What Technical Companies Keep Getting Wrong About Growth

Richard Byrd

All right, welcome to Above the Clouds. Today we have a very special episode — and I always say that, but this time it really is. We're flipping the script. Usually I'm the guy asking all the questions, and today I'm going to have the fastballs fired at me. They're going to be fired by Cindi Boudreaux, our head of business development for BlueByrd, and Shannon Carlson, our managing partner and chief operating officer. Welcome to the podcast, guys.

Cindi Boudreaux

Thank you. Glad to be here. I've seen you record it before but I've never been on it, so I'm honored.

Richard Byrd

Well, be nice to me with these questions. No gotchas, no fastballs — I don't need that in my life right now.

Shannon Carlson

I never agreed to go easy on you.

Richard Byrd

We never do. That's why we're letting you out of your cage, Shannon. Usually you're in the salt mines because somebody's got to do all the work while I'm out doing podcasts.

Cindi Boudreaux

Shaking babies and kissing hands, like you always say.

Richard Byrd

That's what I do. The office might be on fire right now without you there, but we'll see if it's still standing when we get back. It's okay — as long as the books aren't in the building, we'll be good.

All right, the reason we're here is because I wrote a book. It's called The Best Kept Secret: What Technical Companies Keep Getting Wrong About Growth. Feel free to ask away and let's talk about it.

Cindi Boudreaux

First of all, congratulations. It's no easy feat to write a book, and I'm very proud of you as your business partner. I was excited when you told me you were starting to write one — I know you have so much wisdom from over the years. Why don't we start by you telling us what inspired you, how long it took, and give us the backstory?

Richard Byrd

Well, it turns out it took me about thirty years to write this book. Turns out I'm not a very good writer and I'm a slow learner. Seriously though, I did start it about a year ago and it took a long time. I kept writing it and thinking, I don't like this — I'd write a few chapters and feel like it wasn't really what I was trying to do, so I kept rewriting it. It was really a Saturday project for me for about a year. I'm an early bird in our house and no one else is, so I'd get up early and write before everybody woke up. I actually wrote in the acknowledgments that I had to apologize to my family because I was writing it while I was talking to them and not really paying attention to what they said.

What I wanted to achieve — and you know this, Shannon — is that we see a lot of the same issues happen over and over, across industries, across company sizes. There are a lot of B2C marketing books out there, but not a lot of B2B marketing books. So I took the best practices and what we've learned over the years and put it in book format. You know, when you get kicked in the face by the same boot enough times, you tend to learn some things.

Cindi Boudreaux

Yeah, it makes total sense. Was there a defining moment, something that happened with a client, that made you say now is the time?

Richard Byrd

Not anything particular with a client, per se. I was an empty nester and I thought — now's the right time. I've thought about writing a book for a long time, and it just kind of sits in your head until one day you go, all right, I'm just going to start it. I think that's the hardest part with any project like that — actually getting started. We have busy lives, it's always busy at work. Throwing something new on like writing a book was always, I'll do it next year. But I'm glad I finally did it. It felt really good.

I will warn anyone out there thinking about writing a book: once you finish writing it, there are still two big chunks of work left. You have to figure out how to get it published, and then you have to promote it. So it's really three jobs. And you can actually start the promotion before you're finished writing.

Cindi Boudreaux

That's great advice. I'm really excited to see what technical leaders take from this. We know they may not read marketing blogs or go to marketing conferences, but a lot of them do read business books. This is a great way to get the word out on commercialization and how a lot of companies fail commercially — for reasons that we believe can be fixed. This is something we wish we could hand to everybody.

Richard Byrd

Yeah. And I wanted the book to be short enough because all our clients are super busy. I wanted it to be something they could read on a plane or over a weekend and get the full blueprint for how to get themselves ready commercially. Because as you mentioned, it's fixable — you just have to recognize that there are issues and challenges ahead of you.

Shannon Carlson

You mentioned wanting a book focused on B2B. Throughout my career I've looked for books focused on B2B marketing and sales, and it's really difficult to find. It's either B2C marketing or B2B SaaS. What I'm finding in the field — having had an advance copy and helping you get it out to potential clients — is that it's not marketing and sales people who are most drawn to it. Who did you actually write the book for?

Richard Byrd

That's a good question. I really wrote it for technical leaders of all sorts. A lot of times CEOs are the ones who ultimately feel the pressure when they hit growth plateaus. They've engineered really awesome products, built a good team, built a good culture — and then they hit a growth slump and think, maybe we can sell our way out of it. They hire some salespeople, the trajectory doesn't go up like they expected, and this book is really for them. But it's also for the commercial leaders in those organizations, because those are the people the CEO looks at and says, where are the numbers? What happened to that deal you said was going to close? Where are the leads? Those people get pushed hard to find answers.

Shannon Carlson

That's exactly who I'm finding. It's the CEOs, the founders, the commercial leaders inside technical organizations who have figured out that things aren't clicking commercially, and they can't diagnose what's going on. They know everything is relationship-driven and they're not growing. The answer isn't always to throw more salespeople at it or try different marketing tactics.

Cindi Boudreaux

So I'm sure everyone would be curious to know — what actually is the best kept secret?

