Incentives, Truth and Selling the Right Way with Wayne Morris
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In this episode of Executives Unplugged, Keith sits down with Wayne Morris, founder of RVNU and seasoned Chief Revenue Officer for multiple Silicon Valley startups. Wayne shares his transformative insights on go-to-market strategies, building sustainable sales teams, and the critical role of truth in creating long-term success.
💡 Key Topics Covered:
• How to diagnose product-market fit and go-to-market fit.
• The truth-driven approach to selling and why it builds trust and success.
• Structuring sales team incentives for long-term growth and customer success.
• Leadership lessons from Silicon Valley and beyond.
• Wayne’s wild journey from London to Silicon Valley.
Whether you’re a founder, sales leader, or just curious about what it takes to thrive in high-growth startups, this episode is packed with practical advice and compelling stories.
📍 Take Wayne’s Free Go-to-Market Assessment: RVNU.co
📧 Connect with Host Keith Cowing: kc.coach
Share your thoughts and feedback—Keith responds to every listener!
If you enjoyed this episode, please like, subscribe, and share it with someone who might find it valuable. Don’t forget to leave a review to help others discover Executives Unplugged!
Full Transcript
Wayne Morris: 0:00
Whenever I walk into a company and I see salespeople that look under pressure or stressed or not that happy people say what's the first thing that you do to try and figure that out? I tell them every single time show me where the CEO is, Just walk me straight to the CEO, Walk me to their office and let me have a conversation with them, because everything comes from their outlook and their mindsets.
Keith Cowing: 0:20
Welcome to another episode of Executives Unplugged. In this episode, we have Wayne Morris joining us. Wayne grew up as an account executive in London, then relocated to California and has been the chief revenue officer at multiple successful Silicon Valley startups that have grown, scaled and exited. Wayne is a go-to-market and sales expert. He is now the founder of RVNU, which you can find at rvnu. co, where he is productizing his knowledge about sales and go to market. In this episode, wayne shares his playbooks for how to diagnose where you have product market fit and go to market fit and where you don't. How you can spend your time to have the highest leverage within your business to grow your sales. How to tell the truth while selling, maybe in a counterintuitive way, so that you can build the best long-term organization. And how to lead and successfully structure your incentives for your sales team and your sales leader. It's also an entertaining conversation, with some personal adventures along the way. Let's jump in, wayne. Welcome to the show.
Wayne Morris: 1:22
Thanks, Keith. I'm thrilled that you've got me here. I'm really looking forward to this.
Keith Cowing: 1:26
Awesome, super excited to have you here. And let's jump into a life story. So you grew up in the UK. Now you're based in Silicon Valley. Walk me through that story. How did you get here?
Wayne Morris: 1:37
I came here in 2017. I invested in a startup in Palo Alto. I built the company up in Europe and we were growing faster in Europe than the company was growing in the US. So the founders and investors said, hey, why don't you come to California? I jumped at the opportunity. I've been trying to come to California for a long time. At that point, I had a four-year-old daughter and a three-month-old boy. We decided to stop off in Barbados on the way in the Caribbean.
Keith Cowing: 1:59
Just for fun, to make life more complicated?
Wayne Morris: 2:02
Well, I wanted a holiday. I wanted a little vacation before I kick things off as a chief revenue officer for a fast growth tech company in the Premier League of Tech. So we hung out there for 10 days, which was great, and then we went from Barbados to Miami and then Miami to San Francisco, and the gap between the flight that we had to catch in Miami was really tight. And we have all this kit with us because we're moving continent and two young kids, and we're about to miss the flight, as are many other people about to miss the flight. And I kid you not, at one point there are these two guys, young kids, who are in the same situation as us. We literally handed our three-month-old over to one of them and said, hey, we need help carrying stuff, and this one guy goes I'll take the baby. So he had Oliver, our three-month-old son, and I'm running alongside him with all of our kit.
Keith Cowing: 2:55
And you've never known this person before.
Wayne Morris: 2:57
No.
Keith Cowing: 2:57
Here's my life's most precious possession.
Wayne Morris: 2:59
We were in such a panic just trying to catch this flight. In the end we got to the flight in good time because JetBlue was delayed and we made the flight. But I stayed in touch with that guy. Actually he lived in San Francisco. I went for a beer with him afterwards and it was one of those kind of like movie style stories. I could imagine that being in a movie. We made it just. It was a lot of fun, and Oliver survived too, which he's grateful for.
Keith Cowing: 3:29
And now you're in Silicon Valley. Talk to me a little bit about the culture difference.
Wayne Morris: 3:30
You've worked in go-to-market teams for a long time between folks in the UK and folks in Silicon Valley or in the US in general, the US is famed for being the place where people know how to sell and do it religiously, in a very kind of well-thought-out, professional manner. In most cases In the UK, I would say, selling is somewhat more considered. You're not going to be in the face of people so much, you're going to be a little bit more. I would describe it as respectful, because buyers think about things a little bit differently, whereas in the US, generally, people are more open to taking risk, more open to being creative in the way in which they reach their revenue goals, both on the buy side and the sell side. So people will buy technology, they'll take a flyer on In my experience, more so in the US than they might across certain parts of Europe.
