Unlocking Sales Potential with David Roberts, SugarCRM
Join SugarCRM and David Roberts for Fuel Growth Podcast’s S3E10 and learn David’s leadership philosophy as a "mechanical strategist," and how he aims to empower sales teams.
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About the Episode
David Roberts has spent a career empowering customer-facing organizations to excel at knowing their customers and driving exceptional marketing, sales, and service engagement. He is currently President and CEO of SugarCRM and is responsible for leading the company’s vision, culture, strategy, and operations. David has led exceptional companies and teams for 30 years with publicly listed and private equity-backed companies, with a focus on profitable growth and successful M&A.
On this episode of Fuel Growth, David discusses his journey through the CRM industry, his leadership philosophy as a “mechanical strategist,” and how he aims to empower sales teams and unlock sales potential through innovative technology.
Check out the site for more episodes, and information about the Fuel Growth podcast, brought to you by SugarCRM.
David Roberts has spent a career empowering customer-facing organizations to excel at knowing their customers and driving exceptional marketing, sales, and service engagement. He is currently President and CEO of SugarCRM and is responsible for leading the company's vision, culture, strategy, and operations. David has led exceptional companies and teams for 30 years with publicly listed and private equity-backed companies, with a focus on profitable growth and successful M&A.
He joined SugarCRM from Alchemer, a global SaaS company focused on helping 12,000 global customers improve their customers’ experiences (CX) and their customer and employee feedback programs. He served as CEO and Director during a period of incredible growth and scale; rebranding and repositioning the company and selling the business to KKR. In prior leadership roles, David was a Senior Partner in Accenture’s CRM practice, the CEO of ReedGroup (now part of Alight), and a cabinet member in Denver Mayor,John Hickenlooper’s administration.
Transcript
Clint Oram
Welcome to the Fuel Growth Podcast, where we explore how to unlock the secrets to sustained revenue growth. David Roberts is our guest today. He is the Chief Executive Officer of Sugar CRM , appointed to that position in September, 2024. Prior to joining Sugar, he served as CEO of Almer, where he scaled the company into a leader in the customer feedback and survey industry.
Clint Oram
David has also held senior leadership roles as CEO of Regroup, and as a senior partner at Accenture, bringing over two decades of experience in the CRM sector. Throughout his career, he has been recognized for his focus on innovation, operational excellence and customer success. Welcome to the pod, David.
David Roberts
Thanks, Clint. It's great to be with you.
Clint Oram
It's good to have you here.
Lizzie Overlund
Yeah, it's a rather unique pleasure to have you on the podcast. David, you are the CEO of SugarCRM , which is the sponsor of the Fuel Growth Podcast, and we haven't interviewed somebody from SugarCRM before. Before we jump into the business side of things, can we get to know you on a personal level specifically? Can you talk about how you fuel your own personal growth outside of the office?
David Roberts
Yeah. I think for me it's a constant quest to try to be better at whatever I'm doing and I love the Colorado Mountains. I live here in Colorado. I spend a ton of time outdoors. I. As an example, I love to ski, but I'm not skiing blue groomers. I'm in the moguls trying to improve my form and get better at moguls when I'm out there skiing. And so the challenge of trying to be better at things is a lot of what fuels me and it drives me at work, but it also drives me personally. I've got a couple teenage boys and my wife and I spent a ton of our time on soccer and flag football sidelines watching them and paying attention to them. The oldest one's about to be able to drive, which might take a little bit of pressure off of the constant currying and ubering of our children, but they occupy a huge amount of my time, energy, and love too.
Clint Oram
Join us as we interview CEOs, entrepreneurs and seasoned executives to explore what it takes to propel your business into growth. Today is another special serum spotlight edition of the podcast from the SugarCRM Adoption Roadshow workshop in the beautiful Amazon Web Services offices in Austin, Texas. Just like in our other CRM Spotlight editions, we're going to dig into the topic of successfully deploying a customer relationship management project and driving adoption and usage. My guest today is Tanner Mackenthun, CRM Sales Enablement Manager for Agiliti based in Eden, Prairie, Minnesota, just outside of Minneapolis. Agiliti Health provides medical equipment rental and maintenance services to health care providers. They offer on demand equipment rental, repair and clinical engineering services to ensure hospitals have access to high quality and well-functioning medical devices. Welcome Tanner!
