# Revenue Innovations — full content corpus > Revenue Innovations is a B2B GTM revenue enablement firm. Proprietary GIVE methodology, modern revenue curriculum, custom AI tools, and senior practitioners who have carried the number. Generated: 2026-10-04T03:45:46.717Z Documents: 18 See [/llms.txt](https://www.revenueinnovations.com/llms.txt) for the short index. --- # What Is the SDR Seat Actually For? url: https://www.revenueinnovations.com/articles/what-is-the-sdr-seat-actually-for lastUpdated: 2026-06-26T22:07:09Z > Deciding on the purpose of the SDR role should not be reduced to efficiency and cost alone. The SDR is a vital training ground for future sellers. If the SDR is given over solely to AI, you may find yourself without a bench when you need it. Last week a client asked me a question I've been hearing a lot lately. Are SDRs and BDRs still worth it, now that an AI agent can do the job for a fraction of the cost? It's a fair question. The math is hard to argue with on the surface. In a recent six-month head-to-head, a human SDR generated $147K in revenue at a 71% meeting-show rate, while an AI agent generated $56K at 52%, but the AI was about 54x cheaper (Mike Kunkle ran the comparison here). A fully loaded AI SDR runs around $24K a year. A fully loaded human one runs $110K to $160K. You can see why the spreadsheet ends where it ends. So I asked a different question back. What is the SDR seat actually for? The obvious answer is meetings. Pipeline. Coverage at the top of the funnel. And if that's all the role does, then fine, the spreadsheet wins. AI books meetings cheaper, and it doesn't take a lunch break. But that's not all the role does. The SDR seat is where sellers are made. It's where a rep learns your buyer, learns your product, and learns the difference between a real opportunity and a polite no. It's where someone finds out whether they can take rejection at 10am and pick up the phone again at 10:05. It's the only farm system most revenue teams have. Nobody starts their career as a great closer. They start as someone who made a hundred bad calls and got coached through them. Here's where it gets uncomfortable. The cuts are already happening, and they're not happening evenly. Net SDR headcount in U.S. B2B SaaS is down about 18% year over year, but junior SDR roles, the zero-to-two-year seats, are down 31%. Senior SDR and manager roles are actually up 14% (SignalFire's 2026 Outbound Report). Read that again. We're protecting the top of the pyramid and removing the bottom of it. That's not a cost decision. That's a decision to stop building sellers, and most of the leaders making it haven't named it that way to themselves. They think they're trimming an expensive, replaceable function. What they're actually doing is defunding their own bench. The bill for that one doesn't come due this quarter. It comes due in three years, when you go looking for your next class of AEs and realize you stopped making them. I'm not anti-AI here. Not even close. The teams getting this right are putting one experienced human in charge of two AI seats and getting more meetings per dollar than either pure-AI or pure-human (same report). The job isn't going away. The job is changing. That's a very different thing from cutting the entry seat to make a board deck look decisive. So before you run the $24K-versus-$160K math, I'd sit with two questions. What does the SDR seat actually produce in your company, beyond the meeting count? And if you remove it, where does your next great seller come from? If you can't answer the second one, you're not ready to cut. You're ready to think. ## FAQ **Q: Q: Can AI replace human SDRs?** A: Not completely. AI can book meetings faster and roughly 54x cheaper than a human SDR, but in a recent six-month head-to-head the human still generated far more revenue: $147K at a 71% meeting-show rate versus $56K at 52% for the AI agent (Mike Kunkle). The teams getting the most out of AI aren't replacing reps. They're putting one experienced human in charge of two AI seats and getting more meetings per dollar than either approach alone. **Q: Q: Are SDRs still worth the cost in 2026?** A: Yes, if you account for what the seat produces beyond meetings. The popular comparison, a roughly $24K AI SDR against a $110K to $160K human one, only counts pipeline coverage. It ignores the seat's real output: trained sellers. The SDR role is where your next AEs learn your buyer, learn your product, and learn how to handle rejection. Cut it on cost alone and you defund your own bench. **Q: Q: What happens if you eliminate your SDR team?** A: You stop producing future sellers. The cuts are already uneven: net SDR headcount is down about 18% year over year, but entry-level roles (zero to two years) are down 31% while senior SDR and manager roles are up 14% (SignalFire's 2026 Outbound Report). Companies are protecting the top of the pyramid while removing the bottom, which means in three years they'll have no one trained to promote into the senior seats. --- # The Five Questions Every Revenue Leader Should Ask Before SKO url: https://www.revenueinnovations.com/articles/five-questions-before-sko lastUpdated: 2026-04-20T17:27:38Z > Every year, revenue leaders spend six figures and three days trying to inspire their teams at a Sales Kickoff. And every year, within two weeks of returning, most of that energy has evaporated. The problem isn't effort. It's sequence. Every year, revenue leaders spend six figures and three days trying to inspire their teams at a Sales Kickoff. And every year, within two weeks of returning, most of that energy has evaporated. The problem isn't effort. It's sequence. Most SKOs are planned backwards. starting with the venue, then the agenda, then the keynote speaker. The strategic questions that should drive every decision get answered last, if they get answered at all. ## Question 1: What Specifically Needs to Change? Not "what do we want to reinforce." Not "what's our theme this year." What specific behavior, belief, or capability is broken enough that we're willing to invest this much to fix it? If you can't answer this in one sentence, your SKO doesn't have a purpose. It has a calendar. The best SKOs we've seen start with a diagnosis. Leaders walk their teams and ask: Where are deals stalling? Where are reps going off-message? Where is the disconnect between what we're promising and what we're delivering? The answers to those questions become the design brief for the entire event. ## Question 2: What Will Reps Be Able to Do on Day One Back? This is the most underused test in SKO planning. If your team can't articulate a specific skill or behavior they'll execute differently on their first day back, you've built a morale event, not a training event. Both have value. But they're not the same thing and they shouldn't cost the same amount. The answer should be concrete: "Reps will be able to run the new discovery framework without notes." Not: "Reps will feel energized about Q2." ## Question 3: Who Actually Needs to Be in the Room? The default is everyone in the revenue org. But SKO design changes significantly depending on whether you're optimizing for the top 20% of performers, the middle 60%, or the new hires. Mixing all three in the same sessions often means you're optimizing for none of them. Some of the most effective SKOs we've facilitated use breakout tracks. different sessions for different audiences, converging on shared sessions for culture and strategy. It takes more planning. It delivers more impact. ## Question 4: What Are We Not Going to Cover? Scope creep kills SKOs. Every department wants airtime. Every leader has a message. Every product team wants to present the roadmap. The result is an agenda that tries to say everything and lands nothing. Your SKO has a finite amount of attention. Every session you add is attention subtracted from something else. The discipline of saying no. to internal