Episode 132 | Tackling the AI Confidence Crisis with Kevin Knieriem

Kevin Knieriem  00:00

It’s almost impossible to hire 1000 top reps, right? So there’s things that those top reps do that AI can now actually help us replicate. So a couple things…one, we can automate the common, mundane tasks that everybody has to do. Use AI for those. Two, we can use AI to provide guardrails so that those you know, up and coming sales reps can look and operate like those a-player sales reps

Voiceover  00:03

Welcome to the “Lead at the Top of Your Game” podcast, where we equip you to more effectively lead your seat at any employer, business, or industry in which you choose to play. Each week, we help you sharpen your leadership acumen by cracking open the playbooks of dynamic leaders who are doing big things in their professional endeavors. And now, your host, leadership tactics, and organizational development expert, Karan Ferrell-Rhodes.

Karan Rhodes  00:36

Hello, my superstars. This is Karan, and welcome to another episode of the lead at the top of your game podcast. We have such a tremendous guest on today’s show, I am very honored to welcome Kevin Knieriem, who is the President and Chief Revenue Officer of Clary. And Clary is a platform that uses AI and agents to help revenue teams create, convert and close more revenue faster, and what company doesn’t need that, right? Kevin offers over 20 years of experience in driving revenue growth and building successful straps, successful sales teams for leading enterprise giants and high growth startups. So welcome to the show, okay!

Kevin Knieriem  01:19

Thanks for having me. I’m so excited to be on with you and your audience.

Karan Rhodes  01:22

We’re so excited to have you as well. I cannot wait to talk a little bit more about your role, because we do have, like, you know, caught a lot of corporate leaders, many of those are in the business development and sales spaces and, you know, or executives that are very interested in helping to grow revenues. So I’m sure there’ll be a lot of people that are fascinated about our conversation today, but before we get started, we always like to learn just a tad more about our guests. So just for as much as you feel comfortable, will you give us a sneak peek into your life outside of work?

Kevin Knieriem  01:58

Yeah, for sure. So I’m married, father of two daughters, so 15 and 13, both are now out of school for the summer. So, you know, they may or may not run by the office door here. You know, we live in Park City, Utah is it’s a great place. It’s, you know, year round outdoors, mountains. I’m since we’ve moved here, it’s been six years become an avid skier and mountain biker and in hiker and all things outdoors, which is, which has been great, amazing place to raise a family, great community. And you know, as a family, we, you know, love those outdoors. We like to travel. And each of my kids is into different things, so sports and arts and all kinds of good stuff,

Karan Rhodes  02:48

I bet they keep you running and keep you busy, right?

Kevin Knieriem  02:51

US running, for sure.

Karan Rhodes  02:53

Well, it sounds fantastic. And ironically enough, I think a couple of weeks ago, I interviewed a guest that was also from Utah, and just had rave praises for the quality of life there. And it sounds like you’re enjoying it as well. It’s been

Kevin Knieriem  03:09

great. I was nervous we moved from the beach to the mountains, and surprisingly, there is more to do out here than than living at the beach. So

Karan Rhodes  03:17

Really, well, that’s always a good thing because I’m a go or I love to go and do and experience different things, and it sounds like that’s a great place to do it.

Kevin Knieriem  03:26

It sure is.

Karan Rhodes  03:27

Awesome. Well, thank you for sharing that, and let’s dive quite deeply into Clari, your position, your background, and then we’ll talk a little bit about leadership. That’s okay with you.

Kevin Knieriem  03:41

Perfect.

Karan Rhodes  03:41

But I’d love to start with you, share with our listeners just a few top milestones in your career, and then what ultimately led you to Clary and your role.

