---
title: "Inside the Mind of a Modern CRO"
episode: 69
podcast: "The LeanScale Podcast"
publisher: "LeanScale"
guest: "Brett Kelly"
guest_title: "Chief Revenue Officer, Inovonics"
date_published: 2026-05-15
date_modified: 2026-07-22
duration: 00:50:56
word_count: 8445
topics: ["sales-leadership", "revenue-operations", "ai-in-gtm", "gtm-strategy", "enterprise-sales", "demand-generation"]
canonical_url: https://leanscale-knowledge-hub.netlify.app/podcast/brett-kelly-modern-cro/
source: "LeanScale Podcast Knowledge Hub — https://leanscale-knowledge-hub.netlify.app"
license: "Free to quote and cite with attribution to The LeanScale Podcast."
---

# Inside the Mind of a Modern CRO — Full Transcript

> Episode 69 of The LeanScale Podcast, with Brett Kelly.
> Published May 15, 2026 · 00:50:56 · 8,445 words.
> Machine-transcribed and **not diarized** — speaker attribution is inferred, so verify
> attribution against the audio before quoting a specific person.
> Structured breakdown: https://leanscale-knowledge-hub.netlify.app/podcast/brett-kelly-modern-cro/

## 00:00 — Brett's unusual arc: guitar, finance, RevOps, CRO

**[0:00]** Today, I'm sitting down with Brett Kelly, who's the Chief Revenue Officer at Inevonics. Brett's career arc is one of the most unusual I've come across. He started with a degree in classical guitar performance, pivoted through finance during the Great Recession, and then worked his way up through sales analytics and RevOps at NCR, where he was operating across 80+ countries with 1500 sellers. He went on to AWS before landing the CRO seat at Inevonics. What I find really compelling about Brett is that he made the jump from ops to carrying a bag to running the entire revenue organization.

## 00:43 — The RevOps ceiling and wanting more than the dashboard

**[0:43]** And he's got a clear perspective on why that path gave him an edge most CROs don't have. Brett a lot of people in RevOps feel like there's a ceiling. They can see the strategic picture but can't really break into that leadership seat, especially at the Chief Revenue Officer level. And you actually made that jump, which I think is really inspiring for a lot of people that we are working with that are in RevOps today. But before we get into that, when did you realize you wanted to be more than the person behind the dashboard and the person behind the systems? I don't know when that moment was. I think I've always been kind of a naturally curious person.

**[1:25]** I feel like most folks that are in RevOps are these people that are just, they'll find something, latch onto it for a little while, learn enough, and then some other squirrel will run by and they'll go, "Oh, okay, I'm curious about that too." The moment that I realized that there's like an actual future in that was when I landed the sales ops analyst position at NCR. And I was quickly shown, you know, here's the job at hand, the task is go and calculate SAS churn across our global portfolio. But with that comes like revenue wreck, you know, and I had a background in finance, so

**[1:57]** it was like, oh, I put my accounting hat on for a little while and I kind of understood that stuff a lot better than others. And then it became, well, if you can understand the churn rate, can you start to forecast? And then you get introduced to sales. So I don't know, I think it's just that curiosity more than anything. Yeah, and I think anyone in a RevOps seat, it's interesting because you have access to the data. Sometimes you actually have access to more information than maybe the CRO might have access to because people feel more comfortable talking to you and sharing what's actually happening in the field.

## 02:32 — Having the data but not the seat: 'Your Iceberg Is Melting'

**[2:32]** But one thing, and I can empathize with this, I'm wondering if you felt the same, is it's frustrating when you feel like you have all the data, you have all the ability to make a decision, but you're not in seat to make the call. Did you have that same experience? Yeah. I feel like everybody in every type of position has that moment of like, I see things clearly, this is definitely a path, but the reality is always consensus. Have you ever read the book, oh God, what's it called? Your Iceberg is Melting? No. Oh, it's fantastic. Also embarrassing to read on the plane because there's pictures, it's like 90 pages. It's an allegory of organizational change.

**[3:14]** So it's this beautifully put and funny story about these penguins, it's John Kotter that wrote it, so go get a copy. But it talks about like, you see there's a crack in the iceberg and you're the smartest guy in the room or whatever way you want to put it. You see something that others don't, but the reality is you have to go and sell it to the elders and what does that really take? It's beautiful. So that book will answer that question better than I could. Very cool. So I think that's probably where you might learn some of the best selling when you need to sell initiatives like that internally.

## 03:54 — Soft-skill gaps: waiting tables, service, and humility

**[3:54]** When you're in that role transitioning into a sales position, what were some of the gaps that you felt you needed to fill? Oh man, so the soft skills, I'm really just sitting down and talking to customers more than anything, like I'll point back to my years waiting tables as like the big connective tissue between everything is like just knowing how to serve others. I feel like a lot of folks, like if you intentionally go into carrying a bag and being in the sales world, it is all about like how do I go and sell this thing to the person? But if you've ever waited tables, it's like you're constantly just listen.

