Mastering leadership across continents and cultures with Corporate Traveler’s Amanda Vining

Do you have what it takes to scale globally? 

In this episode of Reveal, host Dana Feldman sits down with Amanda Vining, Global Chief Sales and Customer Officer at Corporate Traveler, to discuss leadership in diverse and complex international markets.

Throughout the conversation, Amanda highlights the importance of communication, empathy, and connection. 

She discusses the challenges of managing teams across borders and her strategies for fostering a customer-centric approach, integrating sales and customer success, and achieving revenue goals.

Dana Feldman: What do the world’s best CROs have in their playbooks? This is the place to find out. This is Reveal: The Revenue Intelligence Podcast. I’m your host, Dana Feldman. Hi and welcome. I’m Dana Feldman, and this is Reveal: The Revenue Intelligence Podcast. Each episode we are focused on helping you build the ultimate CRO playbook. We promise to give you access to the most influential revenue leaders at the world’s top companies so that you too can achieve your revenue goals.

And in this episode, I’m delivering on that promise with my guest Amanda Vining, global chief sales and global chief customer officer at Corporate Traveler. Throughout her journey, she has mastered revenue generation, honed in on empathetic leadership approaches, and fostered strong relationships across diverse teams worldwide.

In today’s episode, we’ll uncover the strategies behind scaling for further growth, the delicate balance of humility and expertise in leadership, and the evolving landscape of customer success in today’s competitive market. With insights that are drawn from Amanda’s rich experience managing both sales and customer success pillars, she provides perspective on understanding the full scope of business and nurturing healthy relationships between teams. So let’s dive in. Amanda, welcome to the show.

Amanda Vining: Thank you, Dana. It’s so great to be here.

Dana Feldman: It’s so great to have you. It is so nice to reconnect with you and certainly after being partners all these years. But I’d love to kick us off and just start with your journey really from the beginning of your entry-level sales position to where you are now and just getting the audience a little bit familiar with that journey.

Amanda Vining: Yeah, absolutely. So I always say I’m really lucky and fortunate that I was able to find my career at a fairly young age and just getting out there in the workforce and didn’t realize that what I thought might be a first couple steps in my journey ended up being where I’ve found my future and my long-term path, or as I always say, my longest relationship to date has been my relationship with Corporate Traveler and with Flight Centre. But I was 21 years old when I started with the company. I had just come out of selling door-to-door telecommunications, so phone and internet service to small businesses. And if anyone needs a humbling first-sales job, that would be it, getting doors slammed in your face and trying to do your thing out beating the pavement.

And I was interested in Corporate Traveler because what I had learned about it early on was that we weren’t really contractual and it was very much a service-based company. So going out of a space where I was getting used to being yelled at about where’s my phone and internet, I was really intrigued by talking about options that were really going to be great in serving the customer and really highly service driven. So I started just based on that whim and from there went into a sales position. I did that for a long time. That was back when sales and customer success were amalgamated into one position, where you’d sell the deal and then you actually had to maintain the deal, which was great for not overselling, but not necessarily great in how well we were resourced.

After a few years of doing that, I moved into a regional sales leader role. Then I eventually moved into being VP of sales, which was a nice five-year journey and had some great exponential growth over those five years. Then I moved into being president of Corporate Traveler USA and I did that for five years. And then about two and a half years ago, I migrated into my existing position as our chief sales and chief customer officer globally, so moved out of that regional into the global space.

Dana Feldman: That is quite the journey and I love where you started on the hard yards of door-to-door knocking, which is like there is no harder job, I don’t think. Talk to me a little bit about what have been some of the key milestones in your growth journey and I think particularly in terms of revenue generation and sales strategy implementation would be interesting.

