Cody Gilland, VP Revenue at Zight: Unlocking Sales Success & Customer Relationships & Data-Driven Strategies

hey everyone this is Joe Martin a head of marketing over here at zeit and I’m excited for our chat today with Cody

Gillan he is currently the head of sales at zeit and has some great uh past

experience with lots of uh great SAS companies and media companies uh has

been a sales game for a long time and and can really help uh understand how to

nurture people along the way and make sure that you have a good relationship with customers so they stay with you and

also want to grow with you so Cody go ahead and take a minute to introduce yourself and we’ll jump into some

questions yeah thanks Joe I’m so yeah I’m Cody Gillan I’ve been uh in sales

and and revenue and Subway shape or form and customer experience for the last almost 20 years in different things um

and been in tech for B basically like the last uh 12 or so and across a few

different companies and so scaled a lot of different teams up you know sales side customer success support

you know everything from frontend SDR to all the way up to uh you know Enterprise and strategic uh AES and um I’ve had a

blast doing it so been worked with a lot of really great people um a lot of great

team members and and had a lot of fun along the way there’s also been all kinds of uh of ups and downs and so you

know just like people have kind of started chipping away ahead of us uh I’m always happy to chat and to at least

share my experience and and see how I can help in some other sort of way so

awesome yeah Cody’s definitely accessible on LinkedIn or uh anywhere

else and you can connect with him also offline with any other follow-up questions to our chat um Cody we live in

definitely a datadriven generation uh we have lots of information about our customers how they’re interacting with

us there’s lots of tools out there uh we do surveys and research how do you like

to kind of pull in all those inputs that we have and kind of create a cohesive

plan based on customer insights and research uh yeah I mean um I think I

kind of come at it from a a little bit different perspective I mean in a past life I was in you know finance and um so

spreadsheets are like my best friend I know on the uh you know in the sales side of things not very many folks love

spreadsheets but I I think I’m a unique person in that aspect that I love spreadsheets so

uh I think if I need some kind of quick data obviously everything’s in Salesforce we have a lot of cool plugins

in there that give us a lot of you know uh use case data from our our from our

team members our reps on their activities and metrics um that are compiled in there and kind of cross

pollinated across all different data sets to give us kind of our unique view of the world um and and our teams view

as well so we can really drill in and and uh drill down into into different

problems issues or even questions or things that we’re looking to invest in but um every now and then you just kind

of need you know I do kind of personally default to dumping some data into a spreadsheet and you know cutting it down

and doing some some uh con catnation and vlookups all that jazz right but um

that’s usually just for kind of quick answers for myself but there’s definitely a lot of really great tools out there to to get you know extract

both user information and or user user feedback and uh rep um information on

their activities so awesome I love it yeah that’s you know obviously a big piece of marketing too is just pulling

in all the information and figuring out how to create a strategy from it uh this is kind of you and I second time go go

around with sales and marketing um how do you like to use that information from

the sales flow to really try and influence um marketing materials created

or Campa PS that are running um just kind of using that to go hand inand with

marketing um yeah I mean there’s always this you know this push and pull or economy with

sales and marketing right and I think it especially in Tech it really you know got

um there’s there’s definitely been much more I’d say probably more lines dri you know kind of drawn there sometimes uh in

the tech world than it has in the past or even other other Industries but really what it comes down to is neither

group can do it without the other right like Mark kind of one thing is marketing needs the feedback and the customer

voice uh that sales and and other teams like customer success support can can provide but um sales also needs the

content the collateral the the larger more all-encompassing push uh even just

general Vibe of of uh the brand and and the the feature set and uh help to

really tell the story as a whole to then get salese more at bats right so um that

kind of makes me and kind of thinking about that a little bit um it really

just makes me think that like you know if we’re going to grow you know um especially sales and you know sales and

marketing orgs and sales and marketing efforts going forward there has to be kind of like a a kind of

re um kind of like a a uh a reallocation of thought to be much

more synergistic right uh and that that’s not easy to do when we’re all kind of used to kind of doing our own

thing and working a little siloed and everything just kind of working out especially sales and marketing um but in

times like we’ve seen the past couple years and I think also going forward for a little bit um you know kind of

approaching growth as as a conjoined centralized team of one mindset is kind of the key and to really search for have

