DocketAI
Podcast
Episode
3

Steve Armenti on the role of Ai in sales and GTM

Join host Arjun Pillai, cofounder and CEO of DocketAI, for a conversation with Steve Armenti on his transition from sales to marketing and his tenure at Google and DigitalOcean.

About the Speaker

Steve Armenti boasts over 15 years of experience in marketing, beginning his career in sales, where he pioneered early ABM strategies and digital marketing tactics. His journey started with launching and growing a successful website, which led to roles in demand generation and growth marketing leadership at Google and DigitalOcean. Steve combines his expertise in demand generation with a passion for innovation and shaping strategies that blend product-led and sales-led growth. His journey is defined by a pursuit of empathetic leadership, growing and nurturing high-performing teams, and staying ahead of the latest marketing trends.
Steve Armenti
CEO and Founder, twelfth
Connect on LinkedIn

Summary

In this episode of Rethink CRO, Steve Armenti, CEO of 12th and former marketing leader at Google and DigitalOcean, shares his journey from sales to marketing. He reveals how he introduced ABM at Google by transforming Chrome Enterprise's demand strategy. Steve discusses the challenges of modern GTM leadership, the inefficiencies of traditional MQL models, and why aligning sales and marketing is key. He highlights AI’s role in predictive lead scoring and SDR automation, while emphasizing the importance of clean data for GTM success. Steve also shares how marketers must now understand financials and revenue efficiency, and why marketers should rethink lead gen, especially content syndication. He advocates for account-based strategies and shares a practical approach to mapping customer journeys for better GTM decisions. Finally, he recommends 4,000 Weeks by Oliver Burkeman for professionals seeking clarity in a noisy, fast-changing environment. Connect with Steve via LinkedIn for more insights.

Transcript

Arjun Pillai | Docket AI (01:21.203)

All right, let's go. Welcome to the Rethink CRO podcast, everybody. Today, I'm so excited to welcome Steve Armenty to the podcast. Steve is the founder and CEO of 12th. He has over 15 years of experience in marketing, and you started with sales as your first thing that you do. And then you were at Google and you convinced somehow Google to go to ABM. And I want to hear that story.

Arjun Pillai | Docket AI (01:50.785)

how you convinced Google that doing ABM is the right thing. And then your first thing that you do was you had some form of a website that you grew and that's how you kind of got into marketing and demand generation and growth marketing. You were at Google Digital Ocean and now you're on your own, starting off with an agency kind of a company. Did I get that right?

Steve Armenti (02:10.147)

Yeah, yeah, you nailed it. You nailed it. And, you know, first off, thanks for inviting me on. I'm so excited to talk to you. And yeah, that's, that's pretty much it in a nutshell. You know, I think I, I actually, I always wanted to be in marketing. So in high school, I remember I took an advertising class and you know, this was 20 years ago. And so they were talking about big brand billboards and TV commercials and you know, like ad agency stuff. And I thought, man, that's what I want to do. I'm going to get into marketing.

And then, sure enough, 2008, I graduated college. There's no jobs. And ended up as an SDR, making 100 phone calls a day. But it built tough skin. It showed me how sales works. yeah, then from there, I still pursued that passion of marketing. And I think in that sales role, I was A-B testing emails. And I was trying to scrape information together to learn about who I was emailing and calling.

Arjun Pillai | Docket AI (02:45.335)

Sure.

Steve Armenti (03:08.325)

now you can do it massive scale. But to me, that was all like market research and marketing. And so I pivoted that and started a website with my brother and we grew it to, not a huge thing. It's like maybe 30,000 views a month, but we started playing around with advertising and social media. And then that just turned into a real marketing job. then Google came and then DigitalOcean and now I'm doing my own thing. And it's been a wild journey.

Arjun Pillai | Docket AI (03:09.398)

you

Arjun Pillai | Docket AI (03:22.341)

Okay.

Arjun Pillai | Docket AI (03:35.438)

Sitting here and looking back and talking about these things, it will all feel natural. know, yeah, sending emails at scale, you know, having hundred calls, dials, you know, all of these things looking back is easy. But back then when you were doing it, people were not doing it. 2015, I remember I sent cold emails and I would get stingers back saying, how dare you email me? You are talking about even five years, seven years prior to that. So that's

Steve Armenti (03:48.759)

Mm-hmm. Right.

