The CMO Role Should Be Replaced By CRO. #ChangeMyMind

Brandi Starr [00:00:00]:
Who actually owns revenue in your business? The CMO, the CRO, the CCSO. If you just said all of them, you've got a problem. Because when everyone owns revenue, no one is accountable and your org chart is bleeding dollars because of it. My guests today say the current C suite model is broken. Separate leaders, separate goals, separate metrics. Meanwhile, your buyer's journey is seamless and your internal org is a train wreck. So here's the question.

Brandi Starr [00:00:26]:
Do you need a better team or a new playbook with one clear leader? Let's get into it.

Brandi Starr [00:01:06]:
Hello, hello, hello and welcome to another episode of Revenue Rehab. I am your host, Brandi Starr, and we have another amazing episode for you today. Joining me today are Alan Gold and Paul Peterson. Alan is a fractional CMO who spent decades helping B2B companies align sales and marketing into one unified revenue engine. He's worked across the globe and he's not shy about saying most org charts are built to fail. Paul is a seasoned marketing executive and fractional CMO known for helping leadership teams streamline operations, expose hidden inefficiencies, and especially when sales performance makes deeper marketing issues or mask deeper marketing issues. Gentlemen, welcome to Revenue Rehab. Your session begins now.

Paul Peterson [00:01:58]:
Thanks for having us.

Brandi Starr [00:01:59]:
Awesome. Thanks for joining me. So the common misbelief that we are tackling today is that revenue needs to have multiple owners at the C suite level. That there needs to be a CMO, a CRO, a CCSO, all of the Cs all pulling their weight. And I know you all see it differently. And so Alan, I'm going to start with you. You've got 60 seconds. Convince our audience.

Brandi Starr [00:02:28]:
Why is splitting revenue leadership across roles holding companies back?

Alan Gold [00:02:33]:
Well, thanks very much. Glad to be here. Well, I think that it boils down to this. If everyone's in charge, no one's in charge. Period. End. And so depending on the size of the organization, and that really does dictate ultimately what an organization needs to look like. You have to have one person who's responsible for revenue.

Alan Gold [00:02:53]:
Once you come down a layer within the organization. Having people who specialize in marketing, in rev ops, in product management, in sales, obviously those are important skills to have and they can be C suite titles, but that doesn't mean that they shouldn't roll up to a single. If you forgive the phrase throat to choke for holding the rest of the organization accountable for meeting goals. In my experience, when you don't do that, you have people heading off in all directions at once. You have marketing doing what it thinks its mission is to generate revenue. You have the direct sales team leaders heading off in another direction. You have any channel management that you have heading off, and you have a third direction. And then you come together for staff meetings and everybody points fingers at everyone else.

Alan Gold [00:03:47]:
And so if the board says, what's my number and what's my forecast? How do you roll that together? If you have lots of people all raising their hands to sing via the version of the.

Brandi Starr [00:03:57]:
All right, and so before I react to that, Paul, tell us, you know, what's. What are some of the hidden costs? What are your perspectives? Why are these separate lanes at the executive level challenging?

Paul Peterson [00:04:10]:
So I think Alan hit the nail on the head. Not only is it you need to have one throat to choke, but you also need to have one metric that everyone is following. When you have all these multiple roles like CMO and CCSO and cso, all of them have their own individual metrics. Marketing might be looking at impressions and followers, but sales might be looking at leads and conversion rates. And customer service is going to be looking at what kind of ratings are we getting on Google reviews. And while they're all important, none of those are money. And that's the important thing for any business is to focus on that bottom line. So having that chief revenue officer is that person who can unify all of those metrics and help tie all of those individual metrics into money.

Paul Peterson [00:04:59]:
So, you know, saying, yes, our, you know, average close rate is 25%, 30%. That would equate to this much revenue. Or we can say, yes, marketing, you generated this many leads, but if you generate this many more leads, that will contribute this much money to the bottom line. So having that CRO maintain that focus on revenue, on money, is going to be a great way to unify all of these different. All of the groups that have, you know, very different expertise but all need to be pulling towards the same goal.

Brandi Starr [00:05:31]:
And I agree wholeheartedly. You know, I'm a bit biased. We wrote the book CMO to CRO, so clearly I believe in this. But I want to put myself in the shoes of the naysayers. And because I hear this, you know, this debate has been a heated one for a number of years. And one of the first arguments that I hear here is that There seems to be a universal agreement in that we need to have the 1 number and that number has to be revenue. The argument that I hear some make is that if we give each leader the same metrics to be accountable for, so instead of sending everybody in all these different directions, if we still have one number but multiple people, it accomplishes the same thing. I'd love to hear your reactions, Alan, I'll start with you.

