206. 2 Months of Revenue in 8 Days: How Brex’s CRO Fixes What Breaks at Scale

Your, your actions created that. That course correction. That’s a giant course correction.

Garrett Marker:
I mean, I don’t know if I’d say my actions, I don’t sell the deals and do all the work. Right. It’s a collective ever to go.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
No, you as, you as a, you as an organization, as leadership, everybody involved,

Garrett Marker:
collective, collective things to go and do that. And so know, overall we’re hitting revenue goals, which is great. Right. But obviously we want to make sure we do it across all segments in a repeatable, scalable way where everybody gets to go participate in the success. Right. But also we feel like it’s stable and repeatable. And so I’d say on that, you know, I’d give us like a, A B, right. If we’re going to grades.

Garrett Marker:
Right. It’s like you, I want to know what you did.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
I want to. You went, you took two months of, what was it? Closed deals. Two months and got those numbers in eight days. Subsequently.

Garrett Marker:
What.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
You’re bearing the lead here. You’re listening to Unchurned, brought to you by the Gainsight podcast network. A seller in London was worried about getting fired. Then they changed one question at the end of their demos. What are the reasons you won’t move forward? Three months later, they were the top performer in their segment. Garrett Marker taught them that question. He’s the chief revenue officer at Brecht, where reps now ramp in days, not months. And the best ones get promoted on the spot.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
Josh. I’m Josh Schachter. This is Unchurned. Subscribe to our substack@ Unchurned.Gainsight.com where we go deep on every episode. Like how one post sales team at cloudbeds built over 150 AI agents. That story and more at unchurned.gainsight.com hello, everybody. I’m your host, Josh Schachter, senior vice president of strategy and go to market development at Gainsight, host of Unturned. And I’m super excited to be here today with Garrett Marker.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
Garrett is the chief revenue officer of Brex, the platform that is helping businesses spend smarter, move faster. I know you guys as just like a credit card, but you do so much more, Garrett, that you’re going to tell us A little bit about. And so Garrett, who I’ll introduce in a moment, has a large remit as CRO of Brex. I’m looking at your LinkedIn profile here, Garrett. You are fortunate enough to lead sales, account management, sales engineering, customer success, rev ops, SDRs, partnerships, biz, dev, channel sales, CX sales, enablement, implementation, support, product operations, PR and IR, a little bit of product marketing, all the things. I don’t know where you get time in the day, Garrett, but welcome to the show.

Garrett Marker:
I appreciate you having me and apparently I must have a lot of time because I can go spend some time chatting with you in addition to maybe doing some of that work.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
I feel so much more honored to have you on the show after just reading that because that was exhausting. It was like the biggest run on Sentence ever. Just reading all the things under your agreement. How many folks report into you, roll into you?

Garrett Marker:
Ultimately full time is probably like 6, 700 people today.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
Yeah. How big is, is Brex overall?

Garrett Marker:
Brex overall is like 1300 people or so. So it’s maybe like 60ish percent of the company.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
No, that’s, that’s, that’s a span of control for you. Tell us a little bit about Brex. What you’re, what you’re selling, you know, sales and then what your post sales folks are reselling, renewing, expanding.

Garrett Marker:
Yeah, I guess the easiest way to talk about what we sell is essentially we sell a full suite of products that is focused on enabling businesses, but more specifically finance teams to go run more effectively. Right. So I think as you alluded to, we started with corporate cards where the core thesis there was for startups, it was very hard for them to get underwritten. Right. For a corporate card, but you needed that to go pay for things at that point in time. It’s because traditional underwriting models didn’t understand kind of the venture ecosystem. But we’ve since expanded to a lot of different things, right? We have expense management solutions, we help tens of thousands of customers close their books every month with accounting software. We have agentic products so we’ve co built with companies like Anthropic and OpenAI and other customers to go help people eliminate work, kind of reduce fraud, help solve audit problems and different things from that perspective.

Garrett Marker:
So at this point it’s a pretty full platform for, you know, anything that someone might want to go do in the finance suite.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
Yeah, you had my attention when I was the founder of my startup Update AI. You had my attention with all the perks for founders, for, for poor fledgling founders you know, like, like myself at the time. And I guess that rolled up into you as well, the partnership stuff, right?

Garrett Marker:
Yeah. Well, what’s I’ve always found very interesting, I talk about this a lot internally is that we have, you know, several different segments that we sell into. But when we think about the founders, right, or small business owners, I joke sometimes that their purchasing process is more similar to what a consumer might be versus a corporation because you have different priorities at that point in time. Sure, point. Like the perks, benefits, other things might be very interesting. You know, the example I give sometimes is like, you know, getting lounge access and different stuff with Amex or other things might be interesting as a consumer. But if you’re a billionaire, you just fly private. So why would you care about those perks, right? And so maybe there’s different things that you would care about from your business and kind of your corporate card provider or kind of expense management provider.