Amanda Vining: For us, when I first got started, we are an Australian-based company, so we’re founded in Australia, and then we grew through all of Europe, and then we made it to the Northern Hemisphere last. So we had opened in Canada and then we were expanding in the US. So I came in for those early days. So I’ve gotten to watch the company grow exponentially with thousands and thousands of new customers in North America. We have 16,000 customers now globally. We’re a multi-billion dollar organization. So I had the fun of riding that trajectory and being part of it.

For me personally, I think the milestones that stand out over my career were the transition from sales and going from VP of sales to president of the organization. It was a big leap, one that hadn’t been taken often. And I was a new mom at the time, so I had a nine-month old at home. So it was that whirlwind of trying to do a little bit of everything, sometimes not doing everything perfectly, but certainly giving it my best. And that ability to compartmentalize and focus on what’s important and be transparent and vulnerable to show that you’ve got a lot going on in all places and trying to be there for everyone was certainly a milestone as we simultaneously had great success. Those couple years pre-pandemic, we had exponential growth. In the US, we doubled in our size in terms of total volume coming into our business as well as our profit, which is not easy to do at the same time and was a real milestone for me in that period.

And then the other big one was how we grew out of the pandemic. So what a horrible and difficult time for all organizations, but mainly for anyone who had anything to do with travel. It was humbling and difficult. It was just unprecedented and more than we could have ever fathomed going through. So coming out of that, I transitioned into this role and having our best acquisition year was something that was a goal of ours is really solidifying our space. So we grew into well over a billion in acquisition that first year coming out. We’ll beat that again now, so that’s great. But the other one that means even more to me is that we retained our customers at over 95%. So our customers didn’t have a reason to communicate with us. They didn’t have a reason to talk. They didn’t have a reason to do much with us for a pretty long period, but our CS folks were able to engage them enough that when they came back to travel, they thought of us. So for me, those milestones solidified our future and where we’re able to get to next and are the ones I think probably most fondly of.

Dana Feldman: So you mentioned this leap that hadn’t been done before when you took on the role of president. What do you attribute that to in terms of characteristics for you? What do you think got you into that role or allowed the company to take that bet on you to make that leap?

Amanda Vining: It felt like a big leap at the time too. I think that they could see that I wouldn’t know everything, but I’d lean on resources and had a great team within our organization as well on the different pieces that would bring in the operational components that were so necessary to that position. But they also wanted to trust on someone that had a really can-do yes attitude and is extremely customer-centric and could really push that customer centricity into our growth and say yes and work diligently to get it done and do it. So it was probably a bit of a chance that they were taking, but betting on the fact that the work ethic and the team within and underneath would be willing to take that journey with us. And we all just pulled up our bootstraps and had a can-do attitude and did everything we can to acquire really heavily over that period. So it was a mix of a million things going right within the organization, but probably one of those chances that you just got to take.

Dana Feldman: It’s interesting because you made mention of this too, but you were a new mom as well and I know there’s so many listeners of this podcast out there that get faced with these sorts of decisions. Did you ever have a moment of pause? Did you ever think maybe this isn’t the right time to take that leap? And I’d love to just hear your thought process of where you went with that.

Amanda Vining: Oh, 100%. I think a lot of times, and I don’t want to make this all specific about women, but women leaders, and you know obviously being a woman leader, we set these unrealistic expectations on ourselves sometimes. You want to be the mom who’s working and contributing and doing everything there, but you still want to do bath and bed and have a warm meal on the… The amount of pressure on us can sometimes make us doubt ourselves and have a lot of insecurity. And for me, it’s just like you’re going to miss 100% of the shots you don’t take. This is something I had been dreaming about and aspiring towards and had always been in my personal growth trajectory that what I wanted to do in my life was to have done that role since I had started the organization and I didn’t want to miss that chance when I knew that I would give it my all and simultaneously maybe burn the candle on both ends a little bit in the home and personal life. I was willing to take that on. So I had to have the hard yard conversation with myself and my family about, can I do this?