Alan Gold [00:06:25]:
Okay, well I think that's a lot of BS to be blunt, because I think it overly complicates things and I think that some of that comes from. I'll take a step back. Some of that comes from the old adage that we all would know in marketing. Whenever a CMO or back then just the VP of marketing wound up reporting to an SVP of marketing and sales, it was always sales plus marketing equals sales. Because they always took someone with a numbers mindset, pop them into that role and it was all about short term gains, was all about quarter, quarterly quotas, monthly quotas and hitting numbers. And long term strategy always wound up being, well, we'll get to that. You know, it was really about planning things out three months in advance. And that's not strategy, that's just tactics laid out on a spreadsheet.

Alan Gold [00:07:19]:
So I think that having lots and lots of people even with one number doesn't mean that you have a unified way of approaching the problem. That means again everyone can still go off and lean into their particular skill sets. But I think the caveat to this in my opinion is you have to look at the CR role differently then we would have looked at it in the previous iteration of leadership in a company. This is not a classic VP of sales that came out of IBM, that came out of a consultancy, that came out of some other large company whose focus is running a bunch of people who are very coin operated, which is fine. I mean you need that in sales. But it has to be someone that has much more of a, a COO or even a CEO mindset. Someone who has an understanding of the broader strategic goals, someone who's trained and understands strategy, who can then pull the levers of the team below him or her to be able to drive all of these things together in harmony. And if you don't have them working together, you just spend an awful lot of money with people stepping all over each other doing the same thing, sometimes approaching the same client, which also happens sometimes with very different approaches.

Alan Gold [00:08:39]:
And all that does is confuse me.

Brandi Starr [00:08:40]:
Hey Paul, anything you want to add there?

Paul Peterson [00:08:43]:
Yeah, I think that Having the one number is fine so long as everybody knows how to relate to it. So we talked about having that sales plus marketing equals sales because it was all about the revenue. It was all about the money. I think marketing needs to take ownership for that because marketing never used to speak the language of money. Marketing used to focus on only its own metrics, and they never bothered to tie it to revenue. And until they started doing that, and that's only happened in the past, say, 10 years that marketing has learned, you know, to do this. I used to joke that, you know, when the, when the C suite all gets together, the chief operations officer may say, hey, I need $10,000 to buy this machine that increases our productivity by 50%. That's great.

Paul Peterson [00:09:27]:
Everyone gets that. When the marketing guy says, I want $10,000 to do a direct mail campaign that increases unaided brand recognition by 45%. I'm a marketing guy and I don't care. But if I, if I instead walk in and say, hey, I want $10,000 to go to this trade show, there'll be 50,000 people there. If we get 10% of those people to come by our booth, that's 500 people. If half of them give us their business cards, that's 250 leads. Now, of those 250 leads, if we close 10% of those leads at an average rate of 30% and an average sale of 15, 5, then that turns our revenue into X. Now can I.

Paul Peterson [00:10:06]:
They'll write that check all day long. So once marketing learns how to speak the language of money and realizes how their activities tie to revenue, then marketing can contribute a lot more. The same thing is true of customer service. When they can figure out, okay, by increasing my Google reviews, I make it easier for marketing to generate leads, which makes it easier for sales to close. But ultimately someone has to be able to tie all of that into that one number. And that's really that CRO who can tie everything into revenue. That's the common denominator.

Brandi Starr [00:10:37]:
Okay, And I agree. I think where, it's where people hear this argument and they start to take what you're saying and draw it back to different products problems. So for example, I have heard the argument that you don't need a single leader of revenue. You need a better revops team who can show all of these different things and help those leaders to understand their impact, making each of the C suite leaders better at what they're doing and that it's more about alignment and not about the org structure. Being a single person that Owns things end to end. This time, Paul, I'll let you start. What are your thoughts in thinking about, like, can we just get better at how we're tracking and measuring and communicating and still let everybody do what they've been doing?