Kevin Knieriem  03:55

Yeah, and, well, look, it’s, it’s been a fun journey this career. When you look back you go, how’d it go so fast? So look, I grew up right outside of Philadelphia in South Jersey, and went to school for food marketing, so nothing to do with technology. Found myself working at Accenture and knew nothing about computers, but learned how to code. And really what I learned there was business process, how to look at a company and understand the business process, and that became foundational for everything else I did. So I would say, like, you know, Milestone One was learning one, learning how to learn things quickly that you didn’t know, and learning how to really analyze a business. From there, I went to a company called Siebel systems, really the first CRM as a solution engineer. Yeah, I learned how to be a storyteller there. So another milestone, and under the one year that Bill McDermott was there, got my shot at being a sales rep. So it was the year 2000 from there, moved to Southern California, took a job at SAP. I was a picked over patch that nobody wanted, and turned it into, honestly, about $44 million in revenue over the course of a few years. And that’s really where I proved myself that I could sell. Was fortunate to start to take on leadership roles there, you know, different span of control and amazing mentors, the likes of Bill McDermott, Chris McCray, McClain, Chris ball and others, just to drop some names of great people in my career. And you know, from there, progressed to different and more challenging roles, but after a while, I kind of stopped learning, and this is where I went into startup world. I went to a company called data science.com that was pre revenue, and got to go with them from pre revenue to acquisition pretty quickly. And that’s when I found Clary. And for me, Clary was the opportunity to go on the next journey 200 million to 200 million. And really, kind of honed my skills at every stage, and so joined at promising startups, and I’m still here through the old late stage growth company.

Karan Rhodes  06:12

Wow, that’s amazing. What a career and lessons learned from each highlight and milestone. And I can already tell you’re a great storyteller, so it’s absolutely fascinating. And for our listeners who don’t know what Chief Revenue offers do, can you share just a little bit more about your work and how you provide value to the

Kevin Knieriem  06:35

Yeah. So ultimately, what does the Chief Revenue Officer do? They’re responsible for the revenue and growth numbers of the company, and depending on the company, the role can be, you know, just focus on the Sales Machine, or it can be broader, right? It can include customer success. It could marketing. And in my career, I think I’ve been in, you know, these kind of roles now for over eight years, I’ve had the full go to market. I’ve had parts of the go to market, and it spans based on what the company needs at that moment in time.

Karan Rhodes  07:05

Right. And how does your role integrate? Also ask you this, what are the types of areas of the company and roles is your type of role integrate with more closely, like, who are your you know, cross functional partners. Within clarity, I assume sales, but, you know, I don’t make that assumption, but who do you interact with?

Kevin Knieriem  07:31

In this journey, you know, look, what are we trying to do? We’re really transforming the art of selling into the science of selling through our platform, right? And we’re giving companies full visibility into their continuous customer journey, from building pipeline to converting it, to closing it, to renewing it. And so along that journey that takes all departments of the company, you know, marketing, customer success, product becomes such a huge part of it, because in our journey Karan, we handle some of the requirements of some of the biggest, most complicated global companies in the world, and there’s no standards, and so product becomes a really important partner in solving for their complexity in such a way that it’s not being built as a one off, but you’re really solving for, you know, overall market problems. And so I’d say product honestly becomes a huge part of this partnership.

Karan Rhodes  08:28

Amazing. And can you share with our listeners a little bit more about Clari and what the platform actually does?

Kevin Knieriem  08:35

Yeah, and so think about all the things that selling teams and go to market teams need to do to drive revenue and bring it in, renew it, expand it, no matter what your business is. And so at Clari, what are we? We are a revenue platform. And really what we’re trying to do first is bring together all of the signal and activity that is happening around that sales team’s engagement with their territory, with their prospects, with their customers, and not just the sales team, but everybody in your company is touching them. So at the heart of Clary, we are a time series revenue database that is collecting all of this signal in real time, if it’s the CRM, email, calendar, LinkedIn, the top of funnel systems, the call recording systems, the customer success platforms, billing data that might be in a snowflake or somewhere else. And we bring it together, and we snapshot it. That snapshotting basically creates for us what I call revenue context. That is basically who did what, when that led to what outcome. So you now have this baseline, and when you have this baseline, you can start to compare what’s happening now to what’s happened in the past, to know what good looks like, help you see around corners and then actually predict the future. So. So on top of this revenue database platform that provides revenue context, we’ve rolled out all these workflows that allow go to market teams to run repeatable process. So in our world, think about the forecast process and rolling up a good forecast the rep manager, one on one, our rep manages their territory and giving them visibility into hey, here’s where you have weakness in this opportunity. Here’s where you have opportunity. Here’s accounts you haven’t touched that you probably should and so we really become this platform for the CRO to orchestrate their revenue cadences, know that they’re being followed and actually get signal. Are we going to meet beat or miss our revenue targets? And so our customers really use us to drive process, to get signal into where the business is going so they can make strategic decisions.