But what I think I learned through that experience was what’s most important is that level of vulnerability as well to give and empower each other of like, everything’s not going to be perfect. There’s going to be days where I got to go home and take care of my kid or if she had been sick or something came up or maybe I can’t be on a plane every single week in the first six months. But are you willing to work within that and have that level of honesty with each other is so important for working moms that are trying to do a bit of both. And it’s not just moms, right? It’s like taking care of parents as they’re going through ailments or whatever responsibilities may fall on us. It’s really important I think to be transparent and vulnerable as well so that other people know that it is not just an aspiration and something you can do.

Dana Feldman: I couldn’t agree more and I love that. So thank you for sharing that. I’m curious, how do you think about or how do you approach scaling further within your role and organization?

Amanda Vining: We’re very much on that pathway, so it’s front of mind. We’re on the Australian year, so we’re in budget season right now. So our year ends on June 30th. So scaling and future growth is all I’m thinking about at the moment. And the way that we approach it is that we set pretty ambitious targets. We, of course, will go and make sure that there’s locality involved in the budgetary process and that people are able to be expressive of what they’re going to actually be able to achieve. Like many organizations, we’re setting our overarching OKRs and strategies, and then making sure we’re really working with the localized team to talk about how they are going to deliver them and what they need to potentially have a bit of nuance and alternative to, because it’s not always going to relate in all six countries that we are operating in exactly the same way. So in our world it’s thinking a lot about where are we headed, having an extreme and acute passion for that goal of where we are headed, certainly taking in the feedback points that are necessary and how we’re going to get there and how we’re going to execute, breaking them down into smaller targets, and then thinking about what might have to give in order to get there.

So in order to have that top line, you might have to give a little bit in your profit. You might have to invest more in your enablement function. You might have to do more go-to-market marketing plans. What are we going to give in order to hit that growth and what is our main drivers? So whenever we’re looking at a total scalable picture, it’s like where are we investing? What are we doing? What is the plan? What’s going to have to give to get there? And in a perfect world, nothing has to give, but I think we all know that something typically has to. So it’s just having a real granular level of detail in all of that planning.

Dana Feldman: Well, I mean, it’s so interesting the scope of your role and just the global reach of it obviously. And so I would love to hear from you a little bit more around what are your thoughts about what does it look like to be a great global leader?

Amanda Vining: I probably will think of some of the great global leaders that I get to interact with or even work for in our company or how I would describe them to answer this question. So for me, someone who is a great communicator, you’re going to have to communicate and you’re going to have to do it consistently because you’re going to have everyone pulling at you from a million different time zones. And they’re going to have their problem be their biggest problem and their region and they’re going to have an expectation of you to deliver for whatever they’re trying to solve. So communication is really important. Having alignment is really important. Having consensus is really important. I think talking with passion, as I shared before, is just so extreme. You want to feel that fire in the belly of your leader. You’re looking at them to do the impossible and to hit these strategies, and you need to know that they care more than anybody else. They care about the company. They care about you as a human being. They care about your customer. And you want to look and see that passion for someone who’s trying to set that tone, especially to multiple countries. And then someone who is just such a problem solver. Curveballs are coming and you got to be resilient in a global role because there’s always one. So you almost have to get away from being afraid of a curveball and being like, “I know if I can hit this one, I’m going to hit it out of the park, so I’m going to just figure this thing out.” And you have to have that adaptability. If you don’t enjoy that, it’s probably not the right space for you, because inevitably there will be something. There’s just too many dynamics going on around the world in all the different markets that something new won’t always pop up.

Dana Feldman: As you are looking at your global teams and running this business, I’d love to understand more about your approach in understanding your team’s needs. What is your approach? How do you go about that? And what are some, I guess, rallying cries or some mottos that you might really subscribe to as you lead your team?

