About the speaker

Chris Nethercote is the Head of Sales at Metadata.io, leading the sales team in their goal of changing how B2B companies do advertising. Chris has over 10 years of experience in B2B sales, having worked with the largest US Federal Government agencies to SaaS start-ups. From CIOs to CMOs. From 5-person companies to 50,000. Chris’ journey has taught him that no matter what he’s selling, sales is about understanding, listening, and helping people achieve their goals.

Mark Lerner:

All right. Welcome to another episode of RevAmp. I’m joined today by Chris, and I’m going to let Chris introduce himself so we can get into the conversation. Chris.

Chris Nethercote:

Cool. Hey, it’s good to be here. Thanks for having me. Mark. I’m Chris Nethercote. I lead the Sales team at metadata.io and have been selling software since 2012. So yeah, started at some bigger companies, started Forrester and then kind of progressively found smaller and smaller startups. And then I landed at metadata two and a half years ago.

Mark Lerner:

And what’s your role at Metadata?

Chris Nethercote:

Head of Sales.

Mark Lerner:

So what was your journey from starting on the front lines in a sales role towards being at a higher managerial director level?

Chris Nethercote:

What was my journey?

I mean, some of it is right place, right time, certainly some of it has been just me really enjoying the craft of sales and working really hard at it. I think the lucky break, if you will, I was actually, when I started at Forrester, I was selling to their government practice and I was sort of forced into large enterprise sales because you’re selling to federal government. So some of the largest organizations in the world all of a sudden were my customers and I had to take them from being small to being very large and sell our research, but also sell consulting engagements, which is really what the government liked. And those were really complicated. There’s a lot of stakeholders. So that kind of set a good foundation and was trained really well there. So jumping from that to going into smaller startups, that was just a really, really good foundation for me. And then using some of those principles that I learned, just was fortunate to be successful at a couple other places and then jumped to metadata. And the opportunity to lead the team was, I was here for a while. I think it was the fifth AE hired or so, and we had some change in leadership and then they asked me if I wanted to give it a shot. So I said, sure, let’s do it.

Mark Lerner:

So what does your team look like under you? How many folks

Chris Nethercote:

Right now? Right now we have six. So it’s not a huge team.

Mark Lerner:

Okay, cool. So that leads us kind of into the conversation we’re going to have today, which is we’re going to talk a little bit, I want to pick your brain about the way you think about the sales process and how your team functions and creating a level of simplicity and streamlining to make it remove the complexity and the potential points of failure. So I would love to know about your philosophy and the process that you have in place for your team and how you kind of came to that.

Chris Nethercote:

Sure. So I think the first thing is I want to try to avoid as many little things that are mandated that don’t add value to an AEs day or a customer’s day or add value to the process for the AE or the buyer as possible. That’s kind of the first thing. But my overarching sales philosophy is that I think it’s even more true now than it was when I first sort of landed on this, but we have to operate much more like consultants than we do salespeople and going after hitting very specific metrics and KPIs and whatnot. And those are important leading indicators, but the best salespeople I know and the ones that actually hit their numbers consistently and their customers talk about how great it is to work with them, or the ones that have a really high level of business acumen and they understand what it’s like for their customer to try to solve the problems that they’re trying to solve, that sets salespeople up for success.

It gives you access to different types of conversations. Then more of that sales experience that we’ve all probably had in one way or another where it’s like, Hey, is this person listening to me? Do they understand the problem that I’m trying to solve? So that’s kind of what underpins it. And then that process that we have in place is really simple. It’s just breaking down the sales process into its component parts. And so the first part is the initial meeting, which I do not call discovery, because discovery is this overarching concept that happens throughout the sales process. We’re always learning if you think that you know everything about what’s going on in your customer’s organization after one Call, I promise you, you are wrong about that. So discovery is this thread that goes throughout, and then you have the initial conversation we’re getting introduced, there’s components of how we plan for those initial conversations, how we plan for those meetings, and then break it down into, okay, what happens in the middle?

How do we prepare for a demo? How do we prepare our internal teams for demos? How do we prepare the external teams for demos if they’re bringing other stakeholders and making sure that we’re really aligned to a business case. And then the last part of it, we’ll leave the negotiation and procurement as it’s separate own little beast. But the last part of it is how do we help transition from explaining and saying, Hey, you should be interested in this to a customer to, alright, the buyer, the customer knows that want this and knows that this is going to help ’em solve a problem. Now my job changes, my job is now I’m going to help them get what they want. And once you make that switch in your head, it’s like, okay, I’m no longer selling to you. I am enabling you. I’m giving you resources.