Richard Byrd

That's a good question, because the book doesn't actually have a best kept secret in it. What the title refers to is a term we use in marketing for companies that have built something really great and then forget to tell the market about it. They think their offerings are so awesome that they're going to make a gazillion dollars — but they forget to tell the market. So they become the best kept secret. These are companies that can't grow because they haven't communicated who they are, what they're about, and why it's valuable. If you don't communicate those things, people won't buy what you're selling.

Shannon Carlson

And I'd add — the best kept secret is that most of your competitors are making the same fixable mistakes. The company that closes that commercial gap first doesn't just grow. It dominates the market.

Richard Byrd

That's a great point. There are higher stakes than just growing. If you're not growing, you're dying. And if you let somebody else jump out there and steal your thunder, that could put your company in real jeopardy. We've seen it happen. Clients come to us saying these other guys are eating our lunch and we can't understand it — their technology isn't as good. And it's because those other guys are out there talking to customers every day. Including your customers.

Cindi Boudreaux

They're also talking to customers with the right message. A lot of companies we see have built really sophisticated products, but the growth engine hasn't evolved the same way. They're dependent on founder relationships, institutional knowledge, and random acts of selling. The book gives technical leaders a framework to apply the same rigor to their commercial engine that they've been applying to their engineering and product development.

Richard Byrd

Exactly. And I've had clients say, we can't talk about that — that's our secret sauce. But the more you hold that in, the more market share you're losing.

Cindi Boudreaux

A lot of times their secret sauce is just mustard, mayonnaise, and ketchup mixed together.

Richard Byrd

Which is actually a great combo.

Shannon Carlson

I'm out doing some of the lead work with the book. If I were telling a potential client what it's about in one sentence, what would I say?

Richard Byrd

I'd probably say it's about why brilliant technology doesn't sell itself — and what to do to fix it. I'm an oversimplifier, so that's a simple answer. But I'd also say it's a playbook for technical leaders who feel like they've made something great but are leaving money on the table — because they haven't built their commercial engine to match the rigor with which they built their engineering engine.

Shannon Carlson

The phrase that gets the best reaction for me is: we help technical teams sell complex products and solutions to complicated organizations. That's exactly where a lot of these technical companies get stuck. The buying market has changed, their technology is strong, but they can't compete — large buying committees, multiple stakeholders, trying to get messaging right for people who aren't engineers.

Cindi Boudreaux

It's the most challenging market right now — not just because of short-term economic pain, but because of the long-term structural changes that have made it very difficult to sell. The people who are figuring it out are going to be the real winners. The ones who keep doing things the old way are going to fall farther and farther behind.

Shannon Carlson

Let's get into the ideas. The first big concept is the Innovation Blind Spot. What is it, and why is it so costly for technical companies?

Richard Byrd

It goes back to what we were talking about — the dangerous assumption that if you build the best mousetrap, people are going to line up and buy it. Field of Dreams: if you build it, they will come. That's only true in baseball movies.

Most of our clients are engineers, doctors, people from a STEM background who have reluctantly ended up in a marketing or CEO role and are now responsible for commercial growth. The curse of knowledge is what makes this so fascinating. This is a known psychological trap that all humans suffer from — once you know something, it's very hard to remember what it was like before you knew it. You've been talking about your product in your organization, explaining it over and over to a small group of customers, and now you think, doesn't everybody know this? But the people you're explaining it to didn't hear you the first hundred times. And the people who did hear it a hundred times may still need to hear it a different way.

What happens is they explain three levels too deep on the first go-round, and the customer walks away going, I don't get it. And the presenter goes, I don't understand why they don't get it — they seem smart. As I say in the book, a confused mind never buys. The customer walks away thinking it sounds like a science project — maybe it's not something we have time to get involved in.

Shannon Carlson

I've walked into companies where the engineering team couldn't explain what the product did in plain language, and they'd been selling it for five years. The hardest part about being a marketing leader in those instances is convincing the technical team that simplifying the message isn't dumbing it down. It's just making it so your audience can understand it. When you have different buying groups who speak different languages — procurement is about money, engineers want technical details — you have to communicate differently. And the level matters too: are they managers, directors, executives, analysts?

Richard Byrd

One of the things that really opened my eyes early in my career was a book called Obvious Adams by Robert Updegraff. It's about a guy who wasn't the smartest person in the room, but he was just curious. He would go into places, ask lots of questions, and he would see what was obvious that others had stopped seeing. I read it when I was working for a big oil and gas services company — there were PhDs everywhere, the smartest people I'd ever been around. And I realized I didn't have to be the smartest guy in the room — that was never going to happen at that company. But I could ask the right questions. Just because they were PhDs on the subject didn't mean the people they were selling to were equally as smart.

I had an engineer tell me he wasn't going to explain it like I was a ten-year-old because he'd never sell it to a ten-year-old. And I said, have you met many procurement people? Because the CEO of the company you're selling to is not going to know this stuff the way you do.

Cindi Boudreaux

I'm out doing a lot of networking and talking to these technical people, and sometimes I don't understand anything they're talking about — but I know it's really cool. When you can make that flip and understand what the product delivers and what the benefit actually is, that's where the selling happens.