stakeholders who want the mic, to topics that are important but not urgent. is what separates a focused, high-impact event from an exhausting information dump. ## Question 5: How Will We Know It Worked? Most SKOs are declared successful based on survey scores taken immediately after the event. when energy and goodwill are at their peak. That's the wrong measurement. A better question: what are we going to look at 30 and 60 days after SKO to know whether this worked? Pipeline coverage? Conversion rates from first meeting to opportunity? Message consistency in call recordings? Define that in advance. Build the event to move those numbers. Measure them after. That's the only loop that teaches you anything. --- A Sales Kickoff is one of the most expensive investments a revenue organization makes. The leaders who get the most out of it aren't the ones with the best venue or the best speaker. They're the ones who answered these five questions before anyone booked a flight. --- # Why Most B2B Companies Are Wasting Their Trade Show Investment (And What to Do Instead) url: https://www.revenueinnovations.com/articles/why-most-b2b-companies-are-wasting-their-trade-show-investment lastUpdated: 2026-04-20T17:27:47Z > The U.S. B2B trade show market hit $15.78 billion in 2024. That number is projected to climb to $17.3 billion by 2028. Companies are spending more on events than ever, and 74% of Fortune 1000 companies increased their event budgets last year. And yet, here's the stat that should keep every VP of Sales and CMO up at night: only 6% of Fortune 1000 exhibitors feel confident in their ability to convert event leads into revenue. The U.S. B2B trade show market hit $15.78 billion in 2024. That number is projected to climb to $17.3 billion by 2028. Companies are spending more on events than ever, and 74% of Fortune 1000 companies increased their event budgets last year. And yet, here's the stat that should keep every VP of Sales and CMO up at night: only 6% of Fortune 1000 exhibitors feel confident in their ability to convert event leads into revenue. Six percent. That's not a marketing problem. That's not a lead quality problem. That's an execution problem. And it starts well before anyone gets on a plane. ## The $15 Billion Paradox I recently sat down with David Howerton on our Some Goodness podcast to dig into this disconnect. David has spent years working with B2B companies on their go-to-market execution, and he sees the same pattern everywhere. "People show up without knowing why they're there," David said. "It's table stakes to be part of a show. And so that means they're lacking success criteria, ownership, and a game plan." The data backs him up. 80% of trade show leads never receive any follow-up at all. When companies do follow up, 40% wait three to five days, well past the 24-to-48-hour window where conversion probability is highest. After that window closes, the odds of converting that lead drop by 20% every single day. Meanwhile, trade shows remain one of the most cost-effective B2B channels available. The cost per lead at a trade show runs about $112, compared to $259 for a field sales call. 81% of attendees carry buying authority. 59% make a purchase decision within three months of attending. The channel works. The way most companies use it does not. ## Before the Show: Stop Treating Events Like a Vacation David's first piece of advice is a framing shift. Stop thinking about individual trade shows as standalone events. Think about them as a program, a sales channel that deserves the same operational rigor as your outbound motion or your inbound funnel. That means a few things happen before anyone leaves the office. Your account executives should have meetings booked in advance. Not just executives meeting with key accounts. Your AEs should have calendars stacked with 15- and 30-minute meetings with prospects and customers who are attending. If a rep can't get meetings booked before the show, David's question is pointed: "Is that the right representative for the organization?" Your team needs to know their roles. Who's running point at the booth? Who's doing triage on walk-up conversations? Who's in the hallways and networking sessions working target accounts? That choreography needs to be sorted out weeks before the event, not in the hotel lobby the night before. And marketing needs to arm the team with current talk tracks, collateral, and a clear narrative for the show. The best companies David has worked with hold planning sessions two to three weeks out, reinforcing what the team is pushing at this particular event and making sure everyone is on the same page. Research shows that 76% of attendee agendas are shaped by pre-event engagement. If you're not doing outreach before the show, your target prospects are filling their calendars with your competitors. ## During the Show: Conversations Over Badge Scans Here's where David's perspective gets interesting. Most companies over-index on badge scans and contact collection. The LinkedIn connections, the QR codes, the event app exchanges. Those give you a name and an email. That's it. The real value is in what gets said during conversations. What problems did they bring up? What's their timeline? Are they evaluating alternatives? Is there an internal champion or a blocker? That context is what turns a lead into a qualified opportunity. and it's what disappears fastest. "Memory decay is real," David pointed out. "The more conversations pile up, the more they run together. Even if you scribble something down, having something that allows you to expand on it quickly, using voice or a quick note between conversations, that's a major win." The practical takeaway: build time into your show schedule for note capture between meetings. Don't save it for the end of the day. By then, the details that matter most are gone. And don't limit yourself to the booth. The side conversations, the hallway meetings, the coffee break chats with competitors and partners. those often yield the most valuable intelligence. David encourages teams to think beyond "who am I selling to" and include "what am I learning" as a core objective. ## After the Show: Where Revenue Lives or Dies Post-show follow-up is where the investment either pays off or evaporates. David doesn't mince words about what goes wrong. "This handoff is a gray area for some companies. Value disappears. If you can't have speed to follow-up and you can't create the context, the nuance, what happens is it winds up in the hands of a sales team without real reason for them to follow up." The typical process is painfully linear. Go to the show. Scan badges. Wait for the data download. Triage. Load into CRM. Assign to reps. By the time a salesperson picks up the phone, it could be a week or more after the conversation happened. The context is thin. The outreach is generic. The prospect has moved on. The fix isn't complicated, but it requires discipline. Consolidate lead data within 48 hours. Segment contacts into tiers based on urgency and fit: Tier 1 for decision-makers with immediate needs, Tier 2 for influencers worth nurturing, Tier 3 for early-stage interest. Then run a multi-touch follow-up cadence across email, LinkedIn, and phone, personalized to the actual conversation you had. Companies that use integrated CRM systems for lead capture see two to three times the performance improvement over those relying on manual processes. The tool gap is a real barrier, but so is the process gap. ## The One Big Rock At the end of our conversation, I asked David if there was a single thing companies should change. His answer was immediate. "Treat it as a program. Treat this as the sales channel that it is. Have a holistic game plan that isn't just show up and scan badges." That's it. Not a tactic. A mindset. Everything else flows from there. --- # ABM Didn't Fail. Marketing Discipline Did. url: https://www.revenueinnovations.com/articles/abm-didnt-fail-marketing-discipline-did