Name: Lead Sponsor Meetings That Shape Critical Deals
Uploaded: 2026-03-09T18:10:02.530Z
Duration: 48 min 43 s
Description: Lead Sponsor Meetings That Shape Critical Deals

Transcript for "Lead Sponsor Meetings That Shape Critical Deals": Greg, thanks for your time today. Appreciate it. Hey Dean, happy to. Thanks for making the time. It's a great conversation. I'll kick it off today. So I'll introduce myself, for the greater audience. So my name is Dean Ordzviawe. I'm based here right outside of Chicago, Illinois. I've been in the SaaS enterprise, you know, software space now for, jeez, coming on about fifteen years. And I am the Associate Vice President of Account Management here at MURAL. And it's our largest strategic segment of our business here. I manage the American team here. And just a little bit about MURAL, right, is we help enterprise organizations drive better business outcomes through structured collaboration. So and how we do that is we have this visual platform that enables teams to align around strategy, accelerate decision making, and execute on growth initiatives. And so, in a world where teams are increasingly distributed, we help companies engage earlier, collaborate more intentionally and move from conversation to execution. And so I'm excited to be here today and Greg, I'll hand it to you. Yeah. Thanks Dean. That's terrific. My name is Greg Baumann. I am based outside of Philadelphia. We're enjoying a very nice long winter here. Thanks to the local groundhog. I lead one of our enterprise sales teams here at Outreach. I'm a senior director of sales. And I've got the pleasure of working with, I think one of the best sales teams in SAS and working with honestly, Dean, awesome people like yourself who are leading world class go to market organizations. And so I to talk to people who are running incredible sales teams all day every day. It's awesome. Love it. Yeah. So what I'm particularly excited about today to have the conversation around is, you know, just kind of sales leader to sales leader, and to really get into, you know, what we're dealing with on a daily basis, What's working right now? What are some of the challenges that we're seeing across the industry, our teams and how we're pivoting and looking at things moving forward? Yeah, definitely. I love it. I think one of the things that I've been talking a lot about with some of my friends and sales leadership, particularly across the tech spectrum is how this thing called artificial intelligence is impacting the efficacy of sales teams. I think from where I stand, it's been an incredible tailwind for my team and for the organizations that we work with to do more and to put more good shots in the hands of their best players. And so for me, I feel like the future of sales from an enterprise perspective, and it's certainly in the near term. And I think over the next decade is really going to be what can we do to make sure that our sales teams are building meaningful relationships, are pouring into our customers with value and spending time in person. And so in order to do that at a really high level, we're leaning on AI to strategize and to execute and to continue to be top of our game. I love that. Yeah, that is definitely something that's top of mind, for me as well. And, just talking to a lot of thought leaders and seeing just a lot of posts, out there. It's top of mind for everyone, right? I think we went through this very, weird phase years ago where, you know, where we had COVID and everyone was in the office. And I remember at the time I was at Salesforce and it was actually on my birthday. It was really weird. It was 03/05/2020. I remember being in the office and nobody was there because I think everything was starting to hit and everybody started working from home. And then I got this email from security at Salesforce said, Dean, we noticed you badged in the office. You can no longer come in the office anymore as soon as you leave. And that wasn't like, hey, you're fired. It was a, hey, just don't come in the office. And so I was, I don't know how I felt because I was like, well, how am I going to work remotely? I used to work with my account teams on a day to day basis very closely. And that's where the shift really started. And I noticed like, wow, I got to relearn some things and I got to learn how to work remotely now. Yeah, absolutely. No, I think that everyone's like March 2020 stories are I think really fun because it was, I think for a lot of people, a massive shift in terms of what life looks like. But I also think, Dean, if you kind of go back to how did those moments hit me? What was sort of the feeling in that moment? And I think it kind of gave us culturally this opportunity to adjust how we approach things, right? As individuals, as families, as teams, as organizations, and really step into something new. I think that obviously there were a ton of downsides for what COVID meant for millions of people and for what they meant to show up professionally. And I think it's also shown like a lot of upsides too. There's a lot of elasticity in terms of how we can approach the market and how we're going to approach changes in front of us. It's been six years since that happened, but it feels like it's been sixty in some ways because there's been this accelerant