Why He Left the CEO Seat to Become a CRO

0:00 Today I'm talking with Alex Wakefield, the chief revenue officer at Acuity MD, a commercial platform for the med-tech industry that just raised $80 million at an almost $1 billion valuation. Alex was there at the beginning when they were just shy of 20 customers, and in just four short years, they're now serving over 500 customers in the med-tech space. But what makes Alex's perspective unique is his path. He didn't come up through the traditional sales track. He started operations, moved to VP of Sales, became CEO of his own company, and then chose to go back to being a CRO.

0:41 We're going to dig into why he made that choice, what CEO experience teaches you about being a better CRO, and how he thinks about building teams, especially his approach to hiring unconventional people who don't have the typical sales resume. Alex, you were CEO before coming to Acuity to be the chief revenue officer. Very few people go in that direction, and often they're searching to go the other way. I'd love for you to unpack that story. Yeah, sure, of course. Appreciate the time today, Anthony, and thanks a lot for the intro. So I did.

1:19 I joined Longbow Advantage as chief commercial officer and built out the commercial organization, which is a little bit tighter in my background. I'd known the founder for a little bit of the organization. So when I took the organization over and we experienced some great growth, it was a really good experience. I enjoyed it. Fantastic. People love the solution, but what really attracted me to Acuity MD was when I started digging in and looked at product market fit of the particular offering that they had, which is really challenging to come by, as you probably know. I will tell you before I made the leap, I talked to no fewer than 25 people.

1:57 You know, father and mentors and advisors and CEOs and said, "Is this kind of crazy to do this move from CEO to CRO?" And, you know, the general consensus is if you're running a commercial organization and you think you have a great product and a great team, and I really wanted to go build something at a really rapid scale, those were a lot of the factors that played into the decision. I did dig into, you know, I thought I could partner with the founding team really, really well. Three amazing guys that have super complementary skills and know the space and technology really well. So I thought I could work with them real well to build things.

2:35 And I did love the investment thesis. I dug into the venture thesis on why they were investing, particularly in vertical SaaS. So a lot of those things came together, and then I just, I kind of, you know, reconciled myself to the fact that I think I'm great on the commercial side. I did like running a company, but when you're just kind of building and you can drive exponential growth, a lot of the, you know, honestly, like compensation, equity and how you feel about yourself, math, just kind of makes sense when you're in a good build and a high growth mode with a great culture.

3:12 So this was really a build based on some product market fit assessment, and I added like the commercial aspect to the organization. So it's been great, you know, just based on some of the growth you mentioned in the introduction. Well, and the growth that QT's gone on is absolutely no joke. Going from around 2 million ARR when you started skyrocketing up to 50 million ARR, that is a tremendous run already. And I know you guys are just getting started. I would love to hear how you approach. We get this question so much, and I think your ops background will probably help you here. But what does go to market look like at each of these stages?

3:53 There's when you're building it, but then as you're going through all of these new phases of the company, what are the biggest things you run into as you're scaling? I've done it. I've done a few different stages, which I think is one of the things that sort of attracted the founding team to my background is the idea was, hey, let's at least invest in a person that's seen a lot of these stages, you know, long, both small growth and then some mid stage stuff based on the team I ran at JDA and a very larger running in America's business and model. And so the different stages definitely carry challenges.

4:28 One of the things that I did when I first joined was I implemented pretty rigorous sales process, which I'd done a few companies before, perhaps a little process heavy, you know, for that stage. So I think that was sort of difficult to digest for the team that I was hiring. So I think I was kind of heavy on process at the beginning, but I heard some folks from the space that were like the med tech selling space. So a real expert and they were amazing at generating pipeline, getting excitement in the industry. They understood like the game changing technology we had.

5:01 So it was an interesting stage because I think a lot of that, like, you know, in the in the mud fighting and just growing like your pipeline and winning deals for excitement was really great and took us from, you know, I don't know, 20 customers to 100 or something like that. You know, 22 to 10 million in ARR, but then you you do have to pivot and as as the organization grows and kind of gets out of that hand to hand combat and you're really in process orientation. What was super interesting was I thought we had pretty good process in infrastructure, a little light on metrics like we were late on hiring RevOps.

5:39 I thought a little light on metrics, but trying to migrate some of those super early successful folks into larger enterprise deals. You grow into six figure deals, you go up market, you get into bigger organizations. That's kind of a different motion. So that's where process became a little bit more important. We started to bring in some folks that had kind of legacy software selling background, sort of move some of these med tech legacy folks into other areas of the organization. Like enablement, customer success, kind of, you know, event management, like super successful in those areas.

6:15 So it's interesting to see the backgrounds that were a little bit more successful later in stages. And now as we're getting bigger, process becomes much more important. RevOps is a significant contributor to how we're doing analysis and optimizing the team. And what's really interesting is we do have an awesome blend of people that have been selling software in the past and people that have been selling med tech in the past and have sort of cross-pollinated and learned the others industry. But yeah, the different stages have definitely leveraged different areas of the process.

