Maria Trysla—Why Companies Stall Between $5M and $50M

Maria Trysla  0:00  
If you're talking about saving your customer when they're leaving, that's the wrong time to be asking. You need to be talking about Retention and Expansion as readily as you're talking about acquisition. How many companies discuss acquisition, retention and expansion in equal parts?

David Bush  0:20  
Welcome to the Business Builders playbook, the show that breaks down the systems and strategies behind Predictable Revenue Growth to win in business. In each episode, we're diving into the proven strategies that separate the winners who scale from the losers who fail. This show is sponsored by bdr.ai the AI powered business development platform that automates your outbound prospecting, so you can focus in on closing deals instead of chasing leads. Let's get started. All right. Well, welcome everybody. This is going to be an exciting episode. I've got a fantastic guest for you today. I've got my friend Maria trisla, and she's a revenue arc, a growth architect and a go to market executive advisor, and today's topic is going to be focusing in on, primarily the CEO growth plateau. Ever felt that? Have you ever experienced that? I'm assuming that you probably have had some level of that. Some of you have maybe had a full stop, and some of you have may just begun to see some slowing down, maybe a little bit fearful about hitting that growth plateau, but we're going to talk about today why companies stall between 5 million and 50 million, and Maria has spent a lifetime working with organizations and helping them to not only break through those plateaus, but to avoid those plateaus. So we're going to talk about the structural mistakes that quietly stall momentum. And we're going to talk about how org design and accountability impact revenue velocity, and what must change in your go to market strategy if you want to scale. So if you are a founder where you have found that everything is dependent on you, and you want to develop a repeatable growth engine, you're in for an exciting show. So Maria, thanks so much for joining me. I'm super excited about getting this conversation kicked off.

Speaker 1  2:05  
Thanks, David. It's a pleasure to be here and speaking with you.

David Bush  2:09  
Yeah, you bet well before I gave you just a little brief introduction, but bring everybody up to speed of what you have been doing with other organizations and what specifically is your role when you partner with an organization who wants to break through growth plateaus or anything else that you do so everybody has a clear understanding of what you do and for who?

Maria Trysla  2:35  
Yeah, so I'm a two a former two time CEO and multi year CMO of fast and technology companies. I started in telecommunications, which I think is the first technology companies moved into SAS. And so, you know, largely B to B, but also some B to C. But in you see this, I've seen it repeatedly where, you know, the era of growth at all costs, is gone, right? Unfortunately, gig is up, if we say, and, and, so what I tend to do now is, you know, executive advisor, or a fractional CMO or CRO is I come in and and dislodge those, you know, that plateau or any obstacles that you're having. So, you know, having been there, done that, you know, this is not my first rodeo. I've seen a lot of things, and that is, you know, there's too many obstacles in generating growth. And you know, as you said, that CEOs doing this Herculean effort to get to a certain amount of revenue, and then, then you get a, you know, you hit a point where it just doesn't, you know, I check, there's only 24 hours in a in a day, and CEOs don't get more. I check, so, you know, it's really about, how do you make sure that your revenue levers that you have available to you, acquisition, retention and expansion are all operating, you know, as a repeatable engine, so that your scalability, the revenue that you're generating is scalable. And what I'm doing now is going into companies, say, from really the target we were talking about five to 50 million. And I come in and I can either advise you as to what you know how to change that you know how to change from that rope plateau to repeat all engine, or I can stick around and help you execute so I could set the strategy. Or I can help with execution. And, you know, I think it's terribly exciting to do it. You know this, this discipline is called revenue architecture. And you know it's, it's a proven capability that, you know, those that are growing in a sustainable manner, they're doing this on a daily basis. Yeah, long.

David Bush  4:56  
So what do you what do you think that is the reasons behind come? Companies stalling in that revenue range, and even if they have demand for their products and services out there in the marketplace, what's causing them to stall?

Maria Trysla  5:12  
You know, so early growth is driven by founders, relationships, right? Opportunistic deal bursts of marketing activity, and that can carry you to a few million, maybe even 50 million, but it's just not sustainable, right? The CEO may have to take a vacation. What happens then? Right? So what you do to break that plateau is you have to shift from tactical growth to intentional system building that creates predictable pipeline, stronger customer outcomes and compounding expansion revenue, and that's when growth becomes more scalable and predictable. And I've had situations where marketing doesn't talk to sales, which I think is the dumbest situation you could even imagine, and no one's talking to customer success. And really it should be all of those functions not existing in silos and operating, as you know, one dude.

