Stop Treating Agentic Cybersecurity GTM Like a Sales Project: Kristen Twining SVP Sales @ Reco

[00:00:00] [SPEAKER_00] This episode is brought to you by FastRamp2Revenue, the done-for-you new hire sales program built exclusively for cybersecurity companies. We bring the process, the frameworks, the training and the coaching. You bring your content and we customize everything for your market and for your company and run the entire program for you. You don't have to pull a single person off your team to do it. Proven at over 15 cybersecurity companies? Get your new reps selling faster.

[00:00:28] [SPEAKER_00] Visit unstoppable.do to learn more. Most cybersecurity sales teams build their target list for their reps for their teams the same way. They take their ICP, so they say, okay, it's portion 1000, it's all financial, pharmaceutical, whatever it might be, right? And they suddenly end up with a list of 463 companies, which is their target list. And then what they do is get that company list, they run it through Apollo or ZoomInfo and they get the contacts and they build it out.

[00:00:58] [SPEAKER_00] And suddenly what they have is their target list with some contacts and numbers and emails. And it's usually a big list. It's usually many accounts per rep, especially at early stages that are in that list.

[00:02:09] [SPEAKER_00] So we're going to look at the next week, but it's usually a big list. So we're going to look at the next week, not next month or next quarter. So we cover all of this in this episode, especially look out for what she told her team when she essentially changed up or ripped out their traditional tech stack. You know, all the things that we talked about there, the things that most sellers, they know very well and they mostly love or at least very comfortable with. So how does she broach that subject with the team?

[00:02:35] [SPEAKER_00] She talks about her favorite interview question for BDRs and AEs to guess the heart of how they think about AI. And by the way, her dad, who's in his seventies, would have probably aced the interview based on how he thinks about AI. So it's interesting learning right there. And we also talk about the hire that she didn't think she even needed a year ago or two years ago, didn't know existed. It was going to be part of the equation.

[00:03:04] [SPEAKER_00] In fact, it was so new that she had to run through the job description three or four times before we got to one that the team thought was the right one to go higher. So we cover all these things and a lot more in this episode. Here's Kristen. All right, Kristen, welcome to the podcast.

[00:03:31] [SPEAKER_01] Thank you so much for having me.

[00:03:33] [SPEAKER_00] I am looking forward to our discussion today. We're going to be talking about something that is, I know is top of mind for a lot of sales leaders right now. And I would probably put you in the category of someone who's maybe one of the furthest leaning forward in using AI inside the go to market motion. So we're going to get into what your thoughts are, what it means for different aspects of the go to market and any learnings you've had along the way.

[00:03:59] [SPEAKER_01] Sounds great. Looking forward to it.

[00:04:00] [SPEAKER_00] But before then, what we're going to do is spin the spin the go to market magic wheel. I'm going to call the magic wheel from now on. It sounds more interesting, right? So you ready for me to spin the wheel?

[00:04:12] [SPEAKER_01] I'm ready.

[00:04:13] [SPEAKER_00] So for those audio only, you can watch this on YouTube, but there's five categories. There's the cyber donut hot seat. There's a category called it's personal. There's no one called visionary or smoking crack. There's also the differentiation teardown and there's overrated or underrated. So let's spin that wheel. Oh, it's landed on overrated or underrated.

[00:04:39] [SPEAKER_00] So, Tristan, at the end of the episode, we're going to come back to this and I'm going to ask you, I'm going to give you three things and you have to tell me whether you think they're overrated or underrated.

[00:04:51] [SPEAKER_01] Oh my. All right.

[00:04:53] [SPEAKER_00] Nothing to worry about, but a bit of fun. So let's get into our topic today. So I know you to be someone who is, I would say, definitely, you know, leaning further forward the most into adopting AI inside what you're doing there at Rico. How did that start off? What was the realization for you that said, you know, this isn't something I should just play around with anymore. It's now something that really we need to embrace and include in everything that we're doing?

[00:05:21] [SPEAKER_01] Yeah. Well, first of all, I'll say it'd be kind of weird if I wasn't pushing hard on this. If you think about Rico and what we do, we secure AI and agents for a living. So, of course, I had to be thinking about being someone who is kind of stress testing, agentic go to market. And I think it really wasn't something I woke up one day with a master plan on. It was more of a gut instinctual feeling.

[00:05:47] [SPEAKER_01] When you look at where the market is today, whether it's what we're doing for our customers and where you see customers moving with AI and agentic forward, but also the efficiency that it can create within a sales organization. And for me, I knew that the traditional model is no longer. There are pieces and there will always be pieces of the traditional model that will be foundational.

[00:06:14] [SPEAKER_01] But I knew that something needed to change and I needed to be thinking differently about how I built and how we built our go to market organization and thinking with AI and agentic leaning forward. But quite frankly, I'll be really honest. I didn't know how I just knew that I had to do something. I had a gut feeling that the traditional model was not the model that I should build here at Rico.

[00:06:40] [SPEAKER_01] But I'd be lying if I told you that I had this big idea and plan of what that specifically was. I had pieces of a vision, but I had to really figure out what that looked like built on the foundation of I know something needs to change.

