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Bill Binch (Operating Partner at Battery Ventures) joins GTMnow to share the operational frameworks he’s built across 116 quarters on quota, and what actually changes when you move from driving revenue to advising an entire portfolio.
Before Battery, Bill was employee #16 at Marketo, where he led sales from zero revenue through IPO and a Vista Equity acquisition. He then served as CRO at Pendo, helping scale ARR to nearly $100M in only three years. His career spans some of the most defining sales organizations in enterprise software, from Oracle to PeopleSoft.
Discussed in this episode
- Why every forecast conversation should start with “my quota is” not “my forecast is”
- The three metrics most companies aren’t tracking (and should be)
- The “mojo metric”: 6 daily inputs that tell you whether pipeline is gaining or losing ground
- Why the 5-quarter look-back is the most important slide in any board deck
- What the transition from CRO to operating partner actually looks like
- Why Battery doesn’t run a one-size-fits-all playbook across its portfolio
- The accidental sales experiment at Outreach that proved the power of in-person teams
- How the best sales and marketing leaders present as one motion in board meetings
- What Bill looks for when evaluating whether a company has the operational rigor to scale
- His advice for VPs, CROs, and CMOs who want to eventually move into an operating partner role
Episode highlights
00:00 – Bill’s career path: Oracle, Marketo employee #16, Pendo CRO, and choosing Arizona over tech hubs
15:01 – Battery’s approach: why there’s no one-size-fits-all playbook
19:56 – Outreach’s accidental sales experiment: remote vs. in-person results
21:23 – What nobody tells you about the transition from CRO to operating partner
23:01 – Gold watch and slippers? Why operating partner is not a retirement plan
27:15 – Three audiences: prospective investments, portfolio companies, and Battery internal
31:42 – Investing in GTM tech: why Battery went 7 years between bets
34:44 – The Phil Fernandez warning: “your hand is on the wheel, now you’re a passenger”
36:44 – Why every forecast should start with “my quota is” not “my forecast is”
38:33 – The metric most companies miss: plan vs. planned quota vs. actual quota deployed
40:05 – The mojo metric: 6 daily pipeline inputs that tell you everything
43:16 – Helping technical founders sell: the one-eyed man in the land of the blind
48:04 – Advice for operators who want to move into an operating partner role
51:03 – The sales and marketing dance: what real GTM alignment sounds like in a board room
Key takeaways
1. Every forecast conversation should anchor to quota, not forecast.
Bill requires reps to start with three numbers in order: my quota is, my forecast is, my closed won is. Most reps default to leading with forecast, which lets the conversation drift from the actual target. When you anchor to quota first, the gaps become immediately visible, and you know exactly how much urgency is required. Sales leaders get paid on quota, not forecast. Language used should reflect that.
2. Most companies don’t track whether they’ve actually deployed enough quota to hit plan (and that’s a massive mistake).
Three metrics, tracked monthly: company plan, planned quota deployed, and actual quota deployed. Bill gets called all the time by leaders in Battery’s portfolio saying “we don’t have enough pipeline.” The first place he looks? Quota deployment, because more often than not the real problem is they’re running at 70% of planned capacity but expecting 100% of plan. That math is never going to work, and reveals that hiring is your problem, not quota.
3. Pipeline health is a daily exercise.
The “mojo metric” tracks six daily inputs: three that add to pipeline (new deals, expansions, pull forwards) and three that subtract (killed, shrunk, pushed). Net them out every night. Three straight days of net negative and you’re sounding the alarms. Foolproof way to catch slow leaks overnight instead of once the quarter is already gone.
4. The transition from CRO to operating partner is more of an identity shift than people expect.
After 29 years with a clear scorecard, Bill moved into a role where outcomes might be 5-10 years out. Measuring impact is entirely different in venture. Be prepared to solve a completely different set of problems requiring a lot more context switching than when success metrics were pre-defined.
5. The path from operator to operating partner starts years before you’re ready.
If you’re working for a venture or PE-backed company, build relationships with those teams now. Show up at industry events, chat with the team. It’s a sales pipeline nurture, just for your career.
Thank you to our sponsor: AngelList
From starting as a small, operator-led rolling fund, to evolving to an institutional platform, AngelList has been a core partner in every phase of GTMfund’s growth. Their software-first fund admin infrastructure allowed us to scale without sacrificing agility — from onboarding hundreds of LPs seamlessly to handling compliance, capital calls, and reporting as our fund size evolved.
As we expanded from Fund I to Fund II, AngelList took care of the back-office operations, allowing us to stay focused on what matters most: investing in world-class founders and building the strongest go-to-market network in venture.
They’ve scaled with us across funds and into the future.
If your fund is growing in size or complexity, check them out at https://angellist.com/gtmfund.
Follow Bill Binch
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/bill-binch-302a4a2
- Battery Ventures’ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/battery-ventures
- Battery Ventures’ website: https://www.battery.com
Follow Max Altschuler and Paul Irving
- Max Altschuler on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/maxaltschuler
- Max Altschuler on X (Twitter): https://x.com/HackItMax
- Paul Irving on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/paulsirving
- Paul Irving on X: https://x.com/PaulGTM
- Newsletter: https://thegtmnewsletter.substack.com
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- Podcast Directory: https://gtmnow.com/tag/podcast
VC 5 Episode Transcript
00:00
Bill Binch: Bill is an operator. Your hand is on the wheel. You’re driving in this role, you’re a passenger, and you might even be a backseat passenger. I’m not the zero. So I can come in and I can coach, but I can’t make you bill bench.
00:11
Max Altschuler: Now, an operating partner in battery spent nearly three decades on quota as a CRO and explains why this transition isn’t easy.
00:19
Bill Binch: I spent 29 years on quota, and I’m used to it. And coming into an organization where you make investments that there could be five, seven, ten years out before there’s an outcome that’s a different type of thing. So you have to find another set of metrics to measure that. You’re having impact.
00:34
Max Altschuler: Decades as a CRO or what’s shaped Bill into the operator he is today.
00:39
Bill Binch: I don’t like seeing the imprecision. Hey, what’s your average sales like when they’re like, you know, it’s between like 60 and 120 days? That’s not precise. That’s a range. Precise is 72 days.
00:50
Max Altschuler: If you’re a CRO or GTM leader thinking about what comes next. This episode breaks down what the transition really looks like as an operating partner. What are the things that you get graded on?
00:58
Bill Binch: For me, how I think about measuring is.
01:07
Max Altschuler: The.
01:12
Max Altschuler: Goal. We’re back with another episode of the GTM now podcast VC Special Edition episode. I’m here with my partner Paul Irving. What’s up? Paul?
01:23
Paul Irving: How’s it going? Max?