6:52 And, you know, as we kind of like pivoted to the next phase of getting up to 100 million, 200 million, whatever it is, it becomes a lot more sophisticated in analyzing pipeline metrics and sales efficiencies and all those things we can talk about in RevOps. But yeah, it was super interesting to see the different stages and how we try to construct those and, you know, the mistakes we made and some things we did well. A lot of that stuff can be glazed over with a really, really good product, which we have. But yeah, it's been interesting. Absolutely. I want to go back to one of the things you said.

7:23 You said maybe you were a little too late in bringing RevOps into Acuity. I'm curious, specific to you when, in hindsight, do you wish you would have brought RevOps in? And then as a litmus test for others, when is it time? Is it a certain headcount threshold, a revenue threshold? Is there a certain complexity formula you have that says now is the time to bring RevOps in? Yeah, I don't know if there's a formula. I can tell you that the consistent OKR that I had promoted to the organization that I did not deliver was data completeness and accuracy in CRM.

8:03 So basically, like the underlying data to collect it and make sure it's clean so that you can actually have sort of a basis for how do you measure your organization. I continued to kind of kick the can. I thought I could do it on my own. I didn't really have enough time to do those things. So it got to a point where it was very difficult to measure anything. We might have had 16 or 18 salespeople, and it was really difficult to measure anything aside from the sales stages I defined, the pipeline and what people were booking.

8:33 So a close loss ratio. But there was very little sales efficiency and process efficiency is how well are we doing? How much? How well are we generating pipeline? What is the quality of the pipeline? How are we qualifying deals in? What are we closing? So we didn't bring RevOps on until three years, two and a half years after I joined or something like that. And it was a lot of catch up. It was a lot of catch up. We brought a person in at the beginning who I think was just it was really difficult to get their arms around what we were doing.

9:11 And so we brought a newer person in, you know, about a year ago, and he's just got a really strong analytical background. And it's got it. It's take somebody that wants to really build, get into the details, get their hands dirty. I actually learned in recruiting and said, hey, look, I know RevOps sounds super exciting, but I hope you want to get your hands dirty and like data cleanliness because we have to build that foundation in order to build from there.

9:36 So my sense was we were a little bit late. I think that as soon as you have some sort of critical mass where you've got enough reps, whatever you want to call it, like six, eight, ten, whatever the number is where you need to start collecting data and assessing the efficacy of what is working that they're doing. What are what are they pitching? Who's doing well? Who's not? The sooner you can start to measure those things, the better decisions you can make. And I think you'll make fewer mistakes down the line in hiring, enablement, process efficiency, things like that.

10:10 Yeah, I'm seeing a lot of philosophy recently. I think, you know, I grew up in the growth at all cost SAS era. That's when I entered and it was a lot of fun, but that doesn't fly as much anymore. So a lot of teams are thinking, OK, slower to hire reps than before. Earlier to bring in process and earlier to bring in things like RevOps. I'm curious, what is your threshold or your method to know that you need to bring on more reps? What does that formula look like to say, OK, now's the time to add X amount to the team? Yeah, I think like you should have a plan for what you think you're going to hire and stick to plan as best you can.

11:05 But you should set a threshold of how well are folks ramping and what percent of their quarter are they achieving. So we had we had found a little bit earlier on that we were we were doing pretty well in the metrics. We had pretty good attainment and we continue to hire. And then as startups and high growth companies do, you kind of stub your toe or have a couple of hiccups here and there. And when you like the way we've done it, I think our our our founding and finance team has done a really good job. I would say we're very financially conservative. We maintain a really strong headcount plan, but we want to try to make it streamlined.

11:46 So we do a good job, I think, of not hiring rather than letting people go. So as soon as you see those indicators that, oh, man, I want to achieve 75 or 80 percent of my quota or I want to be at 90 plus percent ramp quota capacity, whatever threshold you pick. If you're coming in short of those, it's a good idea to pull back on the hiring plan. That way, we're not really laying people off. We haven't done that. I haven't really done that in my past.

12:16 You're not really laying people off because you've gone too fast and made mistakes. You kind of stay ahead of it and look at your sales productivity metrics and you adjust the hiring plan down, which we've definitely done. And we've tried to lean in and hire more where appropriate. But I think that's the best thing to do is figure out what your onboarding and ramp definition is, how well you're achieving quota compared to what you're assigned, and then how well you're achieving versus your ramped quota capacity.

12:49 Those are the things that we look at. So we didn't really get ahead of ourselves, but we've definitely pared back some hiring when we thought we were a little shy on where we wanted to be. Yeah, and I still think it's the biggest mistake that I see the customers that we're working with is overhiring in sales because all the time and it's not just there's more effects to it. So it's not just you hire people that might not hit their quota. It's also your good reps that you have on the team that are performing really well for you.