lastUpdated: 2026-04-20T17:27:36Z > Over the last decade, B2B marketing adopted more technology than any previous era. And yet pipeline efficiency declined. MQL conversion rates stagnated. Buying groups expanded while marketing teams quietly reverted to the volume tactics they once claimed to outgrow. Account-based marketing was supposed to fix this. Instead, many organizations now ask whether ABM still matters at all. Over the last decade, B2B marketing adopted more technology than any previous era. And yet pipeline efficiency declined. MQL conversion rates stagnated. Buying groups expanded while marketing teams quietly reverted to the volume tactics they once claimed to outgrow. Account-based marketing was supposed to fix this. Instead, many organizations now ask whether ABM still matters at all. The uncomfortable answer may be simpler than expected: ABM didn't fail. The discipline underneath it did. ## The Numbers Tell Two Stories On paper, ABM looks like a clear winner. Companies aligning ABM with account-based advertising report 60% higher win rates. Organizations implementing ABM document an average ROI of 145%, with elite programs delivering returns between 7.5x and 9.1x. Deal sizes increase. Companies with synchronized sales and marketing teams experience 24% faster revenue growth over three-year periods. And yet approximately 80% of ABM programs launched in recent years have failed to deliver expected results. Both things are true. ABM works extraordinarily well when executed properly. Most organizations don't execute it properly. The failure patterns are remarkably consistent. Lack of alignment between sales and marketing remains the most frequently cited reason for ABM failure. Sales teams don't trust or prioritize marketing-sourced accounts. No clear handoff process exists. Marketing tracks vanity metrics like impressions and clicks instead of revenue impact. One study found that misalignment can cost B2B companies revenue slippage of up to 10%. Forty-two percent of marketers cite limited access to accurate and actionable contact-level data as a primary barrier. Account intelligence stays trapped across CRM fields, intent platforms, enrichment tools, and sales notes. Nobody has the complete picture. ## Technology as Shortcut The pattern repeats across every marketing era. Teams buy technology expecting it to solve problems that require discipline, strategy, and cross-functional commitment. The platform becomes the shortcut. Skip the ICP development. Skip the sales alignment conversations. Skip the messaging work. Just implement the tool and ABM happens. It doesn't work that way. It never has. During the ABM platform craze of the mid-2010s, vendors sold the dream of personalization at scale. And the technology could deliver that, technically. But personalization without strategy just means faster, more scalable irrelevance. Teams implemented "personalization" that was really just token swapping. robotic, useless, a waste of everyone's time. The same pattern is emerging with AI. Teams layer AI onto broken processes expecting transformation. But AI can't tell you your CRM data is wrong. It just gives you conclusions based on what it sees. The garbage in, garbage out problem accelerates when the garbage processing runs at machine speed. ## The Distinction That Matters One-to-one ABM. the original discipline of one marketer building bespoke plans for strategic accounts. still deserves its own function. One-to-many ABM is different. That should simply be your demand generation motion now. ABM served its purpose. It broke the bad habits. The batch and blast. The reliance on MQL volume over quality. It forced focus on right accounts, right people, customized messages, signals to guide timing. With current technology, data infrastructure, and AI capabilities, there's no reason this can't be your full go-to-market approach. ## What the Fundamentals Actually Require The work that makes ABM succeed isn't glamorous. It doesn't fit neatly into a technology purchase. First, genuine ICP development. Not TAM sizing for board presentations. Your total addressable market is a vanity number. Your ICP defines who will actually succeed with your product, who your sales team can realistically engage, who won't churn in six months. Second, deep research on what your ICP segments actually care about. Not generic industry challenges. Specific priorities, strategic imperatives, the problems keeping executives awake. Third, signal integration so you understand where accounts sit in their buying journey. Organizations using intent data report a 70% increase in qualified pipeline compared to traditional lead generation. Fourth, buying group orchestration. Marketing over-indexed on individuals with MQLs. ABM over-indexed on accounts. The real target is the buying committee. Fifth, data hygiene. This has become non-negotiable. If your CRM data is unreliable, your ICP will be wrong. Your AI insights will be wrong. Everything downstream compounds the error. ## The Real Question for 2026 Every year, marketing teams plan strategies around new tools, new channels, new tactics. Most of those plans will underperform because they skip the foundational work. The question for 2026 isn't whether ABM matters. It's whether your organization has the discipline to do marketing well. If the answer is yes, ABM principles embedded into your full demand generation motion will outperform. If the answer is no, the next tool won't save you either. --- # The Storytelling Trap: Why Most Business Content Fails and What GTM Leaders Should Do Instead url: https://www.revenueinnovations.com/articles/the-storytelling-trap lastUpdated: 2026-04-20T17:27:43Z > Every few years, business rediscovers storytelling. Job titles shift. Teams reorganize. According to a recent Wall Street Journal article, companies are now "desperately seeking storytellers," with LinkedIn job postings using the term doubling in a single year. Executives increasingly invoke storytelling on earnings calls. Marketing functions rename themselves around the concept. Every few years, business rediscovers storytelling. Job titles shift. Teams reorganize. According to a recent Wall Street Journal article, companies are now "desperately seeking storytellers," with LinkedIn job postings using the term doubling in a single year. Executives increasingly invoke storytelling on earnings calls. Marketing functions rename themselves around the concept. This should make you pause. Not because storytelling is wrong. But because when something becomes fashionable in business, it's usually being misunderstood. The WSJ accurately diagnoses the environment. Earned media is shrinking. Trust is harder to earn. AI has flooded the market with generic content. Brands now publish directly through blogs, podcasts, social channels, and events. With no external filter, companies feel exposed and want tighter control of their narrative. The reflexive response is to hire storytellers. That response misses the real problem. ## The Problem Isn't Content Volume. It's Narrative Discipline. Executives estimate they waste more than forty days a year on ineffective presentations, while nearly seventy percent of company messaging feels interchangeable. Organizations produce more content than ever, yet attention and impact continue to decline. This isn't a creativity problem. It's a discipline problem. Most companies aren't failing to tell stories. They're failing to impose constraints on what gets told, why it gets told, and what decision it's meant to influence. Storytelling has been reduced to decoration. A customer quote on a slide. An anecdote at the top of a deck. A few favorite stories sellers repeat regardless of audience. These gestures feel human, but they rarely change how buyers think or act. Real storytelling isn't additive. It's subtractive. Journalists and screenwriters work inside unforgiving constraints. Word