Steve Armenti (03:56.397)

Uh-huh. Yeah.

Arjun Pillai | Docket AI (04:03.539)

That's massive.

Steve Armenti (04:03.757)

Yeah, yeah, you know, it's funny. I look back now and what I was doing was creating these offers, right? You I was making these phone calls, but then I figured out email and Salesforce and how to segment my accounts in Salesforce. And so I figured out that if I sent, you know, these very direct emails to the, was talking to CFOs, if I'd hit them with this email that said, Hey, so and so, you know, my, my CSO, my like chief sales officer is going to be in town.

meeting with your competitor next door, he wants to know if you're around. And I'd literally do the research and find out that these offices were 15 minutes apart. And then I'd bulk schedule meetings. I'd get 10 in a row over the course of two days. And my sales manager at the time was like, what are you doing, Steve? This is working great. I'm like, I'm just tinkering. I'm not quite sure.

Arjun Pillai | Docket AI (04:52.886)

People still use that. I still get emails. My is in town. Do you want to meet? And I'm like, no, I'm OK. Exactly. Yeah, yeah. And so when did you get to Google?

Steve Armenti (04:56.421)

Now you're like, who is this person? I don't know.

Steve Armenti (05:06.981)

Google was about eight years ago. So before that, I spent five years with a content marketing startup company called Skyward. I guess they're a little bit more than a startup now, but we were advising and building content strategies for Fortune 500. So I naturally kind of niched down on B2B. I had HP, HPE, IBM. I actually had Google as a client at one point.

And what was interesting was we were going in and we were building kind of like SEO driven content strategies. But then every single customer said, okay, we have all this content now. What do we do with it? And then it turned into, you know, the team I was running at the time. were kind of like demand gen, right? We're like, okay. Well, you should be thinking about paid media and social and organic and how are you distributing this across prospects and customers and building newsletters? And so a lot of the stuff today, that's like table stakes, you know, 10 years ago was like,

Arjun Pillai | Docket AI (05:43.413)

Yeah.

Steve Armenti (06:02.847)

you can do more than just SEO? That's interesting. And then so that took me to Google. That was how I kind of learned DemandGen and then went into Google as a, started as an integrated campaign type of role, which was essentially managing all of the demand functions across Google Cloud.

Arjun Pillai | Docket AI (06:06.814)

Understood.

Arjun Pillai | Docket AI (06:23.417)

So you were specifically helping the marketing of Google Cloud or did you have something more than Google Cloud?

Steve Armenti (06:29.867)

It was specific. Yeah, so my Google experience was honestly was great. I love that company. I think all the people I've met there were phenomenal and over the seven years I worked on Google Cloud. I worked on Google Drive Enterprise and then workspace and then right before I left I was leading demand gen for Google Chrome browser OS and then Android Enterprise. So you know kind of product by product there. You know they're so big there's there's a marketing team for.

virtually every product except for the small ones. So we were like these full stack teams that were going out and developing the entire go-to-market strategy for that product.

Arjun Pillai | Docket AI (07:10.196)

And how did you get APM into Google? So what was the thought process? What was the problem you were solving? Was it for Google Cloud? Just give us the story.

Steve Armenti (07:19.437)

Yeah, yeah, yeah, this is my favorite. I tell people, it's like, this is my claim to fame, kind of. But it actually was with Chrome. So Chrome Enterprise Business is built on the operating system and then the browser. The browser is very well known, right? Billions of users were probably both in Chrome right now. But when I started there, it was predominantly a brand-led marketing motion.

So lots and lots of display ads and event sponsorships and those types of executions. But as that market changed and Google as a whole saw more of an opportunity to put those devices and that software in the hands of enterprises as they're ramping up workspace and cloud, Chrome, there was more importance on building demand. So when I started there, I was a team of one trying to figure out like basically lead gen, we were producing leads.