01:25
Max Altschuler: Quickly, before we go into the episode today, talk about a couple things that we’re seeing. You know, I guess on the front lines of VC around SAS and software and AI. First one being build versus buy. You know, you’re hearing this whole is software dad. Some good is going to vibe code this app and put you out of business and you know I think that’s one of those things that we’ve been talking about for a very long time that like nobody’s going to go vibe code DocuSign.
01:50
Max Altschuler: Like, I vibe good to DocuSign ten years ago. It’s called PDF, you know, preview. You could sign a doc in there and then send his attachment. Like the whole reason why people use DocuSign is for underlying fingerprint technology that allow the document to hold up a court, not to sign a document. That’s like the easiest thing. So, you know, I think there’s certain things you can use, the little balls and the anythings and those types of companies for that’ll be great.
02:17
Max Altschuler: You know, I had a buddy is an entrepreneur, texted me that day and sent me a interactive pitch deck that he used, built on Loverboy. And he’s like, look what I’ve ab coded. That’s great. Sure. Fantastic. But it’s not like DocuSign is going the way somebody is vibe coding it. But what are you seeing in the kind of build versus by commoditization side of of SAS?
02:37
Max Altschuler: And where do you feel like there is real stress here?
02:40
Paul Irving: No, it’s a great point. I think there’s two different conversations. It’s been one of the busier periods, even though there’s never a sleep period. I think on X for whether it’s VC or the software ecosystem, but it’s been a particular, particularly crazy one, and you’re seeing it reflected most importantly in the public markets. But I feel like people are conflating two separate conversations, which is the first one you called out, which is build versus buy, and then the second one, which is just company to company and competition foundation model to traditional software company competition and some of the concerns that people are having there.
03:14
Paul Irving: So let’s put number two aside for now, because I think that’s another separate conversation, which we can have in a minute and start with build versus buy. DocuSign is such a perfect example because I think it’s one of those tools. When people say, now software is getting easier and easier to build, I can vibe code some of these tools myself over the weekend in cloud Code, and well, that is true from a functionality and workflow perspective.
03:38
Paul Irving: You’re missing the point on why companies buy certain softwares and then why they might choose to build some other ones internally. And so the point with DocuSign, they don’t buy it because nobody could build a product that allows you to sign documents electronically. They buy it because there’s security and verification that allows the documents that you have signed contracts and otherwise to hold up in court, because that’s the only thing you really need to do or you need that product to do.
04:04
Paul Irving: If you’re an enterprise or mid-market company, there’s a variety of other tools that would, I think, apply the same maxim, which is the price that we pay for the software. And maybe this is going to change. We might not pay per seat, we might pay per outcome, but the cost of us as a business to purchase this off the shelf and have it run functionally and deliver about we need it to is much lower than if we were to build it ourselves, even if it might be cheap to initially build up, keep, maintain, make sure it’s delivering on the security, the functionality, the data, connectivity, all of those things that when you’re just looking for
04:42
Paul Irving: a problem to be solved off the shelf, have historically been value drivers and software. And I don’t know if that part is going to change. There’s going to be bespoke tools. I think what’s cool about some of the fastest growing and best companies that we get to talk to and work with is they’re building really custom bespoke point solution software internally, and you can maintain that.
05:02
Paul Irving: But some of the most important fundamental categories of tools that you know I might need is an enterprise, forward looking business. I still think those are technology budgets that people are going to go purchase something for.
05:14
Max Altschuler: I totally agree, I don’t think that HubSpot or Salesforce course or any of these companies that are public should be down, because we’re worried that cloud code just came out and somebody is going to buy code one. And in fact, what’s floating around Twitter now is the anthropic job post for a Salesforce admin. So, you know, even in one of Dario’s presentations, he gave where it’s like, yeah, we’re not going to need these products anymore.
05:41
Max Altschuler: Like they’re still hiring for somebody that’s managing Salesforce instance inside of Claude, which has cloud code and would be the company that would be cannibalizing this the most. Right. So I think a lot of that is overblown. And I think this is we do we have like an overreaction. Things settle, things come back up. But yeah, there is there obviously is a reckoning that’s happening right now.
06:04
Max Altschuler: There’s a lot of companies, I think, that are in very saturated markets that haven’t really leaned into AI and done enough to, you know, show us what the next act is going to be leveraging this new technology. And hats off to a company like Airtable. I mean, completely just reinvented themselves. Hey, this is we’re going to scrap the rest.
06:30
Max Altschuler: And this is what we’re building now, right? What are your thoughts on, I guess, the whole open core kind of rise of agents, like, now that agents can do all this and you don’t need a user interface anymore.
06:41
Paul Irving: Yeah. Because I think what you just did. Yeah. The question there is probably the right question for concern because it’s not that. And this is where the the concept of software is dead is a misnomer. Software isn’t dead, but it is going through a repricing exercise. And I and this is where some of the meaningful disruption is actually happening, which is depending on where you sit in the stack of technology tools and the value that it drives for customers.
07:13
Paul Irving: I think there is a shift in the terminal value of your company or how much you’re going to be able to charge, and the idea is that a lot of software historically, and this is where the public markets are feeling it most acutely, arc sit in a middle layer. So it’s the interface. I want to go in and execute XYZ business function for whatever team that I work for.
07:34
Paul Irving: There’s a UI, there’s a dashboard, it pulls data for somewhere else. It gives me visibility. I have to learn that new interface every time I’m logging into a new tool, right by the tools company, and the squeeze is happening where there’s, you know, three layers, there’s the action, and then there’s the middle layer of sort of just visibility updates, UI functionality, and then there’s the data and maybe foundational layer of what powers some of the tools above it.
08:03
Paul Irving: And you’re just seeing the middle get squeezed where you’re either now an agent, a company that has, whether you’re a public market company or you’re a private market startup, you have an objective work for a company that drives in outcome and value. So not just every user in my organization signs on and your plug in to the dashboard and I’ll see the visibility.
08:23
Paul Irving: But what business function do you drive it. You actually do. And that’s the objective layer. And then what are the fundamental data layers that power the agents that sit on top of it? You know, it could be your snowflake or your Databricks. From a data lake perspective, it could be a Salesforce from all of your CRM and GTM data that sits within it.
08:42
Paul Irving: But the value is starting to accrue in two different areas, which is are the, are you sitting at the top layer where work actually gets done? Things actually get automated and you’re actually driving value? Or are you sitting in the bottom layer where you have proprietary data infrastructure, something fundamental that allows the agents to operate on top of it?
09:04
Paul Irving: And if you sit in the in between in just a UI dashboard or workflow software or something that miss are having to go in and update and change, that’s where you’re seeing a repricing. And I think some pretty serious risks, from a company, our customers.
09:18
Max Altschuler: Actively want to go into what that means for founders, because in the back that we sit in, you know, it’s a pretty big shift for B2B, SaaS builders of the past ten years have done compared to today, it’s a different game. You know, we’re looking for deeper moat. There are a lot of, I think, things we used to call moats that no longer exist.