Amanda Vining: It’s never lost on me that the local teams are going to know their customer and their people better than I ever am. So while I might have this in-depth knowledge of building the USA, because I’ve been in it doing this thing for 17 years, I’m never going to have that same level of knowledge in the South African business, but I was just there a couple weeks ago. So one of the things that their leader did is actually presented to us not just on the Corporate Traveler business in South Africa, but is presenting to us on all of the market trends and what’s going on in the region and presenting to us what they’re going through with elections and who the parties are and presenting to us around the unemployment rates, about load shedding, and how much insight they have to it and how they’re running their offices with generators. Just all this fascinating information that you’re able to put yourself in the shoes of how would I work in this business and how would I interact with customers and who are your core customers?

So for me, I love to have the different leaders really share with me at the beginning of the year, at a midpoint in the year, later in the year, what exactly they’re going through in their respective region, and then how our business is intercepting with all of that really at a macro and a micro level so that we can best plan together. And then make sure that they can fit into the strategies we’re setting as an organization, make sure they know their part and what they need to contribute to that because it isn’t the same. Our growth trajectory looks different in different countries, where some might have exponential growth expectation. And other already have a really fair amount of the market, so there’s only so much they’re going to be able to grow into. So I think them knowing where they fit in the puzzle is really important. And that I’m never coming at them as a know-it-all when they know their market 10 times better than I do. So I think all of that is a way to really get buy-in.

And then making sure that that buy-in isn’t only at the leader level. So that may mean going to prospect meetings in those countries. And they may be in a really off hour, but you’re not going to learn like you do in front of a prospect or in front of a customer. So being present for that. Using great tools like we have with Gong so that you can actually see those insights and be part of those meetings that you may not be part of. So love using you all and using revenue intelligence for that. And just being open to really hearing it at all levels. So like I said, go out with the people, do office hours for your teams in those other countries, hold seminars on the topics that they want to hear from you about, but all of that helps build that consensus and that alignment that we hope for.

Dana Feldman: I’ve heard you say in the past it’s about opening your ears rather than your mouth to be a great global leader and would love for you to share and I think I’ve heard you speak to this even on your own podcast, which is fantastic, by the way, just about having a relationship with the masses, not just your direct line. Share a little bit about just your thoughts around that so the listeners can understand where you’re coming from.

Amanda Vining: So my podcast, if anyone wants to tune in, it’s called The Vining Perspective. It came out of COVID, so where we had all come from very in-office experiences and now we’re all of a sudden at home and people are really going through it. We had only seen this exponential growth in success, and now we’re in a total other trajectory that frankly for me was one of the hardest times of my life, and I know for many of our people one of the hardest times of their life. I had built that just to communicate on a daily basis with our team at mass. So that rather than not hearing from their leader, they were hearing from me extremely regularly. And I was being as honest with them as I possibly could be as the punches were being thrown at us.

From there, it’s evolved to something that is really much more sales and customer-centric and is really much more used on that side of the business. Not nearly as frequent, of course, but has been an opportunity for the masses to hear about what’s going on in different interactions that we’re having, different advice points, or just opens that dialogue and line of communication. So that’s one way that I’m able to communicate at mass. As I said, hosting office hours in all of the regions in a regular cadence, and again, holding myself accountable that I’ll block out a day for joint meetings for the different regions that they can assign me to every month so that anyone in the team can have that opportunity to do a bit of co-pitching. So because of that, it has allowed me to really get to know a lot more of the team. And whenever I’m traveling, of course, I want to spend as much time with the whole team as possible, and I try to get out there to the other countries and see them, but there’s nothing like that interpersonal interaction that you can replace. So it’s about all of us.

Dana Feldman: Talk to me or share a little bit about the culture at Corporate Traveler, and I think this piece that you really subscribed to, which is really rolling up the sleeves and getting in there. And I know when we chatted before, I really loved what you shared around some of the work, just even with the SDR team. And I think even to that, and I know this is a question within a question, but a really hot topic just for a lot of sales leaders out there is the function of SDR. And I think you have a really strong point of view on it that I had love for them to hear from you on.

