growing in the past year or so. Thanks so much. I'm definitely having fun, for sure. Yeah. So going back to your experience at Marketo, I know that's like such a big name in the BBSAS world. What was it like working there back then and like their acquisition with Vista, I believe, going to PBACT?
CATIE IVEYMarketo is just such an incredible company. I feel so privileged to have worked there. My only regret is that I wasn't there earlier. So I didn't get to live through the really early years and some of the hyper growth.
CATIE IVEYThey were already public when I joined. And then they went to the Vista acquisition not too long after I joined. And I stayed through all the Vista years up until the Adobe acquisition and then left not too long after the Adobe acquisition. But Marketo had actually made the decision right before I joined to build out an East Coast hub. So they're based out in the Bay Area, but they were hiring pretty aggressively in the East Coast. So I was hired in Atlanta. I live in Atlanta. So I was hired to lead a commercial team in Atlanta and then led a number of teams kind of throughout that journey on the East Coast.
CATIE IVEYBut an incredible ride. Vista was an interesting experience. I learned and worked with some incredible people. Yeah, we'll just use the word interesting. So there's lots of upsells and pros and cons whenever you're talking about PE. But Marketo was a product. Marketo was a community. Just everything that they built so early on and then really scaled. I had the interesting background, too, of I had been at Pardot a little bit earlier and then worked at a startup for a season in between. So it was fun to then get to walk in and be like, oh, literally working for the best marketing automation platform in the world.
CATIE IVEYSo that was a ton of fun. And building some of their outbound motion because Marketo was, like most of the marketing automation companies, really built and they created the concept of inbound for the most part and did really well with inbound. But then as they grew, realizing and understanding the need to build a more scalable outbound motion. So we did both of those things across mid-market and commercial, which was really fun as well.
SPEAKER_08Yeah. And so going through that PE acquisition, what were the differences that impacted you while you were working there?
RACHAEL BUECKERTSo like how you did things operationally and then like the new changes that came in?
CATIE IVEYIt's a good question. And it's a hard one to answer super succinctly. Vista's got a really well-known playbook.
CATIE IVEYSo they've got kind of standardized norms in terms of how they look at a business, how they dissect a business, how they go to market kind of end to end. And that was a huge positive because there was a lot of learnings for us. But even just as they diagnosed and understood some of the inefficiencies of the business and different ways that we should be thinking about segmentation, pricing and packaging, pre-sale versus post-sale and who should own what. There was a lot of kind of small nuances that more holistically make a pretty big impact for my role. So I was a frontline sales leader for most of that season. So really my big focus was taking care of my people, buffering as much change as there was going on. The goal is to make their lives feel really consistent and their territories feel as consistent as possible. So in a lot of ways, I feel like as leaders, we spend a lot of time obsessing over how do we buffer all the noise that's happening at the top just with enabling our people to keep doing the great work that they're doing and try to minimize that feeling of change that was being felt across the organization, specifically in the front lines with those closest to the customers.
CATIE IVEYThere was probably more of an impact, though, on the post-sale.
CATIE IVEYSo we changed how we talked about renewals and who owned what and some of the functions post-sale, which was a smaller part of my world. So that was probably more impactful for the front lines than even the pre-sale side of the piece.
RACHAEL BUECKERTOkay, cool. And what were some of those big changes that you had to kind of like buffer out? And did they help in the end or were they just a little bit chaotic?
CATIE IVEYChange is always chaotic, even if it's the right change. But I mean, even simple things around how we organized around a target account list and how we looked at territories and is it geo-based, company size?
CATIE IVEYLike what are the different levers in terms of how do we maximize? With any sales organization, you're trying to figure out how you maximize the individuals that are in seat and get as much out of them as possible. And that if you think from a very macro level, that's what PE is trying to do at every piece of the business, figure out how do we get more out of less, essentially. So there were certainly those types of nuances happening throughout the sales organization, but some of it was also like recognizing some of our, you'd think an incredible company like Marketo would have amazing data, but they had been through hyper growth and scaled so, so, so quickly.
CATIE IVEYAnd so there were certain systems that didn't integrate particularly well or data that may be duplicated in multiple different places.
CATIE IVEYSo Vista did a really good job of identifying some of those layers of inefficiency and then figuring out how to get rid of some of that noise so that at the end of the day, especially with a seller, you want them to know how exactly should they be spending their time to get the most out of that time and make it impactful. And of course, there's tons of soft skills that go into that, asking better questions, building better relationships, being able to really dissect and uncover the industry that you're in. But there's also really specific kind of hard skills of what are the Salesforce reports that they look at? How do they structure their calendar? What happens before a meeting, but after a meeting, like how do you run a sales process end to end? How do you forecast? What are the categories that you're using? So Vista certainly came in and added rigor to that, that I think probably in the moment felt not always lovely going through it. But as you look back and realize like, oh, absolutely, drove a ton of additional efficiencies for sure.