counts matter. Attention is earned sentence by sentence. Audiences leave when bored. These constraints force ideas to earn their place. Business content has no such discipline. Slides multiply. Messages sprawl. Every feature wants airtime. Calling this storytelling doesn't fix it. ## The Protagonist Problem The most common storytelling failure is self-orientation. Customers aren't protagonists in your story. They're protagonists in their own. They wake up managing risk, pressure, incomplete information, and competing priorities. A story only matters if it helps them interpret their situation more clearly than they could on their own. This is why so much "storytelling" fails. It centers the company, not the buyer. Your product isn't the hero. At best, it's a tool that appears at the right moment in someone else's story. Until you internalize that shift, storytelling remains theatrical rather than operational. ## Expertise Isn't a Story Deep expertise is valuable. It's also frequently an impediment to clarity. The fix isn't simplification for its own sake. It's sequencing. Strong stories establish a shared reality first. They name the tension second. They resolve the tension last. Business messaging usually starts with the resolution, assuming the audience already agrees on the problem. They don't. This is why surprising or contrarian stories work. Surprise signals that the listener's current mental model may be incomplete. That moment of disorientation creates attention. Without it, you're just adding to the noise. ## Stakes Are the Missing Layer Every meaningful business story has stakes. Missed forecasts. Lost deals. Regulatory risk. Operational failure. Customer churn. Human consequences follow all of these. When stories avoid stakes in favor of sanitized feature descriptions, they become forgettable. ## What to Do: A Story Discipline Framework 1. Audit Your Current Narratives. Can every seller articulate your core story in under sixty seconds? Does your messaging name a tension the buyer feels but hasn't fully articulated? When did you last cut a message? 2. Impose Real Constraints. Decide which tensions you'll name publicly. Align stories to buying stages, not org charts. Early-stage buyers need problem stories. Late-stage buyers need proof stories. 3. Retrain Your Leaders and Sellers. Stories should function as diagnostic tools, not monologues. Practice the "you, not us" test: before any presentation, count how many slides focus on your company versus the buyer's situation. 4. Model the Behavior You Want. Set narrative standards. Make it clear that volume isn't valued. impact is. Reward curiosity over confidence. 5. Measure Differently. Stop measuring content output. Start measuring narrative impact: win rate by story used, time to first meaningful buyer response, message consistency across the organization. ## The Real Opportunity In a world saturated with AI-generated content, disciplined human storytelling becomes a competitive advantage precisely because it's rare. Not emotional fluff. Not brand theater. Coherent, constrained narratives that help buyers think better and decide faster. Your standard should be simple: Not more stories. Better ones. Fewer of them. Anchored to real stakes and real decisions. Anything else is just content wearing a costume. --- # Why the MQL is a Failed Metric (And What to Measure Instead) url: https://www.revenueinnovations.com/articles/why-the-mql-is-a-failed-metric lastUpdated: 2026-04-20T17:27:49Z > For nearly two decades, the Marketing Qualified Lead (MQL) has been the central currency of B2B marketing. We've built entire funnels, dashboards, and compensation plans around this single number. But what I find is that the MQL is fundamentally broken. For nearly two decades, the Marketing Qualified Lead (MQL) has been the central currency of B2B marketing. We've built entire funnels, dashboards, and compensation plans around this single number. But what I find is that the MQL is fundamentally broken. In today's GTM motion, it's a vanity metric that does more harm than good. It rewards marketing for activity that has no correlation to revenue, it creates a huge chasm between sales and marketing, and it burns your most expensive resource: your sales team's time. It's time to declare the MQL a failed metric. There is a far better way to measure marketing's contribution to the business. ## The Anatomy of a "Successful" Campaign I've seen this scenario play out hundreds of times. Marketing launches a new, gated whitepaper. The campaign is a "huge success". it generates 1,000 MQLs! The marketing team celebrates hitting their quarterly goal, and the leads are passed over to the SDR team. Then, reality hits. This is what I call the Revenue Chasm. Sales stands on one side, staring at a list of 1,000 names. After weeks of calls, they discover: 400 are students, competitors, or have fake contact info. 500 are "tire-kickers" who just wanted the free content. 50 are lukewarm and might be interested... in 12 months. 0 are ready to have a sales conversation. The SDRs are demoralized, having wasted 80% of their time chasing ghosts. The sales leaders are furious, declaring, "Marketing's leads are junk." And marketing is baffled, asking, "We gave you 1,000 leads. Why can't you close?" The MQL model doesn't measure value; it measures noise. It incentivizes marketing to generate the highest volume of leads at the lowest cost, regardless of their intent to buy. ## A Better Metric: Pipeline Contribution ($) Instead of obsessing over MQLs, I advise my clients to change the dashboard entirely. The only metric that truly aligns marketing and sales is Pipeline Contribution. This is measured in two simple, unforgiving ways: Marketing-Sourced Pipeline ($): The total dollar value of new sales opportunities that marketing's efforts originated. Marketing-Influenced Pipeline ($): The total dollar value of all opportunities that marketing "touched," demonstrating their role in accelerating deals they didn't originate. Shifting to these metrics changes the entire GTM dynamic. It forces marketing and sales to agree on the single most important definition: "What is a qualified opportunity?" When marketing is on the hook for a pipeline number, not a lead number, their behavior changes overnight. They stop asking "How do we get more downloads?" and start asking "How do we get the right 100 accounts into a sales conversation?" ## The Proof: A Tale of Two Marketers Imagine two marketing leaders, Mark and Jen, who both have a $100,000 quarterly budget. Mark (The MQL Hunter): Spends his $100k on gated content syndication to maximize MQLs. Result: 2,000 MQLs at $50/MQL. The MQLs have a 1% conversion rate to a real opportunity. Business impact: 20 opportunities, $500,000 in Marketing-Sourced Pipeline. Jen (The Pipeline Builder): Spends her $100k on targeted, non-gated content to their top 500 accounts and high-value customer-story webinars. Result: Only 100 "hand-raisers." Her "lead" volume looks 20x smaller than Mark's. But these high-intent leads have a 40% conversion rate to an opportunity. Business impact: 40 opportunities, $2,000,000 in Marketing-Sourced Pipeline. Mark hit his vanity metric. Jen was 4x more effective at her actual job: building the sales pipeline. ## How to Bridge the Revenue Chasm Change the Scoreboard. Get sales and marketing leadership in a room. Formally agree on the definition of a "Sales Qualified Opportunity" (SQO). This is your new handoff point. Change the Compensation. Stop paying marketing bonuses based on MQL volume. Start compensating them based on Marketing-Sourced Pipeline ($) and, as a secondary metric, pipeline velocity. Stop Measuring "Leads," Start Measuring "Intent." Stop gating all your content. Use it to educate and warm up your target accounts. Save your forms for high-intent actions, like "Request a Demo" or "Talk to Sales." ## From Activity to Accountability The shift from MQLs