Grit and a Little Grace: What a $1.6 Billion Carve-Out Taught Tamie Adams About Leading Change
The CRO of Octave came on Sales Is King the same week she rang the NASDAQ bell. What she said about speed, customer success, and the CRO clock is worth your next ten minutes.
Some guests you catch on an ordinary Tuesday. Tamie Adams, CRO of Octave, sat down with me in the New York studio the same week she was ringing the bell on the NASDAQ, the culmination of carving a $1.6 billion company out of a $30 billion parent. So when she talks about leading change under pressure, she is not theorizing. She is describing the week she was living. What struck me most is that a leader moving that fast led with patience. "You have to look at transformation with speed," she told me. "You also have to do a little bit of grace and understanding." That tension, speed and grace at the same time, ran through the whole conversation.
"Where folks'(CROs) tenure is short is because they just didn't do the due diligence to really understand and educate their executives on how long the transformation potentially can take.
Her first move was not a reorg. It was the data. Adams comes out of finance, and she refused to change anything until she understood the ground she was standing on: the tech stack, the people, the margins, the true cost to serve. Only then did she start making calls, and she made them fast. "Ninety days is my window, my policy of we've got to get exits moving so we can bring the right talent in, because you're going to have a four-month ramp-up window anyway. So you're going to move with speed." That is the CRO's real arithmetic. The clock on a new hire's ramp is already ticking, so the clock on the changes has to start the day you have the diagnosis.
The part that lit her up was customer success, and it is a lesson for anyone still treating CS as a cost center. Adams owns the full post-sale motion, close to a hundred CS professionals, and she is blunt about the upside most companies leave on the floor. "Those CS individuals are kind of an afterthought. The deal is done, they get brought in. But there's so much untapped value and potential. I fundamentally believe CS is a true profit center." She backed it with a number. By retooling how the CS team engaged customers, "even within nine months, we have moved pipeline through this channel and it's increased 200 percent, just by retooling how the CS organization looks, feels, and how they talk to our customers." The change was mindset first, headcount second.
We got into AI, and her take is the one every seller should tape to their monitor: use it, but never stop questioning it. She calls it the fastest way in the world to research a 10-K, the work that used to mean flipping through the filing by hand. Then the caveat. "The teams are not comfortable enough yet to challenge it, and there's still a lot of junk coming out of it. It's still 80 percent data and 20 percent human element, and you have to question it." The tool prepares the seller. The human still has to own the judgment, and, as she put it, it all comes back to trust.
Then we hit the question this newsletter keeps circling: why does the average CRO last only 18 to 22 months? Adams put the failure squarely on a conversation that never happens. "Where folks' tenure is short is because they just didn't do the due diligence to really understand and educate their executives on how long the transformation potentially can take. Hopefully you move from 18 months to 36 months." Renegotiate the clock before you start changing things, or the clock runs out before the change can land. She closed on her definition of success, and it is the best one I have heard in a while. "A little bit of grit and a little bit of grace. Success looks like I can walk away knowing my team has leveled up, it can run on its own, and it still does really well even after I'm gone." Listen to the full episode. She is one of the sharpest change leaders I have had on the show, and she rang a bell to prove it.
Dan Sixsmith is an Executive Revenue Leader at Ecosystems, writes CRO Talk and is the creator and host of the Sales Is King Podcast
Full episode with Tamie Adams, CRO of Octave, on the Sales Is King podcast.