The X-Interviews | The Language of Business

Interview #3 - Bart Fanelli on Designing GTM Growth

Bart Fanelli on Designing GTM Growth

Today we have a very special guest with us for an X-Interview. We're going to be talking with Bart Fanelli, Chief Revenue Officer, Author, and Award-winning High Growth Sales Leader, about his experiences building successful GTM (Go-To-Market) organizations.

Bart previously served as CRO at Outsystems, where he oversaw revenue-generating initiatives as the company grew globally and became ranked as a leader in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Low-Code Application Platforms for six years in a row. Prior to Outsystems, Bart spent seven years in multiple roles culminating as the Vice President of Global Field Success at Splunk, where he helped drive annual revenue from $60 million to more than $1.5 billion.

In our previous X-Interview with Karen Holtzblatt, we discussed why Design must learn to effectively use the Language of Business. In that interview, Karen stated: “The Language of Business is simple. Is the product making money?” But how does the business go about doing that? Bart Fanelli is here to give us an insider’s look at the GTM function and share insights on how we might improve the connections between business and design so that we can advance the goals of the business together.

What is Go-To-Market?

X-Mentor: Welcome to The X-Mentor, Bart!

Before we get started, let’s touch on some of the things that you've been doing to help businesses accelerate their growth. You have co-authored a book called The Success Cadence, where you talk about why businesses should consider designing and running their GTM functions to sustain growth. While most people may have an idea of how businesses work, it may not be understood well enough by some of us in the Design organization, for example, and for some in the Engineering organization as well. This GTM conversation is around “transparency” and having an “integrated approach and rhythmic flow” with the cadence of business. Okay, I’m ready to learn more about GTM and how a business works!

So, let's just start by you telling us, if you will Bart, a little bit about what happens once you have a viable product to sell. Somebody's already built something and now you need to make sure that lands well in the market. So, can you please summarize this scenario for us?

Bart: I can. Well, thanks for having me and I appreciate the lofty intro. I'm going to learn from you as much as you're going to learn from me. And then let's just say that I'm pretty sure I've learned from all the people before me. So, that's how we think and that's how my mind operates.

Well, you bring up an interesting dynamic in that, a lot of people come into organizations and there's already a product built. Then they must figure out how to take it to market. That's, to some degree, how it's worked for a long time in the traditional sense. There are problems with that, because building a product that does something really well, from a technical perspective, is what we aspire to do. But if you start the GTM conversation after the product is designed, that's a challenge because you’re coming from behind as a field organization and attempting to determine the ideal customer profile (ICP) and use case. And usually what ends up happening is there's an expectation set by a product manager, or an expectation by a CEO, that the product is supposed to work and be sold and used in a certain way. And it might not hold true once you understand the GTM motion needed to put it in the hands of buyers or prospects. This is a problem and it’s typically with less modern companies.

I'll tell you a story. When I was at Splunk, and we were less than $60M in revenue, one of the immediate observations was the field was the last to know the details about product updates or what was new and being built. It's very common, because companies are trying to get their footing early, and they're usually led by technologists in the beginning that understand how to solve a complex problem with technology. GTM is usually the last thing they’re thinking about. So, I had the experience where if we didn't personally, as a field organization, fund a role to go upstream, meaning get side-by-side with product management, with development roadmaps, with engineering and understand their processes of building and delivering the product, we were behind.

We needed to understand what inspired the team to build the product or add features so we could consider how that was going to translate down into the field from a marketing, messaging, and sales execution perspective. If the GTM organization didn't put that person in place, it would not happen. We did it at Splunk and I think it's one of the elements that helped us execute cleanly as a field organization. David Jenkins, who's a friend of mine, wrote the book White Board Selling. He knew the integration and messaging process cold. He came from BMC Software, where we met, before he joined me at Splunk. We call it “field integration” and its function was to integrate the narratives the product organization was pursuing, what engineering was doing, into the field, so we knew what was being developed, and why. It worked exceptionally well because it was like being in full fidelity, in concert. We were all on the same page as a company. But without that GTM “field integration” role, we would be handed something to sell, and then we’d immediately be behind. That's just bad practice.

X-Mentor: Yeah, it's one of those things where not everyone understands that bigger mission and vision.

