SalesTechStar Interview with Rachel Bergman, Chief Revenue Officer at Cordial

Rachel Bergman, recently joined Cordial as their new CRO, we had a quick sit-down with Rachel where she spoke about her vision for Cordial while sharing a few best practices for today’s B2B CRO.

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We’d love to hear about your journey through the years, Rachel…what are you looking forward to in your new role as CRO at Cordial?

I really enjoy having responsibility for all revenue in an organization. There is so much you can do when pre- and post-sales reports into you – it allows you to get super creative and make things happen very quickly.

I’ve spent all of my career in digital marketing, and in particular mar-tech SaaS. Recently, someone told me I was part of the group that “invented” Customer Success back in the early 2000s. We took that term really seriously at CheetahMail, and it was really exciting to find another company with a similar philosophy on the importance of the client and their success.

The tech we have today allows us to be so much more agile, and to innovate so much faster than we could even a few years ago so the possibilities of what we can offer clients is at such a different level. While I’ve worked with some big name clients in the past (American Express, Victoria’s Secret, Neiman Marcus, Hilton Hotels, etc.), I’m equally as excited to help grow the brands we have at Cordial and be a big part of their success.

Cordial bringing a truly cross-channel platform to market is also a big reason I came on board. We’re enabling programs for clients that would have been incredibly manual and rules-based until now.

I also love Cordial’s size – at just about 100 employees and 100+ clients we have so much room to grow. I started at CheetahMail when we were ~50 employees and was there to see 600, so I say bring it on!

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In what ways do you feel CROs of today need to focus on creating and building better inter team alignment for better output? A few best practices you follow?

This to me, is the key to the CRO role. When you own the pre- and post-sales experience for clients you can ensure a cohesive and awesome experience at every touch-point. Although I don’t have direct responsibility for Product, the relationship my teams have with Product is absolutely mission critical. Some things that have worked for us are having daily standups with some of our teams to ensure client needs are being met, and twice-weekly meetings with Product so client requests and feedback is heard continually. As well, we utilize Slack heavily which has helped with collaboration, Trello and Jira for project management, and ClientSuccess to track client satisfaction and changes over time.

How do you feel the CRO of tomorrow will have to evolve to bridge changes in customer trends and salestech-sales processes a lot quicker?

Gosh, I feel like we’re already evolving – it’s constant. Clients expect that we understand everything about them since their customers expect a lot from them, so it only seems fair. Like I said, we do a lot of listening and a lot of research to ensure we know as much as we can about our clients’ businesses. While Cordial’s solutions can ultimately fit the needs of many companies, we need to prove that every day. We need to evolve our systems, our processes, our product, really everything to ensure our clients can meet the needs of their customers – this isn’t easy, but it’s imperative if you want to win. Our goal at Cordial is to empower marketing teams to create personal relationships with every customer.  And our vision is to build technology for teams to communicate cordially—delivering messages that are personal, relevant, and intelligent. The same applies as much to our own sales process and the customer journey we deliver to the brands who we hope will choose to work with us.

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Can you share a few thoughts on what it takes for CROs of today to help their teams succeed and build better customer relationships?

Cordial is at the size where we can be very nimble, so it’s super important to listen to our clients and understand all the ways we can empower them to be more successful. Many times we’ll hear clients say things like “we are looking for a BLANK technology so we can do BLANK” and when we bring that feedback to the team we come up with creative ways to meet the client’s needs with Cordial rather than buying an entirely new solution.

I feel one of the most important things I can do in my role is model the behavior I want the team to exhibit, so I do a lot of listening and a lot of brainstorming about new and exciting ways we can solve the problems our clients need solved.

Hopefully, most everyone understands that our teams are the most important asset we have, so if I’m not thinking about how to better serve our clients, I’m thinking about how to better serve my team to make them happier and more productive. With a company name like “Cordial” we have a lot to live up to, and we expect our team members to be authentic, kind and respectful in everything they do.

A few thoughts on what you feel today’s sales and marketing leaders need to do differently?

With so many choices of providers who, on paper, look very similar, it’s incumbent on sales teams to simply be better than the rest.

For us that means offering a personalized experience for prospective clients that mimics how we would work with them as clients.

We go above and beyond to learn about our prospective clients’ businesses and give them concrete ways they can accelerate revenue and create loyalty by delivering unmatched customer experiences using the Cordial platform.

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