Karan Rhodes  10:56

Right. I definitely see where it enhances the decision making processes you’re seeing, like you said, trends, areas of opportunity, maybe blind identifying, blind spots that your clients and customers didn’t see before. And it seems like all of that together is this invaluable as they make decisions about how to next move forward, or whether they should pivot or not, exactly, do I have that correct?

Kevin Knieriem  11:27

You do. And now we’re at the next iteration of this works. Where I get excited is we’re now deploying all these AI agents. Yes, help. Let’s say, let’s say I’m a sales rep one. We’re recording the call that they’re on. We’re creating a smart summary of that call. We’re creating the next best follow up actions for them out of that call, so they can automatically send those cadences out. Anybody else who is on the team can actually see what happened in that call. We’re helping reps figure out where to go, focus and spend their time in their business. And so there’s a not just all the visibility and rigor and process that we’re doing, but there’s also all of this efficiency that we’re now bringing to the sales process. And so we’re deploying agents now at different places in the revenue process and at different levels in the revenue hierarchy.

Karan Rhodes  12:20

And it sounds like Clari, you know, of course, AI is the big buzz word, although I always remind people AI has been around forever. You may not have known it, but now it is advanced in a way that it’s really more deeply being infused into organizations and processes and what have you and because it is become such a core piece of clarity. Do Are there any concerns around how it’s going to drive your business moving forward or or how impactful Do you think the evolution of AI is going to be for what you all provide?

Kevin Knieriem  13:06

So I guess on two fronts, one, it’s coming fast, and it’s completely transforming the craft of selling at clarity. It is specifically we. So we, we’ve been doing AI for almost 13 years, specifically around our ability to predict, are we gonna beat or beat or hit the number? We also were doing it around descriptive, right? Actually helping the rep describe what’s happened in their business so they can have a good conversation around it, and then some of the productive stuff on the follow up. And now we’re doing even ask. So think of like the chat ask interface of I can ask a question to the machine, and the machine is going to come back and tell me, here’s the answer. And now these agents that will actually go in and do tasks for us. And so this evolution is happening super fast, and we’re seeing roles change dramatically because of it.

Karan Rhodes  14:01

I definitely imagine, can imagine that. And you know, for me, being on the human capital, strategic human capital side of the world, you know, one things that I always advise my clients on is that, you know, you it’s not so much a jobs totally going away. It’s you’re going to need AI skilled individuals in the context of your business, so that they can help lead the driving of that value, because they’ll have the human eye on what you know the technology is able to provide. How do you see roles in clarity evolving similar to that, or

Kevin Knieriem  14:44

Yea, so just, think about like a sales rep, right? And let’s say you’re a large organization, it’s almost impossible to hire 1000 top reps, right, right? So there’s things that those top reps do that AI can now actually help us replicate. So a couple. Links. One, we can automate the common, mundane tasks that everybody has to do. Use AI for those two, we can use AI to provide guardrails so that those you know, up and coming sales reps can look and operate like those a player sales reps. And three, what really trying to do is free those reps up to use their special skills. Maybe it’s relationship building, maybe it’s strategic thinking, maybe it’s business case. You know, acumen being a good consultant to free them up, to really let those things shine through. And so, you know, in our world, we’re using AI all across the front lines, with our reps, for our managers. We’re deploying it so they can be better coaches and help free their reps up to be more productive and honestly manage more reps than they would have in the past. You know, our solution engineers are being more productive by deploying AI to help them understand fit. You know, a solution fit for our customers, and it’s showing up across the full go to market. You know, our marketing teams are using it to create content our, you know, our reps are using it to do research on customers, right, and to get really good questions ready to go. And so it’s, it’s showing up in every role, in every department.

Karan Rhodes  16:14

Love that, love that I definitely want to make sure we fit in Kevin, the fantastic research that Clari labs and census wide recently released. And I don’t want to steal your thunder, because I probably can’t set it up in the right kind of context, but it was fascinating. Would you mind sharing with our listeners what came out of that research?