Arjun Pillai | Docket AI (08:02.035)

Thank

Steve Armenti (08:14.979)

scoring, qualifying, sending them to a sales team. And over the course of two, three years, that evolved into ABM. But the moment, the kind of the thing that the tipping point, as Malcolm Gladwell would say, is a meeting I had with the GM of Chrome, the VP of Sales, the VP of Finance, and then Marketing Leadership. And I basically went in and built this whole business case around the fact that LeadGen,

as in its current state was just highly ineffective. We were spending tons of money top of funnel and we're not seeing the return down funnel. And then I introduced this concept of like, what if we re-architected the entire sales and marketing motion towards this account based approach? And at the time I didn't even really call it ABM, but that's what it was, right? And it was everything from the data to the operational model to the tactics, the channels, the planning, the forecasting.

Arjun Pillai | Docket AI (09:05.075)

Thank

Steve Armenti (09:12.289)

Everyone was kind of centralized on this one approach. And ultimately what it did was bring sales and marketing super close together. Like right after that, there wasn't 24 hours that went by that I wasn't talking to the SDR manager or AEs or sales pod leaders and stuff. just, it kind of made us one team, which in a big enterprise is really tough because we all had different VPs and you know, right? And so that to me was like, man, that

this has value in itself. And then we saw the return in the performance later on.

Arjun Pillai | Docket AI (09:45.843)

Oh, perfect. So that was for the enterprise version of Chrome. And then you were executing that. But now that you have seen all of this, right, the interesting thing about your background is I guess market and HubSpot these guys started 2005, 2007 from the billboards to being able to measure marketing. And from there, seen all the way to 2025 where, you know, I don't know if anybody is sure what is working today, but

Steve Armenti (10:04.837)

Mm-hmm.

Arjun Pillai | Docket AI (10:13.235)

Being an Avenue leader and helping a bunch of companies. What is keeping you at night?

Steve Armenti (10:18.937)

Yeah, you know, I thought about this and it's for me, it's actually the uncertainty. you know, from, I can share a few different experiences when my last role as a VP of revenue marketing at DigitalOcean, you know, that was the uncertainty of that market, right? But now as a business owner, it's like, I'm thinking about, you know, AI is changing everything. The playbook that's been run from a marketing and sales

you know, point of view over the last 10, 20 years is completely different. And so I'm thinking more and more about like who's out there getting an edge on me or getting an edge on my clients. What new technology are they using or testing or trying that's giving them that leg up? And, it's, it's kind of an anxious state to be in, right? Cause I think you go from, Hey, I know what I'm doing. I'm very confident in what I'm doing. I've driven results. This is great.

you now you throw that playbook out the window, it's like everything is changing. Everything is so different. So, you know, as a lifelong marketer, I think that's putting some pressure on marketers. And a lot of the folks I talked to obviously have some kind of problem that they're trying to fix. And that's what I'm helping with. But it's really it's really pushing them to understand, you know, deeper how the business operates, like the financials and the revenue efficiency, and then be able to adjust their approach to that. They can't just ask for budget and, you know, run campaigns. That just doesn't work anymore.

Arjun Pillai | Docket AI (11:44.434)

It's pretty interesting how the CAC has changed over the years. Even the some of the public companies, the time it takes for them to get back the CAC is like 34 months to 54 months. And we are not talking like deep service now kind of engagements. It is even smaller ACV engagements. We are seeing like 34 to 40 months of CAC payback period, which is insane. You know, to your point, it has been not this difficult to get companies and deals through.

Steve Armenti (11:53.509)

Mm-hmm.

Steve Armenti (12:02.233)

Mm-hmm.

Steve Armenti (12:07.407)

Yeah.

Steve Armenti (12:14.095)

Yeah.

Arjun Pillai | Docket AI (12:14.434)

So knowing all of that Steve, what do you think is the biggest shift happening in the go-to-market leadership?

