CMO Mathematics with Service Express

Joshua Leatherman has been CMO at Service Express for 9 years now—during that tenure, revenue has grown from 30 million to 130 million, marketing efforts now contribute a whopping 70% of qualified leads in their sales pipeline, and their NPS score is currently at 90. Behind these impressive numbers is a lot of hard work, gaining executive buy-in, inspiring staff with an employee-first organizational purpose, and building a customer experience that drives satisfaction and referrals.

Leatherman is an expert on the metrics that matter, both the impressive ones listed above, and the ones that you look at behind the scenes to get there. It’s not about the number of meetings, it’s about the number of quality meetings; not the number of prospects, but the strategy behind how prospects are brought in and engaged. In this episode, you’ll get an up-close look at CMO math as Leatherman discusses how they calculate ROI and the essential steps to building a revenue-generating marketing engine. For more on measuring metrics that matter, check out chapter 10 of our B2B Brand Strategy Guide, here.

Full Transcript: Drew Neisser in conversation with Joshua Leatherman

Drew Neisser: Hello, Renegade Thinkers! One of the things we don’t talk enough about on this show is what I’ll call CMO math. As the CMO, you serve multiple stakeholders, all of whom have their own agendas and thus their own yardsticks. Your CEO and board are undoubtedly interested in revenue growth and if your public, share price comes into play. Your partners in sales are hungry for qualified leads so, we’ll measure you based on your contribution to pipeline. Your distribution partners measure you based on ease of sale, customer satisfaction, and of course revenue contributions. Your customers show their pleasure by renewal rates, referrals and references, and employees have their own measures often expressed in longevity, Glassdoor ratings and recruiting efforts. Of course, thinking personally, CMO math shows up in how long you get to stay in the CMO chair. Two years? Four years? Longer?

Let me share the CMO math of my guest today. In his nine years at Service Express, revenue has grown from $30 million to $130 million. That’s over 4x revenue growth. That’s a good number. Marketing’s contribution to the qualified lead pipeline is 70%. Now, on a recent episode, a CMO said that the average marketing contribution of pipeline was 15% to 20% and another CMO on another show expressed delight for raising marketing’s contribution to 40%, so 70% is really high.

And here’s the kicker. On the Service Express website, you’ll see their Q4 2019 Net Promoter Score is 90. Wait, stop the presses. 90!? That is ridiculously high. With that kind of CMO math, you can see why I’m delighted to welcome Josh Leatherman, CMO of Service Express to the show. Welcome, Josh.

Joshua Leatherman: Thank you. Thank you for having me.

Drew Neisser: It’s really cool that you’re here at Renegade’s world headquarters in New York City. Nine years on the job, take us back to 2011. What was the situation when you arrived?

Joshua Leatherman: When I arrived, Service Express was $30 million in revenue. We essentially did not have a marketing program, we had what looked like a 1990s type website and our president and CEO at the time, Ron Alvesteffer, had a vision for marketing and that was to drive qualified leads to our sales team. When I started in 2011, our sales team was having a tough time getting a hold of prospects. We had a top-of-funnel problem and we knew if we invested a little bit of time into demand marketing, we could essentially front-load the top of the funnel and help the sales team out.

Drew Neisser: So, you get there. Let’s talk about where you start. I mean, marketing is not really contributing or holding its weight. What were some of the first things that you did in that situation to figure things out? There were a lot of problems to solve, which one did you say was the top priority?

Joshua Leatherman: The top priority was first and foremost getting a website that was optimized for form fills and lead conversion, we did not have that at the time. Secondly, it was getting a CRM that worked for us. We had a home-grown system at the time, and it was an electronic Rolodex for our salespeople. If you truly want marketing and other teams to be on the field helping the sales team, you really need a system that integrates well with martech, other sales technologies, and one where sales and marketing can mutually contribute to the buyer’s journey.

Drew Neisser: What did you end up using for CRM?