Wayne Morris: 4:16
So from a sales perspective, I think it's relatively straightforward to have the first conversation relative to Europe. In my experience, getting in and having that first conversation is normally the hardest thing to do. Personally, I've always found the US to be relatively straightforward compared to Europe to have that first conversation. And then, once you're in, really at that point it's all about being very considerate about the way in which you present the solution that you have, and obviously you have to do that in the right way, and typically that means listening intently for a long time before you open your mouth.
Keith Cowing: 4:49
I used to joke that that's a skill they don't teach you in business school is how to listen. Everybody talks about how to present yourself, how to make a compelling pitch, how to talk, how to push yourself out there. Sometimes you forget to learn how to listen, which is a super important skill, especially in product, which is my background to listen to your customers. I'd love to hear a little bit about how your upbringing, your background in Europe, family life, et cetera, impacted how you approach go-to-market now, how you lead teams. Sales is a psychological game, getting in the psyche of your customer. You're constantly getting rejected. You're dealing with a lot of competitive drive, but also failure, frankly, no matter what, even if you're the best on earth, and that's hard and it's psychologically challenging. What, from your background, has influenced how you approach that?
Wayne Morris: 5:32
Yeah, that's a great question. Well, I'll take that in two parts. One is an individual contributor. When I first started selling, how did I think about it? And then how did that translate into me being a leader and running these revenue teams as an individual contributor? Let's put it this way as a child I was always super inquisitive. I think it drove my parents nuts Probably the reason why they sent me away to boarding school age 11, because I just had enough of all these questions I was asking. But I think the fundamental basis of being a successful salesperson is, I believe, that you have to be truly inquisitive.
Wayne Morris: 6:03
I obsess about telling the truth. You can't present a product objectively unless you can understand the detail on the buy side. So the person that you're selling to, where is it that they're coming from? So this whole concept of selling ice to Eskimos or having the gift of the gab, in my opinion, is complete BS when it comes to sales. If that's how you want to operate, you're going to be really mediocre and in fact, you're probably just going to set your customer success team up for real failures, and I've never liked that, I've never bought into that. It's never sat well with me.
Wayne Morris: 6:34
The thing I obsess with, as I said, is telling the truth, and how that translates in sales is I need to understand the pain of the person I'm speaking with. If we want to get tactical for a second, I would typically open up by saying I think I have something that can really impact you, both personally and professionally, but at this point in time, it's just a hypothesis. However, in a couple of minutes, if I can ask you a couple of questions, we might be able to take this from hypothesis to reality, and I still have, at this point, no idea whether this is going to be valuable to you or not, but my hypothesis is that it will be. Do you have two minutes just to validate this one way or the other? It's never two minutes. It's always a much longer period of time than that, and what I'm really doing at this point is listening intently to try and understand what the pain is that they're suffering, and there are always two pain points there's a personal pain point and there's a professional pain point. The professional pain point is the one that they lead with, and that's an easy thing to abstract from someone. The thing that's like a little bit more difficult is the personal pain point, but you eventually get to it when you build up enough trust. And so, once you understand that arc of pain, from professional to personal, you have enough information at that point to be able to determine whether there is a pattern that you can match with what they're telling you, with the product that you have. And if that pattern matches, you can then make your case.
Wayne Morris: 7:54
To say, based on everything that you've just said, I think my hypothesis was correct and I'd like to be able to present back to you why that is. Are you open to me doing that? And the answer is always yes to that. However, on the flip side, you always have to have the confidence to be able to say the opposite, which is hey, based on everything you just said, I don't think that what we have is relevant for you. I describe this as like the anti-sell, and I'm not selling at this point. I'm just telling them what I see, because this is how my product impacts businesses and this is how my product impacts businesses and this is how it has to be applied and, on this basis, I don't think this applies to your business. Can you confirm that back to me?
Wayne Morris: 8:30
What's really interesting in those scenarios is that most people will come back to you and try and convince you that you're wrong.
Wayne Morris: 8:35
I've often found myself in scenarios where I am literally convincing people that this is not something they should buy or spend any more time on, and there's nothing wrong with them or their company.
Wayne Morris: 8:45
I'm just being straight with them and I'll try and recommend other products or other services.
Wayne Morris: 8:50
So being truly obsessive about telling the truth has always stood me in good stead. The challenge that I find in Silicon Valley, or at least in the last five to 10 years across SaaS, the sovereignty of salespeople to make those decisions has been taken away from them, and what I mean by that is I see so many founders, sales leaders, chief revenue officers the people that run the revenue forcing salespeople to sell to buyers regardless of whether it's a fit or not. I think that's come from the pressure that they're under to generate 3x annual recurring revenues post a Series A, do that again in the second year post Series A, maybe raise a Series B and have to double revenue three years in a row to get to that valuation. So, unfortunately, the sovereignty of salespeople has been ripped from them in this environment. I don't think it's an excuse for salespeople to incorrectly sell, but I do think it has made it harder for them to lean into the truth. That's how I approached it from an individual contributor's perspective.
Keith Cowing: 9:53
You used one big word there truth and to be honest, I don't think we think about truth as much when we think about selling. We think about getting to the end game, which is a closed deal, whatever it takes. There's a little bit of Hollywood in there. It makes a great movie to have somebody pitching their heart out on the phone and convincing somebody to buy something. Somebody listening intently is a terrible movie. I think that gets in the zeitgeist. I'd love to hear, maybe on two fronts working with CEOs and then working with salespeople. Both of them may have a slightly different view of the world than where you're anchoring. How do you work with them when a CEO may be slightly delusional that's the art of being an entrepreneur is being just delusional enough so that you see some future world and you get there. Yet not so delusional that you're trying to shove something down somebody's throat and don't take the time to figure out whether it's really working or not.