[00:06:59] [SPEAKER_00] Kristen, I am shocked that you haven't got 15 years experience of using generative AI and go to market. So there's job descriptions, right? It's the you've got to have 10 years of AI experience. Really, there's probably, you know, 100 people in the world who have experience for 10 years. But yeah, so that's interesting. So you had the gut feel to say, yeah, there's something there, you know, we've got to embrace it rather than not. For many companies, though, that can be a hard thing for them to take on, right?

[00:07:24] [SPEAKER_00] Because I think a lot of companies are in the mode of, well, you know, we kind of gave our team, you know, Claude or ChatGPT and they're going kind of crazy with that. We've got a couple of flows going on, but they really haven't embraced it. So I'm wondering, as you had your idea and you're willing to get a couple of bits of vision in place, what was the starting point?

[00:07:43] [SPEAKER_01] Yeah. So first of all, like I said, right, there's no playbook to copy here. I mean, you are basically writing a new playbook. And I think what a lot of people don't think about. So you go in and you say, I've got this feeling. I know the traditional model isn't the model that we should be embracing. And I've got this vision. Here's kind of what I think should be the plan. And you sell the pitch and what you think the outcome will be.

[00:08:08] [SPEAKER_01] But the problem is there's a lot of things that have to happen that are almost unsexy to be able to get to that plan. And I don't think a lot of people really understood that, quite frankly, even myself, right? There's a lot of things like, oh, if I really want to build an AI forward and agentic forward go to market motion, I actually need to look at the infrastructure that's been built. I actually need to look at the data. I actually need to look at the access. I actually need to look at that plumbing that nobody really wants to talk about.

[00:08:38] [SPEAKER_01] And the hardest part is when you sell the vision, everyone wants the vision to come true now. And I think the thing that I'm learning as we're going through this is the outcome comes after all of the foundation is built. And the foundation takes some time because the reality is to make this successful. What you put in is what you're going to get out.

[00:09:00] [SPEAKER_01] And so if you put something in that is wrong or built off of the wrong data or built off of the wrong infrastructure, then no matter how good the AI is, your output is not going to be what you want it to be. And that's been the hardest part because there's so much work that has to be done at the foundational layer to get to the outcome that you're selling the vision of.

[00:09:26] [SPEAKER_00] What's an example of something then that you kind of realize, you know, oh, we're just not ready. This thing needs to be fixed or changed or something in that foundational layer.

[00:09:33] [SPEAKER_01] Yeah, so I was one of those who was so excited about the vision that I'm like, OK, we put this plan into motion. We hire one of the top agencies in the world to help us. And I'm like, great, when are we going to see the results? And as we're talking about planning, the thing that got me the most was, oh, we have to really think about all of this data. Oh, we really have to think about the fact that our CRM needs to probably be adjusted a little bit here.

[00:10:01] [SPEAKER_01] Maybe it's not where we need it to be to actually build off of. So you almost you start peeling back those layers and you start peeling back that onion to only find that it's kind of messy. And that's not a bad thing. It's just if we built off of the mess, then we wouldn't get to the point where we needed to be. And so for me, one of the biggest things was it was the data.

[00:10:26] [SPEAKER_01] It was making sure that we went back and cleaned up our CRM. We went back and cleaned up even just our tech stack. Right. I mean, we had a traditional tech stack, which I'm sure a lot of sales organizations do. And we realized that that's not going to get us to where we need to be. And we need to rip that out. And I think one of the challenges there was you're basically telling the sales team, hang with me.

[00:10:54] [SPEAKER_01] I'm not going to give you your traditional tech stack that you know and love. We will get there. But I have to rip this all away from you. And that's a really hard thing to tell a sales organization that's very used to. I get my data from a Zoom info or I get my data from this over here. And yeah, we're going to rebuild an entire new stack for you. But just bear with me. We'll get there.

[00:11:17] [SPEAKER_00] Yeah. It's funny. You say the old thing about the CRM data being messed up, right? No organization has anything close to clean data in their CRM. So I get that. And usually I get that. But the other side of me is, I mean, you spend five years trying to clean up data inside a CRM and still never get there. So how do you know you're working on the bits that are really the important bits and not the bits that would be really just drag you down and slow you down?

[00:11:42] [SPEAKER_01] So I'll say two things. One, it's the collaboration with your entire team. I want to make it a point that when you're building a go-to-market agentic forward motion, you can't confuse that with I'm building a sales agentic motion. This is a company agentic motion. And so you need to make sure that you have the collaboration across your entire team, your marketing team, your rev ops team, because that's what makes all of this clean.

[00:12:10] [SPEAKER_01] You can't just from a sales perspective say, I'm going to go clean up this portion of my CRM. It has to be a full view across all of the different business units and functions. And then I would say the second piece is, I feel very confident in how we're doing it because we've hired experts to help us go do that.

[00:12:27] [SPEAKER_01] And so those are the two, I think, mechanisms of the foundations for success is lean on experts and also make sure your entire organization is with you on this because it cannot be a siloed approach.