Kevin Knieriem  16:35

Yeah. So look, we’ve done research on AI adoption. We’ve done research on data in access to and I think one of the key stats that came out of that, and so this is Clary labs, what we did is we went out and surveyed AI adoption, including one of the, I think key stats that came out was 67% of enterprise leaders lack confidence in their revenue data and how distrust in AI outputs is the number one blocker to AI adoption. And so why do I bring that up if you don’t trust the data, doesn’t matter what you put on top of it, because the output isn’t going to be something that you’re going to go, I’m going to go stake my career on this, and just think about it.

Karan Rhodes  17:19

Lots of junk out, right? You don’t have that trust in it, yeah,

Kevin Knieriem  17:23

The CRO role that we talked about is a, is a high performance role. The average tenure is 17 to 18 months,

Karan Rhodes  17:31

Why, because of the stress level?

Kevin Knieriem  17:33

yes, a couple reasons, um, it’s a performance job. And you, you basically live in three month increments, right? That’s the quarter, and so you have to perform every quarter. If you don’t perform, you know you’re out of the job. And really what, what is clarity helping do? It’s giving that CRO visibility into what’s working, what’s not, not just in the current quarter, but in the out quarters. Do we have the pipeline? We need to hit targets. If business is accelerating well, you want to actually be able to put more reps in the field and hire faster. If business is decelerating or a certain segment is challenged, you want to be able to see actually what’s happening so you can take action. Foundational to all of that is the data.

Karan Rhodes  18:17

Yeah, definitely. And what you all are providing at Clariti is more ways for them to trust the data better.

Kevin Knieriem  18:30

Well, data becomes the foundation for running your process, understanding you know, is the process working or not? Where do you have opportunity? Where do you have risk? Most importantly, and how do you overcome and get around that risk?

Karan Rhodes  18:47

Interesting? Well, in your role, I’m sorry, go ahead.

Kevin Knieriem  18:50

I was gonna say Karan. What does it really do for a leader at the end of the day, it’s a sales leader, from running the business quarter over quarter to leading the business year over year. It helps you become more strategic.

Karan Rhodes  19:06

It was a very interesting stat you gave around the tenure of Chief Revenue officers. I imagine in your role, part of your team is working to help track where people go too, because if there’s high turnover, but they know and appreciate and love, Clary, you got to keep track of where they’re going, right for your own

Kevin Knieriem  19:28

We absolutely track, not just the CROs, but all of our power users, on where they go. It’s really cool. Karan, when a CRO is switching jobs, the first call or email they send, even before they have their company email is to us, Hey, can you get me what I had before I’m coming in? They don’t have clarity. We need you guys, yeah, it’s a pretty cool feeling to know that we’re that trusted.

Karan Rhodes  19:51

That’s fantastic. That’s wonderful. And I’m just curious how expanses… expansive is your team in particular?

Kevin Knieriem  20:02

Yeah. So, you know, at Clari, we, we kind of go to market by segment. We’re really focused on enterprise and bid market and so, you know, more complex, bigger companies were deployed in the US, you know, as our primary business. And then we, we’re also growing fast, and EMEA out of the UK. And so we support, I think we’re in 23 countries in in Europe right now and continuing to grow. And then we service other parts of the world, either out of the US or out of the MIA, with a strong solution engineering team that’s, you know, really do some of the hardest work in the company, and making sure that we can support these, these really complex customers, we we have a robust customer success team that, you know, is in there with our customers, helping them get value out of the product. And here’s what’s interesting in in sales, and especially in the environment. The last three years, companies change their go to market, not just every 12 months, every six months, every three months. And so they pivot it. We’re there helping them adjust and re instrument so they can continue to run and be nimble. And our customer success teams are really, really focused on helping that, and then on services side, as well as implementing new customers, bringing new use cases in, you know, and so it’s, it’s a lot of integrated teamwork. And then, you know, our product team is right there with us, helping, helping us, you know, solution through new complexities to show up, a great example. And I don’t know how Karan, how much you pay attention to the tech world, but a lot of companies move from, you know, an opportunity based sales process into a consumption or use case based process. And that for us was a big product development, the work that we did in partnership with with our product and engineering team and our customers to be able to support those non opportunity based revenue workflows. And by the way, the data in many of those cases, does not live in the CRM system. It lives in other systems. And so that was a that was just great partnership. And so, you know, it really is a company effort.