Wayne Morris: 10:38
For me, the key is always education and taking a little bit of a step backwards. Now, for a CEO who is obsessed with the sell and just getting the deal done, especially if they're running a SaaS company, my question to them is where do you think this leads? So you get the deal done, and then where does it go? What happens next? Typically, they'll say something like well, that's customer success's problem, and whenever they use that word problem, I'm always really skeptical, because enterprise value is created in SaaS companies in the post-sale environment where revenue compounds, and so, really, if you're a very good salesperson or you're running a very good go-to-market operation, sales operation, what you really need to be doing is giving your customer success team deals that are not problematic, but they're actually deals that are going to almost naturally renew and expand, so they need to be lacking in problems. So for a CEO, there's largely an education about how they're going to create enterprise value for their company and therefore for themselves. In some cases, it's like a re-education of like why are you doing this? And so I think a lot of people think that founders know all of this, but the reality is that they just don't. So for CEOs, it's relatively straightforward If you want to create enterprise value, you have to have gross revenue retention and net revenue retention. Numbers that stack up and that for gross revenue retention, that's like 80% plus probably 90% plus. For net revenue retention, that's 120% plus. You do crappy deals. You're not going to get those numbers because your deals are going to churn. General unit economic education is relatively straightforward for CEOs to understand.
Wayne Morris: 12:19
For the reps it's a little bit more difficult. It really comes down to who's managing them. Most of the reps that I speak with will say one or two things I'm motivated by money and that's all I really care about. And that really kills me when I hear that, sure, you have to be motivated by money, but there has to be something that comes before that and after that. There are people at the end of that statement.
Wayne Morris: 12:38
In the worst case scenario, you could be selling something to someone that takes up 50% of their budget. If they make the wrong decision because you didn't help them make the right decision, they could get fired and their career could be screwed. I mean, do you really want that on your plate? And I really do believe that's a responsibility of the salesperson, but it's also the responsibility of the sales leader to ensure they don't put their team in that position. So for the individual contributor, I impressed two things Like morally, do you care about looking yourself in the mirror and being very proud of who you are and what you do every day? Because if you do, you need to be sure that you're selling the right thing to the right people.
Wayne Morris: 13:13
But just as importantly, especially if you're in early stage technology, the really beautiful thing about early stage tech is that you are bringing something new and disruptive to the market, probably for the very first time, and you're bringing something to a buy they probably never have heard of before. This could really be a game changer for them, but only if you sell to the right company and the right people in those organizations, and those things will catapult your career. They catapulted my career People that I sold to that had no idea about technology that I was selling, that took a leap of faith and bought it from me for the first time. These have become lifelong friends.
Wayne Morris: 13:45
These are people that get you interviews in different companies. These are people that put you in front of venture capitalists who say, yeah, I've got this startup that you should either invest in or you should look at. It's one of the reasons that this kid from a working class military family in the UK finds himself in Silicon Valley living a great life is because I sold in the right way and I was very true to myself throughout the whole of my career. So that's my advice to individual contributors and, frankly, if they want to operate like that, they should, and if they're in environments where they're unable to operate like that, I would encourage them to look elsewhere.
Keith Cowing: 14:16
Now what I hear. There is a long-term mindset You're building for the long-term the company, the team yourself, your customers, everything. Incentives are everything in terms of motivation and a lot of times sales teams are incentivized 50% base, 50% commission and if you want more deals, you incentivize that. If you want long deals, you incentivize that. If you want renewals, you incentivize that, and a lot of it's around the structuring of compensation In your situation. If you want people to think long-term and at times long-term is at odds with hitting a number this quarter how do you manage that in terms of incentives and motivations?
Wayne Morris: 14:49
Yeah, that's a great question. It's a long-held debate. Here's how I did it. I would look for leading indicators for renewal and I would incentivize salespeople around not just getting the deal done but also those leading indicators for renewal. And I would incentivize salespeople around not just getting the deal done but also those leading indicators for renewal, and so that puts a good amount of pressure both on the product and the customer success team. The things that I look for are things like proof of usage post the sale within the first X period of time are the key buying influencers. So the economic buyer and the user influencers whoever it was that are critical to getting value out of the deal are they using the product? And I also look for an ability for the company to prove some kind of value exchange within a certain period of time. These are all leading indicators that a client is going to renew and expand, and you can get these indicators within the first three months of a deal getting done. I would set up compensation plans that would hold back certain elements of commission just for three months post the deal being done. It created really solid hygiene within the company to ensure that the team that was responsible for integrating the product and getting the client to use it were under a time constraint that everyone was driving towards, and it ensured that the salespeople knew that they were on the hook for getting the right deals done with the right people. More than anything, it really kind of set a culture within the company that said we're going to do things the right way, both for our customers but also internally.
Wayne Morris: 16:17
I ran a survey on LinkedIn a year or so ago and it was something like there's a week of the quarter to go. You've got four deals, you get them closed, you'll hit your goal, but you know all four of them are not ideal customer profiles. What do you do? And 80% of the they don't close the deals. That's the general nature of sales. But it also means that culturally, the company is set up in a way in which promotes that kind of behavior and so, downstream of that, those four customers are going to churn right. They're going to churn prematurely. They're going to be a pain in the ass for the customer success team to deal with.