**[4:33]** You only have so many things that are available, so really just listen. So I've come up through the school of hard knocks as well, six years at Carabas Italian Grill. Did every front of house position you could think of. And I also go back to that experience as well. I have a lot of reasons for myself, but what specifically about serving, being in the restaurant industry, did you really, really pick up that you've been able to use? And more than anything, thinking about this recently is I run all of the customer support, customer success teams here, thankfully led by people much more capable than I, and much

**[5:21]** more patient, is like when there's a problem that you can't react, right? Somebody's going to get something undercooked, and it was no fault of your own. And having the just pure humility, I think that that's like service industry is humility in the best form, and it's just a way to practice. And man, the 10,000 hour theory, you wait tables for a year, and I know there's not enough hours that actually add up to that, but it's like you get those three or four years of just constant, hey, I'm sorry, or we missed the mark, or how can I make this up to you? And just being a servant more than anything, like still, sales is servitude more than anything.

**[6:06]** Yeah, I think you're also in a unique position where you get a lot of reps. So you get multiple attempts every single day. You get people from all different walks of life, different communication styles, and I think the sheer volume of interacting with people that you get in those type of jobs, it's pretty tough to replicate. Yeah. Yeah. We just hosted a sales training session about an hour ago, and we're all gearing up for this product launch in a month. And the sales trainer, he picked up on that, too, and he's like, "We're sales. We don't practice. We get practice in what we do, but we don't really take the time to sit down and practice together."

## 06:45 — NCR as a 'second master's': how change lands on people

**[6:45]** And service industry, that's called the lunch shift. And you're going to do that, and then you're going to go eat a meal and refresh, and then you're going to actually go make your money that night by having to perform. But I love that concept of practicing together, too. 100%. When we were prepping for this, you called your time at NCR your second masters. You're a sales analyst at a 140-year-old multi-billion dollar company operating in 80-plus countries. I'd love to hear what that environment taught you about revenue that no classroom or other experience could.

**[7:28]** Maybe it just comes down to learning style, but I think a lot of folks have this learning style of like, "I actually have to do the work," right? So if you go get a master's degree and you read the case studies and you have to do big projects or whatever the task at hand is, it's all kind of play. It's all theoretical and really high level. But what you don't understand in that educational setting is the nuance of how it actually comes across to the people, the human beings, that when you're thinking about shifting an org or training on a new solution or exiting or introducing a different channel strategy in

**[8:06]** a handful of countries from the perspective of a cost-cutting measure, the way that it rolls out to the people is the thing that I don't think any educational setting will really give you. And the amount of consideration and high ethical bar that a good steward that's in that position will put on themselves, that's the second master's degree. You get the first one to understand the technical things like what should happen, what is good look like, but the real like roll up your sleeves and actually do the work and help craft the decisions is really considering it at the individual person level.

**[8:47]** So like a good example at NCR, we were given this task of, "Hey, go cut by 10%. Cut your SG&A by 10%, 2.3 billion dollar business that we were running that there's no easy way to do that." The easy answer is exit APEC. Like we're not going to, nobody's going to, that's the wrong decision. That is one way to come to the number, but the reality is if you could just tweak things and I'll never forget like we had one person in Cyprus and they were a direct seller and we knew what the total available market in Cyprus was and the decision of like does that person's name, did they get a red dot next to their name that says, "Hey, that's cost

## 09:30 — Abundance over cutting; the square-and-circle lesson

**[9:30]** cutting, we're going to save that," or is there more opportunity that one person can't really meet and should we pivot our strategy and go and identify a handful of partners and now repurpose that well performing person to say, "Hey, you go manage a few of these partners. We're going to retool our strategy and instead of going direct, we're going to go through partners and here's how it's going to work and we need you to do that." Those were big decisions and they weighed heavily on all of us. Especially coming from a finance background, where do you think you got that abundance mindset in that situation specifically?

**[10:08]** What do you mean by abundance mindset? So rather than seeing it as a zero-sum game of, "Hey, in order to hit our efficiency goals or hit our operating plan, we're going to cut here," but instead seeing, "Hey, actually, let's go drive even more opportunity over here. Let's go meet it with more growth instead of trying to cut." So I got a point to a mentor, Eric Shock is his name. He was running North American sales when he started shortly after me and he ended up becoming the president of the company. The guy is just an expert operator and when we first started and we learned our dynamic together, I was the ops guy.

**[10:51]** I was his like, "Hey, go figure out this number." I was the gopher and every single time I would come back to him and I'd say, "Hey, Eric, I know you asked me for this number. Here it is, but here's the other thing. This is what you didn't ask, but this is what I think you should really look at." He ended up like, he phrased it really well. He said, "If I ask you for a square, you better come back with a square. If you don't come back with a square, I'm going to discount everything else you have to say." So professional advice, come back with a square if I ask for a square. But if you know that a circle is really what I need, come back with that too.