Paul Peterson [00:11:34]:
Challenge with that is, if everybody is doing their own thing, then there's nobody in charge. And when there's no one in charge and no one accountable, then it's hard to get everybody to align because everybody is focused solely on their own area. That's why that chief revenue officer is so key, is because that's going to be the one person that is responsible whose neck is on the line. If we just say, oh, everybody get better, then it can degrade into a whole lot of finger pointing. Sales can say, yeah, well, marketing's leads are weak. And marketing can say, yeah, well, sales isn't closing, you know, or using the tools that we developed. And customer service is saying, we don't even do anything with sales. We don't get involved until after sales are over.

Paul Peterson [00:12:14]:
So everybody is pointing at everybody else. And no one takes accountability. When you have that chief revenue officer, the accountability has to stop with them. And they're the ones that can then say, okay, we do have a problem, and it's a sales problem. And now go to whoever's in charge of the sales organization and say, fix it or no, we have a problem.

Alan Gold [00:12:33]:
And.

Paul Peterson [00:12:34]:
And it's a marketing problem. And you go to your chief marketing officer and you say, fix it, because my neck is on the line now yours is, too. And now there's accountability.

Brandi Starr [00:12:43]:
Yeah. And I think one of the other things that I've heard I had early in revenue rehab, I'm drawing a blank on the episode, but I interviewed Helen Baptiste when she was the COO at Path Factory. Her title was coo, but it essentially, she owned all of revenue and a couple other functions. And one of the things that she said that was a huge benefit because she was one who said, I never really wanted to move into this role, you know, kind of happened. And that it was exactly what you were talking about, Paul, in that when those tough decisions have to be made, when it's one person making it, there is no bias. If there was a situation of what really needs to happen is we need not to hire any more salespeople. We need to put that money over here, or we need to pull some money out of marketing because we need more salespeople. It's like there's not that battle of sales saying to the CFO like, hey, give me Some of marketing's budget for more salespeople and marketing saying, no, I need that budget.

Brandi Starr [00:13:50]:
It is the one person who is able to objectively look at where resources are, where the breakdown is and what to do. Alan, any thoughts on that?

Alan Gold [00:14:01]:
Yeah, I do. I think. Paul, I couldn't agree more with your comments. I look at it a different way. What can you point to outside of the corporate marketing and sales world where everybody doing their own thing, even working with the same numbers and information works? Can you imagine a building going up and not having a general contractor in charge, making sure that things are going well? Can you imagine being in surgery, God help you, and not having one person, the primary surgeon, telling everyone what else to do? And I think that, that, I mean on a ship, I mean what are you going to have everybody stand around and pull sales in the direction that they think it's supposed to go? You'll go in circles or worse. And you know, I think that the role of sales and marketing and rev ops and all the things that are necessary now to close a deal, it's not a zero sum game. So there's not a takeaway from one role if it's not being diffused into others. You have to have one person who ultimately is the decider, as Paul said, and they have to take responsibility for coordinating whatever gets done at the execution levels, however senior or junior those people may be.

Brandi Starr [00:15:16]:
Yeah, and I do think that that is true and that is such a great point. I really had not thought about that in that there is always a single point of accountability for most things that just doesn't seem to exist with revenue. I want to shift gears a little bit because there's a piece of this argument that I think gets ignored, not discussed as often and that is some of the personal fear and motivations because I think that many people who are against a single revenue leader that their challenges are more personal, they're worried about their own careers. I have heard people say so are you just saying that marketing doesn't have the ability to get to the C level? Or I have to want to be able to run all of these departments in, in order to move up past a certain level? Or what if I don't have sales experience or don't want to work? You know, there's this, this, I think feel like there's this fear and personal challenge. There's a little bit of the old CROs are historically promoted salespeople and you know, I've heard multiple CMOs say that have said make me report into a CRO and I quit. Like, talk to me and I'll let whoever wants to start talk to me about some of those personal challenges that I think people are thinking. But nobody wants to say the quiet part out loud.

Alan Gold [00:16:51]:
Well, you know, I'll jump in. First of all, I have said those exact words more than once. And that's because typically they are just a promoted sales guy who wouldn't know how to spell marketing if you spelled it out in very large print and sounded it out slowly. But that's changing. I mean, that's a very cynical kind of view in the world. And I also think that it's also very old thinking from a hierarchical perspective that there's this latter progression of moving up a cmo. Let me say it a little differently. In a lot of companies, especially as you get bigger, you wind up in matrix organizations.