to Sourced Pipeline is about changing the conversation from, "How many leads did we get?" to, "How much pipeline did we create?" It forces marketing to stop being a "lead factory" and become a true partner in revenue. It eliminates the Revenue Chasm by giving sales and marketing one shared goal and one number to rally around. --- # Why Your Win Rate is a Vanity Metric (And What to Measure Instead) url: https://www.revenueinnovations.com/articles/why-your-win-rate-is-a-vanity-metric lastUpdated: 2026-04-20T17:27:51Z > For decades, sales leaders have lived and died by one number: the win rate. We present it in board meetings, use it to stack rank our reps, and often see it as the ultimate measure of our success. In today's complex B2B sales motion, however, the win rate can be one of the most misleading numbers on your dashboard. For decades, sales leaders have lived and died by one number: the win rate. We present it in board meetings, use it to stack rank our reps, and often see it as the ultimate measure of our success. In today's complex B2B sales motion, however, the win rate can be one of the most misleading numbers on your dashboard. What I find is that it often becomes a vanity metric. It tells you what happened, but it tells you nothing about the incredible cost of that win. It can hide deep inefficiencies and lead you to celebrate deals that were actually unprofitable for the business. ## The Anatomy of a "Vanity Win" We've all seen it. The team lands a huge, well-known logo. The announcement goes out, high-fives are exchanged, and the win rate for the quarter gets a healthy boost. But what did that "win" actually cost? In most cases, it was a deal that took 18 months to close, consuming hundreds of hours from your top sales rep. It pulled in your best solutions engineer for countless custom demos. Your product team was sidetracked with one-off feature requests, and in the final hour, you gave up a 35% discount to get it over the line. Everyone celebrated the logo, but no one calculated the cost. The win rate went up, but the business may have actually lost ground. ## A Better Metric: Cycle Yield Instead of obsessing over the win rate, I advise my clients to focus on a far more powerful metric: Cycle Yield. I define Cycle Yield in simple terms: Revenue Generated per Selling Hour. This metric completely changes the conversation. It measures the efficiency of your sales process, not just the outcome. It forces you to ask a much smarter question: for every hour a rep invests in selling, what is the actual revenue return? ## The Proof: A Tale of Two Reps Imagine two of your account executives, Sarah and David, who both had a quarterly quota of $200,000. At the end of the quarter, they both hit their number. Sarah (The Grinder): Logged 250 selling hours. Cycle Yield: $200,000 / 250 hours = $800 per selling hour. David (The Strategist): Logged 160 selling hours. Cycle Yield: $200,000 / 160 hours = $1,250 per selling hour. The difference is stunning. David is over 50% more efficient than Sarah. He has a scalable process; Sarah is on a path to burnout. The traditional leaderboard would call them equal. Cycle Yield shows you the truth. ## Why Were Their Hours Different? The difference isn't about one person working less. it's about one person's process being dramatically more efficient. Ruthless Qualification: Sarah likely spent dozens of hours chasing prospects that David would have disqualified after the first call. David says "no" more often and earlier. Precision Prospecting: David spends more time on research for fewer accounts, resulting in a higher conversion from outreach to qualified opportunity. Process Discipline: His deals move through the pipeline with more velocity because he's more effective at identifying the real buying committee and establishing urgency. ## How to Measure Cycle Yield The responsibility isn't on the rep to track this. it's on leadership to build a model using data that already exists in your tech stack. You can approximate "selling hours" by pulling data from your calendar (time in customer-facing meetings) and your CRM (time spent on logged calls and emails). Is it perfect? No. But it is directionally accurate and allows you to start making smarter decisions. ## What to Do With This Insight Transform Coaching: Instead of "good job hitting your number," ask "how can we get you into higher-value conversations that require less effort for more return?" Sharpen Your Strategy: Analyze Cycle Yield by market segment, lead source, or deal size. You might discover that your high-volume SMB motion has a terrible yield, and you should reallocate resources to the enterprise, where your yield is 3x higher. Build a More Predictable Business: Teams with higher Cycle Yields are more predictable. They aren't reliant on a huge volume of low-probability deals to hopefully cross the finish line. The shift from judging outcomes to diagnosing process efficiency is the mark of a modern, data-driven revenue leader. --- # Rethinking Customer Health: It's Not About Who Likes You url: https://www.revenueinnovations.com/articles/rethinking-customer-health lastUpdated: 2026-04-20T17:27:39Z > We've all seen it. A cheerful Net Promoter Score slides across the screen in a board meeting, and for a moment, it feels like a win. But then someone shifts in their seat and asks, "Do we really know how our customers are doing?" That pause says everything. We've all seen it. A cheerful Net Promoter Score slides across the screen in a board meeting, and for a moment, it feels like a win. But then someone shifts in their seat and asks, "Do we really know how our customers are doing?" That pause says everything. Because deep down, we know: liking you isn't the same as staying with you. And it certainly isn't the same as growing with you. Customer health isn't just a number. It's a mirror, showing you what's working, what's misunderstood, and what's barely holding together. ## When NPS Isn't Enough For years, companies have leaned on NPS as the heartbeat of customer experience. It's simple, recognizable, and easy to plot on a chart. But that simplicity has a cost. NPS doesn't predict renewals. It doesn't reveal product usage. It doesn't tell you if your customers are actually getting what they came for. It's a signal, but not a summary. That's why leading companies are moving to a new model with three parts: relationship quality, product usage, and value realization. ## Part 1: Relationship Quality (Beyond Polite Emails) Do they like us? Will they refer us? That's a beginning. But real relationship quality goes deeper. Are your customers willing to go on record with you? Speak at a conference? Join you in a case study? If they've trusted you with their reputation, that's a much stronger signal than a 9 on a survey. And sometimes, the real insights aren't objective; they're emotional. A customer who pushes back, asks hard questions, stays engaged even through frustration? That might be the healthiest relationship you've got. ## Part 2: Product Usage (Yes, But How?) Most companies track usage. Fewer ask what the usage means. A customer might be logging in regularly, but are they exploring new features? Are they expanding to new teams? Are they relying on your product to solve strategic problems, or just using it to check a box? Usage data exists in your system right now. But usage without insight is just noise. If customers are under-using your platform, you're vulnerable, not just to churn, but to missed opportunity. ## Part 3: Value Realization (The Gold You Have to Mine) This is the hardest piece to measure. And the most important. Are your customers actually achieving the outcomes they bought you for? Most companies can't answer that. They forget to capture a baseline. They don't revisit the original problem. And when renewal time comes, they cross their fingers and hope goodwill is enough. But goodwill fades. Results last. That's why