Joshua Leatherman: We started with Pardot and then we purchased Salesforce. Back then Pardot was not owned by Salesforce, so Pardot was our marketing automation tool and Salesforce quickly became our CRM.

Drew Neisser: So, you needed to have a catcher’s mitt, if you will, to catch the leads and manage the data. That’s certainly part one of being able to have some CMO math, because if you don’t have a CRM and you don’t have a marketing automation system, it’s kind of tough to measure. Then, at some point you have to start driving leads, right? It’s not like any of those investments created demand or created traffic. What were some of the things that you started to do to get people to come to the website so that you actually could get some leads?

Joshua Leatherman: The first thing we determined that we needed to do was build awareness in our category. Our primary competition is the OEM, the big guys, and there’s very little awareness that there is a company like Service Express or a category of companies out there that do what we do. The first thing I wanted to do was work with the team to build valuable content that we could share and educate our buyers with. We didn’t want to just spam them with e-mail, so we built content and then we leveraged our marketing automation system at that time to create a strong outbound marketing program that got the content out there.

Drew Neisser: I realized that while I was talking about all the numbers, I never actually explained what Service Express does. You manage server farms, right? We had Jennifer Deutsch on this show from Park Place Technology, it’s somewhat similar to what they do, right? All of these servers are a Dell or whatever and their warranties run out and they need to be managed. Is that essentially what we’re doing?

Joshua Leatherman: Yeah, that’s spot on. Typically, the OEM is in the business of selling hardware. IBM, EMC, Dell, they will sell you servers typically with a three to five year warranty. The useful life of that hardware is seven to ten years and so what we do is come in and say, you do not have to buy new hardware. After three or five years when that lapses, we’ll take over the servicing of that equipment and we will increase your service and reduce your costs.

Drew Neisser: So, it’s a pretty good deal for the clients. Is this about a share battle or is this about building the category?

Joshua Leatherman: This is all about building the category. We’re called a third-party maintenance provider and if you took North America and put all the third-party maintenance providers together, we would probably be less than 7% of the total addressable market, so it’s really about the category.

Drew Neisser: Ok, a lot of upsides. I just imagine there’s a VC listening who’s just doing a rollup of all of you right now and that would certainly be an interesting play. Okay. So far, we’re talking about some pretty basic blocking and tackling. In the last nine years, has there been a program or a methodology or something you’ve done that you think has really made a huge difference in driving the business forward?

Joshua Leatherman: Absolutely. I would say the alignment of several teams. My mandate when I came in was to build a great demand marketing team that drives leads at the top of the funnel. I realized when we started to build that team and send leads through that our field sales team that had a difficult time following up on those leads. Some of them were poor leads, some of them were good leads, but they didn’t know which were good, which were poor. I realized I had to build a sales development team who would follow up on the leads that marketing was bringing in within five minutes, because we learned that our prospects are 800% more likely to pick up the phone if we call them within five minutes of the lead coming through.

I would say it was the alignment and creation of our sales development team, who fields those inbound leads, and also our revenue operations team, which is sales ops and marketing ops rolled into one. We have a very robust technology stack. Increasingly, CMOs are spending more money on technology than anyone else in the organization, but too often its marketing teams are responsible for the deployment, implementation, and integration of those systems when they should not be. So, we have a dedicated rev ops team who is, as I like to call it, Switzerland. When sales and marketing are fighting in a healthy way about the quality of leads or a process, we have a great revenue operations team. I think our team is nine or ten people right now and they’re Salesforce-certified people, they’re Marketo-certified people. This is a team that objectively looks at the systems and the data and they are Switzerland for us. They have a dotted line of responsibility to me and to our Chief Revenue Officer.

Drew Neisser: Really interesting. There are so many things that I want to dive into this area and I think the best thing to do will be to take a break and then come back and dive in. Gosh, building a rev ops team makes a lot of sense. Building a sales development team, a field team, all those things make a lot of sense. I want to talk about the challenges that you went through to get that done. We’ll be right back.