David Bush  6:12  
So is there warning signs that you've been privy to, or that you've come up with that's kind of like, you know, hey, when this warning sign happens, or when this warning indicator light happens, you know that you're going to hit a growth plateau in the very near future?

Maria Trysla  6:30  
Yeah. I mean, besides

David Bush  6:31  
the one that you just mentioned, those, those ones obviously siloed and, you know, bottlenecks with a CEO, founder run organization where everything's dependent upon them. Those are the, I think, the obvious one. But is there anything else that's kind of like, maybe the blind spot?

Maria Trysla  6:48  
You know, if you have pipeline volatility, if you're experiencing your upper pipeline, or it's either non existent, or generating your upper pipeline takes more just more, more cost, more people, more time to generate any sort of, you know, upper pipeline that's not sustainable. Another signal is when you have acquisition revenue, but it's increasingly offset by churn or lack of expansion. So you know what? That's what we call in marketing, a leaky bucket, right? Acquisitions going in, and customers are going out, through chain, through churn. And I remember just being a really large organization, focus on acquisition. You know, our our retention marketing was over on a corner, and they were, you know, promoting and doing save campaigns. If you're doing a save campaign, you're already too late. And then, you know, like you said, I mean, I think you can as a CEO, if you're sitting in that seat, or, you know, maybe a member of the board, if you see organizational myth alignment across marketing, sales and customer success you know, either each of them are functioning in their role, and no one's accountable for the full customer life cycle. That's an issue. I think this is an opportunity for your CEO or a senior member you know, to bring those functions together, knock some heads and say, really, we're going to be focused continual life cycle from acquisition to retention to expansion. And that's what it means to have a, you know, the process of creating a revenue architecture, yeah.

Speaker 2  8:38  
So

David Bush  8:38  
when you go into an organization and and you're trying to, you know, fix some of these holes in their leaky bucket. Are you getting into the process with each department, marketing, sales, client success, and you're doing a deep dive interview to find that maybe the problem behind the problem? Talk to talk. Talk me through a little bit more about what that typically looks like.

Maria Trysla  9:04  
Yeah. I mean, I like to do, I call it inside out, outside in, and that's just about discovery. It's asking questions, you know, internally, like, when you lose, what do you lose? Right? That's a question to fail. Do you know, um, you know, you know, do you have a defined ICP ideal customer profile? Do you feel like you have a truly differentiated message, truly differentiated, if I could highlight those or underline them, or whatever, not just saying what your competitors are saying. Those are all signals. So I do that inside out. That's what I say, that it's outside in talking to your customers. What is it like to be a customer of yours on a day to day basis? And a lot of times, what's being told to me internally is not what's being what's really happening, the reality of the customer. For life cycle. So, you know, you really have to be intentional and understanding that. And a lot of times, you know, as a third party, I get different answers than if someone internally was, say, doing this, you know, outside in, inside, out process. You know, I might be considered Switzerland or, you know, safe base, if you will. And that becomes really important. And once you've talked to a great number of people, their ideas that bubble up to the top right there, you'll see you can identify, or I can identify, maybe it's just because I have some a few gray hairs I've been around a little bit. But, you know, you you see common missteps that are happening, and then you go about and being intentional about, about, you know, fixing those. And, you know, I'll give it, I'll give you an example, because I was sitting as a CEO of a task company fast growing even during covid, which seems kind of impossible, but my Director of Customer Success brought forth the executive team, you know, they said, you know, from that handoff from sales to customer success, they actually, the customer success team actually did this kind of internal study, and they looked at and They said, hey, if we spend more time in onboarding our customers, and it's going to cause less tickets, you know, down the road, and it builds loyalty from the very beginning of that customer relationship, you know, when they're probably the most pleased with your company, right? And so, and they even had done like a statistical review of, you know, this customer was onboarded with less you know, issues down the road, as far as our customer life cycle goes, and and we implemented it and it was validated on a larger scale. So it's those moments of truth, especially in hand off from one organization to the other, that can truly build loyalty, and you think, oh, it's, you know, it's just the little things. It can be just the little things, but it's like, you know, death of 1000 cuts, or a positive other than that analogy, but truly like making sure that those transitions and that you have a scalable, repeatable revenue engine that really is tied to what the customer wants in its relationship with you. You know you don't get to necessarily define that inside.