Garrett Marker:
But yeah, it’s definitely interesting. It makes it fun to kind of see some of the more creative consumer type dynamics that we get to go do stuff with down market with our startup community.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
I met you in passing the other month. You were speaking at the first Mark Venture Capital Summit in New York. They did a great job. So I want to give them a little bit of praise there and was really taken by the presentation that you gave to the Go to Market Group. In that panel room you talked about a lot of the AI stuff that you’re doing. Creation of the 10x seller onboarding that’s helping to speed, ramp folks up very quickly. I want to get into that. When you started the beginning of this year, when you were doing your planning for 2026, what were the major rocks, foundational items, problems that you were looking to solve?

Garrett Marker:
Yeah. So. Well, first of all, shout out to Ben and the first Mark team for inviting me and having me. They’re always humbled when people think that you might be able to go talk about stuff that is valuable and definitely enjoyed kind of getting that experience, getting to talk with folks there as far as this year and things that we’re trying to go solve for. I’d say there’s a couple things, right? One is, you know, we’re trying to go scale the team pretty aggressively actually. I saw some posts on LinkedIn today from someone at Repview which I know is basically like glassdoor for sales reps that says in the last 12 months on a percentage basis, Brex has been the third fastest team as far as like growing their salesforce. So we did a really good job the previous year of making it so that the unit economics.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
This is the third fastest team for growing your salesforce. What across.

Garrett Marker:
Across all, all tech companies, all sorts of sales companies, companies with sales people, whatever their, their data set is, I guess they have.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
So it’s like, is it guys like, like anthropic, lovable Brex? Is that kind of some. Is that how it went?

Garrett Marker:
I don’t know who number one and number two were, to be honest. Right. I just know we’re number three, which means we clearly have work to do from that perspective.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
Wow, man, you really have a lot of work ahead on your shoulders. That’s amazing.

Garrett Marker:
Yeah. And so I think, you know, the reason we felt like we could go do that is that our performance was pretty good in previous years. Right. Our cat paybacks were good, the economics were good, the repertainment was pretty good with like 60, 70% of sellers at or above a plan kind of month over month, quarter over quarter. And so we felt like we had a really good foundation to go scale. And I oftentimes talk about our TAM at Brex is any business that pays for stuff, which is a lot of businesses. And so by definition we should be a really big company with a really big team. And so that was one element was trying to go figure out how we could go make sure that we continue to go scale the team while not having rep proficiency erode and other challenges erod and things that happens, you kind of scale the business over time.

Garrett Marker:
So both building the infrastructure to do that successfully and actually doing that successfully, I think were big things we’re trying to go solve for this year. I think another thing we’re really focused on is how do we make sure that we solve for next year as well. I’m a big believer in this concept of like, as an executive, you need to think about how do I solve today problems and also solve tomorrow problems. Because if we scale the team and hit all the numbers this year, they’re just going to ask us to hit better, bigger numbers next year. And so if you’re not doing things that help long term, you’re going to kind of fall behind at some point. And so thinking about like where the space is going, there’s plenty of people that want to go buy the solutions we’ve had for a long period of time or competitor solutions that are similar to ours. But when we think about where the market’s going to, we see a lot more interest, especially in the last like 12 months or so on the finance side. In more AI based products, agentic based products and different things from that perspective.

Garrett Marker:
And so us and our competitors all have businesses there. Right. And we’ve had some level of success there, but portion of our revenue that comes from those products is relatively small compared to the overall business. But I think we expect moving forward that’s going to go be a larger percentage of things. And so we’ve got in all the major AI labs to go decide we’re the best product in that space, which is really great market signal that we have and of good product market fit. But those are also the early adopters. Right. So like how do you go get

Josh Schachter [Host]:
the good salesman right there? I know that’s your route, that’s your roots there of being salesperson, but you in that, in that one little fragment of a sentence, you just told us all that you’ve got all the, the AI labs using Brex, Is that right?

Garrett Marker:
Yes.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
Well done, well done. This, this podcast time paid for itself there, Garrett, with that one.

Garrett Marker:
There you go. Hopefully we can get them to sponsor you because I think some of those companies have a little extra money sloshing around they can go spend on some things. Things. But it’s really great validation that like we have good product market fit there. But obviously we want to make sure that all companies, right, are using our solutions and so it working and people wanted it is one thing. Being able to figure out how to do that at greater scale is a more important thing that involves sales enablement, product marketing, pricing and packaging. A lot of different things with that. And so I think that’s been another big focus for this year is how do we make sure we exit the year not just with a lot of revenue through those product lines, a lot of successful customers using those solutions, but essentially a playbook for how do we make that even bigger next year.

Garrett Marker:
Similar to how we had to go build a foundation to be able to go scale the core team this fiscal year.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
Which one should we start with? I want to hear how these things are going, how they’ve gone the path. You know, the first half of the

Garrett Marker:
year we can go sequentially, I think on the scale and the team part, admittedly, I think it’s gone well, but not perfect. Right. So like let’s say we have several parts of the business. When you think about different segments, right. When you think about different product lines and things like that, I would say a majority, it’s gone really well. Right. Where we’ve hit pipeline targets, we’ve hit hiring targets. Right.