We are building business cases together. We are doing this together, and we’re just managing a project that is going to end with you kicking off, actually working with our team. And then that’s the real thing that everybody’s excited about. So I think it’s more of a mindset than a process. And there’s specific things in there that we want to make sure we do and how we plan for meetings and how we plan structuring demos and how we think about business case development and all that, which I can go into. But I think the philosophy is I’m here to help customers make decisions and then ultimately embark on solving a problem is a good frame of mind to at least start from.

Mark Lerner:

That’s awesome. And I’d love to double click on each of those, but I’m also interested in our last conversation. I got the feeling that you hire or you look for people that are added value to your team that can bring additional things, insights or whatever or experiences that people on the team don’t have and therefore they’re bringing a unique perspective. So it sounds like how do you give each of these folks the ability to shine their skills and their experiences while being comfortable in a broad context, understanding what their goals are and so they know exactly what they need to do. It’s not just like they one, drop them in the seat and figure it out. How do you find that balance?

Chris Nethercote:

Yeah. Well, I mean think, so first and foremost, we are selling stuff. We are selling software, we’re selling metadata. We have goals and KPIs to hit and we are tracking those. So the first part of the job is am I getting meetings with the accounts that are assigned to me? Am I running sales processes with those? Am I structuring deals correctly? Am I closing revenue with the profile customer that we want to sell to right within our ICP? So that’s stuff like that’s a given. And then it’s like, all right, how do we actually get there so that people are fulfilled while they’re doing it? Not just robots. We’re human beings. And so my mindset is I am managing and bringing into my team an entire person, not just a person who sells something and has to hit a number. So then when we think about what’s important to ’em for performance, it’s okay, well what do they want to accomplish in their career?

So I have a person on my team that is really interested in product marketing. Awesome. So that doesn’t really have to do a lot with us immediately selling and hitting our number, but can I find things for him to add value to the broader organization that will help him hone that skill or help him hone that interest? And the answer of course is yes. And I just hired somebody. We think about an added value of the team. I just hired somebody who comes from an agency, which is great context for us. They really know a lot about performance marketing. So one of the things I’m looking forward for her to do is when she goes through her onboarding and is watching calls and of the top performers on the team and is watching customer success calls and all type of stuff and learning of what it is about metadata, she’s going to do that through a lens of I was just at an agency working with some people that already use metadata, some people that are struggling with performance marketing.

She adds an entirely different perspective to our sales team that we just hadn’t had before. We haven’t haven’t hired anyone that has that direct agency experience. On the sales side, we have ’em on the post-sale side, but not on the business side. So when I think about, okay, hey, we’re going to do call reviews and we’re talking about things that we’re seeing out there in the field during sales meetings or team meetings, asking her to share what she’s seeing her perspective, how much she might handle certain situations, and of course making sure the team is in a good position to absorb that information as well, obviously. But I think it’s about we know we have a job to do, but we want to enjoy it as well, and let’s find opportunities to lift each other up. Let’s find opportunities to help each other be better.

That starts with me knowing what everybody on the team actually wants to do. Do you want to hone your enterprise sales experience? Okay, so what does that look like in terms of the deals that we want to focus on and work or the skills that we need to work on? Do you want to help us with product positioning? How can that help both our marketing team and us as we’re talking to customers directly? So I think it first starts with me understanding that and then making sure people have the floor to just kind of explore and feel safe that they can say what’s on their mind and provide feedback in real time and work on things together. Because I don’t know everything. I’m not going to pretend to know everything. So to me, to think that other folks can’t add value to the team would be a little bit crazy.

Mark Lerner:

So I find often just with everything really, there’s always this tension between simplicity and ensuring that you have everything that you need. There’s always this kind of mantra, keep it simple, stupid. It’s the thing you’re supposed to go on, but then you worry about, am I not covering everything across everything? And I’m talking about in terms of the process, but also the tooling that you’re incorporating and the way that’s set up. How important is keeping things simple while giving each individual person under you the ability to add their own flare or add their own things that they’re comfortable with? How do you find that balance?

Chris Nethercote:

Well, first, I mean, I think it’s really important. I think if, so, one of the struggles I had when I started was I was thinking, okay, so I’ve just been selling metadata for a little over two years and I was having success individually and now I’m leaving the team. So if I put the how Chris sells metadata process in place for everybody, what does that look like when someone else is running and it doesn’t look the same? So then I said, okay, well maybe it’s best to think about it as a framework that everybody can operate within and they can find their own voice within it. So these are the guardrails. We know these things work. We know that if you structure your initial meetings in a certain way and you focus on building credibility and asking questions and diving a little bit deeper and whatever, if we structure those initial meetings in a way, it’s going to lead to a better demo, it’s going to lead to a better outcome.

