About the speaker

Brian Tully is currently the Senior Vice President of Sales at LiveU, producer of technology for television broadcasters to enable live video links via wireless cellular networks. Prior to that, Brian was the Chief Revenue Officer at Goldcast. With 20 years of experience in Go To Market strategy, B2B Implementation, Sales, Operations, and Marketing at Startups and Fortune 500 technology companies, Brian’s specialty is rapidly growing SaaS companies 50%+ Year over Year.

Mark Lerner:

All right, everybody. Welcome back to the next episode of the Revamp podcast. I am super excited to have our guest, Brian Tully. Brian and I got to sit next to each other at a sales leader dinner recently and had some really interesting conversations around the table. I was able to grab a few of the folks that dinner for various episodes, and I was really excited that I was able to get Brian to fit us in. So, without further ado, Brian, why don’t you introduce yourself to the folks at home? Tell them a little bit about who you are, what you do, and your background.

Brian Tully:

Sure. So my name is Brian Tulley, currently the head of Americas for Sales at Live View. Prior to that, a little bit of history. I did investment banking at Lehman Brothers and did my own bootstrap startup with two friends and an accountant. We grew that from zero to 21.4 million reoccurring SaaS revenue, and then we were purchased by Thomson Embroiders. We then continued to grow that with a couple of other pieces to about a half-billion-dollar division. Since then, I’ve been working with different startups in media tech, prop tech, video streaming, and some other things, and basically helping them grow, helping them do transformative decisions and, whether it is as president or COO or CRO or SVP, it’s basically how do you create the most amazing client journey from beginning to end, first message BDR, all the way through. How do you make that align with your strategy and plan so that everyone’s going to be successful, including your customers?

Mark Lerner:

Yeah, and I bet I would imagine that nowadays, especially over the last few years, having that skill and that experience is probably very, very valuable to a lot of people. They use that word transformative or transformation. I think we’re all kind of in a very transformative period, and we covered it in that dinner, and everyone around the table had a very similar sentiment about how quickly things have shifted, and we all have whiplash from a lot of things. I wanted to talk to you about your experience of kind going through changing marketing conditions, changing environments and being kind of that transformative leader. One of the things we talked about, you had mentioned in your previous role there were some decisions that you had made that ended up being the correct decision, but I would imagine that may have had some pushback or may have been a challenge to get buy-in around, and I’d love to hear a little bit of the backstory there. I feel it’s really a learning insight.

Brian Tully:

So, the previous role is that gold cast, by the way. Goldcast is an amazing company. That video platform webinar, ai, virtual snippets, got to check it out if you’re doing any kind of virtual event or even hybrid event. So that’s my plug for Goldcast. But when I first joined them, the founders, young founders, and I’ll a little bit basically the past couple roles prior to LiveView, my job is to show what’s around the corner that I’ve done a lot of different things and because of it, it’s like being in a horror movie, and you just know don’t go in the basement, go to the attic or don’t go in the attic, go outside in the backyard. You’ve seen how the movie ends. You’re the character that knows that. Because of that, I met the founders, and they are amazing people. I did a little bit of consulting.

The business problem was how we expanded beyond our core demographic. How do we ensure that we hit targets? And then how do we basically onboard so that customers renew for a long period of time and we increase adoption? All those were challenges at the moment. Well, it’s interesting because the first thing you do is you don’t start with sales. You don’t look at your sales numbers; you run over to clients; you run over to retention; you run over to what’s working, the ideal ones that you want, the clients that you want, and why they are renewing. Which clients are not renewing? Why are they not renewing? And you need to have data; you need to be able to track all that. So we did, and when we did, we found out that there was an exact line where if you had this amount of employees, you renewed at a two to three X ratio. If you were under that amount of employees, then you probably weren’t going to do it because either you just ran out of funding, or you don’t have a defined marketing strategy, or you’re going international and you’re just kind of winging it and hopefully it works and if it doesn’t work, you’re not going to renew.

So because of it, we basically immediately realized, wait a minute, we need to start going after a different client size based on employees on top of trying to go to different industries on top of other stuff. So that was the first thing is look at what’s working, look at what success looks like when it goes all the way through the funnel, and then start backtracking from the funnel of what’s working to what didn’t work, where did it break, where did it break, where did it break, where did it break all the way to your marketing inbound funnel and your BDR, and you step back that way. I’ll pause there. Do you have any questions on that?