Bart, something that you have written about is creating relationships with the customers. But there's also another relationship dynamic that is inside the company itself. So, when you're talking about bringing a product to market, a lot of things need to happen to get that product out the door. Right?

What is the sales team typically doing during that design and development phase? How might we make improvements to our internal relationships?

Bart: Well, I don't think it happens organically, by the way. It's usually a forcing function that makes it happen. And as we go into this, you used the word customer. I'm going to say that word is universal, meaning it's not just who we're selling to and the GTM organization. Everybody’s a customer internally as well. Successful GTM organizations market and sell their vision internally to gain alignment, funding, and execute a strategy – otherwise we would be accepting the status quo. Professional selling organizations require deliberate design. 

The right way to build a GTM organization is to sell and align with all the other functions. It is not simply “let’s see what has been thrown over the wall after it was developed” or “let's go discount our way to success.” There’s a high level of discipline that's required for agreement and alignment between all organizations to happen. And it has to be forced in most companies, especially if it’s not instilled early in the company’s maturity. It’s usually the last thing to be thought about by an engineering minded founder or in a legacy company. The irony is the field GTM organization is the first to be blamed if things aren't going well - when in reality, it is a shared responsibility from the executive team down to the contributor on how the company is run. I've advocated this in other writings and interviews where highly technical founders don't have GTM experience. If they don't step aside, or don't truly embrace a GTM executive that has the requisite experience to help them, they will always suffer. Their cultures will suffer, their products will suffer, and their sales will decay over time. And it's because they treat the noble profession of professional selling, selling to a business outcome, as secondary. Look, everybody in the company is important. Otherwise, they should not be part of the organization. If you think about sales and the profession of selling or GTM teams, it isn't just a person carrying a bag. It's the integration of the product manager into that motion so that they can truly understand what's happening in the field. The Product Manager needs to understand why the product they're advocating to be developed integrates purposefully into that GTM process and can be monetized at scale.

I talk about baselining quite a bit. And baselining is usually done from a GTM perspective, what's the baseline process we're going to follow. And then that must be cross-sold inside the company to all of the organizations, so that they understand what the field is doing and why. I think what happens is it raises the credibility of the field. So, it's usually the responsibility of the CRO (Chief Revenue Officer) to do this. Then it opens the eyes of all the organizations that truly don't have visibility into the field. They do things differently because of that. They design things differently. The best run companies truly have that transparency and cross-functional dynamic. Everybody holds everybody accountable for the outcome. It isn't a finger pointing exercise.

How Can We Improve Collaboration?

X-Mentor: As a Chief Revenue Officer, you've said that you collaborate very closely with Field Success and Enablement, Value Consulting, Solution Architects, Customer Success. What are some of the ways we can improve GTM collaboration with CX and UX, Engineers, Developers, Product Managers?

Bart:  Well, if we think about the first group you just mentioned, they are all GTM for the most part. Usually when you have a VP of Sales, or SVP of Sales, their sole responsibility is to hit quota. Whether or not that goal is in the best interest of the company is different than if it's a CRO, who is truly at the executive level and designing and integrating a GTM function with all of the other organizations in the company. And that's what we should all aspire to do. The reason that doesn't happen more often, especially in smaller companies, is usually the CEO or the founder wants control, and they think they have all the answers, and they don't.

So, there's a wall, right? There's a wall between the corporate and the field or back office and the field. Development and the field. Engineering and the field, and so on. The GTM function: sales, pre-sales, value, post sales. Those folks talk to customers, hundreds, thousands of conversations through sales cycles. They e-mail and communicate. They're at events with customers. They know how the product is being used, how value is being conveyed, and what the flaws are. The best way for that to be understood by a product manager, engineering, or development organization is to communicate with the GTM teams. And both are responsible for that.

As CRO, I would advocate constantly getting GTM in the room because your product manager can't make that decision on what's next without us. Because they're listening, they would go on customer tours, and this happened at every company: BMC, Splunk, OutSystems. Product managers would have a couple of phone calls. They'd go and see a couple of customers and they think they got the answer about what they're going to build next. Nobody asks the field. And we'd say, “No, absolutely not.”

In the best-case scenario, the product management team, UX, CX, you name it, they're side-by-side with the field organization.

