BLOG

Josh Schachter:
Unchurned is presented by UpdateAI.

Brian Weinberger:
I’ve been in environments, by the way, when customers aren’t successful, it’s impossible to sell.

Josh Schachter:
Yeah. Generally speaking, right, as a broad generalization, CS has had not as much influence, less comp, you know, still kind of figuring its way out. Why why is that, do you think? Hey, everybody, and welcome to this special edition of Unchurn. I’m Josh Schachter, your host. And this is a really special edition because this is the first time that we are going behind the scenes as Unchurn and talking to revenue leaders. And I am so happy, so delighted to have, a leader from an amazing company on the show today with with me today. I wanna introduce everybody to Brian Weinberger. Brian is the CRO at Sisense.

Josh Schachter:
Brian, welcome to the program.

Brian Weinberger:
Absolutely. I’m fired up to be here.

Josh Schachter:
Awesome. So yeah. Please please please go.

Brian Weinberger:
Oh, I I thought you wanted a quick background on on, like, my journey to CRO.

Josh Schachter:
Yeah. Yeah. Like a like a true salesperson. Just jump into it and and, take over that talk ratio. Go, Brian. Let’s I wanna hear all about your background. We’ve got lots of people aspiring to be in your in your footsteps, so I wanna hear all about your background to to that path.

Brian Weinberger:
Absolutely. Yeah. We should listen first in sales for sure. But, basically, yeah, I’ve I’ve been in sales leadership for 28 of my 30 years. So carried a bag for 2 years, moved into management. My career started at a company called ADP, the payroll company.

Josh Schachter:
Never heard of it. Exactly.

Brian Weinberger:
And then, worked my way through CRM for a long time, about 20 years in the CRM space, 7 years at Salesforce. When I left Salesforce roughly 7 years ago, I’ve been on a journey to get to this seat. So it’s been ups and downs, but amazing. What a fulfilling career.

Josh Schachter:
Now I’ve always heard that actually Salesforce has some of the the most, like, just buttoned down honed process, and it would make sense as they are the the the chiefs of the industry. Was that just an incredible place for you to go to to to to grow your chops?

Brian Weinberger:
It was unbelievable. Yeah. I mean, I’m still in touch with a a lot of the sales leaders from that my time there. I would describe it as this. Like, I was for 12 years, I was running, like, a consulting company that we did implementations of tech. And I was like, wow. We’re doing this amazingly well. I have this tremendous process.

Brian Weinberger:
I have the sales playbook. I’ve hired the greatest salespeople, and then I hop over to Salesforce and I look around. I’m like, oh my god. There’s, like, 400 people like me, doing the same thing. So it was quite remarkable, super fast paced there, and, you know, just a well oiled machine of salespeople and leadership.

Josh Schachter:
Competitive? Was it very competitive amongst peers?

Brian Weinberger:
Very. Yeah. I I I kinda coined this phrase of coopetition. So, like, the way it would operate is if, you know, someone else closed a deal, especially in the in the vertical teams. I was in industry teams, financial services, retail. If you close the financial services deal, it would only help you win the next deal. So even though you were competitive with the person on the in the other cube, we yeah. I worked at a time where people sat in cubes.

Brian Weinberger:
But, basically, when you close the deal, you would look around and, you would leverage that for the next deal. So I call it coopetition.

Josh Schachter:
Oh, interesting. I I think anywhere where you have a players just makes it like, it it just brings your level, your game up so much. But it it also can be taxing because you are in a coopetition with people that are all a players. I was at BCG Bossing Consulting Group, and it was no different. You’re you’re only as good as the last case you were on. Right? And, and you’re all, you know, you’re all, Ivy Leaguers and whatnot and and and high achievers that are just leveling each other’s game, but also wearing each other down at the same time. Let’s talk about your new role. Yeah.

Josh Schachter:
You’ve been in this role as chief revenue officer at Sisense for 6 months. Congratulations on that. Thank you. It’s a wonderful company, a large company. And so tell us a little bit about for for folks that may not be as familiar, I know many folks are, tell us about Sisense, and then wanna talk about little bit about the the mandate and purview of your role.

Brian Weinberger:
Perfect. Yeah. So the category we’re we sit in is embedded analytics. Basically, so other products, software products, consumer facing applications, they’ll leverage our technology to get give better analytics experiences to their users. So, let me take you through the journey of, like, this category. Way back in the day, companies would create custom reports for their clients. Like, they would cobble together in a manual fashion, like PDF type reports. And, you know, a large customer like Coca Cola would say, hey.