of technology and how we're able to work with each other in these distributed systems for sure. Yeah, absolutely. And so I'm kind of putting that behind us and returning to, you know, a lot of companies are returning to in person, still majority of companies, still have a very large remote aspect, But once, what I've noticed here the last couple of years, just working with our customers is that in person meetings are great again, or hot people are taking them on. We're seeing a lot of that. How are you seeing the kind of shift for the transition out of there and where sales is going again? Yeah, no big time. I'm probably infamous or famous internally for being long IRL. That is where humans connect. That is where the ideas happen. You learn more in that ninety second walk from the conference room to the elevator than you do in a sixty minute Zoom call. Being able to connect on that is really important. But I think it's changed a lot too because one of the things that I think is particularly different now versus six years ago versus six years ago. Dean, you and me are on the same team. We're going to meet in office on Monday. We're going to hop into a room and we're going to do all of our preparation for our onset with Miro on Wednesday. Right? And we would get together, we'd get the whiteboard out. We would think through, okay, what do we want MURAL to come away with coming out of this conversation? What do we want the outcome to be? We'd grab lunch or whatever and then would be ready for the onset with Mural later that week. Now it's really interesting because I find that probably 90% of my team's prep is virtual. We are using that collaborative time to say, okay, hey, we've got this on-site with MURAL. It's going to be in San Francisco. You're in Chicago. I'm in Philadelphia. We've got to get together. We've got to plan this virtually. What are we hearing? What do we know? What is the research that we're learning from our AI agents? What is the mission? What makes this on-site meeting a success for us? And then, of course, we'll both find SF and meet and kind of hash things out of a breakfast and then we go on-site. So it's been really interesting to see like, yeah, I think IRL is fully back. I think our customers are seeing a lot of win out of this. I think prospects are really open to it again. People are in office and people see the value of being together. But I think even just how we get there is different than it was because it is sort of this multi channel experience internally to deliver something that's a lot more seamless externally. Absolutely. Yeah, those are great points you make. I've seen that and especially something you brought up with explosion of AI, still something we're all familiar with at this point, but not something that a lot of people are as comfortable with or leveraging to the best of their abilities. And so something that we've been doing here and actually we're seeing this with our customers as well, something we talk to them a lot about is, there's that thing of working smarter, but not harder. But I think it's a combination of both actually. I think you're getting a lot more active teams like you're having to work harder, but also smarter. Right. So I think of this stuff, you know, when we're working with our customers or going through our account growth plans and what our strategy is, how does AI play into that on a day to day basis? And, you know, how are we leveraging the tools we have available, to the best of their ability and then to streamline, the overall process, speed up execution, drive winning outcomes. And so, one of the things that I'm seeing now is, really incorporating AI in day to day, right? And From the count plan level to responses to we use Slack here, they got the AI bot in there now as well. And so, I think it's really changing how sellers are preparing and thinking. And then on the flip side, our customers are doing the same thing, right? Like kind of dipping their toe in that water as well. And so, I've seen like a great, pretty cool shift from the way that we work in. Just remember doing something the other day where probably would have taken me hours before. Now with the right prompts and the right data that I can ingest, it's taking me minutes, if not seconds. So are you seeing that a lot and you work with a lot of customers, think like with what you do over there at outreach and what I love is just from a seller perspective is for me, I've always been big on driving the right activity with the right people, with the right message in an organization. And that's what, Outlook helps us with. How are you leveraging AI? How are you seeing your customers use it? Yeah, absolutely. I think there's a few things that AI really helps us with and our customers that are certainly helping sort of like that early adoption curve. For like, again, some of the largest companies on earth, not just kind of tech companies. I'd say kind of maybe three things boil down for me. One is frankly getting smarter on stuff. I think people really love the idea of an AI agent or generative AI that does things for you. Like the auto response that'll pop up on your email or on your text message that says, Dean's like, hey, I'm running late for lunch. And it's like, no worries, whatever. Sure, that's fine. I think