They're going together to events. They travel together from time-to-time. They're understanding what outcomes the field is positioning for the buyers to experience using the tech they're building. That's Nirvana! That's the best-case scenario. And then they can ask valid questions rather than simply deciding without consulting who would be, in large part, the closest to the customer every day of the year. It's just critical. It has to happen early in a company's life cycle for it to stick. It’s not to say that a company that does not embrace this concept cannot be successful, they can. However, they will underperform compared to those that do.

X-Mentor: Designers need to know their designs are going to sell. Why else would we be designing? Which is why professional Researchers must collect the data that helps everyone to know that what we’re designing will advance the business objectives for the organization. Product Design is not just about meeting or exceeding the needs of users. It’s also about contributing to the financial aspects, like revenue, profit margins, costs, that has to work for the organization too, right?

Bart: It does. I'm going to tell you a story that was the best-case scenario at Splunk. We were at a sales kickoff event at The Cosmopolitan in Las Vegas, NV. We had run a really great program with the GTM field organization, a value consulting program led by Doug May. He went to Databricks after Splunk, built the value program there, and now he’s with Datadog. It was a phenomenal program that he built in our tenure and his team designed, implemented, and executed ~5,000 business cases while I was leading the field success function and learning from Doug at the same time. Their deep interaction with customers on how they were applying and using the Splunk product, the core product to drive business outcomes, was second-to-none.

We needed that function at Splunk specifically because the platform and data we indexed was horizontal and highly universal. You could do a ton of different things with the core product, and we had to pattern match to determine what the most valuable use cases were. It was difficult for us to zero-in on where the value was so we could replicate the most valuable use cases in the form of playbooks. Doug helped us do that. We had a deep understanding through all the business cases his team participated in, created financial models for, etc. Understanding which capabilities were being leveraged by our clients to drive the business outcomes our GTM team were positioning was critical. We would then design sales plays, assets, selling motions that complemented the most valuable use cases, and implement these practices as a baseline for ALL new hires and existing GTM employees. All based on the pattern matching process of use case, persona, value, leading to a playbook. When you have ~5,000 engagements over the years, you know where to go and you know what's defensible in the product, how to position it to solve a critical problem, and how to sell from a defensible position of value. No guessing required.

The Splunk executive team built a culture of openness and integration that would allow the team to come together for two days, once a quarter. All the business functions across Splunk would mix prior to our field business reviews (QBR’s), organically facilitating the cross-functional conversations. People would ask: what's working? What's not? How are you going to market? Tell us about the business case process. Doug would present it to everybody. To our delight, Splunk’s UX leader and Chief Experience Officer, Carola Thompson, is in the room. Carola found Doug and I at the kickoff mentioned, wanting to sit down and understand what customers were utilizing in the product that was returning all the value based on the business case data set we used for pattern matching and playbook focus. Carola wanted to make using the product features that were used in the most valuable use cases easier for customers to consume. Amazing. We're all sitting there thinking, this is the best validation we could ever have. So, we had all this intrinsic knowledge of how the product is being used in the field and the design team wanted to know more from us. We were gracious and we were like, “Wow, this is amazing and we are really doing something special.”

Keep in mind, at this time we were a company shifting from perpetual to term subscription, and then cloud.  We didn’t have telemetry to rely on at the time this occurred. If you know anything about the LAER framework, Land, Adopt, Expand, Renew – this is exactly the type of focus that enables the correct metrics we all love. Here we are, the company is growing rapidly, we are hiring in the field at max capacity and in real time. We had a very rigorous onboarding, training, sales process playbook, and business case framework we used as a baseline. Coaching and developing started in our bootcamp and ultimately our GTM frameworks were all operationalized at scale. We were religious about doing business cases with our champions whenever we could sit side-by-side with them to test and learn.

What ended up happening is the Design team started asking us how and why the product was being used in a certain way. And we were able to answer those questions based on how the business cases were being developed and how the transactions were being sold in the field to the customers that we were serving. All very repeatable methodology that we've built over the years and focused on horizontal critical business services that we made more resilient. But the takeaway for me was, you start to get a product organization and a field organization collaborating, unprovoked, and great things happen. No one told us to do that. It happened organically because we had the collaboration mechanism in place on a quarterly basis. Before you know it, the rest is history. The company is phenomenally successful. It's continuing to grow 40%, 45% a year in billions in revenue – even with heavy competition.

