The Corporate Executive Board Company

That's amazing, man.

So, you know, before Leave Me Not, it's funny because I actually have come from the B2B space, right? So I spent years working with B2B technology, started my career at the company called CEB.

We were then acquired by Gartner.

So Gartner is Magic Quadrant, really big IT research firm.

And I was working in our HR technologies that CEB acquired.

So I worked in customer success, I did tech sales, account management, product management, And then I was at IBM for five and a half years in data, AI, and automation businesses as a product manager.

And then I turned into a founder for a D2C app, which I had no business doing just considering my background, but it was something I was super, super passionate about.

I graduated college, moved out to the Bay Area in 2013.

And, and they didn't come up with it.

They hired this consulting group called the Corporate Executive Board, very famous for writing a book called The Challenger Sale.

Mm.

And they had written a big binder that was kind of like, how do you, how does an IBM sales rep manage a first call? But in there, there was a very high-level structure, and it was specific to IBM.

Now, Zach Gropper did not end up in Hollywood.

He ended up stuck in Lithuania waiting on a visa, and he took a job with a company called CEB, which is Corporate Executive Board, almost by accident, and then spent the next 15 years on the team that built the Challenger sale model.

He'll tell you to this day he still thinks about directing actors when he watches sales calls.

We get into a ton of stuff on this conversation, including where the industry got Challenger badly wrong, including all the companies that just mailed out the book to their reps and called it transformation.

Yeah.

East Coast, uh, you know, New York parents.

Grew up in the DC area, uh, which comes back to haunt me later when I accidentally found out there's a company called CEB right on our doorstep.

Yeah.

How do you successfully educate buyers before they ever hop on a sales call? Because I ...

If we're having this conversation 10 years ago CEB, the Corporate Executive Board, that's part of Gartner, found that roughly half of the journey was over before you got to meet a prospect.

At the time, it was like 56, 57%.

T- in the early 2020s it was like 83% with generative AI.