Clint Oram
I'll enjoy every moment of that while you have it. I'm now an empty nester as of two years, and I miss going to all the games and sporting events. That was such a big part of my life, so that's awesome. Hey, let's shift gears and let's talk about your professional background and striving to be better. Tell us a bit about the path that led you to become the CEO of sugar CRM.
David Roberts
Yeah it was a bit of an interesting path. There's a theme throughout a lot of this, which is being really close to the customer and focusing on software and technology that. Improves customer success and relationships. I started with Anderson Consulting straight Outta school, and if I'm completely honest, I was like a lot of 21-year-old young men didn't know exactly what I wanted to do with my life and consulting sounded nice and open-ended. So I joined Anderson Consulting and that became Accenture and I was lucky. I ended up part of the CRM practice from really early on and spent the next 17 years helping. Organizations improve their relationships with their customers. And that took me from consumer packaged goods early on to high tech in California to British government across a huge spectrum of geographies and industries, all with the customer at the core and the customer being what was most important to our clients. I left there, did something completely different and helped the mayor of Denver run the city of Denver Again, trying to help the customer of the city, which is really the resident, get the most out of the city. And then this is now my third CEO role. All, all along. Really, again, focused on front office software and technology. First with helping employees access, then to Alchem, which you mentioned, which was feedback and survey software. And finally now here to Sugar, completing the circle of my CRM path.
Lizzie Overlund
Personal and a professional question, but what professional growth for yourself are you looking to accomplish in your third tenure?
David Roberts
I keep trying to do it better, Lizzie, and I think for me as a CEO, you really own strategy, culture, clarity, communication. These are things that I think. Every CEO is responsible for, and I've learned a lot over the three roles, and I think I'm doing some things here at Sugar that are, that have built on what I've done in the past. I wanna be able to provide great clarity and consistency and how every employee here at Sugar knows how they connect to our mission and our strategy. Everyone in the company should be able to connect the dots from what they're doing every single day to where we're headed and why that's important. And it takes a while. It takes a lot of repetition, it takes a lot of thoughtfulness about that, but I think that's a part of my leadership that I've gotten better in each role.
David Roberts
I often describe myself as a mechanical strategist, and I've heard people use that term. I started using that term probably 15 years ago, and I've heard other people use it since. I love strategy. Really have to understand how the dots connect into the business and into kind of operations and execution for it to make any real sense to me. We've got a strategy here at Sugar and I love to see everyone connect into that and that there's a lot of alignment, a lot of clarity, and a lot of like connection down into the organization so everyone can operate somewhat independently. And know where we're headed overall. I don't know if that's who I am as a CEO, but mechanical strategist is something I that, that I've often talked about.
Clint Oram
Do you have a role model or another type of CEO that you or another CEO out there that you admire?
David Roberts
I don't know. I struggle with that. I think, I'll give a couple examples. There's I think when you're developing software and trying to meet a market. It's really important to understand the what, but not necessarily the how. I'm a big fan of listening to customers. Lizzie, I know you have a lot of passion about VOC as well, but I think when you listen to customers, it's listening to them articulate what they're trying to achieve. Often customers will try to tell you exactly how they wanna see it show up, and I think if you'll listen to that too much, you get locked in on ideas. David Roberts: So I love how Apple, and there's been a number of leaders at Apple that have focused on the what, not necessarily the how. They're constantly thinking about the new ways to deliver on the how that maybe the customer wouldn't have been able to articulate themselves. And I think that started with Steve Jobs. David Roberts: I think it's the culture of Apple today. So I love how they develop products that no one, I. Would've articulated exactly the way that they've built them, but they know what they were trying to do in their lives. I also, I've worked, I've gotten to know a CEO here in Denver really well, who founded a company called Ping Identity, a guy named Andre Duran. And I, have a ton of respect for all the phases of growth that he's led that company through. From startup, to angel investment, to venture capital, to private equity, to public back to private equity again, like being able to keep your rudder in the water. And having different partners and investors over time, but having clarity of kind of vision and purpose and being able to weather all those different stages of growth and kind of company maturity has been remarkable to watch.
