Ep # 173: Qualification as Risk Management: The Discipline Behind Predictable Pipeline ft. Colin Wood (VP, US Sales, SG Analytics)

Colin Wood 00:05 What I would love would be to see some more real-time guidance during calls without it being distracting. I'd love to see something that would provide that real-time guidance during a call. Intro 00:23 Welcome to Across the Funnel, where we dig into concrete Go-To-Market moves across sales, customer success, and account management so you can build revenue that lasts. Brought to you by Hyperengage and Dextego. Ioanna Onasi 00:40 Colin, thanks so much for joining Across the Funnel. Really a pleasure to have you. Colin Wood 00:43 Thanks for having me. Ioanna Onasi 00:45 Very excited to learn more about you and your career in sales. I know we have a lot to discuss, so why don't we start by learning more about your background? So tell me, you have worked in various companies and you've been for almost two years now in your latest role at SG Analytics. Walk me through the path. Are you from these people that knew they wanted to get in sales or randomly ended up in a sales role and stuck with it? Colin Wood 01:13 Yeah, absolutely. You're correct in that. I initially started out my career in financial services as an analyst in analytics. So I was still working with data analytics for a company called The Bank of New York Mellon out of college. I learned very quickly that I'm a people person, and a back office position, although with a great company, was not for me. I saw the salespeople coming in and out of the office, bringing high-profile clients in and out of the office. I knew right away, that's got to be me. That's where I need to be. Very early on, I started taking steps to become client-facing. After I left BNY Mellon years ago, I ended up working in financial services still for basically a private capital, private markets, capital markets firm in Arizona called Cole Capital, a real estate investment trust. But it was my foot in the door into becoming client-facing as a relationship manager and account manager. Still not where I knew I wanted to be exactly, but heading in the right direction. I was there for about four years, three years, four years, and they went through a big acquisition. I'm originally from the East Coast, from the Boston area, and I wanted to ultimately get back to the East Coast and be back close to family. So when they were acquired by a competitor of theirs out of New York, I took that opportunity to move back to the East Coast and worked at a couple of different financial services firms. Eventually after leaving Cole Capital, I was a wholesaler for a short time for a mutual fund and started working with Newfound Research, which was kind of a fintech asset manager research firm. That was my first true carrying a bag, a quota, initially selling into firms like UBS, Morgan Stanley, Merrill Lynch. We had a proprietary algorithm or platform that helped traders buy and sell. It was a signal type of platform that provided signals when to get in and get out of certain sectors in the market. That was the first step toward tech we're in today, and I worked there for four years. Then around 2015, the financial market started to change. Things were moving away from mutual funds and toward low-cost ETFs, and that really changed things from a seller's perspective. So I ended up working with a company called Concentric, which was a predictive analytics company, software, SaaS-based in Cambridge. We did what-if scenario analysis, and it was a great company. I'd probably still be there today if it weren't for COVID. You've seen this movie before, 2019, 2020. Firms couldn't stay above water, and unfortunately, Concentric ran out of funding. I feel like they were a little bit ahead of their time. That led me to Pecan AI, which is another startup. They were based out of Tel Aviv. We did customer journey analytics, demand forecasting, marketing mix modeling. I was an enterprise account executive for them, growing business in the U.S., and things were good there. I had a couple of years with them. There were some internal challenges, which is what ultimately led me to LTIMindtree, much larger firm. I had been with a couple of startups and really liked working with the smaller organizations. But I figured I'll give another large organization a shot now that I'm in a client-facing role. So I was with LTIMindtree. They're based out of India, 100,000 employees. I learned very quickly that I still preferred those smaller, more scrappy, agile type of companies where you're not just a number, you have a greater impact on bottom line. It's much more rewarding for me anyway. For others, working for a big company, the stability, the brand recognition, that's great. But for me, I like rolling up my sleeves and having to be scrappy and gritty. So after a short time with LTIMindtree, I was recruited over to SG Analytics, where I am today. I have gone from financial services to software products in the AI/ML space to products and services now, and kind of selling as a whole, not just a solution, but a transformation, an outcome with a product and services. That's the direction that I see things going, and that's the place that I really like to be. Ioanna Onasi 06:48 I couldn't agree more that that's where we're heading. It sounds like throughout your career, you have a lot of experience with complex sales. This change management, bringing new technologies, trying to persuade, this slow pace, big red tape to change. So tell me, throughout all these years, what you've seen as two, three key takeaways of what really makes or breaks that process. For someone who's now starting in this path of trying to sell something more