Karan Rhodes  22:08

Yeah, it sounds like it definitely. Well, I will say, in your role as Chief Revenue Officer, you probably have to function your, I’ll say your leadership style, just like an octopus, because you have to stay on top of so many different areas of the company, in the different industries, understanding the needs of like, your revenue, I’m sorry, your enterprise level, And, you know, mid market clients, I mean, you’ve got and keep on top of AI, just knowing what kind of the, what’s the trends that are going because it changes every nanosecond. I’m just curious what your personal approach is to leadership. I mean, how do you stay on top of your game?

Kevin Knieriem  22:55

Yeah, well, I think one. And I’m, you know, maybe this a little personal, the role I have. It’s a privilege, because I get a seat, you know, with these executives at these amazing companies, and I get to hear about their go to markets. By the way, I learn a ton because of this, and we take it back, and then we give it back to others. And so I’ve been really fortunate to get to meet these companies at this the executive level that I had, and build a network that’s been trusted. And so for me, that’s been amazing. My leadership style. Think of it as they you know, I work for everybody else. My job is to make their job easier. And so, you know, for that sales rep, I tell each of them, there’s a bargain, right? You do your part. Understand your clarity franchise. Have a business plan for it. Tell me how you want help from the company, and then I will play any part you want in your business. You just have to, you know, make sure that I’m prepared and that you’ve done the right things, and I’ll do whatever it takes. I will remove as many obstacles as I can, and I want to make selling as easy as possible, and so in the same goes for my managers and my VPS. Is at the end of the day, it’s a reverse pyramid. I’m only successful if they are

Karan Rhodes  24:11

Right. I love that. I absolutely love that. And not to make you feel too vulnerable, but we always love to because, you know, the purpose of our podcast is to always, you know, bring out just a piece of advice or two, and keeping it real with our listeners. So if you had one area that you would love, or you try to always constantly improve on and in regards to your approach to leadership, what is that one area that you’re always striving

Kevin Knieriem  24:46

Yeah, maybe a couple dimensions for me personally, I think I’m self aware of myself. You know, maybe you could argue, you know what I’m good at. I know. I’m not good at, and I know what I don’t like to do.

Karan Rhodes  25:03

And those are important to know.

Kevin Knieriem  25:06

I build my leadership team around me, yeah, to support that, right? Allow me to amplify what I’m really good at. Yeah, do things that I’m not good at, you know, and hire experts for those. And then, quite honestly, there’s things that I don’t want to do or drain me, have someone else do that, and that allows me to be to me and operate the way I am. And then the second thing is, I always look for people that have talents outside of their role. It’s been really fun here to experiment with this over the years, to get to see, you know, I hired a gentleman like six and a half years ago to run our SDR team. Turned out he had skills way, way beyond being an SDR leader. He had a pension for demand generation. He was also a very good strategic go to market thinker. He accomplished things very fast, and so just kind of let him run and one influence those other orgs, and then take on that responsibility. And so I’ve got 10s and 20 examples of that here. It’s just so much fun to see people end up in places they never thought they wouldn’t. This person said to me, my career goal is to become do strategy and go to market operations. They’re now a CMO. They found their way into something very different, because that’s actually where their talents were.

Karan Rhodes  26:31

right?

Kevin Knieriem  26:31

Yeah.

Karan Rhodes  26:32

You know, when I was at Microsoft, I still remember we had a person, a leader, that was grew up through the ranks in finance, and, but she had was multifaceted, had a lot of skill sets as well, and, but then it was very easy to change job functions, because Microsoft would always give you an opportunity. And I still remember having a conversation with one of the corporate VPS, and I was like, You should give her, you know, a shot. She has all the basic skill sets. She’s really passionate about sales. I think she’d be amazing account rep. And if it, you know, works out great, if it doesn’t, I’m sure she’ll pivot and find her next best opportunity. And, you know, she ended up moving over to sales and just rose through the ranks to the executive ranks, so similar to your stories, you know, giving people a chance to demonstrate their skill sets that they’ve already shown in different areas of the companies could be, you know, valuable 10 times over, right? If you just give them a shot to be able to do it, recognizing that talent is important.

Kevin Knieriem  27:43

Yeah, that’s a great story.