Wayne Morris: 16:57
Is that what you really want in your company? So I think CEOs really have to think long and hard about the culture they want in their organization. It's on them to think long-term. Whenever I walk into a company and I see salespeople that look under pressure or stressed or not that happy people say what's the first thing that you do to try and figure that out? I tell them every single time show me where the CEO is, just walk me straight to the CEO, walk me to their office and let me have a conversation with them, because everything comes from their outlook and their mindsets. Go straight to the head of the snake and speak to the CEO and figure it out with them, and then let everything roll downhill from there.
Keith Cowing: 17:34
It sounds like your advice to entrepreneurs, which is simple but probably underused, is incentivize and build a culture where you're there to make your customers successful not just to make your customers buy and to actually structure your compensation and the way you hire and fire and promote and reward based on finding the right customer, selling it in the right way, making sure they're successful after launch and it's actually delivering value to them.
Wayne Morris: 17:58
Yeah, 100%. And I've been under pressure to not do that and I've walked away from companies where CEOs have said, just sell this thing. And I'll say, well, where's the value? You're a product guy, keith. Product and sales need to get closer together.
Wayne Morris: 18:12
Sure, if you want to sell ahead of the curve enterprise and strategic selling you do have to sell ahead of the product actually being ready.
Wayne Morris: 18:19
That's the nature of the game. Then it's the job of the product team and the product marketing team to sit down with the sales team and say look, this is what's coming, this is when it's coming and this is the impact it's going to have on our customers and the value they get from us. And this is how we propose that you position this, because we know how this is going to land once the product is ready. So I have no problem in selling ahead of a curve. I'm just saying that we just need to make sure that what we're selling is a fair reflection of the reality of the value that they're likely to get. That's, honestly what we believe and what we're trying to build. And if it doesn't work out that way, we have a feedback loop back from the market through sales, through customer success, back into products. So we'll iterate it and make that right. That to me is optimal, but again, that's kind of rare.
Keith Cowing: 19:07
And there's a huge difference in my experience between selling ahead but directionally what you're really trying to make the product do. If you're building a product for professional sports teams and you've solved basketball and you're going into baseball and you hope it's ready in the first quarter, but maybe it's the second quarter and you're selling that it's going to be ready at the end of the first quarter, you're kind of pushing the boundaries, but that's what you're trying to accomplish. But then if you're selling it to high schools and it wasn't really built for high schools and you're not trying to make it work for high schools but there was revenue on the table, and you pull in a couple of high schools and say, hey, what's the harm? Here's a couple extra dollars. All of a sudden you get pulled in these directions that are not helping you.
Keith Cowing: 19:44
I'd love to hear your take on that, because we're starting to talk about product and sales and engineering and you've built this very powerful framework that entrepreneurs can use to identify where they are in the go-to-market process and development similar to product market fit, but on the go-to-market side, and I think it's really really enlightening to help people understand exactly where they are, how to assist the team, how to move forward. I'm sure you built this not because everything was working, but because there was some kind of pain in your life. Walk us through what that pain point was that led you to build this, and then let's actually walk through the framework and how entrepreneurs can apply it to their companies.
Wayne Morris: 20:17
It was born out of walking into early stage startups and seeing something different to what I was presented initially. And, to be fair to the people that were presenting the view of the startup with their own eyes, they were looking at it through an engineering and product spectacles. Through that prism, of course, I'm looking at it from a go-to-market perspective. I need to be able to take what they've got and take it to market and there were just huge gaps. And it's pretty painful when you walk in and you say sure, I'm going to take a package that has me of 50% base which might cover my bills, but really I need to sell a lot to be able to have a good life. In some instances I was so big on a startup I would compromise even more on cash to take more equity, and so after a couple of those, I realized I needed to close this gap between what I was being told and what the reality was. I spoke to a number of different colleagues on the go-to-market side and it became really obvious that the same thing was happening to them. Once I got into the companies, it was different. Once I got into the companies, I found I had a knack for being able to communicate effectively with the founders, who come from engineering and product background, and it really bought me time in the way in which other go-to-market colleagues were struggling. They would be getting fired inside 18, 24 months. Back in the day Now it's more like 12 months, whereas I would have long stints where I would be able to buy time effectively with both investors and with founders. And the reason I was able to buy time was because I was able to contextualize their conceptions of the business and the reality of what was needed to happen in order to successfully take the product to market. And so, after doing that for a few times, a venture capitalist actually came to me and said hey, you're clearly doing something that other people are not, that is able to get people onto the same page very quickly.
Wayne Morris: 22:09
When that happened, I'm probably over a decade into leading revenue teams, and so I decided I said, sure, I'll tell you what I'll do. I'll go away and I'll try and kind of productize what it is I've been doing. I found it so difficult. It was really difficult to productize what I was doing. I had it all in my head but I couldn't really get it down on paper. It was all over the place. I made a couple of efforts and it didn't quite land. Then two things really happened. One of my venture capitalists, a guy called Toby Coppel at Mosaic Ventures in London he had suggested long before that. I keep track of a guy called David Skok from Matrix Partners and his blog for entrepreneurs Are you familiar with that?