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Drew Neisser: Ok, we’re back. This is a show that’s dedicated to CMO math, and if you’re a regular listener, I’m always trying to simplify these things because complexity is not our friend. You recognized that there was a problem with the ability to manage processes and qualify leads, so you decided to develop a sales development team. Yes, SDT. Talk a little bit about what it took to get that in place. Was that a hard sell and, as a sales guy might say, why is that under marketing?

Joshua Leatherman: First of all, it was not a hard sell because I had a president and CEO who was an ally of mine. I have colleagues who do not have that. It’s very difficult to get investment because in order to create a sales development team, a revenue operations team, or if you want an effective technology stack, it takes investment and it costs money. And you’ve got to be able to articulate what you believe the return will be. I’ll just start there: you really have to have an executive team who buys into it.

Drew Neisser: Right. That’s true for everything. No CMO succeeds without a CEO right behind them. So, you get permission to start the sales dev team. You have to hire these people who are different than others. They have different skillsets and frankly, they probably have different metrics. What were some of the challenges, as you were developing these things, and some of the lessons that you learned about developing a sales dev team?

Joshua Leatherman: What I learned is you cannot place high enough importance on the agility and the ability to pivot. When we started, the metric for success for us was number of meetings scheduled. How you measure people is how they’re going to drive performance and fill their days. That was a great place for us to start but we had to move the ball because what we found is that we had great people who ended up scheduling lots of meetings with unqualified people. We had to start looking at, ok, the number of meetings is an important metric but how much sales qualified pipeline are those meetings driving to the sales team?

Drew Neisser: I think that’s such an interesting and instructive thing. There’s a lot of emphasis on leads, for example, and let’s face it, not all leads are good leads and not all meetings are good meetings just because you have them. The clear understanding is that what you measure and what you pay for is what you’re going to get. It’s so important. Big punctuation point on that. So, you switched the metrics, what was the metric that you started to look at?

Joshua Leatherman: There are two different ways we use numbers. There’s the way we look at numbers to drive our business and to execute on strategy, and then there’s the way we use numbers to report up to investors in the executive team. Those are two very different scenarios and I think a lot of my colleagues get into this trap of using the metrics that we use to execute and drive our strategy. They try and report those to bankers, investors, and executives, and the executives and bankers go, “I have no idea what this means. What is a lead versus a marketing qualified lead? What do you mean by impressions? What do you mean by click-through rates?” A lead from one channel like display advertising is going to be very different than a lead from another channel like content syndication so we have to simplify it for our audience and understand and recognize that we have multiple audiences that we’re speaking to.

Drew Neisser: Right. Love that. Let’s focus for a second on the executive metrics. We marketers tend to talk about SQLs and MQLs and all that other stuff. What are the metrics that matter to your executive team and investors?

Joshua Leatherman: At the end of the day, I want to be able to articulate to my investors that, if they give me $1, how many dollars in pipeline am I going to be able to give back to them? How many dollars in monthly recurring revenue am I going to be able to give back to them? We know our lifetime value, we know how long we keep customers, and we’re able to understand how we can say to investors, if you give me a dollar, I’ll give you this back in pipeline.

Drew Neisser: Lifetime value, LTV, is an important calculation to have because that allows you to figure out how much you can spend to acquire a customer cost-effectively. I love the notion of being able to say if you give me a dollar, I’ll give you 4x, right. That’s a nice return, or I’ll give you 10x. If that’s the case, at which point a smart CFO and a smart board will say, “All right, well, if you could do that, I’m going to give you unlimited dollars until you can’t.” Are you there?

Joshua Leatherman: We are with private equity, and I would say we are as close to being there as we can. I love where you’re going because we lived in a state where marketing was a cost center. How much am I going to be expected to pay for marketing this year and next year? Now you’re exactly right. We’ve got an independent board member who’s done a fantastic job advising and counseling me. He has really ingrained it in my head and in the board’s head that marketing is an investment with a strong return. We need to understand what that ceiling is, and we need to push our investment all the way up to that ceiling, particularly in private equity. When you’ve typically got about a five-year life with them—we’re on a monthly recurring revenue business—so years one and two we need to go all in on demand marketing and make sure we’re maximizing that investment.