Karan Rhodes  27:45

Yeah, well, Kevin, I can’t believe time is running a little close, but we have a few more things before we wrap up here. First of all, we always have to ask you our signature question of this the show, and for my newer listeners out there, there, our company did research on high performing leaders and companies all about like, what did they do to best execute in a way that helped them to lead at the top of their game? And there were seven big buckets that of actions that we identified. We call them tactics, and we always ask our guests which of the seven really popped. All seven are equally as important, but you use them at different times and in different ways. But Kevin was so kind to share that strategic decision making really popped for him, and it is what it sounds like. It’s making great decisions yourself or leading a very good decision making process with a team in order to make significant impact. So curious minds want to know, Kevin, why did strategic decision making really resonate with you?

Kevin Knieriem  28:49

Yeah, you know, at the end of the day, it’s, you know, there’s so many decisions we have to make every day, but it’s the strategic ones that actually really matter and make an impact. And on strategic decisions, you might not be the one that’s doing all the groundwork. You might not be the one that is even doing the synthesis of it, but at the end of the day, it’s the ability to take the best work from your team and be able to go, okay, here, here are the three options we have and making a very good, informed decision. And I think the other part about strategic decision making is you can’t languish on it. You need to be able to make a decision, have the plan, execute the plan, and move forward, and then the ability to adjust that plan as you go. And so that one stood out for me, because that’s where the brainpower goes. That’s where the effort goes. The other decisions, the other 1000 that come up every day, honestly, sometimes, if you make 50% of them right, it’s okay, the decision that the strategic ones are the important ones,

Karan Rhodes  29:48

That’s right. You’re so right. And I always share, you know, you always have to make those baby steps, even if you’re uncertain what’s going to happen. But to your point, making the decisions and pivoting. And later, I always say, there’s nothing except murder, short of murder that you can’t course correct or pivot or or make better. So take that chance, and you might be surprised. The world’s not gonna stop

Kevin Knieriem  30:14

Simplified, if anything but murder go.

Karan Rhodes  30:16

We can change. We can redirect

Karan Rhodes  30:20

Well, it has been fantastic talking to you, Kevin. And you know, we always, of course, we’re going to have all information about your extensive bio, links to where to find you, and clarity and all of that in our show notes. But I love to give air time to our guests as well. So if our listeners are curious to learn more about you or clarity or to follow the great work that you all are doing. Where can they find you all?

Kevin Knieriem  30:47

Yeah, so first our website, www.clari.com. Great place to go, very informative. My LinkedIn profile. Kevin Knieriem, you can get access to some of our assets from there and also learn a little bit more about me. If you want to learn about my company. My company, hit me up on LinkedIn or go through our website, and we’ll have somebody follow up with you, and we’d love to see if we can help.

Karan Rhodes  31:09

Fantastic. Well, thanks again, Kevin for the gift of your time today. This was absolutely tremendous. I know that it will be probably one of our top episodes, because I know our profiles that listen, but thank you all for sharing and listeners. If you’re out there and your company could use clarity, you need to definitely check them out. But thank you for your time. Kevin,

Kevin Knieriem  31:31

Thank you, Karan, you have a wonderful rest of your week. Appreciate the opportunity

Karan Rhodes  31:34

Absolutely, and thank you to listeners for the gift of your time as well, because we know that you literally have millions of other podcasts you could be listening to, and we do not take your patronage lightly at all. All that we ask is that you like and subscribe on your favorite podcast platform of choice, and be sure to share the cast our podcast with just one friend, because by doing so, we’ll all better lead at the top of our games. Thanks so much, and see you next week. And that’s our show for today. Thank you for listening to the lead at the top of your game podcast, where we help you lead your seat at any employer, business, or industry in which you choose to play. You can check out the show notes, additional episodes, and bonus resources, and also submit guest recommendations on our website at leadyourgamepodcast.com. You can follow me on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn by searching for the name Karan Rhodes with Karan being spelled K a r a n. And if you like the show, the greatest gift you can give would be to subscribe and leave a rating on your podcast platform of choice. This podcast has been a production of Shockingly Different Leadership, a global consultancy which helps organizations execute their people, talent development, and organizational effectiveness initiatives on an on-demand, project, or contract basis. Huge thanks to our production and editing team for a job well done. Goodbye for now.