transformative, what would be your tips? Colin Wood 07:28 Yeah, I think the complexity for me, it's the challenge of it. Having started out in capital markets and raising private capital, I fell in love early with the analytics of everything. Analytics is in everything. For me, the challenge of piecing it all together is the challenge of selling on value, providing something of value to clients. Building a team that can navigate that complexity is critical. It's so important. I realized a couple of things. One being enterprise buyers care very deeply about ROI and measurable outcomes. Also, the sales cycle is long because risk tolerance is low, which is a big challenge. And I think, like I said, the third thing being that really being able to build a team that can navigate around that complexity is very crucial. So now it's selling transformation, decision intelligence, AI agents, systems, data platforms. In the role that I'm in now, it lets me think holistically. How do we help enterprises rethink their data strategy? Not just with buying a tool, but really providing architecture and a story and an outcome. Showing that progression from product to solutions is really important. Ioanna Onasi 09:33 I also enjoy that part, the challenge and the strategy that's required, especially understanding the motivators of each of the stakeholders and trying to build the true business case because everybody has an opinion about what should be the priority, right? But there can only be so many. But to your point with the education part, that sales cycle can get too lengthy. Historically, how have you managed to create some urgency? What levers do you push? They're looking for the ROI, so is it more of a cost-benefit analysis? What have you done to show, hey, we need to start now? Colin Wood 10:11 Yeah, I think there are a couple of different approaches that work there. First, it's not necessarily creating the urgency, but more about discovering that urgency. Is there urgency there? Because if there's not, then that may not be the right opportunity for me to focus on right now. Throughout my pipeline and when I'm talking to prospects, I'm looking to discover that urgency to understand how quickly they're looking to get things done, and by also asking questions like, what happens if nothing happens? What happens if you do nothing? What's that opportunity cost? What does that look like? By uncovering those types of questions, it helps to paint that picture of urgency. If there's not urgency there, it's difficult to create. There are tactics you can use to create urgency. Fear of missing out. Your competitors are doing this. Everybody's talking about AI and machine learning agents and LLMs. But for the really good deals, the ones that I like to focus on, they're the prospects telling me. I'm getting them to open up to me about their situation and how much urgency is already there. Ioanna Onasi 11:53 Yeah. So it's all about good discovery and building that trust with them that they will actually share. Now, taking that, there's all sorts of profiles within a buyer committee, right? You have the more analytical ones, the more big picture ones. So how do you teach your team to prepare for these calls? Like the first ever discovery call they'll have, what is the best practice you teach them? Colin Wood 12:20 Yeah, this is one of my favorite challenges. There are things that I like to focus on. I hire sellers who have a track record of closing enterprise deals. I'm looking for those who have closed enterprise deals, but they may have come from enterprise software or infrastructure or other areas in the market, but they may not know analytics. My approach is we don't throw them into the technical weeds. I don't like to throw them into the technical weeds right away. I start with business context. I have them sit with me and walk them through three to four real customer examples, customers of mine that I've worked with, Disney, Subway, AT&T, talking about these real stories and real examples so that I can help them understand not the technology, but the business problem that's being solved and the executive who cares about solving it. Second, I like to pair them with a technical buddy, somebody that is usually from our delivery team, somebody that's very technical and can speak on a technical level with prospects who they can call without being defensive. I tell them, you're not expected to know the technical answer. You're expected to know when to bring in the expert and ask the right follow-up questions. That's the important thing. Thirdly, I have them sit in on discovery calls with me for the first month. Have them listen or have them take notes. I like to have them hear how I ask questions about ROI, about timeline, about constraints and champion dynamics. I'm modeling the behavior that I want them to replicate. Then by month two, or six weeks in or so, they're leading the discovery calls with me shadowing instead of them shadowing. By month three, they're autonomous. They're still learning technical resources, but the confidence is there. You're starting to see that come through, especially after they close their first deal. So it really helps show that I can be a multiplier, I can hire multipliers. I like to try and demonstrate systematic onboarding, not trials by fire. Ioanna Onasi 15:26 So what I really like about what you're saying is the buddy system, but I want to also ask the following question. Yesterday I was talking to a friend of mine who's a CRO, and his team is similar. They have solution engineers and enterprise AEs. He and others, some of our clients, have said the same challenge, that it's very hard to align them because obviously solution engineers know the