Monty Fowler, VP of Revenue Strategy & Enablement at Kentik, recently attended our Chief Revenue Officer Summit in Chicago, where he was excited to discuss key revenue topics with his peers.
He also spoke on a panel session alongside Mike Weir, Chief Revenue Officer at G2 and Guy Mounier, CEO at Aptivio, titled: “Driving GTM efficiency with data, automation and alignment”.
Monty is a sales and marketing leader, and entrepreneur with more than 30 years of technology sales, marketing, and business development experience. His career has spanned industries such as telecommunications, consulting, enterprise software, IoT, and services.
Today, his passion is coaching and mentoring the next generation of sales professionals to learn the art and science of selling with high integrity. We caught up with him to learn more about his experience at the Chief Revenue Officer Summit in Chicago.
His thoughts are focused on:
- How he heard about the CRO Summit
- The value he gained from attending the summit
- His experience as a panelist at the event
- His top takeaways from the summit
- The benefits of attending an in-person event
- What he’d say to someone considering attending a CRO Summit
How Monty heard about the Chief Revenue Officer Summit in Chicago
“ROA’s event producer, Jack Debono, reached out to me because I’d worked with him previously and we've kept in touch. He knew I was in Chicago and reached out.”
The value Monty gained from attending the event
“It was just nice to get out of the house,” Monty joked. Before continuing:
“It was really good to sit with other revenue leaders in a safe environment, where you're not worried about what we sell or who our customers are, instead we're worried about how we run our businesses.
“I was just really impressed at how open and participative everybody was.
“And I really liked the size of the event, because even when there was a panel discussion or a presenter, the conversation seemed to naturally evolve in the room, which was great.
“You can't do that when you've got hundreds of people in a room.”
Monty’s experience as a speaker at the summit
“It was great!
“I thought Warren Zenna, Founder of the CRO Collective, did a great job of being the discussion moderator.
“We were very well prepared for the panel session, Jack worked with us for a couple of weeks prior to the event. We had a Google Doc, where we figured out what questions we wanted to have asked.
“Then as a group, we walked through who's going to talk about what because we had different interests and different experiences. We wanted to make sure we brought the right information out in the limited time that we had.
“And I think we achieved that!
“When we were working on the document, I was like, ‘Wow, this is way too much content to talk about in 45 minutes, but then we got through it because Warren just kept the discussion moving, which was great.”
Monty’s key takeaway from the CRO Summit in Chicago
“I think my key takeaway was two things.
“One, everybody is struggling with the same core set of challenges right now. There's around five or six things that everybody's concerned with right now and trying to figure out.
“The other thing was, I was very pleased to see how interested, plugged in, confused, and unsure everybody was about AI, generative AI, and what that means for business.
“But I was also pleased to see that everybody knew it was important. They knew they had to figure out a play for it in their organization, and that the time was now.
“I tried to echo that sentiment and encourage everybody there if they weren’t already playing with this stuff, and trying to figure out what value it can have for their organizations, they need to dedicate a fair amount of their time every week, to figuring that out.
“The pace of change is so rapid, this isn't something we can just check in on every month.
“It's something you've got to look into, sign up for some newsletters, go do some reading, grab a few tools and play with them on a regular basis, bake them into your workflows, and see what value they can give.
“I was very pleased to see that so many people were like, ‘Yeah, I'm already doing that,’ or, ‘Yeah, I really need to do that, thank you for bringing it up.’
“We're in an inflection point right now in the marketplace, where there's a new capability in our hands, that dwarfs every other technology we've ever had before. And we need to figure it out because our competitors are going to figure it out, so we better have a plan.”
Stewart Townsend
The benefits of in-person events for revenue leaders
“I think it validates things that people are already doing.
“And it gives a lot of creative energy to ‘Oh, wow, I didn't even think of that. I need to go try that.’
“These events bring all the best capabilities and ideas together in one room and just throws them all on the table. You can look through and take away ideas you hadn’t thought of before.
“And you get to talk to the people who are actually practitioners and not just trying to sell you something. I'm going to learn even more at an event like this and get a very narrowly focused idea of what I'm missing out on.
“Because I'm talking to my peers who aren't trying to sell me anything. They're just like, ‘Dude, you gotta be doing this because it’s amazing.’ It's great.
“It's like going to church camp, everybody's just on fire, and excited.”
What Monty would say to someone considering attending a Chief Revenue Officer Summit
“If you're a revenue leader, director or above, and certainly if you're an executive or C-level, you need to bake into your calendar three or four or five opportunities every year to do exactly this.
“I would highly recommend the way ROA does it, because the size of the event is just right, for the type of topics we want to cover.
“The more people you have the more diffused the information needs to be, whereas here we got really specific.
“We dug down into some really nitty-gritty stuff in these presentations, and that's something you just never get anywhere else.”
Feeling left out?
Join us at a Chief Revenue Officer Summit near you in 2024...
New York, San Fransisco, Chicago, and London. 🌎
We'll see you soon! 👋