SPEAKER_21Yeah, and that is so interesting for me to hear it from that side, because at Union Square Consulting, we work with a lot of PE companies and helping them bring their portfolio companies to that level and like increasing their operational maturity.
RACHAEL BUECKERTSo we see it from that side of like, okay, we're going to discover like all these things that are inefficient going on and we're going to help you implement these new processes and these new workflows and stuff. I am always wondering, like, how is this? What is this like for the actual people on the ground load? Because you said change is always so chaotic, right? And I think that is a big barrier sometimes for clients and for people working on these teams is like, oh, we don't want stuff to change.
CATIE IVEYYeah, for sure. And I would say even more so when it's a company that's gone through so much positivity, like a Marketo, it's a great example, right?
CATIE IVEYThey were just a darling for so many years and in a lot of ways, you know, continue to be to this day. But you've got a lot of sellers that are very successful or a lot of customers that are obsessed with the product, a lot of things that are going really well. So you are constantly juggling that balancing act of how do you protect the things that are working really well while still making the changes that need to be made in the long run. And if anyone has the perfect solution or the perfect formula for that, I'm sure there are gazillionaires out there. But it's a hard balancing act for sure. Yeah. I think as a sales rate or maybe one piece of, I don't know, advice I would give or one thing that I think specifically that the team that operated out of Atlanta just had great culture. And even the boss that I reported into did a really good job of finding the things that were working and doubling down on enough areas that there were certain things that just felt the same. So we held on to some parts of the operating rhythm and how we met as a team and some of the social things that we did and just certain aspects of the business that had really driven a lot of success. And so I think that can allow certain things to feel maybe more the same, even if there is a lot of change that's happening around them. Yeah, I think that's so important.
RACHAEL BUECKERTLike the culture clash that can happen with mergers and acquisitions is sometimes as much or more of a shock to people than changes of process, right?
SPEAKER_28Yeah, absolutely. And so what would you say was maybe the biggest process or operational change that positively impacted you guys on like the manager or the directorial or managerial level for sales?
SPEAKER_29At Marketo specifically during those times?
CATIE IVEYAt Marketo, yeah, yeah. There were so many. Probably if I had to pick one, they still have a whole methodology around what they call creating demand and kind of how they think about, and really at the end of the day, it's just an outbound motion, but how they think about building sales pipeline. And it was a pretty big step up or an evolution from what we had done historically, more consistently across the commercial business specifically. So I think it's a good reminder that even whether it's the right playbook or not, having playbooks in a common language that all of your sellers or all of your teams speak so that you're aligned. You're talking about when you say a metric, you need to mean the same thing. So we could be talking about NRR, but have a couple of different definitions in terms of how you actually quantify NRR, conversion rates, win rates, all of those things. And so I think that through that lens of the creating demand model that they brought in of really standardizing this playbook of here's how we think about building pipeline and building outbound pipeline, probably if I had to pick one, that would be one thing that I would say definitely made a lasting impact across the organization.
RACHAEL BUECKERTYeah. And like with us, we find that that is just so fundamental. We call it the go-to-market efficiency pyramid. The base, the blast, very bottom one is our fundamentals and like ICP definitions, all of your metric definitions like that is something that you just need across the board.
RACHAEL BUECKERTBecause if that's messed up, it's like a domino effect that just hinders everything at every single stage down to customer success. And I think it's important to acknowledge too that it changes the right word, but the fact that you've got to go back to it repeatedly as the life cycle of the company evolves, like, because again, Marquette was a good example of a much more mature organization of already a public company.
CATIE IVEYSo of course, along the way, they had nailed a lot of those fundamentals, but then the company doubles, triples, quadruples in size, and you've got to go back and redefine and realign around those. And I think it's true. I mean, I'm obviously a much smaller company now, but we're in a very similar process. Okay. Like we got to double click. Are we aligned? And when we think about our ICP and we think about the problems that we're solving, who we're solving them for, it's not a one-time exercise. It's something that happens again and again as a company grows and matures and scales.
RACHAEL BUECKERTYeah. Do you feel like that experience going through all these changes with Vista coming in, do you feel like you learned from that and took that into your role at Wellnut? Oh, for sure. I mean, I feel like every role that I've had has been a culmination of the learnings that I've gone through before.
CATIE IVEYAnd I've been so lucky in that I've worked for some really big, amazing, mature brands, like Salesforce being one of them. But then I've also had a couple of much earlier stage experiences and worked for one really true startup before being at Wellnut. And it's such a great, I think, really healthy mix. If you can experience in some capacity, both of those. And I was much earlier in my career when I worked at Salesforce as an example, but even getting to just be an AE and go through the sales training, go through the boot camps and the learnings. And not that I replicate all of the aspects of Salesforce's sales process, because of course it doesn't make sense everywhere you go. And it's not plug and play for what we do at Wellnut, but I'm so grateful for the learnings of going through some of those much more mature motions earlier in my career. Because, yeah, I think that you're always, at least good sales leaders and revenue leaders, like you're always looking for, okay, what have I learned in the past and how does it apply now? And I'm certainly not a believer that there's any one playbook that's just plug and play from one company to another. I think any CRO that tells you, yes, I've got my amazing playbook and I'm going to go work with the next great company and I can run it the same way. I don't think that that's accurate, but I think that playbook as it evolves is certainly a culmination of all of those learnings and experiences, some of which are great in the things that work. And we learn from things that don't work as well. We've all had great bosses and pretty terrible bosses and good processes and we've experienced lack of process and lack of alignment.