Keith Cowing: 22:55
Metrics 2.0, one of his old posts many years ago, is still one that I share with my MBA students, with entrepreneurs, with folks constantly about how do you think about SaaS businesses and the metrics and just a totally different approach than a lot of people are used to.
Wayne Morris: 23:11
David has this knack of being able to break things down into first principles in a way which is very easy for me to understand, and so I'd been reading his blog for a pretty long time and I thought, well, there's definitely something in this that I can riff off. And then I read Pete Kazanjy's book Founding Sales. He's a friend of mine, but he wasn't a friend of mine before I read the book. I read the book and that, combined with Scott's work, was the epiphany. He comes from a product marketing background and it was really obvious reading the book that he didn't have my background. He broke things down into finite detail and he did it in a way which made complete sense to me. So that, combined with the teachings of David Skok, really was what led me to this framework.
Wayne Morris: 23:55
There are different stages of growth on that startup journey. What are they and what do they consist of? And what happens in these phases and stages of growth and what has to happen to successfully exit these stages of growth? What happens if you don't successfully do things? How does that impact the business further along? And what are the mistakes that people make where they kid themselves, which happens all the time that they kid themselves that they've successfully achieved a certain milestone when in reality they have not. I put all this together and came up with this framework and then began to test it in the market. So one more thing I'll say is I knew I was really good at early stage and I knew I lost interest as startups got traction. But I also knew-.
Keith Cowing: 24:47
Now that's opposite of a lot of go-to-market leaders. A lot of people want to come in when the thing is lighting on fire and it's easy to go out there and sell, because the product and brand are selling itself.
Wayne Morris: 24:57
You're just a sucker for punishment.
Keith Cowing: 24:59
Why do you like that early?
Wayne Morris: 25:00
stage. Yeah Well, I can't really explain it. What I would say is that my father was in an elite squadron in the British military and I grew up in an environment where, when he was away on missions, I would have to go and check for bombs under our car at age seven, you know and then I went to a military boarding school. I mean, we were in some kind of war as a kid growing up. So trying to close a series A doesn't make you sweat. Well, I have context that I can always just anchor back to and I'm like this just isn't that big a deal, and maybe it's why I was good at sales, because it's like how bad can it be?
Keith Cowing: 25:37
I'm not going to get blown up, let's go take one piece of that and then we'll get back to the framework that the mentality of. So you said you're not going to get blown up. It's not that big of a deal. One of the things in sales is that you're constantly going to get rejected, and to a lot of people that is a big deal. To most people that is a big deal.
Keith Cowing: 25:57
It sucks to get rejected, and so it sounds like that was one of the forming moments of your psyche where it just anchored you differently on like, compared to other things, it ain't that big of a deal, so I'm just going to hop in. How do you help other people get into that mindset of let's just go for it and, trust me, the worst case is not that bad.
Wayne Morris: 26:18
You know, the thing that I say to people is you have to understand the product in as much detail as you possibly can. There are no real shortcuts to it. Let me give you a really basic example of this. When I was in my early 20s, I decided to travel around the world. I did the backpacker thing and then I landed in Sydney, australia. I could have got a corporate job with a company I was working at in London prior to going there, and I just didn't want to do that. I guess I try and take the path less trodden is kind of a general theme in my life. And so I decided you know, I wanted to get good at selling because I knew I could make money and I come from a relatively poor background. So I thought what better opportunity to sharpen my sales skills than to like get a sales job? But this was a door-to-door, 100% commission sales job. But this was a door-to-door, 100% commission sales job. It was the toughest of the tough, and what they teach you to do in those environments is basically run this script with you and you just repeat it rabbit fashion. And I tried that for two weeks and it was horrific. I didn't sell the thing. It was awful, it was terrible, and I decided in that moment that I was going to understand this product and the buyer for myself. I wasn't going to rely on somebody else to tell me who I was selling to and what this product was about. I was going to go and take it upon myself and determine what this product was and what the value exchange was, and I wasn't going to try and sell to everyone. I was going to say no to some people. I was going to say yes to others, but it was going to be on me to do that. Here's what I would say to say no to some people. I was going to say yes to others, but it was going to be on me to do that. Here's what I would say to sellers If you can understand the product in detail and you will have your own sovereign opinion on the value of that product, selling then becomes really interesting.
Wayne Morris: 27:56
It just becomes primarily consultative. That in itself is really rewarding. You're helping someone progress themselves, or their day, or their company, or you're helping them not waste time and move on to the next thing. Once you get into that position, it really is then just a numbers game. It really is then. How many conversations can I have? Not how many sales can I make, how many conversations can I have? And that simplification I have found to be really comforting, because I have never thought about the sale for a very long time. All I've thought about is my at-bats. How many at-bats can I get in in a day? And as long as I can get the at-bats in, everything else will figure itself out. And so I say to salespeople if you can understand the product in detail, you can understand the value exchange, you can understand who you should and shouldn't be selling to. All that matters is your at-bats. I guarantee you, as long as those targets are accurate and fair, you will either hit or exceed those targets. I promise you. Simple as that.
Keith Cowing: 28:58
And so that's the psyche of the team, that's get the job done. And then, in terms of the structure and the strategy, walk us through this framework. I'll show the visual and then, for people that are audio only, I'll put this in the show notes and they can look at it as well, but walk through it.
