Navigating the Intersection of Sales, Marketing, and Operations

Oct 5

Featuring Michelle Allbon, Fractional CRO and Managing Director of Grounded Advisory

Michelle Allbon is a Fractional CRO and Managing Director of Grounded Advisory, where she Advises companies globally on go-to-market best practices for sales, sales enablement, and Rev Ops. She has lived and worked in SF, London, and now is settled in Auckland, New Zealand. She’s also a first-time mom of an 18-month-old toddler!

Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn:

The importance of surrounding yourself with a diverse network of mentors and thinkers to enhance personal growth and development.

The power of embracing different roles and titles, such as “fractional CRO,” to open up new opportunities and establish oneself as a leader in a specific field.
The concept of fractional leadership and how it allows senior executives to focus on strategy without being bogged down by day-to-day operational tasks.
The skill required to draw clear boundaries between strategic and tactical work.
Michelle’s journey from studying environmental science to finding her passion for communication and eventually becoming a Head of Sales for a tech startup.
The need to be adaptable and curious when working in diverse sales environments to meet the differences in sales practices across regions and industries.
The challenges women face in finding female mentors in male-dominated industries, and the importance of developing transactional relationships to seek guidance and support.
The impact of power struggles in companies, such as in product marketing, and the need for establishing clear swim lanes between marketing and sales to ensure effective collaboration and lead generation.
The evolution of sales as a field, from relationship-based approaches to the importance of salespeople in revenue generation, and the role of marketing in driving product development and lead generation.

In this episode…

In this enlightening episode of The “Solutions Seekers” podcast, host Paige Buck is joined by Michelle Allbon, Fractional CRO and Managing Director of Grounded Advisory. During her interview, Michelle dives deep into the dynamic world of sales, marketing, and operations. Drawing from her diverse career path and wealth of experience, Michelle sheds light on the complexities and challenges of navigating these intersecting domains.

Michelle's valuable insights highlight the need for a harmonious relationship between sales and marketing. She emphasizes the importance of establishing clear swim lanes and a shared understanding of goals and responsibilities. By aligning these functions and leveraging modern practices like revenue operations (Rev ops), companies can optimize lead generation, conversion, and customer tracking. Michelle also challenges the traditional view of sales as a linear process, advocating for a holistic approach that embraces the power of data-driven strategies while fostering genuine customer relationships.

Through her expertise as a fractional Chief Revenue Officer (CRO), Michelle provides a fresh perspective on how operational change and uncertainty can be approached strategically. She stresses the significance of distinguishing between tactical and strategic work, empowering leaders to focus on the broader context and make informed decisions based on concise, bottom-line data.

This episode paves the way for professionals across sales, marketing, and operations to explore innovative ways of driving revenue, fostering collaboration, and navigating the ever-evolving landscape of business. Michelle Allbon’s insights serve as a guiding light for those seeking to excel in the intertwined realms of sales, marketing, and operations.

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Resources Mentioned in this episode

Sponsor for this episode…

This episode is brought to you by Kennedy Events.

Kennedy Events creates stress-free conferences and events, providing expert management and design for all your corporate event needs—from in-person to hybrid and virtual events.

To learn more about our services, visit our website at www.kennedyevents.com and schedule a consultation today to find out how we can guide you in making your event successful.

Transcript

Paige Buck [00:00:00]:

Welcome to the Kennedy Events Podcast. I'm your host, Paige Buck. Past guests have included Jack Kosakowski of Creation Agency, Alyssa Taylor of ReCharge, and Elaine Honig of Studio 4Forty. And today I am delighted to be with Michelle Allbon. Michelle is a fractional CRO and Managing Director of Grounded Advisory, where she advises companies globally on go-to-market best practices for sales, sales enablement, and RevOps. She has lived and worked in San Francisco, London, and is now settled in Auckland, New Zealand. She is also the first-time mom of an 18-month-old toddler.

Before we dive in, today's episode is brought to you by Kennedy Events. Kennedy Events creates stress-free conferences and events providing expert management and design for all your corporate event needs, from in-person to hybrid and virtual. You can learn more about us at kennedyevents.com.

Welcome, Michelle. Thanks for sitting through that. Thanks for being here.

Michelle Allbon [00:01:02]:

Absolutely. Thank you.