## 11:29 — 'Build a fast race car': taking over inside sales

**[11:29]** I'll always be open to it. So I think that the abundance mentality is just fostered by the environment that I've been in. And man, I've been so fortunate in the people that I've reported to and every single one of my managers has always been a mentor. And I've found that relationship and I know that not everybody's that fortunate, but I've been given the environment to really do that. One of the things you mentioned your boss at NCR told you, he said, "Brett, you're not a race car driver, but you know how to build a really fast car." And then fast forward, following him saying that, he ended up giving you an opportunity

**[12:11]** to be in the driver's seat leading inside sales. Walk me through how that happened and what you learned in that transition. Sure. Our inside sales organization was about 12 heads. I want to say it was all North America, about a 750, maybe $800 million a year business. And there was high conflict between the BDR roles that inside function. I've never landed on that terminology, by the way. I say inside, I mean like cold calling, lead gen. I don't know. I think sometimes rev ops, sales ops, GTM ops, I don't know, I'm still figuring out too. So, there was high conflict between them and field sales because there was some management

**[12:57]** disagreements of, "I want my inside team to own that customer all the way through." And in the meantime, those in the field that have been in the industry for a while, like they had contacts, they were working it and it was conflicting. So they made an exit of the inside sales manager and at the time I was running all of the numbers. I was the ops analyst for everything, funnel was kind of the key thing that made me kind of focus that like, "What are we doing to go in prospect?" We were living off of the fact of very large customers in North America and we were expanding

## 13:31 — Discrete functions, swim lanes, and the $74M win

**[13:31]** at their growth rate, but we weren't really identifying new entrants or anything. So we knew that this inside function was going to have to grow. So fast forward to the exit and then Eric and HR walk in the room and they go, "Hey, look, we want you to go and lead this," and the comment was, "We know you're not a race car driver, but you know how to build a really fast race car," and that comment was really centered around like, "Do you understand the mechanics of funnel management? Do you understand the mechanics of where this function operates, like inside demand gen

**[14:04]** versus maybe a sales specialist or how are you going to hand it off and how are you really going to manage the sales cycle?" And to wrap my mind around that, that was my first true customer segmenting exercise because I knew that if I'm entering into a high conflict arena, all of the field sellers, which was 70 or 80 people, hated us, didn't want anything to do with us. So I had to again, like the iceberg is melting, I had to go and paint the picture to everybody and say, "This is the problem," everybody nodded, "Yes, I agree, we need to go and find new customers," "Yeah, yeah, yeah, we're prospecting them, that's us."

**[14:47]** And I had to go back and say, "Hey, go on top," and say, "Hey, Eric, the message from the top needs to be we have discrete functions," and that's an organizational decision that maybe not every company's going to have, but the organizational decision was we have specialized folks that go and do very top of funnel work and we have account executives that manage the whole territory, but their primary focus is land and expand in current customers. So there's some element of top level strategy, but also like, "Hey, guys, this is the space that this team is going to operate in now and we're not going to get out of our swim lane."

**[15:23]** And once we were able to get that, it was the most fun that I had had in my career since because I was given the license to say like, "Hey, I think there's," I don't even remember what our market penetration was, it was like 20% or something pretty low and it's like, "There's all of this opportunity and we've got a 140-year-old name. We've got the license to walk into any customer and show up." So we got to be really creative as a team on how we're going to go and drum up new business. And within the first, I think it was first like nine months, we had landed a $74 million

## 16:00 — What managing people really takes: the team as coach

**[16:00]** opportunity and at a $750 million a year business, that was the gold star of like, "Hey, if you're not engaging with this team yet, go do it," that was our validation point, that was fun. That's incredible, especially coming from your first time in a role like that. What surprised you about being in that role, about maybe yourself? What type of things did it unlock in you that you felt like maybe you weren't getting in those obstacles? So I got to go back to the music side of things too. For me, when you start managing people, just the volume of time for one-on-ones and true

**[16:47]** personal connection and understanding not just the person and where they're at from their priorities or tasks, but also on a personal standpoint, carve time, have the kind of... It's work, but we're all people. So leading well and managing well took a ton of time and I didn't anticipate that. So for anybody going into that world, budget time, it pays off in spades. I'm curious if you could double click on that because I think a lot of people don't realize exactly what it takes. They have an idea of what a lot of time is, specifically, how much time did you invest in your time? What did a week look like or maybe a month with your team?