CATIE IVEYAll of those, I think, are important building blocks for sure.
RACHAEL BUECKERTYeah, and I like what you said, but like there isn't one playbook for every company.
RACHAEL BUECKERTAnd that's so true. Like you can't just plug and play for it. You have different ICPs. You have different products. Everything is completely different. But at the same time, I feel like there is like some sort of structure that you can bring into every company, right? So it's just the frame. You can't bring the whole house, but you can bring like an idea
RACHAEL BUECKERTof the blueprint and how like the frame is supposed to go up.
CATIE IVEYI would say playbooks are pretty much never plug and play. Frameworks are very much plug and play.
CATIE IVEYSo yeah, the building blocks are kind of the way that you orchestrate more of that holistic bowtie or the funnel. That is for the most part plug and play across organizations and the things that go into it may look very different.
RACHAEL BUECKERTYeah, and so moving up to your experience going into demand-based and Pendo, how different was that?
CATIE IVEYDifferent from what? That would be my first question. I would say that demand-based and Marketo had a lot of similarities. Like ABM, at least during the season that I was at demand-based, it was really marketing automation 2.0.
CATIE IVEYSo it was how marketers were thinking about the next phase of demand gen in a very different capacity. So a lot of how we sold at Marketo, how we supported customers at Marketo, even the buyers of the problems they were trying to solve had a lot of similarities company to company. Of course, the sales process is always going to be a little bit different in pricing and packaging and all of those nuances. But there was a lot of similarities there. I would say when I moved to Pendo, Pendo is the only non-Lartec that I've ever sold or taught people how to sell. So we were selling at Pendo, they sell product analytics and a ton of other really great software, but they sell into a product organization. So that was a new buyer for me, our new core persona. So it was interesting learning not just a new product, but a new buyer and the problems that they're solving and what they care about. And just the nuances of how they think, how they operate. Product teams function quite differently than marketing teams compared to sales teams. So just understanding and learning all of those dynamics while being brought into an organization where I'm managing managers and have a relatively broad purview there as well. That was probably the bigger jump in terms of really having to learn while I'm in the weeds doing to a very different buyer.
RACHAEL BUECKERTYeah. And I don't know a whole lot about Pendo. Is that the smaller startup?
CATIE IVEYNo, no. Pendo is a larger company. They're phenomenal. In my opinion, the leader in product analytics. Got a great product and a great team. Based out of Raleigh.
RACHAEL BUECKERTAnd how long were you at Pendo for? Almost three years. So I joined them to lead their commercial team.
CATIE IVEYSo Pendo had a three segment model, like a S&B, a commercial, and then an enterprise. So I basically owned like the upper end of mid market, the low end of enterprise is how they defined commercial. Did that for about a year and a half and then took over the enterprise segment. So I took part of my team with me and then also managed our enterprise customer base and the sales motion there.
RACHAEL BUECKERTAwesome. And were they going through, like, did they go through any like massive jump in growth while you were there or any big changes?
CATIE IVEYI mean, we definitely grew like really healthy and steadily, but it was nothing like they're a relatively mature organization.
CATIE IVEYSo it wasn't, we're not talking, you know, 200% hyper growth or like the early stage stuff that you could experience somewhere else.
RACHAEL BUECKERTNot as much as like Walnut. I know Walnut's grown super fast in the last couple of years. We're a lot smaller. So the starting point of the base is definitely a lot smaller.
CATIE IVEYYeah. But it's a very different feel of Pendo to Walnut for sure.
RACHAEL BUECKERTAnd what was the transition like going from Pendo into Walnut, from all these other experiences, going into Walnut as CRO? And that's your first CRO role, right? Yeah. What was it like, like coming into that and now you're responsible for all these different departments?
CATIE IVEYI mean, it was a huge leap for one. Most of us at any point in our career, we have moments where like, am I ready for this? Do I know how to do this? The answer is pretty much, yes, you're ready.
CATIE IVEYNo, you don't know how to do it. Yes, you'll figure it out. Like, that's what I would tell people if they're going into literally their first time leading a team or first time leading a company or a much larger organization. There was a ton of differences in a couple of different ways. One, Pendo was a very mature organization. So I was reporting into a phenomenal, really strong CRO that had a large, large, large number. I carried a large number within that. But we, of course, had processes and structure and multiple teams and a very, very well-defined go-to-market. And I knew that I was transitioning into a company that was much smaller without a lot of those things as well-defined. I was very excited about that challenge and that opportunity. You have to work in a very different mental model to get out of the, there's an amazing machine and I'm going to make it better and make it run smoother. To there's very little machine or there's a lot of things that have been working, but pattern matching across those things and really defining what that predictable revenue engine or revenue machine needs to look like was pretty non-existent. So it's a very different set of challenges, I would say.