Mark Lerner:

Yeah, I mean, it’s so fascinating because I feel like somebody’s gut kind of instinct, at least in my mind, is to look at the sales funnel and see what’s closing and what’s not. And there’s that kind of inherent bifurcation where they don’t even really consider that part. We were in this growth-at-all-costs mode where it was all about closing net new, and the idea that someone would come in and fix the kind of revenue you’re focused on, who’s renewing as opposed to who’s closing, I think, is obviously the correct move. But one that I think for a while, people neglected because it just wasn’t incentivized from the, let’s say, investor class, something like that. Obviously, that’s changed. I’m wondering about that approach. Was there an immediate kind of buy-in from everybody about that? Or was the pushback, especially from sales where they’re like, well, smaller deals, that’s our bread and butter, are you taking that away from us?

Brian Tully:

There was a lot of friction. So it’s interesting because analytically, everybody saw the data and was like, oh my gosh, that’s amazing. And they were like, yes, it’s true. The entire client team went, yep, this is true. This is fact. The real friction comes with, okay, now we need to change because if you’ve been out of college and you’ve been doing this for four to eight years, you probably know one way of doing stuff. You have not been through the ups and downs, you haven’t been through hypergrowth, and then I need to worry about cash and then hypergrowth again. So because of it, it was when it’s like, okay, we understand the problem, we all agree on that. Now, here are the changes that we’re going to make. And the changes were pretty drastic, starting with, okay, we’re no longer going to go after these customers.

We’re only going to go after customers like this. So, that leads to multiple challenges. One challenge is, okay, I know how to sell these people. I know that they close really fast, and anything above this I might know how to sell to a little bit. But then there are other people, and I have no idea what they do. I have no idea what their organizations look like because it gets more complex. On top of that, they don’t know what the timetable is. So if you have monthly quotas or quarterly quotas, they’re scared you just changed their whole pipe, and the BDRs aren’t going to be successful, the AEs aren’t going to be successful, the investors are worried that, oh my God if you do this and you literally are taking away 80% of the funnel as is and going after this thing that’s not tried and true in this organization, are you going to be successful? That’s a pretty big change. And depending on how much pressure is on your organization and how much cashflow you have is the timetable you get to either slowly lead it in or, nope, I need to make a real hard pivot, and we’re all going to go on for the ride.

Mark Lerner:

Yeah, I mean it’s like if it works, you’re the genius, but history business, let’s say war or whatever, all kind of decision making things is littered with people who made decisions that in retrospect, they tried to make a bold decision and it went against ’em. But with the decision you were making, you had the data in front of you. I mean, this was not a gut feeling.

Brian Tully:

Well, half of it was in a gut feeling. We knew it was working and not working, but could our team actively change and then flip their pipeline from 80% of what we don’t want to do to 80% of what we do want to do instead of that 20%? Can we find it, will they like us? That was a big leap, and that was a leap of faith that the executives and the board had to make along. And then probably 80% of the company got on board, but there’s always 20% that there’s also an emotional feel. These are the customers I like, these are the people I’ve been nurturing, these are my peeps, and you are not with my peeps anymore. You’re telling me to leave them in their hour of need. And that’s a hard, hard thing.

Mark Lerner:

So, after the 80% kind of got on board, how difficult was that transition? Was it a slow easing in, or was it like ripping the bandaid off and sinking?

Brian Tully:

I wish we had time for a slow easing in the original plan was six months plus. We actually did it in two months.

It was hard. It was a hard left turn that we made, and everybody got on board and really worked together. We also made major changes to the customer success side because if you’re going to go after larger customers, it’s not just the sales approach. It’s not just message and contracting. Can you properly onboard them? Because let’s just say Goldman Sachs has a different onboarding strategy than X, Y, and Z software with 40 employees. So we had to make those changes too while we’re doing this, and that actually compounds it because then you have, okay, I knew how to sell when it was three phone calls of support, and this was very simple. Now you’re telling me there might be a project manager, and there might be this, and there might be a month and a half of stuff that we’re going to do instead of a week. I don’t even know what you’re talking about. So the constant enablement material cycle through to enable the sales reps and the SDRs is essential, as well as to make sure that they’re saying it correctly so that customer success is put in line for success so that the client doesn’t go. I was promised this, and then they go over the wall, and then we’re like, what the heck are you doing? I was promised this, and that takes some iteration, but we actually got it right.