Clint Oram
All right. So let's shift gears. You're the CEO of a CRM company and there are a lot of CRM companies in the market today. Tell us about Sugar Serum and what sets the company apart.
David Roberts
I think we do an amazing job of helping sellers sell better. So I started in CRM 30 years ago, and c m's always been about this illusion of control that sales leaders have. They think that pipeline management and forecasting is gonna allow them to deliver better results and it can to some degree, but CROs or sales leaders or commercial directors, whatever the title may be, what they actually want is. For sellers to be better at what they do, right? The top 20% of sellers are always gonna exceed their number. The bottom 20%, no matter what you do, are never gonna do what you need 'em to do. I think the trick in CRM is moving the middle 60 to the right and I think what sugar does a great job of shift that bell curve to the right, help the middle 60 be really good at what they do. And I think that's through. It's not through asking salespeople to capture more fields about their opportunity. In fact, I used to joke back at Accenture that teams got a budget of five fields beyond the core opportunity information. They got five more fields and that's all they could ask for. Asking sellers to go capture a bunch of data is never gonna move the needle. I love that Sugar is able to provide. Insight into their patch, into their customer base, into their product suite, and use analytics, which we've always used to help sellers find their way to the best nest, their best next step to now how we're leveraging AI and being able to use AI to rev recognize patterns in large data sets, and they're able to summarize information across all sorts of different mediums. Our lead engineer said something the other day that I love. He said that structured data is the data of business and unstructured data is the data of relationships.
Clint Oram
Unstructured data is the data of relationships. That's like emails and documents and conversations. Yeah.
David Roberts
If you think about whatever relationships you have in your life, you're not communicating to whoever those relationships are with through structured data. You're sending them a text or you're talking to them live or you're writing them an email and it's all unstructured. I could never get my kids to read those spreadsheets I send to them. I know you love your spreadsheets, Clint, but that's not the language of relationships. It's the language business, right? No, it's not. I think again, what sugar can do is be able to capture that unstructured data, the data of relationships, and help people make sense of it and know what to do next based on it. I love that. That's a great idea.
Clint Oram
And in there had asked though, is it, aren't all companies, all serum companies trying to apply AI in, in similar ways? What are you doing that's different?
David Roberts
I think sometimes people talk about AI as a technology looking for a problem to solve. Yeah. I remember back when people talked about blockchain, no, besides chain of custody, nobody could talk about the specific ways that blockchain was gonna help business. It was always a hammer looking for a nail, and I think AI is today's version of that. It's, it's technology looking for a business problem to solve. I think what sugar's really good at is taking a pragmatic approach. I'd prefer if our sales managers, our sales management sales manager customers, our sales rep customers, they didn't even know it was ai. We were guiding them in the right direction because it was in line with how they run their day-to-day in their business. And I think sugar's very pragmatic in how it applies ai, and I think it makes it really easy to use and really approachable for businesses and sales teams.
Clint Oram
So one of the hot topics in AI right now is this concept of agentic ai. Do you have a point of view on that? Does sugar have a point of view on that?
David Roberts
Yes, that is a hot topic and one of our competitors talks about it incessantly. I think there's a, I think ultimately in sales, that agent, if we talk about agentic ai, the agent is the seller. And I think people buy from people. I often say that sales is about the transference of belief, and I think people transfer belief.
Clint Oram
I like that: Sales in the transfer of belief. That's deep. That's a good one. I hope it's not too deep, but... no that's good. I like that.
David Roberts
That is really profound. So it's a transference of belief. I'm not sure how agents transfer belief. So I think with customer service there's agents that can help PE help our customers and through a problem faster. I think there's places for it. We're really focused on sellers and helping sellers make the most of their day and most of their opportunity. I think ultimately, I think AI is like an Ironman suit for sellers. It's not the robot that takes over their jobs. It more helps 'em figure out how to be at their best, and those relationships are really key to convincing people to trust you and give you their money. In return for a product or a service you sell.
Clint Oram
I've got this image of an IVR being stuck in an IVR tree and the only transverse transference of belief there is how do I get out of this IVR tree? Yeah, I think you got a really good point there. People buy from people I. Yeah, absolutely. So David as a CEO who is a mechanical strategist, what suggestions do you have for businesses who are looking for that next phase of growth?
