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Josh Schachter:
Hey, everybody, and welcome to this episode of unchurned the revenue series. This is my way of ditching John and Christy and speaking with leaders of the CRO sales revenue well, CS’s revenue too, but the the sales part of the world to really kinda help bridge together sales and post sales. And I’m delighted to be here on this episode with Margaret Wise. Margaret is the chief revenue officer of ActiveProspect. Thank you, Margaret, for being on the program.

Margaret Wise:
Thanks, Josh. I’m excited to be here today.

Josh Schachter:
I don’t like to tell, the executives that I speak with what their company does, so I would like them to introduce what they do, you know, in a in a better way than I could. So tell us a little bit about ActiveProspect.

Margaret Wise:
Sure. Thanks for asking. And, we focus, in the marketing technology area, and we focus specifically on consent marketing and also a related component to that around performance marketing. So when brands are reaching out, to consumers or they’re working with publishers or affiliate marketing that are providing leads to them, they wanna be sure that they have the right to contact those consumers. They have consent to do that. So we provide a technology that records that lead filling a form out and ensures that they have agreed to be consented. And so a company can confirm that as they’re accepting a lead in or buying a lead. They have the ability to ensure they have consent to contact that consumer that they are expecting to to hear from that brand.

Margaret Wise:
And then we also have solutions that allow companies to manage those leads, do filtering, ensure if they’re going to a call center that they have the right, that they’re calling within the right times, that they’re allowed to contact those consumers, that they meet certain criteria so they can track intent and score into their CRM or into their dialers, as well as ingest from social media platforms, lead generation from those as well into their systems and and manage it similarly.

Josh Schachter:
So you you’re helping protect all the consumers that are have stuffed inboxes and now text message threads of folks that yes.

Margaret Wise:
So we so we’re kinda we’re sitting in that ecosystem where we’re we’re technology that is ensuring that the companies that are ingesting the leads into their systems are able to really get best highest quality leads that match their criteria and then ensuring the actions that they’re taking on those leads are on a consent basis and that the consumer is protected in that process as well.

Josh Schachter:
Makes sense. Okay. Company is about 20 years old, so just a baby. Been around for a little while, and I assume that there’s some really interesting kind of genesis there and evolution, through technical evolution. And then you’ve got about a 150 employees. Tell us a little bit about your your your remit and and your part of the organization.

Margaret Wise:
Yep. I joined just under 2 years ago as chief revenue officer, and the company, has really experienced a ton of growth specifically in the last 5 years. And so this was a newly created role in the organization as part of that growth. And my remit is marketing, sales, customer success team, implementation, and support.

Josh Schachter:
And you’ve got about 65 people underneath you. What what I mean, what was the trigger? You weren’t there 5 years ago, but you’ve you’ve you’ve you’ve been in this new chapter. What’s been the catalyst for that growth?

Margaret Wise:
So it’s been powered by a couple of things. 1 is the company took some investment in, and so that really helped power some of the investments that drove that growth. And we’ve also been driven through a lot of regulation in the industry that has galvanized companies to make more investments both to protect themselves from the law, and also to improve the conversion of the leads that they’re purchasing through these channels.

Josh Schachter:
Hey, Margaret. Just a heads up, and Manali will cut this out. I think my Internet is probably in and out. I think there’s, like, a storm brewing in my area. I the recording is is is okay, though. It might be might be tripping you out a little bit. Yeah?

Margaret Wise:
Yeah. It’s glitching out on my side. Like, my screen will freeze, but I’m just gonna like, I’m a figure I’ll just keep talking. And if we need to rerecord

Josh Schachter:
it or anything, I can No. We’re we’re fine with that. I think that’s that’s it. We’ll just keep talking through it. We’ll cut this part out and and so on. Cool. You started your career couple years ago as an individual contributor in sales. You’re working in CRM.

Josh Schachter:
The year. It was it was it was post COVID. Right? And, and you you’ve evolved now to the the top of the hill as as chief revenue officer. Tell me a little bit about, like, if you were somebody listening to this episode and at an earlier stage in your career, what breadcrumbs have you picked up along the way? Like, what what have been some of the biggest learnings to that growth?

Margaret Wise:
I think for me, starting out in sales, I I I was a little ahead of some of the more modern sales methodologies that are in place now, but I had a I had a a good business orientation right from my first day of sales, and I was thinking about, like, what is the business of my customer, and how do I quickly put myself into their shoes and understanding what their problem is and trying to be an advisor in that process and making sure that I understood how my solutions were going to help them because if I couldn’t figure that out, they certainly weren’t gonna be able to figure that out. And so now you might think of that as a challenger methodology or or some of these others. And so I’ve really carried that with me and and some of the most successful salespeople and sales leaders I’ve worked with, I feel like have that. I think another thing that I thought about early in my career that’s really helped my growth is I also thought about from a really early stage in my career, what’s good business for the company? And so I had a little bit more willingness, I think, than some of my peers.