Paige Buck [00:01:04]:

And I know this is a mostly audio medium, even though we post this on YouTube, but I'm delighted by the surfboard behind you. And before I start asking you all these professional questions, do you surf? Is that your surfboard?

Michelle Allbon [00:01:15]:

You know what's funny is that it's actually my husband's surfboard, and it was a gift that I got him when we were in San Francisco, and I was trying to think of what he wanted for his birthday. They had this board-shaping experience that he got for his birthday, and he, of course, never uses it, so it's just become part of the background because he has five other surfboards he uses before this one.

Paige Buck [00:01:37]:

It’s a cool prop that says San Francisco and New Zealand all in one. That is awesome. So you are now a Fractional CRO, which is a pretty incredible thing. And we'll dig in a little bit about what it looks like to be a fractional leader. C-Suite executive who just gets to buzz in and buzz out. And it's very sexy.

Michelle Allbon [00:02:06]:

You make it sound so luxurious, tell me how I can capitalize on that!

Paige Buck [00:02:08]:

Let me paint you a picture of what I imagine your job looks like. But before you got there, before you harnessed that, how did you get started in revenue and what were the early days of your career like?

Michelle Allbon [00:02:21]:

Yeah, so it's interesting because my degree in school was communication. It actually started as environmental science because I had no idea what I wanted to do, as is the case with most people that study communication. I went, Well, I think maybe I'll end up in policy. Maybe I'll go join the Peace Corps. Maybe I want to help with marketing. I didn't even know what sales was. And my sophomore year of college, a tech startup that was kind of just trying to be like, a book-sharing company, but they made an app out of it, came to my university, and they were trying to find interns to help with their sales strategy. And I just thought, well, hey, it's an easy paid job, I'll go ahead and apply for this. And I ended up being basically the head of sales when I was in college for this tiny little startup. And it wasn't the plan, it wasn't even necessarily something at the time that I was studying. I was still an environmental science major. And I so enjoyed the idea of how do you find a problem, articulate exactly what that problem is, and attach a solution to a specific set of people who can get value from solving that problem. Like that little matrix was something that I got so excited by. And I was like, well, people have a problem with paying too much for books and what if we could book share? And here's the exact audiences. And I got into almost like persona work naturally without even knowing that that's what it was, right?

And then from there, my first job out of college was working for a company where I was doing sales. And then, my first job in San Francisco was working at a tech startup. And then I ended up working for big companies like Oracle and Cisco. But what's interesting is that my passion has always been–people would attribute it to marketing because they go, you enjoy looking at customers and pitches and value propositions. But to me, it's actually the impacting of behavior and outcomes that I'm the most fascinated by. I like looking at what is a problem that somebody has, how do you solve it, and how can you take as many things as possible in your control to be able to kind of influence the outcome, which is really what sales forecasting is. And so every role that I've had, even though I've had a whole bunch of different titles, has always been this core influencing value and securing revenue for companies. That's what I've done, pretty much, yeah, ever since I was in university.

Paige Buck [00:05:08]:

And when you were in the smaller companies, are you sometimes in the position of having to tell product or even leadership like the actual problem we need to solve is this, not this?

Michelle Allbon [00:05:22]:

It's really interesting because depending on the scale and maturity of a company, that's almost the number one thing that happens, right, is that you're the feet on the ground when you're in sales, so you're the ones talking to customers. And whether that actually jives with what the product really does kind of depends on how good the company is. And so when I was in my startup world, they would have put together a pitch and had this idea of what they were selling. And I would often find myself talking to customers and going, oh, but if we adapted this way or we can just adjust our products ever so slightly in this, that's how we'll get the sale. And then as I worked in bigger and bigger companies and in enterprise spaces I realized that desire to do that doesn't change. But it becomes really dangerous because to be really aligned with product and engineering about what you actually can sell and not putting custom use cases together. So it is funny because it is almost like the natural progression of sales is to try to find custom use cases and then balance that with product and engineering.

Paige Buck [00:06:31]:

That is really funny because I imagine it's much easier to move the needle in a small startup. You can't be in an enterprise-level company being like, if we just shifted it, like this...