RACHAEL BUECKERTYeah. And was that like your first challenge coming into the company is having to look at that and figure out what that engine looked like?
CATIE IVEYYes and no. I think probably for me, and this might be a little bit nuanced to Walnut because we have such a broad TAM or total addressable market. Legitimately quite small companies can use our product and see a ton of value. And then really large companies can use our product and see a ton of value. Anyone that has software that they demo, in theory, can be a customer. And that has a lot of positives, but it also means we have a lot of customers and they don't all look the same. We can do a lot of different things with our product as well. And so I think for me, probably the biggest initial learning curve that I think I would be faster at if I was doing it a second time was pattern matching across all of those and making sure that I was seeing the right signals. Because you want to understand who are our customers, who are our best customers, where are our most successful customers, where are win rates the highest, like where do we really need to be focusing? Everyone has finite resources, but at a really small company, you have even more finite resources. And so there's so many people that we could be selling to and building value and customers we could be trying to upsell, but trying to make sure that we're focusing in the right areas. I think for us is at least priority number one. And it took me being a first-time CRO so much to learn. Like, yes, you're trying to understand what exists, what doesn't, what parts of the sales process are working, where is there no process. There's building blocks of a true sales methodology, but not to the level that I had experienced. So you're trying to sift through all of that and figure out what really matters the most and pattern match kind of among that. So that for me was the biggest learning curve, I think, because you know the details of kind of what to do, whether we're talking marketing sales or customer success, but no one has the capacity to do all of the details. So you're trying to figure out really what to prioritize and what's going to make the biggest impact and probably made nine mistakes for every one thing that I got right. So if I did it again, maybe I'd make eight mistakes for every two things I would grow.
CATIE IVEYMaybe the math would change over time.
RACHAEL BUECKERTYeah. What was your approach to tackling that?
RACHAEL BUECKERTLike, what were some of the very first things that you did to figure these things out? The first thing I did was try to meet everyone in person.
CATIE IVEYWe're fully distributed. So we're Tel Aviv-based, but go-to-markets primarily based in North America. So my team was spread out all across North America and a few in Tel Aviv. So trying to get time with people and really ask a lot of questions and not come in with a ton of assumptions or think that I understand, but really ask open-ended questions and try to really understand across marketing sales and customer success. So I wanted to know what we were doing, what was working really well, where the challenges were. I also wanted to understand not just our products, like any revenue leaders got to understand the product, specifically a sales leader, you've got to be able to demo the product, you've got to understand it, you've got to be able to use it. But I also really wanted to understand how my team was using our product because we sell to revenue organizations and there are use cases across marketing, sales, NCS, where you can leverage interactive demos and leverage them really well. So I spent probably more time than you would if you were, I don't know, if I had joined a company and we were selling accounting software into finance, wouldn't be quite as relevant, but we were selling go-to-market tech into go-to-market teams. So I spent a lot of time trying to understand how do we use the product, where do we see as much, like a ton of success internally, what are our blockers, what would we love to see in the product so that we can align from a, even a long-term roadmap perspective, but to really understand the impact that we expect. You know, if I'm going to have a conversation with the CRO, it can't just be high level, it's got to be the details and like, let me talk to you about how I run my team and where Walnut fits into that and all the impacts that I'm seeing. So I spent a lot of time trying to really uncover and understand those pieces too.
RACHAEL BUECKERTYeah. I'm guessing you use your product to demo your product? We do, yeah.
CATIE IVEYWe're an inception thing. So at times there's the challenge of like, we're using our own product to demo the product itself, but yes, we certainly do.
CATIE IVEYAnd we use it across a lot of different use cases through the full funnel, but also a new category. If I had joined a small company that was competing in marketing automation or something that was much more well-defined, you know exactly what great looks like. And we know what a great customer experience looks like. And you know what the best products are doing and what the trade-offs are if you're going to use a less expensive product versus a more expensive product. Like most of that is well-defined. In a new category or a category that's not even really clearly defined yet, you don't know all of those things. So there's not like a plug and play point of view or reference even on, okay, we think we're the best in these areas and maybe this other player is really strong. There's some of that, of course, but the customers haven't necessarily decided what they want in an interactive demo platform yet. So that's another sort of layer that you add on of, of course, you want to get to know your customers. Of course, you want to hear how their experience has been. What was the sales process like? What's working really well? How's the post-sale experience? You want to learn all of those things, but then you also want to understand what they're thinking about long-term and what are things that they think maybe should exist in an interactive demo platform that doesn't yet. And so there's kind of that layer of trying to pattern match and work with product too, to figure out not just how do we take the feedback and build the things that customers are asking for, but what is no one thought of yet that we actually should be asking for or should be thinking about.