Garrett Marker:
We’ve hit revenue Targets, Right. We’ve hit growth targets. Right. We have some parts of the business that are growing 200% plus year over year, which is great. There’s admittedly other parts where things broke as we scaled, right. The foundations that we thought we had built weren’t as strong as they we thought they were, or we haven’t been able to hire as quickly as we expected to, or we haven’t been able to go figure out how to go hit the larger pipeline goals this year than we had in previous years. So in aggregate, things have gone well, but there definitely have been some parts that have broken from that perspective, which I think, I think it’s to be expected at times. Obviously, I’m not okay with that outcome.

Garrett Marker:
Both one, because, you know, we want to do everything that we said we do. But also, admittedly, if you’re an individual seller in that individual segment, that’s not doing as well. Like you don’t feel great, right? Like you’re not enjoying the journey as much as other people are that are in the segments that are doing better. And so obviously that’s where I spend a lot of my time, is trying to go figure out how to go help those other groups catch up. So as an example, there’s one segment that has already done as much revenue in July in eight days as they did all the last two months combined. Right. And so it wasn’t doing as well. We’ve course corrected, right.

Garrett Marker:
So we’re kind of back on track from that perspective.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
But there’s that course correction created. Your actions created that. That course correction. That’s a giant course correction.

Garrett Marker:
I mean, I don’t know if I’d say my actions. I don’t sell the deals and do all the work. Right. It’s a collective effort to go, you

Josh Schachter [Host]:
know, you as, you as you as an organization, as leadership, collective, collective things

Garrett Marker:
to go do that. And so, you know, overall we’re hitting revenue goals, which is great. Right. But obviously we want to make sure we do it across all segments in a repeatable, scalable way where everybody gets to go participate in the success. Right. But also we feel like it’s stable and repeatable. And so I’d say on that, you know, I’d give us like a B, right. If we’re going to grades.

Garrett Marker:
Right. It’s like, you know, I want to

Josh Schachter [Host]:
know what you did. I want to, you, you took two months of, what was it? Closed deals, two months and got those numbers in eight days. Subsequently, what, what, what you’re bearing the lead here. I don’t know what you can share, Garrett, but.

Garrett Marker:
Well, I think, I think there’s a few things, right? So one is we went deep on market analysis to try to understand why do we start performing worse than a segment where we’d historically been performing better. And one of the great things about AI is it’s a lot easier to go understand what your competitors are doing, what’s happening on sales calls and different things. And so we found a couple tactical things that we saw with some subset of competitors where they’d made some shifts that quite honestly we didn’t react too well, right. Where they were successful in the things that they did. And we need to go figure out something new and different to be successful. Right. The stuff we had been doing up to that point wasn’t successful. So there were some things on what I call like brand pmm, top of funnel, things that we had to go do differently.

Garrett Marker:
There are some things on kind of like sales execution tactics, different things we had to go do. From that perspective, I think there were some different things around kind of like activating our network and executive connections and multi threading and different things we had to go do differently. And so I think the combination of those factors essentially allowed us to go pivot, right. Based off how some market dynamics have changed. And so far the results have been pretty good from that perspective. I think the baseline understanding was my belief now versus like 10 years ago is that before you could go produce a battle card for someone and it might be good for a quarter or six months, right. If you wanted to produce that kind of material now it’s probably good for a week or six days. And so I think the reality was we just didn’t move quickly enough in that part of the business.

Garrett Marker:
And we course corrected on that.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
Do you really believe that? You really believe that a battle card is good for two weeks or one week?

Garrett Marker:
Most of the time I think the battle cards are awful and actually not that useful. But that’s a whole different conversation. But yeah, I think things change pretty quickly, right? Like we’re changing our tactics and strategies all the time, as I think most companies are. And so I think there’s more competitors in all spaces. Before, I’ve never. My last several years in tech, I’ve never heard so many people say, hey, I just demoed five other tools and they all look the same as yours. What makes you different? Right. When I started my career, that was not the kind of thing that I would hear as a seller, as a sales leader.

Garrett Marker:
And so I think when you’re in that kind of market dynamic and people are shipping faster than ever. Right. We’ve never merged so many PRs. We’ve never been shipping as many products as we do now at Brex. Given how AI has enabled our team to go ship faster and do more stuff on the code side, I do really believe that you have to be able to go move quicker and more intentionally if you want to go stay ahead and continue to go grow.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
So you made the remediations with, with, with what was tripping you up the last couple months for whatever that segment or SKU was. You made those remediations and now you guys are back on track with that. That was a little reactive. Right. You looked at the data and showed you what actions you had to take. Are you able to then translate that into being more proactive? Maybe that’s using AI technology or tools in the future?

Garrett Marker:
Absolutely. Right. And so I think you can go use what you learn then to go make sure you have the infrastructure in place to go get ahead of problems in the future. I think we’d done that already in other parts of the business where we’ve been able to pivot more quickly. I think this was probably a part of the business that given it had done so well for so long, admittedly we probably didn’t focus on as much, not in the context of it not being important or not caring about or not staffing it. Um, but I find oftentimes as a leader, your job is to go run towards the things that aren’t working and fix them. Right. And if something’s working well, like spending a lot of time looking at how great the dashboard looks and patting your back self on the back about it, it’s like not necessarily the best uses of time.