David Bush  12:32  
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Maria Trysla  13:51  
You know, it's, it's really that customer having to make a shift. I mean, in the in the beginning, a founder has to be involved in everything, right? There they may be the chief clothes officer right at that point in time, you know, closing every monumental sale, they're shaping the product, right? They're, you know. They know and understand what the brand differentiation is, right? What their company does, that intersection of what your company does well and what the customer wants and and they're shaping that. But there's, there's only again, so much, you know, time in a day, and so you really need to move from, you know, a, you know, intentional system, and that means kind of enabling your executive team. You know, that conversation about, Do I have the right people in the right seats? I know you're a football fan, you know, do we have the Do we have the right place? You know, define and everyone's if. Implementing them it do. I mean, I bound into companies where they don't even have their sales process defined. And so that means every salesperson is, quote, unquote, you know, doing it on their own. And of course, that doesn't build, you know, that long term value that we're looking for. So it's really about, you know. And you know, there's a couple things you can do. You can enable and build the processes that are necessary so that decision making is done right, even with your even when you're not around. You have operating metrics. Everyone is tied to the same metrics, you know, not marketing. Focus on SQL. And, you know, our MQLs and sales are focused on SQL and that nonsense. It's like everyone is tied to revenue and churn and expansion metrics. And then there's that, you know, like I said, that leadership layer, layer that just drives accountability. And you, you know you, you have to feel comfortable walking away and making sure that when you're in the room, your executives know and understand how you would make that decision. And you know what in that we can't replicate every founder and their you know kind of mentality is you know you, you you know that the decision making is sound, so maybe they didn't make the exact same decision that you would. But there's a reason that executive is saying, Well, this is why I made the decision I did, and then the executive has to, has to kind of accept that, and that that's the role of accountability, making sure you're you know that the team, the executive team, and really maybe any member of the organization that's become critically, you know, successful within that customer support or customer success organization is you know and understand that the decisions that you can make. And so it's all about the customer and making sure their their customer value is realized every single day in enacting with your product or service.

David Bush  17:05  
Yeah, so talk a little bit more about the most common organizational structures that companies are making mistakes around. I mean, you talked about, you know, the lack of accountability. You talked about, maybe the lack of structure and processes and standard operating procedures. But is there anything else that would just jump out at you as being like, Hey, if you haven't addressed this and you're a five to $50 million company, like, just stop, stop, and whatever you're doing right now, and make it a priority. Make it a rock in your commitments for the second quarter, or whatever the timeframe is you're watching this video. But what comes to mind first when you're thinking

Maria Trysla  17:44  
about that, yeah, it's like, stop everything. You know, don't collect $200 or you're not going to collect $200 right? So you know one thing is, is that you again, back to it takes more. So that's a clear signal, but the there's some organizational structure. If your sales leader is saying, Oh, I just need to hire more sales people. Sorry, that's not the answer. You know, if you're over indexing on sales hiring to solve growth problems, you really, you please, it's just stop there, because you have an issue in regard to you have an upstream issue in regards to positioning or demand generation or qualification, something. So don't think that throwing more body at the problem is going to solve it. And you could say that definitely for sales, but you could definitely, you could say it marketing, customer success. Also, you know one another issue is you have no clear ownership of the post sale revenue engine. You know, no one's really talking about Retention and Expansion. You don't have any metrics. Maybe you look at it in a QBR or something like that. And again, if you're not the light of your customers every single day, they will turn so you have to treat customer success, not as a service function, but as a strategic driver of Retention and Expansion. And not that it's just customer success. I can make an argument in regards to how sales can drive retention expansion, right? You know, from a sales perspective, if they're churning, you know, and you start calling them, you know, two weeks before you know, their one year anniversary, that's too late check in on them. How you you know, how is the product and service meeting your needs? How can we do better to meet your needs? That could be a, you know, that could be something that sales can relate to product, in regard to a product, something like that. So everybody has to be kind of with that mindset of, what can I do that is focused on developing and operating an integrated system designed to grow customer value over time. If everyone is thinking of. About that. How do I grow customer value over time? And I don't care what function you're in, is you know that seamless customer experience? If you can do that every day, those are going to be the common organizational structures that will trip you up. So if you can address those, then you're going to get to a failing phase faster.

