---
title: "How to Become a Shot Caller"
episode: 8
podcast: "The LeanScale Podcast"
publisher: "LeanScale"
guest: "Tom Miller"
guest_title: "Author of 'Call Your Shots'; former CRO, Emailage"
date_published: 2023-05-25
date_modified: 2026-07-22
duration: 00:13:12
word_count: 1654
topics: ["gtm-strategy", "sales-leadership", "revenue-operations", "brand-positioning"]
canonical_url: https://leanscale-knowledge-hub.netlify.app/podcast/tom-miller-shot-caller/
source: "LeanScale Podcast Knowledge Hub — https://leanscale-knowledge-hub.netlify.app"
license: "Free to quote and cite with attribution to The LeanScale Podcast."
---

# How to Become a Shot Caller — Full Transcript

> Episode 8 of The LeanScale Podcast, with Tom Miller.
> Published May 25, 2023 · 00:13:12 · 1,654 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/tom-miller-shot-caller/

## 00:00 — Cold open: the unicorn problem

**[0:00]** It's a super rare event, like so rare that when it happens, the term unicorn is applied, which means to people like us that have devoted our lives to these mostly go-to-market professions in my case, it means we're pretty much doomed. Welcome to The LeanScale Podcast, where we talk about everything RevOps. Thank you for listening. Very grateful to have a special guest with us today, Tom Miller. Tom has led sales, marketing, product management, P&L growth for both public companies and startups. He's participated in multiple IPOs and led strategic acquisitions both on the buy and sell side. He's the author

## 00:55 — Meet Tom Miller, author of 'Call Your Shots'

**[0:55]** of Call Your Shots, where he's codified his frameworks for achieving success, but most importantly, he's my former CRO and good friend. Tom, thank you so much for being here today. Good to see you, Anthony. Thanks for having me on the podcast. I was telling some folks today I was doing a podcast later and they were all extremely impressed. We'll have to flood the internet with this podcast and see if we can get some viral moment to occur or something. I'm sure if any of our topics is going to go viral, it's going to be this one. I'm really excited to go through some of the frameworks that I got to learn firsthand working with

## 01:41 — Why he wrote the book: the book he needed didn't exist

**[1:41]** you, operating within a startup. I think one of the questions I'm sure you've been asked a million times, but I'd love to hear it for you. I know our listeners would love to hear. Why did you decide to write your book, Call Your Shots? Yeah. It was basically born out of necessity more than anything else. I didn't want to write a book. I just wanted to read the book I needed to explain what created winning in business. I've had a long career. I've been fortunate to be in all kinds of operating roles, running all different kinds of teams, go-to-market teams, engineering teams, product

**[2:24]** teams, marketing teams. Success was always elusive in one of the sort of defining moments for me. It just dawned on me through the expression of hearing about how companies become unicorns. It's a Silicon Valley expression when a company achieves a billion dollar valuation. Some people would define it as a billion dollar valuation within 10 years. Either way, it's a super rare event, so rare that when it happens, the term unicorn is applied, which means to people like us that have devoted our lives to these mostly go-to-market professions, in my case, it means we're pretty much doomed. If the only chance to really hit a home run

**[3:15]** means we have to achieve this unicorn status, you could easily then surmise that that's going to be really hard to do. As the person oftentimes responsible for trying to create success or alter the trajectory that a company was on, it was always hard. It always came with a lot of pain and suffering. Something has to explain in data-driven scientific terms what's separating the winning companies from the companies that are losing or underperforming. I tried to buy the book that explained it. It didn't exist. That really set me on this journey of understanding what was creating the winning in the first place. There were

## 04:14 — What a business really is: the value exchange event

**[4:14]** some concepts that I hung my hat on really from the beginning. If you think about what is a business, what is the most fundamental aspect of a business? It's an entity capable of creating a value exchange event. Until there's a value exchange event, it doesn't matter if you're lean scale or email age or Google or you're running a lemonade stand. Until there's a value exchange event, you're really not a business yet. If you're in a role where you have to understand how to create a value exchange event or accelerate the exchange of value so you can start to perform at levels that are commensurate with the effort that

**[5:02]** had gone into the endeavor in the first place with investors and boards and C-level executives and people pouring their heart and souls into these companies and we're also desperate to perform at the highest possible level. Those thoughts started to connect for me in my mind. What's the relationship between value, the way humans perceive value, and the likelihood that we're going to be able to manufacture a value exchange event with some element of control that would allow us to start to alter our destiny? Ultimately, that becomes kind of the defining characteristic of any go-to-market individual contributor or manager or executive.