Amanda Vining: Yeah, we love our SDR so much. I mean, they’re touching so much of everything that we do. So our businesses, and it’s a word that’s not used everywhere in the same way, but in Australia when you talk about irreverence, it really means that you are not taking yourself too seriously. And in our world, it really means that we just roll up our sleeves. We all in leadership in our company acknowledge that our job is to inspire our teams and for them to enjoy working with us. And that essentially my customer are the 16,000 customers that Corporate Traveler serves, but it’s also our people, because I’m trying to help support in a global perspective each one of the regions. And I want them to subscribe to the strategies that are being put in place.

And ultimately, I want them to be here long-term. I want everyone that comes and works for our company to love it in the same way that I have and to grow up with it in the same way that I have and to hit whatever that respective milestone is for them. So they’re going to make a certain income, or they’re going to have more balance for their family, or they are going to get that promotion that they’ve always dreamed of. I want nothing more than the people we manage to find the love that I have found in working for this company. And I think that they really feel that and see that, but the best way I can show that is through rolling up my sleeves and not asking anyone to do anything that I wouldn’t do.

So in our culture, we don’t have executive assistants. There’s nothing wrong with companies that would allow that. Half the time I fantasize how lovely that would be for me, but we don’t have closed office spaces. My calendar I publish for everyone so that they can grab me for joint meetings or grab me for a one-on-one if they’d like to. We’re really open and honest. I’ll role play with SDRs. I recently was traveling and SDRs were struggling on something, and I picked up the phone and did dials with them. And people are like, “Are you crazy?” But ultimately, again, we were not going to ask anyone to do anything that we wouldn’t do. So we really have an open-door policy and we don’t take ourselves too seriously. And I just keep it at the front every day that I’m really grateful that I get to be in this position. And I know that if I wasn’t, the company would be probably quite okay and move on without me. They’ve got enough good things going on. So I try to bring that gratitude for what I get to do every day and be present for our people.

Dana Feldman: Amanda, it gives me goosebumps. You can so feel your love for not just what you do, but for the company as well. And so it just radiates off you. So it gives me goosebumps to see a leader have that sort of passion. I’m curious, after doing all the other jobs to get you to where you are today and the role that you are, how has your perspective changed and has that even maybe changed your work style a little bit?

Amanda Vining: I think that perspectives just change a lot as we grow up and we go through different things and you spend a long time with an organization who you are evolves to. So for me, I learned so much from each position that I had. And I, as I navigated my career too, had to be like, well, what do I want? What matters to me? And if I’m honest, I think at times I was more centered in my own ego. You joke and you say people are a bit of a peacock, and I think almost like that’s insecurity. The people that sometimes come off as the biggest showboaters or the biggest peacocks, oftentimes it’s their own insecurity. And I cared so much about what do people think or what job am I going to get or what is my title?

And for me, I went through a really hard time in the pandemic. So not only did that go on, I’m probably getting almost too personal here, but I went through a difficult divorce. And for anyone who’s divorced, it’s like the death that you don’t get a funeral for. And when you have kids or a young child, you’re going to in any even shared custody engagement have to go, “I’m going to miss out on time with my child.” And at the time I also went through losing my house, and all of this while our company was going through this hard time. And in that time my company showed me so much empathy. So I was so honest, I wasn’t my best self, and they gave me the freedom to be myself, to get through it, to take a sabbatical, to come back. They promoted me into what is now my dream job.

And when you root yourself in what do you learn and what is your culture, and coming out of that experience and coming through a pandemic, all of that just changed me. All the things I thought my life was going to be or that linear trajectory that I was determined to be on was changed for now. My core motivators are getting to work with customers that really inspire me. They really change our world. They really do incredible things. And I sit there in front of my TV and I go, “That’s my client. We did that production.” Or I see someone on the news that’s changing our world in terms of a drug innovation. I’m like, “Oh my gosh, that’s my client. I can’t believe they’re doing that.” Or I go to a game and I’m like, “Oh, this is my client that I’m rooting for.” So I think that pride for me really matters.