Michelle Allbon [00:06:43]:

The thing is, people sometimes do, like with our biggest clients at Oracle, there would be times where we'd be like, well, I guess we're going to try out a completely new set of features, or we're actually going to test something on this client because they're willing to pay for it. And that is, we call it building the plane while you're flying it mentality of being like, well, I guess we can add one or two more things, and if somebody's willing to pay, maybe it'll progress our product roadmap. Like that is a lot of the ethos of sales.

Paige Buck [00:07:13]:

Well now, is that also coincidentally a natural progression out of thinking of these groups as silos. Marketing is marketing and sales is sales and product development or engineering are a third bucket of people who just shake their fists at them. No, they all just shake their fists at one another. But into this broader sales enablement and shared world and shared understanding.

Michelle Allbon [00:07:44]:

Yeah, I have really strong views about the progression of sales as a field, right? And especially with demographically just who I am and how I kind of sit in all of this stuff because I have been in all of these different companies who traditionally had people who would do–you think of like the original salesman, which is a guy with a briefcase going door to door being a traveling salesperson. Like so many industries, sales, even through the 80s and 90s, was something that was just a relationship-based kind of handshake. If you trust somebody, you buy something from them was how sales worked. And so a lot of the strategy and how products were built came from marketing and how you would market something or the product and how it was built. And over time what has happened is that strategic sales, so when there's a lot of competition in a market, you can't just be the one relationship and that's how you get deals. You actually have to be the best. And so in areas that are not commoditized, so spaces where there's a lot of innovation happening, you do have the relationship advantage if you're selling something good. But you still need to do a lot of work to be able to actually make a use case happen. And so when you look at that, the salespeople in companies often have a disproportionate amount of power because they are responsible for bringing the revenue in and across the line. And marketing is funny because there is a line, but we are doing the same thing. Like marketing is going and getting everything in from out there and then they're handing it to sales. And in a sports analogy, it's like, we're the ones making the goal, they're making the pass, product and engineering are building everything that's going on. And really in healthy companies, all of these things are very closely aligned. And my skill set, even though it's in sales, has sat in marketing and in operations. But that sometimes is not the way that people who are from kind of old-school sales think of it. They're like, you're either a hunter or a farmer. You're keeping accounts or you're getting new accounts. You're building relationships. And I just don't believe that sales is actually that linear in our modern era anymore.

Paige Buck [00:10:06]:

Yes, I never appreciated this before. I took a course, it must be 15 years ago. It was a UC Berkeley Executive Marketing course, led like Marketing 101, Principles of Marketing, understanding product market fit. And this was an old-school sales guy teaching this course. He had worked for Monsanto. So immediately I'm like, and he said, sales is a function of marketing, not the other way around. And everybody has it wrong. Everybody has it wrong. Sales has the power. Marketing should have the power. It all flows from the same thing. And it was like every session he was trying to drill that into us. And I was like, this is fantastic. I buy this orientation, but I don't think anybody else is going to, like, walk out of this room. I don't think anybody's going to agree. I think you're coming back to that. And maybe that's where, maybe we will finally have to make that shift in this 21st-century marketplace.

Michelle Allbon [00:11:10]:

Well, I think what it is the question is people get in power struggles all the time. I've been in many companies where my favorite power struggle is product marketing. Because you have sales, you have marketing, and you have product marketing, which drives all of the sales enablement. And so there's these funny little sub-functions that people are going, who is controlling the narrative? Is it the salespeople who've gotten the use cases? Is it marketing who's driven the persona language, who is out articulating and getting leads to the salespeople? And the answer really, I don't think any one person should hold power. Right. I think that really what it is, is that there's often an imbalance of power where either marketing is driving leads that then are not sales actionable. And that's the problem. Marketing is too heavy. Or in all the companies I've been in, it's that sales are the bullies. And they're like, we don't even need marketing. We're just going to go out and hunt everything that we want, and we ignore most of our marketing leads. Right. And a healthy organization is good swim lanes between what is the line between top of the funnel, the bottom of the funnel? How do you generate market interest, convert that, and then accurately be able to track and adjust your behavior in both marketing and sales based on data? And that's RevOps. Right. This area is really new. Like, it's maturing. A lot of businesses aren't even thinking in this way yet. And so that's what I'm really passionate about, is kind of modernizing the way that we think about sales.