Drew Neisser: A little part of me, whenever we have these math conversations, starts to quiver. The quiver part, and maybe I’ll save this for the third segment, is short-termism versus long-termism and one of the ways that organizations start to fail is when all of the emphasis is on acquisitions. We’ve just got to get them in. If we can get him in, we can show momentum, we can show revenue. But there’s another important metric: we’ve got to get the right customers in. I’m curious, how have you been able to manage that walk that tightrope of wanting to increase demand, but not wanting to get the wrong customers in. There are wrong customers, right?

Joshua Leatherman: Yeah, absolutely. We measure customer profitability. We’re very fortunate as well to have partnered with, and we are currently partnering with, private equity firms who are not interested in short term gains sacrificing long term company growth. They have said from time and time again, and our executive team has said that we will build the strongest organization and make the right decisions now. We’re not going to increase investment upfront and then taper back. We’re in it for the long game. We’re going to build the best company we can and make decisions for the long run.

Drew Neisser: Interesting. I may have to retract my comment that PE is the devil. It sounds like at least the firms supporting your company are actually thinking that by building a real business, and ultimately when they turn it over, they’re not just turning over pretty books.

Joshua Leatherman: Yeah, and when I started, we were private. We did not have private equity and we thought too that private equity was the devil, but what’s neat about the partners we’ve had is they are partners who have bought into our strategic growth plan, which is to have strong organic growth with some acquisition. That organic growth is centered around demand marketing, sales development, a strong segmented sales strategy between field sales, inside sales, and customer growth. They’ve bought into our strategy. We didn’t just go to the highest bidder.

Drew Neisser: We’ve talked about how you built this internal team to help qualify the leads, and one of the numbers that I mentioned very early on was that 70% of pipeline is marketing driven. That’s a humungous number. How long did it take to get there? What are some of the key things you learned in order to get there?

Joshua Leatherman: Let me just clarify, 70% of new logo pipeline comes from marketing, which still is a huge number. We went from 0% to about 70% and I attribute all of that to the alignment we have with demand marketing, the follow up we get with sales development, and the checks and balances we have with our field sales and inside sales teams. When you look at the traditional sales and marketing funnel, every single prospect or customer in our CRM has a systematic way that they progress through.

No one can progress through and get lost in a black hole and that’s so important because too many times sales and marketing are working in silos and marketing hands off to sales and somebody gets lost in that funnel. Again, our revenue operations team ensures that every account, every prospect, has an owner. It starts in marketing, goes through sales development goes through to our sales team, and sometimes we win them, sometimes we recycle them and send them back to somebody else, but there is always an owner and next step in that sales funnel.

Drew Neisser: New logo pipeline. Is that the magic number? If we had a group of CMOs here and they needed a number from an acquisition standpoint—we won’t talk about customer satisfaction or employees or brand for a moment—if you had to pick one number to say marketing has doing its job, is new logo pipeline the number?

Joshua Leatherman: I think it’s different for different organizations. For our organization, that is the right number because we have such little market share compared to what’s available. We have very strong teams who, once we get a customer in, build wallet share and come alongside our customer. We are starting to get into more wallet share and customer marketing, if you will, but I think for us, in a market with such little awareness, that is really the holy grail for us and that’s where we started first.

Drew Neisser: All right. I’m with you because a lot of the CMOs that we’ve had on this show have had stated that as well. I like its simplicity and I like the fact that it takes a lot to get there. There are a lot of things that have to happen before you can get to new logo pipeline. As you said, there’s an infrastructure, there’s a lot of data analysis and so forth. Also, the notion of creating a data Switzerland makes a lot of sense because that resolves the problem. You have a single source of truth from a data standpoint. Another thing you said I think is really important is that no leads get lost, so there are owners and, again, that takes a meticulous approach. One of the things that I rail on is this notion of too much tech. What’s interesting is, as you’ve gotten and built your tech stack, you’ve also built an organization around that to take advantage of it. So often you find them say, “Look, we’ve got a 20 strong tech stack, but we haven’t added staff in three years.” It’s pretty problematic.