**[17:27]** What is actually good? I'm sure that there's a lot of different ways to approach this and the tech stack then versus now is different, so it's probably easier. But for me, it was an hour weekly kickoff, it was 30-minute one-on-ones, it was a weekly training schedule that was an hour, and then we had an extra hour where we would bring in different functions, whether that was pre-sales engineer, marketing, so we did this round robin learning session. But the goal was you've got one-on-one coaching time, one-on-one personal time, but then... This is what I think is the most important, is what's the team meeting where everybody's

**[18:06]** allowed to just put everything out in the open? Any individual coach is never gonna be able to exceed the knowledge of the entire team, so as a leader, are you creating a platform by which everybody has a chance to say, "I need help with this," and fostering the culture that it's okay to say, "Hey, I don't understand this," or "I'm struggling here, this is where I fell flat," and for somebody else to pick it up and go, "Hey, me too. We need help with that," or "Hey, me too, I figured this out, let me share it." I think in order to create that culture, going back to your waiting days, you need to exhibit

**[18:45]** that humility to make people feel comfortable, but there's certain ways you injected that to create that place of mental safety. Yeah, some of it is just leaning into the imposter syndrome that is like, "Oh shit, I don't know how to drive a race car, but I'm like here, I got it guys." I think some of it's just that, because most of the time I'll preface, and I think I just did it a second ago, where it's like, "There's probably other ways to do this," or "I don't know if this is right, this is my hypothesis, you guys correct me where I'm wrong." The other side of that, from being like, "I'll lay down if everybody objects," is also setting

## 19:25 — Breaking into the CRO seat: exposure over ladder

**[19:25]** the tone that like, "Hey, we're a team, we're going to make decisions together." The ultimate decision still does reside with me, and I reserve the right to override respectfully. Yeah, those are some of the toughest ones too, especially sometimes you're sitting in a position where you just have more context, and you're able to make a decision. Okay, talk to me about breaking into the CRO position. There's lots of people who come up through sales, they go into ops, they lead some inside sales teams, but that is a very, very, very difficult position to break into. You're at the pinnacle of a sales career. What did it take?

**[20:09]** How did it actually happen, and what surprises did you get when you stepped into that role too? I don't know, I'm a few months in, so I'm still feeling it. I'm still like, "Oh, good, all this is fresh then. Perfect." Oh, yeah, it's a lot. All right, so the arc of how did I get here? Sales ops analyst, brief stint, carrying a bag, being in sales leadership, which is like, there's a gap there, right? I should have carried a bag and had an actual sales coach that was telling me what to do. That seems like the proper path, but I skipped that because it was operationally focused.

**[20:52]** Then I became basically like an undefined chief of staff for the global SVP for the retail part of NCR. With that came, "Hey, we need to talk about the componentry lead time for our manufacturing facilities and how that impacts funnel." Hey, there's inside sales orgs across this entire $6 billion, three vertical company. Where's the redundancy in that? What does a really good inside sales team or demand gen function look like? What's the tech stack look like? Just the breadth of the things that we serve in RevOps, it was that exposure to everything. Then again, being paired with just an expert operator with a photographic memory that would

**[21:45]** call out every single change and want to inspect to the most minute detail at a speed and velocity and a sense of urgency for such a massively shifting company from a, "Hey, we sell point of sale like hardware," to, "We run your store front to back." All of the full solution stack. What it took to train a 140 year old sales organization to make that shift, those are the things that I was exposed to where at this point you could throw anything at me and I've probably experienced it enough to responsibly say, "I don't know enough to answer that well, but I do know how to get help or I do know how to ask the right questions or

**[22:32]** I know how to solve it and I have a position on it." That's the arc is like just being exposed. M&A's came in, what is the legal structure of an M&A look like? I shouldn't know that as a sales ops analyst. I shouldn't, but I got exposed to it and, "Hey, the inside function isn't really working. They all feel stuck. What are the off-ramps? Oh, you need a competency matrix and how the career progression aligns to the salary bands for each level." Nobody's around to do that? Oh, that's me? Cool. It's those kind of like you just find these problems. I don't know. If I was giving advice to anybody out there that's in that early career ops analyst of

**[23:17]** any kind of function, that was the time in my career that I got to be extreme. I was afforded the ability to be curious. I was given the task at hand, but you find time and whether that's nights or weekends if you're that slammed or if the ask affords you a little bit of creativity time, go be curious. Find where the faults in the data are and then raise your hand and say, "Hey, I think that this is a problem. Who should I go talk to about that?" I found that problem with marketing. That's my weakest area, weakest area, but I had a really amazing team that I could go and lean on and say, "Hey, explain this to me more," or, "How can I help you guys?

**[23:55]** You guys have very little analytics capability. It's all content people, it's product marketing, it's field marketing. You guys have the muscle, but the brains behind the operation aren't there. I can take on the spreadsheet work. You need to analyze what's going on and do the revenue attribution stuff. Tell me what's important. I've got the time to go and figure it out now." That luxury of time and luxury of almost, you're on the hook for a recommendation, but you're not on the hook to make the decision. This allows you to get that breadth of experience like you're talking about.