13:20 You're diluting the territory, you're diluting the top of funnel demand that's coming in and getting assigned to the team to people that just aren't going to hang there and you don't have enough to feed that machine. And then you see your good reps leave too. So I think it's unbelievably dangerous to overhire and you have to be really precise about when you bring people on. That last piece is one of the worst pieces there is. If you have a player reps that start to leave, people notice that. That is about the worst thing that can happen.

13:51 We did a little bit of that because in a vertical asset organization, we try to narrow down your account list so that we can grow our largest customers as much as we can. We should be really large strategic partners with these companies. So the account list, as lots of times it does, I'm a big fan of this historically, but you want to shrink your account list because you want to go deeper and deeper and deeper and be more strategic and ultimately you end up selling more and being a more important partner.

14:20 So we leaned into that a little bit earlier this year and I thought we got a little bit aggressive on hiring, we restructured the territories, made them a little bit thinner. But we pretty quickly pulled that back when we saw there was some lack of attainment in what we wanted to do and we grew the territories a little bit, talked to our top performers and you have to make sure you're protecting everyone but you're really looking at your top performers and saying look, we got to make sure we're not diluting your pool as much as possible.

14:53 So, we've definitely had folks leave, we've definitely moved out of the organization, but I think we've done a pretty decent job of not really losing who we don't want to lose but that last bit you mentioned is like super important if you have a players, a player sales reps start leaving. That's pretty noticeable to the outside world. That's not a great thing. Yeah, no matter how much commission you're paying them, there's no better ROI than your top sales people. So, you don't want them to go. Yeah, if you're if you're perhaps in the top five paid people in your company you're in a good spot.

15:29 100% on hiring. You're in a very unique space, and I actually, I started my career in med tech I worked at a company called global med. So, telemedicine devices and software. That was a product trainer and then I moved into sales. It's a very very unique selling environment, if you're in the healthcare med tech space. How are you finding the right people you said you have a mix of some traditional SAS, plus some med tech sellers. What's the common denominator you're looking for that lets you know if this is a good profile for acuity.

16:08 Yeah, it's an interesting one because I've gone back and forth so much on is it the background is the experience and coming from the space, I will tell you about med tech sellers. They work really hard, and they really focus on their customers whether it's surgeons or hospitals I mean they work really hard around the clock is an exaggeration but odd hours is not. And so, I think what works for us is, I always like to try to mirror emulate your customer base. And so I think just a very simple common denominator is if we can start to suss out.

16:51 Does someone really want to like put the time in to understand their customer whether they have to learn how to sell software a little bit better or they have to understand, or they have to learn the med tech space a little bit better. Does someone really want to put in the effort to become an expert and support customers that work really hard, and actually have a really great altruistic mission of, you know, helping patient outcomes and patient outcomes.

17:16 These are folks that that love what they do and they're passionate about healthcare. So it's an interesting common denominator for us, because I do think that like work ethic passion for like an altruistic mission and believing in what we do is a really interesting common denominator I know it's not you know quantifiable or sales process oriented or things like that there's so many things you can teach. Those are things that are that are hard to teach and I think that we've seen a lot of success for people that buy into what we're doing, really want to support their customers mission.

17:49 And it's kind of a unique position, I think for us to have an altruistic mission as a software organization for instance like our mission is to accelerate adoption of medical technology want to help our customers, like, get their technology into the hands of the physicians and hospitals that can get them into the lives of the patients that improve their outcomes as quickly as possible that's our whole goal is like to create visibility into your technology, so that the healthcare system can get them into the patient's lives as quickly as possible.

18:20 I think it makes a big difference when you have people who are mission aligned, and that when you know you're working for something bigger than yourself. That's what helps you put in that extra mile, being in the healthcare industry is, I think, easier to do because you're so close to the impact that you're making, and you can see the tangible difference you're making. And if you run it to the end it's like I know hey in some way, it might be a couple steps removed I probably saved a life or two by getting these people set up with what they need

18:54 to deliver care. Absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah, we try to tell those stories internally as much as we can where we have positive effect in folks lives. It wouldn't be a go to market B2B SAS podcast, if I didn't go down the AI path. I'm always curious because everything is changing every day today as of June 17 2026 you know fable got pulled down they're reluctant to release meet those. Everything feels like it's just in flux, and I think go to market in general has some of those interesting applications. I'm curious, how are you and your team leveraging AI, either internally, or how are you leveraging externally for your customers.