I think we’ve covered this pretty well. Maybe you could just quickly talk about how you’ve built your stack. What else is in that stack and how have you grown it?

Joshua Leatherman: I’m proud to say we’ve got incredibly talented marketers who specialize in R&D, which is “Rip Off and Duplicate” to us. We don’t have to reinvent the wheel. We do a lot of company visits, we know that we’ve got vendors and partners who are doing fantastic digital marketing, so we simply ask and we travel to many organizations who are using good technology, good processes, and where applicable we bring it back to Service Express. Where not applicable, we may try it and if it doesn’t work, then it doesn’t work for us.

Drew Neisser: Perfect. There you have it. R&D is “Rip Off and Duplicate.” Love that. Great place for us to take a break. We’ll be right back.

BREAK

Drew Neisser: All right, we’re back and we’ve been talking about R&D as in “Rip off and Duplicate.” Love that. What you didn’t say is what else is on top of the stack. What would be interesting to me is, is there some technology that you’ve tried and abandoned?

Joshua Leatherman: I think there are a lot of tools we’ve tried and abandoned. One of the most important functions of our revenue operations team is the idea of this solutions architect. We try it before we buy it and we articulate, from a marketing and sales point, here’s the problem we have. We try not to come to them with “I want this technology.” We articulate the need that we have, and they are responsible for going out and finding the best solution for sales and marketing.

The other component to technology is the data behind it. Technology is only as good as the quality of data that you are using behind it, so our revenue operations team really focuses on filling out and qualifying that data so that our sales dev, sales teams, and marketing teams don’t have to qualify people before they’re sending things out. We’ve got a robust tech stack of probably 20 or so technologies that all tie into the Salesforce ecosystem. Of course, Marketo and Salesforce are the two big ones, but we have sales enablement tools, cadence software for our sales development team. We have pipeline management and deal management tools for our outside sales team. We’ve got a lot of technology that we’re using.

Drew Neisser: It’s unbelievable. One of the numbers that I highlighted in the intro was your NPS of 90. When you and I talked on the phone, I said, one, that’s impossible. It’s just it’s too good to be true. There’s no upside with a number like that. But let’s go back to when you first measured NPS several years ago, what was the score and what were some of the things that you did to improve?

Joshua Leatherman: When we started measuring NPS, I think we were at 79 or 80 if I recall, so we were high then. The average Net Promoter Score for an IT buyer is like 21 in the data center so the bar is pretty low, but our purpose as an organization is to provide the best experience for our customers, partners, and employees. We are all about experience and that permeates everything we do. When our engineers go onsite, they are fantastic and they’re not just there to fix a problem. They’re there to ensure that our customers feel like they’ve had a wow experience. The Net Promoter Score is fantastic. You can go to Gartner peer insights and we are the highest rated TPM on Gartner. That’s another way to validate what we’re doing. If you look at Glassdoor, we’ve got an outstanding reputation there, so I think what I’m saying is, don’t take my word for it.

Drew Neisser: Let’s talk about Glassdoor, because that’s employees. That’s a metric that shows this is a company that people enjoy working at. From a marketing standpoint, hat kinds of things did you weigh to help get those numbers up and make employee satisfaction part of the marketing challenge?

Joshua Leatherman: It starts with the talent pipeline. As a growing organization, we’ve got demand generation for sales, but we also have demand generation for our talent because we are only as good as our pipeline of talent. We really try not to jump on Gartner or Glassdoor and participate in the ratings. What we do is we try to bring in the right people, create a wonderful culture in which they can grow and thrive where we give them opportunities and I think that’s really how we affect that score.