09:39
Max Altschuler: Speed being one of them. Right. Even resources, like with agents writing the bulk of code, you can now build things much faster, bigger things than you ever could with a smaller team. So what are some of the moats that you know you’re seeing in, you know, our side as investors here?
09:56
Paul Irving: I think it goes to yeah. Well what would you do if you’re a founder today. How do you look at the world? If I already have a company, what direction to build it? If I’m starting a company, where do I start? This has always been important, but I think it’s never been more important to think about what you build, where you build, and how you build it.
10:17
Paul Irving: So where do I sit within that stack? What exactly am I doing and what value does that drive to customers? And instead of saying like, what’s the problem statement, I would almost start with an outcome that you can drive and then decide how burning is that outcome and how potentially defensible would it be if we started here as a company and built technology around it?
10:38
Paul Irving: So, you know, defensible points? Do we accumulate proprietary data that couldn’t be scraped publicly anywhere else on the internet? Because that’s something that’s become very quickly commoditized. And then there’s a bunch of companies doing really interesting work here. But I think that continues on that trend. So do you accumulate data that couldn’t be found anywhere else? Are there regulatory or structural barriers to entry to the market that your is it financial services, is it healthcare, GovTech, public sector?
11:05
Paul Irving: There’s a variety of different versions of this, but is what you’re doing, is there some structural barrier for somebody to just jump in involved? Go to tool over the weekend. And then the third one is their network effects. So as you grow I do network effects lock in I take some of the value that you’re trying to capture as the company the company builds.
11:22
Paul Irving: But the thing I always want to underline, and we talked about this in the last episode too, is if I’m a founder or owner operator at a technology company, I listed technology company right now, don’t confuse the public markets sell off with a lack of enthusiasm around B2B technology. You are not building a SaaS company of yesteryear. You’re building the future of B2B technology.
11:43
Paul Irving: It’s going to be objective. It’s going to look different. It’s not for companies of old look, but the demand for technology. If you just do an umbrella statement of B2B technology has never been greater. And I think one of our founders from Kalpa, from Atlan, shared this tweet, and it’s a pretty perfect, summarization of this. We shared it back and forth.
12:01
Paul Irving: But, software spending is barely 1% of GDP. Knowledge work is over 50%. The SAS is dead. Cloud is starting at a $300 billion market in flux. In my opinion, they’re missing the $50 trillion plus knowledge economy that it’s about to eat into. Will every software company make it now? But the good ones will figure it out. And I think we spoke very similarly about that.
12:24
Paul Irving: There’s never been more appetite. Appetite for technology budgets have never felt more robust. But how did you execute? To get there is probably as perilous as ever.
12:33
Max Altschuler: Yeah. And I and I think you know, on the buyer side there is a good deal of pause. I mean, I remember seeing a Jason Lincoln tweet where he spoke to a company that was doing great, signing big contracts. But the, you know, the customer was like, I’m not going to sign anything more than one year because I don’t know what’s going to be out a year from now.
12:50
Max Altschuler: I mean, technology’s moving faster than ever before. It is a whirlwind of a marketplace. And with that, let’s dig in to our guest today, Bill bench, operating partner at battery. Great episode. Probably could have went another hour or two. I’ve known Bill well for a very long time. And you know, we’ve got a great rapport, I think was a fantastic conversation.
13:13
Max Altschuler: But, you know, a lot of our GTM leader LPs, will say to us, hey, I want to get into VC next, you know, as if it’s like they’re kind of bridge to retirement. They think it’s like an easy job. And I’ve known Bill for a while. I’ve never seen the guy work harder. I think he he said it on the show.
13:30
Max Altschuler: You know, he’s he’s working harder now than it did as a CRO. I know us, one of us is always in the air, if not both of us. I mean, we’re scrapping. So there’s real work, especially when you’re an operating partner like Bill. You know, he’s really in the weeds helping a lot of the battery portfolio companies.
13:48
Max Altschuler: It was interesting to hear a little bit about his day to day, how he’s going in and helping those companies. Any interesting kind of, learnings or call outs for you from listening to the episode?
13:59
Paul Irving: Yeah, there was there was tons. I think you touched on the transition from operator two to the venture side of the ecosystem nicely there. But, I’m excited for more people to to understand Bill’s mojo metric. And he talks about it in detail and how he calculates it. But such a fascinating way to look at net pipeline generated.
14:18
Paul Irving: And so what gets added, what’s net new, what gets taken away when deals get downsized or resume and then close loss and get removed from the pipeline in its entirety. And he, you know, iterated it down to a science where you would get this net number every single day. But you talk we talked to companies all the time, and sometimes it’s the last few weeks of a quarter that someone finally realizes they’re going to miss the number, or it’s the last few days of a month where you realize you’re going to miss your number and the Mojo metric is such a fascinating way to keep a pulse on.
14:47
Paul Irving: How are we tracking on a day to day basis on that pipeline? And excited for more people to, to get in on bills that matter?
14:54
Max Altschuler: Yeah, it’s a great show. So Bill bench, operating partner at Battery Ventures. Bill, thanks for coming.
15:00
Bill Binch: Great to be here.
15:01
Max Altschuler: Yeah. Back in Arizona, this is your hometown. Yes. A lot of people know that. Not that warm glow frequently.
15:06
Bill Binch: That was your former hometown.
15:08
Max Altschuler: Was my former hometown. Yes. Yes. It’s been a fun time here. So how much of your career have you been here? Marquette opened. Oh, everything.
15:16
Bill Binch: Yeah, really? The earlier stage stuff. I’ve been here 18 years, which is interesting because I. I started my career in San Francisco, went to Boston, went to Seattle for three tech hot spots, and I never found myself in those cities. Yeah, I was always traveling out. So I finally got to the point where I was like, look, my wife and I are gonna decide where we want to be and exist from there.
15:40
Bill Binch: And we did kind of a play off between a few cities in Scottsdale one. And so we came here 18 years ago, and I gotta say then, I mean, like you’re talking about go to market or because I go to meeting days and like WebEx days, pre like zoom days, there are a few roles that pass me over.
15:57
Bill Binch: Yes. Of where I was based. Yeah. But I was just committed to it. I was committed that I’ll make it work.
16:02
Max Altschuler: How do you reconcile that in your head? Like like, oh, do I, I pass up on this like maybe generational wealth opportunity with this company or did you just have enough of them where it was like, okay, if I don’t pick this one, I’ll have another one. Or were you just family first? And this is most one thing, my career.
16:17
Max Altschuler: If my family’s happy wife’s happy kids are happy, then everything else will come together.
16:21
Bill Binch: I’d say there’s probably more stupidity than anything in like, a just a blind conviction. To be honest, I we made the decision to be in a place where I hopefully didn’t have to travel. That quite honestly didn’t change that much. I still traveled a tremendous amount. That was the give get, which is okay, I’m not in one of those tier one city, so I’m going to travel to it to be around the headquarters, to be around the teams.
