Ep. 86 – Aligning Sales and Product to Drive Revenue with Mike Milburn - Part 1
Ep. 86 – Aligning Sales and Product to Drive Revenue with Mike Milburn - Part 1  
Podcast: Selling the Cloud
Published On: Wed Jul 30 2025
Description: In this episode of Selling the Cloud, Mike Milburn—former Chief Customer Officer at Salesforce and founding team member of Service Cloud—joins Mark Petruzzi and KK Anderson for a masterclass in aligning product and sales teams around a shared go-to-market mission.Drawing from his 15+ years at Salesforce, Mike shares hard-won frameworks for building product roadmaps that sales can actually sell, developing trust between CROs and CPOs, and scaling alignment across growth stages. This is a blueprint for leaders who want revenue-generating product strategy—not just internal harmony.What You’ll Learn:The Product–Sales Friction Point: How most teams mismanage this relationship and how to turn it into a revenue advantage.Revenue-Calorie Framework: Why Salesforce prioritized roadmap decisions by “calories” and how to balance innovation vs. renewals.V2MOM as a GTM Operating System: What the V2MOM framework taught Mike about prioritization, transparency, and shared accountability.From Anecdotes to Data: How to structure sales feedback into decision-ready inputs for product teams.Product + Sales = One Team: What world-class collaboration looks like—when sales leaders evangelize the roadmap and product leaders join customer conversations.Key Topics:CRO and CPO relationship-building strategiesTranslating sales objections into roadmap investmentThe role of customer success in roadmap prioritizationQuantifying “deal blockers” to influence productRunning effective board conversations around productHow “True to the Core” made Salesforce a customer-led companyScaling product-sales collaboration from startup to enterpriseGuest Spotlight: Mike MilburnMike Milburn is the former Chief Customer Officer at Salesforce and was part of the founding team of Service Cloud. Today, he serves as an advisor to multiple SaaS companies. His career centers on building GTM systems where product, sales, and customer success function as one growth engine.Resources & Mentions:Framework: V2MOM – Vision, Values, Methods, Obstacles, MetricsSalesforce Event: “True to the Core” session at DreamforceRecommended Book: Behind the Cloud by Marc BenioffOther Concepts: Revenue-calorie model, sales telemetry, deal blocker mapping🎧 Listen now and follow Selling the Cloud for more insights from GTM leaders building high-growth, cross-functional teams. Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.Mark Petruzzi (00:03.044)Welcome to today's episode of Selling the Cloud podcast. We're thrilled today to welcome Mike Milburn, former chief customer officer and many other things at Salesforce for I believe 17 years and current advisor to some incredible technology companies as well, many of which are connected to the Salesforce ecosystem. So 15 years at Salesforce.during a very key time for the evolution of the firm. The transformation from true startup to enterprise giant that we all know and love today. When it comes down to it, what we'd like to cover today is a number of the frameworks that Mike has used to align product and sales team throughout his career and particularly through the Salesforce journey.Four themes we'll explore today. The product sales friction point, why most companies get this wrong, building revenue driven product roadmaps, something Salesforce always did a really good job with, probably mostly led by Mike. Go to market execution, when product and sales team need to move as one, and scaling product sales alignment.All right, let's jump on to topic one, the product sales friction point. Mike, you mentioned that product sales relationship is one of the most critical friction points for CROs, CEOs, and boards as well. What are the fundamental misunderstandings that typically create this tension?Mike Milburn (01:47.64)Thanks, Mark and KK. It's great to be here. I'm really glad that you guys are having this. I can't tell you how many times I've had this conversation in private. so having this conversation in public is just, it's a really neat thing and it's an honor to here. So congrats to that. So I guess I would just kind of like imagine the audience and I would imagine in any company that you're in.And that kind of water cooler, or maybe you're in a car or an airplane and you're having a conversation. And if you're on the sales team, you're talking about, man, I wish I had different products or better products or some sort of anxiety around the product side. And then if you go to the other side of the aisle, imagine that same conversation, the door shuts in the product meeting and you're wondering why you can't sell it. And if you sort of put yourself into that.mode of listening and that mode of parenting those organizations, that's a pretty frequent conversation. So I think that's the place to start, is like an acknowledgement from this virtual audience, how many of you guys have been in that position of hearing friction or anxiety from both the sales side to the product side or the product scene to the sales side.KK Anderson (03:07.463)So that's an excellent point. So when you arrive, let's say you arrive to a new company as a CRO and you discover, let's say that the product is difficult to sell. How do you approach that conversation with the product leadership team and with your board without just saying, hey guys, this product sucks, we can't sell it.Mike Milburn (03:32.034)Yeah. So I think first of all, let's start with the relationships between the CPO and the CRO. And let's start with if you're the CRO identifying the CPO as one of your critical stakeholders to your success. Obviously you're reporting into probably the COO or the CEO of the company, depending on the size and the maturity, but have you properly identified the product leader as one of the key stakeholders kind of colloquial?Locally, I would say are they on your Christmas card list? Have you earned the right to build a relationship that allows you to send a Christmas card to the chief product officer? And so where I start that relationship is really If I'm the CRO, I want to meet the head of product. I want to understand their tenure at the company I want to understand their motivations and I want to understand the successes and failures that I've had with with my