liz christo

In the final episode of season two of the Recession-Proof podcast, Alex and Kimia discuss the most impactful insights from previous episodes with Sam Mallikarjunan of OneScreen.ai, Geoffrey Woo of Anti Fund Investment Fund, Dan Chen of Deltec, Anup Singh of Illumio, Keith Masuda of Modern Treasury, Liz Christo of Stage 2 Capital, Kelly Battles of DataStax, and Ken Suchoski of Autonomous Research.

Each of them share advice on how to overcome the challenges of the current state of the market, prioritize investments, and grow your business through the end of 2022 and the start of 2023.

Here are a few highlights, check out the full episode for the rest… 

Why Sam Mallikarjunan, Co-founder and Chief Executive Officer of OneScreen.ai emphasizes the importance of connecting the finance and marketing functions

“I will say there is an adversarial relationship between finance and basically every other part of the company. But to treat the finance team and the finance leadership as if it's an adversarial relationship or to not actually proactively reach out to them, to me, that therefore has always been like, you're yelling at the person who's sitting in the top of the ship's sails being like, Hey, there's an iceberg up ahead, or, Hey, there's land over there that's just like filled with random gold. Why are we ignoring it? And we're not creating clear lines of communication in alignment with a partner whose objectives are fundamentally aligned with our own.”

Geoffrey Woo, Co-founder and Partner of Anti Fund Investment Fund explains why attention is more valuable than capital

“We all have 24 hours in a day times 8 billion people. That is the max limit of attention that exists in this world. You can print money, do weird financial engineering with money, but literally, the max attention cap of humanity is some 8 billion times 24 hours a day. Anything that can wield attention, I think, is going to be increasingly powerful over time.”

How Kelly Battles, a Board Member and Audit Committee Chair for DataStax, Arista Networks, and Genesys thinks you can become a more well-rounded finance professional by…

“Get on a board if you can, even as a full-time executive, because it makes you a better executive. When you're a full-time exec, especially in an intense startup or private company scaling company, you can get tunnel vision. And I think having another company and seeing from a bird's eye view what they're going through gives you perspective, context, and learnings, and you start building your pattern recognition.”

Learn more about our season two guests:

• Sam Mallikarjunan on LinkedIn
• Geoffrey Woo on LinkedIn
• Dan Chen on LinkedIn
• Anup Singh on LinkedIn
• Keith Masuda on LinkedIn
• Liz Christo on LinkedIn
• Kelly Battles on LinkedIn
• Ken Suchoski on LinkedIn

Check out the full transcript here.

For more episodes from Recession-Proof, check us out on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and our RSS or your favorite podcast player. Instructions on how to follow, rate, and review Recession-Proof are here.

Stage 2 Capital Partner Liz Christo joins Kimia Hamidi on Recession-Proof this week to share why she sees the economic downturn as an opportunity for businesses to optimize their go-to-market strategy. Liz has 14 years experience in sales, and has recently  transitioned to angel investor, partner, and GTM advisor for multiple start-ups such as Gradient Works, QuotaPath, Gappify, Writer, and Vergo.

Liz and Kimia discuss:

• The effect downturns can have on your GTM team
• Shifting from founder-led sales to a your first sales hire
• How to create a comp plan that drives behavioral change

Key takeaways

• Liz shares that during a recession, companies need to resort back to business fundamentals to identify leading indicators, shore up their existing customer base and ensure they have clarity on potential customer churn.

  “There are the very basics of building a business, and it starts with actually identifying what your leading indicators are. Most track revenue and lagging indicators like results and output of the activity. We try to gear everybody to think a bit earlier than that. So rather than waiting to see if your largest customer renews 12 months from now, what things can we track now to understand whether that client is happy, engaging with your product, and activated in the way you expect?”
  
  

• In times of economic prosperity, experimentation is a must. In times of recession, companies should be more thoughtful: you can now longer spend unreasonably. To experiment, you must have a clear hypothesis, timeline and budget, and test one idea at a time.

“I always think people should be experimenting. But it's a question and trade-off of resources. So the companies stop thinking about growth at all costs. And so you're doing the work first to understand what basis you have? What are these proven routes to revenue? How can we exploit them? And then any incremental time, resources, energy, and money you have can be pointed at experimentation”

• In terms of sales incentives, compensation plans drive the behavior change in teams and, respectively, the dynamic of your business. They should be simple, easy to understand, and designed according to the behavior you want to drive. 

“The great thing about salespeople is they do what you pay them to do. The terrible thing about salespeople is they do what you pay them to do. And so, if you put it in that context, your compensation plan can drive a lot of behavioral change”

• Shifting your company from founder-led sales to building up a sales team is a matter of developing people and operations. On the people side, your first hire should be a jack of all things revenue and an avid student. On the operational side, start by documenting what is working and constantly adapt your sales playbook as you learn.

“When I think about the first sales hire, the first go-to-market hire, it's a mix of things. But we often look for somebody who can play a little bit of everything. They need to be able to do some prospecting, they need to be able to close new business, do a little bit of the CS work, they might do a little bit of that early process building the very early stuff. It needs to be somebody who's a bit of a jack-of-all-trades”

Learn more about Liz:

• Liz Christo on LinkedIn
• Stage 2 Capital Website

Episode resources:

• Science of Scaling
• Who by Geoff Smart
• How to Hire A-Players by Eric Herrenkohl
• Quota Path

For more episodes from Recession-Proof, check us out on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and our RSS or your favorite podcast player.

Instructions on how to follow, rate, and review Recession-Proof are here.