there's opportunities for this. But what we're seeing internally is that agents are incredible use case for helping us get smarter. Right? Less creating the output of some of these things. Although we certainly do this. We have revenue agents internally that are driving immense amount of pipeline for my team and for our customers. But something that we're using a lot is research agents. So it's helpful for my team to really get smart on our customer. I think one of the big shifts over the last decade of selling is you'd hop on LinkedIn for more than three minutes and everyone would talk about the information asymmetry between the buyer and seller getting smaller and smaller. Any considered purchase means that there's a lot of research that's going into it. People 70% of the way through their buying cycle or 80% of the way through their buying cycle before they ever speak to a salesperson. So how do you level that out? And I think what we've seen too, is that there became so much noise in the market. Everything you can find out online. And we're able to deploy agents from a research perspective to help us get smarter. Can we be a leader? Can we lead our buyers through a buying cycle instead of leading them through a sales cycle? So being able to deliver that, get smarter on what our customers need and helping them get smarter on what their customers need has become an awesome use case for us in terms of agents. I think the second thing that really jumps off for us and kind of fits in with the first is account plans. When I was coming up as an individual contributor, we would spend so many times creating these PowerPoints, creating these Word docs, writing down and paper, old school of like, hey, here's what's going on. Here's the screenshot of Dean's headshot from LinkedIn. He's like a decision maker for us. We've got our technical buyer and I'm running through all these med pick things. And I'm trying to tell the full story of what's happening in the account. Account plans themselves have become incredibly powerful for multi stakeholder deals. What we've seen from Gartner and what we've seen from Forrester over the last few years is these buying communities keep getting larger and larger. Which means necessarily the selling communities keep getting larger and larger. So how do you distill all of this information into a single place that is easy to update and easy for people to rally around? And so for us, that looks like account planning. Having a single unified place to say, okay, here's our point of view on what's going on at MURAL and how outreach can help. The third thing too and kind of blends into the first two is a point of view. One thing that I'm always telling my reps is that we have to have a point of view that's portable and valuable for our customers. I say portable because if I'm selling to mural, I am going to give this to Dean and say, hey, this is how we can help you. This is our point of view of what you're facing in the market. And now I need you to work through your internal buying committee to make sure that the framing isn't like four pages long, but it was really a couple of key points. And it has to be valuable too. So it has to uniquely reflect the challenges and the opportunities that we see that are causing us to come together in a commercial relationship in the first place. So for us, to kind of synthesize those three things, it's like we're using AI to get smarter. That right? Like research on the daily. We're using AI to fill out these account plans that are helping us have multiple stakeholders internally. And then we're using AI to shape our point of view with our customers to not only help with our internal stakeholders but our external stakeholders too. Yep, I love that. Yeah, the account plan, the account planning stuff and the power of that. And keeping that is your North Star, right? As a rep is more important than ever. And one of the things that, we're really putting a heavy emphasis on is the power of relationships and knowing who's who in an account. And so for us, the importance of stakeholder mapping and identifying, what specific, role or contact type those person are within the organization is just more important than ever. It's something we've been really focused on and trying to nail down. And one of the things that goes into that here that we talk about a lot is, the business sponsor And the concept of the business sponsor, at least how we define it, is a leader who represents or defends like the partnership or your product in leadership conversations where the account team is not present and champions, you know, us, for example, MURAL to other leaders in their organization. Identifying who those individuals are and then leading, I think, with what kind of got us to where we're at in the first place. Always look at like, Hey, what's made me successful in my career in sales? I always talk to my reps about this all the time. Hey, what are your strengths? What's the thing that's made you successful? For me, it's building relationships, like the to connect with people. And so I think of like, Hey, as we're looking at our accounts and we're building out what that stakeholder like map looks like, the relationship ecosystem. And then as we build relationships, identifying like, hey, who are these people? What