Drew Neisser: I’m going to go back to something you said about trying to create wow experiences. We’re talking about servers and maintenance. What does a wow experience mean?

Joshua Leatherman: It’s the people you interact with. Our tagline is “people powered data center solutions.” There are two things we do really well. One is data center solutions, that’s easy for us. Where I think we differentiate ourselves is that we have outstanding, talented people who want to serve others. They want to create that experience. We are very vigilant in the hiring process and making sure that someone’s values align with ours and they’re interested in not just a job but creating some kind of experience for our customers. We also know if we treat our employees better than anyone else, they’re going to treat our customers better than anyone else.

Drew Neisser: Happy employees equal happy customers. It’s so true and it’s so easy to say, but there are lots of companies out there that don’t have happy employees and you can see it. There’s a lack of purpose in the organization, there’s a culture of quarterly revenue growth and not being in it for our people or even to make the world a better place. I want to explore this line, “People powered data center solutions.” What’s really interesting about the line is that there’s an immediate thought of, “Wait, people powered? We’re talking data center solutions.” That’s when you think about great lines, there’s a little bit of conflict there, there’s a little bit of stopping power. What does people powered mean, because, in truth, they’re powered by electricity. It’s a nice turn of phrase. I’m curious how you actually bring that idea of “people powered” to life.

Joshua Leatherman: It starts with our core value, which is a very unique core value. It’s to help our people achieve their personal, professional and financial goals and again, it goes back to the idea that we know if we take care of our people, they’ll take care of our customers. As a growing organization, our goal is not to grow for the sake of growth, it’s not to maximize shareholder value. It’s to create opportunities for our employees, for our people. If our leaders go to bat and understand our people in such a way—they know what they want to make in five years, they know they want to participate in the company as the company grows. We can have very thoughtful conversations with our people and we’ll retain them. That retention pays off as well with our customers.

Drew Neisser: It’s coming together for me now and it’s interesting. A lot of times, when people hear the term “purpose” and “purpose-driven marketing,” they immediately leap to what I call big “P,” which is helping the planet and the world at large. But I think that the little “p” here of people is also really profound. It’s also a little hard to believe in the sense of, “wait, you’re in business for your employees?”

Vanguard talks about how it is investor-owned and that’s an interesting perspective for them. Although Stephen Handmaker from Assurance has never been on the show, I interviewed him probably five years ago and they’re very much about taking an insurance company and making it about the employees. I’m curious, there’s a certain skepticism that people might have. “Wait, you’re really focused on your people?” How do you make sure that, in fact, it’s a promise that you’re delivering on? Maybe give an example of something that you think you’re doing differently with your employees?

Joshua Leatherman: First of all, if you are truly concerned about not just giving platitudes and talking about it, but making sure it’s institutionalized, then you measure it. We measure everything, but one of the things that’s important to us is employee engagement. How engaged are our people with their teams and with what we do? We have employee engagement scores and surveys and we home in on areas where people say, “Hey, we’re missing the ball here.” It could be internal communication or whatever. We really care and we want to understand where we’re missing it as an employer. We also start every meeting, whether it’s a board meeting or internal meetings, with our core value to help our people achieve their personal, professional and financial goals. We’ve institutionalized that. You could go to Service Express in Grand Rapids, Michigan, and ask anyone what our core value is and they’d be able to recite it word for word. I think those are some of the important signs that something’s really organically taken hold in the organization.

Drew Neisser: What’s amazing to me is that we’ve circled all the way back to CMO math. If you take away one insight here, it’s probably not real unless you’re measuring it because you’re not getting from here to there without it. I fought that notion because not everything is measurable, but certainly, the fact that you know employees can cite the values says that. That’s one and then, of course, they hold you accountable to talk about those and make sure they’re real. When you say we measure employee engagement, I’m curious, what does that look like? We know what Net Promoter Score is, but there are a lot of different ways of measuring employee engagement. What do you think are the key ways of knowing that you really do have an engaged employee base?