Steve Armenti (12:22.563)

Yeah, I love this question. here's my hot take on this. So you've got you think about, you know, what go to market leadership is, right? It's it's the CFO is the CRO is the CEO, and maybe a CMO, or maybe a chief customer officer, right? Those could be edge cases. Now, you've got all of them trying to figure out what the hell's going on right now. And they're bringing their own biases and their background in right. So you know, over my years of experience,

most leadership, right? They came from a product led organization, a sales led or marketing led, and they bring that with them. And you see that in their day to day, right? And so that's how they're operating on day to day basis. But then at the same time, they all have their job to do, right? The CEO is trying to please the board, investors, Wall Street, whoever, right? CFO is trying to run a lean organization. They're obsessing about the numbers.

they're pushing that pressure down on the go-to-market team. And then you've got the CRO who's maybe overseeing marketing and it's formerly a sales leader is like not sure what to do about this. Or you've got a CMO who's unsure about a sales led organization. They're trying to run this go-to-market and they're getting all this pressure. And then the whole thing is just sort of blowing up, right? And I think that's where this whole GTM efficiency thing came from and why it's so important now, because all of these individuals are looking and saying, well, something's not right.

Arjun Pillai | Docket AI (13:29.498)

Thank you.

Steve Armenti (13:39.631)

What are we going to change? I'm not sure, right? Like, hey, CMO, do you know? No, I'm not sure. Hey, CRO, do you know? And I think it's more, it's got to be more of a team effort and everyone rowing in the same direction. Otherwise it can create a lot of chaos.

Arjun Pillai | Docket AI (13:52.92)

And when you look at this whole entire funnel right from let's say awareness all the way to advocacy, what are some of the biggest inefficient phases, let's say, so to speak, that you are seeing today that the revenue leaders are most concerned about?

Steve Armenti (14:03.493)

Hmm.

Steve Armenti (14:09.561)

Yeah, I'll tell you too that I think are most, you know, most kind of like intimate in me and my experience, right? And the first one, I'll be the first to say like sometimes marketers are inefficient, right? Lifelong marketer here, but like you got to be humble and own up to your mistakes. The whole lead to MQL model is done. Like it just, has to be done. If you are buying leads, scoring them with a dated system and then sending them to sales.

Like I can almost guarantee right now 50 % of that activity is inefficient wasted budget. Like it's just not going to work. And so I think that that all has to change. Right. And, my approach there is this taking it through this account based lens where you're looking at really a hierarchy of dimensions from, you know, the account, the people within the account, their behavior, their demographics, firm, a graphics, you know, we all have access to all of this now.

And so you can get much smarter about who you wanna talk to, when and what you say. So that's the first piece kind of higher up in the funnel. And then I think the other is actually just the SDR model because it's directly connected to this inefficient lead and MQL model, right? So now you're investing in humans to sit there and call into and qualify this massive volume of low quality that marketing is spending tons of money to acquire.

And you're basically just flooding the system with inefficiency, right? And so I think that creates some issues on the SDR side, and then that model breaks as you try to scale it, and you're not getting the ROI out of it. And so I think both sides can really, in general, become more efficient, right? Marketing can get smarter about what segments they want to acquire, where they're best at acquiring them, and putting metrics to that.

know sales, SCR's can get better at giving feedback and running more efficient outreach plays and things like that. But I think those two pieces right there, know, at least with a lot of the companies I'm working with, that's like where I go first. You know, when someone says we're having a pipeline problem, I say, OK, let me look at that data between those two things right there.

Arjun Pillai | Docket AI (16:18.127)

So you are essentially saying is the way to buy leads, whether it is, me if I'm going wrong, but content syndication or having, you know, useless white paper lead magnets, somehow getting the emails. So these are what you call us the leads and the are those masking. not stating, then, you know, finding some form of elite scoring and pushing it to sales.

Steve Armenti (16:26.469)

Mm-hmm.

Steve Armenti (16:35.961)

Mm-hmm.

Arjun Pillai | Docket AI (16:44.291)

the person does not even remember that they downloaded a piece of content. Is that what you mean or something else?

Steve Armenti (16:47.941)

It is, yeah. Although I have a bit of a hot take on syndication in particular. and you know this world well from ZoomInfo, right? And I ran a lot of it in the past. And I think where marketing went wrong is this idea that I can buy an opportunity. Like that's what they think, right? They talk to a lead gen vendor and the lead gen vendor says, I'll give you.