Cindi Boudreaux

You've talked before about a statement you hear a lot from technical founders — we don't need marketing, we don't need help with sales, the product sells itself. What do you say when someone tells you that?

Richard Byrd

I say, let me see your pipeline. Because I haven't seen too many products that really do sell themselves. Product-market fit is a real thing, and you have to have a good product. But today, a great product is kind of table stakes. There are not too many companies making terrible products that stay in business very long. So if you're competing against someone, they've probably got a pretty good product too. Their technology is not garbage. Their employees are not idiots. So how are you going to differentiate?

If somebody says the product sells itself, they probably don't have a CRM and they probably don't have an active pipeline they're really monitoring. I also think about the different stages in a company's life. At the beginning, a founder seller can make the phone ring because they know a lot of people. But that's not going to scale the company. We've got to sell to strangers. If you're ready to scale and hit your growth ambitions, you're going to have to quit being the best kept secret.

Shannon Carlson

And products that sell themselves is usually more of a B2C thing versus B2B. In B2C, you can infer what something is for. In B2B, there are details, specs, case studies, supporting evidence needed. And B2B purchases are a lot more expensive — most of the B2B sales we work with can be in the millions. It takes a lot more when the price is a lot higher.

Richard Byrd

A lot more touch points, a lot more people to convince. In B2B you're convincing six to eight stakeholders on average — I can't convince six to eight people where to go for lunch. The complexity goes up infinitely with those buying patterns, and then you mix in a long sales cycle on top of that. Very challenging for a product to sell itself.

Shannon Carlson

Let's shift gears from the product to the people who sell them. You talk in the book about two different salespeople and the behaviors that make someone successful. Can you paint that picture?

Richard Byrd

I reference Tom and Maria in the book. Tom is an old school smiling and dialing guy — calling people and saying, hey, let me sell you my software. Maria is somebody backed by account-based marketing. She knows exactly what accounts they're going after. She knows those companies, knows their pain points, has been looking for a window of opportunity. Those companies have already been engaging with her content. So she picks up the phone and she's not saying, hi, I'm here to sell you software. She's saying, hey, I noticed one of your colleagues downloaded our white paper — knowing you have a big merger coming up, is now a good time to spend thirty minutes to see if we might be able to help? That's a very different conversation than 'do you want to buy something from me?'

Our friend Ken Proctor has a term: commission breath. Tom is ridden with it. You can smell it from a mile away.

Shannon Carlson

The buying process has gotten so much more complex in the last decade. How have you seen it change?

Richard Byrd

A couple of things have changed and are continuing to get worse, not better. One is the number of buyers involved in an average B2B deal — the last number I saw was six to eight, and it's probably going higher. That's a big challenge. The other is that sales cycles are getting longer because there are more people involved, so it takes longer to convince everyone to say yes — or at least convince some people not to say no. That's sometimes the best you can do.

And technology has gotten more complicated. You see a lot of salespeople with their nose in Salesforce all day doing admin work instead of getting out there and talking to customers. One of the things we really try to do when we work with clients is simplify the technology piece so they can focus on what really matters.

Shannon Carlson

I deal with that firsthand. One of our clients — the sales leader's goal was to reduce the amount of time his team spent in HubSpot. He wanted them out there selling. The more we can simplify that, provide the workflows, automate as much as possible — that's critical.

Cindi Boudreaux

You describe the B2B buying process as a gauntlet. That's a strong word. What's actually happening out there?

Richard Byrd

It's a strong word because I've seen it kill so many deals. Not only do you have to convince six to eight people to agree on something, but a lot of times those people have competing goals and interests. What's going to make one person look like a star might make someone else look stupid, or feel threatened, or feel like their territory is being encroached on. In big organizations, that automatic no can happen very easily.

Let me give you a case study. We were working with a client that sold ocean bottom nodes for seismic. They thought they knew their entire buying center — reservoir engineers, asset managers, production guys, procurement. We built their messaging, got it all ready, the sales team brought it to market, thought they had a deal, high fives all around — and then the deal died. We went to find out what happened. The sales leader was in Scotland, in the North Sea. He took their champion out for coffee. The champion said: everyone really liked your solution. Best technical solution out there. You're the right people to do it. The only problem is our safety guy questioned your safety record.

So they came back and someone in the room said, does he know we're the only company that can work around a certain major client's rigs at night? Nobody even knew that was the case — it was locked inside the company. We put together a quick white paper and a flyer about their safety record, armed the salesperson, the champion handed it to the safety person — and that one thing unlocked a tens-of-millions of dollars deal that they're still working today. All of that just to show: someone can creep into your buying committee that you didn't even consider, and the next thing you know, your deal's gone.

Cindi Boudreaux

What's the root cause of that? Why do companies get it so wrong?

Richard Byrd

The curse of knowledge is a big part of it. Of course everyone knows our safety record's great. Well, they didn't put that on the website, didn't put it in their RFP, didn't put it in any of their documentation. It was all locked up inside. The curse of knowledge plus the curse of assumption.

Cindi Boudreaux

The gauntlet is something I've experienced personally. I've been in BD long enough that I've had many deals where our champion was sold, I was talking to just the champion, they had the authority, they wanted to move fast — and then all of a sudden seven more people got involved and the timeline doubled. Now I ask early: who else is possibly going to be involved for you to decide this is right for you? The earlier you can get that answer, the better.