value realization requires collaboration. Sales has to know what problem was sold. Customer success has to track whether that problem was solved. And someone has to ask, "What changed?" ## It's a Team Sport Too often, customer health lives in one department. But the reality is it takes all of them. Marketing hears early signals. Sales captures the original intent. Success sees the day-to-day reality. Product notices patterns of use and non-use. Finance sees when the invoices stop getting paid. If your teams are only looking at their own dashboards, you're missing the bigger picture. ## What QBRs Could Be QBRs should be gold: a moment to sit down, compare notes, and plan what's next. But too often, they become tactical check-ins or complaint sessions. The fix? Reframe the purpose. QBRs aren't status reports. They're strategic checkpoints. An invitation-only opportunity to co-create the next phase of the partnership. Put a velvet rope around the QBR. Pre-align with champions. Surface issues in advance. Frame the meeting around goals, not grievances. And don't just talk about the value you've delivered. invite your customer to reflect it back. ## Start Where You Are If your current view of customer health is just a survey score and a handful of anecdotes, that's okay. You don't need a perfect model to start. Sit down with your customer success lead and your top sales rep. Look at those three categories and ask: What do we already track? What are we guessing at? What would help us predict retention better? Then build a simple scoring system. Test it. Tweak it. Let it evolve. The goal isn't to replace gut instinct. It's to give that instinct something to work with. Because when you truly understand what keeps your customers healthy, you're not just protecting revenue. You're building trust. And trust, unlike a survey score, doesn't fade. --- # A Stack of Good Intentions: Simplifying Marketing Ops url: https://www.revenueinnovations.com/articles/a-stack-of-good-intentions lastUpdated: 2026-04-20T17:27:35Z > There's something deeply satisfying about a clean dashboard. The way it looks. The promise it holds. But that feeling fades fast when the data doesn't speak, the tools don't connect, and no one remembers who bought what or why. That's the quiet problem marketing leaders like Dreya Armstrong are tackling, one calendar invite, one MarTech audit, one frustrated team at a time. Dreya was a guest on our latest episode of "Some Goodness." There's something deeply satisfying about a clean dashboard. The way it looks. The promise it holds. But that feeling fades fast when the data doesn't speak, the tools don't connect, and no one remembers who bought what or why. That's the quiet problem marketing leaders like Dreya Armstrong are tackling, one calendar invite, one MarTech audit, one frustrated team at a time. Dreya was a guest on our latest episode of "Some Goodness." The real work of marketing isn't stacking tools. It's making them useful. There's a rhythm to how these tools appear. A vendor says it'll save time. A colleague used it at their last job. A competitor mentioned it at a conference. The purchase gets made. The training happens. Then silence. No one opens it. No one knows where to start. No one has time to figure it out. Eventually, it's not a tool anymore. It's a trophy. Dreya put it plainly: "Automation without understanding is like painting a dirty room." It hides the mess instead of fixing it. ## Complexity Leaves Clues Want to find what's broken? Don't start with the tools. Start with the tension. Listen for eye-rolls. Notice where people get defensive. Pay attention when someone says, "Well, that's just how we've always done it." Emotion is data. Frustration is a flag. These aren't small annoyances; they're early warning systems. ## Too Many Tools, Not Enough Alignment The danger zone is mid-size. Big enough for tool sprawl, not big enough for a governance layer. Marketing has a tool. Sales has theirs. Customer success is off doing their own thing. Everyone's solving the same problems in different ways, and no one's comparing notes. That's how you end up with four CRMs, six email platforms, and a reporting stack that requires a legend. The fix isn't a better system. It's a better question: "What are we using this for?" If the answers are vague or historical, it might be time to let it go. Draw the stack. Circle what matters. Eliminate overlap. ## Bridging the Tech Gap If you've ever been in a meeting where marketers and analysts are talking past each other, you know the problem isn't intelligence. It's language. "Campaign" means one thing in Salesforce, another in Marketo, and something entirely different to the person writing subject lines. Dreya's advice? Start by assuming good intent. Then build from there. Marketers should explain not just what they want, but why. Analysts should prepare for some translation work. And everyone should expect to meet in the middle. ## First Step? Look at the Work If you want to simplify, start with what your team is already doing. Dreya runs a dead-simple audit: for one week, have every team member write down what they worked on. Then ask honestly, "Does this tie directly to one of our core goals?" If 30% or more of the work doesn't connect, the issue isn't effort. It's focus. She also uses a weekly "Three Up, Three Down": what got done last week, what's on deck this week. No slides. No filler. Just rhythm. ## Simplification Has a Soul We like to think the wisdom sits at the top. But often, the newest hire is the one who sees what's actually slowing us down. Dreya schedules regular "show and tell" sessions where someone on her team demos a new shortcut, system, or AI trick. It's a way to keep learning alive. To flatten the hierarchy, just enough. Because the goal isn't to control the stack. It's to clear the path. And that only happens when leaders are willing to listen, simplify, and when needed, start over. --- # The Space Between the Questions url: https://www.revenueinnovations.com/articles/the-space-between-the-questions lastUpdated: 2026-04-20T17:27:41Z > One year in. When we started Some Goodness, the idea was simple. What if we captured the kinds of conversations we were already having with leaders, the ones that didn't make it onto the slide deck, but stuck in our minds for days? One year in. When we started Some Goodness, the idea was simple. What if we captured the kinds of conversations we were already having with leaders, the ones that didn't make it onto the slide deck, but stuck in our minds for days? We weren't looking for answers, exactly. We were looking for clarity. And maybe permission. Permission to ask questions we didn't have tidy language for. Permission to admit that growth isn't always formulaic, and leadership doesn't always come with a playbook. Now, a year in, that hasn't changed. But something else has. It's not just the topics that stayed with me. It's the space in between them. The pause before a guest answered. The quiet conviction behind a story they almost didn't tell. The moment they stopped describing their work and started revealing their why. That's where the real learning lives. ## What Makes a Conversation Stick Some themes came up again and again. Clarity is kindness. Consistency builds trust. Good strategy has fingerprints. But the episodes that stayed with me weren't just well structured. They were deeply human. Jack Galloway talked about what it takes to enter a difficult conversation with curiosity instead of certainty. How real leadership doesn't begin with judgment. It begins with a question. Larry Sweeney reminded us that most people won't remember your 20-slide deck. But they will remember how you made them feel. Storytelling isn't a tactic. It's a way of making your message portable so others can carry it forward, even when you're not in the room. Stacy Leidwinger brought clarity to messaging, but her insight reached further: consistency