Wayne Morris: 29:11
Yeah, sure. So there are four phases of growth idea, market fit, product market fit, go to market fit and scale. And the area where I specialize and spend most of my time and have done in my career is really in the product market fit and go to market fit phase of growth. The idea of market fit phase of growth is relatively straightforward. That's the really fun area where founders are. You know, they have this hypothesis and they think, yeah, there's a problem with the world and I think software can solve it and I'm going to go and build a product to try and test that out. A lot of founders will skip stage two and three. If you're looking at the framework now, which is like you know what's out there in the market right now, who are we competing against, and you know what's the true size of the market that we can go after, Because they get super excited and they build a product. So don't do that. Any founders listening to this, don't do that. Do the work, it doesn't take too long. And then, once you have that, especially if you've got a founding team, you'll get executive alignment around what it is that you're going after. So you want everyone pulling in the same direction. We all know how many times founders fall out. In my opinion, A lot of founders fall out in the early stages because they don't truly align at this stage of growth, so getting that right is really, really important.
Wayne Morris: 30:16
The next stage of growth is product market fit. Now there is a ton of definitions around product market fit. The product market fit definition that we have at RVNU, that I created, is really built around what comes next in go-to-market fit, and so what I really care about here is stage five. We have to have design partners. Really care about here is stage five. We have to have design partners, and those design partners have to reflect the ideal customer profile that you're going after in the idea market fit phase of growth, and I don't really care whether they're from your accelerator or from your network. A lot of people argue that that's bad, but actually I don't care. This stage of growth I don't really care about that. What I really care about is like do they fit that profile of customer that you know you can deliver value to? If you can get those, what comes next is the right people need to be using the right features in the product that delivers value that they can then justify the price point for, at some point in the future, getting design partners, getting them to pay some money, going and raising capital on the back of top line revenue from those design partners and then building a sales team to go and replicate that.
Wayne Morris: 31:19
Well, there's a ton of issues with that and it's the reason why most salespeople fall down. It's because founders sell in a way in which other people cannot. If they're in your network, then salespeople aren't going to be able to sell to your network. It's your network, it's not theirs. And one thing I'll say here is whenever I see go-to-market teams being built post a series A and I run an analysis with them which, by the way, any of your listeners can do it takes them 20 minutes. They'll get scores for every one of these stages of growth. When they do that and I run the analysis, the delta between where they're trying to operate and where we determine they're operating that delta, which we call go-to-market debt, is typically spanning product market fit and go-to-market fit. So the summary there would be the founders have incorrectly concluded that they have product market fit and they're ready to go to market. What we typically find is they don't quite have product market fit and that's the reason that sales isn't quite working.
Keith Cowing: 32:16
Can you give a few examples within that of some of the gaps you typically find?
Wayne Morris: 32:20
Yeah, absolutely so. We'll typically find that a startup has sold the product really well, but no one's using it. Now a lot of your listeners will think no, surely not. Well, think about it Enterprise, b2b, saas, good salespeople. They get sold on the product and its value and the buyers say this makes a whole lot of sense. Or someone senior says this makes a whole lot of sense, I'll buy it and they'll expect junior people further down the chain of command to implement it and use it. And it just doesn't happen. And so no one sees that until renewal. Right, no one sees it until renewal. So everything looks good until the anniversary of that contract.
Wayne Morris: 32:55
So you've got to get ahead of that within weeks of that contract being signed. So that means you know, make sure people are using the product. But more than that, you have to make sure the right people are using the product. There's no point in people that aren't going to get that much value out of it using it. But that happens a lot. The other thing that happens a lot is people are using the features that are not going to deliver the requisite value to justify the price point. So founders are great at building product incredible products, beautiful products. And then when I go in and say, okay, talk me through the features that you need them to use, that are going to deliver the most value, they'll say what do you mean? I'll say, well, sure, there's a hundred features, but there's always just two or three that really derive the value. Which ones are they? And they'll either not be able to tell me or they'll tell me features that aren't being used and you go speak to the customer and say, why aren't you using these features? And the customer will say because I don't really need to use that feature. I'm using this other stuff. And I'll say Can't you get that other stuff for free from Google or somewhere else? Yeah, but we bought this. Okay, so we have a churn issue on the horizon. So making sure people are using the product, the right people are using the product and they're using the right features is critical.
Wayne Morris: 34:02
If you've got all of that right, the next question is okay, how much value are you getting from the product? And this is a really difficult thing. If it's not in consumer, it's relatively straightforward, because people will be on month-to-month contracts and they'll renew every month or they'll churn. But in B2B, with annual contracts, typically proving the value comes at the point of renewal, which is kind of crazy. You should be trying to prove value as early as possible. This whole idea that you have to wait until the end of a contract to renew a contract or expand a contract is absolutely nuts If you're doing this properly and you're proving the value early.
Wayne Morris: 34:38
So you're sitting down with customers and saying how much value did you get from this Dollar value, time value, saved. Why wouldn't they renew early? Why wouldn't they lock in the rate for a future? Why wouldn't they do a multi-year deal? Why wouldn't they try and use their experience to expand it to a different department in the organization? Why wouldn't they do that? No one has a good answer for that, because the answer is they will if you can do that effectively. But if you skip over the proof of value stage, then you're unable to do that.