Josh Schachter:
Good good business for your company? Like, what’s what are good accounts? What are not good accounts?

Margaret Wise:
Right. Exactly. Thank you for clarifying that. Right? The the business that I was bringing into the company that I worked for, like, was that a good customer for us? You know? So I wasn’t in marketing. I wasn’t thinking about ideal customer profile and some of these things that I think a lot about now, but I kinda have that orientation of, does this does this deal make sense for our business? Is this customer a good fit for our business? Are they gonna be successful, and have a, you know, be a lifetime customer for this business? And so that’s something that I I thought about very early on, and something that I’ve, you know, really carried with me throughout the career as well as always, you know, kinda thinking about that, being willing to walk away from business that wasn’t good for us, like customers that prospective customers that would not be a good fit for us, and really focusing on what’s what’s the right fit for them and then also for our what we’re bringing into our business.

Josh Schachter:
I mean, you could argue that when you’re starting your career, when you’re a little bit lower in the totem pole, yes, that principle makes a lot of sense, but what’s your motivation for that? Right? Like, you wanna close the deals. You wanna get more more more demos booked. You wanna, you you wanna grow in your career. Now you are in a position that you can affect that that change in mentality of making sure that that your your army is taking on the best customers that are fit for your organization. So what do you do in your role to help oversee that?

Margaret Wise:
Well, one of the, one of the most important things you do is incent the behavior that you want. So, so we think about the, the compensation associated with that. So, so more incentive to bring the business in that that we want to have because that has such a downstream effect in the business in terms of, the success management, the churn pieces of it. So a lot of that really starts at the very top of the funnel. Who are you going after? Who are you bringing into the business? So incentive Does

Josh Schachter:
that mean your your incentives are your your your compensation centers are not only tied to the deal conversion? There’s there’s a longer tail to it as well?

Margaret Wise:
Well, there there there are some incentives in terms of, like, signing a multiyear contract or some things like that. But we actually have, we have some process in place, tied to, like, creditworthiness of a customer.

Josh Schachter:
Mhmm.

Margaret Wise:
And then we also have some incentive tied toward, how that customer fits in our ideal customer profile criteria, like, specifically related to the size of the company. Like, there’s a little bit more incentive to bringing in a larger company versus a smaller company because we have like, we see, like, some churn impact based on the company that’s coming in, the business. So we really try to incent more of this is somebody that’s more likely to be a longer term customer for us versus someone that’s maybe gonna fit a profile that might be more likely to churn.

Josh Schachter:
It’s interesting because I I’m I’m hearing this more and more from leaders, you know, from CROs that, more and more incentives are not just the the initial, deal, but Mhmm. That that these deals end up being beneficial over the long term. There was actually a leader that was on just recently that was talking about how product usage, product adoption is, is tucked into the compensation package even for the the sales teams. So there’s definitely that chart.

Margaret Wise:
At that. We we look at our average contract value, 1st year contract value, and there’s the committed component to that, but then there’s also the usage component. So if somebody could exceed their committed value to us in their contract, and then they they pay for the additional usage above that. And then in the 1st year of that contract, we compensate sales on the total usage in that 1st year. And part of that is because we don’t want to incent the sales team to get somebody to commit to something that they’re overselling. Right? We don’t want them to to get the customer to commit to a higher value than what they’re actually going to consume, And then you have a potential churn situation because they’re like, well, we didn’t even use, you know, everything we paid for, or they want credits, or they wanna roll over, something like that. So we wanted to kinda remove that from the equation. And there’s you know, for higher committed levels, there’s a little bit of discounting lever in there.

Margaret Wise:
So we, you know, we do wanna for from our business perspective and the value that we put on committed revenue versus usage revenue, we think about those things. But, you know, but we didn’t want, the sales team to to be you know, we we didn’t wanna disincent them or overincent them in certain ways.

Josh Schachter:
Yeah. Yeah. Let let’s move to further in the journey here on a related topic, talking about the relationship between customer success or post sales at large and sales and presales. Tell us a little bit about what that relationship looks like at active prospect.

Margaret Wise:
Yep. I I appreciate the fact that I’ve had the opportunity to work on a number of different roles. And one of the things that I really love about, specifically, the the CRO role is you really do get to look at that full funnel. And so it becomes you really it gives you an orientation much more around the whole customer experience. And so I think about it less so much of what’s the sales role, what’s the success role, and I think of trying to put myself in the customer’s shoes and think about how does it feel to them. They don’t really care. Am I talking to a salesperson? Am I talking to a success person? And, you know, they just they wanna they want to get the value out of their investment. And so when I think about that, I try I wanna try and take as much friction out of those out of that process for them as possible so that there’s the least amount of friction of them switching from their engagement with the sales director to their engagement with a success manager or an implementation engineer.