19:41 Actually, I think we did a really good job just from from our CEO Mike, on the way down like as soon as tools were released we didn't we didn't settle, you know between open air and thropic right away but but quickly settled into, you know, Claude co work, whatever but there was a pretty big push for internal testing utilization sharing of AI stories. So we did get pretty good feedback from the board that we were, we were doing a great job of adopting AI internally for efficiency and a lot of that stuff right out of the gate is like testing

20:16 is it going to stick probably not. So as we get further down the path. How do we, how do we make sure that people aren't, you know, I wouldn't want to, I wouldn't say wasting their time I think smaller tasks can be, you know, easily done with with AI but how do we, how do we help folks in in automation and CRM and get visibility into what they need, without a lot of the point and click just like serve things up to them so that's kind of what we're working on right now so I were doing relatively well on the commercial side there.

20:47 And that's what we've done recently to pivot because my view is the AI space moves like super fast I just did an internal meeting yesterday. And, you know, the leaders like market share can shift quickly. I mean, snowflake came out with their results what earlier this month and all of a sudden popped into the popped into the leader category of AI with, with, with kind of pop q1 results so super interesting that the perspective shifts I think switching costs are pretty low.

21:21 So I think it's a really dynamic environment about what people can use. We see a lot of customers want to write internal agents. We've, we have sort of an industry leading data set. That we do sell and provide to our customers is one of our offerings. They want to ingest our data right agents on top of them, great like that's that's great you can do some of those things, but when you look externally at what we do with AI, we are now ensuring that our team our customer facing team, which is about, I don't know, 80 or 90 people but our customer

21:54 facing team is an expert in our own AI solution so that, you know, ask our solution whatever you want it to do we help, for the most part medical device sales reps, be more efficient in understanding their market their territory, how to sell better into hospital systems or surgeons. So we want our team to be experts in using our own AI inside our application so that they can train their, their customers or at least show them how simple it is, as one thing that I has done for us is it's made

22:30 tech more usable and easy to adopt you kind of don't need training or don't need to know anything you just have to not be afraid and ask it whatever you want so we've now pivoted hard into internal experts on our own AI so that we can help train our customers and show them how best to use it. So that's what we're doing right now and then, and then the reason, you know, we think that's important and why we think we can help our customers a little bit better than some of the horizontal

22:59 players or the data players is that, like I said, we do think we have an industry leading data set but we also have a pretty large cohort of folks that know our customers industry and our use cases that came from the industry. So between having proprietary data set folks that know the industry and can sit with our customers and show them the best way to use AI that's why we think we have a pretty good advantage so we went from testing internally to kind of what I would just say is

23:31 hardening our use of AI so that it can be broadly adopted to pivoting into using our own solutions and becoming experts there, so we can you know as kind of Sherpa our customers into the proper use of the ad that we provide to them. I think that's great because so much of the value is in the context. So, if you have deep context of your customer their industry their problems or pains, then you can build things that are just so much more relevant than somebody building

24:03 generic things for them. I was just at an event last week in London, rev ops, they have events put on by rev ops co op, and one of the biggest conversations was, okay we're past this experimentation phase, where, hey, everybody gets Claude code max license and go build whatever you want and connect it to any MCP you want. And we're moving into this okay it's time to like, professionalize it. And it feels like there's a couple different camps of how people are doing that.

24:36 One is rev ops is really taking a leadership role in this. Another is there's this centralized committee that's working across engineering and product. How are you thinking about who holds the keys to how acuity leverages AI internally. And for us, for us, and I, and I definitely can't speak to product or engineering I can say that we're, I'm gonna leave that and I'm not gonna speak to that I don't run that business I'll let answer that question.

25:08 But I can tell you in the in the commercial world. And the way our organization has pushed forward is it's kind of decentralization of AI. So, in the commercial world what I've done is I'm trying, I'm not. I encourage folks to do less testing because then I think you get all sorts of different reports and tools out of Claude code that are really cool, but everybody's got their own particular thing that they've built which isn't like super efficient at the end of the day. So we don't necessarily want to completely dissuade that I think there's huge efficiencies to be used on a daily basis in the tools for sure, of course.

25:54 But I'm trying to move it more into rev ops centralized to say hey look like here's a skill you can use sales leaders, here's a skill you can use to assess your team real quick. Look at a deal where is in stage. How are you doing against stage movement criteria. What are you missing, you know, where's your next meeting like things like that that we can build for folks rather than they build it on their own.

26:19 So, from an organizational standpoint, there's definitely not a centralized command and control, but from a commercial standpoint, I do like people being efficient in the day to day, but when you're talking about overall process and structure. I definitely want rev ops, ultimately to at least have a look at it in a say in it to make sure it's, it's applicable to mobile, multiple parts of the organization but we're, you know, early on in that journey that's just like my kind of hypothesis right now is we're sort of building out the team and solidifying some of these things.

26:56 Yeah, I know it's early days and we're having our own, I'd say it was about six seven months ago. November of 25 is when everybody started getting their hands on cloud code here. And it was just like a massive explosion of creativity and building things. And then it quickly turned into a bowl of spaghetti and chaos, and we had to reel those experiments in and say okay. Here are the 10 valuable things that we need for our business and everybody needs to use these plugins and skills and agents and using this way and they have the connectors.