predecessorsif you're a new CRO, then there was probably somebody before you. And so what were the things that they did right? And what were the things that they did wrong? Typically where that goes is again, relationships take time to build. So we're sort of jumping into how do you build a trusted relationship with them? You're to have to deliver, but ultimately you want to give the chief product officer the, the trust that you're going to bring them.real-time feedback from the field, you're gonna sell the products that are available, and you're gonna help bring them key insights from customers and partners on what are the things that they should be building. And we're gonna touch on that in a second, but those are really the key things, being able to sell what's available, being able to bring them trusted information about what's going on in the field, and help bring them guidance about where the market is going.Mark Petruzzi (05:30.637)So Mike, tell us about how you built a methodology for navigating this relationship at Salesforce. And how do you make this process kind of board ready and productive and collaborative rather than adversarial?Mike Milburn (05:51.33)Yeah, great question, Mark. So as a, first of all, as a backdrop, you know, I had the immense honor of being one of the guys that started Service Cloud on the founding team for Service Cloud at Salesforce. And of course, Service Cloud is now over $10 billion business inside of Salesforce. And I was there on day one when we booked the first, you know, 30 or 40K order way back in the early 2000s. So that's the framework that I'm going to use. Second is,I think all the credit really goes to Mark and Parker, Mark Benioff and Parker Harris. They created a framework that we inherited, we modified and we enhanced. And that's what I'm going to talk about today. So the way that I think about it, Mark, is what we did in the early days of Salesforce is let's say that you had unit, I don't know, let's say you had 10 calories to burn on product.And let's just for a moment say that all calories are equal, right? We would look at those and we would say, how many those calories are you gonna spend on new or innovation things? And how many products are you, or how many calories are you gonna spend on customer success? And so for argument's sake, let's just take 10 calories. And those calories really translate to resources or funding. But if I had 10 calories,And I devote them all towards the front of the house or all towards sales. And that meant that I was going to create some debt on the renewal side or on the customer success side. And conversely, if I spent all 10 calories and I didn't create any new innovation, I might suffer on sales, but I would really be strong in customer success or renewals. So once you go away from the teeter totter,And you go, well, the natural instinct is to peanut butter and to do five on each, let's say in this, in this hypothetical example. And I think what Parker really did was challenge that idea of peanut buttering and say, let's be really, really thoughtful, deliberate and challenging. And maybe you spent seven calories on sales and only three on customer success or vice versa.Mike Milburn (08:10.134)And let's really think about the trade-offs and let's make those data driven revenue generating success oriented decisions. And so where we took that team was we would take the product roadmap that was based off of that framework. And we would go to the sales leadership and we'd say, can you sell this? And the sales leadership would sign up to sell that. And I think, you know, that, conversation that we started with was.can the product team create a roadmap that the sales team stands behind? And if you imagine that conversation, that's a very delicate conversation. The sales team has to take accountability for, if you're gonna go build something, then the sales team needs to be the one to stand up and say, if you build that, I'm gonna go sell it. There's always problems that come up with pricing or packaging or competition or any one of the various things that happen in the real life world, but.The head of products job is to create a roadmap that is innovative and can support both sales and customer success, which I'm directly calling renewals, usage and adoption. So I think that was the really neat part is once we made a data driven decision, we could then look at our roadmap and say, if I remove one calories from sales, what are the sales impacts?And what are the renewal impacts? And once you have that, the leaders of sales, success and product can all come together and they make the right decisions for the KPIs of the team. And of course that's where the CEO and the ELT come into play. But that becomes a really fun conversation when you have it, you know, when you have it laid out like that, like for this quarter or these two quarters, let's over rotate to sales. And yeah, we might create some customer success issues.If everyone's on the same page and there's no blame game come when the, when the customers incur issues or problems, there's no finger pointing. It's we all made this decision together. And conversely, if you make a decision to go renew all your customers, then that's going to have a lot of benefits and then you might have some, some, sales friction. So it's really creating that alignment and transparency that I was really lucky to be a part of and, mature that process.Mark Petruzzi (10:29.315)So Mike, before we go into our next question, I'm going to open this up a little more strategically. How much did the approach that Mark drove right from the beginning of beat a mom? How much did that get into some of this? Is the methodology that you're talking about building, is it tied to beat a mom or to just kind of work in and integrate on its own along the way?Mike Milburn (10:58.828)Yeah, great question, Mark. So I think of the V2Mom is really a corporate operating plan. And, you know, I've got to be candid and say, think when I first joined and I was baptized in the V2Mom process, I think I wasn't quite on board with how important it was to a company. After a couple of years, I guess I would go back and restate that and say the V2Mom was one of the most important things that Salesforce has as an asset.And it's one of the most important things that I learned. And it's one piece of advice that I've given and driven to any company that I've been lucky enough