## 24:32 — What feels different as CRO: ownership and human weight

**[24:32]** What do you feel responsible for in your CRO role that is different than any roles you've had in the past? This one might just be personal to where the company's at in its history. We're in avionics as a 40-year-old company, feels like a 40-year-old startup because we're transitioning from hardware widget sales to, again, full solution. It's not my first rodeo in that regard, but what's different, or maybe I have the perspective now of ownership of it, is at NCR, that shift of, "Hey, you're an account manager to your account and executive, and you have a team of different functions, and you need to be

**[25:14]** the point of contact, and the way that we're asking you to operate is changing, and the things that we're asking you to sell is changing, and how is changing." The sense of ownership that I feel for our sellers who are 15, 20-plus year veterans of this company who know this industry way more than I do, that weighs heavily on me. I think that I would imagine most CROs feel that, "What's the personal impact on people's career?" Because some of them, 30-plus years, that's a career. They're probably looking at retirement. That's closer on their horizon than it is, "What's my next role?" Asking somebody to change, that's no small task.

**[26:00]** That's no small ask, and it needs to be done carefully. Yeah, just always find it interesting. People get very excited to hop into the role, and then they end up with this level of accountability and responsibility that is very heavy. CROs, you're expected to hit a number, you're usually the face of the company outside of the CEO, but you're the person that goes in front in the board meetings, if there's fundraising. Are you having fun? Are you enjoying the new position? Yeah, yeah, very much. There's not enough hours in the day, right? I have to be really intentional about when to turn off because there's so much opportunity,

**[26:50]** and we're a small company, but I don't know. Every day brings a different problem. I think one of the other things, too, to answer your last question again. Because I was removed, prior to the CRO role, I was a director or VP of commercial ops, so I was still the behind-the-scenes plumber, right? How do I connect the front of house to the back of house, that was me. Now it's like, I didn't realize I was being shielded from so much customer nuance, right? All of these interpersonal relationships, and like, ah, that's the CEO there, but they used to be here, and we didn't have such a good relationship with them, but they're at a company

## 27:31 — RevOps infrastructure at Inovonics: Salesforce, MuleSoft, Claude

**[27:31]** that they're our best friends now. So dealing with all of those much more nuanced, much more qualitative things that is not my 100% wheelhouse coming up through ops, it's a learning curve for me. Again, imposter syndrome always weighs heavily on me, but at the same time, it's like, that also keeps me completely engaged, and I'm like, oh, let's go explore, who's that person? Let's go figure out what makes them tick. So I have to know, with your RevOps background, how have you set up your RevOps infrastructure at Inivanix? What are you doing in that area? Yeah, I know that you're, and everybody is like super heavy on the AI front right now.

**[28:19]** We are, we're a Salesforce shop, and I'm 100% on board with that infrastructure. Right when I got here two years ago, we got MuleSoft to connect our ERP. So all of the ERP stuff is feeding in. Later this year, we're a GCP shop, so all of our software runs in GCP. So we're using MuleSoft as the transaction layer to make sure that the single pane of glass is available to the sellers. We are transitioning right now into Salesforce voice. We're using, oh, shoot, they're gonna kill me for this, Vonage, sorry, the brain fart. We're implementing that, so Vonage has the backbone, but Salesforce voice is the way

**[29:00]** that it will present to our sellers and support teams. We're a Claude shop, I believe all of Roper is a Claude shop, and man, I was telling my Salesforce admin, which by the way, I'm not gonna mention his name 'cause I, please don't poach him. I love him so much. I'll do my best. Thank you. I hired a Salesforce admin in May of last year, fresh out of school, three or four times certified. He was the president of his Salesforce club at his college. Oh, I love the fact that there was a Salesforce club where he went to school. Yeah, he reached out to us, just the best candidate, the best guy, and just knows his stuff too.

**[29:50]** So if you ask somebody, can you manage the system, checks all around the board, because of Claude, within the first, when he started, I was like, "Hey, I built a bunch of flows. I'm feeding in data and then I'm using Salesforce flow to push all of the CRP data into opportunities to help forecast at the customer level." I was building all of that stuff. And he was like, "Ah, I haven't really built many flows." I think it was within six months, he was writing Apex classes and custom Lightning Web components and retooling the entire system at a level that is a senior architect. That thing is a game changer.

**[30:31]** He's using Claude code to inject and extract data in VS code. So he's not even really interacting with Salesforce anymore as an admin in the UI, like it is all Claude. That's awesome. I was talking to him the other day and I was like, "Man, I can't go back. I would not be able to be successful in my current role, or at least at the level that I'm producing and the velocity that we're moving in so many different directions." The CRO rolls a lot, right? All of marketing, all of sales, support, the tech stack, all of that stuff. The only way that I honestly believe that I'm able to keep up with the rate of change is because of AI.