Wayne Morris: 35:03
But what's critical about stage seven, the proof of value stage, is this it's like how do you justify your price point, what's your pricing strategy and where does it come from? Well, it should be derived from the value exchange, especially if you're a new, disruptive product where you don't really have a proxy upon which to compare price. If you're not doing that, you might be in a race to the bottom against a product that's inferior to yours and then you're not giving yourself any chance of growing this company and delivering an enterprise value that's going to get you a good exit if that's what you're in it for. So this product market fit stage of growth is the layer. I would go as far as to say you get this right. The rest of it, from a go-to-market perspective, is relatively straightforward.
Keith Cowing: 35:41
You mentioned HubSpot and I remember a great conversation with Dharmesh Shah and he said that in the early days they purposely didn't have contracts. It was month to month. They knew they could sign contracts and financially be better, but they wanted the real-time feedback loop of are people churning or are they staying? And if you have a 12-month or a 36-month contract it delays that feedback loop on whether or not they really want to keep the product. And so in the early days they wanted the fastest feedback so they could build the best thing. And then, once they had that, they went and they started doing contracts because that's better financially for the company and predictability, but it lets you get lazy in terms of making sure they're getting value.
Wayne Morris: 36:19
I didn't know that Dharmesh is a man after my own heart, to be quite frank, because that is exactly how I believe you should operate. Why would you lie to yourself? And I think a lot of people do it? Because they don't know or they know that if they can deliver top line revenue numbers, they can raise around a capital, but at some point these chickens come home to roost. What I implore founders to do is to understand what's coming, and a lot of them were like don't worry about it, we'll deal with that when it comes, I'll just kick the can down the road. But these are real problems for go-to-market teams. That's what they're doing. They're building up this go-to-market debt that presents real problems for go-to-market teams, and they are very challenging environments. I've been in them, I've had to correct them, I've had to fix them and no one wants to be operating in those environments. No one in the go-to-market team wants to be operating in that environment.
Keith Cowing: 37:21
One of the things-suite team and you talk through things and you just go in circles for weeks or months, whereas one visual sometimes just anchors everybody and it's oh, and you can just like feel the energy in the room shift towards alignment, and alignment is magical. The default is not alignment, the default is entropy. You got to pull people back and I found visuals are one of the most powerful things to pull people back and we just underestimate that, probably because they're see is an ability for an entrepreneur to tell the truth and then go back and tell the story and wrap it in pixie dust and all of this stuff. So you want to make it seem magical to the world, but you have to start with the truth as a nugget.
Keith Cowing: 38:03
If you're going to go to a D1 college and run track and run the a hundred meter dash, you know you got to be in the 10 to 11 second range, and so the truth is hey, I'm feeling really good.
Keith Cowing: 38:13
Well, let's put a stopwatch to it, let's see where you are, and if it's 13 seconds, it's no judgment. You timed yourself, that's the number, and now I'm here to get you from 13 to 11 and then from 11 to 10, and here's all the things you can do, but you start with the truth, and a lot of folks don't have the truth because it's not as simple as let me just take your time but a lot of people are operating without the timing. And without the time, yeah, what are you talking about? It doesn't really mean anything, and so this to me looks like a tool that an entrepreneur can sit down and just assess themselves and have the truth. And then the question is OK, what's the nutrition plan? What's the you know workout plan? How do I get there? But you start with the truth, and so how do you recommend entrepreneurs use this?
Wayne Morris: 38:54
I'd say, if you're genuinely a truth seeker, then go to rvnuco and take the go-to-market debt self-assessment. It's 20 minutes, 70 multiple choice questions. You'll get a score for every one of these stages of growth and you'll understand what your go-to-market debt looks like. If you're not a truth seeker, don't waste your time. Just keep burying your head in the sand or keep doing what you're doing and maybe you'll figure it out. The key is you have to have the courage to look at that truth and be prepared to do something with it.
Wayne Morris: 39:21
One of the biggest challenges is how do I reframe this with my investors? Well, you know what I would say to any founder listening to this thinking I think I've got a problem here. I think I have product market fit, but my sales aren't working. So, listening to this guy, it probably means that I don't have product market fit and I have to go backwards. How am I going to frame this with my investors?
Wayne Morris: 39:41
Let me tell you this 100% of investors that have seen this, that have had their founders do this and seen this and seen that their founders have to go backwards, have been cheered, have been absolutely overjoyed by the results. Do you know why? Because there is a plan, a very clear plan about how to pay down that debt and how to move forwards, and everyone breathes a sigh of relief. Okay, so now we know what the challenges are. Now we know we have a plan and now we can put a timeline against that. This all makes a lot more sense. So anyone that wants to do it, that wants to seek the truth, go to the website and give it a go, and I promise you, as long as you have good investors that are fair, they will be happy with what you present back to them, because it's a very clear plan that they probably haven't seen before of this kind.
Keith Cowing: 40:26
And what I see a lot of times with boards and CEOs and investors is the CEO feels uncomfortable, feels the pressure and the stress of. I now kind of realize this thing and I don't really want to admit it to myself. I've sort of shoved it down and I don't want to let the truth out and I'm afraid to tell them because I don't want them to know. And when you bring it up like they sort of knew or they really knew and this is just you admitting it and they're like great, you've discovered it and now you're going to do something about it, because the board doesn't run the company. It's your job to run the company. And sometimes they discover you know they have a pretty good hunch or a really strong feeling about something before you do, but they're hoping you discover it and come up with a plan.