I think watching people that I care so much about at a human level take off and their career trajectory hit a new high or they’re building families or they’re mobile and they’re moving across the world, those are now my motivators and they’ve changed so much. So I think my perspective of what is a good job or what matters in the world has changed. So I think that might just be age in life.

And the other one, not to necessarily belabor this point, but is that evolution from being the seller to the buyer made everything change. So I used to approach things of like, oh, I think this makes me a good salesperson, or I think the customers want this because this is the segment they fall in. And now I get the fun of being the decision-maker on whether it’s you all, whether it’s our CRM, whether it’s different products that we use or very well tech resource sales and CS org. And now I think about everything, well, what matters to me? Do I care very much about this QBR, or do I care that your team who’s phenomenal with Levy and Sabrina and you and everyone else is giving me insights that are going to help our conversion? They’re going to help our product strategy in a way that we know that we’re going to be able to build features and iterate based off of what we’re hearing. Those are the insights that are being given to me regularly that might mean more than that.

So how do we want to think about value and bringing that forward with our customer? So that’s changed it. The way that I approach sales now is different because I realize you don’t have to have this linear path where you go, “I’m going to talk to you about service. Then I’m going to talk to you about savings and value. Then I’m going to talk to you about pricing.” It’s like instead, someone might be getting on that call the same way I’m getting on the last call because I trust my team and I just want to talk about commercials. I don’t need you to take me through that whole pitch again. So just being cognizant of where do you want to go? Pick your own adventure.

So now I think that perspective for me has just evolved from what my personal life is, how I’ve felt the culture and that support, and then simultaneously, what has been done with my own experience as the buyer has just evolved so much of how I want our teams to approach their prospects and their customers.

Dana Feldman: It really resonates. I mean, for anyone that’s gone through the leadership journey, understanding and learning about the ego and what role that’s playing in all of our lives is really fascinating. And I was going to ask you, you use the term peacocking at some point in your career, and I was going to ask you, was there a piece of feedback that you got that really snapped you into realizing there’s a lot of ego there, or was it more just the accumulation of experiences of personal life, work life, COVID that got you there? So I got to ask, was there anything really memorable to you feedback-wise that you got that maybe just got you recognizing some of that?

Amanda Vining: Yeah, there was. So during the pandemic, people were just in it up to their eyeballs of like… Everyone was just going through, “Am I going to have a job? Am I not going to have a job?” All of that. And I think anything that if I was bringing up, oh, but we were able to still achieve this, it was something that people were not ready for. So just being really delicate and empathetic to people are going through experiences that you might be aware of because they’re willing to be transparent and vulnerable or you might be completely unaware of. So the way that you give them energy or if you are coming off, it can really be disrespectful. Everyone’s problem is their biggest problem. So I did have a couple pieces of feedback then of like, we don’t want to hear that the company’s made it back to profit yet. We’re not ready for that. You’re like, oh my gosh, I didn’t really think about what your personal journey was through this process when you’re trying to say, “Don’t worry, we’re all going to be okay in the end.” So you just learn that the sensitivity of your messaging and how you present yourself is so important.

So I think that was part of it for me. And then the other pieces were just learning to be okay with myself. My own insecurities were why those other pieces manifested. So I just always take a grain of that in looking at some of the young talent or the young talent that I get to work with what I’m being sold to of like, okay, it’s that growing into yourself and figuring it out through the years.

Dana Feldman: I love it. Well, thanks for letting me ask a little bit more around that. Not to pivot us back into the business world too much, but I do think there’s something really interesting in your role today where you are managing both sales and customer success. And would love for you to share a little bit about what does that look like to do both, and how have you helped navigate the healthy relationship between sales and CS?