27:35 You can experiment and do your own personal stuff but like if you're doing something serious for the business. These are the things that you need to use and serving it up to them. And we've been wrangling that in for our customers. It's been one of our quickest growing practices we have revenue operations marketing operations and AI operations. Yep, and, you know, building in, making sure you have the data pipelines the context graphs, when you're asking cloud about data it's pulling accurate data it's not hallucinating.

28:02 All of those things are super important if you're going to do it at scale, especially like where your team is marching towards right now. Yeah, absolutely. I mean I think the beginning early experimenting phase is really important because in it, and then it, it reduces the kind of the fear and uncertainty of folks that might not be as technical, that it is really easy to use and I think that's an important

28:25 learning for when you project it out to your customers so the testing and experimenting phase is really really important. It's just as you said, so they splinter and proliferate and create a bowl of spaghetti like yeah, you want to tighten those things up. And then pivot into the next stage which is like really becoming efficient and how do you actually use it across your organization. Yeah, well, I'm sure more learning to come I don't know maybe they'll launch the model that just does everything for us and we won't have to worry about it too much but we'll see.

28:54 Yeah, we'll see. Another big topic, especially since AI is kind of gotten ingrained into how go to market teams are approaching building pipeline giving their messaging out is a lot of the older pipeline building tactics really aren't working. The outbound is having a lot of teams are having a real tough time with outbound things like paid ads things that used to feel like you can throw money behind it and it would scale. What are you seeing work to build pipeline get opportunities and get in front of the people that you're trying to sell to.

29:38 There's a few things I've never been a huge fan of like blasting lots of things out and playing the numbers whether it's a 2% hit rate or whatever like I'm, you know, 2% here let's like double our, our blasted out but I've always been more of a fan of really thoughtful curated messaging. We actually tend to send a lot of the inbounds you can imagine we all get like a lot of the inbounds that I find particularly ineffective to our SDR team and our sales team as examples of what not to do. Just catchy phrases at the end you know you're you're quintessential like how do I get somebody to respond.

30:23 We find that curated messaging and we're, we have the advantage of being in a vertical sass company where we're selling to a pretty specific buyer. So we really lean into curated messaging as far as specific research into the org and specific use cases that we can think we can solve, and it's very much a specific email or call or even in our industry like text work so.

30:52 Believe it or not, we have response rates, we have pickup rates on dials of like 20%. It's absurd because folks in the industry are so dialed into using their phone and serving their physicians that they're sensitive to those types of communication so we have pretty good hit rates on text, on dials, response rates on emails are very high, 12%, 13%, something like that, but I've seen a lot of folks in our organization get really creative quick loom, you know quick videos, 90 seconds specific to our customer built in our software, sent to them in a video.

31:31 Hey respond if you'd like to learn a little bit more specifically how we can help you in this territory. So we tend to lean into very curated messages where we have a pretty pretty good response rate. That I think is the number one thing for us that gets that gets folks to engage and respond. And are you building this with a classic SDR team that's focused on building the pipeline or your reps doing some of this themselves do you have a different approach. I mean I always think that I always think that you can cut the numbers however you want. I think reps are going to generate 50% of their pipeline, whatever, give or take.

32:10 So it's another criteria when you hire folks is, is you want to assess someone's ability to generate pipe or not be afraid to call call and not be afraid to create their own leads. So the, so the, I don't know if I want to say the majority but like the plurality like most the biggest contributor of their pipe is going to be the reps themselves and more successful reps definitely create more of their own pipe, but we contribute.

32:36 I don't know what the number is 12% from SDRs and 20% from marketing or something like that but the majority is going to come from the other bits are marketing SDRs, we have a pretty good referral partnership network, and then the reps themselves. Okay, last question on pipeline building any. I've seen a little bit of a resurgence with events for in person, are you seeing a similar trend or seem about the same or maybe less event events are actually very big for us.

33:09 Some folks have come in, you know, some just coming out of COVID I think and coming from some software companies considered events to you know, kind of be just boondoggles and waste of time, not for us. I mean events are very, very productive for us. It's a combination of the space, very interpersonal selling very interpersonal folks in the medical technology community community so it's very interpersonal so I think that plays into it. I also think that people like getting out to events and it's always better in person, no matter what, but we get a big percentage of our pipeline from events, we go to a lot.

33:51 I think it's, there's just so much noise in our inboxes or LinkedIn that, and especially if you're in a vertical SaaS where you know you can be pretty targeted about the events you go to and you know your buyers are going to be there. And it sounds like you have proprietary research and data that can probably get you some on stage presence and those type of things I think if you play them right and if it's a good fit.