David Bush  20:20  
Is there an experience or, like a story, maybe that you could share, that would maybe give an example of an organization that you went into and you ended up, you know, pushing some of these levers to increase sales velocity and execution speed, and just kind of give, like a real life scenario, of like, what was the situation? You don't have to name names or anything. But I'm just kind of curious, if the people that are watching or listening to this show, they're saying, what does this look like in real life? What did you do, and how did that look? And then, what was the timeframe before they saw, you know, more throughput on sales, velocity and execution,

Maria Trysla  21:03  
you know, I'm going to relate to a time when I was, I was a w2 an employee, right? Kind of before I became a fractional CMO, and it was, you know, I really didn't think it was a situation of marketing versus failed. You know, we seem to be, and I was the lead on marketing, and I had a counterpart and sales and you know, so I felt, you know, partly responsible for this, but where, where it existed, where it where the truth became live, if you will, is through data. So I had a member of my team who was really focused on customer data and and, you know, the the team, you know, focusing on demand generation was kind of up in arms. And they came to me and they said, Well, look at that Salesforce data. And, you know, look at all these leads that are sitting at the sales director level that aren't being distributed and aren't being worked, and they were just kind of up in arms. And I said, Okay, that's great information. Thanks for giving me that. But I'm not going to be storming into my sales leadership counterpart and going, what are you guys doing? You idiots, you know, you know, look at all this. So I, what I did is I took that information and I and I said, Okay, based on the sales close rate. So existing close rate that was happening, you know, average, you know, NRR, if I could take those of those leads that were just sitting in Salesforce and being weren't being worked, weren't being reacted to, I could take that close rate and the average, you know, customer revenue generated. And I went to this LGP and said, Listen, yes, these aren't being worked. But if you were closing them at your regular rate after, you know, revenue that you're bringing in, you would be exceeding your, you know, self target, which, by the way, you know, the precursor of that was, is they were missing their target. They weren't at, you know, they were missing it. They were below, you know, their target for the year, right, for the quarter, for the month, repeatedly. So all of a sudden it became a different conversation. It wasn't you know, us versus them. It was how we're going to fix this. And I, you know, and I also went in and said, Okay, tell me why these leads that are sitting in Salesforce not being worked. Tell me why they're bad. Why? Why? How she not fit, you know, you and I have agreed on the ICP, you know. And this was, this was not something that we took to the CEO. Well, eventually we told him what we did together. But it wasn't something like, you know, I went up the CEO and had a conversation, you know. It was just two, you know, two people who have, you know, really the same goal. I hope your marketing and sales leaves have the same goal, right? And it was just this gap that was happening, and he replicated it, right? It became, you know, I started attending, like, you know, certain, not all the time, but I would, I would, you know, the sales, you know, meetings in regards to, you know, leads that were sitting at the director level, not being distributed. And I would listen in, like, why are they working? Why they're not working? And all of a sudden, we turned it around. Now, this, you know, this didn't have a, you know, it was kind of a probably mid market company, I guess, you know, not terribly enterprise didn't have a huge, you know, customer like, or, you know, time to close. So, you know, they were able to turn around that revenue within three to four months. And it was really just, you know, we're leaving money on the table. And you could say that about expansion. If no one's talking about, how does you know, if you're talking about saving your customer when they're leaving, that's the wrong time to be asking, like, you know, you need to be focused on expansion. And here's the, I think, here's the key to this, you need to be talking about, or. Retention and Expansion as readily as you're talking about acquisition. Now think about that. How many companies discuss acquisition, retention and expansion in equal parts? Probably not a lot. If you anything else, there's nothing else that comes out of this. It's that you know, look at what's going on from a retention expansion. Because I dare to say, most companies are not as focused on retention expansion. And, I mean, of course, there's that rule of, you know, it costs less money to, you know, retain a customer than it is to acquire a customer. So that's kind of the, you know, if I could ask get anything out of this today is, you know, focus on retention, expansion is readily so

David Bush  25:45  
let's go. Let's dive a little bit deeper into that. You know, I mean, you talk about building predictable, go to market systems. So if you were to think about the top, you know, two or three strategies that, or systems, technologies, whatever that the organizations that you were going into partner with, what are the three things that you're doing to develop more structured lead generation on the acquisition side?