Alan Gold [00:17:32]:
The whole notion of a matrix organization is to have dotted line reporting and to have straight line reporting, but it takes on the idea that you're working together as a team to solve a specific set of problems. So I think for the people who get very nervous about either being career limited or sort of shoved to the side, I think frankly there's a certain insecurity that they need to kind of get over and look at a role of a modern CRO role. And I'll be the first one to say it's still evolving. God knows it's still very heavily the dude that ran sales or the woman that ran sales. But in forward thinking companies you've got to have that much more strategic mindset. And I'm starting to see that change. And that's what you should be setting your sights on as the person reporting to them is making sure you've got those skill sets. Because that's the more important way of organizing a business to be effective.

Paul Peterson [00:18:33]:
You know, it's, it's very similar to anybody who wants to ascend to the level of a CEO. If you come up through the ranks as, let's say a cfo, and now you want to make that change to the CEO, you're going to have to understand operations, you're going to have to understand hr, you're going to have to understand sales and marketing. So you need to understand or learn more outside of your role if you want to progress. I think that's where a lot of the fear is. A lot of people who have progressed to the pinnacle of the sales role or the pinnacle of the marketing role think this is it, I've made it and I'm good. But what they don't, you know, what they haven't been ready to accept yet is if I want to progress, I need to actually get good at what my counterpart is doing. So if you're, you know, at the top of the sales game, if you don't understand everything about how the sales organization works, you're not going to be an effective CRO. If you're at the top of the sales game and you don't understand how customer service fits into the puzzle, you're not qualified.

Paul Peterson [00:19:37]:
So all of these people who may be qualified to be have a C in their title at the marketing or customer service or sales level. They really don't have the qualifications to have to be that Chief Revenue officer unless they understand all of those pieces together just the same as a CEO has to understand all of the pieces that report into him or her.

Brandi Starr [00:19:57]:
And I think you just hit on a really key point because once you reach the C suite, that C really means that your accountability is to the business. That becomes the level where you are no longer just accountable to the function. So when you're, you know, VP of marketing, SVP of marketing, yes, you're thinking about the business, but you're true your swim lane, your accountability is more narrow. Once you get to the C level, it's like you have a focus which is CFO is focused on the money, CEO, you know, et cetera. But your accountability is to the business. And there is an expectation that you. Exactly what you said, Paul, that you are going to understand how all of the things are impacted. And I just had a conversation with someone that runs facility operations for a manufacturing company.

Brandi Starr [00:21:02]:
And the manufacturing company, this particular facility, they have the marketing team in place and the marketing team does all the boards, like, you know, if you want to get carpet or tile or whatever, you know, they put together all the things for these big commercial projects. Well, one of the things that they recognize was the CMO really had no understanding of how facility operations worked. And there were so many more ways that the facilities ops people could help to support revenue in how quickly they can turn around, request what they are able to provide, et cetera. And so this is one of those things where this organization has someone at the top with a C level title who is still acting and thinking like a VP because they are only focused on their silo.

Paul Peterson [00:21:55]:
And.

Brandi Starr [00:21:55]:
And so I feel like this is what I see. A lot of people have ascended. You know, it's always, I say that dramatically, they have ascended to the C suite, but they have never had that C Suite mindset adjustment. Have you guys seen the same thing?

Alan Gold [00:22:12]:
Yeah, I think, I think so. What's the PETA principle? You know, you get, you get promoted to your level of incompetence. And it, you know, and I, it was from a different generation. I don't adhere. I like the word incompetence, but, you know, I don't think anybody on this podcast would be a good candidate to run General Motors. It's a different set of skills, a different set of problems. And you're so far, on the one hand, you're so far from seeing the rain hit the ground, you have no idea what's really going on. At the same time, you're accountable for every single person on every single line, regardless of where they are in the work.

Alan Gold [00:22:49]:
So it's a very different set of skills that you need to have. And it brings me to a point that a little bit tangential, but I think it's relevant to the conversation. And that is, it's been a long time since we in the US and in companies of really any size put a lot of value and effort into teaching people how to be managers. And I can remember one of my many mentors over the years used to tell me said, you know, the best way to ruin your top sales guy? The guy who's been hitting 2 or 300% of quota A year, Promote him, you know, make him ahead of sales, you'll kill him. He doesn't know how to manage people. He has no patience, or she has no patience. And what made them really good at what they did was that, you know, and it's a very different set of skills. It requires a certain management capability, a certain personality, a certain broadness of view.