16:44
Bill Binch: So to take a little bit of work. But I it was probably work conviction that I was going to find a way. Yeah, it’s going to find a way. It was way before you know, remote work and stuff like that. So everybody was mostly office based. The one thing I, I’d gone for me is as a, as a sales leader, you can argue that.
17:00
Bill Binch: Look, do you want me in the office or the cash registers ringing outside? I’m at events, I’m at conferences, I’m at customer sites, I’m at prospect calls doing that type of stuff. So it did take a little bit of, I’d say, finessing to get the right type of CEO, to see the vision of that.
17:16
Max Altschuler: And that battery. Now you’re, you know, you’re in an operating partner role, you’re working with a handful of companies or investing in companies. Do you have a lens in which you view best practices there? Is it you know, we want sales leaders to be in office. We want to build sales teams in office. Is it company dependent? Is it remotes?
17:34
Max Altschuler: Fine. Hybrid. How are you looking at things?
17:37
Bill Binch: The unique thing about battery is there is no one size fits all playbook. It’s very bespoke to the stage of the company, the type of technology where the company is headquartered, who they sell to. There’s a lot of other PE and some VC funds that have a very much like written, a very written playbook that they come in and impose upon the company.
18:00
Bill Binch: And Barry doesn’t do that. We’re very unique in that sense that we look at the actuality in the totality of the company that we’re investing in and make a decision from that. So there isn’t one size fits all. Now, personally speaking, the power of in-person is hard to replicate. And so I personally lean if I can help influence or nudge a company that we’re working with to think about how they’re going to structure their organization to something that’s important, because I just think that it doesn’t matter if you graduate college day and you go to a big company or a small company, the experience of being in person is is just it.
18:36
Bill Binch: It’s invaluable to be able to walk the halls. I tell some they’re not always great stories, but at Oracle, my first company, there was a guy that ran the telesales team was 500 sales reps and he smoked. And there are literally people that I think took up smoking, and if not, they time their smoke breaks to be when he was doing his smoke breaks.
18:54
Bill Binch: Because why 500 people? But Sam has no Sam. Sam knew your name.
19:00
Max Altschuler: Yeah.
19:01
Bill Binch: And has, you know, 500, 450 other sales reps. He doesn’t. Yeah. And there’s something about that proximity that, you know, you talk about walking the halls, you talk about just like having that ten minute walk around the building or something like that. That’s so real. Oh yeah. And making connections. And I look back on it and, you know, just knowing myself, if I hadn’t had that, if I’d been left to my own devices of sitting in my house, and I don’t know if I’d have been on the same path.
19:26
Max Altschuler: At outreach, we had, like, this Accidental World’s best sales experiment, because we were this weird hybrid where we had maybe half at this point, we maybe had, I’d say 50 to 70 reps and half were remote and half were in Seattle. It was very clear cut. The half that were in Seattle perform better on the whole then the half hour remote, and you just had this kind of one energy, the buzz of the room you get in.
19:56
Max Altschuler: Everybody’s there to learning from each other that just it’s magnetic. You just happen to have lunch with the person who just close the deal. Oh, like, I noticed this really interesting thing about our competitor that I started using. And like that just ends up in small circles. And it was my job as marketing leader, who was also very sales savvy to like, go in and try to extrapolate all those little nuggets.
20:18
Max Altschuler: And I’d be like, hey, we’re ordering Thai food in this conference room. Com if you want to share, like recent wins and losses and competitor stuff. And that might have been the thing of the week where we’re like talking through, you know, our competitive decks or the next week it was just like, hey, here’s the product positioning on this new thing.
20:33
Max Altschuler: That’s coming out. But like to be able to get in the room with the salespeople, there was, you know, no substitution for that. But then you have people who thrive in other environments. I agree, I think it’s a nuanced conversation. I think it’s interesting, as we have a lot of our listeners who are RFPs, we get feedback from them.
20:50
Max Altschuler: GTM leaders, they always say, oh yeah, when I’m like, retired from a CRM, they want to move into an operating partner role. And I look at you, I know, but I like you’re a road warrior still to this day. From moving from Sierra to Pando to an operating partner at Battery, I’d say you’re on the road just as much, if not more so.
21:09
Max Altschuler: You know, I’ve had this conversation with many people, and I look at my team and I’m just like, this doesn’t. This feels nothing. This is that cushy like this is hard work. What has been the, I guess, like, differences between the two roles and what’s the what’s the day to day of an operating partner look like?
21:23
Bill Binch: We could do a whole episode on that. So I’ll try. I’ll try and keep this succinct. I’ve actually thought about doing my own personal episode on this topic, because I get hit up on it a lot.
21:33
Max Altschuler: Let’s do it. Let’s go.
21:34
Bill Binch: Do it. I get a lot of a lot of people. That role me and say like, hey, what’s the transition like? And there’s a couple of distinct things you need to think about, I think. So there’s a lot of operators in different functions sales, marketing, she asks that think about going into some type of operating partner role. I’ll answer this more from a sales perspective because it’s it’s my view.
21:56
Bill Binch: The first thing that I noticed was I don’t have a scorecard. I don’t have, a set of dashboard metrics that measure me every week, month or quarter.
22:06
Max Altschuler: Pros and cons to that, right?
22:08
Bill Binch: Like so I thought I was just going to get to is I spent 29 years on quota or as I say, 116 quarters of my life. Yeah. And I’m used to it. And I like it, you know, don’t like when I’m not making quota. But I also know where I stand and I know what I have to do.
22:26
Bill Binch: And coming into an organization where you make investments that they could be five, seven, ten years out before there’s an outcome that’s a different type of thing. So you have to find another set of metrics to measure that you’re having impact. Yeah. And it’s harder to do. So that’s the first thing that I think anybody coming from a sales background coming into operating partner will will notice.
22:47
Bill Binch: And then secondly is I think a lot of people think when you come into this role, you’re putting on the slippers and the gold watch and you’re kind of like, this is my exit plan. Like you said, I work wall to wall, you know, like I was. And going to San Francisco last tonight. I was in London last week.
23:01
Bill Binch: I was in Boston the week before that. I’m still on the road. I’m out in front of our companies that we invest in. I’m doing workshops. I’m running programs with them. It’s work. It’s work. And the cool thing, on the pro side of this type of role is the mental stimulation is pretty amazing because I could have a 9 a.m. meeting with a $1 million, company hang up that one in it at 930 at 930, 10:00.
23:24
Bill Binch: Have a call with $100 million company. And the challenges that they face, the things that they have to look at, the the stages of where they’re at, the problems that they’re dealing with are vastly different. And I have to slot myself into that mindset of, okay, I got to make the change and it’s got to be instantaneous.
23:40
Max Altschuler: That diversity of mind shares one of my favorite things to just being able to talk to this type of company with this problem one minute and then completely separate thing the next minute. It’s like, wow, these challenges are amazing. And then, you know, my brain as like an operator addicted to scale and building infrastructure around things is like, okay, cool.