Garrett Marker:
And so I think that was probably the piece where like now since some things broke, we obviously put some different infrastructure in place and I think we’ll be more resilient in that part of the business moving forward.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
Yeah. How have you used technology to speed ramp the onboarding of your new sellers?

Garrett Marker:
So I think a few different ways. I think one is expectation setting. So I think with our sales enablement team like a year and a half ago, the expectation I set with them is we should be able to go onboard more people than we ever have, better than we ever had, without actually making your team any bigger. Because I’ve always found that the key oftentimes for an individual seller being successful. Right. Is do I understand the pattern recognition that happens in an individual sales cycle? Because I understand the combination of the buyer’s journey and what they go through when deciding to go pick something or not, and how that journey overlaps with what we sell and what we solve for. Which is why I think so many people learn via call recordings and listen to call and kind of doing mock scenarios and shadowing and like, stuff like that from that perspective. And also when I think about kind of AI and the proliferation of those tools there, there’s many things that AI can’t do yet.

Garrett Marker:
But what AI can do really well, right, Is analyze large sets of data, right? Lots of calls as an example, and kind of spit out information and trends related to that. So if you think about it, right, it can go take the, you know, listen to a bunch of calls sequentially, right? To kind of go get some information from that and really condense the loop from that information in that situation. And so essentially what we tried to go do is rebuild our entire enablement program around essentially like the role play or kind of like the call and kind of like learning and listening understanding for that. And so that’s everything from you shouldn’t have to go shadow a bunch of calls, right? We should be able to give you a bunch of insights from recordings we’ve analyzed with AI, you shouldn’t have to go wait until your manager is free, right? Right. To go kind of score your call recording or kind of do a mock scenario with you. We can actually set you up with AI tooling where you can go do as many practice role plays as you want and then actually have AI that’s built in with our kind of sales methodology and scoring system and all these different things to basically go grade your call and your information. And we’ve essentially found the result of that has been people can do what used to take them weeks or months to do because they’re waiting for other people in hours or days. And when you can do that work that’s required to get up to speed faster, you just start doing your job faster.

Garrett Marker:
And when you start doing your job faster, you tend to go close deals more quickly. And so I think that’s been a big part of why we’ve been able to maintain and even increase efficiency across some parts of the business as we’ve actually been hiring at greater scale. Where I find most companies, when you hire more people, right, like the proportion of people that are new is higher, the proportion of people that are tenured is lower. And so like the average rep performance actually goes down, right? As you’re trying to kind of figure that where we’ve been for the most part been able to go maintain or increase, which I give a lot of credit to, kind of building that enablement strategy around the idea of, okay, what’s the core way that people learn? And let’s actually use AI to make it so that people can kind of do that at whatever pace that they want versus being waiting for others to produce a deck for them or do a role play with them or go grade their call or do something else that they get too busy to do based off the day to day work that they’re doing in other areas.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
Yeah, you mentioned build a couple times. How much of this are you building versus buying?

Garrett Marker:
I’d say most we’re buying. I think we build where we think there’s going to be the highest, like highest alpha or highest leverage. And so if I think about something like mock call tools. Right. There’s a lot of different tools that you can go do that with. Right. And I think if you just kind of like give the context to those tools and providers about how you’re trying to go do stuff, they can go work pretty well. Right.

Garrett Marker:
So like I don’t feel the need to go do that. When I think about like the call recording softwares and kind of a data analysis and they’re taking like there’s a lot of different providers that can go do that well. So I think that’s kind of been less important. So when we think about enablement, maybe as an example, I’d say almost all of that is stuff that has been off the shelf. Tools that we’ve obviously tuned to be more specific to our business. I think the areas where we’ve decided to go invest in kind of building our own solutions have probably been more around, I’d call it like workflow tools. Right. And different things that ramped sellers would go use on a day to day basis.

Garrett Marker:
Because I think that there are some benefits that we can get from building there that are kind of unique to Brex that I think are probably a little bit less so in some of those other areas we talked about.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
Unpack that for me. Tell me paint a picture of one of those tools, those workflow tools that you’ve built.

Garrett Marker:
Yeah. So one of those tools is something that we essentially call the narrative platform. Right. And it’s this idea going back to like the roleplay exercise that the core difference oftentimes between the top sellers.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
Right.

Garrett Marker:
That do 10x better than everybody else. Right. And the sellers that are not doing as well is their understanding of the buyer’s journey and their ability to then better do active listening and kind of the right things and discovering different stages. Right? So we’ve all probably experienced a call that we’ve sat on with a seller or a customer success person or something from that perspective. And it’s like feels like nails on a chalkboard, right? Where it’s like they ask some set question that they’re supposed to do because they’re trained on the top buyer gives an answer and. And like they ask the next question that makes no sense based off the answer that they got. And it’s like very clear they’re just trying to read down a script, right. And do that.