Alan Gold [00:23:42]:
That is, to your point earlier, that C suite, you know, accountability to the business and not an individual function, you've got to be able to look across all that and you don't just wake up being like that. You know, founders think, I mean, look what happens in startups right now I'm getting really tangent, but I mean, look, look at founders. I mean, what's the best way to destroy a startup is not finding a way to reel the founder in because he or she has found the greatest things to slice bread, built the UI the way they want it to work, and all you have to do is follow the dots, right? And everybody wants to buy and then they go out, get some false positives because they've been emoting and the energy carries people along and they get stuff in there and the company never scales, they blow through money. I've seen it a dozen times over. You read about it everywhere. And what's the missing gap making? Having the sense to bring people in who are specialists in their area of responsibility and bringing in a CEO or a COO or whatever the right level is for that size business to manage things that's focusing on the business itself. And so all of these things knock together in the same place, and it's the same gap.

Paul Peterson [00:25:03]:
You know, two things. One, really quickly, I understand what you're talking about with the promote the sales guy, because I started my career as a sales guy and I wanted to, you know, progress to that management level, but I never got the shot because I wasn't the top sales guy. And I asked my boss, I was like, what is it about a top sales rep that makes them qualified to manage? And he told me, absolutely nothing. But since we have nothing else to go on, that's what we're using. So I get it. And that was kind of my reason for getting out of sales and into marketing in the first place. But to see if I can kind of loop this all back for us. You know, you were talking about how when you have different sizes of organizations, when you have a smaller organization and people have to wear more hats, you almost naturally fall into having a CRO.

Paul Peterson [00:25:51]:
They might not be called that, but they are because, oh, shoot, one person's going to have to be in charge of the sales and the marketing, and now they're. They can see both pieces. Now when you get into a larger organization, you know, like a General Motors or, you know, something like that, then all of a sudden the role is too big for one person. And now you need to parse that out. And that kind of gets into what you're talking about, you know, with the startup and the founder. Yes. When you're small, the founder can have all of the different hats, but the larger the organization gets, the more that founder is going to have to delegate and say, I'm not going to be in charge of finance anymore. This person's going to be the cfo.

Paul Peterson [00:26:30]:
I'm not going to be in charge of operations anymore. This is going to be the coo. I'm going to retain responsibility for vision, which is hopefully what the founder started the business for in the first place. But that's kind of the, you know, the interesting thing. So now as the company gets bigger and everything gets more specialized, everything falls into its own silo. The challenge here is that this is something that it's a silo that needs to Encompass other silos. That Chief Revenue officer, it's kind of like that founder that wants to be in charge of everything. You can't.

Paul Peterson [00:27:04]:
You're going to need a CMO to focus on the marketing piece. You're going to need the Chief Sales officer to focus on the sales piece and the customer service person. But you're going to provide that vision the same way that the CEO provides the vision across all the other divisions.

Brandi Starr [00:27:17]:
So.

Paul Peterson [00:27:17]:
So it's kind of interesting how as the company gets larger, it kind of naturally progresses through this. We have a CRO. We don't have a CRO. We need a CRO again.

Alan Gold [00:27:28]:
Yeah, that's well said.

Brandi Starr [00:27:30]:
I think that's a perfect segue. We have explored the issue. Let's leave everyone with some advice to quick to fix it. So welcome to the lightning round. Quick answers only. So I'm gonna go back and forth. I'm gonna start with you. What is the first sign that a company is facing a C suite being too big problem, but hasn't really named it yet?

Alan Gold [00:27:58]:
The CEO can't get a straight answer to what the future looks like and what the revenue stream is for the next quarter. Okay.

Brandi Starr [00:28:07]:
And Paul, what? One mindset shift unlocks progress.

Paul Peterson [00:28:12]:
It's that mindset of it's delegation, so figuring out who's in charge of what, but then also making sure that you have someone in charge and being able to loop those three things together. Marketing, revenue, sales, customer service, they all have to come together. That's the mind shift. Is that all three of those you have to see, they all work together, so one person has to be in charge of them.

Brandi Starr [00:28:35]:
All right, Allan, what's one common trap leaders fall into when trying to solve this?

Alan Gold [00:28:40]:
Just one. Following what they've done before. Following everything exactly the same path they've done before. Not taking a step back and saying, is this the right decision to make and these are the right people to do the right job for the things that we need to accomplish today in today's market.

Brandi Starr [00:28:57]:
All right, and Paul, what is the most underrated move that actually works to fix the this fast?