Brian Weinberger:
We need this report from your product, and the company would put it together in a manual way and send it out. Fast forward to, like, this automated world where companies like Salesforce, right, had dashboards and reports baked into the product. And so that’s where Sisense thrived is baking in dashboards and reports. And then we wanna take everybody to the next step, which is modernizing their analytics experience. Like, think of hovering over records and getting insight without having to click. So, basically, bringing analytics to the user versus the user having to navigate to dashboards and reports. When

Josh Schachter:
I hear that when I hear that, I hear I hear AI. I hear agentic workflows. I hear a really fun, future for what you guys are up to.

Brian Weinberger:
It’s exciting. I mean, it’s it’s sort of, the consumer market has been kinda leading the way, you know, whether you watch a movie on, you know, basically Prime, Amazon Prime. If you notice the scene, it’ll show, like, who the actor or actress is at the bottom. That’s sort of popping up some insight, or maybe you wanna voice, hey. How old is George Clooney? It gives you the age. Right? Like, that’s kind of AI and insight. So taking that consumer behavior or, like, I think of fantasy sports, of course, you hover over an athlete. It gives you like, you don’t have to click to see information.

Brian Weinberger:
But, basically, bringing that to the b to b world, right, the enterprise world. So that’s kind of the next step in the evolution, and Sisense is really well positioned to do that because we we kinda marry we’re the best of both worlds. We allow creators and builders to create custom experiences, but we have a rich platform underneath it that has AI services, you know, security based, role based, services, data modeling services, etcetera. So you kind of you don’t have to really know under the hood about analytics. You just can create on top of it.

Josh Schachter:
Interesting. Alright. My mind is wandering now. I have these ideas. You may not you we I never told you about UpdateAI, but we’re all about helping, you know, sales and post sales on the meeting management of their conversations with customers. I’m thinking to myself, what information could you pop up in real time as somebody’s having a conversation based on on that data being fed to them? That could be could be interesting. Which which yeah.

Brian Weinberger:
Which we’re gonna get into, and I’m excited about it. But, like, the whole, like, AI and sales, AI and customer success, like, where it fits in. Yeah.

Josh Schachter:
Yeah. So tell us a little bit about well, the organization we talked about, what what you guys do, to the extent that you can. Yeah. Right? We we we wanna know the size of the company, whatever. Any any rough revenue numb numbers or something like that. Just to give people a sense of scope as we talk about some of the lessons you’ve learned Yeah. The scope of the company, and then also the scope of your role as

Brian Weinberger:
well. Absolutely. Yeah. So, our primary customers are software companies. So we work with a lot of medium sized software companies, sort of south of a 1000 employees, and then what I call digital native brands. So one of our clients is USA Swimming. So if you went to usaswimming.org, their insight or their analytics is powered by Sisense. And then, basically, I run sales and CS.

Brian Weinberger:
We’re overall, we’re 400 employees, roughly a $150,000,000 in revenue.

Josh Schachter:
And your the the company is 400 or your your org is 400, the company?

Brian Weinberger:
So my my org is about 30% of 400.

Josh Schachter:
So Got it.

Brian Weinberger:
Call it a 120 employees, which entails, you know, sales, sales leadership, sales operations, sales or enablement overall, solution engineering. And then on the customer success side, CSMs, the CSM leadership, We have, what we call field engineering, FES. I have TAMs, solution consultants. So it’s a it’s a really exciting role and an exciting opportunity. I also have partners. So we have a partner ecosystem that does our implementations. We have some resellers, and we have some tech partners as well. So I report to the CEO, and it’s you know, we’re a global company.

Josh Schachter:
So how, and this isn’t something that I had had, I had given you light on before. But as you’re talking about the the post sales and the presales rolling up to you, how does that help in the organization? Like, how do you think that mends the and bridges the 2 functions working together, having them roll up to you directly?

Brian Weinberger:
Yeah. I mean, I think it’s simple, yet complex. But the simple part of it is we not only wanna, like, land new customers, we wanna land them for life.

Josh Schachter:
I

Brian Weinberger:
mean and that that’s something, by the way. That was a a a total Salesforce thing. We called it CFL, customers for life. And, basically, you want you wanna make sure from the top of the funnel all the way to delivering and then renewing, it’s it has to be sticky. So I think the first step is aligning on, like, who’s your ideal customer profile? What’s your sweet spot? Then go attract them. Right? Get pipeline. Then sell them and sell them a, you know, hopefully, a long term deal that you know our product and their and our client are gonna be successful with, and they’ll stick around for a long time. I mean, that’s kind of I think bridging that is what the number one value of, like, a CRO is to do.