Garrett Marker:
And it just like, doesn’t feel right. Right. Where we’ll always have someone who they ask a question they can answer and almost feels like they already knew that answer was coming. They ask a natural question. It may not even have been anything that you ever had in training, anything you ever put on mock call discovery guides and anything that you put there, but it sort of naturally made sense in the flow of conversation. And the reason they’re usually able to do that active listening is they understand what. What’s going on well enough to be able to go read the cues and kind of go down the right direction, right. Without having to be told distinctly how to do it.

Garrett Marker:
Right. It’s critical thinking in some ways, if you want to go think about it that way. And so the idea of the narrative platform, right, is there is sort of a story that as it happens and unfolds in real time, there are different things that we should be doing as individual team members on go to market to kind of best map the flow and continue to take people down. That story arc from initial conversation to they ultimately decide that your solution is the unique investment for the company to they’ve got initial value and now they’re kind of a proponent and kind of a multiplier of your brand and solution out in market. And so we built this story, this tool around, okay, what is the core story, right? Like, what are the core things that need to happen? What are the aha moments that happen for customers and actually build it across the entire journey. Where I find a lot of the tools in market are very focused on, like, how do I make the individual seller more effective? Or like, how do I like, eliminate note taking or like, how do I kind of get everything in your CRM? Or like, how do I go, like, prompt them on what to say and all those different things. But it’s very like siloed. Like, in some ways I care less about them winning the deal.

Garrett Marker:
I care more about that that customer is really successful two years down the line. So I actually need a platform that understands what’s going to happen then and ties all that data back in. I need to know what happens with support. I need to know what happens with csm. I need to know what happens with all those teams to kind of like understand the overall buyer’s journey life cycle for an individual customer. And I don’t find that most tools are thinking about it that way. I think they’re thinking about it more for like an individual team that they’re trying to solve for where I think ultimately speaking the problems that you’re trying to solve for as a business end up being like full life cycle problems for your customers. And so I think both that different approach we’re taking than other tools I’m seeing on market, but also the different data sets we’re therefore trying to go pull from, I think made it so that it was more interesting to invest.

Garrett Marker:
And then there’s also aspect of that data can be used for a lot of other things, right? Because that can help us understand how to do implementation better, how to support customers better, how to do a bunch of things that again, I don’t think are really the focuses of the current tools on market that are just trying to 10x your sales team.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
It sounds very similar to a success plan. This narrative platform that’s occurring, this information.

Garrett Marker:
I think that’s part of it. In the context of like, a success plan is usually bad ones are thought about in the context of like, okay, what’s the mutual close plan? Right? Like what’s the plan to just get to close where the better ones are. Action plans of like, how do we help the customer after that? Because that’s when the fun starts, right? Where they actually should be getting value and actually using the product and maybe actually buy more because they’ve had so much success. And so I think that is part of the overall narrative, right? Because for most buyers they only buy your solution once, right? If you think about yourself as like coffee, right? I’m not a coffee drinker, but for people that are, right, like you buy coffee thousands and thousands, thousands of times in your life, right? So you have a very good idea as to like what you want. Do you care about cream? Do you care about what kind of milk, right. If you’re in a different city, are they gonna have a certain thing that’s more fit for you, not a fit for you? Is there a certain chain you need to go to like, you know, a lot, because you buy this stuff a lot. When you think about software, it’s not like people are buying Brex every week, right? Like, it’s not like they’re buying these kind of solutions, right. They might buy once in their lifetime, right.

Garrett Marker:
Or just a few times. From that perspective, never, never bought it before, so they don’t know how to buy it. Right. And so a thing that can oftentimes happen is they have a problem, they want to solve it, they think your solution looks interesting, but they’re like, man, like, how am I going to make this work? Right? And so the idea behind a success plan is you’re essentially helping someone bridge the gap of, I’m scared that this thing that I’m buying that looks so great won’t work because I don’t know how to go set it up. And when you put in that success plan, it can give them a lot of comfort of, oh, you’ve explained to me how that’s going to go work. So I do think that is part of the overall narrative at most companies, buyers, journeys and how they go think about stuff. But it’s obviously not the only thing that they think about. Right.

Garrett Marker:
But it definitely is an aspect of that.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
What’s, what’s beyond that? What are the other parts of the narrative like? Very, very tangibly speaking.

Garrett Marker:
Yeah. So I think there, it obviously depends on the company, right? So I’m a big believer that like the buyer’s journey for different companies and different solutions are different, right? Because you’re selling the different audiences, different points of maturity curve. Are they early adopters, late adopters, Are you a small, scrappy company? Are you a larger company? Right. Like there’s a lot of different factors that go into it. But I think that when I think about some things, right. I think some examples that come up often are social proof, right? So most people are smart enough to go, no, if I work at Brex, I’m going to tell you that Brex is the best solution out there. If tomorrow I start at a competitor, I’m also going to tell you that that’s the best solution out there. And if I leave that competitor for third competitor, guess what? I’m going to tell you that third competitor is the best solution out there.