product inside out, but they're not sellers. So sometimes you have, as a seller, to put extra effort in structuring an agenda that works and kind of controlling the time the engineer needs to speak, the time this person speaks. In a 30-minute window, it's very hard to do this and cover everything the prospect wants to hear and secure the next step. So that is a whole other skillset. It's more like maybe an operation thing rather than a sales skill per se. So how have you managed to see that? What's your preparation when it comes to the agenda? This is what we're going to talk as a team, and this is who will talk about what. Colin Wood 16:36 Yeah, that's a great question. I think it's very important. That first call is when you're looking to uncover their pain, their needs, their timeframe. Not necessarily budget, or even authority. But as an enterprise seller, you're doing more listening than talking. You're asking questions, very specific questions that are meant to probe for information and get them talking, to pull information out of them. The preparation that goes into those very first discovery calls, now with ChatGPT and tools, it's even easier to pull information that's out there, get a good intelligence report about that prospect, understand the type of work that they're doing, look at the postings, or have a tool pull a summary of postings that they're talking about, maybe positions that they're hiring for. That'll give you a good sense of the types of projects they're working on, and if there's any type of need. So a lot of preparation goes into that discovery call, laying out a clear agenda, giving a quick background of who we are as a company, but really not spending very much time. I don't even like to do too much screen sharing during that first call. I'm not typically doing any kind of demos or anything. It's just a conversation. It's an open conversation, asking questions of them, getting them to uncover, is there a need? Why did they decide to take this call? Having those specific pointed questions ready to go up front, and then leaving a couple of minutes at the end to schedule that next call if the call is going in that direction. It's okay to qualify out very early. You want to qualify out as quickly as possible. So if it's not a good opportunity, that's no problem. Put a pen in it, table it, come back to it later. But it's spending a lot of time preparing, asking a couple of very specific questions, getting them to talk, and then spending time actively listening and asking follow-up questions to guide them in that right direction to understand who else could we be speaking to. Have you ever gone through the software or solutions buying process yourself? That's a big one that I like to have my team ask. That opens up, is this something that they've ever even done? Are we talking to the right person? Do they know how to get other stakeholders involved in the conversation? So, that’s something that’s really important. And then the tools that we're using. I've made call recording and analysis pretty much a non-negotiable in my sales organization. Every rep knows their deals are being listened to, not as a gotcha moment, but as coaching opportunities. It's so important now that we have this technology available to be recording calls, transcribing them, using AI to flag specific moments. Did the rep ask about X? Did they ask about budget? Did they uncover a timeline? Like I said, I don't think budget's too big of a deal, but are they uncovering that urgency, or were they just talking? So the metadata that you're pulling out of those initial conversations, that's valuable information. So yeah, that’s something that I like to do in today’s market. Ioanna Onasi 21:00 So are you looking into also specific sales methodology? If they follow a specific process like that, or what do you see? Colin Wood 21:09 Yeah, absolutely. I've been a big follower of the MEDDIC sales qualification process. I don't think it's really a methodology, but more of a good qualification process. Understanding the metrics that are important to the person, the prospect. Which metrics do they own? Which KPIs do they own? Trying to maybe uncover that economic buyer early on. All of the points of MEDDIC, or how they decide to buy. What's their decision process like? Who needs to be involved? Who has that signing authority? None of it can move forward if you haven't identified that pain or initiative, that champion, and that economic buyer. That's what I like to call ICE. And ICE, obviously, is a big word, but Ioanna Onasi 21:14 Triggering Colin Wood 21:16 Yeah, a trigger in today's world. Without those three things, an opportunity is doomed for failure. It's destined for failure right from the get-go if you can't identify those three points. Ioanna Onasi 22:32 Earlier, you mentioned also looking to ChatGPT, for example, about the company. What are the things you look for there? Is it more like the 10-Ks and recent news, their products? What are the questions you ask it? Colin Wood 22:44 Yeah, so I think that goes into the call preparation. I'm using AI, ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, to scrape for postings, for job descriptions. We're looking at the company they work for and the hiring that they're doing, the types of roles they're hiring for. Are they hiring a bunch of data scientists or machine learning engineers or AI architects? What are the keywords they're using in those postings, the skills that they're looking for their candidates to have? Other Linkedin posts, going to Linkedin and seeing how many data scientists they already have, or machine learning engineers, or data engineers they already have. That helps put together a story and it helps