## 05:51 — Imprinting your ideas on the business

**[5:51]** We're all trying to imprint our thoughts, ideas, strategies on a business to make it easier or better or faster. All the things that largely create this outcome we're looking for and then ultimately, that led to some themes that became fundamental to the shape of the book. In a lot of ways, this understanding of how it all goes together and the result was this idea that if you can understand the science of value exchange and the relationship between value exchange and strategy and go-to-market and the way you run your business, you could significantly increase your chance to win. Then you would learn that a lot of the capacity

## 06:54 — Winning as a service: predictable, repeatable success

**[6:54]** to realize this aspect of control was predictable. As it evolved in my mind and as I put more of it into practice, I was able to start to alter the outcome that I was projecting. The ability to do that accurately was always extremely on my mind. As you know, working with me, we're all very much under the pressure of trying to be high performing, but we're also under the pressure to try to be highly accurate. We're under the pressure to try to be highly predictive and efficient. All of those things come together in my mind as the difference between companies that seem to be working hard and trying hard and at some level maybe

**[7:52]** making it up as they go versus companies that really had a plan that was prescriptive enough that these ideas of high performance and predictability and accuracy and efficiency could be documented and investors and boards could count on the delivery of the kinds of results that would inspire confidence, that would create winning. All the best parts of being in business was what I was hoping I could predictably and repeatedly create. I sometimes think of all the things we can buy as a service, why can't we buy winning as a service? In a sense, that's what the framework is all about, is trying to create winning in a predictable, repeatable

## 08:44 — Becoming a shot caller

**[8:44]** way and imprint through the use of this framework, imprint any individual's utilization of the framework on the business in such a way that I would categorize that individual as a shot caller. That became the theme, that became the name of the book, Call Your Shots, because what I believe now more than ever is if you can master the understanding of these concepts, you really can become a shot caller. I really like the term because I think there's a severe lack of shot calling in business. We see it with people that we work with, our past experiences and the ability to comprehensively put together a plan. I know we called it the interlock

## 09:36 — Why shot calling is so rare

**[9:36]** plan when we worked together at emailage. It's very rare. I haven't seen a whole lot of shot callers. I don't know if it seems like there's a lack of shot calling out there. Why do you think that is? Why do you think there's such a lack of shot calling going on in business today? This is more of my opinion. The answer to that question, I don't believe can be necessarily borne out through any data that would indicate that X percentage of companies or individuals are shot calling or not shot calling in terms of the specific prescription that I believe is necessary to achieve this predictable, repeatable outcome in the AKA

## 10:37 — It starts with an operating plan (AOP)

**[10:37]** to be a shot caller means that you're first of all executing against an operating plan. There is a lot of data indicating that any company attempting to operate without a proper operating plan has a very low chance of hitting expectations or exceeding expectations. I'm always stunned when I get to any business that does not have an annual operating plan in AOP. It seems like such a natural thing, but many, many times I've seen that companies don't really take AOP seriously, but you need to. But an AOP isn't enough. I say to people sometimes like if you practice a bad golf swing, you might get incrementally better,

## 11:29 — The bad golf swing trap

**[11:29]** but ultimately all you're doing is ingraining bad habits. You will as sure as God made little green apples, you will invariably hit the wall. If you keep practicing any system that's systematically flawed, and that's again like what sort of flaws create the traps that companies fall into. And these I write about a number of these traps because I'd experienced pretty much all of them, and they're avoidable. But for me, my belief is I love the line the road to hell is paved with good intentions. I don't think it's any sort of lack of commitments or passion or hard work or intelligence or even innate skill. I don't think it's any

## 12:21 — Trained improperly about value

**[12:21]** of those things. I just think we've all in a sense been trained improperly about the reality of value, how the human mind perceives value, the idea of how to best alter the market's perception of your offer to maximize your chance to create a value exchange event. And then to roll that all the way upstream to the way that some of these ideas have to be reflected in your roadmap and in your brand and in your strategy and mission and objective and purpose.