Maria Trysla  26:12  
Yeah, I would say, you know, when you hit that growth plateau, that's how I hadn't met to talk about it is, you know, really, when you get you have to get over that hump, if you will. And it is about like, the first thing I would evaluate is your pipeline health and predictability. You know, can you make forecast right based on past performance? So, you know, do you have consistent pipeline? That might be an easy thing to to be able to identify, right? And just look at it, you know, are you closing to your revenue targets, right? What you where you thought you were going to be? I mean, that's, you know, that's red light green. That's kind of pretty basic to be able to do that if you're if you're looking, if you're doing that, you really need to get you know being you need to be less episodic and become more predictable and repeatable. And so it's those plays, marketing plays, handoff to sales, which ones are working and which ones aren't working. I'd say, like, right now, revenue operations is having a day and, you know, in court, if you will, and revenue operations will be able to tell you metrics, like, you know, customer acquisition cost, your close rate, you know, how how fast do you, you know? How fast are you responding to an opportunity that comes in? You know, if it's days, that's too late, if, even if it's a couple hours, it's too late. No, people you know are your buyer is doing their research offline, and they're not necessarily talking with your sales people. And so when they're ready to talk to somebody, you better be there. So, you know, look at those, those episodes that feel like episodes. They shouldn't be. They should be predictable and repeatable, and you have to make them pick predictable and repeatable. And that's usually through process, which, you know, kind of maybe is the unsexy thing to do. But make sure that everybody knows the plays. I like plays, you know, I OG sports analogies plays versus processes that you know, kind of people cringe, if you will. But it's really just making sure that everybody's, you know, in the boat, rowing the same way and doing the same thing to build customer value. And I think you know it, that you know, if you're growing your company through effort alone, it's operating as deliver new, deliberate revenue architecture, and that you know that turns pipeline creation and customer success into scalability in your and it really drives your next page of growth. I hope I

David Bush  29:00  
Yeah, and so many sports analogies, and yeah, I love the idea about getting the right people on the bus, and, you know, having the right culture, the accountability, the structure, and then having the right playbook that is going to lead to those predictable outcomes. And anything that you could say about retention in terms of strategies or plays that you you would highly recommend organizations run on average. Just, you know, across different industries, there's certain things that if you're not doing these things, your retention is not going to be where it needs to be.

Maria Trysla  29:37  
You know, I think you know, just, in, you know, taking care of your existing relationships and that, and that might be someone is assigned, you know, not that, you know, if you have, you know, the CEO, the company I was CEO with, you know, we had 16 million customers, right? So that, you know, as the SaaS platform, you know. Little bit of self serve. But you know, so I it's not like you know anyone on the team. You know, I think we were at 25 you know people at the time. You know, could check in on 16 million customers. But you know, you have touch points. You can understand you either signals that are showing customer satisfaction or not. You know, you know, and around customer renewals, are people looking at upsells? Are they looking at renewals? Like I said, you know, don't wait until the last minute when that renewal, you know, check in at, you know, designated talk, you know, points of their life cycle. You know, maybe it's three months, maybe it's six months, you know, just to check in, even if they're fine with you using your product or surveys, just you doing, you know that making that intentional, and, oh, by the way, it doesn't have to be a person doing it could be, you know, you send out an email just checking in, and there's a, there's a way to escalate if they want to speak to a person, that kind of thing. But you have to be, you know, it's, it's really, you know, expanded usage. Do you have an easy way for your customer to buy more from you, or to have to speak to a customer? Again, back to my example of when I was sitting in the seat of the staff CEO, like, we had a, we had a self service model. You know, there was a definite, you know, digital customer experience where a customer knew when they got to a certain point they could move up to a next tier or not. You know, they would have to use less of a product kind of thing. But, you know, we were intentional in building that digital customer experience. So that's really important to make sure that it's easy to expand revenue. And that might be the conversation we're having, right is like, make it easy to buy more from you. And sometimes it's not necessarily, you know, talking again with a customer, you know, with a salesperson or, you know, customer support person. It might be, but if they want to do that, and if it's, you know, or an enterprise account, high touch, you know, I get where that is. But there are other ways that you can, you can solve for that, and just making sure that you are solving for