[00:12:41] [SPEAKER_00] I would imagine when it gets rolled out to the sales team, whatever it is you're doing, there's going to be a few hiccups along the way. What's an example of something that the sales team like, ah, I don't know if this is as easy as I thought it was going to be.

[00:12:53] [SPEAKER_01] I think the sales team just wants me to move faster. Right. Like I said, when you're taking away some of the tech stack, your sales team is wanting to make sure that you're augmenting that very quickly with something to help them get moving. And so right now, I think the end result is going to be fully automated. There's a lot of things that we've built to date that have some of that automation, but there's still a manual aspect to going and getting that, but it's there.

[00:13:22] [SPEAKER_01] And so I think it's just been the growing pains of getting there and making sure that you're hitting milestones along the way. And I think for the sales team, it's right now, for example, we've cut our outbound target list by approximately 80% because we've scored for signal instead of kind of blasting to a broad list of everybody.

[00:13:47] [SPEAKER_01] And that can be hard because you've got a sales team who basically will say, hey, I'm going to develop my account target list. And they're basing that off of what we have for ICP, of course. But the reality is maybe some of those aren't ready to purchase Rico because they're not in alignment with whatever it may be that we need them to like call it AI forward or whatever it may be that we say, hey, this is the formula for a buyer outside of just the generic ICP.

[00:14:16] [SPEAKER_01] So we needed to make sure that we are helping our sales reps prioritize the targets that they're going after. All of that will be automated. But today, you have to physically sit with our go-to-market engineer and work through your list and work through that scoring to get what your prioritization looks like. And so it's call it we went from just completely saying I'm going to focus on an account list because it's my ICP.

[00:14:44] [SPEAKER_01] Our end goal is to get to a place where it's fully automated, where AI basically tells you who you should call, when and why and how. Now we're at that middle point right now where you still have to be manual to get that data, but it's trickling in. And I think that that's been one of the call it hiccups or growing pains of it goes back to my the expectation is this is going to be fully automated and everybody wants it now. But it is little wins across the way.

[00:15:11] [SPEAKER_01] And if you think that you're going to wake up one day and create a fully automated agentic forward motion in the matter of two weeks, it's not going to happen. And if it does happen, you've probably done it the right the wrong way.

[00:15:23] [SPEAKER_00] Yeah, the shortcut isn't the fast way. Right. At the end of the day, it kind of reminds me, you know, you probably are thinking, well, if I was a more junior salespeople, I'd be horrified if they said you don't get to call 100 accounts. You get to call these 15 or 20. Right. It takes someone who's quite experienced to say, no, actually, that's the right thing to do. I'm wondering if you got any resistance or raise eyebrows to the team going, you're telling me what?

[00:15:48] [SPEAKER_01] Yeah, exactly. I mean, it's a very hard concept to think about VDRs. Right. I mean, their whole their whole game is to make 500 dials a day. And and the dialing and the outbounding isn't changing. It's just making sure that they're targeting the right people at the right time who have a problem that they're willing and wanting to solve. And that's automatically going to shrink your list down.

[00:16:17] [SPEAKER_01] I mean, even when you look at your your your target accounts, I mean, you can however many accounts there are, even if you just take in the Americas. Right. Right. That's a lot of accounts to go after. And then once you shrink that list, it can be really scary to your point, because it's like, oh, does that mean my territory has shrunk? No, that actually means that you're going to be now more successful in calling this piece of this pie, because these are the people that are, quote unquote, hand raisers.

[00:16:45] [SPEAKER_01] These are the people that are fitting this model that we know works because we've assessed all of our data. Right. Right. But it looks smaller to you, but it's going to be more targeted. And that can be a very hard concept to get around for, I think, not only just sales, but also other other other business units. Right. And who we're targeting to and how we're targeting to them. And so it's I definitely think that it's a mindset shift.

[00:17:12] [SPEAKER_01] And it even just when you think of the sellers, like they have to get out of that traditional model as well and realize that I got to pull the bandaid off and it's going to be really hard. But once I get there, this is going to be great because I'm going to I am going to increase my efficiency across my BDR outcomes, across my AE outcomes. And the whole goal is to get to winning faster.

[00:17:36] [SPEAKER_00] Yeah. Yeah. I just in the last probably five or six months in my business made that shift as well from, you know, if you think about it in cybersecurity, there's 4,200, 4,300 vendors. I think, you know, my time in that is probably about 2,000 companies based on size alone. You know, the super big ones is not me and the super small ones is not me. So between five and 500 employees, 50 and 500 employees, but my target range.

[00:18:04] [SPEAKER_00] But now what I'm able to get is real triggers, real signals that are coming out saying this company over here in this space, they just announced this and they've got that coming on. They've got, you know, they just put in three new roles out for reps in the East Coast and things like that. It's OK. Now I'm a lot more intelligent about who I go and focus on. And then my messaging is more on point as well when I go out and reach out to these sales leaders. It's a big difference. I love it. I personally love it.