to put together some intelligence that you can use to guide that discovery call. Also, it can guide you in terms of the right companies to go after, the target accounts that you should be going after, because there are many organizations out there that have lots of hiring going on. You can really leverage that to your advantage and really target those types of companies that are doing a lot of hiring, and the type of hiring they're doing based on the keywords. That can facilitate deal flow and really help deals move along faster. Ioanna Onasi 24:31 Yeah, I do the same. I feel like everybody right now is using ChatGPT for company research and these signals, I totally agree. However, there's still a gap in terms of the person, right? You might know everything about the account and you still might feel like, I don't really know who I'm about to speak to. For someone like you, a sales leader, of course, you can tailor your approach once in the call. You can understand this person is too detail-oriented or extrovert, or whatever, and adjust. But we noticed that basically, it's about the timing. It's too late to figure these things out during the call. You need to be prepared. So anyway, the reason why I founded Dextego was to give these insights to people on the communication style of their prospect and give them insights on how to best approach them, things to avoid, key talking points. So right before this, I ran the extension on your profile to see what it says. I would love if you can tell me if you think it's accurate. Colin Wood 25:40 That'd be great. I'd be happy to. Ioanna Onasi 25:43 So firstly, here, what you see is it says we are 88% compatible, meaning our communication styles are similar. So I don't need to adjust my communication style. But let's say it was 30 or 40. I would, and this is how. So I'll let you read this to tell me if you think that's you. Colin Wood 26:04 This is interesting. Yeah, okay. So I'm looking for... Ioanna Onasi 26:11 So you're hard to convince, it says. Colin Wood 26:14 Yeah, okay. Ioanna Onasi 26:15 Path buyer here. You're focused on the quality. If I was to reach out to you, I can make it objective, medium-sized, but formal. Colin Wood 26:28 Yeah. Ioanna Onasi 26:29 And then here, based on this, it says I need to focus on more detailed information, like probably case studies. You'll ask me a lot of questions. Colin Wood 26:41 That's really good. Ioanna Onasi 26:42 Yeah. Colin Wood 26:43 Yeah, that's impressive. It is spot on in terms of, I'm a very factual. If you come to me and present a bunch of facts, I'm very open to hearing those facts. And if I'm believing one thing, and you present a bunch of facts that might sway me the other way, I'm very open to moving or changing my position. So I would say that's... Ioanna Onasi 27:16 Oh, that's very interesting. Yeah, see, how would I know that just by reading your posts? AI is amazing. It combines all these data points, it found public data about you. If we had previous conversations, you would also take recordings, like you were saying, the post-call analysis is very important. But in short, from what it gathered, it figured out your key motivators. So now, if I were to pitch you, I would know to highlight, let's say, teamwork, like how this would help you maybe work with the SDRs in India, right? And your team here. Talking about facts, it also analyzes DISC and OCEAN. So it would say, this is me, this is you. You're an evaluator, which makes sense, what you said. Then I can say, okay, this is a very high D and high C, consensus buyer. So what does that mean? Let's say I was very low on D. I can assume that we'll go in a call and you will set up the agenda for me. So as a seller, I need to know that, hey, this person will take the lead. So I have to maybe be proactive and send them an email prior to this with the agenda. So it's all about preparation and knowing potential objections, right? How can I proactively make sure that I answer your questions? Come down and then continue the discussion. Colin Wood 28:45 I liked there was, under one of the avoids, the first one was saying, avoid inviting them to any social interactions until you've built some rapport. That's spot on. I will not go to a lunch or anything without having some chemistry, some connection, something that we've bonded on, and it makes, or it seems to be good use of my time. Ioanna Onasi 29:18 I’m like that too, yeah Colin Wood 29:19 Yeah. There needs to be something there, a connection, before I'll go to a happy hour or something like that. Ioanna Onasi 29:26 Yeah. I mean, I get these messages too, like, hey, I'm traveling from somewhere. I'm in New York. Let's grab a coffee. I'm like, I don't even know you. Why would I want to go for a coffee? Colin Wood 29:36 Right, yeah. You've got to do better than that. Do rapport first. Ioanna Onasi 29:42 Let's go back to coaching your team. We talked about discovery skills a lot and I'm curious if you can remember a case, maybe last year or in previous roles, where someone came to you and were like, Colin, I'm about to lose the deal. You figure out a way through coaching to get them to save it, or even if it was pushing to the next quarter. Where have you seen coaching really have an impact on your career? Colin Wood 30:13 Yeah, I think things like that happen all the time, where deals get pushed, or there was lack of preparation and questions were asked and they may have fumbled. But I think failing fast is important. Getting them to put all of the options out on the table with the prospect as early as possible so that if there is a mistake that was made, or the tone of the conversation wasn't positive enough, we can pinpoint that now through the transcription