David Roberts
Yeah, I think that answer sits at the intersection of data and customer. So what I figured out, I've learned a lot about sale sales and the growth engines of companies over the years. And another thing I've look, come to believe is that sales is a tactical engine. It doesn't mean that sellers are tacticians necessarily, but companies need to be clear about what its product is, how that product is packaged and priced, how you go to market, what motions you run. And the sales team needs to be able to become masters of executing against those tactics, right? So I think that the best sellers, and I've been inside CRM systems versus as a consultant and then as a CEO. The pattern I've seen the most successful sellers are the ones who are organized as structured and how they approach their a and their time. I believe the way you unlock growth is to bring data and rigor and process. Listen to the customer relentlessly. They'll tell you. They may not tell you exactly in the words they use, but they'll tell you what they want from you and how to meet them where they need to be. So they'll tell you, you have to listen. You have to be really curious and listen, but customers will tell you. So I think if you're relentless about the data of the demand engine and you're relentless about listening to your customer, you'll solve your growth problems.
Clint Oram
I like how you put data as a key component in there.
Lizzie Overlund
You're hitting on one of my passions, David, around voice of a customer. And I do wanna get to understand more about how you, at an aggregate would suggest businesses listen to customer sentiment. Because on one side I'm hearing the, those relationship-based conversations where you're having a conversation with customer, you learn about them. I assume because you are so data-driven, you're not taking what one customer says and you applying it to an entire customer base. You're looking at data across an aggregate of the customer base.
Clint Oram
Yeah.
Lizzie Overlund
It would be helpful to learn from you what suggestions you have or how do you seen other businesses use customers, customer sentiment to drive change within the organization?
David Roberts
Yeah, great question, Lizzie and remind me to come back to another thought on, on data too, Clint, but, so I ran a company called Alchem. For six years. And what we did was feedback and survey and we found the, we found a few things, Lizzie. First, it's gotta be a systematic program. I think people go out and ask for customers to share their thoughts and opinions in response to an event or as a reaction to something, rather than think about how they wired into everything they do. So for example, NPS. People love net promoter score. And often if you ask people how they use it, they say we present it at our quarterly all hands meeting. I'm like, great. And then what? And they're like, and then what? We present it at the next quarterly all hands meeting. And everybody's looking at it going and then what? Exactly. And I think there's a way to operationalize, and ps I don't think the score matters as much as if you're a promoter, a nine or a 10. Why don't you ask that? Customer to share their love for you with the rest of the world, right? Whether it be through G two or Capterra or Gartner, or there's all sorts of ways people can share their opinion of the company. If that customer is a detractor, 1, 2, 3, 4, et cetera, they often have a complaint, an issue that's they're facing. You can turn that into a serviceable event. You can send it into your support team and have the team respond to that. If you're a passive 6, 7, 8 in there. Passives actually have the worst renewal rate. This is the thing that surprises people. There's an old expression, love me or hate me. Just don't ignore me. I think in NPS, passives are the ones who leave you faster than the promoters or the detractors. So you can take those passives, send 'em to your customer success team and talk to them about engaging that customer more deeply. There's a way to operationalize what customers are telling.
Clint Oram
That, that's a fascinating insight there that kind of flips the whole idea of NPSA bit on its head. That the lower number is not the worst number, it's the middle number. That's the worst number.
David Roberts
That's my experience. That when people have given up, when they don't care, apathy is a problem, right? It's in our personal relationships. If someone starts acting apathetic towards you, they don't care enough to have the argument or they don't care enough to engage with you in a positive way. It's, apathy is the problem. It's not love or hate, it's apathy. So I think in net promoter score, it's the same kind of concept. Passives of the problem.
Clint Oram
So you said a minute or so ago that you wanted to come back to the idea of data a bit more. Is that what's on your mind there?