Paige Buck [00:12:47]:

Yeah. So Alyssa Taylor, who introduced us, she's from ReCharge, and we met when she was at Ripple. It blew my mind wide open to appreciate, when she first hired us, just what her job entailed. I was like, this is incredible to find and be responsible for the synergy between these groups and as you said, define the swim lanes more clearly. Find, I don't know. I feel like it's like mediation and peacemaking, perhaps, or maybe it's just hiring the right people, the right framework. But yes, we were talking about something that I still feel like blows my mind in a great way about how new this is, how it's a beautiful opportunity in this moment, but it's still very new. Is it unique, do you think, to tech to see this this way because of how they're leading?

Michelle Allbon [00:13:44]:

Yeah. No, that's a great question, and it actually has been a really healthy experience for me to get out of San Francisco because I did have a very biased viewpoint on the field of sales, what it means, what a best practice should look like. I mean, I worked at Salesforce right out of college, and at the time, they literally, they wrote the book about a sales funnel. Like, that language and the concept of a CRM was being invented. And so I, in San Francisco, totally thought that I was, like, the gold standard holder of what sales is supposed to look like. And then I moved to London, and I started working in Europe and the Middle East, you know, bringing clients in and looking at our sales cycle and going, oh my gosh! Like, we're getting telecommunications companies in Dubai and how they work their sales opportunities may very well not look like a funnel at all. Like, there is lots of regions of the world that things are actually still very relationship-based, and that there's marketing and sales look a little bit different and more nuanced because of how you are acquiring relationships. And that was still within, obviously, selling tech. But now that I'm in New Zealand, technology is not the primary industry here. Agriculture is one of our primary industries. And when I look at our biggest companies that are in agriculture, for instance, marketing is really important. They have really strong and sophisticated marketing organizations. But when you think about a product, their product may be milk or it may be a byproduct of wool or something else that is not as transactional in how it's sold. You're talking about huge overheads in how you're doing even the structure of how something is shipped out. If you have a physical product it's completely different than software. So I guess, long-winded, the idea is can you generalize sales best practices? In my opinion, yes, but maybe only about 20 or 30% of them. Whereas 70% of the sales best practices will look different depending on the industry you're in. And I do think that's something that people do wrong. They talk in generalities as if this is the way that sales is supposed to be in sales best practice. And I'm glad you brought that up because my bias is for technology, for software and hardware. I can tell you the best practices, but when I take on clients in other industries, all I know is that there are personas, there is marketing, and there's sales, and you start from those kind of places in the ground, but you have to work backward and be super curious to be like what is that? What do you guys even call sales? What is your revenue model? And it is super different when you're working across various industries.

Paige Buck [00:16:37]:

I imagine there's a lot of value in coming in a little blind and just super curious to discover for yourself with fresh eyes, but maybe it's enlightening for them to watch it be filtered through you as you will learn.

Michelle Allbon [00:16:55]:

Yeah, it’s enlightening. Sometimes I guess the word can also be annoying because the concept of using data to make decisions is very tech and finance. Like tech, finance, and telecommunications, you're like, hey, we're going to come in and we're going to look at your financial reports, and we're going to go and look at every person that you've ever sold to and check out the patterns. They'd be like, yeah, of course you are. Whereas if you're going and doing that in a retail operation, or you're going and doing that in an agricultural company, or in something that's government-oriented, like here in New Zealand, we have a lot of our customers as an industry are government-focused entities. And if you're like, hey, can you just give us all of your financials so that we can essentially audit you and then tell you how to sell? It actually is technically the best practice, and it's how I approach things, but it definitely makes people uncomfortable. And my view is that that is the direction we're going in. We are actually no longer working in a situation where we can just make platitudes about what somebody should do when they're selling. It should be data-based, but not everyone is emotionally comfortable with that idea yet.

Paige Buck [00:18:15]:

Yes, that makes sense. Also, I imagine if you are selling into a government, the whole sales process is going to look very different.

Michelle Allbon [00:18:25]:

100%. Yeah. And that's my primary client right now in my Fractional CRO role, sells into Emergency Management Disaster Response, which we're looking at the Department of Transportation and Homeland Security. And so when we're looking at our sales process, we're looking at seasonality, there's grants and there's budgets, and they only purchase once a year, but it isn't reinventing the wheel each time. And so this is that 70/30. Like 30% of the best practices carry across the industry. 70% you have to adjust. And so it's just kind of understanding how to steer.