You’re going to help your customer make a decision in a better way than if you come in just gun blaze and hey, this is all metadata. But there’s a lot of different ways to go through that prep. There’s a lot of different ways to ask questions. There’s a lot of different ways to run that. So to say, Hey, this is how I run a discovery call or initial meeting. Now you go forth and do, it just takes a lot of your ability to be autonomous. And I think honestly just feel fulfilled frankly out of the job. And sales is about thinking and being creative truly. And so take that creativity away by applying a very rigid, strict process. You just get sales robots and that sucks. So I think that’s part of it. There was a second part of the question. I feel like I’m now rambling, but what

Mark Lerner:

Was the Yeah, I think you answered it. I mean, it was mostly about how you find the comfortable middle ground between that tension of not wanting to be too rigid while not wanting to be overbearing, but also there’s always the risk that if you don’t give enough instruction or structure that either somebody will go rogue and start promising things on the roadmap that don’t exist or whatever, making pricing promises that can’t be kept or they just don’t have the guidance they need to maybe answer the questions the way you found is most successful. So you mentioned a framework, is that here’s the framework. You hand ’em a written description of it on day, how does that work?

Chris Nethercote:

Yeah, so if you start at metadata, I’ll walk you through how you sell at metadata, what the baseline expectations are. And so this is how you run an initial meeting. This is how you prepare for an initial meeting. This is how you run a demo, this is how you prepare for that demo. So there is some, this is what works, and we know this is what works and this is the expectation of how you’re going to go and execute. But there’s a lot of wiggle room. So in the framework it’s like, hey, say things like X, Y, and Z. Don’t say things like this. And there’s two examples, but there’s no script. So it’s like, okay, you can kind of go in a few different ways.

In there it says, Hey, metadata is not demand generation software. That could mean a million different things to a million different people. And so I really don’t want us to say that. What I want us to say is something much more specific like metadata optimizes the performance of your paid advertising and it drives revenue while saving you money at the exact same time. So it’s more specific. We know exactly what it is. Instead of being a bit more vague with, Hey, this is demand gen software, this is sales enablement software, what are those things actually means? It’s just one small example, but I will say there are a couple places in there that have a bit of specificity to them, which is particularly around the initial meeting and how you prepare for it. I have some pretty, I dunno, high expectations of how we walk into a meeting, especially if this is a customer that is, I mean we’ve either out bounded them or they’ve come in through marketing.

So we’ve spent time and money to try to have a conversation with these folks in one way or another. And we know that if they’re having a conversation with us, they probably have a problem that we can solve. So establishing credibility and making a first impression is really important. So how do we structure that first meeting? It’s like we need to know what ad channels they’re running paid ads on. We can go and we can look, that’s all public information. I can pull up and see if they’ve had any recent funding events. I know what their tech stack is because there’s tools out there that will tell me exactly what their tech stack is. So all for the purpose of not asking the types of questions that are like, hey, kind of going off of a checklist all for the purpose of driving towards, Hey, I can have a meaningful conversation with you because I already know all these things about your business.

Hey, I know you connected Salesforce and you have Marketo. I know you have these things. Great. So people are talking to metadata because they have usually maybe one of these three problems. Is it something, is one of those problems why we’re here or is it something else that I’m missing? But we can kind of dive in and have a much more substantive 25, 30 minute conversation. So there is some, I wouldn’t quite call it rigid, but it is like this is the type of information that you got to walk into this call with. Otherwise you’re doing yourself a disservice type type of vibe.

Mark Lerner:

So instead of having requiring them to go your team to go through some sort of checklist to identify their tech stack or whatever, you ensure that they already have that information if it’s available, so that they can start the conversation where it’s meaningful rather than going over checking off boxes. And I think from being a prospect in many sales processes, I appreciate that because it’s like you want to just talk about your problem. You don’t want to spend time explaining which CRM you use or whatever. That just becomes annoying.

Chris Nethercote:

It’s really easy information to find.

Mark Lerner:

And I think today we have an abundance of tools in our tech stacks that give us this kind of information, whether it’s kind of inferred or publicly available. And I think that kind of brings me to my next aspect of this. You talk about a framework in terms of how they sell, but as a sales organization, there’s all sorts of processes. It’s like if it’s not in the CRM, it doesn’t exist. Are you keeping notes in the right places? Are people in the right stages? Whatever your system is for that, how has it evolved? Does it change a lot? And how much of onboarding a new rep is involved in you have to follow this process.