of the call or whatever. I'm looking for that main point to be able to uncover what went wrong, why it went wrong. It may require me getting on a call to try to smooth things over, or to ask more questions about what would they like to see or what would they need to see in order for the relationship to continue forward. When it comes to tools, what I would love would be to see some more real-time guidance during calls without it being distracting. Probably not too far away from this and we've got all these call recording tools that we use, but I'd love to see something that would provide that real-time guidance during a call. Where if the prospect was asking a question and it was a one or two or three-part question, you could have the information there and it could nudge you and say what that answer might be. Or it could be like you're 25 minutes in and you haven't uncovered who the economic buyer is, or uncovered that need yet. But I think that requires the tool to understand the deal stage and dynamics and we might not quite be there yet, but I think we're not too far. Ioanna Onasi 32:42 We're definitely close. Basically, it needs to know your knowledge base and, to your point, what would a good call be. That's why the agenda part is so important. Knowing what do we have to achieve in this call based on the stage, and post-call analysis. Okay, you missed this part, come back. Based on the compatibility here, your manager has a better one, so nudge them to do an executive communication rather than you following up again and again, not hearing back. So it's definitely getting there. I agree. I think the issue with post-call analysis today is it just tells you what happened, not why or how to improve. The issue that I see in a lot of these tools is they measure too much things like talk-to-listen ratio or, like you said, the default methodology. But behind this, there's much more. Like why was I not able to ask about budget, for example? Maybe because the prospect already told me we don't have budget. The context of the call sometimes is gone because each deal is so different, each company is so different. So AI has to be very flexible and configurable for this to work. But usually, what's the sales process for you? How many meetings, key meetings, do you have? Colin Wood 34:08 Yeah, typically, it can go from seven or eight meetings to sometimes 12 meetings. It depends on the urgency, the need. In some cases, I've had prospects bring a one-page outline of all of their pain points and what they need, when they're looking for it to be implemented, and the budget that they have. Those are the bluebirds that we like to call them. But in most cases, it's going to take that discovery call, then maybe a second call where you're diving a little bit deeper, and then those L3 calls, L4 calls where you're bringing in a technical resource and doing technical feasibility and data feasibility to understand where the data sits, how accessible it is, how structured or unstructured it is. It all starts with data and how AI-ready it is, or how much work needs to go into it to make it AI-ready. That will dictate how many more calls or meetings it'll take before that deal moves into negotiations. But yeah, it's typically seven, eight meetings before we're reaching a verbal agreement. Ioanna Onasi 35:48 Well, let's move into some reflection. Looking back into your career, what would you say has been a leadership mistake you've done that you wouldn't do again, because it cost you? Colin Wood 36:01 Yeah, that's a good question. Thinking back earlier in my career, I was at Newfound Research. I was one of the top producers there. I made a mistake where I thought that I should have kept my best deals for myself rather than handing them to a developing rep. I thought that being a top producer meant hanging on to those deals and keeping them to myself rather than handing them off. I told myself it was risk management. If I gave up this $300,000 deal to a junior rep, we might lose it, so I'll take it. But what I was really doing was hoarding. I was thinking like an individual contributor and not a leader. In that situation, that cost me. I didn't develop a bench of strong sellers. When I was eventually promoted to VP of Sales at Newfound, I didn't have a team ready to scale and I had to hire externally when I should have been developing them internally. What I've learned from that is that I've tried to make the opposite true now. I'm always asking myself, which rep needs this deal for their confidence and their development early in the year? I'm probably giving deals to high-potential mid-tier reps rather than the sure thing. That could mean I'm sacrificing a few points of quota in January to build a team that crushes it in Q4. Also, there's a shift in how I hire. I'm not looking for people who need me to close deals for them. I'm really looking for people who I can coach into greatness. The difference is subtle, but it's everything. One requires me to keep doing the work and the other requires me to teach them how to do the work. I think that's the big difference there. Ioanna Onasi 38:37 I couldn't agree more. Coachability is something that, whether you're talking about a seller or an employee, is that key to leadership that shows up potential for growth. It's something I believe a lot of people, due to the sales culture, are forgetting and they do the opposite. You're saying they want them perfect and they forget that if someone is such a perfect seller, they can work anywhere, let alone they can create their own company. So it's a bigger challenge to maintain that high performer. It's also very risky because you can burn them out. Like you can say, you did great this quarter, I'll