Richard Byrd

That's a really smart move, Cindi, because you want those people involved as early as possible. Understand what their concerns are, what motivates them, what does a good deal look like to them. Get them in the conversation early if you can. It takes a lot of pressure off your champion, because most of the time they're not classically trained salespeople, but you're asking them to carry the sale throughout the organization. You doing that job as the professional salesperson and BD person will go a lot better.

Shannon Carlson

Catching it upfront and early instead of three months in — and being able to arm your champion with the right messaging for each stakeholder, especially if they're looking to get something done quickly — that's how you speed up the timeline.

Richard Byrd

You've never seen a deal go seven months in and then go pear-shaped, have you?

Shannon Carlson

Never. I've got a client who took thirty-six months to close, but they held on. Now's not the right timing — follow up in six months, what changed in the business, okay they're in a completely different position now, what information do we give them? Or the sponsor changes, and that really derails everything.

Richard Byrd

So if the reality now is six to eight stakeholders and longer timelines, what does a company need to do differently to keep deals from stalling? One thing I reference in the book is what I call the armory — a place where you can keep all your sales materials so salespeople can arm their internal stakeholders with the right content at the right time.

When I first started at BlueByrd, everything was in my head. As a founder seller, I knew where all the stuff was. But having those things in a neat, organized place where salespeople can grab the right piece of content for the right person at the right moment — that's critical. And with AI now, you can develop that content a lot faster than even two years ago.

Think about every deal that stalls in your pipeline. The salesperson is getting ghosted. What do they do? They send the 'just checking in' email. That's the worst thing you can do. If you have a good armory, instead of giving off commission breath, you can reach out and say: by the way, I wanted to share our latest case study where we helped a company just like yours solve a problem just like the one you have. Provide value at each interaction instead of making them feel like you just want your commission.

Shannon Carlson

We actually automated that for a client within their sales pipeline. Every time they moved a deal from stage to stage, an automated email went out with content aligned to whatever service they were selling at that point. One of their prospects said — because of the case study in that email — 'I hope you can do this for me.' That pushed the deal forward significantly.

Richard Byrd

That's what orchestrated sales and marketing looks like.

Shannon Carlson

You write about how only five percent of the market is actively buying at any given time. What does that mean for technical companies and how they should think about pipeline development?

Richard Byrd

People push back on the five percent number all the time — and they're right, it's not exactly five percent. It's a dynamic number that changes day to day. But the analogy I like to use is: if you walked into a theater with a hundred people and I asked who sleeps on a mattress, every hand goes up. But if I ask who is in the market to buy a new mattress today, almost all the hands go down. Maybe five people say yes — their mattress is ten years old, their kid got sick, whatever it is. Tomorrow it might be eight, or two. It fluctuates constantly.

The problem is most companies come to us wanting leads — they want at-bats for the salespeople. That means they want to focus on the five percent. But if you're only selling to the five percent, you're selling too low in the organization. Who's looking for solutions when there's a known problem and they're searching? Procurement. And procurement's goal is to find the best deal and make comparisons. By the time you're talking to them, you're already eighty percent through the buying cycle. You're probably competing against someone who was already in front of that company while they were still in the awareness phase. You're playing from behind. You get beaten down on price.

The answer is you've got to talk to all of the people. Because if you were talking to someone yesterday about how great your solution is, and today they raise their hand saying they're in the market — you're the first person they think of. Brand awareness is super important at that early stage so people know who you are and what you solve for, so that when they're ready to make a purchasing decision, you're already top of mind.

Cindi Boudreaux

This is one of the most important ideas in the book for CMOs specifically, because it really reframes the brand versus demand debate. Companies want to put everything into lead gen and skip brand awareness. But that brand awareness is speaking to the ninety-five percent. When those people are ready to buy, they already know who you are, what problems you solve, how you can help.

Shannon Carlson

We've been running a manufacturing campaign for a client targeting a new vertical for the last four months. Just today we got two leads in that vertical — but we've been talking to them for four months because we started with brand awareness, moved into consideration, then lead gen. If someone had converted in week one or two, I would have been shocked. They weren't ready, and they didn't even know who our client was yet. Most people don't get married to someone they just met that day.

Richard Byrd

Exactly. You have to keep that awareness level out there so people know — this is a company that solves the kind of problems I might have one day. I'm a big Astros fan, and Methodist Hospital advertises during games all the time. If I ever hurt my knee, I know Methodist has the right people and equipment. My knee's good today, knock on wood. But when that problem arises, they're who I think of.

Cindi Boudreaux

Leadership wants pipeline now, so all the activity gets pushed to outbound sales. But in a long cycle, high consideration environment, trust and market familiarity are already shaping the deal before the salesperson ever gets there. If the market doesn't already understand who you are, sales is trying to cram all of that knowledge into one thirty-minute discovery call. That's extremely difficult.

Shannon Carlson

You identify the seven deadly sins of marketing. Without going through all seven — what do you see most often in technical companies?