isn't a creative limitation. It's the thing that turns language into memory. And Chris Strammiello offered the kind of practical wisdom we sometimes overlook. He didn't just talk about owning a strategy; he talked about the weight of it. About how owning a morning might be the first step to owning a day, and why space is the leader's most overlooked resource. ## What Leaders Said Without Saying It There was something else, too. A pattern not in the answers but in the posture. These leaders weren't performing. They were building. And sometimes rebuilding. They talked about trust. About learning to get out of the way. About giving others room to lead, not as a tactic, but as a discipline. They were unafraid to admit what didn't work. And they were generous in sharing what eventually did. That kind of openness can't be faked. And maybe that's what I've learned the most this year: Leadership isn't defined by the room you command. It's defined by the space you create. ## Not a Recap, a Reminder This isn't a greatest hits post. It's a thank you. To the leaders who joined the conversation with humility and presence. To the listeners who took these episodes and passed them to a colleague, a mentee, or a friend. And to those quietly working out what their next step should be, wondering if anyone else is navigating the same tension. You're not alone. We don't have to have all the answers. But we can keep asking better questions. And we can keep learning from the space in between. --- # When Strategy Becomes Personal url: https://www.revenueinnovations.com/articles/when-strategy-becomes-personal lastUpdated: 2026-04-20T17:27:46Z > You can tell when it shifts. At first, strategy is something leaders talk about like it's external. A plan someone else made. A target someone else set. A deck they were asked to present. You can tell when it shifts. At first, strategy is something leaders talk about like it's external. A plan someone else made. A target someone else set. A deck they were asked to present. But if they lead long enough and care deeply enough, it changes. It becomes something they own. Something they shape. Something that starts to sound more like them. That's what came through in our conversation with Chris Strammiello on Episode 25 of Some Goodness. It wasn't just strategy. It was strategy with fingerprints. ## From Execution to Creation Most sales leaders earn their place by being exceptional executors. They follow the plan. Deliver results. Run the playbook with discipline. But Chris drew the line clearly: there's a moment when following the plan isn't enough. At the top, you're no longer judged by how well you execute someone else's strategy. You're measured by how well you build your own. And that kind of leadership doesn't reward precision. It rewards perspective. ## What You Don't Like Might Be What You Need Chris said: "Sometimes the body part you like to train least is the one you really need to train most." He was talking about marketing events. not his favorite. But it applies to just about everything. The parts of leadership we tend to avoid? They're often the ones growth will eventually demand. You don't get to skip what makes you uncomfortable. You have to grow through it. Not because you love it. But because the business needs it. ## Seeing Beyond the Center A lot of sales leaders know their customers. They know their space. They've built playbooks that work. But what they often lack is the ability to discern what is happening outside of that center. They don't see what's next. Growth isn't just about going deeper into what you're good at. It's also about looking sideways, at adjacent opportunities, neighboring needs, emerging gaps. That's where leadership starts to move from tactical to strategic. ## If You Want Support, Bring the Proof When it comes to board conversations, Chris doesn't sugarcoat it. "It's all about the numbers," he says. Strategy without proof is just an idea. If you want momentum behind your growth plan: back it up with numbers, show it's repeatable and scalable, lay out the upside and the risk, and demonstrate that your peers support it too. You're not just trying to be persuasive. You're trying to be credible. And credibility is the bridge between your vision and their approval. ## Alignment Comes from Ownership, Not Agreement If you want your team to align, involve them. Let them help shape the last 10 percent. Ask the questions you're actually willing to act on. Don't surprise them with a plan; help them see their fingerprints on it. Because when people help build something, they're far more likely to carry it. Chris said it simply: "It's not your pitch, it's our pitch." ## Leading When the Strategy Isn't Yours Of course, not every leader gets to build the plan. Sometimes, you're handed one. Chris's advice? Ask the questions anyway. Don't fake alignment. Get to the truth of it. Then once you're clear, own it. Because your team will take their cue from you. Leadership doesn't require agreement. It requires conviction. ## Own the Morning At the very end of our conversation, Chris shared something quiet. Something real. He gets up early. Not because he's a morning person. But because that's when the day still feels like his. He reads. He walks. He puts his feet in the sand. Watches the sunrise over the water. "It's hard to have a bad day after that," he said. It reminded me: we don't just lead teams or shape strategy or drive outcomes. We carry weight. A lot of it. And we need spaces to reset. To breathe. To remember who we are before the meetings start. Because that's where clarity begins. And clarity is what others are following. --- # What We Say Over and Over url: https://www.revenueinnovations.com/articles/what-we-say-over-and-over lastUpdated: 2026-04-20T17:27:44Z > It wasn't a statistic that persuaded them. It wasn't a product demo. It wasn't even the deck. It was the sixth story. It wasn't a statistic that persuaded them. It wasn't a product demo. It wasn't even the deck. It was the sixth story. Stacy Leidwinger shared this account almost in passing on Episode 24 of the Some Goodness podcast. A deal in progress. A team deep into acquisition discussions. And somewhere along the way, the person sitting across the table realized something: Stacy just kept telling the truth. Customer after customer. Story after story. Six total. None of them were dressed up. There weren't soaring metaphors or glossy promises. Just clear, consistent reminders of what the company had done and who it had helped. When the meeting ended, the executive said it plainly: the reason he came back wasn't flash or novelty. It was evidence. Something in the pattern said, "This is real." That's the moment that stayed with me. Not because it was dramatic, but because it was ordinary, and powerful. We spend a lot of time trying to get messaging right. The exact phrase, the better stat, the sharper metaphor. But here's what we forget: clarity repeated is more persuasive than brilliance delivered once. Consistency isn't sexy. It doesn't win awards or make headlines. But it builds something far more valuable. Trust. That sixth story wasn't different from the first five. That was the point. When we say the same thing across marketing, sales, product, success, and yes, even partners, people stop wondering if we're performing. They start believing that we mean it. And in a world thick with noise and spin, belief is rare currency. Too often we confuse volume with repetition. But those are not the same. Repeating the message isn't about being loud. It's about being clear, over and over again. That means it's okay if your white paper sounds like your pitch. It's okay if your sales deck echoes your website. It's okay, wise even, if customer success shares the same value language you used to close the deal. The goal isn't novelty. The goal is recognition. When messaging is rooted in the words your customers already use, tested with