Garrett Marker:
And so they know that you do that because you’re paid to do that. And so that’s why people tend to want references or they want to go read review sites or they want to go talk to people at a conference, Right? Because when they get at a certain Point of process. They’re basically thinking, okay, I don’t actually trust you, right? I’ve gotten far enough to know this is a relevant conversation. But I want to talk to someone who I actually trust, who is unbiased, who, right. Who has no reason to tell you that your solution is better otherwise. Now, what a lot of those people don’t realize is a lot of those people might get things for being reference calls, right? Or they might be investors in the company, they might be all these other things, right? But the reason why people reach out for that, right, Is it some level of social proof which kind of removes anxiety of is everything I’m told accurate or not? Are these people being trustworthy or not? Which is a common thing people are trying to go solve for. So I think that’s kind of one example. Another example would be I don’t believe it works until I see it, right? And so that is oftentimes why people either want a pilot, a sandbox, something like that, right? Because again, it’s a.

Garrett Marker:
I need to touch it and feel it to know that it works, right? I am a person who learns that way and that is the way I’m trying to go solve it. Or that’s why oftentimes when you think about demos, the more real you can make the demo, the better and more likely it solves that problem, right? So that’s why people try to do verticalization, right? They try to have specific data sets or they try to go skin it in a way where it looks like it’s in your instance versus giving a generic demo, right? Because the generic demo doesn’t make it real for me. And so I don’t actually understand how it works in my environment, which is typically a thing that I’m going to want to go understand. So there’s like many, many other examples of things over time. But there are some commonalities, I think, for considered software or financial services purchases where as a buyer, right, you have to go think about that. And I know that because I’m a buyer of software, right? So like I’ve experienced it on the other side. But I think those are some examples of those things that most sellers understand intuitively, kind of put into how they process stuff and they, that’s why they come across as a trusted advisory actually is trying to like solve your problem more than selling things because they actually know when you do that, you’re more likely to buy. One of my favorite questions when I was a seller to go ask at the end of a demo, right? If it Gone.

Garrett Marker:
Well, you’d ask questions, they’ve told you in their own words why your tool is better or different. And like, you basically have all the reasons I think you’re going to go. When the question I always like to ask at the end of those calls is I’d state all of those things. Right. To get them to go revalidate. And I’d ask, so what are the reasons why you’re not going to move forward? Right. And sometimes they kind of look at me kind of funny, right. And be, what would you mean? Or other times they just tell me.

Garrett Marker:
But when they looked at me funny, I’d be like, well, I can. I can see all the reasons why you will. Right. But I’ve been here long enough to know that many people have all these reasons to move forward. Don’t. And I know they exist, and I don’t want to pretend like they don’t. Right. So I’d love to actually understand what your concerns are, because if there is mutual interest here, it’s in all of our best interest to figure out how we resolve those issues either to make, you know.

Garrett Marker:
Yep, you know what, we’re not ready for this. Or you know what, we should move forward because we have all these reasons where it’s obvious to go do so. And I always.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
I love that question so much.

Garrett Marker:
Yeah. And most sellers don’t want to ask that. Right. Because it’s scary. Nobody wants to hear someone tell you why they don’t want to move forward with their solution or why they think your competitor is better or why they think doing nothing’s a better answer.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
Do you remember the first time you asked that question? Or one of the first times you asked that question and you’re just like, shaking your boots.

Garrett Marker:
What I actually remember is there’s a seller I worked with at a previous company in London who I was in doing some like, Fireside Chat thing or with the, with the AMEA team. And, you know, they asked a question about, like, what’s the thing you like to do? And I gave that example. And it’s funny, three months later, they went from being one of the bottom quartile performers in the team to the top performer in the segment. And I remember they reached out to me and basically said, I just started doing that. Like, that’s the only thing I changed. And it fundamentally changed kind of like my trajectory and my performance. And so that I remember, uh, more so because I think in leadership, at least for me, part of the reason I do this is wanting to go see people matriculate up in their career and get to go do more stuff. I have some like deeply personal reasons for like why that’s important to me.

Garrett Marker:
And so me winning a deal or not on that, actually a bunch what I remember is this person’s life changed, right. They basically went from worrying about getting fired to probably making six figures more money. Right. And getting promoted and just changing the trajectory of their career and their life, which to me is a pretty cool thing.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
Yeah. AI has driven productivity of SDRs up. They can do more now, hopefully without the AI slop. And would love to hear your how you’re managing that from above. People still rolling up the sleeves, doing things the old fashioned way when it makes sense. But you also didn’t raise quotas for your SDRs. Rather what you’ve done is you’ve said, okay, great, if you hit your numbers, you can explain the details of it, but you hit your numbers, you get an opportunity to be leveled up, to be promoted to ae. Just kind of automatically tell us a little bit about that.

Garrett Marker:
Yeah, so I think. And there’s a couple things, right? So back when everybody was investing in AI SDRs, we went a different direction. And the reason why we went a different direction is I have this philosophical belief that the primary reason that you employ bdrs is actually not for the pipeline they generate. They have to generate pipeline for the business case to make sense. Right. So it’s kind of like a minimum requirement for the role to exist.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
So.