Friction and Performance

X-Mentor: That’s amazing!

Let’s talk about Friction – when something is being introduced to the market that's new, novel. But no one has prior experience with it. We've encountered some of this Friction ourselves at OutSystems.

So, my question, Bart: What do salespeople do when they encounter friction like this? You’re trying to introduce something that is not only new, but in our case at Outsystems, it's going against what Developers see as their pride and their purpose, and their whole identity is built around hard-core high code. As Steve Ballmer used to yell: “Developers, developers, developers!”

Bart: Well, the salespeople, we, yell, Sales, sales, sales! There you go.

[Laughs!]

X-Mentor: How do you avoid Friction? Or at least overcome those challenges that Friction poses?

Bart: Yeah, that's it really.

This will always be an issue and topic for conversation because the value in doing it right is huge and the flaw in doing it wrong decays companies over time. They slow down if you're not integrated from the onset. The larger the company gets, the more difficult going back and getting integrated is. So, I'm an advocate of starting early and you really must have a combination of technical and GTM experience at the same table very early. Otherwise, the divide is difficult to overcome.

Starting early is the best-case scenario, and more expensive at first. However, not having a GTM adult in the room early kills companies. Otherwise, the field organization is always coming from behind and going and rattling cages in product management, with little benefit. You need to build rapport, relationships, and trust with all the organizations. You have to understand their challenges and what their MBO's or business objectives are for their pay, which is usually in conflict with the seller. That’s yet another flaw. This is a long-term process that is all about relationship building internally. If you think about it, it should be a lot easier because those are warm introductions, same company, same desired outcome. We know each other, we have the same e-mail domain and we’re supposed to collaborate, but we don't. It's up to leadership at the end of the day. Or for someone to break through the ranks and get into a leadership position that advocates this type of collaboration and alignment through internal selling rather than dictating what should happen. It should come organically from the teams, collaboration, and happen regularly. This comes back to an operating cadence or a baseline process where the teams work together. Otherwise, it’s a terrible existence. It wouldn't be fun – at least, I don't think it would be fun. It takes a lot of energy to force success, while it takes less energy to collaborate to success and its way more enjoyable.

X-Mentor: Right. When somebody is being forced to do something that they don't necessarily want to do, their impulse is to resist being changed. There’s strong evidence supporting why people don’t respond well in these situations, especially in a sales context. As we’ve seen at Outsystems, you're trying to sell a developer on a new way of doing their job. And they're thinking: Who are you to tell me how to do my job?

Bart: Yes, exactly. It's a process.

X-Mentor: You talk about tracking performance in your writing. In Design we talk about Experiential metrics that drive up Operational metrics. That's important because when you improve these experience metrics, revenue goes up, you retain more customers, you increase share of wallet, you can charge higher prices. Also, costs go down because you reduce the cost of selling, you lower the cost of serving. And then there's risk, the resilience to risk, like regulatory pressure, fines, legal – stuff like we're seeing in the banking industry right now.

Bart: Oh yeah, yeah. Oh, man, don't get me started.

X-Mentor: When we think about customer experiences (CX), we’re talking about what’s happening inside the head of a customer when they interact with our business or brand. When we’re talking about (UX) that’s about what’s happening inside the head of a user when they interact with our product or with our service. What happens next, after these interactions, is people form a perception. Then, based on that perception, behavior follows, right?

We measure perceptions because it is those perceptions that impact all those business outcomes that I just mentioned.

How does this compare to the way performance is tracked on the GTM side?

Bart: I’ll tie that back to the natural and organic conversation with the Head of UX at Splunk, which was just an organic alignment, right. How are our customers using the product? And how is your GTM organization positioning and selling our product? And what is the outcome? And then how can I make that better? That's kind of this “Nirvana loop.” I think it's easier in small companies, harder in big companies, but we all aspire for that to happen. In smaller companies, it's easier due to the ability to get in a room and set the foundation. So, maybe it's a $100 million (target revenue), probably once you get to $100 million, you know you've got something that's meaningful.

If you want to continue to grow, your GTM and Design integration with the rest of the company matters.