Mark Lerner:

Yeah, I mean, I think traditionally, I’m sure you’ve seen this where sales success, these different departments live in completely different worlds, were incentivized differently and having those incentives, sometimes they worked against each other, which in the case you were talking about, they were incentivized to close deals. That incentive kind of led them to close deals that may not have renewed as much. So when you made those changes, was there a different set of goals or KPIs across the entire, let’s say, market organization that everyone aligned to things like net revenue retention or renewal, that kind of thing?

Brian Tully:

And, of course, you have to start with a project plan because you need the project plan to be signed off as a strategy, sales numbers, implementation numbers, and percentages of customers that close hours that they’re going to take to implement them hiring needs. You need to build all that up so that you can get signed off by the board so that the board trusts you because then you have to go back to the board and say, look, we’re in line with what we thought we were going to do or we’re behind or we’re ahead and here’s why. Then you keep on going, and that builds confidence so that you can make the next round of changes when you need to. One example of what you were talking about is that we had a certain number of opportunities we needed to create every single month, and we had a certain number of MLS and SQLs that we needed to do, but we missed those.

For the SQLs and MQLs, we missed the opportunities, I think, four quarters in a row, and meanwhile, we overachieved quota every single quarter by 120, 130%. It was crushing. So after the second quarter of doing this, we actually went, okay, let’s look at the data again. And what you found is that because we were going after this different demographic and because it actually worked all of a sudden, I don’t need to have four opportunities; I just need to have two, and the two are going to be at a two x three X size, or it’s going to close with this probability and because of it, I’m actually going to be better off than if I had the four small or the four ones that were fragile to the ones that were quality. So we actually created a waiting scale based on the opportunity based on I-C-P-A-B-C-D, and if you close an A, that’s worth four points, and if you close a B, that’s worth two points, and if you really want to go after that stuff that we told you not to, that’s worth one point. So because of it, you kind of learn, put that into practice, and then run it through.

Mark Lerner:

Yeah, I think the concept of the MQL is, I think, the biggest example of A KPI that could work benefit maybe one organization but might be the opposite of beneficial to another where it’s like marketing wants is being incentivized on their MQLs. And so the MQL is kind of like whatever they decide, it’s kind of arbitrary, and then it has all sorts of problems down the road. I’ve seen that happen in various forms across a lot of companies. But was the qualification of the A BCD, was that just based on firmographic data of the company size, things like that?

Brian Tully:

So when we started, we created this giant Excel spreadsheet or Google sheet that was this long of all the factors that mattered, and it was the size of the company, and then it was industry, and then it was the technology stack that they used, and then it was other factors, and we had points for each one, and we populated our data lake, and we had a brilliant rev ops person absolutely love him that he basically would go in there and then create the weight gains and this is the people you’re going to chase based on it. Well, that was the first two quarters, and it worked. We were going after the right people, but what we realized by Q3 is about 80% of that information really wasn’t needed and had no effect on what we were chasing. Then we were able to boil it down to a list of things about this, and if you were this, then you were good because none of the stuff really mattered afterward.

Mark Lerner:

Were the ones that actually mattered. Did it surprise you or was it counterintuitive or was it the things that you would’ve thought those were the most important things?

Brian Tully:

Half and half. Some of it was employee size. And by the way, if you’re a Fortune 50, that’s actually not the best. It’s actually you drop it down to Fortune 100, and Fortune 5,000 is really the super sweet spot. So that was a kind of natural industry. We had surprises; all of a sudden, we had four or five closes in the industry. We’re like, that was a C. And after two months of reviewing it, we’re like, maybe we should make it a B. And by the time it was four months, we’re like, maybe that should be an A. And we kind of waited it up, and we would wait. The ones that we thought were great that weren’t performing, we’d begin to weigh them down. So it was constantly not changing everything. So you change everything, you can’t measure it, but if you flick a couple of levers and then you kind of look at it, and you flick a couple of levers, you can get to a good place.

Mark Lerner:

So you were doing continuous iteration to optimize the model, which is, I think, super fascinating because that speaks to being agile and adaptive to what the market is telling you. I think a lot of people, including myself sometimes, are so hardheaded that this is the idea we’re going to do this, and anything that tells you otherwise is getting blocked out. But it sounds like your approach was to start with the hypothesis and then see what the market’s telling us, incorporate that into the model, and just kind of continuously evolve it. Yeah.

Brian Tully:

Yes. And then, to your point, I love that you brought up marketing and MQLs. I really see marketing and sales as one. You should never be this. If anybody’s saying, I created this many SQLs, and you didn’t close that, or I had this many opportunities, but they’re all garbage, both of ’em are wrong.