23:58
Max Altschuler: Like I’ll go work with Manny. It paid and I’ll have a breakthrough once I’m like, go to marketing. And I’m like, this is great. What if you did this? What do you like? How does this work in like, which companies can I now take this and like go to and say like, hey, we found something here. Let’s replicate this at a couple of other portfolio companies because it’s working.
24:16
Max Altschuler: And then you get to do that and it’s like, this is so fun. I’d imagine, you know, the pros and cons on that. You know, you have quota. Maybe there’s a handful of heroes that are out there that have like I’ve had, you know, 116 quarters of quota. I’m done with the pressure. Like the pressure is too high.
24:31
Max Altschuler: Those numbers. You also get that kind of operational discipline, that rigor. Like, you know, you know what you have to go for there. So you’re saying you miss it. But do you feel other areas of sort of like a quota as an operating partner do like do you feel like there are certain things you have to get done or, you know, you’re out of a job, like, what are the what are the things that you get graded on?
24:50
Bill Binch: I do, I do feel pressure. Like I said to you earlier, I have one switch, I have a dimmer. Yeah I’m on. So first of all the job is one that finds you. Right? You’re probably not going to be 25 years old and get called to be an operating partner because you don’t have a lot of operating part of that equation under your belt.
25:09
Bill Binch: And so the the 29 years and now I’ve been here four years plus four years of observations. And that’s what you just said is those observations. So when I’m giving advice or counsel or a suggestion or even a push, a lot of times phrase it as, look, my experience tells me or my observation, because the great thing about working across a portfolio versus an operators and operator, every day you’re in your company across a portfolio, you’re getting all these different inputs.
25:38
Bill Binch: And like you said, you’re picking up on the patterns and saying, oh, this worked over here. Let me apply it, see if it applies over here. So that’s really what your mission becomes. And so for me, how I think about measuring myself, like you said, I can’t think about like waiting for an outcome of the company. What I can think about is the qualitative element that when I hang up the phone, when I hang up the zoom, or when I leave the building, did somebody say or email me and say, Bill, that was so helpful.
26:07
Bill Binch: It helped us go from A to B or from, you know, M to Z or whatever it is, and advancing our thought process around something. And so I really try to look for that qualitative feedback. And I see I keep it because number one, I’m a human being. And it feels good to know that you’re helping somebody. And then number two, so that I can share across my firm that, you know, here’s a couple of patterns that are existing like like this role has some seasonality things.
26:31
Bill Binch: As you would imagine, in Q4 of the calendar year, you get a lot of calls for, hey, we’re building next year’s plan. Could you take a look at the plan? Could you give us a trusted set of eyes and ears? We’re building car plants, right? Like that’s a Q4 thing that happens in a lot of companies. And so when I do something repetitively, I can number one, box it up to make it more of a workshop type of thing for a future company.
26:52
Bill Binch: And then number two, I’ll try and go get some. Like I said, like you almost call customer case studies of being able to come back and show both another perspective investment, how we’ve helped show a current investment that hasn’t worked with me, how I can help and then importantly, show battery. The educate the firm that I work for that here, the different things that I do inside of our organizations.
27:15
Bill Binch: Because remember, a lot of those folks are coming from the investment side and they haven’t been an operator. So I need to educate them as well. So there’s really three concessions there the prospective investments, the portfolio and then the battery internal.
27:27
Max Altschuler: So would it be fair to say that like kind of your job one a high priority is helping existing portfolio companies. And then one B would be like diligence ING slash helping when new portfolio. You know that’s the that’s the surface area of the job. You’re spending most of the time helping when you’re diligence ING new companies. Are they coming to you for help with companies across the board, every vertical, every B jobs to be done?
27:57
Max Altschuler: Or is it mostly GTM tech?
27:59
Bill Binch: I’d think about it slightly different. I think about what I’m being asked to do before the check is written. If it’s thesis development, it’s probably go to market. Really tech, right? So I’m not coming to me for industrial supply chain stuff. That’s not my wheelhouse. They might come to me to help break into the account. You know, they’re knocking on the door of the founder, the CEO.
28:17
Bill Binch: They’re not getting anywhere. And they want to use an operational angle to go knock on the door and show that we.
28:23
Max Altschuler: Could value add value.
28:24
Bill Binch: Yeah. That I get used on, a lot the due diligence, once they are in the deal to come in. Hey, Bill, would you help us evaluate the tech, the Tam and the team would just listen to the the company and where they’re at and get some cues of where we think we could take them to that area.
28:42
Bill Binch: I get you a lot on. And then pure differentiation sometimes like again, they’re in the deal cycle already and they want to bring out the battery Portfolio services group, which is talent, which is biz dev which is operators. We have some data scientists behind us and be able to show where we could help them. So there’s a number of different angles of of how I think about myself being used before the check is due.
29:06
Max Altschuler: Joy that I like.
29:08
Bill Binch: It’s it’s the closest thing to selling.
29:09
Max Altschuler: I was going to say. Yeah.
29:10
Bill Binch: So like I said like hundred and 16 quarters on life. You know, I tap vein everyone. So our, portfolio services is really fun. And like we just talked about like mentally enriching because it’s it’s definitely stimulating me to to move quick.
29:23
Max Altschuler: And but helping close deal is helping.
29:25
Bill Binch: Close the deal bring you back. Yeah.
29:26
Max Altschuler: That’s awesome I’ve seen you I think you’ve done and led the thesis on one GTM tech deals unify. Yeah. Has it been more? That’s the one. There’s no.
29:35
Bill Binch: More.
29:36
Max Altschuler: There’s more. Okay.
29:37
Bill Binch: One mind was.
29:38
Max Altschuler: One.
29:38
Bill Binch: By one. Okay. We just announced about a month ago, unify. And then, I wasn’t part of Barry when they made the investment and gong, but I now work with the gong team to do so. It’s natural. Right? Those are the the GTM related technologies inside of the battery portfolio. So it’s not surprising that I’m going to get close to the of course.
29:58
Max Altschuler: Our LP base spans from individual operators to institutional allocators, and AngelList has been instrumental and supporting all of them. They handle everything from investor onboarding and accreditation to distribution and tax documentation, creating a seamless experience across geographies and fund types. Plus, all of this is available on a single modern platform for an LP base like ours, with over 300 C-suite and VP level operators, this kind of white glove service and seamless workflows is so important, also instrumental, that we support our institutional LPs, and we’re fortunate to work with an angels is able to do so every step of the way.
30:33
Max Altschuler: If you’re looking for a platform that can support any type of LP investing in your fund. Learn more atangels.com/gtm fund my question that we get asked a lot. Everybody wants to know we don’t do a lot of GTM tech investing. What are your thoughts on investing in GTM tech? What did you see in those deals? Do you feel and this is a little bit how I feel.