each team kind of search for you know humility and and and like understanding you know and

to seek ways for how we can scratch each other’s backs because uh you

know if we’re going to grow it’s not just about growing your team or your org or your footprint at your organization

it’s like hey we got to grow Revenue together rather than just grow our sphere of influence you know so I’m not

saying it’s like that everywhere but there’s kind of a en Vibe I think that you know everybody could really find a

lot of value in tweaking and adjusting so it’s not so much sales against marketing it’s more you know um you know

how can we help each other help each other right totally I love that yeah it’s it’s

definitely like one thing I love about a startup and kind of the experience we’ve

had together is um you don’t have those battle lines drawn you’re really kind of

starting from scratch and so you build it together versus going into a huge

company it’s like marketing has an organ of 100 and sales has an or of 200 and

you’re kind of like just trying to figure out these relationships um it’s it’s a lot more fun um when it’s when it’s just a couple

of people kind of just working on the same goal yeah yeah and and the lines

aren’t as thick as small companies but even at larger organizations you know you and I have both been at larger companies as well and you know I think

one thing that uh you know we could all do a little bit better uh with or or

there’s a lot of value to extract from it is to seek for ways to to build up that other side of the organization and

to give credit where credits do instead of just um you know really telling the word about the world about like how

great we are on our side you know you on the other side of the house or vice versa right so absolutely absolutely

team and I think we just I think there’s just kind of like a we need to have a a conf fluence kind of reignition of us

all getting back on the same page as as a whole you know we’ve been at a lot of different uh organizations and everybody

does a little better or worse and just from my experience the ones that do it better and that really seek and and work

to come together in that relationship that’s where you know goodness flourishes and that’s where we’ve seen

I’ve seen the most success so so obviously you’ve been more on the management side recently but a as a

salesperson and you know you can do get involved in some bigger deals that we have bigger customers but how do you

keep a customer engaged when they’re prospecting they aren’t actually signed the contract you know some of these

deals are three six 12 months with a customer how do you keep them engaged

along the way what are your kind of like tactics for connection outside of just

hey following up on that legal stuff you know how do you like build a real

relationship yeah um uh yeah just kind of in general

that’s really what it comes down to now more than ever right like the the day of like the the spray and prey and the the

robo you know email from large sales teams to tens of thousands of people every day it’s you know everyone has

kind of caught on to it and also all the the internal systems have kind of caught on to it to to to start will you know

kind of filtering all those things out so um really what it comes down to is like closing a a 50k deal today is

basically like closing a million-dollar deal you know a few years ago and uh what it really comes down to is just a

little bit more of a strategic touch and um and trying to help assist uh you know

corporate SNB or even Enterprise AES to you know work an opportunity or a

deal just like a strategic AE would with 20 years experience right and uh and and

what I mean by that is it’s not just a onetoone hey following up on that thing it’s actually it’s actually selling the

entire organization or heads of of multiple departments and it’s not just the one buyer anymore it’s a buying

group more so now than ever for from a customer perspective because of all the

you know I won’t go into it too much but everybody knows all the all the the levels of intensity that have been brought on to um you know scrutinizing

the you know budgets and making sure we’re everyone’s kind of running efficient efficiently rather than growing at all cost you know as we’ve

been used to the last couple decades here in the in the tech space right yeah so um so I think like growing or or

approaching opportuni strategically is is pretty big um but how do you kind of get them to you know hooked in and and

and continue to drag them along through the process you know or take them by the hand through the process for customers

it’s it’s it’s really got to be much more than just you and your and your point of contact it’s got to be you know

our organization you know partnering with their organization and multi-threading

the conversations uh and basically turning a salesperson into a strategic coordinator between you know matching up

um uh you know like-minded or or likely interested you know teams and

individuals on our side versus you know the customer the potential customer or the prospect side right so I guess an

example of that would be you know and normal kind of SNB relationship you know hey this is the this is the product we

have and this is the pain you have let me let us help you help help your your team or let’s help you help yourself

right um but now it’s got to be more like hey here’s you know our head of marketing is doing this and this is

where we’re thinking and this is where we’re going and our head of you know product is doing this and this is the vision going forward we’d love to see

what integration looks like between our two platforms and also what joint marketing and collateral we could

provide each other and uh you know how we can add an additional spin in our unique way with our product and uh you