Richard Byrd

The one they all fall back to is failure to take a strategic view of the commercial engine. A lot of times people think about marketing and sales and don't think about it very strategically. It's like, what's so hard? Go sell it. Or: it's marketing, let's show up at a trade show. Order some squeezy balls. I had a client tell me once that the best marketing you can get is a camouflage baseball hat. I told him to get out of my workshop.

That failure to think strategically leads to other sins, like random acts of marketing. I had a client who wanted to generate leads with a limited budget, and she was running vanity advertising — a banner at a little league baseball park and an ad in a free magazine that gets mailed to homes without anyone asking for it. Those are not good uses of a lead generation budget. It's not that sponsoring a team is wrong — we've done that — but that's goodwill spending, not a marketing budget item. It was a total waste of her money.

Cindi Boudreaux

How are they tracking ROI on that?

Richard Byrd

They put a QR code in the ad. I have never in my life pulled out my phone to scan a QR code in a magazine ad. That's not natural human behavior.

Cindi Boudreaux

Random acts of marketing usually happen because a company hasn't taken the time to understand who their target market is. Without that clarity, every opportunity starts looking like the right opportunity. What's dangerous about saying you can sell to anyone?

Richard Byrd

If you're trying to be everything to everybody, you're nothing to nobody. You spread your message so thin that you don't look like a true expert. And it's scary to get focused and say, this is our target market. If people outside that circle don't like our message, that's okay. People think they're leaving money on the table by narrowing, but they're not.

We see it with salespeople too — yes, they have a pulse and they might have money, so they're our target audience. They spend a lot of time trying to talk somebody into buying something from them who was never going to buy. They don't have budget authority, need, or timing — none of the things. And if you took the fully loaded cost of those wasted conversations, it's a big number. It's a hidden cost.

Shannon Carlson

One of my favorite chapters is about the sea of sameness — where every technical company's website looks and sounds identical. Why do smart companies keep falling into this trap?

Richard Byrd

If you're going to really differentiate and you really mean it, it's scary. By choosing to be truly different, you're really saying: we're not going to sand off any edges. It's going to be a sharp message really geared toward these people, and if people outside that circle don't like it, that's okay. People are very scared to do that. Companies also have these mysterious people called lawyers who don't want you to say anything specific. So you end up with the same boring stock photos on everybody's website and these crazy things at the top that no real human would ever say.

One exercise I recommend in the book is to print out your website and all your competitors' websites — cover up the logos, print in black and white so there are no brand colors — mix them up, and then try to identify which is yours. We've done that in workshops and people literally don't know which website is theirs. Death by a thousand cuts is what happens when you craft a message and ten people look at it and say, don't say that, say it like this. Everything gets so watered down and polished that everyone looks like everyone. And with AI it's getting worse, because AI by default tries to position things right down the middle.

Shannon Carlson

That happens all the time in workshops. We prepare by learning everything we can about a company, read the website — and then when we get into the workshop, everything they tell us about themselves isn't on the website at all. The differentiation exists inside the company. It just never makes it to the customer.

Richard Byrd

And we always push back on differentiation because when you ask what makes you different, they almost always get it wrong. They say the same three things: our people, our technology, our processes. If it's your people, that means your people are just that much smarter than your competitors, and your competitors are a bunch of idiots — which can't be true. Your technology, at this point, is table stakes. And they must have some sort of processes. Differentiating on those three things is really, really difficult.

Cindi Boudreaux

The sea of sameness isn't just a marketing problem. It's a real commercial problem, because every conversation has to start from scratch. There's no recognition, no foundation to build from.

Richard Byrd

Exactly. And if you're not competing on what makes you different, you're competing on price. There's always somebody who'll do it cheaper.

Shannon Carlson

Taking the time to understand who those buyers are and what they need to hear — I have a client whose most visited page, and the page most often visited before a conversion, is their team page. People researching them want to make sure the people they'd be working with are actually experts. Their competitors use younger, less experienced people because it's cheaper. But the level of expertise and experience my client's team has is exactly what their buyers care most about.

Richard Byrd

That's true of all professional services firms. Law firms, CPA firms, financial advisors, marketing agencies — people come look at your team pages. They've all been burned by big consulting firms where the experienced people sell the engagement and then their best twenty-three-year-olds deliver it. Now buyers want to know: who are the people I'm actually going to be working with day to day? Can they do the job? If it really is your people, make sure you convey that.

Shannon Carlson

Let's talk about the misalignment between sales and marketing. You have this as one of the seven deadly sins. How bad have you seen it get?

Richard Byrd

It is the single biggest operational drag on any business. Early in my career, working for a large company, we had our marketing department and we never talked to the salespeople. But every once in a while I had to go out to the field. I went into the office, opened a broom closet, and there was a big box of all the brochures we had been handcrafting and fighting over — sitting in a closet. I asked, do you guys ever use these? They said, nah, this is stuff they sent from corporate. And I said: I'm the guy from corporate. Why don't you use them? They said it's not really what we talk about with our clients. What a waste.

We didn't stop to think about what the salespeople actually needed. And what they really needed was stuff we had produced but they didn't even know existed.

I also tell a story in the book about when I was working for a really big company and we launched a product at a trade show. A salesperson came up to me and said, how come I didn't know about this? A customer came to talk to me about it and I felt like an idiot. That was on me. I thought that was somebody else's job — my job was just to come up with the cool messaging. It was a real eye-opening experience that changed the way I think about B2B sales and marketing working together.