RACHAEL BUECKERTYeah. And that's so interesting to me. I don't have a ton of experience like working in brand new categories. Right.
RACHAEL BUECKERTAnd I just, I imagine that is so difficult, like a whole other ballgame. I think it's also what makes it so important that at least for us, that we're using our product often, using it really well, and maybe using it for use cases that it wasn't necessarily built for.
CATIE IVEYSo we do a lot of that, trying to sit down together and whiteboard out. What are the things we haven't thought of yet? Like where are places that, well, it's actually really applicable. Or we have a concept of playlist where you can build all these various demos and put them into a little microsite and coming up with other use cases and internally, like we just rolled out a piece of software to help us get contracts signed. And so we use our own product for all of our internal training around that. And obviously there's LMSs that can do this and there's other things, but it was a good exercise for us to just think creatively about other applications and ways that we can be using our own product. And I think those are the things that also tee you up really well to have those types of conversations with customers, because we're always trying to expand or person, you know, have you thought about this? Or maybe you're having a challenge in a certain area. I've got an idea about how you could solve that specific problem. So I think that's probably the thing that's harder, but also more fun in a category creation mode or a new category.
RACHAEL BUECKERTYeah, and I imagine in a new category, alignment between all your different departments, like product, sales, marketing, customer success, like that must be so important.
RACHAEL BUECKERTI mean, it's important for every business, but especially for a new category, right? The rest is the most important thing, like hands down.
RACHAEL BUECKERTYeah, because you're iterating as you go and you need those feedback loops between everybody to know what's working, what's not. How are the customers using it? How can we feed this to marketing to get more people in? Every company that I've ever worked for, like says we're customer obsessed.
CATIE IVEYOf course, that's one of our core values. Of course, we're customers. But putting that in action at a category creation or early stage company is so much more important. And I do think that there's parts of it that are harder, like you have to be much more intentional. And we by no stretch of the imagination have nailed it. But we certainly are prioritizing that when we think about product, marketing, sales and customer success. Like if we don't orient around our customers and figure out how to have them at the center of each of those motions and like that connective tissue across each of those pieces, there's absolutely no way it's going to work long term.
RACHAEL BUECKERTYeah. And so what does leading like a customer centric organization, what does that mean to you? That's a really good question.
CATIE IVEYI don't think I have the answer for you yet. Over the last year, it's been one of the things that we have spent a lot of time really trying to unpack and figure out like, how does this tie into literally what's the buyer experience that someone goes through before they ever talk to a salesperson? Like that's part of being customer centric. So we get product tours on our website. We have a lot of asynchronous ways that we give them exposure and try to educate even before they're talking to sales. So like that's part of orienting around the customer. And then for us, we have, because of the product that we sell, we can capture a lot of that data. So even if someone never buys from us or doesn't become a customer, we learn a lot about how they're interacting with our product and some of the different journeys that they're going through. But we're constantly looking for ways to tie that in to our entire experience of the whole customer journey. So how do we solicit feedback? Who talks to who when? Where do we ask questions? Where do we give feedback? And I certainly do not think that we have the one answer in terms of how do you run a customer centric organization. I mean, there's like little things that we do. Like every time we sign a new customer, like I do a one-on-one reach out and introduce myself. Sometimes I've met them, of course, in the sales process, but oftentimes I haven't. And I offer and try to get 15 minutes on the calendar with them to ask a couple of questions and ensure that that is layered into how we're going to support them moving forward. But I'm also trying to learn, like, what are the things that we're doing really well? And what are things, again, that they may be looking for or hoping to see in a platform that we hadn't even thought of yet or other things that can be learnings for us? And so we've got different touch points like that that are obviously set up through the full customer journey. We also have a mix of high-touch and low-touch customers because there's customers that spend more money with us and then there's customers that don't spend a ton of money with us. So we're working on both of those different journeys in terms of how do we learn what's digital-led versus human-led and how do those two things kind of align and match to drive a better customer experience, which ultimately helps us learn, too.
RACHAEL BUECKERTYeah, and are you guys PLG or mainly PLG, SLG?
CATIE IVEYWell, we are definitely not considered PLG. I would say that we are product-influenced, sales-led. So folks do interact with our product typically before they talk to a seller.
CATIE IVEYAnd then there's a combo of those principles that are happening. But we do have two different motions. We call them volume velocity. But basically, we have very short, inexpensive sales cycles that happen that are still sales-led, but they're much more transactional. And then we have more, we call them value, but much kind of what you think of as a more traditional enterprise motion or more complex sales cycle. We have essentially a bottoms-up and a tops-down motion that are happening across our customer base. So we do run different processes and have different motions for those two. And that ties into the customer experience and how we support them and how we either go bottoms-up to try to expand the footprint and grow or kind of drive more of a top-down motion, too. Yeah, so how do you differentiate between the two and figure out, like, which motion is best for which lead?