I'll give you 10,000 leads, know, 45 bucks a pop, and then you're going to put them in your lead nurture. Those are going to turn into opportunities. Marketers think this is the easiest ROI I've ever found. Right. My take throughout my whole career is that it is a, it's a better way to build your database because at the enterprise level, and that's mostly where I deal today is like, there is so many privacy restrictions. There's so much governance and compliance happening across lead gen. You can't afford.

to send a text or an email to somebody that's not double opted in to your terms, right? So at the enterprise level, syndication is still valuable. And a lot of people debate me on that, but they've never been in the enterprise, so they don't know what they're talking about. And so like you need that, but the goal is to build a database, not to try to fill a funnel with opportunities there. Sorry, long way of saying.

Arjun Pillai | Docket AI (17:59.852)

But it's not absolutely. I think that clarifies it really well. For an average company, there is the zoom info Apollo seamless of the world where you can directly bring in the database, populate your CRM that or populate your outreach with that. Versus for an enterprise you for you cannot do that directly reaching out just cold because of the restrictions. So you're kind of using content syndication. In my experience, content syndication has never worked for me.

Steve Armenti (18:10.639)

Mm-hmm.

Steve Armenti (18:26.703)

Mm-hmm.

Arjun Pillai | Docket AI (18:26.712)

you I've spent money, I've brought in these leads and then you reach out. I think the place where it completely fails is if you take a content syndication, give it to an SDR, total. And so I think that's what you are also kind of getting at.

Steve Armenti (18:36.184)

Right, right.

Steve Armenti (18:40.089)

Yeah, and that's the thing. That's where I think that, you know, it's oftentimes the that's a symptom of a root cause, right? And I would say the root cause is that there's this belief internally that content syndication leads will become opportunities. And I some of them might. I think you're lucky if you can get two to 3 % of them to turn into opportunities, right? But if you reframe it and you say, we're actually just buying a database that we can market.

changes the game now all of sudden demand gen isn't this content syndication team right they become more of the life cycle the nurture the data the segmentation the sequencing and like predictive and that stuff's fun that's real fun for demand gen.

Arjun Pillai | Docket AI (19:25.55)

And are you a believer of AI is DR since we were on this DR topic?

Steve Armenti (19:30.533)

You know what I think I'll say yes use case by use case right I think that just deploying an AISDR to just straight up replace a human isn't a great idea but if you've got a specific use case where I'll give you an example let's say you're a product led growth company and you've got a lot of volume coming in through the PLG model and then you don't know a ton about them

from a human interaction standpoint, you don't have an SDR that can call into them within the first seven days and see if they're adding value. think an AISDR can work there, right? Because you can send a message out that's related to some product behavior that they've shown, and then you can personalize that a little bit, try to get something back from them. And really, the goal of that AISDR is information gathering, and then pass it to an AE, someone who can actually talk.

technical and get them in there using more of the product.

Arjun Pillai | Docket AI (20:28.909)

Understood. So more of an inbound kind of a use case, whether they have either a form submitted or they are a PQL or just getting to be a product qualified leader. That makes sense. And in your vantage point, what are the other AI pieces in go to market in 2025 that you think is helping will help your bullish about

Steve Armenti (20:36.527)

Mm-hmm.

Steve Armenti (20:52.389)

Yeah, yeah, there's there's a couple areas. I think the first is some of the companies that are doing basically like predictive modeling as a service. So you can you can feed in enough of your CRM and prospect data to then build more predictive models than some of the traditional stuff that's out there. And, you know, typical marketing, you know, call it a lead scoring model is going to be based on demographics and then some event.

or something they did, maybe a little bit more advanced than that, it's going to be behavioral and it'll be some combination of events they did, right? But all of that's very static, right? You set the rules and then you wait for stuff to come in and meet those rules and then route it. Whereas these other tools like MadKudu Forward was one I was looking at, they're actually out there saying,

Your lead scoring model is fluid, right? You're gonna feed it enough data. We're gonna learn from those patterns to create the initial scoring, but then it's gonna evolve as we go and it's gonna learn who your best customers are and then we're gonna send those to sales. That's super powerful to me because of that problem we were just talking about, Marketing's out there buying all these leads, scoring them with this dated model, sending them over the fence to SDRs. SDRs are pissed. They're like, none of these are quality. Whereas, you you've got AI working that process for you is exciting.