Paige Buck [00:19:00]:

Yeah. Okay, so let's talk about that. You've shifted into being a Fractional CRO. How did you get to where you are now, and how did you–I'll pause. How did you get to where you are now? And then we'll pick the next one.

Michelle Allbon [00:19:17]:

Cool. Yeah. So how did I get to where I am now? A whole bunch of different snakes and ladders. So as I mentioned, the beginning of my story was this tech startup that I interned with in college. And then I went and worked for a company that literally was getting college students to go study abroad. Not even close. Not even tech. That was my first job out of college. And then my first job in tech was selling a product that was backed by a Facebook venture that basically was looking at Facebook groups and trying to correlate whether you could get people who were of underrepresented demographics to choose one college over another by their Facebook behavior. So it was a very niche kind of company. But I went in and was helping basically approach the sales process from like, how do we even have a sales process? I was technically in business development, but we were designing the whole entire thing. And when I look at each of the companies that I've been at, that's really been the common theme, is that I have approached companies that are in a place of either operational change or shift, where they're like, we're not really sure where we're going. We need to know what's going on. Like this concept of auditing, which is such a dirty word, but that's what people want. They're like, can you please just look at everything that's going on and tell us what's going on? That is how I have been in every single company that I've ever been in. And that's the reason why even though I've been in sales. I've been responsible for a revenue number. I've been an account executive. I've also run customer success, customer experience centers, and strategies that are around sales. So I haven't looked like any one thing. And so the prerequisite to becoming a Fractional CRO is that, first of all, I didn't even know that all of these bits and bobs that I've done even meant that I was qualified to do anything at all. Like, I had a moment where I was like, am I just a generalist? Because I just get thrown into problems and I just fix people's problems? Is that what I'm good at? And when I moved to New Zealand, I had a conversation with a CEO of a company who said, hey, here's all the things that are going wrong with my company. As usual, people just kind of spill the beans. And I'm like, right, let me help you. And he was like, okay, well, we have a Fractional CFO and a Fractional CMO. I'm not sure, we'll just call you a consultant. And I was like, wait a minute, hold on. What is fractional? Like, you're using this word, and I hadn't even heard of it. I mean, lots will have it.

Paige Buck [00:22:10]:

I'd say most people, because they're not in a hiring position for that, have never heard of it. And then many of us who are, are still blown away to discover, like, oh, the entrepreneurs I know are like, I can't afford a CFO hire. What the f am I supposed to do? And then someone's like, you know what? There's this thing.

Michelle Allbon [00:22:32]:

You just have them. And part-time sounds weird because you're like, why would anyone ever work part-time in a leadership role? And I thought that I'm like, you literally cannot be a part-time sales leader. That's not possible. You're responsible for too much. Like, how is this possible? And so this concept of fractional, what really unlocked it to me is I was like, and by the way, that first job I got, I was not called the Fractional CRO. I was just called the consultant because I was like, I don't know what I am. I'm just going to solve your problems for you. And then when I went in and I looked at what the Fractional CFO and the Fractional CMO were doing, they were doing strategy-level work that requires that you have managed teams beneath you before, that you have the track record of being comfortable speaking to and reporting into a board level. And so you're actually at that senior executive level, but you don't actually have to do the tactical weeds of the work because the company is not in a place yet where they need tons of tactical work. So it's like all the strategy with none of the tactics. And so you're showing up for all the important meetings. You are the accountable party, but you're not necessarily sitting in there running a bunch of email cadences. or being on every customer call, or managing all the one-on-ones, or all this stuff that you think about that is 80% of somebody's day job when they're in a management role that has tactical responsibilities you're free from. So what you're really doing is you're really just doing the most important strategy work that the senior people need without any of the overhead, which sounds really sexy because you're like, well, then why does not everybody work this way? And the answer is because it's hard. You actually have to be really skilled to be able to draw your own lines and being like, these are the outcomes you need me to drive. And it does not make sense for me to be in this tactical work. However, I will make sure the tactical work is happening because I have leadership skills. Right? So it's a funny one because everyone would love to be a fractional leader. Like, who doesn't want to work two days a week? Right? But it's actually a skill set that you have to have developed in your career to be able to be good at it.

Paige Buck [00:24:45]:

That's the other it's all of the work you put in before.