RACHAEL BUECKERTYeah, it's one of the things that my head of enablement and I spent some time on early this year of basically, how do we help reps figure out really quickly whether we're talking volume or velocity?
CATIE IVEYSo is this a tops-down or a bottoms-up motion? Because you would think, in theory, that really small companies, we would be talking more quick, land-fast, minimize friction. Large companies, of course, are running an enterprise sales cycle. It actually isn't that cut and dry, at least not in our category yet. So essentially, we literally built checklists. Like, here's who are we talking to? Here's the question. What types of problems are they trying to solve? How important is this initiative company-wide? Are we talking about exec priorities or is it one specific problem they're trying to solve? So there's essentially a diagram that we've built that reps can get through pretty quickly to figure out, is my goal here to minimize friction, make it really easy to do business with and move quickly? Or am I trying to encourage this prospect to slow down? Let's really understand what you're looking for. Let's talk about your broader team, your broader go-to-market motion, and then build a plan that makes sense for them. That's kind of, at a really high level, the two key differences of the motions for us.
SPEAKER_21Were these motions established when you came into your role, or was this something that you ID'd with the team?
RACHAEL BUECKERTThey were established in that they were happening, but no one had recognized exactly what was happening.
CATIE IVEYBut we knew we had a lot of different sales processes. We knew we had some really big customers and really small customers, quick deals, long sales cycles.
CATIE IVEYWe had a mix of all of those things, but we hadn't put it on paper or into any form of something that would feel like a playbook that reps could actually understand how to run. So that was kind of the focus of the first half of the year, of getting these things at least prescriptive enough so that you can build that framework of setting reps up for success to know what motion they're running and how to maximize their success in that role.
SPEAKER_31Yeah, it's crazy, the power of just having something written down for people to look at in reference, and this is a process that we have.
CATIE IVEYDon't get me wrong, there's still a lot that we are working to get written down and standardized, so we're definitely not there yet. But that's one of the areas where we have made a lot of progress, though.
RACHAEL BUECKERTWell, it takes a lot of time. Developing peak operational maturity is, I mean, most companies aren't there.
RACHAEL BUECKERTEven like $100 million, $200 million companies. Well, good, that makes me feel a little bit better, because we're definitely not there yet.
CATIE IVEYYeah, no, we work with $100, $200, $300 million companies that we come in, and there's still a lot of processes that we need to go over.
RACHAEL BUECKERTAnd sometimes it's down to the ICP still, and it's like you're at this really, really huge place, and there's bottlenecks. What's creating that bottleneck? Well, it looks like there might be some issues with your ICP on a channel-by-channel. At that level, it's more complicated.
CATIE IVEYI was going to say, because they're trying to sell multiple different products or different solutions, so the ICP looks different depending on what they're selling. So I wouldn't think you'd get half a billion dollars without nailing your ICP at some capacity.
RACHAEL BUECKERTYeah, it's that once you get past a certain growth stage, it just gets a little bit more complex. Or if you have a lot of different channels, depends on the company. Sometimes it doesn't get more complex, but it's never-ending iterative work, for sure. Yeah, for sure.
SPEAKER_61So what do you feel were some of the most impactful process and operational changes that you were a part of since coming onto Walnut that helped increase go-to-market efficiency or revenue growth?
CATIE IVEYWell, gosh, we're still working on most of them, so hard to answer the question. I would say nailing that volume, velocity, the two different go-to-market motions, that's probably the most foundational thing that I feel like we've almost solved or gotten really close to solving. And that very much ties into how we think about pricing and packaging and what we're selling and how we're selling it. So that was an area where there was definitely a lot of inefficiency. I mean, just in terms of if you think you're running what's going to be an enterprise, much more complex, larger deal cycle, and it turns out they're actually looking for a really simple solution. You price yourself out because you're trying to solve the wrong problem. So there was a number of those things that I feel like we've solved for the most part and created some structure and some frameworks around that's probably the most impactful in terms of solving some of those, like, just the gaps across the efficiency and the funnel more holistically. Gosh, there's so much. I mean, we've done a lot of work on the RevOps side. There was a lot of systems that weren't fully flowing and talking to each other, so just streamlining where do we work, how do reps spend their time, how do we want people to spend their time post-sale as well because I own the post-sale side of the house as well. So understanding what's high-touch versus what's low-touch and building playbooks for how we onboard new customers, just ensuring that they're, you know, what's that key impact moment, how do we drive to it really quickly. We've gotten a lot of that written down, to your point, like on paper, and the playbooks are still being iterated on for sure. But getting some of those key milestones documented so that we have, Kevin Dorsey calls it the wiggle, but what good looks like. So understanding in every role what does good look like because the reality is some reps are going to crush quota and some reps are going to have rough quarters and some CSM is going to knock it out of the park and then maybe have a tough retention quarter. There's a lot of things that happen that are not directly within the control of an individual, so you need to give them a roadmap of what does good look like in your day-to-day, in your high level, as well as literally how we spend a five-day period. I don't know if you're driving success or maximum impact. So I think we've made a lot of progress in documenting those things so we can give the key individuals the right roadmap of what good looks like.