Joshua Leatherman: We have internal processes, so our core value is that we’ve got processes where our people list their personal, professional, and financial goals on our intranet system and our leaders have access to that to view that. At least two times a year they sit down and have discussions with them about that. We also ask questions like, are your leaders doing what we say that they’re supposed to be doing? How do you feel about your team? How do you feel about the leadership team? Where can we improve? We want to make sure that we’re communicating from the top down, so we simply ask them, do you feel like we’re you’re receiving all the information you need to help grow our company? We’ve got like 80 different questions that are categorized into communication and engagement and growth and things like that that we’re asking.

Drew Neisser: Pausing to think about this, one of the things that we have been pushing a lot, and every client that works with the Renegade goes through this, you must do an employee survey at the beginning of an engagement so that we can benchmark it at the end. We do have a number of questions that I think get around the idea of engagement, but I suspect, in order to really have a good number, you need some kind of blended metric. To me, there is such a thing as ENPS, but I’m not sure if that’s good. We’ve used it a couple of times and the scores seem very “so what” and you end up looking at all the other questions anyway.

Glassdoor is a really quick way to look, retention rates are really good as well as turnover, right? Employee brand also is about how many of the people that you interview accept. That’s a yield number that shows up in brand. But if we’re looking at employee engagement, I’m still a little fuzzy about the exact questions that we might ask to get at an actual score. It’s not about if employees feel the company has a purpose. When I think about engagement, because I’m on the board of Duke Alumni Association and we look at engagement as: Did you attend an event? Did you open an email? Those are kinds of engagement with the university, but engagement with a company is very different.

Joshua Leatherman: There can be several variations on this, but I think a critical one is: Do you know how your job is measured? How your performance is measured? There are a lot of people who show up to work and they’re waiting from annual review to annual review. They don’t know how to objectively say “I’m doing well” or “I’m not doing well” and they don’t know how what they do matters to the business as a whole. I think one question to ask to understand how engaged an employee is with the business in their mission and their service is: Do you understand how what you do is measured?

Drew Neisser: I think that’s a great question. We’re going to wrap up this episode. We’ve talked about key metrics that matter. A couple of insights that I think are important are that recognizing the metrics that you use in your department and with sales are going to be different than the ones that you present to the board. You know CMO speak versus CEO and CFO speak is all about revenue, lifetime value. It’s about things that will show up on the bottom line even if they’re topline measures. That’s one.

Two is having an independent source of truth. What a smart idea, because that takes away the battle between sales and marketing. Three, getting an internal sales qualifying group under marketing because then you don’t have to have hunters anymore. All you have to do is have farmers who can do it and there’s a lot of financial value to that. It also aligns everybody together. We talked about customer satisfaction and NPS as a score, but we also talked about lifetime value and why that’s such a great long-term metric.

Lastly, we spent a lot of time talking about employees and alignment with purpose. What was interesting in this conversation to me was that it was little p “people,” which is not a little thing at all. That’s your biggest investment, your people, and if you can get them to understand what the values of the company are, what the goals of the company are, and show how your company goals are people goals, you have a really good chance of creating a special company. Thank you so much for being on the show, Josh, I think it was a great conversation.

Joshua Leatherman: A pleasure. Thank you so much for having me. I wanted to add that We are hiring right now, so if I can just give a plug. My marketing team is hiring, our sales development and sales teams are hiring. If anyone is out there listening, going, “I want a culture like that. I’m not working in an engaging culture.” I just encourage them to go to serviceexpress.com/careers.

Drew Neisser: There you have it. All right. Well, I have a favor for you, listeners. I would love it if you went to your favorite podcast channel and gave us a rating on the show. That’s our open door. We look for those ratings and it would be awesome if you took that time. Hope you enjoyed this episode. As always, you know how to get a hold of me, so give me ideas for future shows. Until next time, keep those Renegade Thinking Caps on and strong.