Cindi Boudreaux

I've seen it on the sales and marketing side even in B2C — marketing sends something out to the field without talking to sales first, and it never works. The biggest disconnect I see is that sales and marketing are operating from completely different assumptions about the market. Marketing is optimizing for engagement and lead volume, and sales is looking for deal quality, buying readiness, and fit. The friction is never about effort — both sides are working hard. It's that the organization isn't aligned around what a qualified opportunity actually looks like, who they're trying to reach, and how complex buying decisions actually happen.

Richard Byrd

That's a good litmus test. If I walked into an office and the CEO told me sales and marketing were completely aligned, I'd put the head of sales and the head of marketing in the same room and ask them to define a qualified lead. If they can agree in less than thirty seconds, I would be shocked. We walk into rooms all the time where they're like, well, no, it's really this — no, it's really that. If you say 'sales qualified lead' in a room of five people and they all have five different definitions, that's when you run into a lot of friction down the road. That's when the CEO gets really mad because they're like, what happened to all those deals? You said you had all these leads. I don't see any revenue. What are you guys doing over there?

Shannon Carlson

You tell a great story in the book about how we got a client a ton of leads, and then what happened to them. The feedback loop from sales back to marketing is critical — a salesperson needs to come back and say, this lead wasn't a good fit because of X, so we can adjust either messaging or materials. One of the biggest solutions, and I'll just plug BlueByrd for a minute, is that we solve for that misalignment. If you don't have that connection working right, how can you sell? How can you track anything and prove ROI?

Richard Byrd

We learned a lot about this during our fractional CMO days. We'd get injected right into organizations, and that misalignment was always the first hurdle. Sales and marketing finger pointing at each other and the CEO frustrated in the middle. That has to get fixed.

And the loop goes both ways. It's not just marketing needs to talk to sales — sales needs to circle back. You get that feedback loop going and you find out whether leads weren't ready to buy yet, or whether that market segment just isn't right for you. You won't get that learning without marketing and sales talking to each other regularly. Sometimes you find out that you're in a market where you lose every time because it's too price-sensitive or a competitor is too entrenched — and you'd never know that without those conversations.

Shannon Carlson

And if you don't fix that upfront, they'll just keep doing their own thing. But if you create a culture of alignment and establish a cadence — we sent you ten leads, only one was sales qualified, why weren't the other nine? — you start learning. And critically, you also find out that some of those leads just weren't ready yet. They're not a closed door, they're a follow-up.

Shannon Carlson

You introduce something in the book called GrowthOps. How is that different from what most companies are already doing?

Richard Byrd

Most companies are still very siloed. The next evolution in a lot of SaaS companies was RevOps — sales, marketing, and customer support working together from the same scorecard. That advanced things and broke down a lot of silos. GrowthOps is one step beyond that and goes deeper. It covers everything from product to pricing. You get a much wider area where people coordinate, build their processes, and align — everyone singing from one single source of truth.

Shannon Carlson

GrowthOps really takes RevOps to the next level. It gives technical leaders a framework they already understand — systems thinking, feedback loops — and applies it to the revenue engine. That's why it lands differently.

Cindi Boudreaux

What does a GrowthOps approach actually change in how commercial teams engage in the market day-to-day?

Richard Byrd

Going back to Tom and Maria — Tom was definitely not operating in a GrowthOps environment. In a conventional approach, the sales team does what they do, the marketing team does what they do, and it's Groundhog Day — the same motions over and over.

In a GrowthOps environment, everybody knows where they're going. They know the accounts they're targeting, a lot about those accounts, a lot about the people inside them. There's a real sense of purpose. They're measuring how things are going, following those accounts, and waiting for that window of opportunity to open — when someone starts engaging with their content. When people have had six touches, been to the website for a month, read the case study, watched the video, attended a webinar — the salesperson knows it's time to reach out. Compare that to Tom starting at A in the phone book and dialing down. A completely different approach.

Shannon Carlson

Tom probably doesn't even know who the ICP is — the ideal customer profile. I can't tell you how many times we've asked people and got two completely different answers from sales and marketing on who the ICP is. If we can't agree on that, we can't agree on who to sell to or how.

Richard Byrd

One of my isms: marketing is simple, but it's not always easy. The simple part is: who are we talking to, what keeps them up at night, and how do we solve that problem better than anyone else in the world? Once you know those three things, you can make a lot of headway. The hard part is that first question — who are we talking to — is harder than it sounds. When we ask, people give us very big, broad, vague answers. 'We talk to independent oil and gas companies operating in the Gulf of Mexico.' Well, I can't get in an elevator with someone and ask if they're an independent operator in the Gulf of Mexico. I can't recognize that person — and neither can your salespeople.

You've got to get very specific. Not just the industries, not just the companies within those industries, but the people within those accounts who might actually buy from you. We've never walked into a company where they knew the answers to all those questions. And when we do the work to narrow it down, the sales team's energy and win rate both go up. That's what we call a force multiplier.

The stat I point to in the book is that teams where sales and marketing are aligned see a two hundred and ten percent revenue increase compared to those that aren't. Because they're working together, speaking the same language, laser focused — instead of trying to do a little bit of everything.