kind of role do they play? A big thing we talk about a lot, perhaps we'll say it all the time too, is the business sponsors, right? So, and it's the importance of that is actually when we look at a day to day with our customers and let's say we're, whether it's a renewal or just other deals that we're working on, the one thing that's constant when things go well is that we have multiple business sponsors across the organization and that we have really good relationships with those people. So when we look like, hey, when we get stuck when something goes the other way, it always points back to the business sponsor. It's interesting. But I think it shows the power of the relationship, right? And the point of view, to your point that we're bringing to the conversation and the value that we're bringing and adding to every conversation, the overall partnership. Are you seeing the kind of the same thing? Like, I'd love to get your thoughts on that. Is that a thing you talk about as well? Are you hearing out there? Yeah, no. I love the framing of the business sponsor. I think that's a really good way of putting it. We're a bit of a med pick shop here internally. So we think about like the economic buyer, but it's the same thing, right? Who's charged with solving this problem for the business And how can we get through them? And I think one of the things I'm hearing from you as well, Dean, that I constantly am preaching internally and probably externally a little bit too, is the opportunity to sell through the room that you're in. So if I'm meeting with Dean from Ural, you might be the business sponsor assigned to figure this out. You're going to go meet with myself and my competitors to see who fits the needs of the business. But then you'll have people you have to speak with internally like, okay, who writes the check? Who's your senior leader that has to sign off of this internally? Who are the technical stakeholders that have to go into this? And so being able to use things like with an outreach or the mural to be able to say, okay, great. How can we make sure that you are now equipped to kind of sell out of that room? When the door is closed, when the Zoom turns off or whatever was happening, how can we make sure that Dean, the buyer, the business sponsor in this case, is now able to take that mantle of communicating the conversation internally and asking the right questions and seeing around corners. So I love the idea of that of making sure that people are in the room from a buying perspective, are able to represent the problems and the conversations and opportunities we're discussing internally. So that when they're in the internal conversations, they can help solve that. So I don't know if that feels different than what you're saying or if that's It's spot on, right? So we also put a heavy emphasis on obviously the economic buyer, the decision maker. What we've actually seen though too, and you've probably noticed this is just because they're the decision maker, the economic buyer doesn't necessarily mean that they're close to the overall relationship or day to day. So the way we look at the business sponsor is they have you know, that great kinda like collective overview of the partnership and the value that we're bringing. And as they're bridging the gap between maybe the admins, the super users, and the people making the decision or holding the budget, they're kind of the ones that like are the the glue of the overall partnership and relationship. Like like without them in that gap Yeah. You don't typically see candidly, decision makers or economic buyers talking to the users. Right? Right. Somebody in between and are they willing to go to bat for you? Are they gathering the feedback acting as that, you know, kind of healthy, you know, buffer and really influencing the overall partnership. So no, absolutely. Yeah. Resonates. Well, question for you then, Dean, as you think about, you're working with your team and your peers internally. How are you guys like finding and identifying your business sponsors? Is when you're looking at the account? Is that when you're in the opportunity? Like, what does that look like for you guys to identify and test who that business sponsor is in your deals? Yeah, that's a great question. So, it's a combination. I think, if we look at our customers and kind of like, who's who within the account, the title is a huge influence. Mean, obviously, business sponsor technically has some sort of decision making title. I mean, I'd be the ultimate decision maker of the relationship, but, they definitely own an aspect of the product relationship that they're using and the teams that are using that. Right? And so it's it's between like kind of currently what we know. And then as we're going out there and we're hunting and prospecting into our current accounts or even new accounts, new logos for that matter, it's targeting, you know, who are the titles, that we want to be going after. So typical, like from what we understand, right? Like obviously director, VP above are people that we want to go build relationships with, learn more about, you know, their top priorities, initiatives, what they're doing, like what their teams look like, and how we can, you know, what kind of outcomes they're trying to drive and how we can help them. And so that's kind of how we identify business sponsors, right? And then obviously it all boils back to activity and going out there and meeting them with a very pointed point of view. Yeah. That we're taking them and driving good discovery. So I hope that answers your question. Yeah. That makes sense. That's how we go. Right? What we know and what we don't know. Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. Are you using like, does that feel like a soft skills? Does that feel like a, know, we talk about sales as an art or sales as a science. That feel like a soft skills like, hey, Dean or Greg, like clearly have the motivation and influence internally to get something done. The title is the match, but I think you can do it. Or does it feel like, yeah, we're able to outsource a lot of this to AI or specific titles that you're seeing like a higher win rate with? What does that feel like for you in terms of that sort of business sponsor? Is that like an art thing or is that a science thing for you guys? It's great. I think an art but you also have to have that passion and that kind of fire to go out there to want to learn more, right? Meet more people, ask more questions, understand, know, them their business. Like the one thing I like to say about discovery, right? And you see this a lot in sales is when people talk to customers, they're just talking about, maybe they might ask some questions, but then they're going directly into the product. And they're talking about themselves. And I would flip it, I'd say like in discovery, like 90 to 95% of the conversation is all about the customer and their business. And then, you know, obviously you ask enough questions and you get to the pain enough and all of a sudden now they're asking you questions about, hey, how can we help? Right? Right. So I think it's, I think it's a bit of an art, but it's, it's kinda like, you know, gotta want to get out there and do it and kind of get back to, I think what got us, you know, what made us successful in the first place. I think of like, kind of like the pre candidly, the pre COVID days. I I saw, like, in sales, like, there was just just, like, this this hunger, this grit. And, you know, remotes happened. Teams got dispersed. Technology, a lot of new technologies came about, AI, all this stuff. And people got a little reliant, almost too reliant off that stuff and a little comfortable where I think it's like, Hey, how do you leverage, you know, what you have at your disposal today while kind of going back to that kind of grittiness, and just wanting to know more, right? And then couple that and then move forward. So I hope that answers your question, but I think it's a bit of both. Yeah, no, I love that. And I think you've kind of spun us into another interesting kind of segment that I would like to ask about is, we're kind of at this really interesting crossroads, right? Where we're finding that, I think what we're seeing in the market and speaking to our peers, honestly, every day of the week, where that in person moment really matters is one thing. I think another thing that we've seen too is, there's a lot of really talented sellers who were kind of coming up through their careers as COVID happened. And so developmentally did not spend a lot of time in person. I think over the last year, it's really gotten back into sort of this expectation for in person. But maybe that four year window is a little bit taboo in a lot of geographies and a lot of industries. What does it look like for you? I know MURAL is growing and hiring. When you're interviewing people remotely, how are you looking for that grit? How are you looking for that ability to do in person well? That is a great question. So it's funny you say grit. That's one of the things that I that's probably like the top thing I look for is grit. Yeah. And I I think it back to myself a little bit like Mhmm. I'm not I'm not gonna lie like I'm not the smartest like like genius in the world when it comes to this stuff, but the one thing I I try to pride myself or keep myself true to is like where I got to today and the stuff I had to do. Like I remember my most successful years in sales when I was actually at Salesforce in a strategic role. The one thing I remember doing was sitting next to my BDR and cold calling with him. Love it. Remember thinking 50 to 75 cold calls myself while he would make a 100 to a 150 a day, right prospecting in. Yep. And while it wasn't pretty, it was never, beneath me, right? It's like, hey, this is kind of the stuff we got to do. And so when I'm talking to people, like what I try to understand is like when they're on their day to day, like what does that look like? Like, A, like what are they walking into in the companies? Like, is everything laid out for them? Is everything just kind of on a silver platter, everything kind of figured out or like, Hey, like, is there some of that? And there's a lot that they have to figure out. Right. And just kind of be that self starter and to do that and to be successful, you got to have that grit and you got to have that kind of unstoppable fearless mentality. Like, Like what do you have to lose? I mean, everything to gain, right? What do you have to lose potentially your job, right? And so can vary, right? But everything to gain. And the