to work with is the essence of the V2Mom is a corporate operating plan that the exec team creates and they vote on together. And it decides the company's vision, values, methods, obstacles, and metrics. Essentially, what is the operating plan? And if you do it every year, then you're allowed to pivot and change at the speed of business, no matter what size company you are.So think it's incredibly modern. The relationship between the V2Mom and the product roadmap is really simple. If the number one V2Mom is growth, and let's say growth means sales and sales is over customer success, then you should be allowed to spend more of your product calories making products that the sales team wants you to sell. If the V2Mom is customer success is number one, thenyou know, voted on that by the exec team, then you might change the priorities and saying, let's spend more calories together, making products, goods and services that help renewability. So the relationship between the V2 mom, the product roadmap, the sales leadership, the success leadership is the success leadership is it's all part of the exact same formula that drives the corporate operating plan.KK Anderson (12:56.199)And so where like what role do you see the CEO playing out all of this kind of? Facilitating it all you know running them running the balanceMike Milburn (13:06.606)Yeah. So, you we were pretty lucky. We had, you know, we had the legendary Mark Benioff running on that show. And what Mark enabled us to do was he empowered us to create a forum where you're allowed to have a healthy conversation about the VT mom. And I vividly remember, I mean, so many of these meetings all kind of blur together because they were 15, 20 years ago, but I remember somebody in the company standing up and saying, I don't agree with this.KK Anderson (13:11.558)Yeah.Mike Milburn (13:33.13)Maybe the person was an individual contributor, maybe they were an influencer, but when they challenged it, was somebody in the Roman Senate saying, hey, you guys built this, I don't agree with it. And that transparency and accountability was really important. Mark drove that culture. Everyone owned the V2 Mom. Number two was you were allowed to deputize other people for your V2 Mom.So let me make up a little hypothetical situation here. Let's say that Mark is, let's pretend that I'm the CEO, Mark's the head of sales and KK, you're the head of products. And I would say, know, is a number one priority that we sell more and everyone goes, yeah. Well, if Mark's job is the head of sales and your job is the head of product, then you inherit those priorities. And so that's where you can't be parochial or you can't be political. You've got to do the right thing.on the V2Mom for everyone else. And it was more than a faux pas to stand up in a V2Mom meeting and be self-serving. You had to use the V2Mom as the doctrine on how you were going to operate your organization. And you were allowed to deputize other folks. Again, part of the V2Mom conversation that I didn't say earlier was it drives success in a matrix organization.KK Anderson (15:00.006)youMike Milburn (15:00.066)There's some organizations that are more top-down, more command and control, maybe more military or more organizations. And a lot of modern organizations, you know, the CPO and the CRO might not ever report into the same person. They might be dotted lines into the CEO or they might, their peers, right? And so the V2 mom became almost navigate the V2 mom without having to go to the CEO.KK Anderson (15:06.311)youMike Milburn (15:30.124)And when you're empowered as as a, an executive in a company to navigate that without having to go and ask permission or to have somebody navigate those rules. you tend to, you tend to come to the right decision.KK Anderson (15:44.423)You know, it's ironic. Mark and I are sitting here nodding our heads thinking, this is exactly what AGS needed to hear right now. Right? You know, me, every company is no matter the size, is they're navigating growth and navigating our, you know, everything. It's so important. And for the audience who's probably like Googling what is V2Mom right now, can you give an explanation of Salesforce's framework that they've made famous?Mark Petruzzi (15:51.939)I that guy.Mike Milburn (15:52.11)ThanksMike Milburn (15:55.841)Really?Mike Milburn (16:11.586)Yep, absolutely. Okay. So it's called the V2 mom and it stands for vision values, methods, obstacles, and metrics. And so the way that I think about it is, is the vision and values or things that the exec team created and they would socialize for approval and stakeholder value with the company. So that's the first, the V2 part. The mom part is where the work gets done. The methods, obstacles, and metrics.And so you can YouTube V2Mom. You see a lot of companies have borrowed it, but essentially there's about 10 V2Mom methods. And those could be things like say which product has a higher priority. It could mean revenue. It could mean culture. remember when, when one year when we were really going against Siebel and there was a fear that we would turn into Siebel. I think the number one method on the V2Mom was culture.And so that trumped growth. So the M, the first M is methods. That's the kind of how, then the obstacles are what are the things that are going get in the way. And there's a one-to-one ratio between obstacles and methods. And then the measurements are how are you going to get measured on whatever method you wanted? And the, what the execs team's job was to create all the methods and then prioritize those.And one of the really neat moments that I saw happen over and over again was a public discussion on which method is more important. And it sounds like so innocuous. It sounds so easy. But if you were to say, what's more important sales or success? That's a hard one. Cause the more you sell, the more you have to renew, the more you renew, the easier sales get and the more references you get. Which is more important, partnership growth versuscreating a brand. Geez, Salesforce has created an amazing brand. It took time to do that, which is more important. Employee success or creating a great dream force, which is more important, having a great dream force or having 10 events locally or throughout the geos. And so once you sort of create that framework to have healthy discussion, thenMike Milburn (18:35.478)then you kind of get everybody on the same