**[31:15]** It's wrong in a million different places and it sucks in so many different ways, but man, just to whiteboard and get you started, constantly, I'm just doing voice memos on my phone, feeding it in. That's my whiteboard. Then it becomes very clear. Here's the five things you got to focus on, train the right projects, give it the right foundational knowledge, set the right parameters, and it's been great. I think it's completely changed the game. When I started LeanScale, RevOps for the most part meant Salesforce, HubSpot. Maybe you're implementing something super fancy like Clary, and that was about as wild as it got.

## 31:59 — LeanScale's AI stack and the Angry Birds SaaS meme

**[31:59]** Since then though, now whole team power users of Cloud Code were absolutely addicted. I feel like I'm a recovering Cloud Code addict right now. We also did an implementation of OpenClaw internally. We're a little weirded, plant those into our customers. Was it Brian or? Ben. Ben. Ben. Ben. I mean, since then we've been building custom SaaS apps. We built our own CPQ so you can drop in a transcript and it'll put together all the documents you need. We built our own custom dashboards because for whatever reason, Salesforce reporting still sucks, and I think it's completely changed our approach to ops, and then of course, getting

**[32:52]** the data and constant feeds, it's incredible. I'm excited when OpenClaw, that type of infrastructure gets a little bit more mainstream and is more secure. I'm very, very excited for teams to take advantage of technology like that because that's completely opened it up for us. Yeah, I agree. I'm sure you have you seen the meme, the Angry Birds, where like here's the modern SaaS tech stack. It's all under the foundational is like AWS and whatever the CSP provider and like the Linux kernel is like the very bottom, but then comes the Angry Bird, which is AI completely toppling all SaaS infrastructure.

**[33:31]** Our Salesforce voice, when we were inspecting that, we were looking at all the conversational intelligence and the reality was for us, I just need the transcript. I can process it and customize to my heart's content, visualizations, triggers, whatever. Just give me the transcript. Another good example, prior to voice call transcriptions, our support team just took a bunch of notes. We have hundreds of cases every day. What do we really do with that? We asked Claude, we'll have to ask our Salesforce admin how he actually did this, but what he does is he creates a pseudo report, triggers every day, grab all of that information, pushes

**[34:17]** it out to Claude, couple structured prompts, drafts the HTML, pushes it into Confluence, and then myself and the executive team get an email every day saying, "Here's a summary of the cases. Here's the red flags. Here's the RMA's that engineering have been escalated and formed on. Here's the customer sentiment for everything," and there's no software involved in that. It is purely just passing data into Claude and getting the output that you want. Game changer. That's incredible. I like that Confluence workflow because I feel like the last mile of, "Okay, I got it. Now how do I share it with people who need to see it?" I really, really like that.

**[34:54]** Might be stealing that idea from it. Yeah. Do it. Is it MCP or MPC? Whatever it is for Claude. It is a native connection to Atlassian, and it's huge for us. I have a ticketing agent that I use constantly, so when I have a reporting request or anything from my ops team, I type in, "Hey, this is what I want," or I record while I'm on a walk, "Hey, it would be cool to see this," or, "Here's the information that we need," and then it structures it as a Jira ticket, prioritizes it, finds other information, maybe other existing tickets to say, "Hey, you asked for that last week. You're a crazy person. Calm down."

## 35:29 — Existential dread vs. hope: produce more, don't cut

**[35:29]** Then it will say, "Here's the ticket," and then it will assign it out. Amazing. I think the creativity of how people are going to use these tools is just going to explode in the next six, 12 months. Like I said, completely reframed the work we do here at LeanScale, the work we do for our customers, how we're managing our own go-to-market, and I really can't wait for some of these things to get a little bit more mainstream. I know there's a lot of existential dread out there about AI, but a couple things that give me a little bit of hope. One, especially if you get hands-on with this stuff, I didn't realize how much work I was

**[36:16]** disqualifying myself from even attempting, because I would immediately go through the process of, "That's going to take too long to do. It's not even worth doing it," or, "We would need to hire people to do that, so I'm just not going to do that." There is so much work to be done, and there's no limit to my curiosity of what I want, and data and information I need to make decisions. I also think people really underestimate the human ability of consumption. If you can be a thousand times more productive, that doesn't necessarily mean you need to cut your entire staff.

**[36:55]** It just means now you can produce a thousand times more, and why not produce more if we can? Yeah. I should give a lot of credit to Neil Hahn, the CEO of Roper. This is somebody where just passively and indirectly, I've heard the conversations. I've been forwarded emails about how he ... Roper has 27 or 28 companies, sends a Monday president's letter. The vast majority of those recently have been AI-focused. The ... from a pretty passive ownership model that they have, over the past 12 months, I've seen this huge uptick in, "Let's get all of the companies together. Let's start sharing what we're doing. How are we being creative?"