34:15 It's a productive thing. And you still I would add I mean you still have to do tons of pre planning prep meeting set up in advance structure who you want to see go execute against it and then follow up measure the follow up that was a piece we put in over the past year but so I think there's not just going to the event because magic doesn't happen. There's tons of planning preps preset meetings, tons of follow up and holding folks accountable to communications and tracking that through CRM to make sure things are coming to closure.

34:44 And when you can do that, all the way beginning pre plan execute the event post plan follow up and drive pipeline. That's where we've seen the biggest benefit. Amazing. I'm sensing a lot of that ops background in the way you answer a lot of these questions and I really appreciate it. Post series see raised a fresh $80 million in capital. You know there's a directive to keep the growth going. What's going to be the biggest challenge for you, your team to continue that acceleration as you go.

35:21 What an interesting time because we like everyone else we are we are going to like move into a native like that's going to be the expert what is the experience of software look like it could be completely unique to each individual experiencing it like your traditional UI of point and click and hit tabs and you know dropdowns completely go away. I mean probably will see your experience could completely change. So we're in this interesting time where we are pivoting completely into, you know, a native thinking product and

35:55 figure out what what comes along in the platform. So as we're doing this, there is like a little bit of understanding that your, your, your growth might. I don't know, pick up a little bit as you make this transition like like you have to make a decision you're going to do this like right away and get killed in revenue, or are you going to slow burn it a little bit and continue like a really nice healthy growth,

36:21 but I would say we have a really thoughtful board that that gives us really good guidance and like things to think about in that in that journey. So what we've seen and what we're doing is looks like we're still maintaining pretty solid growth is as we move along and then we're in the process right now of trying to move folks into the QD AI solution. And that's a lot of what I talked about earlier in the commercial team being experts in our own solution so we can help sure bar customers in that direction.

36:55 So, it's kind of like a roundabout answer. We can't really stay on that same path because that legacy platform is going to change a lot or a little or whatever it is. So we're in this like interesting transition period I will tell you like, I feel pretty confident about the direction we're going and we're having great conversations and like our engagement at senior levels of our customers is phenomenal. So I think the direction we're going is really good.

37:25 I'm not, I haven't seen like major hiccups in growth, which is nice, but it's always it's always hard to predict so right now we're kind of maintaining plan I think we're doing, you know, pretty well against it, having an understanding board and a really transparent conversation helps those things because it's an interesting transition I mean like the companies haven't done this before, for the most part so, so far I think we're I think we're okay, I don't think I answered that question awesome, but it's a tough one to answer.

37:55 I'll take I'll take honest over awesome any day, and I think everybody's struggling with the same thing in acuity will have its own unique challenges going through that transition, but in general, most software companies are going to have to do this. Where do you think the biggest challenges in general are going to be is it going to be on enabling your team migrating customers. Do you need to change the profiles of your hiring change your culture in any way, what do you think the biggest walls people are going to run

38:29 into while going through this transition. I actually think the biggest wall people are going to run into is the mental wall of AI first. And so here's what I mean by that. Everybody has been kind of hired and onboarded in this pre pre AI world. So one of the things that I've been leading into for the past six weeks or whatever, and just didn't like I said an internal meeting yesterday is trying to shift the mindset of everyone to AI first like the world is going to change like your experience

39:05 with software is going to change the world is going to change is, is probably an overstatement but but your experience with software is going to change. If you maintain this legacy mindset of here is a user interface right term. The term is going to be relevant like here's a user interface. Here's how you think about these things. And if you think about AI as the next evolution in technology. I think that's a limiting way to think about it. So we're talking to our team about is forget about that. It's not that AI is the next wave of technology. AI actually makes it a ton easier to interact with technology actually like brings it backwards.

39:40 Don't overthink it. Ask whatever you want. Ask whatever you want. You know, I got my I got, I don't want to name any names but one of the things I tried to get you know whether it's your parents or your spouse or whatever, as you're as you're migrating from Google search into chat GPT is a lot of want to learn something new. Don't want to learn something new. It's easier than search like it's easier. You don't have to think at all touch the microphone and say what you want.

40:06 It's that simple. I think the gating factor is going to be if folks cannot drop their past notions of how software works and what that experience is like. That's going to be the limiting factor. So it's really up to individuals and it shouldn't be that difficult to move into the new world. So that's really what I'm focused on. I'm focused on leading into the sales team and the professional services and customer success team to say,

40:33 this makes everyone's lives easy. It's easier to use. It's not hard. It's easy to use. Ask whatever you want. Do not overthink it. Don't overthink it. Well, folks, you know, come up with like these amazing prompts that yield amazing results. That's fantastic. But you should also say, I sell knees. How can you help me do that? I mean, that's it. You know what I mean? Like, you should completely demystify it. And I think if we can do that successfully, then most people will be okay.