page. So it's a corporate operating plan for the modern SaaS company.Mark Petruzzi (18:42.711)Yeah, and what I love about all of that, is you kind of ties me back to what you said at the beginning and that this calorie breakdown perspective that when you look at it that way, and very few companies do, right? Very few CEOs do. Most CEOs kind of come in to these QBR meetings or wherever they're addressing a team and they're like, know, sales, sales, sales, we need to grow, we need to grow.And then they turn around and they're like, then they start talking about customer success. And they're like, well, customer success has to be perfect in this way and have to do that. But it's not. It is a zero sum game, even in a fast growing company. the process of being mature and analyzing, hey, if we want to grow a little faster,we're going to have to do some things that are going to be a trade off on customer success. Or if we really, really need to make sure that customer success for the next couple quarters is, you know, that our retention is off the charts, then we have to slow down and accept a couple percentage points less on our growth. That doesn't happen often in companies. And I love the way you're positioning it thus far. Let's kick into topic two.Building revenue driven product roadmaps. KK, why don't you lead us the first question there.KK Anderson (20:11.239)So I'm always going to start with sales because that's my passion. And so when we think about SaaS organizations and our clients, how do you ensure that sales feedback actually influences the product roadmap? That's where I think one of the greatest breakdowns is. And honestly,It's that frontline seller who's having a lot of these conversations and the solution architects. That's the feedback that we need to go up. Right. So how do you do that?Mike Milburn (20:45.858)Yep.So this is the, I'd like everybody on the podcast to kind of close your eyes and imagine this meeting. You're in a QBR, you're in your exec meeting and it's your reporting on your results for the quarter. You're getting ready for your next board meeting of any size and scope. And you're looking at, you're the CRO and you're looking at your results.You're looking at your feature pipeline. You're looking at amount of head count and you're painting a vision for the company on where you're going to go. And what if you had a slide that, that, that said for every opportunity, here's the quantifiable problems that we're facing in the field. In other words, you know, you just kind of invoke this frontline sales and then there's,There's RVPs and they go AVPs and by the time it gets up to the CRO, how do you get feedback? And the image that I'm trying to conjure up is, and this might sound low level, but let's start here to get to the high level. What if on every opportunity there was a way to capture objections? And it wasn't a free text field. It was a data driven format. Is it pricing? it, is it competitive? Is it a feature or function?KK Anderson (21:48.027)Uh-huh.Mike Milburn (22:13.654)And that opportunity has a dollar sign value associated to it. So if all the reps in the field were responsible for adding in all of their objections at the, at the infantry level, at the deal level, and the CRO could run a report and say, here's the number of opportunities that I'm facing where I have pricing as a problem. And here's the accumulated dollar sign that is impacted.Or I'm facing a feature and function gap, or I'm facing a critical piece of functionality that will require &A. Whatever it is, if you can associate deal friction with the number of deals and the amount of ARR or the amount of revenue that's associated, now you're having an exact conversation. It's not emotional. You're saying I've got X number of dollars. I'm going to choose 50 million or 5 million or 5KK Anderson (23:05.991)Mm-hmm.Mike Milburn (23:11.074)beans, whatever vector you want. And here is the data behind it that is causing me friction. Then the product organization or the partner organization or any other organization, they can ask you questions about it. They can second guess the quality of the data or what some of it means, but it's really hard to have. It's really easy to have a great conversation. If you come to that meeting with, Hey guys, our second half pipeline.or X amount of revenue. And here are the three biggest blockers we're having to make the second half of the year. We need a flex capacitor. We need more aggressive POC pricing. And we'd really like exec sponsorship on the following 10 deals because we're having a lot of competitive pressure. Now it becomes a fulfillment opportunity for the rest of exec team to rally behind you instead of that familiar pattern ofwhat's happening with the deals and could have, should have, would have kind of that soft squishy. If the CRO can bring concrete examples of what they need to that meeting, then you're getting this CPO on board with you to build the right things to deliver more revenue.Mark Petruzzi (24:30.253)really good points there, Mike. So, okay, so how do you do, know, companies are getting customer requests, customer feedback every minute of every day. How do you determine, just how do you accept that into the process? How do you get that data into your system first? And then...What are the criteria that should help you really drive and make it affect product decisions that will move revenue versus what may make one client feel good or even what may make the company feel good? Like we may look at this and say, yeah, this is an important one. This is important. But at end of the day, if it's not going to move revenue, it's got to be in a different place in that product roadmap.How have you done such a great job with that throughout your entire career?Mike Milburn (25:28.664)You try and make the process easy, Mark. You try and make it transparent and you try to remove some of the black box. First of all, you know, the, the axiom of feedback as a gift is, is not just true if you're not getting feedback, like you're doing something very, very wrong. So let's just start with the sales side. Do you have a system that can quantify from the SEs and the sales team, the blockers that are getting in the way to sell the deal?Do you have that? That is a binary yes or no question. And then can you summarize that by segment or geo? So part of what you implied by that question is if I have a sales team that's