So it really is to figure out what really is going to work; your ICP agrees on it across the board and then sticks to it. So when the MQLs come in, it goes through the filter, and only the A’s and Bs matter. And if that means you only have to generate 200 MQLs, but they’re A’s and Bs, and that moves the needle, oh my gosh, that’s what you should be doing. And if you generated 10,000 other MQLs, that’s fantastic. I hope they’re wonderful people, but I care about these 200 here who are really going to move the needle. And then that way, when you hand it over to sales, you’re like, okay, this is cream. You have to do your job now and do this.

Mark Lerner:

Yeah. Really, really interesting stuff. I want to as we get towards the end of the conversation, I know that you recently started this new role, so I want to, as you’re starting that role, what are you seeing in the future? We’re in the early stages of 2024; we just finished, we’re in Q1 here. So, what do you think are the kinds of challenges and opportunities that are going to be available to companies in terms of optimizing their go-to-market and the challenges that they may kind of incur?

Brian Tully:

Yep. So, if I’m looking into the future, rarely are you going to build a 40-person BDR team anymore. What you’re going to do is you’re going to have an elite team of five to 10, and you’re going to arm the hell out of them with the appropriate software. And the appropriate software could be that you have an auto dollar doing ten calls of your IPAs, and then you’re picking up that way. Or a good example with video: you can actually use clay.io and a couple of other things, stitch it together, and have an absolutely personalized video. A good example is this podcast. You could have you on the left and me on the right, and then I can use clay.io and put a hundred of my customers on the right with their logo and chat because I’ve already ripped that off their LinkedIn, and I can make it look in their brand and colors.

I’ve already ripped that off their website, and it’s just like 30 API feeds smooshed in, which is going to break the noise of the bombardment of emails. Hey, are you interested in this thing? Or, oh, do you have two minutes on LinkedIn? I do blah, blah, blah. If I see my face and I look like I’m in a webinar, I’m going to go, what? And that’s enough to grab my attention; then your message has to work. So, I really think it’s going to be a combination of automation empowering your reps. It’s also going to be AI in order to take over the first, second, and third touch point to get you to where you need that really intelligent conversation where your sales reps are really going to take off, or your senior BDRs can have a real intelligent conversation. That entry job is going to be tough now.

Mark Lerner:

Yeah, I mean, obviously, we’ve all seen, especially in the tech space, there’s been a lot of reductions in force, and some of the murmurs are a, well, AI is taking these jobs. I don’t think that’s necessarily true, but in retrospect, it might be a little bit because if those that are using AI correctly become more productive and they can two x or three X their productivity and therefore, you don’t need as big of a team, especially on things that are early A BDR, things like that, you can automate more intelligently some of the manually done tasks is that we’re looking at. You

Brian Tully:

Think? Yeah, I think the AEs, especially the mid and senior AEs and the solution consultants, the implementation sales enablement, they are 100% safe for now for the next five to 10 years. It is more about the person who’s just dialing per dollar saying the same message with nothing different. That’s the role that’s being eliminated right now, and that’s the role that I’d be worried about if I were still out of college.

Mark Lerner:

Yeah, I think it’s a blessing and a curse. If you get into the job market now and you grind and you make it, and then you’re going to be so well placed when we’re on an upswing again, wherever that is, to just thrive. But it’s really tough I feel for them. But Brian, this was extremely fascinating, and I really appreciate you taking the time to chat. Before we sign off, is there anywhere you want to tell folks to maybe learn a little bit more about you or your company, things like that?

Brian Tully:

Sure. If anybody is in broadcast sports, your enterprise is doing streaming video, or your CEO wants to do a webinar from its house or beach house; basically, LiveView does real-time train bonding, so you can use one of its units anywhere on the planet. It will give you 4G five, sorry, 5K through the internet. It will go where it wants to. You don’t need a satellite or a truck or anything. And because of it, not only does it do contribution, it does a production, it allows you to edit it snippet real quick, and then it allows distribution. So, a good example for broadcast is that you could automatically post it out to 50 stations immediately, but you can also use that to broadcast all throughout your network internally and a lot of cool stuff. So by the way, they do the Super Bowl, they do the Olympics, he had small stuff, but Rob from Peter and Rob from the rich give to the poor, and everybody can use it. So it’s cool.

Mark Lerner:

Awesome. Brian, thank you so much. I appreciate it.

Brian Tully:

Thank you very much. Bye.