Garrett Marker:
But what you actually hire them for is all the roles they might do in the future after that. I oftentimes say the only thing better than someone who can generate pipeline is someone who can close it too. And so that’s actually what you’re trying to go optimize for longer term. And so when we have that program, right, the goal is if someone’s achieving profitable metrics in their role, like, sure, I can go squeeze a little bit more out of them, perhaps like raise quotas, do different stuff, lower cost of sale, whatever. But like if I can go get them into an AE role where they’re actually generating revenue, like that’s actually just like more valuable and that’s probably also what they want. So like the alignment and incentives are kind of mutual from that perspective. And so the next thing I then kind of thought about is, you know, okay, what’s, what’s the best way to know those people can be successful? Because I find that that’s one of the biggest jumps that people make in their career. SDR to AE as an Example, I think mid market to enterprise is another big one where a lot of people fail.

Garrett Marker:
I think when people go from individual contribute to leadership, I think a lot of people struggle with those transitions. Where I find for instance, people going from like S and B to mid market, it’s different, but maybe not as much of a shift.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
Right.

Garrett Marker:
As those other ones. And so that’s a thing that I saw, I saw many people in my career kind of struggle with that transition. And I also found challenges where you have these issues where people can move at different speeds, right. Some people pick it up sooner, some people pick it up slower. Yet oftentimes for STRs, especially because they’re early in their career ambitious, they’re not used to maybe the corporate process yet you set expectations of like tenure based, like if you’ve been in seat for a certain time, you’re not promotional, these things. And so the way that I thought we could solve that was similar to the enablement stuff right around, well, let’s have them do the work, right? And if they’re able to do the work at a certain level, that’s equivalent to what NA is doing. They sort of already doing the job. So like why would we not just have them do the job? That’s a more valuable role for the business.

Garrett Marker:
We want to go do that. And so essentially what we architect is a program where if you’re over your number by a certain percentage for a certain period of time, which AI was one thing that helped us be more efficient with like lead scoring and different things from that perspective to realize those gains or for the people who are able to do that after a certain point in time when you’ve achieved those goals, that next month we give you open A’s book of business. And if you can close a certain amount of deals while also hitting your SDR numbers, right? Cause we want to solve for the aspect of like they’d be spending so much time closing deals they didn’t generate the pipeline they needed which was still required for the business. Right. But if they could close those deals, we just would promote them on the spot. Like no questions asked whether there’s headcount available or not. Because why not? Right? It’s not a hard argument to make to finance, hey, I can hire more AES that can generate more revenue. And we already know that’s proven.

Garrett Marker:
Are you okay with that? Right. Like most CFOs are going to go say yes to that from my perspective. And also if they’ve already done the job, like what am I worried about? Right. Like they’ve literally already closed deals. Right. Like, sure, like a lot more to learn, it’s a full time job, whatever. But like if they’re already doing it, why would we not want them to go have that opportunity? And so that’s sort of how we structured the program. It’s actually grown since.

Garrett Marker:
Right. So we called our TAP program and actually exists across now all individual contributor roles at the company. And we’re actually working on building that out for managers and different stuff where you know, if you hit certain performance thresholds, you earn the opportunity to do an at bat. So that’s the AN tap, right. For different roles. Right. So you can maybe decide you want to go from SDR to an AM or you want to go from an AM to a mid market AE or you want to do different things but essentially try to create tracks where motivated, ambitious people that are performing are getting rewarded for that performance in a very clear trajectory to go from point A to point B. If that’s something that they want to go do.

Garrett Marker:
That’s something that’s interesting us obviously because as they move to these different roles, they’re typically moving to roles with bigger quotas and larger revenue contributions. So like I guess only thing better than someone who closes pipeline and sources it as someone who sources even more and closes even more. Right. Like I guess that’s probably even better in that example. But that’s some of like why we have it set up, how we have it set up. And surprisingly it’s worked. It’s worked a lot better than I thought it was going to. The one thing that happened that I was a little bit surprised by is it does reset expectations for your team.

Garrett Marker:
Right. So it’s funny now with people coming in like they almost expect to get promoted faster and they like expect that this is now the status quo and they don’t realize like at a lot of other companies, like that’s not how it works but like it’s kind of been normalized here at that point. And so that’s kind of been a funny, a funny aspect of it. But for the most part it’s worked really well. The sellers have done really well when they move in the full cycle roles. It’s really increased internal mobility and I think been a good, good net positive.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
Yeah, yeah, yeah. I guess they can get a little antsy if they see all their peers moving up and they have that expectation. But that makes sense. Trigger at bat, promotion, tap trigger at that promotion. I love it. Before we, we let, let you go here, what’s going on on the post sale side, what’s the biggest thing that you want to tell me as a priority as you finish the year here?