[00:18:28] [SPEAKER_01] Yeah. Yeah, I agree. I mean, again, it all goes to when you work for a company like Rico, we're moving so fast and we're growing so fast and we're solving a relevant problem. But we've got to get to the right people at the right time because that's only going to accelerate our motion. Right. And in order to do that, you have to have something like this in place to enable your sellers to be more efficient. If you go back to the traditional tech stack, you can argue that, well, the traditional tech stack has intent.

[00:18:58] [SPEAKER_01] And it has signals. It does, but it's not dynamic. And so what's a signal today may not be the right signal. Call it three months from now. But in order to go back and recalibrate all of that takes time. And that time gets you behind. The companies who figure this out fast and first are going to be the ones that excel, are going to be the ones that win this market. I mean, you look at some of the stats, right?

[00:19:22] [SPEAKER_01] Only 24% of B2B suppliers have deployed true agentic autonomous AI. But 45% will say, I use AI. Right. There's a whole different model here. It's not just about I use AI for forecasting or I use AI to write my emails. Right. There's a whole efficiency model in how you can really do this right. But it goes back to my point. If you don't build that foundation, you're never going to get the efficiencies that you're looking for.

[00:19:51] [SPEAKER_01] And you'll put a lot of money and waste a lot of time in just creating autonomous AI in places that don't actually accelerate your business. Yeah.

[00:20:01] [SPEAKER_00] It's fascinating this whole movement, this change that's happening like that. I feel like any change control process or big transformation like this in anyone's go-to-market is going to really put a spotlight on the people that you have in place. I'm wondering what you're being thinking about in terms of the type of people you want in the team, experience levels, aptitudes, things like that. That's changed from what you were looking for maybe two or three years ago.

[00:20:27] [SPEAKER_01] Yeah. This is such a learning process, Andrew. Andrew, it's been so interesting for me. And I love this question because the people I would have hired three years ago or maybe even two years ago are not the people that I would look to hire today. And I'll always go back to there's going to be foundations to the traditional model, right? There's foundations to a seller that you're going to hire. You want the grit. You want the hustle. You want all of those characteristics that we know and love. But to your point, this isn't just about building great tools.

[00:20:57] [SPEAKER_01] This is also about how do we bring in the right talent to make these tools efficient? Because the reality is, no matter what anybody tells you, you always need a human in the loop. You always will need a human in the loop. Like I have this view that we're to, when you think of the traditional model and you think of fully autonomous, I think that we're to the right of the middle and the left of fully autonomous. And that requires a human, but it requires a specific human. And so there's really two pieces to this.

[00:21:24] [SPEAKER_01] One is what do I look for in bringing on a BDR or an AE in this role, in this world? And then two, what are some other roles that we need to be thinking about, right? Because I think there's some new roles that have emerged as a result of this shift. And so when I think about the AE side, I don't know and I don't have all the answers. But what I do know is that when I'm interviewing for a BDR or an AE now, I always ask about AI. What are you doing with AI? How are you leveraging AI?

[00:21:53] [SPEAKER_01] And one of my favorite questions to ask is, what do you want to do with AI that you haven't done before? Because I think that that, for me, gets me to see what are they thinking ahead at? What do they really want to use Claude for that maybe because some companies they come from don't allow or don't sanction AI, right? Or maybe sanction something internal. And so maybe they don't have the creativity that they would want to have. So I don't want to fault them for that. But I also, I mean, everyone has access to AI personally.

[00:22:21] [SPEAKER_01] So what are you using for it personally, right? How are you leveraging it for your day-to-day? And some of those answers are really what gets me to say, this person's creative and forward-thinking. And this person understands it and gets it. I think if you're hiring someone who doesn't embrace AI, I don't know what we're doing here, right? Because they're probably not going to embrace what you're putting in front of them.

[00:22:43] [SPEAKER_01] Someone who is going to say, I'm just really used to my Zoom info and my, you know, 15 different tabs that I go to to get the answers. It's just my easy way. I'm comfortable with it. That's just not going to work in today's model. And so you're interviewing questions and your process has to change a little bit.

[00:23:00] [SPEAKER_00] Let me ask you on that. If you were to guess, how many folks do you talk to in the hiring process that are really just chatters? You know, they're going to a prompt, just typing things in. How many folks are, percentage-wise, are actually way beyond that? They're either thinking way beyond it or are way beyond it?

[00:23:19] [SPEAKER_01] I think it's 20% of your ladder, right? Of the thinking beyond. You still have people that are scared of AI, right? I call it, someone referred to it. I loved it. It was called the AI scaries. And you definitely have some of those people who aren't willing to embrace AI. But then, so my dad was here over the weekend and, you know, he's in his 70s and he was talking about AI and he's talking about how he's leveraging.

[00:23:46] [SPEAKER_01] And I'm sitting there thinking, wow, dad, I'm really impressed, right? You know, and he's saying, hey, and it's not just about search, right? He was, I mean, first of all, he did say, I don't even use Google anymore. I just go right to ChatGPT. But then he was giving me other examples of how he's using it in his day-to-day life on, he just renovated his entire kitchen. And he had ChatGPT basically do the entire mock-up. And he went with all of the paint colors and he went into Home Depot and he said, here are the paint colors I want. And everything was done by AI. And I love that, right?