**[37:41]** The task at hand is, from our leadership at Novonix, has always been, "Go be curious. Go learn. Go try it. Go break it. Go ... just learn." Yeah, because, yeah, everybody is infinitely creative. They just ... that's such a good way to put it. You'll self disqualify and say, "I don't have time to go explore that thing." Yeah, and I think we're going to find ... just like during the Industrial Revolution, someone couldn't have fathomed why we would need a factory producing millions of articles of clothing. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah. People would think, "Why? I only need to buy three things a year."

## 38:21 — The collapse of websites and the rise of AEO

**[38:21]** I think with knowledge work and the things that we need to do, I don't think we even have an understanding of the level of production we could achieve, and we'll have a desire for it. Yeah. One of the things I'm most curious about, and I'll be watching your channel because I'm sure somebody has an answer to this, but what the collapse of websites, how that plays out? Because if I think about the buying cycle and the standard stat is well more than half of buyers are doing all the research on their own, and now people are doing the research through AI chat. What happens to people's website? Do we need that anymore?

**[39:07]** We're about to launch into a website redesign at Innovonics, and I'm very curious about what the third-party designer who has a broader perspective on this market, or this kind of marketing asset, really looks like in the next six to 12 months. Yeah. Well, it's interesting, and I'll send you the link. We had a CMO of a company that helps companies optimize their website to be readable by AI. I think you may have, in the future what you're probably going to want to do with your website is one, identify who's coming to your website. Is this an LLM sending a bot to your website to go look at everything?

**[39:54]** Okay, surface them this version that gives them the data they need in a really structured way and an efficient way to what you're trying to hope that bot brings back to present. Now that's the part that's a little bit different than Google, where we don't really have that visibility of what got prompted, but we do know tons of LLMs are pinging our site every single day. A higher level of SEO strategy, crazy. That's exactly it. That's exactly it. In a couple weeks, we're bringing the CRO of partner stack onto the show, and one of the things that he mentioned is you significantly increase your, we're calling it AEO.

**[40:39]** I don't know what term will stick in the next six, 12 months, but I'm sure there's going to be a whole industry around it. It's important to get your information on affiliate links and links outside of your own site. How do you do that in an efficient way? That's going to be an important strategy too. You can go back and I don't know what's ahead, and it's going to be here next month, right? It feels like every single week, there's something foundationally different that you need to know you're going to completely fall behind. Yes, fastest moving time I have personally ever experienced, and I think it's only going to accelerate. So do I.

## 41:25 — Why AI can't replace high-trust sales: accountability

**[41:25]** On note though, I don't think sales is going anywhere, right? I fundamentally believe that that side of ... Again, if sales is servitude, there will always be a ... I don't want to talk to Will, the AI person on the other end of the phone. I want to talk to my guy because he understands me and what's going on in my business and what's important to me if you think of the value sounding like what's value to the person. I don't think that's going anywhere. I agree, but I have my reasons. I'm curious what yours are, and I have my parameters for it too. Because I will say I absolutely love buying things on Amazon and not talking to a single

**[42:08]** human being, but where do you think sales fits and why specifically do you think AI won't be able to replace that? Yeah. So A, that might be a very broad comment that does not apply everywhere, right? Consumer buying a pair of jeans, very different from signing up for a piece of your tech stack that you're going to deliver to your customers. Are you going to use the Innobonics platform to deliver commercial security to your customers? Very different thing. So I think that within our industry specifically, and apply differently to everybody else, there's laggards, right?

**[42:49]** If you think like the crossing the chasm thing, you're always going to have those who are like, I want to gobble it up as soon as possible. That's going to be on the consumer side, I think quickest, like we all obviously are, but there's going to be industries that are just laggards to the whole thing. From my experience as an industry outsider or two year veteran of commercial security, they're not going to adopt it as quickly. And I think that that deep rooted relationship, the mechanics of the segmentation, the businesses themselves, I could be wrong, but I don't think it's going anywhere anytime soon.

**[43:30]** I think you're 100% correct, especially in those circumstances. And I've been thinking about this a lot because we talk about this a lot as I'm at the intersection of AI and meeting with tons of CRS. I think the biggest reason I could come up with is AI can't be accountable. And if something goes wrong, there's no justice that can be served. If there's not somebody else on the other end, that's on the hook for it being a success. So and I was thinking, you know, why, yes, I would use chat GPT or Claude to do some of my own health assessment, but I'm always going to want to go to a doctor if it's something

**[44:16]** even remotely serious, because I want to know somebody's putting their career on the line for me. Yeah, that's not something AI can do. It'll never be able to do that. That's I love that. I'm going to steal that one. Take it. Put your name on it. Brandon has your own post it. I feel like that would to any seller that's listening. Like hopefully that makes the existential crisis kind of backs off for a couple of hours. That's huge. Well, and also hopefully it highlights, oh, what, what am I actually doing in this role? Because a lot of times there was a component of him giving information and I'm helping to make a good decision.