know it’s just multi-threading those those conversations that’s what not only creates um new customers that stick

together but it also um that’s a that’s also kind of an example of sales and marketing kind of working together as

well because the salesperson isn’t going to have the the collateral or the or the uh you know the infographics or all the

all the beautiful stats laid out and displayed correctly of how it would be pertinent or valuable to that individual

or their team or their organization or their or their company right and so um

it becomes much more um I think probably for for new newer younger salespeople it

seems like it’s much more convoluted and more red tape and more um and uh just

more stuff to go through but really I think uh probably these more season sales people who have done a lot of you

know large Enterprise deals would probably just kind of feel like if they’re hearing me talk about this thing

it’ be like oh yeah this is just how you sell sell an opportunity it’s how you you’ve always had to sell an opportunity and

it’s a different mindset of like hey we have to we’re bringing these two organizations together to solve problems

and to benefit each other right the we may be benefiting them and providing a

service or a product to them but they’re providing us a service and and a valuable product back which is money

right or or partnership or whatever it ends up kind of leading to in those joint ventures but especially especially

for for larger opportunities that we have today the level of effort and maybe 100K whatever your your your large

opportunity is a million dollar deal whatever it is chances are on the topend

Enterprise large deal type of stuff you’re probably going to have to be much more strategic and much more partnership

related both internally with your internal team members and heads of those those teams and uh your customer as well

and basically starting to integrate before a deal was even signed right and um that way we know on both sides they

know exactly what they’re going to get and we know exactly how to provide value to them and to help disseminate uh the

me the message and also make sure that they’re on boarded correctly and ensure with you know from our perspective that

they will be set up for Success from day one right out of the gate and there’s no

concern or issue or even thought about hey I wonder if they uh they got set up

correctly or I wonder you know next year at the renewal or whatever is this going to be an issue it’s not because we’ve

started everything out on a rock rock solid foundation right out of the gate and it creates a really flourishing you

know um partnership there and it’s not just a customer anymore who’s paying you it’s piling on customers for Long Haul

Partners right so so you spent you spent all that time kind of building those Foundation blocks and everything you you

establish the relationship let’s say they sign on as a customer what’s kind of is there much difference with like an

upsell process to net new um are you trying to kind of connect with them before renewal

offer um new features or benefits that the company’s added what what’s kind of the process with like an

upso yeah for I mean and I guess that’s a good point I mean I guess kind of what I’ve been

talking about here so far is really through the lens of a net new type of situation which is uh you know

historically if if you’re in a land and expand type situation that’s that’s really turning a an expansion type um

you know play into a net new play like kind of getting ahead of yourself a little bit is how can we provide more

value to more teams or individuals at this organization right out of the gate rather than just closing the initial

deal or the super super super discounted deal from the tops down right but a larger opportunity out of the gate so um

but uh so that kind of one thing it’s being more strategic SL account management is right out of the gate with

net new customers than only with existing customers but as it pertains to expansion it um um I would say expansion

if you have an expansion type you know solution which I’ve had I’ve been a part of teams that are or organizations that

have product like that and those that aren’t um but uh if you do have an expansion type solution especially

Enterprise expansion opportunities with your or cross selling or upselling all that kind of stuff

um uh it’s it’s it’s no I we’re seeing more and more that it’s no longer like

you can have the AE come and close the initial deal and hand it off to um a an account manager or

customer success manager and everything just be happy right um the steam is just

you know beginning especially if you’re starting them off on a solid foundation you know the the level of effort in

which sales people have to continue to push through and to innovate and change and to you know uh start tweaking

collateral you know working with marketing tweaking collateral and tweaking many use cases and stuff like

that to then go and sell Department by Department sometimes team by team or even individual by individual that you

can sew seeds and different uh expansion type opportunities that’s kind of what you have to do um rather than you know

um just letting the product just kind of grow virally as it has in the past if you have one of these types of solutions

which we definitely do here at zeit but uh so that that does help us but um the reason why that has to be done in such a

way more microscopically than it ever has before is because everyone who’s going to go raise their hand and I felt

this internally as well I think you probably have too anyone that’s gonna raise their hand um especially in Tech

um the last couple years then say hey I need this tool or I need a license of this or I need this extra thing that