real humans, and shaped to answer real pain, you don't have to "sell" it. It starts to speak for itself. That's what a good message does. Not once. Not perfectly. But reliably. A message that can travel from SDR to AE to CSM and still sound like the same story. That's the one that sticks. And if you're wondering how to get there? It's not magic. It's listening. To your customers, your partners, your front-line team. It's testing. It's tuning. It's telling that sixth story even when you think they've heard enough. Because the truth is, they probably haven't. --- # GTM Inflection Sprint url: https://www.revenueinnovations.com/services/gtm-inflection-sprint lastUpdated: 2026-10-04T03:43:08Z > The GTM Inflection Sprint is a 90-day, senior-led engagement. In the first two weeks we find where your motion is breaking, using the four layers of the GIVE Method. Then we rebuild the broken layer, train your team to run it, and measure the result. ## Signs you need a Sprint Deals stall late in the cycle and no one can explain why. The forecast slips every quarter, with a different reason each time. You raised money or changed leaders, and the motion hasn't caught up. The team is working hard. The number isn't moving. Teams in this spot rarely need more activity. They need to know which part of the motion is broken. A six-month diagnostic doesn't fit that timeline. ## How the Sprint works ### Weeks 1-2: Find the real gap We audit your pipeline through the GIVE lens. We look at where deals stall and which of the four layers is causing it: Guided Interactions: reps aren't navigating the buying committee. Insights: messaging isn't creating urgency. Value: you can't quantify the cost of inaction. Empowered Buyers: your champion can't sell internally. ### Weeks 3-6: Redesign the broken layer Usually it's one or two of the four. Rarely all four. We rebuild what's broken and leave what works alone. ### Weeks 7-12: Implement, train, measure We put the new motion in your team's hands, train them on it, and track whether it's working. You own the system when we leave. ## Client example: Trinity Industries > Trinity Industries came to us with eight business lines selling independently. We redesigned their GTM motion around vertical specialization, on a performance-based contract. They exceeded revenue targets and won multi-million-dollar deals they weren't winning before. ## FAQ **Q: How long does the GTM Inflection Sprint take?** A: 90 days. Two weeks of diagnosis, four weeks of redesign, and six weeks of implementation, training, and measurement. **Q: Who does the work?** A: A senior practitioner leads every engagement. Our partners have carried quota and led revenue teams themselves. **Q: Do we have to replace our sales methodology?** A: No. We're not here to rip and replace. The Sprint finds the broken layer and fixes it inside the way your team already sells. **Q: What happens after week 12?** A: Your team owns and runs the system. If the diagnosis points to a gap in the story your reps tell, our Sales Messaging work is the natural next step. **Q: How do we start?** A: Book a 30-minute call. Tell us what's broken. We'll tell you if the Sprint is the right fit. --- # Sales Messaging url: https://www.revenueinnovations.com/services/sales-messaging lastUpdated: 2026-10-04T03:43:08Z > Sales Messaging gives your whole team one story. We build the core value narrative, competitive positioning, and talk tracks by persona and vertical. Then we train your sellers to use them in live conversations. ## Signs your messaging is costing you deals Ask five reps what you sell and you get five answers. You lose competitive evaluations you should win. What marketing publishes and what reps say on calls don't match. Your champion can't explain why you're different when you're not in the room. When no one gives reps one story worth telling, they write their own. Then every deal sounds different, and buyers notice. ## How we build it We build messaging around how buyers decide, using the GIVE Method: Insights that create urgency and are sharp enough to travel in an email chain without you. Value framed as the cost of inaction, so buyers see what standing still costs them. Empowered Buyers: language your champion can use to sell internally. Then we train your sellers to use it in live calls, with talk tracks for each persona and vertical you sell to. ## Client example: Pigment > Pigment used our messaging work to compete against Anaplan and Oracle in enterprise evaluations they'd been losing. ## FAQ **Q: How is this different from the messaging deck marketing already has?** A: A deck describes the message. We build what reps use on calls: talk tracks, objection handling, and executive conversation guides. Then we train them to deliver it. **Q: Do we have to replace our sales methodology?** A: No. We work inside the way your team already sells and make the story sharper. **Q: How do we keep the new messaging from fading?** A: Managers have to reinforce it. Our Sales Leadership work helps frontline managers coach to the new story in deal reviews and 1:1s. **Q: How do we start?** A: Book a 30-minute call. Tell us where deals are slipping. We'll tell you if messaging is the gap. --- # Richard Ellis — Co-Founder & CEO url: https://www.revenueinnovations.com/team/richard-ellis lastUpdated: 2026-04-20T17:27:28Z > Engineering background turned sales leader turned CEO. Richard has led GTM transformations at over 60 B2B companies, from Series B startups to Fortune 100. Engineering background turned sales leader turned CEO. Richard has led GTM transformations at over 60 B2B companies, from Series B startups to Fortune 100. He built and carried quota at enterprise tech companies. His consultative approach, grounded in real-world experience, makes him an invaluable asset to businesses seeking to navigate complex strategic challenges. He's the one in the room diagnosing why your deals are stalling. --- # Heather Easterday — Co-Founder & Partner url: https://www.revenueinnovations.com/team/heather-easterday lastUpdated: 2026-04-20T17:27:29Z > Heather runs RI's innovation and marketing practice. Marketing leadership in financial services. Heather runs RI's innovation and marketing practice. Marketing leadership in financial services. Startup leadership in medical devices and entertainment. Nearly 20 years teaching marketing, management, and sales at the graduate level. She builds the curriculum, the content, and the systems that make sure the work sticks after we leave. --- # Tim Kruse — Co-Founder & Partner url: https://www.revenueinnovations.com/team/tim-kruse lastUpdated: 2026-04-20T17:27:31Z > Tim has trained thousands of sales, marketing, and enablement professionals across tech, semiconductors, and manufacturing. Founded a software startup. Tim has trained thousands of sales, marketing, and enablement professionals across tech, semiconductors, and manufacturing. Founded a software startup. Held sales and sales management roles at Fortune 200 companies. He designs the sales processes reps actually follow and built RI's SKO methodology, which measures behavior change at 30/60/90 days. --- # Joel Dokkestul — Partner & Chief Technologist url: https://www.revenueinnovations.com/team/joel-dokkestul lastUpdated: 2026-04-20T17:27:32Z > With a proven track record of working with companies of all sizes, from AI startups to Fortune 5000 corporations, Joel has developed a deep understanding of the complex issues that businesses face in scaling AI. He builds the custom AI micro-tools your revenue team will actually use: prospecting, call prep, and competitive intel. With a proven track record of working with companies of all sizes, from AI startups to Fortune 5000 corporations, Joel has developed a deep understanding of the complex issues that businesses face in scaling AI. He builds the custom AI micro-tools your revenue team will actually use: prospecting, call prep, and competitive intel.