David Roberts
Yeah. I think one other thing about demand chain and data, I think sometimes companies are reluctant to really inspect every aspect of the data that drives their demand chain. So that could be marketing qualified leads and how those turn into sales accepted leads and how they move through sales stages and whether reps are building closed plans. It's all the normal stuff within the demand chain. I think. What I love, and this is the continuous growth concept as well, the always being better concept is I love teams that wanna find where the data's bad, right? Rather than think about vanity metrics, us using data to show that things are going well. The most important part of using data week in and week out to manage your demand chain is being curious and hungry for the areas that things aren't working and building a culture where people feel like they can engage in what's not working. Rather than def defen feel defensive about those data points or focus on what is working, which honestly doesn't need the management attention like the other areas do.
Clint Oram
Do have any hotspots in there that you've seen across your three times as CEO places where that, that data is often bad.
David Roberts
I'll tell you one of the trickiest things given we're a CRM company and we're talking about growth, the trickiest thing is driving outbound activity outta your sales team. It's really hard. I think sometimes people get a list together and they call the names on the list and they go no one called me back. Anyone who knows anything about outbound cadences knows it takes 7, 8, 9, 10 touches. Sometimes people say 12 touches to get a customer response. So you've gotta be relentless about inspecting the activity data that tells you whether your salespeople are driving the outbound cadences. You expect 'em to drive. And learning from what's working and what's not working. Again, one of the reasons I love software is it's so susceptible to AB testing, right? Trying multiple things and leaning into what's working. And so unless you're curious, unless you embrace the challenging data, it's really hard to. Be better and better every week.
Lizzie Overlund
David, what is the reason that you think that sales leaders are not inspecting the data?
David Roberts
I think it's happening more and more, Lizzie. I think it used to be that people thought the successful salespeople are the one who went golfing with their clients, and I think that's the thing. In the past, I had a CMO said to me, 25 years ago, CMOs used to say, I know I'm wasting half my marketing budget. I just don't know which chance. And what technology, especially CRM technologies allow us to do today is really have a lot of information about the marketing function, the sales function, and I think the best go to market leaders today are really data driven and know how to use those technologies to drive their business forward. So I, I think that's changed a lot in the last 20 years in terms of what we expect from go-to-market leadership.
Clint Oram
Okay. So let's take this idea of learning from things and maybe apply it a little bit more personally to you. So sometimes I find that the best lessons learned are those that come from adversity or even failure. So thinking back across your leadership career, what are the top two or three mistakes you've made and how have you learned from them?
David Roberts
Yeah, I think I, I mentioned this a little earlier, I think. The biggest thing I've learned is alignment, communication, prioritization, and the role as a CEO and how important that is to an organization. And that you can't do enough of any of that. You can't do enough to drive alignment. You can't do enough to communicate. You can't do enough to prioritize, make the really hard decisions about where a business is gonna focus and more importantly, where it's not gonna focus. And I think from a leadership standpoint, you framed it as like mistakes you've made. I think it was a mistake of omission. I didn't. Do enough of it in my first role as A CEO, and I've learned more and more that's what I think companies need from its leaders is alignment, communication, prioritization, and making sure that there's real clarity around how we're gonna go achieve our objectives together.
Clint Oram
And the mistake being assuming that you've done enough. 'cause it's clear in your mind. Correct. But not necessarily everybody else in the company. Yeah, exactly. That's a good one. I like that.
Lizzie Overlund
Also what you said earlier too, David, the way that you communicate may not be the way that people receive information. So when you're having to repeat information to an employee base, you have to repeat it through different avenues. Could be email, it could be in some form of...
David Roberts
You have the visual learner, the auditory learner the kinestetic learner people learn in different ways. They totally do. And we all assume that people learn, like we learn. I get so much out of a brief conversation, an email I'm a slow reader, takes me a while to get through emails and it doesn't sink in. In the same way that an interactive dialogue helps things kind of cement in my mind. So I'm the same way, but I know other people work very differently.
Lizzie Overlund
Yeah, exactly. There's so much truth in roots.
Clint Oram
Any other lessons learned that you wanna call out in there?