wasn’t already allocated to my you know cost center budget uh you better have a reason why and a

story uh and like some Roi tied to it so um you know basically helping more on an

individual basis help them helping them individually understand what the value

is not only to the company or the bottom line or the high level Focus or whatever

the the big goal is right but you have to have that as table Stakes now which that that used to be like the value

selling that everyone sold off of forever it’s just like hey this is how we help you you know with your company

level high level goals and help the CEO win right um but now we have to have

that that’s table Stakes but that can’t be all that we’re talking about and beating the drum to it has to be all the way down to the individual hey how is

this going to help you in your day-to-day and creating a on to many type you know content

collateral um situation whether it’s you have it uploaded in the product when they sign up as some sort of you know

Persona picker and then they get specific collateral to them um or if it’s from more of a csse type experience

of once you know say A salesperson signs up for your product um at a customer

account or they get a license right at one of your Enterprise customers and uh they need sales you know uh sales Focus

collateral for them to feel the value right out of the gate as well as for them to understand how the value to

their team is coming uh to them and their team and how then how that all ties to to the overarching goals of how

this will help the sales or hit our numbers and help push the company along in this specific type of way right so

the connection between the individual and the top level goal has actually become much more valuable and much more

important for expansion to actually take place so helping from a one to many

perspective uh helping our our users our new users get there from a a one to many perspective from an expansion Play Type

opportunity it’s really helping them to arm them v as great content great collateral and a great story as to what

they are looking to achieve and what pain they are looking to solve and giving them actually like the battle

cards themselves so that they can go internally whether it’s to it or Finance or their leadership to get approved for

themselves their team or their Department to obtain you know access to this new system or this new product that

they have that you know that’s now been implemented there right and uh you know

the more and that’s where on the S from a sales perspective the we can partner closely with marketing the more we can get high quality High Fidelity super

valuable and and poignant um content collateral little

mini case studies quotes all that kind of stuff to the individual as well as applicable to different teams and

departments across one customer organization right um and we can rinse and repeat that stuff different

companies and similar organizations and stuff but the more that you can

strategically surround the individual every individual or every team that you’re speaking with or every Department

that you’re speaking with with how is the value going to come to

them individually and then spread out that way all the way up to okay uh then all the way up to like

how’s this going to help us achieve our goal that’s both sides are much more needed now than ever right um and it

comes down to like hey if I’m if I’m gonna raise my hand say hey I need a product or a tool or a uh some some new

um you know piece of software for my organization even if it’s for all of my

salespeople uh I need to know how it’s going to Value me personally to make me even want to go say hey I know we don’t

have any any additional budget uh because I’m just kind of coming up with this now um but I need to know for

myself what you know what I’m actually gonna get out of this and uh and have the whole story ready to go is you know

why why is the team gonna g to find Value in it too and this and this is uh this kind of this happens with every

strategic you know large multi-million dollar type opportunity but uh what I’m

saying is is that has to happen lower and lower and lower down the um down the

the uh um the deal size scale right now more than ever so um yeah

that so you go ahead and like you you put in all that process create these

workflows which definitely take time and effort you’re always optimizing and improving on those but how do you kind

of leave space for like new technologies new Evolution in business you mentioned

a few times like it used to be done this way and we’ve had to evolve that way how do you kind of leave space for that um

and as a piece of that like how does AI kind of fit in to the future of

sales yeah um you know I know AI especially like I

was just kind of I guess preemptively dogging it a minute ago talking about Robo calls and stuff but uh Robo emails

but I think AI if directed correctly is actually a huge help um you know you can

definitely get a lot of value out of uh helping to create much more of that custom content really quickly for an

individual or specific use case or specific Persona right which you can’t

have your marketing team constantly like oh now I got this persona it’s a little bit different than this other one on this completely different account you

can actually feed it something that marketing your marketing team has actually given you and and kind of

rework it um really quickly into a more

specific way for a different type of customer right um so that’s one thing that we have been using it for is to

help kind of tweak existing messaging to help uh um you know to to help different

personas help us use the same type of viable uh you know value ad and Roi to

our customers to different personas in a way that makes sense to them so that’s one way that’s been super helpful to us

that’s awesome yeah and um as far as like finding room for other tools I mean I’m

finding in from a leadership perspective this is kind of why I was talking about the top and bottom individual all the