Brian Weinberger:
It’s not you’re not just selling a transaction. You’re hopefully selling, like, a long term relationship that renews over and over again and expands.

Josh Schachter:
How do you do like like, give me something tactical here of of, your your how you how you bring together those 2, the sales and the post sales. Is it just through, combined leadership meetings? Is it through some kind of playbook that you’ve written in concert with each other? Or maybe I’m overthinking this, and it’s just a natural handoff in communication with each other.

Brian Weinberger:
Yeah. So when I first got to the company, first of all, I started as the global head of sales, and then moved into the CRO role. So

Josh Schachter:
you were so you were so you were global head of sales. You were responsible just for sales. There was no post sales that was under your mandate. Of course, you interacted constantly, but that was not under your purview.

Brian Weinberger:
Yeah.

Josh Schachter:
Okay.

Brian Weinberger:
I mean, just to show I’ll I’ll show some vulnerability. I mean, I’ve been wanting to be a CRO for a while. You know, people on your show that you’ve had before probably knew that. And I kinda resorted to the fact that, you know what? Maybe I’m just gonna stay in my lane and be a sales leader. Maybe that’s okay.

Josh Schachter:
Mhmm.

Brian Weinberger:
It got to the point where they actually offer me the CRO job here. And true story, it was on a Saturday. I said, no. I don’t want

Josh Schachter:
it. Mhmm.

Brian Weinberger:
Because I I had, like, resorted to the fact that maybe it’s not for me, and I’ll just stay head of sales. And then, of course, I talked to an adviser who I worked with.

Josh Schachter:
Why why why you you actually said no to them. It wasn’t just your instinct. You actually told them no.

Brian Weinberger:
Yeah. I think because I was going after this is more of a personal thing.

Josh Schachter:
Okay. I

Brian Weinberger:
was going after it for 7 years that and I was told no along the way many times that I was just kinda like, you know what? Sales is where I thrive. Like, just stay there then. Be happy with that.

Josh Schachter:
Mhmm.

Brian Weinberger:
The reason I’m bringing that up is one of the first things I, I I implemented a lot of things when I came to Sisense. And one of the critical items I implemented was this strategy called land with a plan. I didn’t I didn’t invent that. I heard it at one of my other start ups. We did it quite well. But, you know, you hear land and expand, which is very salesy, very tactical, and transactional.

Josh Schachter:
Right.

Brian Weinberger:
It’s not a good behavior to have. So land with a plan is a much more effective, hey, like, get on the same side of the table as the prospect or cut you know, new customer and partner with them.

Josh Schachter:
But it sounds like land land and build a success plan.

Brian Weinberger:
There you go. Yep. Land and in our world, actually, it means, hey, let’s build a product together, because we build a product with our clients, this analytics experience, and then we launch it together. So, basically, that whole process that I had developed as a head of sales was very CROesque. Right? Because I wasn’t just building it to I I actually was almost going against hitting home runs and and closing large deals. I wanted to actually do more, quantity of smaller transactions that will be successful so that we have we have a natural expansion motion.

Josh Schachter:
Mhmm.

Brian Weinberger:
So let’s let’s secure that so that it is stickier so that we don’t have churn on the backside, and that these customers, not only will they stay with us, they’re actually gonna continue to expand. And we we have a lot of ways of expanding, which is amazing here. So that land with the plan, I believe, is one of the one of the reasons why it was such a easy move for me to go into the CRO role. And you asked about, like, a tactical item. That’s that’s it. Because this the CS team was like, oh, wow. This isn’t just your classic sales leader who’s trying to, you know, hit everything out of the park. I wanted to create a sustainable business that we can scale and last forever.

Josh Schachter:
What did your adviser you said the person you had spoke to after your knee jerk know. What did they say to convince you to take that role?

Brian Weinberger:
It was pretty simple. And he’s incredible, by the way. Tony Rodoni. So Tony has Is

Josh Schachter:
that a real name? That’s a fake name. Tony Rodoni?

Brian Weinberger:
Tony Rodoni is is the most real name, real person in the world. He was one of the most amazing leaders at Salesforce, and he took me in when I first started. I didn’t even report in his group, and he he became a mentor for me. And then fast forward, and I know Brett Cleaner was on your show. Brett was on the board of my last company, and he basically we looked at each other. He said, you need an adviser, and we both kinda said Tony Rodoni at the same time. And so Tony became my adviser, and, basically, I called him and said, hey. They they want me to be the CRO, I’m not sure, at Sisense.