Amanda Vining: Yeah, it’s a great one, and I get that question a lot. And frankly, when I first took the job, I was like, both? Are you sure? Because it was lofty targets. So you’re doing over a billion in acquisition on one hand. You get 16,000 plus customers on the other. And I found myself being like, we’re not exactly always attuned with one another. And then I realized really quickly, but your prospects and your customers are pretty attuned with one another, what they expect, what’s going on in the markets. They’re pretty much aligned in where they want things to go. So bringing continuity to that journey could only really be a good thing if we got it right.

So one of the things I often encourage any organization that does not have a joint leader that is doing both to take a real look at is identifying who the ideal client profile is and have your customer success engine really hone in on that and figure that out and have your SDR and sales channel hone in on who your ideal prospect profile is and look at those two examples that are done independently of one another and come back and see what’s going on in your business. Because as the market is going through so much different disruption and challenge and we’re all in a space where we’re having to hit really aggressive profit goals and making sure that we’re making the right financial decisions, that can change who your profile is. So one of the things that I always say is take a look at both of those and see if they’re completely aligned or if they aren’t. Because if they’re not, you’re probably going to immediately be able to pinpoint some areas of your business that you can bring some synergy back to.

Essentially you want sales and customer success to be in a completely symbiotic relationship, so sales is never overselling and customer success is knowing exactly how they deliver value. But for a lot of organizations that have pivoted a bit away or have honed in on new clients and then have a lot of legacy customers, that can be a challenge. So for any business that isn’t new or isn’t existing only within the last three years, I think that that’s a pretty strong exercise to do. But in our world, it was really about how do we ensure that we have common goals, find the common ground between us. Customer success obviously has gone from that evolution from account management to being a revenue-generating function and being part of that journey. That importance is growing more and more and more in all markets, so much so that it’s really on the same par now as a true sales function.

So being able to bring that together and then be the advocate on both sides has actually really been a fantastic and helpful space, whilst it felt a bit overwhelming at first. It’s now two and a half years down the road. I can’t really imagine it any other way.

Dana Feldman: Is there a unlock that you would attribute to getting CS to being a revenue generator that you did, you remember that changed for you at Corporate Traveler? I’m sure people would love to learn if there’s a couple things there that you felt like really unlocked them being able to generate revenue.

Amanda Vining: Yeah, I think the first question you have to ask yourself as an organization is, is CS in our business a function or is it a philosophy of the entire org? And you’re not going to change it until it’s a philosophy of the entire org. And once you determine that it is a philosophy of the entire org, and you don’t just determine it, but you mean it deep down in your bones, you’re customer-centric in your heart of all of your decisions, and you’re not treating your prospects better than your customers, and you get there. I almost try to make everything overly simple when you’re doing massive business transformation.

So essentially customer success is doing one of three things in a triangle. They’re either mitigating risk, so they’re out fighting fires and they’re protecting revenue. They are doing revenue-generating tasks, or they’re demonstrating value for their customer. So we know how that customer perceives value. In our world, that could be really three main areas, which are they perceive value because they really care about their employees. They know that business travel has the impact on employee satisfaction, and they want to know they’re being well taken care of, as well as a range of personas are being well taken care of. They really care about cost savings. They look at us as a 30-year plus travel management company who has lots of access to the supply chain, and they want to see those discounts, and they want those savings so that they can scale appropriately. Or they might say, “I really care about your tech and your platform, where we’re going to book the most of our bookings and how it integrates with us, perhaps an expense, HRS,” et cetera.

So CS should be demonstrating value in one of those areas or all of those areas. So you’re either going to be risk mitigating, you’re going to be doing demonstration of value, or you’re going to be revenue generating. And you got to look at those and say, “How much time am I spending doing each one of these tasks?” So what we did is we did a real granular look at how much time went into each one of those buckets. And in order to do more of revenue generation, that means you’re going to have to ensure that you’re not doing a whole lot of risk mitigation, and then you even have an appropriate score of how you’re going to demonstrate value.