selling an SMB in North America and an enterprise team that is selling in Europe and they're asking for things, how do you distill those two things into a criteria?that creates action? And the simple answer is revenue. So let's just make up some, let's just make up something to talk about. Let's say your SMB team has 20 deals, each valued at $1. Right? And that's in North America, that's $20. But your EMEA team, it wants something that is $100, but there's only one deal.And you look at everyone and let's assume that to build those two products is the same amount of calories. Cause when you get different calories, then all of a sudden you're invoking a different vector. But first of all, can you have that conversation? This is no different than having a conversation with your family about where to go on vacation. Do you go on two little vacations and for a couple of days, you'd be on one big vacation. The world's navigated that for a long time, but now all of a sudden the sales conversation is difficult with your product team.As a CRO, can you articulate the number of deals by segment and exactly what the blockers are? Yes or no. If you do not have that mechanism in place, then I would encourage you to use a CRM like Salesforce to create those objects. And you simply, it's part of your sales operations criteria. Every deal gets a blockers or pathways and it's not a free text.Mike Milburn (27:49.12)It is the top lockers and you're able to, sales ops can help you navigate, and, and run those reports. So that's the first side of it. Then, then the second side of it is as an exec team, do you have the framework to be able to decide and have that conversation? I think this is where a lot of these conversations stall is the fear that you have been building the wrong things or, or are you listening in the right way? Maybe.You know, I just said it in a very blunt way, but if you're going to get to transparency, you've got to be able to listen and then you've got to be able to make roadmap decisions based off it. So, you know, I would say, regardless of what's happened in the past from the product and sales organizations, this is your opportunity to reset. Listen to what the sales team is telling you and then build a roadmap that addresses those. And if you're not going to address it, then just like, just like we talked about earlier, say.we're gonna make these other decisions. And if you keep seeing this deal friction, we're sympathizing with you and we're not ignoring it. On the reverse side, on the customer success side, it's anyone that's a customer needs to be able to submit the feedback into your organization to tell you what is causing them to stop or renewal. And part of the unspoken hard part here is time.A product roadmap usually takes a year to effect, which ironically is why Salesforce's roadmap is three RR was three RR three releases a year. So if you're going to get something into the roadmap, it might take you three releases to get that through the system. So you've got to have your radar out both on the sales and server sales and success side long enough to listen and impact that roadmap. The, so that's the time vector then.That's all systematic and programmatic. And again, you should be able to report that to the CEO. You should be able to report that to the board. Then you have the live functions. And so this is actually a really neat story, but if you were to go on YouTube and you go true to the core, one of the most profound sessions that occurred, that occurs every dream force is usually it's Parker led, but somebody on the product team gets up.Mike Milburn (30:14.578)And the audience can range from five to 10,000 people. And they lead a conversation of, we being authentic with our roadmap? And this is a really neat conversation because there is no sales team. There's no success team. It's just the customer and Salesforce on stage. And what Parker does a great job of it is navigating. Every customer is going to have wants and needs. Everyone's got their individual requirements, et cetera.And those fit either in, no, we're not going to do that. It's the wrong thing for us to build. We're thinking about it or here's where it's going to be built. And over time, what I think is really neat about true to the core is it shows Salesforce commitment to listening. It shows the customer's commitment towards giving that feedback. And I don't have any data or stats on it, but I would guess that, you know,The reason why, the reason why that's so effective is the customers feel that their voice matters. And so if you combine both those things and you have sales radar and sales intelligence telling you what is necessary to drive a sale. And then you have customer intelligence coming through and saying, what do you intend to build?And then you have something like true to the core, it could be exec round tables, or it could be dinners or whatever mechanism the company feels comfortable. Dreamforce is a very unique opportunity. What you see there is sort of like checks and balances, sort of like the foundation of the United States, right? We've got three different, bodies that help govern the United States. You have the sales team giving you feedback, the success team giving you feedback, and then you have actual customers. You take all three of those pieces of feedback and you look at the roadmap and you should be able to say.KK Anderson (31:51.495)with customers.Mike Milburn (31:56.096)Am I building the right things together?KK Anderson (31:59.463)And I wonder how often what the customer says is different in fact than the othersMike Milburn (32:06.338)You know, it happens. mean, I remember some very contentious, true to the core sessions and you kind of have to be candid and say, is this the right thing for the company to build? mean, the more customers you get, the more the need, do the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few or the needs of the individual. Also here is the difference between like core product and customizable. So it's one thing for customer to say, I want this turnkey.KK Anderson (32:28.977)Mm-hmm.Mike Milburn (32:32.918)It's another thing to say you could do this and here's how you would do that. My opinion is that customers want transparency. And just because a customer wants something doesn't mean they should build it, but they deserve to be, they deserve to be heard.KK Anderson (32:47.894)I have a question. Just