David Bush  32:14  
it. We We talked a lot about acquisition and retention. What about moving into expansion? And there's so much talk about AI now, obviously that can be doing so many different things. Do you see AI being a part of that expansion for many organizations? And is that something that you recommend is a strategy or tactic,

Maria Trysla  32:42  
you know, I think AI can be a friend as it relates to expansion and even retention too that. And it gets to data. AI is very good at, you know, kind of sleuthing through large parts of data. And I trust you, you have data that you're probably not looking at, right? So if you there are signals that your customer is giving you in regard to, are they ready? Are they ready to expand or not, you know. And I think AI is a friend, in regards to, you know, data exploration, what is the data telling you? And then you know, you can do that. You know, you can also do that through, you know, asking your customer directly, you know, through AI prompts, you know. But then there's also the opportunity, if they want to speak to a human, and sometimes you know, if it's it, that it's necessary that you make that allowable. So I think AI has a has a great opportunity. It gives us, you know, access to that data, and what is the data meaning to you, as compared to, you know, digging spreadsheets, which can be a nightmare. So I think AI can be help in regard to, you know, data mining, if you will, in regard to almost like campaign or customer experience touch point execution, because AI can prompt that, and then it's just knowing, understanding. What I say about AI is, don't leave your brain at the door, right? AI is a great tool. And I I'll quote one of my favorite podcasts, and it's Kara Swisher, who's commented is really kind of been a journalist in regards to technology and media. And she says, you know, AI is a great tool. You know, a knife is a great tool in the right hand, it's a great tool, right? It slices a piece of bread, right? But a knife in, say, other capacities could be harmful. I'm not even going to go there, but you know what I mean? So, it's a tool. Make sure that you have human intervention in using the tool. And it can, it can. It can be a really valuable asset. You know, I'm I use it daily. I don't think I'm an AI proficient. But, you know, I'm getting that we're all a work in progress. Explore. Don't be don't be tentative about you need to explore even the CEOs out there. You know, not continually everything about AI, but you know, think about how using your in your day to day existence kind of thing. So

David Bush  35:23  
that's great. Well, I want to, I want to talk about some things that you've experienced in working with different CEOs of different levels of revenue. Are there anything or any specific traits or qualities that you have noticed between a $5 million CEO and a $25 million CEO. That you could tell that they grew into becoming a $25 million CEO CEO, the numbers just didn't go up. They actually became the kind of CEO that drew the numbers up. If that makes sense, anything that you could recognize,