Chris Nethercote:

So we use Salesforce. So the Salesforce evolution of what’s on an opportunity and all the notes and all that sort of stuff is actually, we’ve come a long way. It was pretty, we had some folks that were putting in some really great notes and we had nothing. Now the problem with nothing for us is that we have a services business as well when we provide services post-sales for a short window of time. But it’s kinds technical implementation and onboarding, getting you trained. But it’s also like we’re diving in and we’re helping understand what is the current state of your strategy and how are you going to apply metadata to it, right? Because metadata is asking you to do something and run your ad program in a way that you haven’t really run it before because now you have access to a different way to do it.

That of course, we think is better, but that requires change. Management requires time. So if we don’t know why they’re doing something, what types of KPIs in terms of the customer success that they’re looking at in terms of their paid marketing efforts, it becomes really hard for us to have a really successful 90 day quick, fast start for them to see value quickly. We want time to value to be as short as possible. So we brought on a really awesome rev ops person, and we’ve been kind of going through pretty methodically what we need in there. And so the first, we have some fields that are absolutely required. You can’t progress stages if they’re not required. And those fields also are really important to the sales process generally. So there’s things that are a little bit high level, like the three why’s why anything, why now, why us?

So we have that in there. You have to fill that out. You can’t progress your deal into quote or negotiation without doing that. Like what is the deal even, right, if we don’t have that information. But we also want to know in some level of details. So we do need to get into the weeds and build a business case with our customers. How are they measuring the success of their paid advertising? So we want to know, are they looking at revenue pipeline? Are they looking at opportunities? How are they defining those things? What are they called? What do they have today? Where are they hope to go? How much money they’re spending across all these different channels, what channels they’re spending, they’re spending their advertising on. So we have several different sections that you have to fill out depending on what stage of the sales process you’re in.

But I think what’s really important to get, and we have much better adherence to the process now, partially you can’t move your gears forward if you don’t, but if there’s the reason why I think we have a lot better adherence to getting the information that we want in there and not just living in whatever notes app that you use is because we explained why this stuff’s important. It’s like, Hey, the marketing strategy teams, our CSM team, they can’t do X, Y, and Z without this information. The customer that you’re selling to and you’re bringing on the metadata, their journey doesn’t stop. Once they sign that contract, it starts. So you owe it to your customer to have all that in there to help facilitate an amazing onboarding process and help facilitate a short time to value. It will then help facilitate hopefully renewal. So it all has this big trickle down effect, but explaining the why and not saying, Hey, I need this in there because we need you to be adhering to Salesforce.

Is it, it’s not enough. I think people, once they understand the why, people tend to do stuff and respond. And so I definitely think we’ve seen that over the course of the last couple months or six months since we started making some of the changes into Salesforce. We also removed a ton of stuff. We were like, we don’t need this. This is a distraction. Also, it’s like paper cuts. So there’s a bunch of stuff in there that’s blocking you from moving your deal forward or you’re looking at every day like, Hey, I don’t know what this is. I don’t know why it’s in here. Paper cuts. And it just kind of erodes your excitement to do your job over time. And so we want to eliminate as many paper cuts as possible while making sure what’s in there is super valuable and everybody understands why it’s in there.

Mark Lerner:

Yeah, I think it’s super important to be able to answer somebody, why is this field here? Why do I need to do this? And an answer, well, because there is not necessarily a good one. And I think it takes some level of humility to look at what exists and actually be critical of why is that field there, why do they have to fill it out?

Chris Nethercote:

There’s a really good example too, I think, which is the closed loss reason. So I mean, anyone that is selling software knows that, especially when you first get started, you get your list of accounts, you run a closed loss reason on your territory, and you want a closed loss report, and you want to see who in your book has had an opportunity recently, did they close lose? Why did they close lose? So if the answer in the close loss section is budget, what am I supposed to do with that? If the answer in there is not a good fit, what am I supposed to do with that?

And we talked about this example a lot as a team, which is like, all right, if you can spend 20 extra seconds typing out exactly why they didn’t move forward and what the situation was when you go to run your own closed loss report next quarter and the quarter after that and the quarter after that and the quarter after that, you’re going to have a really good context of why these deals maybe didn’t move forward, which ones you might want to reach out to and pick back up. So it serves you the AE a lot to be able to do this and to have good information in there. It also serves the business very, very well. We know when we run more broad, Hey, closed loss analysis, why are we losing these deals? We have a lot more information. We don’t have to go digging through call recordings and all that type of stuff, but directly it’s going to make the account executives more money and allow you to close deals faster because some of the fastest closing deals come out of that closed loss report if you know what you’re looking for. So I think that example is a good one to use in framing up why this stuff’s a little bit important. Some of these things are, but you got to get rid of the non-important stuff to even, I think, have that conversation and be able to stand on that point.