Michelle Allbon [00:24:49]:

Exactly.

Paige Buck [00:24:50]:

But it's like the story I've heard told many times when somebody's asking you to justify your consulting rate, and they’re like, why are you $500 an hour? Well, there was my college degree, and there was the 20 years of things I did before I got here. You're paying for all of that experience brought into this package. And what I think is really powerful about what you said, was that for a moment before you arrived at this, you were like, am I just a generalist?

Michelle Allbon [00:25:15]:

Totally. Yeah.

Paige Buck [00:25:17]:

Am I just a generalist? Yes and, because you're drawing on all of these things, you can now package them up into something.

Michelle Allbon [00:25:25]:

Yeah, and it is that different position, strategy and tactical. Right? Is that tactical is excellent. It's operational. It's the key, it’s the engine of what a business is is tactical work. And because my scope has been strategic, which means that I have an understanding of very broad and complex context that you would lack if you had only been in tactical work, I actually feel like a generalist, but it's because I know how to operate at that senior leadership level. Right. And this is not something that I would have known had I not had a lot of mentors and been explicitly given this language. Honestly, through being trained as a leader, I would not recognize that. And I'm seeing a lot, of I mentor actually quite a few women leaders, because they have the same question. That they're like, oh, my God, am I even skilled? I know how to do way too many things, but none of them seem like they amount to anything. And it's because when you're doing strategy work, it isn't as precise as tactical work, where you're like, here's my deliverable. I made 500 phone calls. I did you 50 reports. You're like, honestly, here's one report. And it's a single slide, and it is the bottom line data that you need to be able to make a decision right now that's going to turn your company in one way or another. And so it looks completely different and feels completely different than tactical work.

Paige Buck [00:26:45]:

So if you're out there reading job descriptions, thinking, I want to make a leap to this or this. You read the job description, and you're like, well, this doesn't describe me because I haven't done this and this. Where do I fit? Where do I fit?

What did mentorship look like for you in your career, and how do you model it now to others?

Michelle Allbon [00:27:02]:

Yeah, I mean, it's interesting because I remember being really stressed out when I was first in first-time manager training, which I was in my early 20s when I was first put in management roles. And they stressed you need a mentor, like a strategic, you need to figure out mentors. And I was like, this is so awkward. What is a mentor? Do I just go up to someone and say, like, will you mentor me?

Paige Buck [00:27:31]:

Maybe if I worked in a law firm, or if I worked in Deloitte, then this would be clear.

Michelle Allbon [00:27:36]:

Right, there would be a person handed to you that you're like, this is your mentor. But when you're going into leadership, it's not as clear. They're just like, you need to find a mentor. And I think, honestly, being female, it's even harder because when I look at my male friends and also most of my mentors have been male. And the reason why is because in revenue there's not that many women who have made it into strategic areas of the business. And just historically, it's a very male-dominated field. And so when I'm looking to solve problems that I don't know how to solve, my pool is men. That's who I need to ask questions to. And men, I think when they come up in a field that they are the majority in, they almost have this intuition on, well, that person knows how to do something. So they may not even call them their mentor. They'll be like, oh, I just golf with him. Or we just talk from time to time, or we just have a text chain. And he tells me everything whenever he's working on this project. And I think that men actually in business have more intuition on how to be mentored often than women do in senior levels. Not necessarily in lower levels, but as they get more senior, they watch other people doing it. Whereas women, I think there's this relationship building where it's transactional because you're basically saying, I need you to share information with me that is closed door information so that I know how to do something that really isn't precise. It's kind of like, how did you handle that situation? How did you approach this thing or make that decision? And you're actually asking someone to be really vulnerable and honest with you. And I think as a female, and especially when I was younger, I was like, I don't know if I'm actually entitled to that much transparency from these men who are way higher up than me. And so I had my first couple of mentors were men who just modeled that to me. Who literally were just like, hey, so, you know that meeting I was just in. Here's how I approached that tactically. This person needed this, and this was the outcome that I was trying to drive. Here's a copy of the text message I sent that person after. Here, I'm forwarding you on an email. And for me, what mentorship was, was people literally just letting me be on a fly on the wall of what they were doing and giving me kind of a crack open into, this is what it looks like to operate at my level. And that's how I learned.

Paige Buck [00:30:03]:

Which is exactly the gap that we all have. What's above us? I don't know what that looks like. I don't know what those conversations look like.

