Sales Engagement evolves to Revenue Execution - with Anna Baird, Chief Revenue Officer - 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 that Measure Up podcast. Today, I'm thrilled that we are joined by Anna Baird, the Chief Revenue Officer at outreach.io. Today, we will be covering four primary topic areas with Anna. First, sales engagement trends in 2022 and beyond, revenue intelligence as science for sales leaders. Third, platforms versus point solutions for revenue teams. What's the future? And fourth, the reality of the CRO, Chief Revenue Officer role, today and tomorrow. Anna, please take a moment to give a brief background overview of your journey to becoming a guest on the Metrics that Measure Up podcast.

**Anna Baird** (1:17)
Thank you, Ray. Super happy to be a guest. I was a partner in Silicon Valley at KPMG, one of the big accounting and consulting firms. I then became executive at McAfee and then went on to become a CFO, a COO, and now a CRO. Again, working my way through the Cs, but excited to be have been with Outreach for four years. A huge journey in creating the category that we're in and excited to talk about that.

**Ray Rike** (1:42)
Before today's episode, we were talking briefly about your very unique journey, and really it's so cross-functional. One of the things I encourage early career professionals is take the early part of your career and have the chance to see every aspect of running an organization, whether that's finance and then a role in marketing, and a role in sales, and it just doesn't happen that often today. So I just love your progression, and congratulations on your career journey this far, Anna. So recently, I hosted Jeffrey Moore, who's the author of Crossing the Chasm, which is a seminal book about go-to-market strategy, and he highlights the technology life cycle adoption curve, and it's still relevant today. But I was thinking about the category of sales engagement platforms, and it's really attained a level of adoption that I think places it subtly in the late majority as a sales tech. How do you think sales and game is going to evolve over time? Do you think it's going to move to new functions? Is it going to become a broader platform for the sales function? What's your vision of the future for sales engagement as a category?

**Anna Baird** (2:46)
Well, I think what's super interesting is we're still so new. There's companies who have no idea that this category even exists yet, and it amazes me every day. We're only 2 percent penetrated in the number of sellers that are out there. Literally, of B2B sellers, we're 2 percent penetrated. And with all of the players who are in the space today. So we are nowhere near really impacting what is going to happen for go-to-market organizations and where technology is going. And we'll talk about, obviously, where that is moving throughout this discussion today. But it is amazing that there's a lot more of discussion about sales engagement in B2B tech. I think a lot of B2B tech companies are definitely kind of jumped onto the bandwagon, but not even all tech companies understand.
Still, so there is so much more to do here. And I think as you look at the evolution, what started out as a prospecting SDR, top of funnel type tool, which is where people were trying to add workflows, because there weren't any for go-to-market teams, has now evolved. And when you see the players today, and obviously Outreach being the leader of this space, is really how do you impact the entire go-to-market team and the entire customer journey? And I think as you see people bringing in functionality and capabilities, it's all about that. So happy to take that and expand any way you'd like.

**Ray Rike** (4:00)
We're going to double-click and we're going to go pretty deep on this one, because I'm a little biased because all the research and benchmarking we do is for B2B SaaS and cloud companies. And one of our latest research programs showed that 51 percent of participating companies in their research had a sales engagement platform already deployed. So it's interesting. I think that sales engagements in the late majority, but that's definitely maybe only in the B2B SaaS world. And there's a whole world of other B2B industries out there. So, Anna, do you think it's going into new industries that's going to give you the biggest growth, or is it going to be to broaden the capabilities and be a system of execution for certain industries?