So in today’s world, you can be thinking about how you bring value forward. There’s so much going on with obviously the ability to self-serve, all of the AI components that are going into CS now, so that you can still do quite a bit of that to free up time to revenue generate. But in the most simplistic terms, I think taking a real look at that triangle and what fits where if you want to intentionally get more revenue, you’ve got to be able to do that. And you’ve also got to be able to find the right isolation between intentional and organic growth. So there’s going to be a number that’s associated from organic growth, especially in a business like ours. How are you pulling intentional growth forward? So complete rearchitecture of it, but had to be that customer success is not a place of refuge. Account management used to be like, I’m leaving sales roles and I’m going to take refuge in CS. That’s not the world anymore. It’s a world where you are very much accountable for revenue growth as well.

Dana Feldman: I could do a whole part two with you on this topic. There is no doubt. But thank you for reading us in a little bit more to how you approach it and think about it. Before we wrap up our conversation, Amanda, I’d love for you to answer the last question, which is a little bit of a hot take. So as a revenue sales leader, what is your unfiltered hot take on something you’re seeing in revenue teams right now?

Amanda Vining: So hot take for me is thinking about decision-making personas right now. So the world we live in is still essentially mainly virtual meetings. Virtual meetings are 97, 98, 99% of most businesses. So there’s a lot of people that are involved in them, and there’s obviously a bit of complexity in this multi-threaded decision-making world. But ultimate decision-maker is the financial persona. So more and more that signatory on that contract is that financial persona. So as we’re going through uncertainty and disruption within many organizations, in order to justify more investment in their business, they’re often thinking about, okay, well, what level of profitization is this going to disrupt? Or what do I have to do to justify this investment? So we’re seeing more and more and more of that.

So for me, the hot take is ensuring that you have a really good measure of how you are going to deliver value and true value to a company is the level of scrutiny that we are all under. So living in a world where we can sell based off of nice to haves and experience feels like a thing of the past. The pendulum has swung to value, and we are living in that world. I can’t think of a single meeting that I’ve viewed or interacted with that has not cared about this.

So the hot take I have is probably one that is somewhat explanatory, but is one that we often forget, which is not only do you need to show the return of that investment, you got to think about how you’re going to be accountable on a consistent basis of showing that you have delivered that return. I think using the cost of inaction is more important than ever, and that a lot of salespeople are really good at articulating an ROI, but they struggle on bringing that COI. And we all know that the pain of change means it’s got to be at least two times greater than the pain of the same. So what are you lacking in your business if you don’t do this now? What is that growth that you could have had that you’re not going to have if you don’t do this? You’ve got to bring that pain and make it real and necessary. So really honing in on your sales culture of getting them to understand how to do the cost of inaction in a pitch and making it a big part of their pitch and in a big part of their close I think is also really important.

And lastly, your ideal client profile, your ideal prospect profile need to have a timeline associated to them. So we oftentimes go pie in the sky and we’re dreaming about who we want it to close, but all of them in your business should have a timeline associated to what the appropriate deal cycle is for you. And that in all of that closed technique and in relating that COI and that ROI, thinking about how you associate timelines to all of your deals is just more important than ever because they’re ballooning up. We’re having five and six and seven meetings. Everything is virtual. So how do we pull that back down to earth? So all of those for me are just very front of mind at the moment in everything we’re doing and teaching.

Dana Feldman: I love it. Well, also I listened to your podcast on the cost of inaction, so I encourage all the listeners to take like that. It was a fantastic listen, and I couldn’t agree with you more. Amanda, thank you so much for joining us today. We appreciate your time and your insight, and there are so many amazing learnings from what you shared. So thank you for joining us today.

Amanda Vining: I really appreciate it, Dana, and thank you for all you do for our business. And thank you, of course, to Gong who we absolutely love working and partnering with.

Dana Feldman: Thanks so much for joining us for this episode. Follow Gong on LinkedIn for our tactical takeaways from this conversation, including the best plays to add to your playbook. For more revenue leadership insights, check out gong.io/theedge, and be sure to follow the show to never miss an episode.