41:02 But I think the limiting factor is people that hold on to old notions and think AI is this next evolution and more difficult. They're not going to learn it. I mean, nothing could be further from the truth. It makes the world so much easier. It's so interesting. One of the growth equity firms that we partner with really closely, Radium Capital, they shared, they've noticed across their portfolio, there has been much higher adoption on the go-to-market side of AI in general than on the product and in general.

41:31 Than on the product and engineering side. Yeah. And I will share, I noticed that internally at LeanScale too. We have go-to-market engineers, mostly heads down, coding and developing for our customers. And we have go-to-market architects that are more customer facing, half technical, but, and they've adopted AI a little bit more than our engineering team did. Yeah.

41:56 And I guess the big core of it that you brought up is, hey, you have these habits, you have this muscle memory of how you're used to working and you kind of have to go back and re-engineer those where some people that maybe didn't have any habits at all, it's easier for them to adopt because they weren't doing anything before. Exactly. Yeah, exactly. So that's like the biggest thing that I'm trying to attack right now. Alex, I could tell you have a deep operations background just based on how you're approaching a lot of these questions and problems or challenges that you're getting in your role.

42:30 I would love to hear, and I'll make it even more relevant. A lot of people listening to this podcast are in a RevOps role. They're thinking about, hey, how do I transition into that CRO role? Because that's kind of at the pinnacle of your career on the go-to-market side. So lots of people are interested in, how do I parlay this operational experience I have into that type of executive position? I would love to hear your story and how you went from operations into sales and then ultimately into the leadership position you're in today.

43:03 Yeah, happy to. This forms my thinking of sales, and I think it's a really big advantage, and I tend to try to pick this out. It's rare, but if you can pick it out on paper and suss it out in interviews, it's like magic if you can find someone with a background like this. We have a lady on our team today that I think just exemplifies this background, so I looked at her on paper and I loved it. So I started in supply corps in the Navy, hardcore operations, and a lot of folks, military officers come out, and they'll go into whatever corporate job they want to go into.

43:40 And a lot of these specialized recruiters will try to get folks into whatever specialty they think, and folks are trying to push me into sales, which I'll take as a compliment. It's fine. Like, okay, cool. You got a good personality, I guess. But that was not my dream. I was taking the GMATs and I wanted to go out of Wall Street. My dad was in finance, and so that's what I wanted to do. And like a lot of folks are, you think you know what you want to do and you have to learn over time.

44:07 So I ended up in like global supply chain operations, logistics operations at IBM. It was cool. Great. You can't go wrong. Go to IBM. It was fun. But what I ultimately ended up doing was I started getting close. I was very fortunate to jump into like an SAP R3 project, like in 1998. So I very quickly got into technology, which is ultimately like I made the pivot into software. But as I went through roles, I got closer and closer to the customer. So I was building like custom logistics solutions, technology solutions for our like large contract manufacturers.

44:42 And then I partnered with the field sales engineering team on product managing, like a global visibility solution for semiconductor production for some of the ASICs and foundry customers like Nvidia and Xilinx and Qualcomm back in the day. And so what I found was I really enjoyed working directly with customers. And that just kind of like backed my way into it. Also happened to take project management certification courses. And that's where I think became really, really relevant because all of a sudden I popped up and I said, you know, I think I want to be in sales.

45:15 And so I kind of made a hard cut into a pretty non-technical product because I was given some advice that it might be a little bit more up my alley for selling in that like, you know, if you're selling semiconductors. Hey, you're an econ guy. They like tend to buy from double E's and you know, electrical engineers and masters and PhDs. Fine. I was very fortunate. I think if you put yourself in the position to recognize me, you get really lucky. That's great. So I had some project management training. And so I joined an organization where they were rolling out spin selling from, you know, Huthwaite back in the day in 2003 or whatever.

45:50 And I actually thought it was gold. I thought it was magic. I was like, wait a minute. There's a process to selling? Like there's things you can do, like you can actually move through a process. And so what I started to digest and like rolled out to organizations was this combination of spin selling, which is really like psychology management. You know, the author of spin selling was a psychology research. I love it. But it's like psychology management. The art of the sale. How do you influence people and then the science of the sale, which my teams I think would probably go, oh my gosh, not another clothes plan.

46:27 But the science of the sale is how do you methodically move through these sales so that you can ultimately get customers to agree to what we want to do together. But you're moving through a rigorous process to get through a sale and get to signature. So it's like this blending of how do you how do you master the art of psychology and working with lots of different folks to get everybody in the same moving in the same direction, which I think is a big like attribute of leadership and then methodically managing your way through sales.

47:01 And it was only after the fact that, you know, you heard about John McMahon and medic and medic and all those things. And I was like, oh, yeah, that sounds good. That sounds like kind of what I'm doing. But that I believe that operational background bringing into sales, you'd be successful in sales is it is absolutely invaluable because when it when you realize that managing a sale is like a project. Man, it just like takes on a whole different meaning. And then if you like, I could recommend something. I just I mean, I love the book range. It's just this, you know, people with varying backgrounds that culminate in one sort of successful move.