Brian Weinberger:
And he said, it it’s not your decision. You were told to be the CRO. And and by the way, Brian, you’ve been wanting this for years. What are you talking about?

Josh Schachter:
Right.

Brian Weinberger:
Now they gave it to you. So, yeah, I kind of, had a a moment of, lapse in judgment, I’d say.

Josh Schachter:
Hey, everybody. It’s Josh. I’m taking a quick break from the podcast to tell you a bit about UpdateAI. I started UpdateAI to solve 2 major challenges for CS teams. The first is that we save CSMs 4 to 5 hours per week with our productivity through AI. Secondly, we give leaders a window into all the conversations across each account and the entire portfolio. So we help knowledge transfer, we help increase the coverage model of your CS teams, and we help you detect emerging patterns and what your customers are telling your CSMs across all the risks, product feedback, advocacy moments, and expansion opportunities. So come check us out at www.updateai.

Josh Schachter:
It’s completely free to sign up and trial. Awesome. Okay. Let’s keep going on. I wanna keep talking about the the relationship between customer success and sales. Yes. How can CS because as you know, like, a core of our audience here are our customer success professionals and practitioners, sales folks too. How can customer success best serve sales?

Brian Weinberger:
Yeah. So we have this idea of a champion. So often a champion and it’s part of, like, sales methodologies. Right? But, basically, the c is the champion. And, usually, it’s like the person who’s gonna carry the torch for you, and kind of, like, basically sell your product and platform through their company.

Josh Schachter:
They’re everything. Right?

Brian Weinberger:
They’re they’re everything. Yeah. That’s how I look at the CSM. K? The CSM is the champion for the customer, and it’s critical. They are everything. I have seen often salespeople don’t leverage that that person who’s the eyes and ears. And literally everything, the glue between the customer and your company who knows takes copious notes, knows more about them than anybody, and why don’t we take advantage of that to actually, like, not go around them, not not sort of go through them, you know, over them in an aggressive way. Like, actually work with them to partner with them.

Brian Weinberger:
Just like the champion on the customer side, we have a champion internally that we need to leverage.

Josh Schachter:
And why haven’t we? Why has it been made so complicated? That’s a sweeping statement. Right? There’s many organizations where where CS has its tea at the table and and is cherished, and and and it sounds like that’s the case for for Sisense. But generally speaking, right, as a broad generalization, CS has had not as much influence, less comp, you know, still kind of figuring its way out. Why why is that, do you think?

Brian Weinberger:
I think this has been done not just to CS, by the way. I saw I see this with, like, your inside sales group, like BDRs, ADRs, whatever you call them. It was much like, for some reason, they we overcomplicated it. So that same breakdown that exists with, like, the ADR, BDR team to the AE team exists between CS and sales. Mhmm. I think it’s

Josh Schachter:
Explain that. Sales Explain that. Like, what what’s the what’s the origin? How did that work out in in the beginning days with AEs and and BDRs?

Brian Weinberger:
So early days, it was kumbaya. It was like, okay. Josh, you’re the sales rep. I’m the BDR. We do everything together. Like, literally, every day, we’re lockstep. You know? And we we were like a team, a true team, which in sales is hard to pull off. Right? Because it’s usually I and the name I see, individual contributor.

Brian Weinberger:
Right? Right. It’s a very independent, but, like, that was back in the heyday, I developed a lot of amazing sales professionals by starting them out as, like, this inside seller, partnering up with, like, a a more senior seller. And they like, you would call that person from when you’re out in the field. Like, Josh, he would call me, like, hey, Brian. Like, can you put together an order form for blah blah blah? And we we just did everything together. And it wasn’t about comp. It was like I was like, oh, I’m gonna learn from Josh. I’m involved.

Brian Weinberger:
I’m active. I’m busy every day. And, basically, I’m gonna learn as much as I can. And then one day, I’ll be in his role, and I’m gonna pay it forward. Somehow, the way it broke the way it I think it broke down or

Josh Schachter:
It was an apprentice model, it sounds like, by the way.

Brian Weinberger:
Yes. Absolutely. What happened was companies software companies are scaling, so they kind of turned more into, like, a factory. So they basically, like, isolated. Like, these BDRs are now, like, front of the line, like, how monotonous they do this. You know, they whatever. I’m not I don’t know why I’m doing this. But, you know, they would like they’re just making one little part of the the this sort of, conveyor belt, and then it got to the rep and they did their job.