way I've always kind of looked at it as like, hey, this company is paying me some pretty decent dollars to go out there and build relationships. I love building relationships and talking to people, right? Might not have all the answers, but you know, I'll learn and I'll get better over time. So one of the things I dig into is like, hey, what what like, does your day to day look like? Like, how do you structure yourself, your week? How do you, you know, how do you approach it? Like, like, what are some of the stuff you're focused on? Like, how do you think about a book of business that you're walking into? What drives you? Like, one of the things here in the strategic world, especially for us is, we have really large accounts, right? Fortune 100 companies, a lot of red tape, right? And I think of things as like, I tell us to the team all the time, we're not going to get those wins in terms of closing deals every day. In fact, they come far in between. Like, you gotta celebrate the little wins along the way and what that looks like. You're getting in getting responses, you know, having great discovery, you know, great actionable insights and information that you're pulling out of that. And so I always try to dig into like, Hey, tell me about like your small wins. Like, tell me about like, what gets you fired up and keeps going on day to day because sales kind of burn you out, you know? If you can't learn to, know, you've heard the term, right? Like, you have like to see ups and the highs and the lows. Right. But that's to get so focused on the highs that when the lows hit, people don't know how to react or how to pull themselves out of it and they get in this rut. And you got to almost learn to embrace and love the process as cliche as that may sound, but you know, it's part of So the I think that's a lot of stuff I try to dig into is like the psychology of it and just help me understand. And I think coming out of that, I can have a pretty good feel of like, Hey, is this, is this person just kind of the figure it out, at all costs kind of mentality or do they have to have like a lot of structure in guidance, which you know, here as much of that as we like to have, like we were figuring things out on a day to day basis, you know, we're still a small fast growing company. Yeah. So, yeah. Cool. I love it. Yeah. Makes a lot of sense. I like the attention to grit too. Like, it's one of the three things that I hire for is I call it doggedness. Make sure that I'm scoring my team too on a quarterly basis. So I like that a lot. Love that. Yeah. So, as we're I think we're doing all right on time here. We're talking a lot about, you know, a lot about great stuff, stuff that's near and dear to me. I can talk all day on this. Yeah, it is great. But, you know, I want to go back a little bit to, you know, you're working with your customers and in your accounts, when you're identifying different stakeholders, right? So let's talk about some deals where you've really had those stakeholders identified in those relationships built. Like how have you seen that, you know, influence the deal positively or negatively for, not being in the right place with the right people having that identified. Kind of sticking around with the same circle of people, right? Not venturing out. Yeah, absolutely. One of the things that I'm really high on my team on is getting in front of more people. We have dedicated, we've got relatively small books for my team. So, at the beginning of the fiscal year, I can feel like, oh, it's a pretty small pond that I'm fishing in. But then you realize these are like large global accounts. And so there's not just one VP for me to speak to or five VPs for me to speak to. Sometimes there's 200 VPs for me to speak to. And so my team has a metric where we look at, they need to be speaking to 200 prospects each month. And that's not as an SDR, that's as an enterprise account executive. With millions of dollars with a quota each year. And so we look to our agents to support that. We look to our data quality pipeline to support that. But for us, we're very interested in going wide in accounts and multi threading within accounts. One of my probably horrible Greg isms or analogies is the idea of an elephant. And so, you bring an elephant into a gymnasium, and you have five or six different people standing around with their eyes covered with a blindfold, They're going be standing at very different parts of the elephant. Dean, you might be standing next to the trunk and you say, have no idea what this thing is that's in front of me. And somebody might be standing next to a tusk and they're like, wow, I think I'm a big piece of porcelain or something like that. And then you've got someone by the tail and you've got somebody standing by these tree trunk legs. And it's all an elephant. Everybody is standing by the elephant. But you have a very different experience for what you're standing next to and how you perceive that. And so one of the things that I really push my team to is like, we need to be finding all of those people who are standing around the elephant. But we also need to make sure that they're seeing the part that they need to see. So from an outreach perspective, the benefit that we bring to a sales operations team is their ability to have all of this