And I think the other is just really the assistance or the agentic side of AI in helping go-to-market people do what they do better. I'm using AI in probably 50 % of what I'm doing on a daily basis, whether it's planning, strategy, content, coming up with ideas and that sort of thing. And so it's made me that much more effective. And so I think that's a huge, exciting use case.

Arjun Pillai | Docket AI (22:41.917)

Sam, the CEO of Matt Kudu is a good friend. Sam and I had a coffee a week back here in the Bay Area. So yeah, he was talking about all the new things that they are adding. mean, Matt Kudu has been one of the pioneers of not pioneers, but they have been around in the new gen lead scoring for a really long time. Right. So I was pretty excited to hear his story and also the rest of what he's building.

Steve Armenti (23:01.796)

Hmm.

Steve Armenti (23:07.213)

Yeah, that's cool. That's cool. Tell them I'm a fan. You know, I think to like bring that full circle to right. I am sort of doubling down on on account based as a go to market strategy, right? And I look at what's happening with a lot of these AI tools, which I think have been primarily marketed towards sales leaders. And that's kind of the sales side of go to market. And I'm looking at all of them. I'm saying

these are phenomenal for account base. Like I can build lists super fast now for super cheap. I can get as much data as I want about those lists. We can build, you know, tons of segments, which then allows us to personalize like crazy and all of the distribution platforms through, you know, email. And you can orchestrate now across like a kind of multi-channel, multi-sequencing type, like multi-threading type stuff. You can automate a lot of that now, which is just super exciting. Cause the old way of doing that was really, really manual.

people led to get a, you you need a Marketo admin, need a Salesforce admin, then you need a content writer, you know, you need team of five just to be able to do that.

Arjun Pillai | Docket AI (24:08.703)

And you mentioned about giving all this data to these tools so that the tools can do their magic. But that is assuming that the data is in a good enough shape. I have spoken with this year or a person who said my Salesforce data is good. How do you think about the underlying data layer for go to market?

Steve Armenti (24:27.329)

Yeah, I am so glad you asked. I think I'm a data nerd at heart. I love learning more about this, right? And so I think, you know, the beginning is like, well, what happened? Like, how did we get here? And I was thinking about this analogy of, you know, particularly in large companies, it's a mess, right? It's all siloed, it's all over the place. And I thought back to, well, there was one point in the journey of this company.

where they could have been data forward. They could have been thinking a few steps ahead about what the data infrastructure was gonna look like, but they didn't. And so the analogy I was thinking about was like, imagine you're building a house, And if imagine if you did it one room at a time. So you hired a framer who came in, built the walls of your bathroom and then the drywall, then the plumber came in, then the electrician came in and then the painter and you finished the bathroom. Then you started building the kitchen right next to it. You're gonna have all kinds of problems, right? It's like.

It's not connected, the plumbing's not working, like what's going on? And I think that's really how companies get built, right? It's like they start with one thing. Okay, we're gonna be sales led. Maybe you've got the CEO and a salesperson or a CEO and a product person. And then they're building from there and they kind of get one piece right and they go on and they build the next piece. And so the end result is just this siloed situation where all of your data is not clean, it's not organized well, there's no hierarchy, there's no broad definitions.

and alignment across the company. And then on top of that, you've got each department trying to fix it, right? And each one's bringing in their own tool, which creates more data, which doesn't talk to the other tools that are creating more data. And then, you know, if you're lucky and you're at a really big company, you've got a central data team, but all they're really doing is just trying to clean up the mess on a daily basis and field, you know, ad hoc requests from people. So I think if anything,

You know, I'd have this wish of like, hey founders, when you're out there building a company, like someday you're going to need this. Like think about it now. All right. It might be five years down the road, but it will eventually become the thorniest part of the business. And like, you might as well tackle it now.