real quick, Mark, if I could, you talk about the three releases a year and that's... It feels like nowadays, that's just... Everyone wants something in the moment. They want real time. They want changes faster. want... I mean, I know it's not really a part of this topic per se, but I guess it kind of is. It's product roadmap and it's more...Mark Petruzzi (32:48.724)You know what's in...KK Anderson (33:15.215)in a real time, faster environment? Like how is the speed of business changing how SaaS companies are releasing and updating?Mike Milburn (33:27.234)Yeah. So this is a great topic. mean, I think we pioneered three releases a day, you know, almost 20 years ago. I guess the way I think about what Salesforce did with 3RR was it gave you some ability to have certainty to what is coming next, what you believe is coming, and then what you believe is coming a little bit longer out. So you sort of know directionally what's happening and it was transparent.The, I felt that same anxiety many times of customers like, want this today and I want it today. I think that's tempered or weathered with building in the right way, building trust, building safety, building security. Some things take more than a day or a week or a month to build. The important thing is that does the company know where, does the customer know where you stand as an organization? Are you being heard?And are you delivering on it? So, you know, we, I personally felt after, after being so many, after being so many, ABCs, executive briefing sessions or customer sessions or dream forces that the customer's desire to have it today is that was less important than Salesforce being able to listen and being able to build the right data driven machinery.It also worked where if a customer said, I want X and nobody had ever heard it, you could tell the customer, you know what? You're the only customer that we've ever heard that's asked for this. And that worked in our favor a lot of times too. So if you speed that up today and people want, know, just in time releases or they want a release every two days, I don't think it changes the equation too much. Can you quantify what is being necessary in order to sell more products?Can you quantify what is being used to renew more products? And if you can deliver it on a frequency of three times a year, five times a year, once a month, once a day, that's great. But I don't think it changes the overall calculus of, you listening to your sales team? Are you listening to your success team? Are you listening to your renewals team? are you, Ergo, you listening to your customers?Mark Petruzzi (35:49.348)Excellent. All right, let's go to our third topic here and go to market execution and when product and sales teams move as one. Tell us a little bit about what world class looks like around product, sales, execution. And when we use that term move as one, I've heard you use that term and that's why I'm asking it.What does it mean for product and sales to move as one?Mike Milburn (36:19.788)Yeah. So.Mike Milburn (36:24.5)One of the great parts that I remember about our internal QBRs at Salesforce was having the sales team kick off or the sales team wrap up one of my product conversations. And imagine your CRO standing up and saying, I'm not the chief product officer.Or I'm not heading up product, but I'm excited about the roadmap and here's why I'm excited. I'm going to go sell this because I believe in it. Now, all of a sudden you're showing alignment with your, with your critical sales component. And I think a lot of the internal meetings turn into sales is the sales job. Product is the product job and everyone just kind of goes off into their silos. So it starts with that message. Does the head of sales.Can they deliver the product roadmap? Can the head of sales demo the product? And this is something that I just find really, really unique and interesting, but I mean, I think it's still the case today that almost every executive at Salesforce is responsible for demoing their product. And there's products that it doesn't make sense and there's really technical and I'm sure we can find corner cases, but it's pretty powerful when the head of sales is able to...KK Anderson (37:18.897)Alright.Mike Milburn (37:43.064)demo in some capacity, even if it's not the world's greatest demo. So I think those two things are one and two. Three is almost no airspace between the roadmap and the sales team. We've touched on it all throughout this conversation, Mark, but you should never ever hear from any sales team. man, I wish our roadmap was different. And I think you hear a lot of that kind of in the background or hallway conversations or exit interviews or.Maybe I'm linked in. Sometimes you hear a lot of that. And conversely, from the product team, selling is hard. And so when you involve the product team in selling and you start to see the art of selling and the science of selling, you're going to see a lot of of sympathies and a lot of energies, know, timely today. Just today, I saw.a CRO for one of the companies I led, he left one company and went to a new company. And when you see the product team respond to that and saying, you're going to do great, John, keep going, we loved working with you. I think that's the job of a CRO is to build those relationships that maybe said a different way. If a CRO is interviewing for their next job,Why wouldn't the chief product officer be one of their key endorse ease or endorsements? That would be a true testimony.KK Anderson (39:12.455)Yeah, it really would. And, you know, take the CMO, the CPO and everybody. what's your, we have recently recorded a podcast with Kathy Minter and she talked a lot about the concept of the unified CRO and having sort of one leader that is overseeing marketing, overseeing product, overseeing customer success and in that way, rather than.know, silent. What are your thoughts around that? Some of what you just said had me thinking.Mike Milburn (39:48.364)Yeah, I think there's some really exciting, I think there's been some, I think there's really exciting new roles that have been created both from CEOs and CROs, you know, and I think the CRO that is just revenue generating or just sales generating, think, I mean, first of all, it's an incredible job with a lot of responsibility and a lot of accountability.But the inputs for that are things like marketing and branding, top of the funnel, the creation of pipeline. So if we're able to understand and navigate brand and marketing, then that's almost a next generation CRO leader. Same thing with system engineering. I've seen customer success fall in there. So it really depends on kind of the company and the investors and kind of the...Also the candidate and the kind of role behind it. mean, at Salesforce, if you look at the current organization, it would be really bad form if you were a sales leader and you couldn't articulate the product or you couldn't articulate the message. Salesforce is lucky. 