[00:24:15] [SPEAKER_01] And I want answers like that, right? I'm not hiring my dad, by the way, for an AE.

[00:24:21] [SPEAKER_00] There's your person right there.

[00:24:23] [SPEAKER_01] Yeah, exactly.

[00:24:25] [SPEAKER_00] But you're right, though. It'd be a sad state of affairs if, no offense to your dad, but, you know, if your dad in his 70s is more advanced than his use of this, you know, fast-moving technology that's transforming so much of our world compared to the person who's trying to get a job from you. That would seem very strange.

[00:24:43] [SPEAKER_01] Yeah. Yeah. And so it's interesting. So I'm on the board for a university here in Dallas on their sales program. They have a sales program, so I'm on the board and I work a lot with the professor. And him and I have bounced ideas off of this so many times. And, you know, as he thinks about his curriculum, he's got to start educating and bringing students up to speed on what I'm hiring for. Right? Because if I'm not hiring for that traditional model anymore, he can't teach that traditional model in his class.

[00:25:13] [SPEAKER_01] So we have to not only be thinking about it from where we are today, we also have to be thinking about how are we educating students for the future and those that are going to get into the business of sales. How can you teach the traditional tech stack if I'm not going to hire for the traditional tech stack? So there's a whole process here, right? This isn't just the AE that's been doing this for 10, 15 years has to shift their mindset.

[00:25:38] [SPEAKER_01] It also has to start where you're hiring early career, where that has to be taught and they have to be able to understand how to embrace AI and leverage it in their day-to-day and know that when they join a company, that's going to be required of them.

[00:25:55] [SPEAKER_00] I'm wondering, you're looking to hire people out of the university program, I would guess, right? That's one of the ideas that you have to do. Have you seen anything from that that says, yeah, these people are rapidly progressing compared to what we might have imagined from a graduate 10, 15 years ago? Yeah.

[00:26:12] [SPEAKER_01] Yeah. And I'm to the point where I'm hiring kind of like, call it a couple years out of university, just based on how quickly I need people to get up to speed and the nature of our business. However, I will say those that are early in their career are absolutely embracing it, right? It is. I mean, they grew up in this world. They grew up in this technology world. Well, my kids are five and seven and they're using Gemini.

[00:26:41] [SPEAKER_01] So it is definitely a part of the mindset and how kids are growing up and I think how they're entering into the corporate world. But you also need to make sure that they're not over-rotating so much that they let AI do the job. And that's why I go back to that, to the right of the middle, to the left of the fully autonomous, because you have to know this isn't just about can this person grind?

[00:27:07] [SPEAKER_01] This is also about can you trust and can you operate AI efficiently? Because if you're just going to come in here and leverage AI fully and just trust it at what it puts out and not be able to call it, manipulate it, call it, it's a part of your day-to-day and you can't just take it just with any tool. You can't just take it for what it is. You have to work with it.

[00:27:34] [SPEAKER_01] And so I need people not only to say I'm embracing AI and I'm leveraging AI in everything I do. I want to hear that you're operating it and you know how to leverage it effectively. Because it's very easy to tell when AI wrote an email versus when the human was in a loop and it's an email that, okay, maybe AI helped you, but it's clear that you had a role in creating it, right?

[00:27:58] [SPEAKER_01] It's clear that you are having a conversation with AI and you are making sure that that output is something that you also impacted. And I think that's the big piece is you can't go fully automated and let it do its job for you. Let it do your job for you. You have to operate it.

[00:28:16] [SPEAKER_00] If you were to look at even two or three years, but let's say three to five years, what's the profile do you think of the enterprise cybersecurity sales rep is going to be the true proper A player that's going to thrive in this new world? What's their use? What's their use of AI? What's their own personal makeup as well that comes together?

[00:28:38] [SPEAKER_01] I don't think you're ever going to get rid of the foundational, like I need someone who's going to grind and hustle. I mean, that's always going to be something that you want. But I think it just goes back to, I have accelerated my business and I have, call it, when we talk about how many net new logos did you bring in your last company or your quota attainment, how did you leverage AI to meet that attainment? How did you see the change?

[00:29:05] [SPEAKER_01] How did you see more efficiency in your day-to-day by leveraging AI? Tell me about that. What does that look like for you? And people who are saying, hey, I was now, instead of getting two meetings a week, I was able to get eight meetings a week because I leveraged AI to do these five things for me. I targeted my account, my 30, 60, 90 day plan, right? I was actually able to accelerate that into more of a 30, 45, 60 because I leveraged AI to help me prioritize,

[00:29:32] [SPEAKER_01] to help me target, to help me know exactly where I needed to go, when and how and why. I want those type of people that are going to come prepared to conversations like that. You're never going to, like, your characteristics of a seller, in my opinion, like you've got to just have the foundation of a will to win and you just got to want it and you got to have the skill set and you've got to obviously have the knowledge of enterprise sales. But you also have to be able to demonstrate to me, how are you more efficient in today's world? Because at the end of the day, you're talking to clients.