And in this case, with Design, it absolutely should be symbiotic. I’ve sat with many founders in companies with $25M to $80M in revenue that have no idea what GTM motion got them to that point – literally.

So as an example, leading indicators, which a sales executive would usually follow to understand what their baseline is. If you have a velocity equation as an example, a model that you follow for efficiency, how you're running your business and what business levers that you have at your disposal, then you have an advantage. Unique personas, unique meetings needed, opportunity size, duration, or cycle time, etc. Everybody has a different model that they “should” follow. That is a baselining capability. If you shift left of that model, these are the inputs that GTM teams have to execute to achieve the baseline. It's how we're modeling our business from a financial perspective. We need (X) amount of revenue per day, we need (Y) amount of revenue per week, per quarter. And linearity as we know in our market today is key. You want very smooth and predictable growth. The inputs: unique meetings, could be unique personas, could be unique opportunities added per week. Rolling pipeline coverage can be based on your retired quota. There's a variety of them and different companies have different measures. One or two that could be relevant to UX or to the product organization is proof events. Not everybody is product-led. Not everybody is pure cloud. Some are still selling traditionally out there. Well, your proof event, or how you've differentiated your product in the technical conversation, matters to UX. Because to the design team, it's how to get to value more efficiently (e.g., less effort, fewer clicks, etc.). Design needs to know that. If you lose because you can't deliver a feature and your competitor can, design needs to know that. But few have that conversation. One of the inputs to success is usually technical validation. That's the Pre-Sales team and the Solution Architects. Well, I've been at companies where Product never, ever talked to Solution Architects, which blows my mind.

X-Mentor: Yeah, it blows my mind as well.

Bart: Those are the types of measures that I think the product organization should know. And should incorporate. Both are at fault: The executive running GTM, and the executive running Product. They should be aligned. And they should understand what each other's mission is so that you get efficiency out of it from a design perspective.

X-Mentor: Let’s talk about Performance Dashboards. Today, a lot of what you will see on these dashboards are operational metrics. That’s metrics that measure the value coming back to the company. So, the question is about tracking customer vs. business metrics.

The goal is to track Value-To-Customer so that we can then see how that translates into Value-To-Company.

Could you speak to this?

Bart: I can. This is how it gets difficult, because most companies start with trying to understand the lagging indicators before they even think about what the leading indicators are that are driving the lagging indicators, or the output for the company. And that's the issue, the elephant in the room. It’s difficult because leading indicators feed lagging indicators, and they're both dynamic, right? So, you must have a deft understanding of how both are related and how they impact each other over time.

I've been a part of the lagging indicator conversation and an analyst loop where no one takes the time to understand the leading indicators. And they make decisions anyway based on the lagging indicators, which are months old. There's no thought of how the correlation of leading to lagging works. So, in our world, when you have mostly cloud companies, if you don't have a good handle on telemetry, how customers are interacting with your product, how are you making any decisions on the product side? The first step for me is looking at the leading indicators to product that tell me how customers are consuming what we've already served them. And that should be how the design process unfolds over time.

Well, guess what? There's a whole set of leading indicators that were executed to achieve landing a customer who is using the product. So, now you have to go shift left again, and that's usually the GTM function, the customer success function, that helps customers use the platform and find success in it. Those are all leading indicators or inputs as well. Then we're left of [happening prior to] Customer Success, Pre-Sales and Sales. Those are leading indicators for Customer Success. Few take the time to understand the long tail and how it feeds all the way through to the company metrics. They all want to talk about the company metrics. That's the last part of the conversation we should talk about as it’s the end of the process in any given period.

X-Mentor: How do you prepare for Board Meetings so that you’re able to say we can show upward causation, by way of these leading metrics, what contributed to these operational outcomes?

Bart: This is huge. And I think it's flawed in private equity and venture capital. It’s the executive team on the ground at the company receiving the money. There’s a void in experience and how this all works in many cases and speed is the culprit. We have gone through a lot in the past five years in our industry. Money was cheap and being doled out in mass, and we watched it create problems because companies had no concept of how to scale. I struggle with how the highly educated write massive checks to founders that have never done it before, and don’t in turn ensure there is strong GTM experience in place. The good news in all this is we're in a better place and now people are pragmatically thinking about how to run a company efficiently rather than based on hope and ideas.