David Roberts
I've done a number of acquisitions throughout my career at every company I've been part of, and I think there's a, I think one of the other lessons learned for me is people jump to the things that are controllable, right? So they want to go like create standard processes and standard data and drive integration, and everyone talks about the integration plans. I think the most important thing. When you do go through m and a, the customer and the employee and I think we move too fast into kind of processes and data and systems, because it feels more controllable, it feels easier than being focused on how you help customers understand the value of an acquisition or how you understand, help employees understand the vision of where you're now gonna go together. I think I would slow down the post acquisition integration track. I grew up as an Accenture guy running project plans. I jumped to that also, but I think that's been a big lesson learned for me that like you can slow some of that stuff down and really make sure the customer and the employees are taken care of.
Clint Oram
I like that. That's a good one. I've seen that myself. Where the. Executive of the acquiring company says, I know how to run things my way, so I'm gonna make everything my way as quickly as possible. And then you blast over some of the things that, that you maybe purposely acquired, maybe as a company acquired is bringing you something that, that you weren't thinking about before. Yeah.
David Roberts
Buy it and break it is a really common story, and I think you've gotta be careful to make sure that the reason you convince yourself that you ought to go buy something or sell something. That you stay focused on that and that you keep that as a north star in front of you.
Lizzie Overlund
I think the, a lot of senior leaders who would be known as, we'll call them functional area owners of a project of post acquisition integration activities, would probably appreciate your remarks on slowing things down, because often you knew that it's done too quickly and the team may not have been able to fulfill all of their wishes and dreams to. Fully or properly integrate and then fulfill that vision that you mentioned, David, for the North Star for customers.
David Roberts
Exactly. Lizzie, that's...
Lizzie Overlund
That takes permission though, right? Permission from leadership.
David Roberts
It does. It does take permission and it's easy because there's a gut instinct to jump to harmonization and process and all that kind of stuff, and you have to resist the urge a little bit, right? Put a sticky up on your monitor that reminds you why you did it in the first place, and make sure you stay focused on that.
Clint Oram
So I've heard, let's see. The first one was over communicate and over communicate and time setting. As soon as you think you're, as soon as you think you're done communicating, then that means you probably need to do some more. And then the second one I heard was go slower on acquisitions. Don't rush to integrate. If anything that you're gonna rush towards is listening to the customers and listening to the employees. Those are two great ones.
David Roberts
Yeah. And that first one, Clint. I think there's alignment, communication, and prioritization, all those things, right? Okay. And alignment comes through struggling. I was saying to my 13-year-old the other day who was struggling with a new math concept, and he got super frustrated about it. And I said, it's in the frustration that we make step functions in our ability to understand and learn, right? So if it's not feeling frustrating, you're probably not pushing hard enough on what those hard decisions look like, and you don't really create alignment. Because people haven't struggled through it together.
Clint Oram
That sounds like a CEO dad, if I've ever heard one. Yes, son. You got a step function coming your way and you're gonna look, yeah, I didn't say step function
David Roberts
to Samuel, but yes, that's the idea.
Lizzie Overlund
Reminds me of the quote. There's beauty in the breakdown. You do need to overcome the challenges, and I there's so much growth that comes from that. We have our last question for you, David. I know the answer to this one, but let's see what, how you'll answer. Where can our listeners find you and learn more about you?
David Roberts
I think the thing I use more than anything is LinkedIn. I think it's a phenomenal tool for more than just connection. There's so much great content out there and it's so well curate, curated against what's most important to you. That's probably the best place in the. The cyber world to reach me. You'll find me on the road, you'll find me with United Airlines a fair amount. You'll find me in the mountains in Colorado, a fair amount. But in our vast disperse world, I think LinkedIn's the best place.
Lizzie Overlund
I should have guessed United Airlines coming from Colorado.
David Roberts
There you go. Yeah. Yes. They've got my loyalty, I must admit.
Clint Oram
Very nice. I gotta tell you, David, as one of the guys that started the company 21 years ago, to have you in the seat of CEO just excites me. Every time I talk to you, you've got such a fantastic view of how to run the company, an inspirational view of the serum industry as a whole. We're lucky to have you as our leader and I wish you nothing but huge success here, which I know as a mechanical strategist, you're busy planning out right now.
David Roberts
I really appreciate that, Clint , and I feel honored to pick up the mantle from yours and others who have led the company over the last 20 years. I know we'll stay close as the evolution continues and I want to hear your challenges and share in our successes. So thank you very much Outstanding.
Clint Oram
Appreciate having you here today.
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