[00:30:02] [SPEAKER_01] For me, I'm talking to clients about securing agentic forward motions in their business. If I can't demonstrate how I'm leveraging it, where does my credibility go?

[00:30:11] [SPEAKER_00] Yeah, if you're a sales rep and you're stumbling over basic phrases or concepts around this world, you're probably not going to gain too much credibility. I just had this idea that, you know, I think everyone's going to catch up, right? I mean, there's going to be right now those are embracing faster than others. But, you know, I don't know, the right timeframe is two, three years time. More and more people are going to be at a higher level, let's say, than they are right now. And then it's going to be those that have the raw DNA, the skill set they've built over years,

[00:30:41] [SPEAKER_00] that the human side of this, that we're probably the ones that really went at it because they know how to use it to be more efficient and better. But they also know that, you know, how they act and conduct themselves and their curiosity and all the rest of them from our prospects is where they're going to really make a difference. If everyone else is just, as you say, spewing out the same emails, it's all the same.

[00:31:00] [SPEAKER_01] Yeah. And I think, too, again, this isn't just about your AEs and your BDRs. This is also about new roles that are emerging. I mean, if you look at go-to-market engineering, those job postings are up over 200% year over year. Nobody even knew what a GTME was a couple years ago, maybe even a year ago. And that role is becoming increasingly important. Gartner has it all over their slides, right?

[00:31:30] [SPEAKER_01] Go-to-market engineering, one of the top roles now that's emerging. And so you're creating a role. But again, you don't really have a mature playbook for that role. I mean, you're creating a playbook. You're creating a role. And so there are things that are also emerging as a result of this, too. Because, again, you go back to you need a human in the loop. So bringing on someone like a go-to-market engineer is going to be able to help those sellers be more efficient. Because the sellers don't entirely know the how and what they're supposed to do.

[00:31:58] [SPEAKER_01] So a go-to-market engineer is going to almost, like, help make sense of all of this and deliver that to the sales team. And so that role is becoming increasingly more important. And it's just another example of, again, we didn't even know that that was going to be a role a year ago. And so I think it's also about not just your traditional, how do I hire my traditional sales team?

[00:32:22] [SPEAKER_01] There's other supporting functions that will emerge as a part of this that you need to make sure that you are leveraging and embracing and hiring as part of your plans to better enable and make sense of this new world.

[00:32:36] [SPEAKER_00] What does a great go-to-market engineer look like? Like, what's their skill set? What's their background? What have you learned around?

[00:32:43] [SPEAKER_01] Oh, my gosh. I think we're still figuring this out. I remember when we were writing the job description, I think we went through probably like five or six iterations because we just quite frankly didn't know. And we took some perspective, obviously, from the experts that we've helped to brought on to help us build this motion. But I think someone who understands the business of sales, right? Because you've got to hire someone who knows who they're working with every day.

[00:33:10] [SPEAKER_01] So when you think of go-to-market engineering, I think you'll get to a point where you have GTMEs across different functions as well. Like you'll probably have one start to emerge on marketing side, sales side, even customer success side. So I think the characteristics are going to differ a little bit based on, you know, kind of the liaison or the teams that they're going to be really implementing and working with on the day-to-day.

[00:33:36] [SPEAKER_01] But I think someone who obviously has a really good proficiency and prompts and AI and knows how to also knows how to be cost effective. I think that's one of the things that we learned. Because if you say, hey, I'm going to put everything into, I don't know, use clay for an example. Clay can get really expensive. Like, so you need to hire someone who's going to say, hey, this is going to be the really expensive route.

[00:34:01] [SPEAKER_01] I'm really proficient enough to know, like, I almost feel like it's not a degree in AI, but you know so much about it that you know how to almost manipulate it to say, I think we should go this route because this is going to be more cost effective, but it's going to give us the outcome we're looking to get. And you also need someone to kind of push back a little bit, right? And you need someone to say, hey, the sellers need this to be more effective. We need to make sure that we're building this to enable them to do that. And here's how I think we need to go do it.

[00:34:28] [SPEAKER_01] And so someone who's proficient in AI, but it's almost like a language for them. Like they understand how to translate it. And I'm still learning as we go. We have somebody on board who's stellar. She's been amazing for our team. And we're still kind of creating the playbook as we go. So I don't have all of the answers, but I do know that there's a language to AI and there's a translation.

[00:34:53] [SPEAKER_01] And that translator needs to be able to be proficient enough to take all of the outputs and to take the automation and be able to translate it effectively to how the sales team or marketing team or customer success team leverages it to be more efficient in their day-to-day. So I'm still learning.

[00:35:11] [SPEAKER_00] I think we all are, right? I think there's lots of different profiles out there. And I bet there's some who are claiming more experience than they probably have. And you have to kind of work through it. But I like that idea, though. It's almost like they have to be the AI expert or the business consultant or the sales GTM consultant as well. They can't just be in their ivory tower kind of thinking, well, this is the way to do things without really understanding how sales and marketing works.

