A Chief Revenue Officer's learnings from $0 - $100M+ ARR - with Mark Kosoglow, CRO Catalyst and SVP Sales, Outreach

**Ray Rike** (0:00)
Hello, I'm Ray Reich, Founder and CEO of RevOp Squared, and your host of the Metrics That Measure Up podcast. We talked to a wide variety of B2B, SaaS and Cloud thought leaders, executives, investors, and people just like you to discuss the metrics and benchmarks they use to make metrics informed decisions. Now on to today's show. Welcome to today's episode of the Metrics Measure Up Podcast. Today, we are joined by Mark Kosoglow, the Chief Revenue Officer at Catalyst Software, and the former Senior Vice President of Global Sales and Outreach. Today, we'll be covering three main topics with Mark. First, the reality of the first two to three years as a sales leader and a category creating B2B SaaS company, Outreach. Second, the lessons Mark learned on the sales leader's journey from zero to 100 million dollars plus ARR. And third, the importance of the delivery of the message while creating a culture. Is that a secret to a zero success? Mark, please take a moment to give a brief overview of your journey to becoming a guest on the Metrics that Measure Up podcast.

**Mark Kosoglow** (1:22)
Thanks for having me, Ray. Really appreciate it. Yeah, so I started my sales career. I was an outside sales rep for eight years for a company that sold stuff to schools, moved into sales leadership for five years after that at a school supply company. That's one of the largest school supply companies in the world, a publicly traded company. Then I got into the startup in the SaaS world at Outreach and was able to lead sales for eight years as Outreach became a $4.4 billion company and with over 15 or 16 hundred employees.
Now I'm the Chief Revenue Officer at Catalyst, which is trying to help companies create a growth engine through their customers. That's the 32nd TLDR path, Ray. Lots of twists and turns that I missed though.

**Ray Rike** (2:10)
Well, we're going to get a lot of additional insights from those twists and turns in your journey, but I always love it when somebody got their education selling to schools, if you get what I mean.

**Mark Kosoglow** (2:21)
I'm feeling these ad jokes.

**Ray Rike** (2:23)
Exactly. I am a recovering father, so I apologize for that. But let's talk about the education that you had at Outreach. Specifically, I saw a LinkedIn post, and for anyone, Mark is a great follow on LinkedIn if you're not doing it. But you talked about the reality of early-stage sales leadership in a B2B SaaS company. That was where Manny Medina, the founder, would actually be your primary lead source. He would work on weekends to go out and create the contacts and leads that you started following up on Monday. It reminded me how much grit is required in building a great company. Can you share with our listening audience the two or three lessons and expectations that they should be ready for if they go into sales leadership at an early-stage SaaS company?

**Mark Kosoglow** (3:10)
Yeah. I think that I'm doing that again at Catalyst, so I can tell you with a lot of recency bias, that the most important thing at a young company is pipeline, and I would say even at a mature company. That's the first thing I did when I came into Catalyst is, I worked with my marketing leader who was in the middle of revamping our demand gen strategy to make sure that we had strong marketing contribution. I then reworked with the SDR team. I was really lucky enough to have this amazing set of four SDRs that are top-notch, and I just needed to give them a little more structure and help them understand what their role and their responsibilities were every day. We started actually with my second week, we started something called a six-week pipeline push. Over that six weeks, we had our six best weeks, almost week over week of pipe gen in the entire history of the company. We just really got that pipe gen right, and pipeline solves all ill. If you can get pipeline, you can muscle your way through other kinds of results down the funnel. We got the pipeline right, that's the first thing. You have to figure out, how do I create a repeatable process in order to book meetings that convert into qualified deals? If you can't get that right, then the rest all becomes just way too pressure packed and hard.

**Ray Rike** (4:31)
Let's double-click on pipeline because I think any revenue leader out there today, that's such a high priority. If not always number one, almost always number one. You talked about repeatability. At an early stage, P2B SaaS company, you define your ICP, your ideal customer profile, maybe have unique messages for the different buyer personas. Do you find those are two of other priorities to ensure that pipeline generation can be repeatable? What else makes pipeline repeatable?