Brian Weinberger:
And I believe the same thing is now happening when you go down the line of post sales. So when it used to be like I mean, the whole idea of customer success really should have been the sales team should be like, I want customers to be successful because I’ve been in environments, by the way, when customers aren’t successful, it’s impossible to sell. Yeah. It may not be like a direct hit on a daily basis, but over a long period of time when you have customers that aren’t successful, you it’s impossible to land the next deal because you wanna leverage the best thing is, like, references. Right? Like, I I used to be like I would walk people into another company and say, hey. You need to talk. Not only did I get meetings that way for references, but also, you know, go to dinner with these people. And that’s how you land the deals instead of me having to sell all the time or me having to deliver.

Brian Weinberger:
Like, I just, actually just did this recently. I was on with a customer, and they dealt with a specific technical, technical requirement that I knew another customer was struggling with. And I was like, oh, you you know, customer, you need to talk to this customer. Like, get on the phone. You guys can actually probably solve it faster than my company probably can. So to me, like, there that’s part of this breakdown of just teaming up collaboration all for the same cause. Like, it just became very factory like at software companies where, you know, it was very siloed.

Josh Schachter:
So how do you how do you address that? You are in a position now to address this or to try to address this. Not everything is a unilateral decision. Right? We know that. But how how can we make this better or avoid further drifting into this area for post sales for CS?

Brian Weinberger:
Yeah. A lot of it’s just, like, learning about specifically, like, it’s it’s super tangible to take, like, churn, which, unfortunately, it happens at a lot of software companies. It’s happening, with us. And, you know, what do you do with that? Right? Like, I think first and foremost, like, I wanna save every customer at all cost. So putting that mentality in place, which we’ve we’ve implemented here, will help sales. It’ll help, like, get sort of wind at your back. But if they were to leave, why are they leaving? And really, really understanding that, and then, like, what do we do with that information? Mhmm. And so you do need to take it to your next deal.

Brian Weinberger:
Like, you need to understand that, like, hey. Customizing something for this to win this deal may not help our business. So what can we do differently? I think that’s the full circle. And and then, basically, you need to get the directors to believe what I believe on board, and they need to be working with my sales leaders as well. Like, it needs to be a collaborative thing. It can’t just be from, like, the CRO’s mouth. I can’t be everywhere. Right? So we have to kind of have leaders of CS really understand our sales process, who our ICP is, how we sell, and that hand off is huge.

Brian Weinberger:
Right? Because that’s like in our business, it’s the plane taking off. Like, you really have to have someone from CS who’s starting to work with the prospect before they even sign so that they own, like, hey. And now I know what they’re trying to do, and I’m gonna own getting them built and successful all the way to the back. So I think it’s like this full cycle of learning and then, obviously, making sure everybody knows this entire full process.

Josh Schachter:
Yeah. Last question. Yeah. No. It’s not easy. It’s not I mean, if it was easy, it would be solved by now. But but clearly, it’s not easy. Last question around AI.

Josh Schachter:
Right? That’s the that’s the hot topic of the year, of the decade, of the the rest of our lives. What excites you the most about AI as an enablement tool for your team?

Brian Weinberger:
Yeah. So I’m gonna talk out of both sides. I’ve I’ve I always liken the idea of, like, a process, like sales all the way to CS as, like, and and my team knows this. We’re making tomato sauce. Heck, oh, back to Tony Rittone. We’re making some tomato sauce because the sauce is like the finished product. But, like, if you know like, tomato sauce is it starts with the tomatoes, and you wanna make sure they’re ripe. And then you basically, you know, turn it into sauce.

Brian Weinberger:
But, like, basically, that’s a machine. And so in my mind, I’ve wanted to create a machine. We’ve said it’s like a people machine, but the reality is it’s hard to create the machine. I believe AI helps us become a machine. And and how and why? Follow-up. AI can help us do that. We become more reliable. What’s the people clients don’t wanna talk to someone who doesn’t show up.

Brian Weinberger:
Right? So reliability. Summarization. Hey. I heard what you said, Josh. I’m gonna basically put it back in a summary, but AI could do that for you really well. And then automating, you know, basically, you know, if this happens, do this, telling us what to do. That’s kind of the machine part of go to market. And then then you can layer your finesse and your style and your your art.

Brian Weinberger:
Right? That’s really where, we can have the skills developed at the art side, and then AI can take care of, like, the process and the scaling of it.

Josh Schachter:
Ryan, this was an awesome conversation. So great to hear about your own background, what you guys are working on at Sisense. The conversation of how you’re bringing together sales and post sales. Really appreciate you taking the time to impart your wisdom for our audience.

Brian Weinberger:
It’s tons of fun. Thanks, Josh.

Josh Schachter:
Thanks.