Arjun Pillai | Docket AI (26:32.429)

Let's imagine a thousand employee company or a 2000 employee company. So it's not really an enterprise. It's in the mid market zone. If they have to start changing their data layer for the better right now, what are some of the, let's say the lower hanging fruits that are going to give them a lot of lift? What are some of one to one, two, three things that you would do?

Steve Armenti (26:52.065)

Yeah, know, being, you know, kind of this is more around go to market. I'd start with the data from the CRM and from any marketing systems, right? That's going to give you the best view into who your customers are, how they engage, what they engage with, and then a sense of what your buying cycle is like, right? And so if you can focus in on that data there, it'll enable your go to market team better.

And there's a lot of ways you can get into this, but I think my sort of quick hit process would be, you start with mapping out the entire customer journey that you think is right at the time, right? So that's your sort of typical, your bow tie or awareness to expansion, whatever it is. And then you're going to plot every single stage, every single step in that journey. And then you're going to go and look at the available data for each of those steps.

And you're going to map all that together. And then you can start to play with that and say, okay, well, what is the, what is the efficiency of our go to market to move someone from step one to step two or three to four. Right. And you can follow that all the way through. get this big matrix of conversion rates. Then the next step would be, okay, let's join in the financial data from the company. So now we can get smarter about pipeline creation and velocity and revenue density across each of those stages and then apply that.

down to a more granular level like marketing channels and sales tactics and that sort of thing. So ultimately as a result of that, you've got a, you know, really a dashboard or a blueprint of how go-to-market makes money, how effective they are at it, who does what, what stages are present in the process. And then, you know, then you should be able to go from there, right? You should be able to have some clear insights.

Arjun Pillai | Docket AI (28:42.696)

In this fast-moving world, you have to also update yourself. Do you read books? there good books that you recommend? Podcasts, YouTube channels, what do you do?

Steve Armenti (28:47.619)

Mm-hmm.

Steve Armenti (28:53.303)

Yeah, so actually the last book I I do like podcasts. I listened to all of the, you know, the B2B stuff to try to learn. for books, I try to save it for like deeper thinking. So I'll tell you when I just read it's called 4000 Weeks by Oliver Berkman. Have you heard of it? It's interesting. So he's a lifelong, what does he call himself? He's a like a productivity addict. He's addicted to productivity. And then he had this revolution and said this whole thing is wrong, right?

Arjun Pillai | Docket AI (29:11.128)

No.

Steve Armenti (29:22.861)

And so he argues that if you can make it to the age of 80, 80 years old, you've got 4,000 weeks to live. And his question is like, well, what are you going to do with it? And so, you he applies it to like business and leadership and stuff. And I think it's relevant today because everywhere you look, there's a distraction, right? Like, you know, you then, know, the website, there's an AI for that. I mean, there's like 2000, right? If not more. so like every day you log into LinkedIn or your email and you're getting distracted by stuff.

And I think those that will do well over the next years and kind of like through this phase are the ones that are going to get really, really clear on what matters most and like what is most relevant to do today that's going to set me up for a year or two from now. And so it is a really interesting book. It kind of makes you pause and think for a second. It's like, how much time have I wasted on stuff that doesn't matter?

Arjun Pillai | Docket AI (30:15.28)

Yeah, I'm sure it's a lot for most of us. And if listeners want to learn more about you or contact you, what are the ways?

Steve Armenti (30:19.161)

Yeah.

Steve Armenti (30:25.295)

Yeah, LinkedIn is the number one. I'm pretty active there. I post a couple times a week. It's me. It's not some AI agent. I respond to comments and DMs. So yeah, hit me up if you ever want to chat or have a coffee chat.

Arjun Pillai | Docket AI (30:39.401)

Awesome. Thanks a lot, Steve. We really appreciate you having, spending all this time with us and sharing some of these insights.

Steve Armenti (30:47.437)

Likewise, Arjun. Yeah, thank you. Appreciate it.

Arjun Pillai | Docket AI (30:50.248)

Thank you to our listeners too for joining and we'll see you next time on another episode. Thanks a lot.

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