[00:35:35] [SPEAKER_01] Yeah, they have to be able to live both worlds.

[00:35:37] [SPEAKER_00] But Kristen, one secret about you is you have your own podcast. You recently... I don't know if it's a secret, but maybe not as well known as your proper work life. You recently... Tell us about the podcast and you recently renamed it. Tell me more about that.

[00:35:51] [SPEAKER_01] Yeah. Yeah. A year and a half ago, I had this pull on my heart that I wanted to start something new. And it felt like I needed... Everyone talks about side hustles, right? It wasn't about revenue for me. It was more about, I think I need kind of more of a hobby. I mean, I work out and I go out with my friends. But my husband's big into video games. And I was like, you know, I feel like I'm missing out and I got to figure something out.

[00:36:17] [SPEAKER_01] So I looked within myself and I was like, you know, I'm a woman. I am high powered executive. I am traveling constantly. I'm a mom. I'm a wife. I'm a friend. I kind of do a lot. And I'm not sure how I always do it. And I look around and I think there's a lot of women out there like me. And I think we're all really afraid to talk about the messiness of this all. We all look polished. We all look put together.

[00:36:44] [SPEAKER_01] But nobody sees the behind the scenes of, you know, me screaming my head off at my kids to put their shoes on to go to school. No one sees what it takes to make this all work because we do it flawlessly to the outside. But on the inside, it's really messy and it's really hard. And I felt like I could help women. I felt like I could just be this, be someone who starts the conversation and be someone who says the things that maybe we only say to our friends after a couple glasses of wine.

[00:37:13] [SPEAKER_01] I wanted to be real. I wanted to be raw. I wanted to be vulnerable. And I wanted women to feel like they had a place to go to say, she's feeling that too. Thank God. Right. She sent her kid to school without shoes on today. I'm not the only one. Right. And that was just a passion on my heart. And I just started talking about it. I mean, I just kind of hit record one day. I didn't know where it was going to go. And I started to just kind of tell my stories. And I received a lot of positive feedback.

[00:37:43] [SPEAKER_01] I have a very consistent following. And I kept getting notes saying, please do more of this. Please don't stop. This is really helpful. I'm feeling this too. Oh my God. I love to hear that you're seeing this as well. And at the end of the day, I just wanted to make an impact. So it became an outlet for me. It started as Fit Fueled Female. And I think it... Originally, I thought it would be about health and wellness as well. But it just became more about everything in general, which also includes health and wellness.

[00:38:12] [SPEAKER_01] But it was a little bit more than that. And so I hired someone to do my social media and marketing. And on our first conversation, we both looked at each other and almost came to the same conclusion and said, I think we need to rebrand here. And because I think the fit part made people think, oh, this is just another gym podcast. And it's not. And so I made the decision September 1st, launched it officially. And my podcast is now called My Stilettos Hurt.

[00:38:36] [SPEAKER_01] And basically, it's just to say, hey, every day we put our stilettos on and they hurt. My feet hurt. But I do it. And I do it over and over again because I'm committed. And I'm also a big shoe lover. So it was very fitting for me. And yeah, so it's been really fun. It's been an outlet for me. I'm really excited about the rebrand. And I hope that more women will come to listen and give feedback. And I hope that they'll just have a space to say, me too. I'm going through this too.

[00:39:06] [SPEAKER_00] What's a story you've told on the podcast that you almost didn't publish? You felt like it was either too raw or I don't know, you didn't feel comfortable for you.

[00:39:15] [SPEAKER_01] I've had some really vulnerable moments on the podcast. And I'll be really honest here. I've had moments where I've caught myself getting choked up by telling my stories. And there have been those episodes where I'm like, oh my God, oh my gosh, should I release this? I've had a couple that I've talked about some of my experience being a woman in this industry that I was afraid to share in fear of any backlash. But I felt like it was the right thing to do. And I felt like people could resonate with that.

[00:39:45] [SPEAKER_01] I've also had a very personal moment where I had something happen in my childhood that I was really nervous to share. But I decided to give it a go because it was my story and I needed to own it. And I needed it to be my narrative. And that was probably one of the most hardest episodes because there was some tough backlash from that, but it all worked out in the end. And so I've really put myself out there a number of times.

[00:40:13] [SPEAKER_01] And for anyone who even listens to one episode, you will find that I do not hold back. And for some people, that might be a lot. But that's really the whole point of it is I'm not going to be that woman that gets on a podcast and says everything is great and rosy. I'm going to be the one that is going to say, this is all working out, but here's what it takes to get there. And here's what it's taken to get there. And here's what I've been through in order to make that happen. And I think more people need to hear those stories,

[00:40:39] [SPEAKER_01] even though it's hard sometimes to press that button to release the episode.

[00:40:44] [SPEAKER_00] Yeah, I agree. I think it's so powerful what you're doing. Everyone needs an outlet, I believe. And sometimes it's nice to know there's other people in the same boat as you or facing the same struggles. It's such a big part. Yep. Kristen, let's wrap things up by going back to this spin the wheel and go back to our topic. We had overrated or underrated. So I'm going to put three things on the screen here or one by one. And you have to tell me whether they themselves are overrated or underrated. Are you ready to go?