Michelle Allbon [00:30:10]:

Yes, exactly that. How I model that, I guess, to others, is that I take the exact same tack. So I felt like it was so helpful when people would be like, here is an exact, and within discretion, obviously, because if you're like, oh, my God, this is a private conversation. You're sharing text messages. It's not exactly that. It's more of like, if you're trying to frame something to someone. I'll give you a tangible example. A friend of mine who's interviewing right now in a RevOps role. I'm sharing with her the exact structure of how I've designed roles. I'm sharing with my friends who are writing job descriptions and SOWs. Here's the exact template of how I put that together. When you're interviewing, tell me what they said. Here's a script I used. I literally give all of my prep notes and frameworks to my friends who are in leadership roles so that they can understand and see what I've done because that's how I was mentored, and that helps them.

Paige Buck [00:31:17]:

I love that. I love fostering relationships where you can be open, vulnerable.

Michelle Allbon [00:31:24]:

Exactly.

Paige Buck [00:31:24]:

That's where the real deep learning happens. We have other agency owners that we get on, just earlier today, get on calls with, and it's just like, oh, my God, can I run this thing by you? Sometimes it turns into just a bitch session.

Michelle Allbon [00:31:38]:

Yeah. Oh, totally. No, but you're figuring it out.

Paige Buck [00:31:41]:

Yes, figuring it out.

Michelle Allbon [00:31:43]:

It’s human relationships at its core. That's what it is. It's human dynamics. And if you don't have people modeling to you human dynamics and how to navigate them, you can't understand how to navigate them yourself.

Paige Buck [00:31:54]:

Right. How are you pricing this and why? How are you structuring? Have you ever tried it this way and, oh, that didn't work? Why didn't that work? Okay, good to know. What do you do when you get pushback on this? Yeah, then you just try to bank those away and hope that you'll be able to draw on them when you need them.

Michelle Allbon [00:32:15]:

Yeah, that's exactly it. I've literally gone back and looked before where I've gotten in a situation, and I'll be like, oh, my gosh, I remember him telling me about this. And I will use an anchor to those examples. And that also really helps with this, Impostor syndrome comes up a lot of like, oh my God, am I good enough to in this role? Whenever I'm in a situation that I'm like, wow, this is really scary, this feels over my head. I anchor to someone I've worked with that has navigated that situation and I go, wait a minute, I'm no different than them. If they could navigate that, I can navigate that. And they gave me the tool. And so that's the beauty of mentorship, is just being like all these things are is tools. It's not hierarchy, it's just skills.

Paige Buck [00:32:55]:

Yeah, and just being able to draw on the right thing in the right moment.

Michelle Allbon [00:32:58]:

Exactly.

Paige Buck [00:33:01]:

I imagine, because it can be on the agency side, that there's the potential in a fractional role for it to be a little isolating. How do you stay on top of things now, or stay connected to whether it's trends or other experiences, the same thing. And even just at the peer level of experience sharing, so you can feel like you've got it deeper.

Michelle Allbon [00:33:24]:

Yeah. So actually it's a really great question because I decided that I was going to call myself a fractional CRO after coming back from maternity leave with my son. So I was doing fractional CRO work for about two years before I started calling myself that. I started my advisory practice deliberately because I thought, well, a practice allows me to subcontract people in so I can find problems to solve and then I can bring other functions in. Which is funny because I'm like, I'm actually hiring other fractional leaders under me. I didn't even think of it that way. Right. I wasn't even putting those pieces together. And then my advisory, I'm like, well, Advisor is more comfortable than Fractional CRO, because do I look like a Fractional CRO? I'm a woman in my mid-thirties. I don't know anybody who looks like me. Maybe Advisor is a safer title. And as I'm realizing it, I'm like, they're two totally different jobs. People who hire me to be an advisor, I'm giving them only a very kind of high level, here is my intuition on what you should do. That one-page summary I talked about, and it's very macro. Whereas when I'm hired to be a Fractional CRO, which is kind of my operating capability, there's a lot more that I can do. I can help build people frameworks. I can kind of apply the things that will help them build tactical structures underneath that. And so when I called myself a fractional CRO, it opened up this whole world to the other people who are there. And I did not expect it. All of a sudden there's a couple different groups that I got invited to. There's Slack groups with thousands of people in them. There's marketplaces to go find work for fractional work. And what I've actually ended up doing is starting a project with a couple other fractional friends to consider how we might be able to make a directory to actually search and understand who's out there in the world. Because there isn't any transparency in this. I came into it because I changed my LinkedIn title. I think that should not be the only path. There should be a transparent way to be able to see everybody that's working in this space and qualified. And so that's a problem I'm actually tinkering on at the moment.