47:38 It's a very cool book for anybody with a varied background. And I read and I was like, oh, that's cool. That sounds like me. It makes me feel really good about making these like wild jumps and seemingly disconnected moves that I now, you know, connect together. But yeah, I love I love sales folks with non-traditional backgrounds. I think it brings a completely different perspective in like, how do you methodically move through the sale?

48:05 I've definitely, in my experience, the best reps have been unbelievably methodical. They time box their day in certain ways. They're very, very numbers oriented. Of course, they do have the soft skills and some of the qualitative abilities to move the sale along and have the right conversations at the right time. But they they have a process and I've seen plenty of people who have like all the soft skills, gift to gab presentation, very, very, you know, exciting people to be around that don't close anything because they're not moving the deal along as they need to.

48:46 So I've 100 percent seen that. I'm curious. Sounds like people pointed that out to you earlier in your career. They recommended you go into sales. So you clearly had some of those qualitative attributes, someone in a rev ops role. They're in. And usually rev ops, you get an eclectic bag of people, too. I kind of did a little bit of sales and marketing before doing rev ops, but then I fell in love with the science of it and had a great passion for it.

49:13 But a lot of people in it who maybe have not had that type of experience, what do you recommend they do? Do you do? Do you go hop out and get an eight year old? Do you look for some type of leadership role? Do you kind of get the next best opportunity? That's close. How do you and I know it's not linear, but how do you kind of work your way towards a zero position? Yeah, I think I think I've actually done both. When I left IBM, I actually took a sales leader role at that company, which was interesting because I've never been in sales before. Can I hang on there for a second?

49:48 How I would anticipate the biggest challenge would be gaining the respect of the sales team and being able to coach them with experience. How did you do that? How did you lead a team of sellers without selling before? Yeah, it was well, you know, I knew the executive team pretty well. This is where I think the fortunate timing came in. First of all, I've never been afraid of getting my hands dirty, so I would go manage accounts individually on my own.

50:14 I've been customer facing in the past, but having spin selling almost exactly at the same time when I joined and just having the eyes open, I was able to actually sink my teeth into something where I could help the team immediately. So a little bit of luck on the timing there, but I think if you're always from a leadership standpoint, if you're always willing to get your hands dirty and do anything you ask your team to do and just commit yourself to helping them, those things go a long way.

50:43 People can see those things. Those things go a long way. And those are things that I've always been willing to do. And you just have to understand that. Like when I joined IBM, you know, you had a lot of people that have been there for a long time working for a younger person. So those are not environments that I was not familiar with. I just think like basic leadership traits help you do that. And then back to your original question, I did, I was at a logistics organization, I was running the sales group in North America and like the IT solutions group, but it wasn't in software.

51:14 So I did take and it was a strategic account manager role in a software organization for like 21 months. And I kind of went in and I said, look, I want to do this to learn the product, learn the customer base and then get back into leadership. They were great about it. You know, got back into leadership, but I'm actually talking to a guy right now who was an executive. And I just think that if you go do the role, first of all, it's pretty fun. Second of all, you can make a lot of money and it is the best way to learn the customer base and the product. So a couple ways to do it. I would not discourage anyone from being an A for a couple years.

51:50 I think it's like super valuable and probably the best way to get into sales leadership. I don't think you have to be an A to ultimately be a CRO, but I never dissuade it. I would highly recommend it. I would too. And I was so fortunate. Mine was all over the place too. My early career, super eclectic. And then I found RevOps, which felt like it rewarded having range and was there. But I think even if you don't take that and move into a CRO role, let's say you're in RevOps, you go do an AE role, you go to a customer success role. There's just anything customer facing.

52:31 I think when you come back, you'll have more empathy, better recommendations. You'll be thinking about your customer better. So I think if anyone has an opportunity to do that, they should. Absolutely. Yeah. I hired a rep early on who's doing okay. Did amazing. Helped us stand up enablement. Amazing. Now he's one of our sales leaders and he is just leaning in and just doing an amazing job from a process standpoint, but has total like context of almost the entire commercial operation in our organization.

53:03 So it's just, it's a great purview to have. Well, Alex, I can't thank you enough for everything you shared unbelievably eloquent and structured. And I think you shared so many nuggets of information and insight that are going to help anybody in their career. And I am pumped for what you and Acuity are doing. I can't wait to see that conversion into AI native as well as the acceleration of growth post a series C congratulations. I know the job's probably feeling like it's just getting started, but you've already come so far. So excited to watch and follow and thank you so much for being on the lean scale podcast today.

53:42 Yeah, of course. Thanks a lot for having me Anthony. Appreciate it. Appreciate all the kind words and yeah, we're on to the next phase. So thanks a lot.