Wayne Morris: 41:08
Yeah, they have a ton of signal, don't they? They see more signal than anyone else. It's not like the pattern that they're seeing with you is not one they've not seen before, but that they invested in you as the founder, so they need you to come to that conclusion. They might lead the horse to water to some extent, but it's all on you, so they need you to come to that conclusion. If there's any fear about doing this, I would say don't worry about it.
Keith Cowing: 41:31
In fact, I think it will be the opposite. You'll probably bring joy to your investors and not everybody grew up checking for bombs under the car, but at the end of the day, this is one of the best leadership things that you can do, and I find that it's usually the fear of the moment as opposed to the moment itself. That's the biggest issue and it can be therapeutic and super helpful. Also, you don't want to do it alone. You bring other people in on it and you have a plan and now you're doing it together, as opposed to you just sort of shouldering the stress internally. I'll put it in the show notes I absolutely think all entrepreneurs should take this that are on their journey and really assess where they are and help come up with a plan.
Keith Cowing: 42:06
Now, in terms of mindset, a lot of what you've talked about is this sort of long-term view. A lot of what you've talked about is this sort of long-term view. This optimism, this mensch mindset is a lot of what I see, where you just literally care about helping entrepreneurs and helping companies and you'll give stuff away for free in the spirit that you know it'll come back to you and you'll get the business. What are you working on these days from a leadership perspective, in terms of how you perform at your best and how you maintain your mindset and your optimism.
Wayne Morris: 42:35
I really struggled with this whole concept of those with the most money would be able to hire the best talent and everyone else would just fall by the wayside. So I spent three years building a consulting practice where I essentially was the CRO for like three or four companies at once, using this framework, and it worked. But that's not enough. The thing that I see in the market is a lot of startups failing because they screw up, go to market. So for the very first time I'm trying to build product, keith. For me it's like I've been trying to sell product for the whole of my life, but now I'm trying to build it. I'm on your side of the fence for the very first time.
Wayne Morris: 43:07
Productizing knowledge as a product is a really tough thing to do at some kind of scale. We're producing content, and that content is supposed to be a relatively straightforward guide to founders about how they can run good a market more effectively. I had an epiphany about six to nine months ago when a couple of founders reached out to me who I'd never heard of before, never met before, and they said hey, we just added a million dollars at a 50% more efficient rate than we did prior to getting to know you and I was like, excuse me, have we met before? And they said, oh no, yeah, sorry, and you often get this when you're putting content out and someone comes onto a screen. They kind of know you and you don't know them. And oh no, we've just been reading your content and we've been applying your framework and then it's been impacting our business really positively. So I thought, wow, so it is actually possible to asynchronously productize knowledge in a way in which can impact companies at distance. So we've been taking that and trying to produce products, the first of which was the go-to-market debt self-assessment. So that go-to-market debt self-assessment was something I used to charge $40,000 for. It would take me four to eight weeks, and now we've got it down to 20 minutes of multiple choice and it's not as good, but it's 80% of the way there and it's free and not $40,000. And then from there I would then go in and do deeper analysis and provide guidance around frameworks and customized frameworks for people to go and do things like prove value, prove usage, realize value, all those things in product market fit, for example. But now we've created frameworks and we're in the design partner phase of releasing these frameworks to design partners and a course to be able to do this at scale, where we'll have perhaps 10 founders at once running through this course and being with us in a community, perhaps having a retreat a three-day intensive retreat to fill in the gaps.
Wayne Morris: 45:02
What I'm trying to do is build product to go from someone hiring me as an individual chief revenue officer to hiring me as a fractional, to hiring our knowledge at scale and applying it on a much higher frequency. So we go from one to four to 10, to 50 to 100. So we're on that path to basically democratize access to the things that we know, that work at early stage growth, and so any founders that are out there that are struggling and they don't have to be in Silicon Valley, they don't have to be a middle-class white dude who went to an Ivy League university, they can be anywhere in the world. They should be able to have access to this information and they should be able to use it to impact their businesses, their startups, effectively. So more of these startups that change the world succeed versus fail. So I'm working on building product to bring that to life.
Wayne Morris: 45:54
That's my vision, because I know that that's what happens in the world, despite what people say. But the chip I have on my shoulder I think every founder has to have a chip on their shoulder is an unnamed tier one VC. When I presented this idea to them Not that I wanted them to invest, but I was just saying this is what I'm going to do, because I think they were trying to pitch me to be an operator in one of their startups they said if that was possible, it would have been done already. I still can't quite work out if that VC said that so that they forced me to go and motivate me to go build it, or whether they actually meant it. Either way, I'm grateful that they said that, because that's what we're going to try and do. No-transcript for doing this. The more help we can give founders, the better.
Keith Cowing: 47:04
Yeah this was awesome and we'll send people to rvnuco to take your assessment and see your content. Thank you, wayne.
Wayne Morris: 47:18
Cheers Keith,
Keith Cowing: 47:18
What fantastic insights from Wayne. If you are building a startup, you can go to rvnu. co and take Wayne's free go-to-market assessment. I highly recommend it For everybody else. I hope this was helpful and, if it was, please give us positive feedback on your favorite platform or share this with a friend that might find it useful, so that others can find the podcast as well. I'm Keith Cowing. You can reach me at kc. coach. I respond to every listener, question or comment, and those emails also help me determine content and guests for future episodes. Until next time, enjoy the ride.