That brings us to this conversation, where board makeup will change. There was a huge DE&I push for boards, which I get, support and believe in, because you get perspectives that you normally wouldn't get. But DE&I doesn't necessarily cover the fact that most boards are led or participated in by people that just have degrees, but have never been in a GTM function, or run a company themselves. So, they could not provide valid input in a board meeting to an executive team. They have no ability to do so. They can nod, and they can say yes and agree that things are looking OK. But they don't know the inner workings of it all and what’s under the covers. So, to your point, being able to educate a board on how this should work would be a privilege. Board makeups overtime will be changing to have true GTM voice or experience. That should then change how companies run. And we will all be healthier and perform better because of it. It is all about the integration of GTM and the rest of the company.

Recently, I was speaking with someone about funding.  When funding flows to companies, there's a point where the funders have leverage, they're giving money to a company which they're expecting a return on over time. They have an opportunity to place an experienced GTM executive at the same time as part of their funding agreement and they don't. In hindsight, this is a huge flaw. Let's put it into perspective. If I'm writing a check for $100 million, and I'm in a big fund, I have the leverage to say: alright, we're giving you $100 million, this executive is someone we know from our network. We want them to be a part of your executive staff and we want them to help you shape your company, and help you shape your GTM so that you can run efficiently, spend this 100 million wisely, and we can all be rewarded. If I said no as the technical founder, what would that say to the investors?

X-Mentor: It would send a signal to the investor, wouldn't it?

Bart: It would, but I don't even know if the investors ask that question or make that offer today. And that's a problem. I think that's a problem and it will correct itself, because now money's precious again. We have to make good decisions. I’m highly valid, certainly capitalistic, and I'm passionate about it.

For the best example, we'll go back to Splunk. The founders stepped aside at ~$40 million in revenue, actually, less than that, ~$25 million. And Godfrey Sullivan came in as the CEO, the founders were the founders. They worked in engineering, mixed with the GTM teams, and were genuinely great people Erik Swan and Rob Das. And Tom Schodorf, (former SVP of Splunk, co-author The Success Cadence) came in just after Godfrey and guess what? The company was run as a GTM engine from that point forward and engineering and development did their part. We can look back and see what happened, Splunk made history. I think there's a lot to be said for technical founders stepping aside and letting GTM collaborate with them and scale their companies. That's a great example right there.

The Success Cadence

X-Mentor: How do you achieve The Success Cadence? That flow? Why is it better when everybody across the entire organization understands things like business strategy, the market, and goals?

Bart: That's awesome and I appreciate the question specifically because I'm a firm believer that there's a cross-section of team members in the field that represent the company, and the brand of the company, to the customer. That cross-section is complex and anyone that doesn't give the cross-section of professional GTM motion the credit that it deserves, will suffer. They just won't perform. Products don't sell themselves. Human capital is in complement to the product and is equally valuable. In fact, even in product-led companies, there's obviously great experience. It's these product-led companies that have tech that's easy to use, and initially monetizes the product digitally. Then at some point, your GTM engine has to come in and harvest all of the digitally landed customers, and help and accelerate and expand enterprise deployments of the product-led company. Well that cross section: Sales, Pre-Sales, Post Sales, Value and Channel and their leadership – is highly complex to orchestrate. That motion being very defined and highly orchestrated and treated as a professional organization that grows and develops human capital that drives the value of companies and brings products to market. That, to me, has to be valued at the highest level and brought in and integrated into the rest of a company as early as possible for it to work at scale. Otherwise, what you end up getting is a tarnished reputation in the field. Your product is misrepresented and there's a lack of understanding of the value that the product provides to the companies that are using it because no one takes the time to understand - it's just achieving a number at that point.

Which is why GTM functions have to be thoroughly funded early along with realistic growth numbers designed. If done behind the wall with the financiers, and not inclusive of a strong GTM voice, imbalance occurs. Growth and scale are not possible without the GTM function being co-designed with targets at the same exact time in a genuine way that is achievable. We've seen companies and growth collapse when the mantra is to add quota carriers in volume with no training, no process, no methodology, no playbooks, no experienced leadership, and a board room looking at lagging indicators.  20% of the of the teams make their number, then those that don’t, leave, and the cycle continues. The CEO bangs the table, the board wants to know what's going on, and the first person that gets (metaphorically) shot is the VP of sales who should have never had the job in the first place. Seasoned sales professionals are savvy and now begin to dissect the companies they are joining to ensure there’s a viable opportunity for success.