[00:41:12] [SPEAKER_01] I'm ready.

[00:41:13] [SPEAKER_00] All right. Number one, Black Hat.

[00:41:17] [SPEAKER_01] Underrated.

[00:41:18] [SPEAKER_00] Oh, tell me more.

[00:41:19] [SPEAKER_01] I really love Black Hat. I think you get the right people. You have great conversations. Everything happens outside of the booth. We all know that, right? And I just, I kind of got this sense at Black Hat that people were just there to learn and they were there to, it felt, just felt relaxed in a good way. It was busy and we had a ton of meetings and we had a lot of success, but I felt it was very genuine.

[00:41:47] [SPEAKER_01] Like people are really trying to figure this market out and they're very open-minded and they're in this mode of really wanting to explore and have really good, deep conversations to help them solve the problems that they're up against and to help them weed through this noise. And we just got a lot of value out of those smaller room conversations. And I, I didn't have such high expectations for it and it turned out to be a really great event for us. So that's why I say underrated.

[00:42:17] [SPEAKER_00] All right. Next one. Overrated or underrated? A degree in sales?

[00:42:25] [SPEAKER_01] Overrated.

[00:42:26] [SPEAKER_00] Oh, tell me more.

[00:42:27] [SPEAKER_01] I love, so there's about 50, maybe even more universities across the country that have programs in sales. And I love that. Maybe as a minor degree, but I think there's so many other facets to the business of sales. You know, people who just study the book, it's great, but you learn more by doing. There's a psychology aspect to sales. There's a marketing aspect to sales. There's so, there's a financial aspect to sales. There's an economic aspect to sales.

[00:42:55] [SPEAKER_01] So if you just pigeonhole yourself into learning the book of sales or graduating and say, I know MedPick, I'm good. There's things that have to happen to bring MedPick to life. And so you really need to make sure that you're getting a broad education across all of the things that go into the business of sales.

[00:43:14] [SPEAKER_00] That's, I really like your perspective on that. I kind of, the way I think about it is, you know, how many people are in cybersecurity sales? I don't know, let's say 500,000. How many are over-trained in financial models and the business and things like that? And how many are over-trained in medic or bent or, you know, pick your poison, right? I know which way I'd probably rather be over-trained rather than under-trained.

[00:43:36] [SPEAKER_01] Yeah. Look, I mean, you can know the book all day long, but if you're not bringing it to life day to day, you're not going to be successful.

[00:43:42] [SPEAKER_00] All right. Last one, Kristen, overrated or underrated work-life balance?

[00:43:49] [SPEAKER_01] Overrated because it doesn't exist. I call it work. So we call it work-life integration.

[00:43:56] [SPEAKER_00] Okay.

[00:43:57] [SPEAKER_01] Because I don't know anybody that has a perfect work-life balance. Let's be honest. We all strive for it, but it doesn't exist. There are days where you work 14-hour days and there are days where you got to take half the day off because you have to be there for something for your kids. Or there are days where you just need a day because you need a mental release. And so I think it's how do you integrate the two together to find your balance? There is no such thing as a perfect work-life balance.

[00:44:27] [SPEAKER_01] And so I think it's overrated, but I think you have to search for what works for you to be mentally healthy, to be physically healthy, and to perform your best. And that's just different for everybody.

[00:44:41] [SPEAKER_00] Yeah, I feel like you listen to your brain and your body to know where you are, right? And whether you need that half day or you need to go do something different or take your phone with you or don't take your phone with you when you're going to do something.

[00:44:52] [SPEAKER_01] Yeah, or just go for a walk.

[00:44:55] [SPEAKER_00] Yeah, one of the things I started doing recently is not listen to podcasts on my walk and just listen to the wind and the birds and the trees. And it's fascinating where your mind goes when you have that space to really think about things rather than just concentrating on whatever's in your ear.

[00:45:09] [SPEAKER_01] Yeah, I think we just we don't do enough of that think time, right? We don't allow our brains to just stop. And to your point, it's pretty amazing. Like my car ride to the gym every morning, I really try to keep silence. I don't even listen to music because I need that point in my day to just decompress, to just have whatever my mind is going to tell me to do and not think about anything in particular because you just need that moment.

[00:45:38] [SPEAKER_01] So I couldn't agree more.

[00:45:40] [SPEAKER_00] Well, on that note, Kristen, let's wrap this up. Thanks so much for joining us today. And we wish you and the RICO team every success the rest of the year and into 2027 as well.

[00:45:49] [SPEAKER_01] Thanks so much for having me. This was fun.

[00:46:02] [SPEAKER_00] Hey, Andrew here. One last thing. If you enjoyed this episode, will you do me one small quick favor? And that's just send it to a friend. Simple as that. Your podcast player will have a share button somewhere. Click that and then text it, Slack it, email it, whatever's easiest for you to someone you know who you think might want to listen. That's the best way you can support this show. And I really appreciate you for doing this.