double your quota. And they're like, what do you mean? Just because I performed last quarter doesn't mean you have to drain me the next. Colin Wood 39:28 Right. That is a morale killer. It still needs to be attainable. We want to make it challenging for them, but attainable at the same time. If it's too challenging or unattainable, you're setting them up for failure. Ioanna Onasi 39:47 It sounds like you spend a lot of time one-on-one with your reps, you get to know them. So what's the cadence? Do you have structure like performance reviews quarterly, but more informal ones to talk? Colin Wood 39:59 Yeah, exactly. I think it's important to have some kind of structure in place. Especially from the top brass, they're going to want to see who you're meeting, what sort of intervals you're meeting with these individual contributors. But I want them to feel like they can come to me anytime. It shouldn't just be once a week that we're having a formal one-on-one. Once a quarter, we're doing a more formal individual pipeline review or deal review. I want to be able to talk with them for five, 10 minutes on a daily basis, and maybe not necessarily about work, just to help build that trust and to show them that I'm not trying to micromanage. If micromanaging has to be put in place so that they can do their jobs correctly, they're not the right person for the job. With the amount that they're being paid and the amount that they're looking to be paid through incentives, I shouldn't have to be holding their hands or babysitting. So I want to be a resource for them. I'm going to let them do their jobs. But at the same time, I want them to know that they can come to me whenever they need help. I try to lead by example and do the same thing. Ioanna Onasi 41:39 Awesome. Last question, looking into Q1 and beyond now, what are some of your priorities personally and as a company within the US? Are you looking to expand in any verticals or do any partnerships, if you can share at a high level? Colin Wood 42:00 Yeah, absolutely. I think we're at an exciting inflection point. I think that 2026, we're seeing buyer behavior shifting dramatically toward AI and analytics. Our firm is positioned perfectly for that. Vertically, we're doubling down on the BFSI space, media, some CPG and retail as well, even though it's a little bit more saturated, where we have proven wins and industry expertise. I think these sectors have budgets, there's urgency around monetization and modernization as well. But I'm very excited about where things are going. On partnerships, we're actively in works to co-sell with Snowflake and Databricks, investing in partners who can architect analytics on top of their platforms. I see a huge opportunity to position as the implementation and modernization partner for enterprises using modern data stacks. The big shift is in our Go-To-Market. The old model was, sell a big engagement, seven-figure deals, big whale opportunities. The new model is, land smaller discovery projects, prove value first, and systematically expand across the organization. That means a rep might close a $50,000 assessment project that we know will lead to a $500,000 implementation. That's what we're seeing alot of the market is shifting towards, smaller buying committees, the C-level executives shifting or pushing buying authority down to heads of departments. Still, I think central IT has a big hand in the buying and decision already. But we're seeing a shift toward smaller deals initially. We're seeing a shift toward outcome-based pricing away from time and materials, fixed cost and materials,  and that commercial structuring, to outcome-based pricing. I think it's an exciting year. Discoverability is a big thing. The way that prospects look for and research vendors is shifting. They're no longer going to Google. They're using AI and peer reviews for discoverability and for finding out who the best vendor is. So that's incredibly important, to become discoverable in large language models and to have good reviews from peers. A lot happening and a lot to be excited about in this upcoming year. Ioanna Onasi 45:31 Yeah, I see the same. I see this push of buyer authority. I also think last year there were a lot of debates about the outcome-based pricing because people were like, I don't know how will I budget for these, but yeah, sounds fair. But now more and more people are shifting gears. I'm thinking of doing the same, to be honest. It goes back to what you were saying, that the value has to be there. Not everybody can do that unless they can prove black and white ROI. Colin Wood 46:04 Exactly. Ioanna Onasi 46:05 It's a good challenge for the entire industry. I think that's awesome. I think we're heading in the right direction and the combination of AI and the human thoughts and the relationship-based selling, all this is coming back much stronger. But I really want to thank you for all your insights. It's been awesome to learn from you and I hope the audience took away a lot of interesting things. We'll put your LinkedIn, so if someone wants to reach out and has more questions, get book recommendations. Colin Wood 46:38 Yeah, absolutely. Ioanna Onasi 46:39 Thank you so much, Colin. Colin Wood 46:40 Thank you. It was a pleasure chatting with you. Thank you for having me on again and I wish you the very best with everything and the podcast. Happy to come on again anytime. Ioanna Onasi 46:56 Awesome, wonderful, thanks. Colin Wood 46:59 Thanks so much. Outro 47:01 Thank you very much for listening to Across the Funnel. If you got one useful Go-To-Market idea out of this show today, please share this with a teammate and hit follow. Explore Hyperengage at hyperengage.io and Dextego at dextego.com