data connected. Like our ability to be extensible. It's really big for them and to manage this easily. It's really big for them. Versus a sales leader, their benefit might be the opportunity to view their business more holistically, right? Versus an individual contributor, they might be able to be 30%, 40%, 50%, 60% more effective on a daily basis. And so for us, it's really about having my team go wide finding these multiple stakeholders within an account. But make sure that we're really staying attuned to the part of value that each person needs to see in that. Yeah, I love that. I like the elephant analogy. That's a good one. Because it actually, it makes me think about leadership, right? And I think effective leaders lead from the front and again, all as well, right in the accounts and they help. The one thing I tell my reps all the time is like, Hey, I'm not going to ask or tell you to do anything I wouldn't do or have it done. One of the things I think about, and maybe we could wrap up on this is the power of executive alignment. And that comes with like leading from the front and getting the right people involved. You Oh know, that can change the outcome and we've seen it. I see that on a day to day basis, the outcome of deals or just the overall partnership. Where have you seen executive alignment work? What does good look like? And maybe what's a quick example that you've seen that you can remember? Yeah. Oh, no. Absolutely. So one thing that I will say is, I love the idea of leading from the front. I like it. Sort of your recollection of like being an IC, making dials with your SDR. I joke with my team. I use our agents internally to drive pipeline for my team. So my team is completely crushing me in terms of the tasks executed and the prospects they've contacted each month. But that's something I'm doing right there with them. But it's not necessarily me setting the pace for that. At Outreach, we've got this incredible culture where our CEO, Abhijit Mitra, and our CRO, Nadia Rashid, and our CFO, Drew Laxton, so many of our product leaders and our cross functional partners internally are part of that executive alignment for us. They're partners for us in this too. And so for me, we're really lucky internally to have that culture where our team is active and figuring out what we can do to drive conversations at the opportunity and at the account level. And it's honestly helped my team just even last year increase our win rate by about 20%, when we're able to bring in our executives for these deals. Yep. I love it. I love it. I agree. I think, one of the things we you've been looking at and we do here at MURAL, right? So within our visual collaboration space and as we're working on our account growth plans, we're looking at the stakeholder maps together. We very much focus on who's who, what teams they're a part of, So it could be R and D, marketing, sales, whatever you have at an organization. We look at that. And then as we're looking at the hierarchy of people, we think about like, hey, as an AM, like, who do you know? Who don't you know? Who are you going after? And then, hey, I see some of these leaders up here. Who does it make sense to connect with? Right? So when I think of exec alignment, I think a lot of like, hey, connecting title with title, even like minded people with like minded people. We do that a lot. We actually have a channel that we've created in Slack to put these requests in. So for example, we've had somewhere that's like, hey, if we're trying to target a CRO, let's get our CRO to reach out to them and have a candid conversation. Same thing we've had, we're trying to go after CMOs. We'll have our CMO reach out to that person. So it's pretty great. And we try to do that often, but it's also important to try to do that early, right? Earlier, than ever. Cause I see, you know, when we look at these deals and, where we feel like we truly have a hold of like what's going on in the account, you know, how the overall, like, you know, adoption and things like that aren't good enough anymore. Right? I've seen accounts that have great adoption. Every user say everything great, but then if you're not at the right levels, you're not connected at the right levels, that can fall flat, the opposite direction. So I think of like high and wide and organizations with the right people. And I think along the way too, what that's gonna do is it's going to uncover any potential risks so you can get ahead of those conversations. Preach. Yeah. Yeah. So, know, we always ask that as like, hey, do we know what's at risk today? Like generally if everyone's like, no, everything's fine. For me, that's the leading risk indicator. Yes. Yeah. You think we don't know enough. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. So yeah, you know, that's, that's something we're focused on. I love it. I've just seen a lot of good coming out of that. It's something I would encourage a lot of leaders out there and organizations to think about, is, Hey, are they aligning at the right levels? They talking to, you know, the right people, in sales, you tend to get comfortable with what, you know, and people sometimes shy away from what they don't know or potentially finding something they don't want to hear. But I think that's call it like uncovering the friction, healthy friction along the way to have ultimately strengthens the partnership. Yeah, I couldn't agree more. That's something that is so key to our process here internally is to drink our own champagne here a little bit internally. We use outreach deal risk, like deal health scores. And it's something that we couldn't have done five or ten years ago. Like at organizations, right? Dean, if you were my boss, we've got thirty minutes once a week for a one on one and we get on here and I'm a sales guy. And so I'm like, Dean, you know that really exciting opportunity that we have? Guess what? It's awesome. Guess what? They still love us. This deal is going to win. Right? And so I can tell you about all the good news that I have and you're getting excited about it too. We're seeing dollar signs. Meanwhile, the riskier deals that I'm looking at just kind of get buried. Right? And it's like, oh, there's only three minutes left in our one on one. Time to go. I'm off to the airport anyways. Awesome. I'll submit my forecast. And what we're able to do is we're able to spot these deal risk health indicators within the platform. And then that allows us to triage around those deals. Where we can say, hey, tell me all the bad news. I have a red alert indicator in our opportunity. And when we do, we're able to look at the entire account plan and say, hey, where are we misaligned here? Right? Like, we've got no CRO connection. Right? And we can pull it up and say, well, actually their CRO is in Texas. Our CRO is in Texas. Let's draft something from our CRO. That'll be a valuable way for her to connect with their CRO. Right? What can we do to say, okay, our CFOs are very tight. That's incredible. What can we do to kind of like go around them and multi thread and make sure that we're making these similarly great connections throughout the organization? And so, being able to have that visual collaborative selling is completely key for us. Being able to say, okay, here's the risk. Here's what we're do to swarm and inform and be able to absolutely increase our win rate as a result of that. I love it. And something you say there, especially with the question is like, hey, can we see it? Do we know? I think something good for leaders to work with their team on is, hey, it's okay if we don't know, you're gonna not know a lot of stuff along the way, but what are we gonna do there to find that out to get to those people? And so I think it's like sometimes you have to be like a little humble and be like, you know what? I don't know. I know this is important, but I don't have that today. And so I think, you know, one of the things I do here, you know, at MURAL is we use MURAL for, account planning and overall like collaborative selling within the organization. So when we plop into a MURAL and we're looking at the account growth plan, can see everybody's cursor is going around, we're brainstorming, we're putting in action items, we're tackling things together. And a lot of it is filling in the gaps. There's so much we don't know, but there's a lot we know, but the don't know, you know, kind of scares us, but also excites us of like, hey, like, great, let's go execute against this and figure it out together. And so, you know, that's, you know, something, you know, we really focus on and we do on a day to day. And it's just, you know, leading from the front and and working with the team. You know, thing I love and where I've seen a lot of organizations be successful is when even the leaders and stuff don't feel like things are below them. Like, you gotta remember where you came from a lot of times and be like, hey, I'm gonna help you get there. We're in this together. One of the things I used to talk about a lot at my last company is, hey, customer success in selling is everyone's job in the organization. The success of our customer, we all own it. Right? So like, let's execute together. So I love that Greg. It's great stuff. Yeah. One the things that I say a lot internally is accountability is a team sport. Right? So being able to say, okay, cool. We're all accountable to this, what can we do to put our executives in a position to win? What can we do to make sure that our customers are in a position to receive the information we have for them? So, yeah. I love I love what you guys are doing there internally. I love what you guys are doing externally in terms of your product for making sure that we have these visual cues for the risk and thinking elaborate together on this. So yes, it's right on. I love it. This has been a absolutely conversation. I could talk all day, you know, we could probably share stories and maybe we will connect again around this, but you know, this is great. You know, just appreciate your time. I learned a lot from you and I think a lot of the stuff you shared kind of reinforce with what I'm seeing out there. The things I'm thinking keeps me a little sane as well. Sometimes we're in our own little bubble in our own world. Yep. To remember like, hey, I'm not the only one going through this or seeing it. Exactly. Yeah. This is awesome. I'll have do this again soon and and, you know, maybe in Chicago or in Philly or somewhere else in time. But, yeah, this is awesome. Thanks, Steve. Let me know. Yeah. Thank you so much, Greg. I really appreciate the time.