Margaret Wise:
And so we think about how can we smooth out those handoff processes as much as possible. And we do it through a combination of tracking in our CRM system. We also have a manual handoff process where we make sure there’s a bit of a download of some of those intangible things that you don’t always capture in a data system. We try to create placeholders for in our CRM system for things that the customer talked about wanting to do in the future. Because in the sales process, you talk about, aspirationally, all the things you might do with our solution, but your initial implementation is often is, like, how do we just solve that initial pain? And then sometimes you lose sight of the future things, and then the customer doesn’t get as much value as they hope to longer term. So we look at what are some of these tactics that we can do in that process to smooth that out and also think about, from the customer perspective. Sometimes the person that’s buying is not the person that’s implementing or consuming the service as well. And how can we, through our hand off internal hand off processes, help smooth that on the customer side as well and translate the things that they told us in the sales process to the other people that might be getting involved in the process downstream.

Josh Schachter:
And how do you do that specifically? How how do you smooth that that knowledge transfer?

Margaret Wise:
So we do, we do those handoffs internally. And then when we do, like, kickoff and onboarding, we keep reiterating the things that we heard from the customer of here’s, you know, here’s our understanding of, you know, what we’re doing why why are we here? Why did you do this? And here’s what you’re hoping to happen. And validate that, you know, multiple times, particularly during the implementation, but really throughout, at a minimum, that 1st year experience and make sure that we keep coming back to that. It never goes perfectly smooth smoothly. Right? But if you keep coming back to that grounding of this is why we’re here and this is what we’re doing, and this is what we hope the outcome is, then, you know, it helps it helps you, like, work through some of those hiccups that always come up and happen.

Josh Schachter:
Yeah. Yeah. That makes sense. In your view of and this maybe within active prospect or just in its totality in the industry, where’s the biggest, gap and area of improvement for bringing together that full revenue system of sales and post sales?

Margaret Wise:
I think for a lot of companies, it is making sure that there is a smooth process through like that implementation because I think that’s where some of the the highest amount of risk is in the customer experience because there’s no matter how much discovery you do, no matter how much scoping you do, like, there’s always some things that come up during the implementation. And so having being sure you’re building good multiple relationships and and that there’s a lot of communication. There’s a lot of expectation setting that’s going on through that, and really making sure the customer is comfortable with that implementation and coming managing through that implementation to post implementation. And we tend to leave customers in that implementation phase just a little bit into their true post implementation, so we’re kinda monitoring the usage coming out of that implementation, before we kinda clear them out of that stage.

Josh Schachter:
Yeah. Make sure they’re nurtured a little bit more and and ready for to to be, let go. Let’s shift gears a little bit to enablement. My company, UpdateAI, we’re an AI enablement platform in many ways, and that’s the hot topic now for leaders as they think about 2025 and budgets and so on and so forth. How do you guys think about AI? How are you thinking about AI Either as an enablement tool or even more strategically, but how are you thinking about it for your organization?

Margaret Wise:
Yeah. We’re seeing AI in a number of areas in the organization. We look at it from a from a, on the marketing side, we’re using AI that’s existing in some of our marketing platforms and how we can better leverage that. And it’s it’s taking some manual digging and discovery process, and and leveraging AI within those tools. From a data perspective, we are we have some tools that use that overlaying our CRM system in doing some of that forecasting, and then we’re starting to extend that out also into, looking at, like, renewals and things like that and giving us some some AI forecasting based on, what what’s in the system and things there. A big part of it for us is we also think about how we can do more push versus pull out to the success teams. And so pushing information to them, sending more signals to the CS team to allow them to be a little more proactive and a little more real time. We’re also looking at leveraging AI in our chatbot, on the support side as well.

Margaret Wise:
So we’re in process of implementing implementing that right now. So and I think we’re just scratching the surface. Honestly, I think that there’s there’s a lot more that we can be doing with it overall. So I’m I’m excited to see where else we can go with it in 2025 and beyond also.

Josh Schachter:
Yeah. I think the industry has hit its limit. I don’t think there’s gonna be any more any more progression in AI.

Margaret Wise:
I mean, there’s no startups or investments or Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Kinda quiet.

Josh Schachter:
Foundational models have hit their have hit their, their their top capacity. Margaret, this was great. Thank you so much for sharing your journey, everything that you guys are doing on ActiveProspect. Congratulations on the recent growth, and, I’m wishing you guys the very best as you enter into 2025.

Margaret Wise:
Thank you so much. Thanks for having me, and, and, wishing you the best in 2025 as

Josh Schachter:
well. Thanks.