30:56
Max Altschuler: It’s what’s one of the reasons. There’s multiple reasons why we don’t do a lot of GTM tech, a lot of it’s headwinds and an outcome based. But, you know, it’s almost when you’re too close to it, it’s tougher to be starry eyed. You’re a little bit naturally more like, oh, I’ve seen this story before, or I know why this won’t work type thing versus when you’re a little bit further away from it.
31:16
Max Altschuler: He may have it a little bit more easy time believing that this could be this could work. This could can happen.
31:22
Bill Binch: Look, I, I did 2008 to 2017 at Marcato, and there was a reason I didn’t go right back into go to market. Tech is I watched lightning strike once and in that space it’s it’s hard and we can leverage all the connections. Know who the buyer that I’m selling to is. It’s hard. So I just did didn’t I didn’t I went to Pando.
31:42
Bill Binch: Right. That played a buyer selling to the product leader, not the marketer. Yeah. And I wanted that number one just to continue my, you know, professional growth. But number two is I thought that was an underserved market. And I thought that that was going to be easier to differentiate a product like Pando and go to sell and be successful.
32:01
Max Altschuler: I mean, I’m I’m sure batteries sees more GTM tech deals. Do they bring them? Do you do you feel like they’re deals in that space that you want to do right now? Do you feel like that’s an area of of investment or. Absolutely.
32:12
Bill Binch: Like we’re always paying attention to it. I mean, if you go back to batteries history, there’s marcato. There is exact target that we did. There’s a bunch of, you know, sales and marketing related software companies that we’ve been in. So we’re always looking at that space. But as you know, the funnel is just like a sales funnel.
32:31
Bill Binch: You know, you have to start wide and move yourself down through the process to find something that you really are convicted about that can go win. And so it’s been harder to find those that we feel that level of conviction. And so I don’t I don’t know when the gong investment was done 2016 or 2017. The ones you just mentioned Unify in One mind were both on in 2025.
32:53
Bill Binch: So it’s like a six, seven, eight year gap. Yeah. From the last one to today.
32:57
Max Altschuler: Yeah. Battery is doing what series A’s to pre-IPO essentially.
33:03
Bill Binch: Yeah, mostly. Mostly series A but as you know, the the definition of what that is. Yeah.
33:08
Max Altschuler: It’s changed over change changed since 2017. But that gong investment should do pretty well for them. Yeah. How are you involved in ICI in general then? Is it every deal that they pull you in on?
33:21
Bill Binch: No, no. Okay. Just the ones that, in the pre-check where we talked about where probably from the due diligence perspective, I’m engaged. If it’s just using to help break in the door, I may or may not ride along again. You know, everybody has time, priorities. And we talked about that. The main part of my job is with the portfolio.
33:41
Bill Binch: Yeah. And so that I see work if that can get pretty pretty deep. And so is that the best, you know, usage of my time? Probably not. So I don’t spend a lot of time there. Yeah.
33:51
Max Altschuler: Let’s move to then supporting the portfolio companies. So you have some tried and true kind of methodologies in your career as a CRO. So if you were to go into a company, you know, 30, 60, 90 type thing or first six months, like, what are you rolling out and then how do you look at that and say, all right, well, I’m not the CRO these companies, but I want to make sure that they have the operational rigor they need to succeed.
34:16
Max Altschuler: What are the things you’re you’re saying these are the must haves. These are the must have metrics. You must have dashboards.
34:23
Bill Binch: There’s a few things, quite a few things. And I’ll preface it with interestingly, before I moved out of operating to this role as an operating partner, my former CEO Phil Fernandez from Marcato asked me, are you really sure you want to do this? And I was like, pretty sure, I think, I think I’m pretty excited by this idea.
34:44
Bill Binch: And he was like, I’m just saying, because you’re a really, really skilled operator. And he said, and Bill is an operator, your hand is on the wheel. You’re driving. He said, in this role, you’re a passenger and you might even be a backseat passenger. And are you ready for that again? I was like, well, I think so. And I got to say, it’s it’s hard letting go of the wheel because you just asked like, I’m not the zero, so I can come in and I can coach, I can guide, I can suggest, I can control, I could try and bribe you, but I can’t make you.
35:15
Bill Binch: Yeah. And that’s the, the hard thing is sometimes you see things that are just so obvious. Then notarization is just chosen not to do or they just disagree with you and you know, they are the operators of the company, so they get to make that call.
35:28
Max Altschuler: Is there a battery mandate as an investor that like, hey, these are the metrics we need to see on a rolling basis. Is that based on the company’s.
35:36
Bill Binch: Performance I’ve created? You know, I post a lot of blogs on this type of stuff. I’ve posted some things like I think like the five quarter look back and a board deck is the most important slide. So take any key metric you track are and are cash number of hundred, K, d or whatever it is and track like your last four quarters plus the current quarter.
35:54
Bill Binch: And that way that the the investors, the team, anybody is participating and reading that deck can see a year over year basis. Plus see the trend as opposed to the worst thing in the world is when you’re in a board meeting and sounds like, well, wait, what do we do two quarters ago? And someone’s like pulling up files that slide.
36:10
Bill Binch: I think it’s critical. So it’s not mandated. But typically when operators see it, they get the value of it. Right away they go. That’s a good slide. Let’s just put that in. So I think that’s a key slide to have inside of a board deck, which as we know board decks tend to be backward looking. Yeah. There are there are a review of the period that just happened.
36:27
Bill Binch: So I think that’s really good for that. Again, nothing’s mandated. But I do try to come in and instill a couple of key things. A discipline that I used to drive my sales teams crazy on was when you sit down and have a forecast with me, it could be a team forecast, it could be a one on one.
36:44
Bill Binch: It starts with the words my quota is. And the reason is, is. I saw that sales reps, sales manager, sales reps were crafty and a lot of them will take the easy path if that easy path is available. And I don’t want the easy path, I want the path that lets me, you know, govern and administer our business in a way that I can be predictable and repeatable.
37:07
Bill Binch: And so the importance of saying my quota is, is when you build a plan for next year, it’s built against the quota, not against a forecast. And a lot of salespeople will come in and say like, well, my forecast is as the first thing as like, no, no, no, no, no, no. Your forecast could be 50% of quota.
37:22
Bill Binch: So I always have him start with kind of a core set of things. Number one, my quota is my forecast is my closed. One is I know a lot of information at that moment. I know that our quotas a million box your forecast is 900. So there’s 100 K gap and then your close one is 200. Okay. Well depending where we are in the quarter that 200 to 900 gap might not be scary.
37:46
Bill Binch: But it could be scary for a couple of weeks away. You’ve got a lot to do. And it’s even scary to go to the 200 to the quota level. And so I always want to understand that inside of a business and I try to teach anybody I work with that don’t allow your team to talk about forecasts, because people start thinking like, that’s okay to hit forecast, which is the first piece we do want everybody to hit forecast, but more importantly, we’re all paid a sales leaders to hit quota.