Cindi Boudreaux

One of the recurring themes throughout the book is moving away from disconnected sales activity toward a coordinated commercial engagement. You describe it as the Pincher Method. Can you walk us through what that actually looks like in practice?

Richard Byrd

Sure. It's integrated account-based marketing and account-based selling coming together. The term has roots in the military — you flank the enemy from both sides so they have nowhere to go. In sales and marketing terms, marketing comes in from one side and sales comes in from the other, and you meet in the middle. Marketing provides air support, and the salespeople are boots on the ground, coming in a lot more informed.

They're walking into a group of people who have heard about you, understand your differentiation, know your value propositions, have read your literature, maybe attended an event. That makes the sell much easier. The salespeople know exactly who to talk to in that organization, probably already know who their detractors are going to be, and they have a whole arsenal of tools — an ROI calculator for the CFO, the safety record for the safety person, competitive pricing justification for procurement, and the overarching story for the executive sponsor. That's the Pincher Method.

Cindi Boudreaux

It makes a huge difference — from random cold calling to having that arsenal and using marketing for air cover. What changes operationally when sales is no longer working independently but as part of a coordinated commercial strategy?

Richard Byrd

You get that efficiency gain. Instead of running around trying to sell to anybody, you're laser focused on the accounts you're targeting. You know where each deal is in the buying process and you can put energy where it's needed most, instead of just hoping to get lucky. People who follow that approach see two to four times higher win rates than people who don't.

Shannon Carlson

You had a full chapter about pricing, which surprised me at first. But it makes total sense — marketing isn't always involved in those conversations. Why does pricing belong in a commercial operating model conversation?

Richard Byrd

Pricing is the biggest single lever that technical companies refuse to pull — and it happens because of insecurity. They think if they raise prices, all their customers will leave. What we've found is that yes, some customers may leave. But a lot of times those are the customers you didn't love, and the difference you make up in pricing pays for those people to go away. The customers who truly value what you do are going to stay.

What also happens is that very logical technical people use a cost-plus model — here's what it costs us to engineer and deliver, let's add a margin on top. They're not being nearly creative enough. They're leaving a lot of money on the table.

For clients who are truly innovative and bringing something new to market — if you're solving a hundred-million-dollar problem for a client, you don't want to do that on time and materials. You have to think about the value you're going to create. That's what value-based pricing is about.

Cindi Boudreaux

We've made deals over the years where people say yes, and then you wonder how much money we just left on the table. Companies leave forty, fifty, even three hundred percent on the table because they're using cost-plus instead of value-based pricing.

Shannon Carlson

And it doesn't require changing the product. It requires changing how you understand and articulate the value to the person you're selling to. If you truly understand what's valuable to them and use that in the sales process, you can price accordingly.

Richard Byrd

Exactly. That's where voice of customer research is so powerful. Every time we've done a value study with our clients, there's always an aha moment. We just did one with a client who thought customers valued their unique manufacturing process. What we found was that customers actually valued their ability to understand and manage the customer's supply chain end-to-end — and nobody else in the industry was doing it. And they were giving it away for free because they were trying to sell the manufacturing. We said: this is something you should productize. All of a sudden they had a whole new offering they'd been giving away.

I always find the closed-lost conversations to be the most revealing. Salespeople say they lost on price ninety-five percent of the time. When we talk to the actual prospect, it's almost never really price. Almost always they didn't understand the value the salespeople were trying to convey during the sales process.

Shannon Carlson

That's because salespeople often aren't asking the right questions. They're showing up and throwing information at the prospect instead of digging down to the root of what they will actually value.

Richard Byrd

A hundred percent. For our clients in the Ascend program, we record sales calls when we can. The best performing salespeople ask the most questions, and they ask them early. They're really trying to figure out whether this prospect is ever going to buy from them. They uncover what the person is actually trying to accomplish. I roll back in my mind to all the deals I've lost in my career, and when I didn't ask the right questions — man.

Shannon Carlson

That's the stuff that keeps you up at night.

Shannon Carlson

You also talk about why technical companies struggle to defend premium pricing even when they have a truly differentiated product.

Richard Byrd

It goes back to lack of confidence. They're afraid they're going to lose the deal on price. And by the way, I suffer from that sometimes myself — let's just win this one, we'll make it up later. Then you find out you're telling yourself that forever and you never make it back up. You set the price low in the market and it's very hard to raise it later. If you start off low just to win business, that's where you're going to live.

Shannon Carlson

If you're truly differentiated and one of the first to market, you don't want to set the price too low and compete with yourself.

Richard Byrd

Exactly. And you're never going to get that price back.

Cindi Boudreaux

Your final chapter is called Making It Stick. Why do commercial transformations so often fail, even when the strategy is right?

Richard Byrd

Baseball players are the most superstitious athletes I've ever seen — because baseball requires an enormous amount of muscle memory. I think sales is the same. It requires more muscle memory than almost any other profession. As soon as a salesperson has a bad month or bad quarter, they say forget this new process, I'm going back to the old way. They slip back into old habits very easily.