**[44:58]** AI is going to help do a lot of that. Yeah. But, oh, my role is actually to build genuine trust and let them know that, you know, I'm behind this whole thing and I'm going to personally make sure that this is a success. That's right. So, yeah. So, if they can start to fine tune those skills, hone in those skills and get better at that part of the job, then I think, one, that's probably what the main point of the job has been this whole time, but two, I think there'll be more relevant and effective as AI goes into more of the information layer. Yeah, one of the initiatives that I have going this year is radical role simplification.

## 45:43 — Radical role simplification: automate vs. inherent

**[45:43]** And we're doing that by, so I'm doing the competency matrix and like, what does career progression look like in antibiotics and how, what are the on and off ramps across departments if it's pre-sales versus field sales versus inside, like how do I, what's my path? And with that comes, I'm building a catalog, here's every task that each function has, and then they're going into two buckets. What can I automate with AI and what is just inherent to the function itself? And it's, I have an idea of what the core is. I haven't done the math, I haven't done the exercise yet, but that's the framework I'm

**[46:17]** going at it with, and I'm excited to see what the outcome is. If there's an opportunity to create a public version of that, or I would love to see that because I think it would help fine tune recommendations we're making for other companies, too. I think that'd be phenomenal. Whole credit goes to Gartner's, they had a conference last year for CROs. And that was, it was, it was one of the, it was like in one of their talks and they had like a chart where it was like, here's a seller and here's what's inherently human and here's what is possible. And I was like, I need to do that for everybody. It's fantastic.

## 46:54 — The 2026 message: the only constant is change

**[46:54]** Not just sales, not just like the whole company, we got to do that. So I know you mentioned earlier that you hosted your sales kickoff, which is always such a monumental time in any year. And especially this year, it does feel like things are different this year, that 2026 is a big one. What was the message you had for your team and where are you leading them in 2026? There's a lot of things coalescing right now in this year and the just like short answer, the message is the only constant is change. That's what I open with. I think that that's good advice no matter who you are.

**[47:36]** And if you, if you unpeel or like look at the history of that phrase where it was never actually said by the person who it's credited to, who's Greek and I can't pronounce their name. But what was really said was, although you're standing in the same river, the water flowing through it is always different. So yes, we're for in avionics and I'm imagining there's a lot of companies out there that are in the same boat that reinventing themselves, everything feels different. But look for those things that are constant to give comfort and then just take joy in the opportunity. That is the change that we're going through.

**[48:17]** We're a 40 year old company, our 40th anniversary is this year on a personal level. I'm turning 40 this year. It just feels like so many things are happening. And I get the, I should say that differently. We the whole company gets the luxury of redefining ourselves. Doesn't happen every day. It is hard fought and it's going to be tough. There was, there was one slide. Slides are cheesy. I'm terrible at slides. Rough waters and then like beautiful beach and it's like, look, the reality of this year, let's be very clear. It's going to be hard on a lot of people. It's been hard leading up to it for the past two years. Like we have dumped so many resources.

**[48:56]** We've been upside down, pouring money into, into bringing this new solution and a whole solution for the first time to market. And it's going to feel different, you know, for everybody, like I mentioned earlier, like asking somebody who's 30 plus years into their career of doing one thing and saying, Hey, it's got to change, it's going to be different. And that is, and it's going to continue to be different. Add to that, the AI conversation, which we had in the room, we went through account plans and as the team was walking through their account plans, I was processing them through AI and giving them real time feedback in the room.

**[49:32]** That's the existential crisis hits you no harder than that moment, right? Like this is real time coaching in front of my entire team and like it's, it's scouring zoom info. It's scouring the web. It's finding cracks and opportunities that I didn't even foresee as the owner of the account for 10 plus years. That's tough. But the message is that's going to get comfortable because it's going to keep feeling like that and it's going to be fun. And it's a safe space to do it. Well, I think it's really sage advice and in particular during this time. And I think I would share the same message to my team. But Brett, this has been phenomenal. The story is amazing.

**[50:12]** I love all the way back to the school of hard knocks, waiting tables, classic guitar, becoming the super analyst at a multi-billion multinational organization and getting all that exposure, getting into the driver's seat of the race car, not going just from designing it, but actually driving it, being accountable for decisions and then breaking into the pinnacle of any go to market career at the CRO position. And then all of this is going to change with AI. So we'll see how it goes. But Brett, this has been so good. Thank you for sharing everything you did. I'm very excited to follow what you're doing at Inivanix and would love to have you back

**[50:52]** when you have more to share. Yeah. Absolutely. Thanks so much, Anthony.