The State of Sales Enablement

Tackling Hypergrowth As A CRO With Michael Savanis

by Felix Krueger

Colombia, Argentina, Venezuela, USA, Malaysia, Indonesia, China, Great Britain, France...

This rather long list of countries is not the line-up of the Tokyo Olympics but a selection of countries our guest in today's episode has worked at. We'll discuss the lessons he has learned along the way and how he finds the balance between strategic focus and short term goals during the hyper-growth phase his business is currently experiencing. In this episode, we speak to JobAdder's Chief Revenue Officer, Michael Savanis.

These are some of the questions we're discussing:

  • What does JobAdder do? What's the kind of transition period you're going through at the moment?
  • In which ways has the pandemic impacted your company? Were there any issues that you guys needed to deal with?
  • Within your role, what are the sort of key challenges you face? What would any CRO face in a growth journey that is similar to what Joe Biden is going through right now?
  • I can imagine you generate an immense amount of experience across the different markets, and as you grow, you will figure out things that work well which other markets might be benefiting from. So how do you facilitate that knowledge transfer?
  • In terms of the way you build a culture, which is obviously also a big part of growth journey and making sure that the culture builds that is performance focused and reflects the values of the company. How do you go about doing that remotely?
  • In terms of your team's responsibility, you obviously manage all customer facing teams within JobAdder and the amount of intelligence that you gather, it must be incredible, right? Like the market intelligence and the insights that you generate. How do you go about capturing that? And not only use it for the advantage of the teams that you manage, but also to socialise that across senior management to utilise that intelligence, that market intelligence to make strategic decisions for the company?
  • In terms of the way you make strategic decisions, have you seen that there's a lot of nuance required between the different regions or is the use case quite similar and it's just all about benching the scale?
  • And in terms of the balance between your short term goals and long-term strategic goals, how do you handle that? I can imagine in a CRO role, there's a lot of revenue pressure, you know, like at the end of the day, you need to bring in the money. But at the same time, you're trying to be strategic, build something long-term and build a solid base for the company to flourish on in the future. So how do you balance those two competing priorities?
  • From a team management point of view, I guess that's easy to communicate, but from your senior management peers, like, how do you manage that? Has everybody bought in to that mentality early on? Or did you, did you have to do some convincing along the way?
  • Marketing from my understanding doesn't sit in your remit. How do you approach that partnership with marketing?
  • What role does technology play in the organisation? And what's kind of core to your tech stack from your point of view?
  • Talk us through how you manage the communication across your teams.
  • For those listeners who are in the senior sales roles and about to take the next step from, let's say, senior sales VP into a CRO role what is your advice to prepare them for that kind of role? What are the kinds of things that they need to establish for themselves to set themselves up for success?
  • What would your advice be to really identify top talent for department heads if somebody is moving into a CRO role and is tasked to fill those roles?

Here are some of the resources referenced in this episode.

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Coaching, CRM, Enablement Tech, Interview, Leadership, Podcast, Sales Process, The State of Sales Enablement, Video

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