38:11
Bill Binch: Yeah. So that’s a super critical just philosophy that I try to embed inside of the organizations. There’s another one that I’m surprised more companies don’t track this. It’s it’s fairly simple to track, but every company comes up with a and by the way the cadence for this one is specific. It’s every month any any earlier or it’s too frequent and it’s noisy.
38:33
Bill Binch: And any longer it’s too slow for you to make the changes that you need to make. So monthly is the perfect cadence on this one. But it it’s three metrics. It’s what is the company plan for the period and the periods a month. So what is the company plan. Second metric. What is the amount of plan and quota I was supposed to deploy, which should not be the same as your company plan.
38:58
Bill Binch: If your company plans a million bucks, you should have deployed some quota amount over the million dollars million to or something like that. So I have $1 million plan for this period, and I have a 1.2 plan quota deployed. And then the third metric should be obvious. What’s the actual quota deployed. And when I get called a lot, Max, I’ll get called with this statement along the lines of we’re missing our numbers.
39:22
Bill Binch: I don’t think we have enough pipeline. And I’ll be like, okay, let’s go dive in. That very well. Could be it. And one of the first things I go and inspect is what’s the for million bucks. What’s your plan? Quota deployed 1.2. What’s the actual .2. 700 I go okay, you’re right. We probably don’t have enough pipeline because you have not a you don’t have enough raps generating what should be the pipeline.
39:41
Bill Binch: But more importantly, you’re expecting all of those raps do 125% of their number for the company, 200% of plan. Did you think about that look like, whoa, I didn’t see that. So those three metrics, I think, should be something that every organization bought or not tracks on a monthly basis in their EA staff type of thing. And then I know you guys did some research and pulled out a few of my other ones I have.
40:03
Bill Binch: The Mojo metric is kind of my.
40:05
Max Altschuler: What’s.
40:05
Bill Binch: That, the Mojo metrics. This is really like the health of are you growing? What I used to look at in this metric, I used to look at daily funny story was my wife one time woke up in the morning and like I was in bed, like on my phone, she goes, what are you looking at? And I go, oh, the mojo mojo metric maybe.
40:24
Bill Binch: And but my CEO, same thing I had up on my laptop. One day. He walked by and he’s like, what is that? And like, it’s one of those visual metrics that it immediately grabs you. And I was like, oh, that’s the Mojo metric. And he was like, we need to look at that weekly. Or he actually he saw that I looked at daily, but he was like, we need to look at that.
40:40
Bill Binch: And I was like, daily will make you jump off of a bridge, right? Because what it outputs is not always great anyways. What it outputs is that there’s kind of six core pieces that all create one number. There’s the three things that add to your pipeline a new deal. Yesterday we didn’t have this deal in there. Today we have a new 100 K.
40:57
Bill Binch: That’s a net new ad. There’s an expansion. Yesterday the deal was 50 K. Now it’s 100 K. That went up by 50 K. And then there’s a pull forward. It was in a future period and we pulled it for those are the three things there in the plus column. Then there’s the negative column. The opposite of those. Right.
41:14
Bill Binch: The deal was in the pipe. It got killed in the zero today. The deal shrunk. It was 50 K yesterday. It’s 25 K now or the deal pushed to a future period. I look at that on a daily basis. There’s another seventh metric in there of closed one. You can look at that and pull that out. Like what we closed during that day.
41:31
Bill Binch: But I run that metric at 12:01 a.m. every night. And that way I’d wake up in the morning, I could go and see what was my net gain or net deficit for the day. And literally this is what would happen is if I woke up on a Monday and saw that the Friday was minus hundred K, Tuesday wake up -150 K, Wednesday wake up -200 K.
41:52
Bill Binch: I’m calling on cars. Yeah, calling the CMO and I’m calling my team. And I’m saying, guys, we just lost a half a million bucks pipe in the last three days. What’s going on like? Because it’s net that it says it’s that’s you’re losing more than you’re gaining bad move. And so most companies are pretty savvy today to say, like, I know I need to be adding X amount of pipeline per day to hit my future numbers and to, you know, fueled, future quarters pipeline.
42:18
Bill Binch: So the Mojo metric I was was really good daily type of indicator. So those are a few things that I don’t assess. But when I go in, as long as the company is mature enough to be able to instrument those things, most people get those. I mean, the sales layer in there like five quarter look back done, you know, mojo metric.
42:34
Bill Binch: Yeah. Let me have it. Like paying attention to how much quota I actually deployed on the street. Yes. Let’s do it. So those are a couple high level ones I like.
42:41
Max Altschuler: And those are great because you’re investing in kind of a and beyond. So these are more mature ish companies. So are you are you working with the CRO, the CEO or both? How do you decide who you work with when you work with?
42:55
Bill Binch: Wonderful question. It goes back to the discussion of operators that want to become operating partners. When I came into this role, I was like, okay, operating partner, go to market. Now, realistically, my major is sales, right? Maybe a minor in CSS. And then I’m savvy in marketing, but I would sell that kind of as go to market because I the for I had the fortune of working for a marketing software company for ten years.
43:16
Bill Binch: So I think I know a little bit more than the average bear, that person. So I came in and you’d think right there, okay, you’re going to work with zero CMO, CC0. And that’s true. I do. But interestingly, I work with a lot of CEOs. Two reasons. Number one, the earlier stage, a lot of them come from a technical background, so they don’t have the distribution and sales chops.
43:39
Bill Binch: And so from that perspective, you know the old adage in the land of the blind, the one eyed man is king. Yep. That is me. That’s this guy. I am the one eyed man there. So that’s number one. And number two, a lot of times they’re still doing founder CEO. So they are the head of sales. So any help they can get in that area is beneficial.
43:58
Bill Binch: So I do spend a good amount of time with that side of it.
44:02
Max Altschuler: Okay. Another question for you. A little bit of, a leap from there, but why battery? Where they an investor in Pando.
44:09
Bill Binch: They were my last year.
44:10
Max Altschuler: So you got. So you got to build a relationship with them through that. So I think if other people are looking to take the leap into an operating partner role, probably best thing to do is work with a fund that you’ve already worked with in some capacity. I assume you built a rapport with, say, trust all that and then go from there.
44:29
Max Altschuler: Did you have other funds you were weighing, or was it just this made total sense throughout my career, they’ve been there, I know them.
44:36
Bill Binch: Sure. The full story was I came out of Pando and took some time just to figure out what I was going to do. I did not have the aspiration to be a CEO. I just didn’t want to go be the freshman at that stage in my career. Yet being a CRO is really hard, and so I needed a little time to get the energy back up.
44:58
Bill Binch: And while I was taking that time, I started doing some consulting work and started enjoying, like we talked about the this different stimulation of of things that are out there around that time. Battery who had invested in my last two companies, both Marcato and Pando, knocked on the door and said, we’d love to be your SDR. We’d love to have you maybe do some consulting work in some of our companies.