Paige Buck [00:35:48]:

I love that. That in turn would create like an entry point for people who are where you were before two or three years ago going, am I this? Could I be this? What am I anyway? That's amazing. So is there somebody that you, this will be my final question, even though I could talk to you all day, and it's early your time, so we really could we could talk all day.

Michelle Allbon [00:36:15]:

We can talk all day. I feel bad for the people listening.

Paige Buck [00:36:18]:

But anyway, somebody that you really admire that you've met through those directories, Slacks, not the directory you haven't built yet, but the one that you're going to build, that you really admire or want to model yourself.

Michelle Allbon [00:36:34]:

You know, it's really interesting because I always remember people saying, I have a mentor. And in San Francisco that was a big thing. People would be like, I have this big-name person who's teaching me stuff. And when I was in that phase of my life, I had a manager who I considered to be that person that I was modeling myself after. And then later I realized that that was actually really misguided and that that person that I was modeling myself after is human and complicated and flawed. And when you project what you want to be in the image of another person, you're not actually taking your own individuality into account. And so what I really think is that now there's a lot of people. I guess for instance, there's thinkers who I love. Like, I love Brene Brown and I love Malcolm Gladwell and I love Yuval Harari and I love people who are thinking in certain ways. And I regularly follow the way people think. And I model the way I'm approaching something by somebody's approaching challenges. And I'll be like, wow, that's the way Brene Brown maybe would have approached this. Then individual people themselves. I feel like I have a really strong network of people who I look up to who are way more skilled than me. I would literally name like six or seven people in different spheres where I'm like, that is my person that I will always go to when I need this kind of insight. And so to me, it’s I know a long-winded answer, but rather than having a mentor, I feel like I've actually built this network of people who I see as kind of like my mentors or my bench of people that I can bounce off of, as well as people who think in the ways I want to think. And that is how I've kind of developed myself.

Paige Buck [00:38:28]:

That's a really wise, holistic approach, and you probably do it intrinsically. You don't have to make a spreadsheet that's like, for this kind of problem, I go to Corey. For this kind of problem, I go to Laurie. You're just doing it naturally and be like, oh, gosh, Cory will know how to handle this. Yeah, that's beautiful. I love it. What a great answer, too. Thank you so much. Oh, my gosh. Well, it's been a joy talking with you, Michelle. Do you want to share where people can find you besides LinkedIn and Google?

Michelle Allbon [00:39:00]:

Yeah, well, at the moment, LinkedIn is the easiest place to find me. Once we have our fractional product up and running, that should be by later this year. That'll be something I'll be posting about and would love to talk to people about. So if anybody's listening to the podcast and interested in tinkering in the helping people who are fractional find each other and just building this kind of, like, Yellow Pages of people who do this work, hit me up.

Paige Buck [00:39:31]:

Oh, my gosh. That's a phenomenal call to action, and we'll have to circle back to you when you do that, but we'll find you, and we'll put it in the show notes, in the meantime on LinkedIn, thanks so much for your time today, Michelle.

Michelle Allbon [00:39:42]:

Yeah, thank you.

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PAIGE BUCK

Paige Buck is the co-owner of Kennedy Events, a large-scale event management company based in San Francisco, Los Angeles, and New York City. Our team creates stress-free conferences and events with a positive impact, which allows our clients to resonate with their audience. Kennedy Events specializes in producing flawless product launches, award ceremonies, fundraisers, and multi-day conferences while keeping our eye on retention and engagement goals.

About Kennedy Events

Kennedy Events began with one goal in mind—to produce high-level corporate events with just as much strategy as style. Maggie founded the company in 2000, found her match in Paige, and in 2011 the two became official partners. Since then, these two resourceful and brilliant creatives have pooled their strengths to build one one of the most the most sought after corporate event companies in San Francisco, New York, and Los Angeles.