Without someone holding them accountable to the new process, and without a genuine willingness to change, it won't stick. One of the first questions we ask when evaluating whether someone is a good fit for Ascend is: what is your organization's willingness to change? How tolerant are you of change? If they say not very, we tell them Ascend is not the right offering for them. Because it's going to require a real transformation — you're changing the way people work together, the tools they use, the way they use those tools. Without change management built in, people are not going to stick with it.

Shannon Carlson

We went through this with a client a few years ago, and I honestly underestimated the change management piece. The sales leader knew his team far better than I did and told me it was going to take six months longer than I thought. And he was right. Getting people who've been there for seven, eight, nine years doing the same thing to change is really hard. Change is huge in an organization — imagine if you and your wife had the same meal every Wednesday for ten years, and then one Wednesday that meal was different. You would be shocked.

Richard Byrd

Salespeople are great at waiting out change. They know that if they wait long enough, the next initiative will come along and this one will go away. The leaders who can stand up and say, this is the way it is now, I stand behind it, we're going to hold each other accountable to this — those are the ones who see the results.

For people sitting on the fence who know their go-to-market approach is broken: every day you don't fix it is a day it's costing you money. This is the lever you pull to pump more revenue into your organization. The sooner you pull that lever, the better off you're going to be.

It's the old adage — when's the best time to plant a tree? Twenty-five years ago. But the second best time is today. How long are you going to let it hurt your company? How long are you going to let new competitors chip away and take revenue that should be coming to your organization?

Shannon Carlson

And doing it incrementally — fixing the most broken piece first and working your way up — just takes a lot longer and the investment is a lot larger. If you build the foundation right the first time, you really start to see the results. We have a client we've been working with for three years. It took almost a year to start seeing the fruits of the foundational work we built together. But once you build it right, it just grows from there.

Richard Byrd

That's what I call the commercial engine. You get it cranked up, let it run for a while, and once it's performing, it kinda runs itself. It's really powerful.

Shannon Carlson

You've been doing this work for thirty years. What did writing the book teach you that you didn't already know?

Richard Byrd

Somebody told me you don't really know a subject well until you can teach it to someone else. All this stuff has been rattling around in my head for years, and I'd never sat down to put it all together in one place. I started out thinking the book was just going to be about the seven deadly sins and how to avoid them. But when I started thinking about the two major headwinds companies face, and really put the full picture together, I understood why marketing can be so elusive and so difficult and unpredictable — and more importantly, I realized it doesn't have to be. There is a system that can be put into place. You build it, get everyone aligned to it, everyone rolling in the same direction, and you see real results.

I was building that system with a client over the years, but we didn't come in with the playbook. We figured it out as we went — through learning and trial and error. After all of that, we decided: we've kind of figured it out. If we had a time machine, this is how we would do it from day one. We'd push back more on the ICP from the start, be more specific about account segmentation, have the change management in place from the beginning. Now we have the knowledge and the process to work through those things.

Cindi Boudreaux

Thank you for sharing everything you've learned over the last thirty years. One last big question: what's one thing you want every technical leader who reads this book to believe that they don't believe today?

Richard Byrd

The one thing I would want a technical leader to take away is that you don't have to turn into a salesperson or a marketing person to be great commercially. You just have to put that same rigor you put into your engineering and business processes into the commercial side of your business — and you'll see great results if you do that.

Shannon Carlson

And I'd add: we want them to believe that the gap between where they are and where they could be is smaller than they think. The knowledge exists, the framework exists, the tools exist today. The only thing standing between a technically excellent company and a market dominant one is the decision to close that commercial gap. And that's how we're here to help.

Richard Byrd

For the people stuck in that loop — tried telling salespeople to sell harder, changed the marketing director, tried a new agency, ran that LinkedIn campaign, sponsored that golf tournament, and the money just didn't come raining in — once a technical leader realizes there are systems and processes you can put in place to consistently take advantage of the market and beat your competitors, I think that brings a lot of hope. Once you get that commercial engine running, it just runs.

Cindi Boudreaux

I was meeting with my executive coach today and he said a lot of companies see the problem, keep looking at it, and keep putting off dealing with it. Deal with it today. I don't think they realize what the rewards will actually be if they invest in alignment and growth the right way the first time. A lot of people try to do it and end up having to reinvest in it later on.

Cindi Boudreaux

Enough small talk — tell people where they can buy your book.

Richard Byrd

Now comes the sales presentation. It's on Amazon — Kindle version, paperback version, hardback version coming soon. I might be talked into an audio version.

Cindi Boudreaux

You will be.

Richard Byrd

I know, I know — everybody's been on me about that. And I only consume books through audio, so I should probably take my own medicine. You can find out more by Googling The Best Kept Secret Richard Byrd and it'll come up on Amazon. Or just reach out to me, Cindi, or Shannon with questions or if you'd like to learn more about Ascend. I highly recommend the book — and even if you don't end up using Ascend, I think companies will see themselves in it and will be able to take steps to improve their commercial processes.

Cindi Boudreaux

Well, this has been fun. Thanks for having us today.

Richard Byrd

Thanks for coming and for asking the hardball questions. I'll let you out of the salt mines a little more often, Shannon.

Shannon Carlson

Thanks. I actually enjoy things like this. I do it for my customers a lot — it's nice to stay on mic.

‍