CATIE IVEYAnd what kind of feedback have you heard from your salespeople and sales leader after these changes, either just seeing the results of their work improving or feedback that they've directly communicated with you?
SPEAKER_07Gosh, I mean, every question you ask, I'm like, oh, it's such a work in progress.
CATIE IVEYIt's still such a work in progress. So I would love to feel like, oh, it's like check the box. And now we're like just humming and everything's doing perfect. I think there's been a lot of breadcrumbs along the way of like even just something as simple as a deal that we closed that was highly competitive.
CATIE IVEYAnd then six months later, the feedback that we had from the customer just being like, I literally got feedback from a CMO just last week via email that was like, just warms your soul. You know, the kind of thing that because usually CROs get brought in when something's not working or something, you know, we get to deal with all the bad stuff and don't always get exposed to the great stuff. So hearing this unprompted email from a CMO that's like, you guys have gone above and beyond, you've exceeded our expectations, adoption's been faster than we expected. I had heard that from the AE and the CSM that's supporting the customer. But you, of course, you're one version from your own team, and it's different to hear that validated from the customer side. So there's all these little examples like that that have happened specifically, I would say, over the last six months, three to six months. But we're still in such early innings of, I mean, where we want to get to is this grouping of people that because we gave more clarity, because they understood what good looked like, this trajectory of not just hitting the number, but understanding what's next in their career. Like, what are they reaching for? Like, of course, they're learning a ton, but learning so that they can do what and being able to see some of that progression. And I think it's just, it's still too early in my walnut journey to have a lot of those stories yet.
RACHAEL BUECKERTYeah, and that's fair, but I do really love this perspective, because I think a lot of people, and especially a lot of people who might be listening to this podcast, they're kind of in the same era that you are, where they're either starting out or they're just now tackling these challenges and figuring out what to do.
RACHAEL BUECKERTSo this is a good, like, what it's like to go through this process and what it's like being in the middle of it and experiencing these changes right now. I think we talked to a lot of people who have had really, really great success in the companies that they've worked in the past, but they went through these big changes a couple of years ago, right? So the feeling's a little bit dulled, like the experience is a little bit dulled in their memory. So this is great to, like, just get a really fresh perspective of, like...
RACHAEL BUECKERTDefinitely a fresh perspective, for sure.
CATIE IVEYYeah. For me, I'm always trying to think through kind of two lenses. Of course, it's what's the impact that I'm making on the business and the people that I support, people that work for me, and I think that's priority number one. But it's also the, what am I learning? And the reality is I'm learning more now than I've ever learned it in the other season in my career. And as long as both of those two things are happening, some companies are rocket ships. Some journeys, some pieces of our career feel really easy, some feel harder. And I think there's a mix of most of that in most roles. But I think as long as I can identify, here's the impact we're making, here's people that are doing great work, here's progress that we're making on the business. And on a personal note, I'm learning a ton and key building blocks for my own career, like, and then that's a win for sure.
RACHAEL BUECKERTYeah. What has been, like, the biggest aha moment or the hardest challenge you've come up against and then you, like, figured it out and you're like, okay, this clicks.
RACHAEL BUECKERTI understand this is the way to go. Biggest aha moment.
CATIE IVEYWe did a lot of work last quarter around positioning and messaging. So I think I mentioned I own marketing sales and customer success and we solved a lot of the kind of fundamental pieces on the sales and CS side.
CATIE IVEYAnd Walnut has historically just always been really good at marketing. They've got a really creative brand and have just done some really great things long before my time. I take no credit for any of them. So I think that many of us had this kind of assessment or assumption that, like, marketing was humming and we just had to fix the other stuff. And not to say that it wasn't, but in identifying some of the, we'd spent a lot of time on ICP and other things, but there was actually some fundamental pieces around positioning that we hadn't nailed. Like we hadn't aligned the company around really big picture, like the core problem that we're solving, who we're solving it for, which ties into a lot of broader pieces of how you build your website and what your sales decks look like and the journey and the process that you take people through sales and post sales. And so spending good, we created a tiger team and obviously did a lot of data analysis and pattern matching across our customer base to make sure that we were pulling the right things out. But that to me felt like one of the, and it doesn't reflect in the numbers yet. Like it's not, there's been like, you know, some astronomical success that's directly come out of it, which most things in marketing are like that. Like it's the big unlock and then you don't see all of it for another, I don't know, 18 months or a long time. But I think for me, that was probably one of the more unexpected unlocks was identifying some of the root causes that we didn't know were there and then getting the right cross-functional team put together to really spend time nailing those things, having the right discussions so that we then got the right framework to build. It was just part of the foundation that we didn't realize was maybe slightly misaligned or not quite as strong as we wanted it to be and then investing the time to get it there.