Maria Trysla  36:01  
yeah, I think it's, it's that conversation about being founder led, as compared to founder inspired. And so what does that mean? Founder LED means I'm closing every sales deal, or maybe every, you know, large sales. We, you know, we, we trout out the CEO, kind of midway people, self, life cycle. Maybe that can be, you know, reserved for, you know, the highest revenue opportunity, that kind of thing. But be founder, if you're founder LED. And again, back to our conversation about the founder is shaping the product or the service, right? They're involved in customer support escalations, right? They're closing deal. They're making, you know, they're working with marketing to define, you know, the ICP and and, you know, the differentiated positioning against competitors. That's just not sustainable. And I don't know exactly, you know, I'm sure it exists between five and 50 million, I can't tell, you know, oh, it happens always at 10 million, right? It comes, it's, it's specific to your industry, specific to your company, but it really gets to you have to become somewhat hands off. You have to be comfortable not making every decision, and that's where you know, you can see and, I mean, and it's kind of intuitive, right? That's where scalability happens. If people are waiting around for your decision before they can take action. That's going to, you know, that's going to slow your momentum, right? So if there's anything is get comfortable not always having to make, you know, final decisions. And when other people make final decisions, support them in that right. Build accountability. You know, ask, ask everyone from you know, from bottom to the top of the organization. How can I make you know? How can I make you more successful? I love that line like I tell you know, customers that I'm working with. You know, as a fractional or or consultant, you know, what can I do to help you? What can I do to remove obstacle? I've said that to employees who directly report to me. How do I make you more efficient and doing your job better? And that that's that mindset of, if I make, you know, if I remove decision friction, then the pipeline creation is only going to get faster, right? So, um, you know, you and consistency. Look for consistency in that you know your acquisition and retention. You know plays are, you know, those are probably the ones less practice, my hypothesis, make sure they're consistent, that people understand it, that they know and understand, you know when when to step in and when that's happening. And it's really about high performing companies solve, you know, establishing clear ownership across every motion, acquisition, retention expansion, and they do that by having shared metrics. And, you know, know, everybody knows and understand who's doing what to whom, right? And that's where proximal value and predictable growth goes. So that CEO, I hate to say it like, allow yourself to get out of the way. I know that sounds pretty negative, but I think you, I mean, I've seen CEOs go, wow. If I didn't have to be involved in every decision, what could I be focused on? Right? I could be focused on what's happening in the marketplace. I could be out getting more investment. I could be, you know, reshaping the product for the future, how to leverage AI, you know, in today's marketplace. Is where adoption might be slower in your industry or sector. I mean, those are the things. That's the mind share you want your CEO, you know, to be thinking about, and not necessarily, you know, the final decision making in regards to, you know, a dilemma within and that's, that's how you remove you know, decision, friction. I think I love that word, that phrase, you know, move friction, and move on to other things that that really can drive value overall for the company.

David Bush  40:33  
Yeah, I definitely pick up what you're laying down. And I think that there is going to be some people that are watching or listening to this particular show, and they're saying, Wow, I am the bottleneck, I am the plateau, I am the ceiling. And it's because of decisions that I have made, or the decisions I haven't made. I haven't made, some of the hard decisions. I heard one person say that the role of a CEO is is not to be the Chief Executive Officer, it's to be the chief executing officer, which means that they're executing on specific strategies that are breaking the business to go to that next level. And so let's just set aside the idea that you know, personal and professional growth and development is probably one of the biggest reasons why a company has maybe hit a growth plate. So what are the three things that you know, let's just say that a company is experiencing a growth plate. So right now, if you were to say the three areas that they should evaluate immediately is kind of land in the plane here, what are the three things that they should go in and inspect so that they can get what they expect.

Maria Trysla  41:47  
You know, you need to change. My hypothesis is I'm going to offer up is you need really need to change the company's sales and marketing approach, and it needs to be less episodic, like I said, and more repeatable, so less activity driven as compared to system driven. So you know, if you're operating through campaigns right or opportunistic deals, if you're looking at that, but then that signaling the problem. And you really have to get look at that and say, Do I have the clear targets? Do I have conversion metrics? What's the you know, what? What is the data telling us in regards to what's going on? So you really have to that's a big shift to move from no episodic to repeatable. You do need to be have tight alignments across, I think, across the organization. I mean, of course, it makes sense for marketing and sales to have tight alignment and have common objectives, but also customer success. I've, you know, I kind of mentioned that too, but also bring in product right? Product, you know, maybe doesn't have that daily touch with a customer and, and, you know, and, and they're, they're maybe not thinking about solving a customer problem because they're not aware of the customer problem, right? That, you know. And when We said that again, back to my example of the the director of customers best that talked about, if we take more time onboarding, it's going to create less issues. Well, that was a, we have to do something from a product perspective, slight adjustment engineering did it. We did it pretty fast. And, you know, so having, you know, all your, your senior executives, HR, obviously finance, you know, everybody at the table and knowing, understand how you're going to grow. And you know, I would say, you know, I was as an executive advisor. I was telling one CEO, it's like, you know, even talk to finance and HR, and they may say, oh, you know, we're back office support, you know. Or it right, if they don't understand how they're enabling customer value, tell them figure it out, right? HR, we need the best people. We need to retain our best people. Finance people. We have a very easy way to recognize revenue, right? It make sure the system's up and running right. Make sure people can send emails, whatever you know, or be ready when your platform goes down, because it will go down if it's when. And it's nothing against shade on it or engineering. It's just, you know, inevitable, but you know, those are the kind of things that you really have to you know that that signaling out and, you know, and I can't miss this one is like, you just have to be focused on, you know, looking at retention expansion, do not, do not ignore those levers. It's really important. And a lot of companies don't, they don't have a loyalty program. Run right? They don't have a referral program. Boy, a referral program is one of the easiest things to implement. You know, you have, you know, word of mouth, and you're giving, you know, a reward to your existing customer that might recommend it to somebody else. Loyalty Program, whatever that looks like. Just be intentional in setting those programs and getting them up and running. Those are probably common mistakes that people aren't looking you know what metrics they're looking at, but you know, setting those programs in motion and making sure they're repeatable and sustainable. And they might be, you know, hands on at first, but get them to a point where they're just they're executing on a daily basis. You know, maybe you know now that we are in the age of AI without minimal human involvement.