Garrett Marker:
Yeah, I think the, I think the biggest thing that’s probably happening on the post sale side is I think a couple things, right? I think one is making sure that we can really make our customers successful with our AI products. So a thing I remind the team all the time about is like my goal is not necessarily to be first, my goal is to be best. Because if you’re actually best to market with a solution, everybody’s going to go find out eventually and they’re all going to end up using your tool. And so I think there’s a lot of companies that have been in a rush to talk about AI, AI, AI, slap AI and a bunch of stuff and talk about how they do all the AI things and then people sign up for the things and it’s doesn’t actually do anything, doesn’t actually work very well. And it turns and we’ve seen that a lot with customers that we’ve now been able to go secure who are kind of promised the moon from different people and it didn’t end up working. And so one of the things I find interesting about AI is one of the ideas is okay, it’s going to go reduce busy work that you don’t want to do. You’d be surprised how hard it is to motivate people to spend the time to configure something, eliminate the work that they don’t care about because it involves thinking about the work that they don’t care about. Right? And so I do think that we’re coding doesn’t have that problem, right? Because people like to code, they like to go do the stuff and so they’re thinking about it a lot.

Garrett Marker:
And so I think making sure that we’ve kind of nailed kind of the adoption part and how to make people successful I think has been really top of mind because we haven’t really seen any issues with getting people to buy it. We haven’t really seen a lot of issues with getting people to realize that our products are better. They’re based off like different infrastructure advantages, ecosystem advantages. We have different approach advantages we have from that perspective. And we have a lot of customers that have been successful, but obviously it’s an earlier product, right? So we have all hands on deck to go make it work and all that kind of stuff. We’re going to need to go make that work for other companies in a more scaled way longer term. And So I think that’s something that’s really top of mind in the install base. Because I could argue the only thing holding us back from kind of growing that part of the business even faster could go be can we kind of support it in a way that’s cost effective.

Garrett Marker:
Right. So you think about it with like the current AI labs, right, where some are very not profitable, some are very profitable, right? We have those kind of things where it’s like, yeah, we obviously have product market fit and people are seeing value, but how do we make sure that we go resource that in a way where it’s going to go be profitable long term, I think is kind of one big thing that I’m focused on right now on the install base. And the other thing on the install base is how can we increasingly better understand our customers and serve them better. And so a good example of that is I think a lot of people at Brex are really great at talking about Brex, which is awesome, and how Brex can go solve their problems, right. And how they should buy more Brex or use more Brex. I think the thing that we could be better at is how can our partners go solve their problems in the context of if I’m a cfo, I sort of don’t care about Brex. I do, I use vendor, you solve problems, that’s all that kind of stuff. But Brex is just one of many tools I use, right? Like one of the things I always laugh about when people talk about all in one solutions is like, find me a executive that only has one tech tool on their tool stack, right? Because it doesn’t exist.

Garrett Marker:
And so the reality is everything needs to integrate with something, everything needs to work with something else. Everything needs to go have other things that it plays nicely with. And so I’m usually trying to think about a problem that, that all these tools ladder up to and kind of solve cohesively. And I think actually if you’re the team that can actually understand the business’s problems at a way where you can have those kind of conversations, it changes stuff. So a great example is we’ve actually increased the amount of people that close the books with Brex by about 20% in the last 12 months. And that’s because we made a bunch of product changes, but we actually basically changed the way that our customer success team was oriented in talking to people about it. Because oftentimes the reason why someone would or wouldn’t adopt the tool is not that the tool did or didn’t work, but if you Think about it, closing the books every month is a business process. And when you really don’t want to get wrong.

Garrett Marker:
And so you need to understand how it works at your erp, how it works with different tools, how all this stuff works together. To feel comfortable about making a change would also mean that you use Brex for that business process. And so we’ve obviously done that with things like closing the books, which is great. But there’s other workflows that we can go drive that are cross functional in nature that we need to go get better at talking about the broader ecosystem to be able to go do that.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
Well, and it sounds like educating your users on that part of the workflow as well.

Garrett Marker:
Yeah, right. And how it all ties together. Right. Because their questions might be about how does it work with Rillet or how does it work with Campfire, how does it work with NetSuite or how does it work with QBO? Like it may be how those tools work. And if you have a sales team that basically goes, oh, well, like that’s not my problem, I don’t know about those. Let me go tell you about the Brex stuff. That’s not good enough. Right.

Garrett Marker:
Where if they can say, oh, actually you want to set up these tools in these ways and this will allow you to do all this other stuff in Brex, they go, oh, that solves my overall business problem. And they end up using Brex more. Right. And so I think that’s a maturity curve thing we’re on. I think great kind of install based organizations do that really well. Right. I think we, when I joined had some maturity we need to do to go get there. So I think we’re just kind of starting the journey from that perspective.

Garrett Marker:
But that like next level maturity as far as how we serve our customers, I think is top of mind because we’ve increased NRR a ton the last couple years, which is great. But I think what we did before probably won’t get us to increase it even more. I think it’s some of these things are examples of what we’re going to need to do now if we want to go increase NRR by another 10, 20, 30 points in the next couple years.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
Yeah. Garrett, you’re a busy man. You got a lot under your remit there. You have a lot of things to do. But you made the time to speak to us on Unchurned and I really appreciate that. Garrett Marker CRO of Brex, thank you so much for being on the program.

Garrett Marker:
Awesome. Thanks for having me.