SPEAKER_55Yeah. And that, that is so huge too. It's like you, you come into a situation and you see all of these symptoms of a problem, right?
RACHAEL BUECKERTAnd you're like, oh, our leaves are down. We need to increase MQLs. And you spend some time working on and actually looking at the data and slicing and dicing the analytics. And then you figure out the actual root cause of the problem. You were just seeing the symptoms before, but this is actually the root cause.
RACHAEL BUECKERTAnd for you, it was the positioning? Yeah, for us, it was the positioning. And some of the pieces that go into like a more traditional positioning exercise really helps for us to then stair step into.
CATIE IVEYAnd part of the messaging was really on point. But then there was a few things that we had missed in terms of just how we were framing interactive demos specifically in the problems that they were solving that I think down the line are going to be a really big unlock for us.
CATIE IVEYCan you give me some examples?
RACHAEL BUECKERTLike what was the before and after that?
RACHAEL BUECKERTNo, because we have a positioning campaign that we're about to launch in three weeks.
CATIE IVEYOh, okay. So we've got some great content and video websites and other things that we're working on, but I'm not going to talk about it yet because I don't know when this is going on, actually.
RACHAEL BUECKERTWell, exciting. I'm going to keep my eye out.
SPEAKER_15It's been a lot of fun for sure.
RACHAEL BUECKERTYeah, and that's so relevant for me too, like as a marketer as well. With USC, we went through the same thing. For a while when I joined, our positioning was a little bit off and we were kind of targeting the wrong group of people that didn't necessarily have like the right authority to make these decisions. And that was a big unlock for us as well, figuring out maybe we should just tweak our messaging slightly and just like left a slightly different person.
RACHAEL BUECKERTAnd most of us have like a variety of personas where we may have core users that are a very clear persona and then executive buyers that are a different one.
CATIE IVEYAnd we certainly have a mix of that. But just, yeah, it's like that layer underneath that you build some of these messaging docs on top of that I felt like it was really good for us to spend time really unpacking and going back to.
RACHAEL BUECKERTYeah, and so we're getting close to time here, but I had one other question for you. If you were to give advice to yourself coming into this CRO role with everything that you know right now, if you could just like give yourself one paragraph or sentence, or I guess you could go longer than that, but one piece of advice you're allowed to give, what would you say to yourself?
CATIE IVEYYou absolutely know enough to do the job. Parts of it are going to be harder than you expect. Give yourself grace and time to learn.
RACHAEL BUECKERTYeah, and would you have done anything differently? Knowing what you know now? I mean, for sure.
CATIE IVEYIn hindsight, you know the right question to ask three months later than you wish you knew the right question to ask. So there are certainly things that I would do differently in terms of order of operations and what I would prioritize and where I would spend my time.
CATIE IVEYBut I don't think it's that I couldn't go back in time and necessarily do it particularly differently. Some of it's just the nature of being a first time in the role as well. Like, of course, I've learned things that my hope is that pattern matching would take less time. Like, I would know some of the questions to ask a little bit earlier, but I think that's the nature of, at least for me, I always want to be out over my skis a little bit and in a role that feels like a stretch in some capacity. Of course, you don't want to feel like you have no idea what you're doing, but there needs to be parts of it that don't feel familiar or that feel different than what you've done before. So it's hard to point, other than asking different questions, listening more. Yes, I would probably do certain things in a different order, but I don't think that I could go back and redo them exactly.
RACHAEL BUECKERTI love that answer because that's so true. It's like you became how you are now because you had to learn those lessons in the way that you learned them.
SPEAKER_28Yeah, for sure.
RACHAEL BUECKERTIt's a good question, though. Thank you. Awesome. Well, this was great. Thank you so much, Katie. I love this conversation.
SPEAKER_28Wow, it was great, Rachel. I enjoyed being here for sure.
RACHAEL BUECKERTYeah, and do you want to tell us a little bit more about Walnut and what you guys do?
RACHAEL BUECKERTYes. So Walnut's an interactive demo platform, which essentially just means that we help go-to-market teams orient their entire customer journey more around their product.
CATIE IVEYSo we think product is the most valuable asset that B2B brands own, and most of us do a pretty bad job of actually exposing the product earlier and then often throughout the sales process and the post-sale experience. So interactive demos are an incredible way to do that, to orient more around your product. And if you're looking to do that, we would love to talk to you at Walnut.
SPEAKER_08Awesome. And where can people find you if they want to follow you on LinkedIn?
CATIE IVEYLinkedIn is the easiest or my most kind of present. I'm Katie with a C, so I'm usually pretty easy to find if you just type in my first name with a C versus a K.
RACHAEL BUECKERTGreat. Well, thank you so much, Katie. Thanks, Rachel.
SPEAKER_03Thanks 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. you