David Bush  45:43  
Well, you've dropped a tremendous amount of value with us today. Let's talk a little bit more about what it looks like if an organization wants to reach out and have a conversation with you, we'll put your contact information with the show notes and all of the resources in the video description, but walk us through what that process looks like.

Maria Trysla  46:03  
Yeah, if, if this, if this messaging resonates there, if you say, Man, that's going on in my organization, um, or I wonder if it's going on my organization, if you have those questions, or maybe something, maybe more simple question to ask yourself is, do you know where your next five to 10 million in revenue is coming from? If you have a blank stare, I'd love to talk with you. I'm helping you know organizations get you know right size, if you will. In regards to growth, I can be reached via LinkedIn. I think I'm the only Maria trislit C, R, Y, F, l, a, on LinkedIn, but reach out. Would love to have a conversation with you and see if you know, if I can help you, I do subscribe. I'll tell you right now, I subscribe to theory to give it to get and so a lot of times I'll say, Well, I can't help you, but somebody else can. So, you know, don't hesitate to reach out, because I might know somebody is a better fit than me. So LinkedIn is the problem. Spy,

David Bush  47:12  
yeah, that's so good. Well, man, we sure appreciate all the the pearls of wisdom that you shared with us today. And looking forward to getting feedback if those of you that have been watching this or listening to this particular show, if you have feedback, we'd love to see a comment. I'd love to see you share it with somebody else that you think that would benefit from hearing from Maria and some of the answers that she provided. And just one final question for you, Maria, we're coming upon March Madness. Your Nebraska Cornhuskers ranked number four. Do they have a clear path to the championship? Are we hopeful? What are you thinking?

Maria Trysla  47:48  
Okay, what kind of world do we exist in where Nebraska is now a basketball school, also number one women's volleyball. My daughter graduated from IU. I said, you know, it must be Armageddon when I use the football school in Nebraska, the basketball school, man, they, they didn't do well in the big 10 tournament. I was disappointed. But, you know, they lost Purdue. My husband's a Purdue grad, so we'll have to have a we'll have to fight about that. I don't think they're going to get to the championship. I hate say out loud, but I don't think so I'd say. I'm gonna say grade eight. Okay, nice. Well, we will,

David Bush  48:30  
we will timestamp this particular show with Maria's predictions. So if Nebraska reaches the Elite Eight, then we'll see if she was a great supporter, and if they win the ship, we'll have evidence that she did not believe at the time they're gonna win. But yeah, it's been fun talking with Maria. Appreciate your friendship with bdr.ai, and we look forward to great success as we help more organizations to break through that growth plateau.

Maria Trysla  48:58  
Thank you, David. I mean, you're you're you're providing a great service, just a different mindset and getting people out of their daily lives and really happy. It's great. But thank you for having

David Bush  49:10  
thanks so much. Take care everybody. Thanks for tuning in to the Business Builders playbook. If this episode gave you some plays that you can start running in your business today, hit subscribe and share with another revenue leader who's tired of the pipeline grind. Building Predictable Revenue isn't something you figure out alone. Whether you're looking to automate your prospecting with bdr.ai, or you just want to talk through the growth challenges you're facing, reach out. We help business leaders just like you, to build systems that actually scale. And if you're ready to stop being your company's Highest Paid Prospector, let's have a conversation. Reach out to us@bdr.ai until next time, let's keep building

Speaker 2  49:51  
you.