25 years later, everyone's on brand, everyone's on message. They have the enablement departments to go through that. So I think part of what you're asking, KK, is like you haveYou have smaller companies, medium companies, bigger companies. You have all these different sizes of companies. Then you have private equity investors. And I think this is also an important point that, you know, in the in kind of the previous model, when companies were publicly traded or that was your goal is to IPO and be publicly traded company. Who was your accountable? Who is your accountable stakeholder? Wall Street, the stock price, right?Now with private equity, they have a different set of goals, a different set of goals and a different timeframe for that. So what is the organizational structure that's going to drive value creation? And so I think you're seeing some consolidation in some of those roles, which is really exciting.Mark Petruzzi (41:59.556)And Mike, think you just set up our next podcast together and I don't think we've ever brought you by me back super fast, even though we've had amazing guests along the way. But I think we have to have a discussion after this about getting you back in in the next few weeks and talking and going more deeply into that private equity, private equity and sales, private equity and how that affects strategy within.All these companies that you work with and and we do KK myself as well Yes, we're running lower on time here, but I'd like to get into topic for scaling product sales alignment frameworks for high growth organizations and I think the the core item here is when you when you scale from early stage startup to enterpriseHow does this product sales relationship need to evolve? And how do you make that work? Because we all know these early stage companies of today are going to be the sales force of 2030. So, or at least a couple of them are. Not many, but a couple. And how do you navigate in each environment to get to that full scalability?Mike Milburn (43:24.096)Yeah, great question, Mark. you know, with all the turnover, all the growth and all the pace and speed that the tech ecosystem is in, here's a couple pieces of guidance. if you're the CRO and there was an impromptu board meeting, could you articulate the product roadmap and give your editorial and a data-driven decision on why it's good or conversely why it's bad?Not subjective, not your opinion, but can you give a data-driven, supportable articulation of the product roadmap that, you know, that can you articulate that? That's thing one. Thing two is, are you listening to the customers in your, again, your sales teams are spending all of their time with customers. Are you bringing the product organizationcritical information about the customers buying decisions, their needs, their wants, and are you giving, are you helping another organization build the right roadmap? Number three is, have you done, here's a litmus test one. Have you done a product tour with your top customers and your CPO? Nothing will flush out a correct alignment.or an incorrect alignment better than a dinner or lunch or breakfast with 10 customers, head of sales and the head of product. There's nowhere to go. The door shuts. They start asking questions. What about this? How does this work? Can you have you done that before? And so I think those are three things. If I had to invoke a fourth one, it would be imagine your board meeting and reverse it.Imagine presenting to either your private equity investors or the public counsel and imagine talking about the product roadmap and your alignment with your CPO. That's, think, what your job is as CRO is to build that alignment and build that trust.KK Anderson (45:30.449)So when you were in the beginnings of Service Cloud and you were there with a front row seat, what, any stories come to mind around how that scale and what that experience was like?Mike Milburn (45:40.268)Yeah. I think I shared this earlier. The first meeting I had when I was the GM, was terrified. I thought I was responsible for innovation and I had to figure out all this stuff. I was very, very intimidated by that opportunity. Parker leaned over and he made it just real normal. goes, just listen to what they say. Just listen.And I listened to the sales team talk about, you know, here's the size of the opportunities. Here's the data coming. Here's the telemetry coming out of sales. And then I listened to the telemetry coming out of success. And the picture that came out of that was maybe it was 80%. Right. It was let's build this to drive more sales. Let's build this to build, to help do success. And I didn't have enough calories to, to, to do everything. So then I asked for help and it was, peer group.How would you slice this? Would you do 80, 20, 20, 80, 50, 50, 70, 30? And I navigated that success together. And eventually it was the head of sales who became incredibly supportive of my roadmap in service cloud, which led to growth. And so the head of sales became one of our biggest advocates. so I think that story, KK, kind of, you know, while it was...very, very intimidating and I had a of anxiety going to that meeting. It's sort of, reflect on that and Parker was exactly right. If you listen to what the sales team is providing in data driven organization, then the roadmap becomes almost a fulfillment exercise of how are you going to deliver that in the shortest amount of time? And the innovation is going to come from your product and engineering organizations on how you're going to fulfill the most amount of those things in the shortest amount of time.Mark Petruzzi (47:35.232)Excellent. All right, let's jump into our rapid fire segment here because I can't wait to hear some of these here from your perspective. So, you you're not a CRO. know, that's not kind of not your core, even though you've done so many amazing things over