45:20
Bill Binch: And so I started doing that. Now what I didn’t know was that they were actually auditioning. Yeah. They had never done this role of an operating partner before, and they’d started thinking about it and they thought, well, let’s go get some data points. But for me, it was just doing some lightweight consulting. So I was doing my own thing, and I was talking with the battery companies and it was going really well, and I’m going to make the leap and say that the feedback they got from the companies was probably pretty positive.
45:44
Max Altschuler: Probably.
45:45
Bill Binch: Because battery came back and knocked on the door at the same time. It did ironically take I wasn’t chasing that as a job I was seriously considering. Do I do that like the bill bench LLC thing? I would have had a cooler name than that. Yeah. But I was saying like.
45:57
Max Altschuler: Do Mojo LLC.
45:58
Bill Binch: Mojo LLC.
46:03
Bill Binch: Do something like that and just be my own boss. But again, going back 29 years, I like being part of a team. I really enjoy that element. And so the that aspect of battery was, was really appealing. There were a couple of other venture firms that started sniffing around. Like I said, these these jobs do kind of find you, I know you know, Brett Cleaner, and I told him this when I went to there was like, geez, like my wife’s looking at me and she’s going like, you’re not as, like, testy as you used to be at the end of the quarter and stuff like that.
46:31
Bill Binch: It’s like, why don’t you do this sooner? And he’s like, that’s what my wife said. He’s like, why don’t you jump into VC earlier? And it’s like, operating is hard, hard work. VC is just a different set of pressures that that you’re under because you’re always trying to create obviously LP share value and you’re trying to create success for the companies you’re working with.
46:49
Bill Binch: And I like I own that, I own that. So like you said, like like I might not be on a quota from a month or 40 perspective, but like, I can be stressed out, like I get ready for meetings like I used to, like I get myself into the zone and I go into it just like it’s a sales call, like prepped and ready to try and differentiate.
47:05
Bill Binch: And I take a tremendous amount of pride at what I do. I have a bench family value.
47:10
Max Altschuler: Yeah.
47:11
Bill Binch: I’ve been really, really good at what you do, and I’m trying to change, like really teach and train my, my boys who are 12 and nine, that I don’t care if you’re a barista, if you’re a fireman, or if you’re a Wall Street titan. Be awesome at whatever you chose to do. So I take that, you know, very seriously myself.
47:29
Max Altschuler: And you’re a long line of lineage of, software, sales tech, said junior.
47:35
Bill Binch: I’m a junior, right?
47:36
Max Altschuler: Yeah. So Bill senior was Siebel. No.
47:39
Bill Binch: Oracle close with that team. Oracle. Oracle. Oracle business objects, Arbor Hyperion.
47:45
Max Altschuler: And then you were you started Oracle I did all right. That’s amazing. Last thing to wrap us up. If you were to give advice to people in the, let’s call it VP Sales crock team. See right now that want to kind of eventually move into this world. What would your advice be.
48:04
Bill Binch: So first you asked before if someone wants to make the leap, a couple things that they should do. Certainly if you’re working for a venture or piggyback company, get to know those teams. Build that relationship. Because obviously, like I’m a product of having done that. And that’s clearly the ways that a venture firm gets to know you.
48:21
Bill Binch: So that’s certainly, I think, something to do, industry events where there are other venture folks. And don’t be snobby about it. Like just because the person is not the general partner or whatever, that person that’s lower level, they’re going to be the general partner. So build those relationships, especially if you’re early in your career and you’re thinking like, I’ve got 1 or 2 more operating gigs before I go look to do that.
48:41
Bill Binch: That’s probably five, ten years at least. And so like that person that today might be a little more junior might be senior back then. So find your way to, you know, let’s just this is just nurturing. Yeah. Just in a different way. Nurturing for your career. You’re the product in this one. But, you know, a couple of other things that I think about is being really precise.
49:05
Bill Binch: Like when I meet with companies or sales leaders or marketing leaders, and I ask them about their business and it’s like, hey, what’s your average sales cycle? And they’re like, you know, it’s between like 60 and 120 days. That’s not precise. That’s a range. Precise is 72 days. And I connect with those people really quickly because that’s someone that is instrumenting their business the right way.
49:25
Bill Binch: What’s your average sale price? Well, Bill R blended average sale price is 38 K. But we have three segments. We have small mid and enterprise. So let me break it down for you on each one. But the blended history okay. That’s someone that knows their business. Know your business. Like I like I think you and I talked a little about a few of the things that like, like that I don’t like seeing inside of the companies is, precision is one.
49:50
Bill Binch: The opposite of that is imprecision is some somebody that’s not looking at their business. Marketers, one thing that I see that they sometimes struggle with is they come to the meeting and over the board meeting and overwhelm with data, overwhelm with data. And a lot of the boards don’t have the skills to be able to parse it apart, where sales, we all understand and speak sales really well so we can break down sales and pipeline pretty well.
50:17
Bill Binch: But marketing comes with Mql and SQL, all these things and it just it it breaks thing for marketers. My suggestion is come in and talk about how much pipeline you created against a goal of how much pipeline you’re supposed to create. And it’s shocking to me, Max, about how, of how few CMO is walk in and say, I actually had a goal.
50:42
Bill Binch: They all talk about what they did, but they don’t talk about what I was supposed to do. And if you don’t have that goal, you’re totally missing something. And so the best sales and marketing teams I see work together, have this dance where it doesn’t matter what order they present in. But typically at sales, something like this marketing talks about we created more than enough.
51:03
Bill Binch: Enough or not enough pipeline for the sales team to make their number. And then the sales team talks about we convert it at a better than normal rate, the normal rate or a below normal rate. That message shows pure alignment between a sales and marketing leader, because it’s not just the poor sales guy or gal sitting out there getting skewered for two hours out of the three hour board meeting, it’s the team talking about like what worked and what didn’t work.
51:28
Bill Binch: And I think that that’s a really elegant message that I want listeners to hear is everybody’s on the clock like developers, even today, developers are getting much more, I guess, metrics on throughput and output of code of like all the different stages of the funnel of the development cycle of what they need to be measured on, be the use of kind of just be like like the developers sometimes are thought of as like these magic artisans over there.
51:57
Bill Binch: And it’s like, we can’t mess with that team. And it’s like, well, no, like that team should have a measurement just like any other functional team does as well. So I just look for equality on that. I look for teams that, that, that look across the whole organization and say, like every quarter we’re going to be advancing something.
52:13
Max Altschuler: Well, thank you so much for doing this. This is a great year.
52:16
Bill Binch: That was great to do it.
52:17
Max Altschuler: That was another fantastic episode of the VC series. On the GTM now podcast. Head over to Apple, Spotify or YouTube and give us a like and subscribe and we’ll see you on the next one.