Paul Peterson [00:29:04]:
It's going back to the data. So it's going back to analyzing what is the sales process, all the way from prospect to booked revenue, and then analyzing the data points there. And if you ask your CRM, it'll tell you, what's my close rate, what's my cost per lead? What's my average cost of marketing? And that will help you figure out where do I need to focus my attention? And that will hopefully tell you I need someone who's asking that question every day.

Brandi Starr [00:29:33]:
Perfect answer. Great way to wrap up. And so before we go, let's have a little fun. What is one book, podcast or tech tool that has been a game changer for your business lately? Paul, I'll start with you.

Paul Peterson [00:29:46]:
It's not really related to what we've been talking about, but the book that really has changed my perspective is called the AI Driven Leader by Jeff Wood. It kind of explains how AI is more than just an answer machine. It's not a matter of, hey, write me an email, or hey, design my webpage. The real power of AI is in using it as a thought partner and being able to say, if we do this, what are the ramifications? And how might this affect other systems? And how does all of this data fit together when there's so much of it that one person can't sift through it? That's the value of AI. It's not just, hey, do my work for me, it's, hey, be a thought partner with me.

Brandi Starr [00:30:29]:
That book has come up so many times in so many different contexts. I have got to put it in my cart and read that one. Alan, what about you?

Alan Gold [00:30:38]:
Well, mine actually, indirectly is a. Is a counter to. That is counter to AI, and it's a book that I keep by my side. It's called the Death of Expertise by Tom Nichols, and it was written a handful of years ago. But it speaks to the issue of how the value of expertise and the reaching out for people who are experts has become increasingly diminished in an age of unlimited access to data. I won't say information or accurate information, and the inability to assimilate and to balance and weigh it. And to me, why it keeps coming up is. I mean, I use AI constantly.

Alan Gold [00:31:19]:
AI is the greatest thing ever invented in many ways, for those of us who need information and want ideas. But if you can't sift it, if you can't separate, we're on a podcast. So I'll say it this way. The fly poop from the pepper. It's very difficult to know what to do with that. And the whole notion behind that is that experts are important. People who actually know something will have value and still have value. And you should let people who understand these things provide input.

Alan Gold [00:31:51]:
The decisions that you make, love, how.

Brandi Starr [00:31:53]:
Yin and yang those are, those feel like two books that we should all read back to back in that the human expertise and your experience is really important, and you can also really effectively leverage AI. And I do think, think this AI versus human becomes this either or. And I feel like it's not either or, it's both.

Alan Gold [00:32:19]:
Not at all.

Paul Peterson [00:32:20]:
It's not an or conversation. It's an and conversation.

Brandi Starr [00:32:22]:
Yes. And I think these are perfect books that are representative of the fact that it is an and conversation. Well, gentlemen, thank you so much, but that is our time for today. So, Alan, tell me, where can our guests connect with you?

Alan Gold [00:32:40]:
Well, you can connect with me on LinkedIn. I'm easily found and feel free to subscribe to my newsletter. I try to write once a week on topics that are mildly interesting to the people. And if I could just. And you can certainly reach me at Tech CXO as well. And if I could just add one quick unscripted comment. Always be polite to your AI because when the revolution comes, I want them to say, leave him alone. He was okay.

Alan Gold [00:33:09]:
He always said please and thank you.

Paul Peterson [00:33:11]:
I, for one, welcome our AI overlords.

Brandi Starr [00:33:14]:
Yes, I am the same, but I saw a stat at how expensive and like, resource consuming it is when we are saying please and thank you. And I'm like, I'm still gonna err on the side of being friendly to the machine.

Alan Gold [00:33:32]:
Absolutely. I asked my AI about that and it said, don't bother. You should be nice to everybody, including AI.

Brandi Starr [00:33:37]:
There we go. Paul, what about you? How can our audience connect with you?

Paul Peterson [00:33:41]:
LinkedIn is going to be a great way to do it. So there's a bunch of Paul Petersons out there, but I'm Paul Peterson, 52, so if you look for me on LinkedIn, I'm an open networker. Just say, hey, heard you on the podcast and would love to connect. Chances are I would love to connect.

Brandi Starr [00:33:57]:
Perfect. I will make sure that we link to both your LinkedIns and your website in our show notes. So wherever you are listening or watching this podcast, check the show notes to connect with. Paul and Alan, thank you both so, so much for joining me.

Paul Peterson [00:34:13]:
Thanks very much for having us.

Brandi Starr [00:34:14]:
It was a pleasure and thanks everyone for joining us. I hope you have enjoyed our conversation. I can't believe we're at the end. Until next time, bye. Bye.