way to the top of the of of uh you know a company’s Focus matters is because um

you know I myself from a leadership perspective am continuing to look at and assess tools and uh you know other

pieces of software that we can Implement to make um my team’s life better and to make us all much more efficient and so

um but if I don’t have a bulletproof story like start to finish as as to how much money is this going to save us or

how much it’s going to bring in if I can’t tie to those two things and it really doesn’t even make sense for me to bring up right it just it all then gets

shoveled into the nice to have bucket right so um and that’s one of the nice

things about Zite little uh selfless plug here is that we’ve seen on our own on our own from our own data and testing

perspective when it comes to uh SDR especially but cold Outreach from a

sales perspective cold Outreach um we we’ve seen personally

using a zeit video as like to as a again getting to that personalization like that humanization of beginning

relationships with even prospects let alone customers um being able to just help make a connection a little bit more

quickly right out of the gate and to really show value by showing your screen showing yourself on on on the screen you

know recording your your screen or your video um so that people can see that they’re working with real people and not

just some AI bot right and that we’re real people working on real solving real

problems for real companies and real customers right um and so with us

implementing that ourselves in in a much more robust way than we ever had before um meaning that every Outreach um email

that’s cold we always put a video of ourselves giving the same you know

welcome and intro and kind of explaining you know what we’re doing like our our cold pitch right uh rather than just

being in an email with a screenshot or something like that or a link to to a deck we give it ourselves right out of

the gate and we keep it less than 30 seconds 20 to 30 seconds and uh we look to schedule a call with them and just in

doing that alone and it has increased our response our email response cold

outbound EO email response by 14% just that’s across the whole team U just that

one thing alone so um and that’s of course us testing with our own product

and um and kind of us dog fooding it ourselves but at the same time we’ve done a lot of other similar things with

you know with with uh you even on the support side um you know chat and chat Bots and stuff like that to help people

our users get to the value that they’re looking for so much more quickly than before so that’s kind of the other

bucket is if we can help our users our customers get to Value and some whether it’s like from a support perspective

perspective trying to like do something new that they’ve never done before if they can get a a response back and and a

video of how to show them how to do it really quickly boom like that’s value back to them in an instant and so that

means hey that’s a win for a chat plot um but um uh you know or if they can

understand hey what’s the salesperson reaching out for you know really quickly out of the gate in 20 seconds then boom that’s a win for

us there and so uh but we have to be intentional with with creating high

quality uh high quality content but at the same time you know Roi packed

information that’s where really marketing and sales really help uh kind

of bridge those two gaps together more so than I’ve ever ever experienced in the past I mean it’s really like you

know you know growth that cost is not really that big of a thing anymore like it has been in the past and so now more

than ever like marketing and sales like we’ve got to stick together you know and

um and uh to really get on the same page to help with these types of motions of really helping the individual not just

like the the purchaser or like the point of contact or like the champion you know

be able to like arm them with the the minimum information that we need to arm them with so they can go get a deal done

just because they say hey I have budget and this is what I want to do that doesn’t really cut it anymore uh it’s

got to be I have budget this is what I want to do or I don’t have budget this is what I want to do and here’s why it can help in so many different ways

across this entire organization or initiative or solve these problems in these specific ways not just for this

team or this or this whole department but actually for these individuals as well right so um that’s how we’re

assessing things over here is like you know that is there some sort

of numeric datadriven you know value ad that we can see that if we do spend the

money that we have to be able to tie it back to some sort of Roi like uh you know dollar-wise right um is kind of

where we’re at at the moment but that doesn’t mean that we’re not looking like I’m constantly looking my leadership

team is constantly looking for other tools other products other better ways of doing things with the the the big

piece of mindset being the big focus is is efficiency efficiency gains and you

know getting leads over from marketing into sales and helping sales generate their own stuff and getting uh how how

do we more efficiently move opportunities um you know through pipelines more so now than ever right um

without letting any chance of any opportunity slip through the cracks

absolutely Cody epic conversation I think you gave some amazing insights on workflows and also honestly sales is is

at its base all very much relationship experience driven always has been always

will be um and just finding the ways to incorporate technology to support that

thanks for coming again today and for the chat and uh yeah appreciate your

time man great thanks we’ll see you okay