your career. So I guess this question becomes, you know, when in your career have you been asked to sell and what what product or servicewas the first one you've ever really got your hands around.Mike Milburn (48:09.506)Yeah. So I've carried a bag. Actually, Mark, I've been responsible. I've never carried a bag from an AE perspective, but I've been responsible for revenue four or five times in my career. And believe it or not, the first is going back to Salesforce. At a matrix organization, I had no salespeople reporting to me and I had all the accountability of revenue. So I had to stand up in front of Mark and team and the board and, and, and, and announce that. So.That was really the first one. And then every company since then, I've had some relationship, either direct or indirect, with the ownership of revenue.KK Anderson (48:50.983)Okay, who is your favorite, let's say CEO or C-level business mentor to follow?Mike Milburn (48:59.34)Yeah. So I think, so first of all, I keep an internal board of directors. And for me, what my internal board and my internal mentor do is, is they allow me to be accountable to people that I value. And one of the sales leaders that was at Salesforce, that was running one third of the company for a large majority of that time was a gentleman named Dan Del Degan, affectionately known as Triple D.And, Dan came out of Oracle and then was it hugely influential in the growth of Salesforce. Dan later on, joined Greg Buchholz, the founder and CEO of Spring CM and Dan became the president and they sold Spring to DocuSign. Dan is probably the, gentleman that I count as my chairman of my board to, to hold myself accountable, butI think the way that he operates in his value systems, a sales oriented to the topic of this conversation, a sales oriented CEO, I count Dan the top of that list.Mark Petruzzi (50:03.203)Excellent. So yeah, what about a tool that every product leader, well, let's do two of them here. Since you've managed these in a dotted line way, you're responsible for this revenue, you get to see the good, bad, and the ugly, and you get to see it from a slightly different vantage point than if you were.a CRO managing that team day to day, which I think is going to give you even better insights to these questions. So what tool would you recommend every sales leader use to ensure they are aligned with the organization? And then is it any different for a product leader, any different recommendations there as well?Mike Milburn (50:48.578)Yeah. So I had the, I had the opportunity to build these tools. actually the first company I left after Salesforce was Salsify and we built both of these tools natively mark. chose Salesforce for those things. as a, as a platform, on the, on the sales side, think building the data model to be able to support what is sales need. I think it makes sense to build natively on Salesforce. It's close to the opportunity. It's close to.leads opportunities, close one, time in sales stage, all of that makes it very, very simple. On the reverse side, it's really about usage and adoption. So, you know, there's a number of enterprise tools. I don't think I'm wedded. don't have a favorite, but what I want to know as CPO is who's using the products and what does usage and adoption look like?from a telemetry standpoint on a good customer and what does it look like on a bad customer? So I almost think about like, I want the customer's name redacted and I wanna see usage and adoption and I wanna see those trends and I wanna see what's working and what's not working. Then I wanna start asking questions. So every product has got their own internal telemetry tools.I'm not wedded to any of them, but I really believe in usage and adoption to drive the customer success product roadmap.KK Anderson (52:23.079)Nice. Okay Mike, what advice would you give your 21 year old self?Mike Milburn (52:30.95)I would give the advice that if I could imagine the number one relationship to build, would be the relationship between sales and products and never ever have a conversation that sounded or looked parochial about. wish sales did something different. I wish services did something different. I think there's a wonderful skill of empathy. And if you're a product person and empathize how hard it is to carry a bag and you'refamily's livelihood is dependent on you selling something in some frequency, and you reverse that from a sales position, understand how hard it is to ship and QA and deliver products. I think it's the empathy between sales and service, sales and product, I think is just something I wish I'd spent more time on earlier in my career.Mark Petruzzi (53:19.649)I mean, Mike, isn't it just the kind of the secrets of life, you know, having that that empathy in every situation and anybody you work with or coordinate with from a business or personal perspective. So I love the way you just described that. All right, let's close up on.Let's just say this from a product manager, a product manager perspective, somebody who is the CPO taking that role for the first time. Are there any books that can give a little bit of the tricks in the trade that you've read or do you just need to get the work and write that so we all have that insight?Mike Milburn (54:01.41)You know, it's a great question. The one that comes to mind is actually Mark's first book. I think it was Behind the Cloud. And it just boils it down into such, from what I remember, it's been a couple of years since I read it, Mark, but it just boils it down into the raw distilling of what it takes to create a product and get people to sell it, use it, and adopt it. And, you know, in those early days, in the first five to 10 years of Salesforce,We did so much evangelizing, so much listening, but there was so much passion behind it. And so I think that's probably a pretty good place to start.Mark Petruzzi (54:39.615)Excellent. Well, we have kept you a minute more than we asked so we want to keep you on schedule for your day But Mike, this is such an honor. It was so great to to dive deep into some of these subjects with you So great that I feel like we should do it again, but we'll figure that one out from hereKK Anderson (54:56.423)ThankMike Milburn (54:58.36)Sounds good, guys. We'll talk to you soon. Great to be here. Cheers. Bye-bye.KK Anderson (55:00.313)Thanks Mike.Mark Petruzzi (55:00.727)All the best.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.