Mark Lerner:

Yeah, I think we’ve kind of shifted as a business community, as a economy, especially in kind of the SaaS, high-tech space from this growth at all costs doesn’t matter how much it costs to acquire a customer as long as you get them and it’s continuing to get them, we’ve obviously shifted from that mindset to this much more, do more with what you have or do more with less or much more minimalistic mindset. So I think a lot of companies failed to jump onto the trend and we’re still stuck in the, it doesn’t matter how much it costs, we just growth, growth, growth. So what you’re talking about is kind of the minimizing almost. Is there a process of doing that within tool sets as well, meaning consolidate to simplify to ensure that it doesn’t get overly complex? Convoluted

Chris Nethercote:

Short answer is yes, this is going to be a really interesting year. And startup already started to be interesting last year too, just for all the different startups and tech companies that have these little pieces of the puzzle. And you can see that they’re all building to consolidate. All you have to do is look at what gong and Clary and outreach and whatever are doing. So yeah, I think there’s definitely this element of tool fatigue and also, hey, having too many tools is going to actually hinder us from doing our jobs. And we’ve shed a couple sales tools that we had that originally were purchased for efficiency.

And then as we looked at what the team was doing and how the team was using those tools, we’re like, well, we’re just moving work to a different thing. It’s actually not even much more time, if at all, to interact with Salesforce in one way versus another way as an example. So it’s like, okay, so what do we do? And is just shifting work to one app, to another app actually worth $10,000, $20,000, whatever the cost of renewal is. And then in many cases the answer becomes no. So when I’m looking at the tools that we need for our team, that lens is definitely like, okay, what is the minimum amount of tools that is going to make us the most effective with, because we have a small team, we want to be super enabled. We want to be using technology and process in a good smart way. So understanding what’s getting in the way and what is actually adding value and is really important. But the part of this conversation I think is even more interesting is we see this as sellers with the sales tech. So we see our organizations and leadership making decisions about what we’re going to have and what we’re not going to have. Apply that lens to your customers. They’re doing the same thing.

So what systems do I need or where not need to get my job done really effectively? Is this going to replace a person? Is it going to augment a person? What is it going to do? So all those things that are happening at your business, if you’re an AE or seller, observe that that’s happening at your customer’s business. And I think it’s a really important thing to remind yourself of as you’re trying to sell whatever it is you’re selling or position, whatever, positioning as a value add as something that’s really going to take the organization, your customer to the next level versus yeah, it’s a thing that moves work.

Mark Lerner:

There’s always that thing. Are you a vitamin or a painkiller? And I can never remember which is which, but

Chris Nethercote:

Yeah, you want to be a painkiller as the adage goes.

Mark Lerner:

Yeah. As opposed to nice to have. You want to have be the thing that’s either replacing other things to save cost or perform a function that is just not able to be done otherwise.

Chris Nethercote:

Right. But I think there’s something in the middle there too. Not to take the analogy too far, right? Painkillers solve a problem, but they don’t solve the underlying problem,

Mark Lerner:

Right.

Chris Nethercote:

Vitamins are a supplement because you’re not actually getting what you need. So what about actually meeting in the middle? We’re vegetables, man. That’s what we’re getting what you actually need and working with your customer to understand what that is. So you’re not just putting band-aids on things, you’re really solving problems. And that gets back to understanding your customer’s context, business acumen, and getting your customer, having them feel like you know how to do their job, you know that much about what they’re doing.

Mark Lerner:

I love that. I love that kind of addition to the metaphor because yeah, I always get confused between the two, but I think the vegetable idea or watching what you eat and just living a healthy lifestyle so that you don’t need to get to that point. It makes sense. So as we wrap things up here, this has been super fascinating. Where can the folks at home learn more about you? Maybe read some of the things, some of your ideas that they can just follow you?

Chris Nethercote:

Yeah. LinkedIn is I think my most active, if not my only active social media channel. And so you can find me there and then if you want to learn anything about metadata, metadata.io. But yeah, I’m on LinkedIn. Shoot me a message. I’m on there probably more than I should be.

Mark Lerner:

Same as me. Chris, thank you so much for your time today. I really appreciate it. This was a really fascinating conversation and I’m looking forward to checking back in another time to see how things have evolved over the last year.

Chris Nethercote:

Cool. Thanks, mark. Thanks for having me.