It's the truth and doing it right is also painful, requires a learning curve and I think businesses can be better off over time with just enough rigor and process. It's enjoyable for me because I've got wealth to create for others, with other companies to help, help them succeed, to leave a legacy. Personally, I want to do that right and it's not about making this quarter necessarily, it's about designing this quarter the right way to allow me to grow and scale elegantly and build a dominant brand in an industry. That's leadership at its best. It's a combination of GTM and product and everything else.

X-Mentor: Bart, let’s talk about the art of coaching. You've said: “Teaching is bilateral. It goes in both directions.” You also talked about giving back to others, stating: “payback is being one of somebody else's five.” Can you share more on these points with us?

Bart: Well, thank you for that. I'm glad to tell you about it. So, the ‘one-of-five’ mantra is from my dad. He said to me, “You'll be lucky at the end of your life if you have five people you can count on, count on one hand that truly helped you and would be there with you at the end.” And I was like, wow, that's kind of scary to think about, but that was a generation ago, right? I think it's more than five today for a couple of reasons - We're more connected digitally, and I think our networks and brand are more known. So, it's probably more today, hopefully.

Then it's the ‘giving back to others.’ You know the send the elevator back down concept and bring some others on the journey. Tom Schodorf, (former SVP of Splunk) He was a phenomenal coach in that his whole tagline was look, check your entitlement. Coaching is a gift. You're only going to learn from those that are around you and what you experience. There's no silver bullet to any of this. And I was like, OK, I'm going to hitch to that wagon because it just made sense to me. And, I didn't have a coaching environment growing up. I was told what to do. Therefore, I would tell people what to do and that wouldn't work. I was probably 37 years old when I finally became coachable. And I was like, alright, I'm going to figure out how to coach others as well. I don't have a curriculum. I'm not a content person on coaching. I just know if you bring people on a journey based on whatever baseline you decide that you're going to use to run your business, and you can defensively articulate and coach them to it. Through that process, explaining how it will make them more successful, and how they should then give that gift to others and bring them on that Journey, you end up bringing a group of people on a ride that never ends. You just keep growing and developing through it. That was my Splunk experience quite honestly, and it was mind-blowing. We had a no entitlement culture. It was performance-based meritocracy for sure.

And Tom Schodorf, whom I was one of his lieutenants, would tell everyone of us: “I'll fire you tomorrow, but I'm also your best and biggest advocate.” He fought more battles for me internally to let me do my job than anybody ever in my career. And I will do the same for my people and my teams, which has shaped who I am. Now I'm a huge advocate of, you coach people, you develop people, you help them see where they are today, against the company’s baseline, because you're all trying to achieve a greater mission anyway.

It is not about you (me). That was hard for me to figure out. It's not about me. It's about us. And the “I” letter / word. That's another problem. It's really, “we.” Look, we’ve got to go do this together. It isn't about me. It's about us and there's more power in that. Guess what, I feel better about myself, and others feel better about me when that's the case. You know what, people bring me on the journey, is the way I think about it. I'm doing my part to push up and to the right (i.e., growth). If I treat people the right way, they should be pushing me, and their people should be pushing them. It's just all about everything moving into a core progression; high and right performance. It's the push-pull effect. And you’ve just got to be a good person and coach along the way and hold people accountable at the same time.

X-Mentor: People matter.

Bart: Yeah, it doesn't mean you're soft, by the way. This is the part where you can be a coach and help people in an empathetic way. And if they don't have the ability to be coachable, you have to remove them. That's just part of it and that's OK because we're here to pursue something way bigger than us. That's the point.

X-Mentor: I couldn’t agree more. It has been an absolute pleasure speaking with you today, Bart! Thank you so much for being on the X-Mentor.

Bart: Likewise. I appreciate it. Thanks for having me.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR(S)

Bart Fanelli is the CEO and Founder of Skillibrium, author, and Award-winning Sales and Go-To-Market Leader.

Greg Parrott is The X-Mentor and publisher of The X-Interviews.