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# Customer Interview: Timothy Brown, CRO at AdTech Company ## Salesloft + Clari Revenue Conversation Series **Date:** January 2, 2026 **Duration:** 32 minutes **Participants:** - **Timothy Brown** - Chief Revenue Officer, $170M ARR AdTech/MarTech Platform - **Sarah Chen** - Enterprise Solutions Director, Salesloft + Clari - **Context:** Discovery call exploring revenue ops challenges in privacy-first landscape --- ## Transcript **[00:00-02:30] Opening & Rapport** **Sarah:** Timothy, thanks so much for making time. I know you're juggling a lot right now. We've been following your company's moves in the privacy space—really impressed with how you've been navigating the cookie deprecation landscape. Before we dive into anything specific, I'm curious: what's keeping you up at night these days from a revenue perspective? **Timothy:** *laughs* Where do I even start? Look, it's not one thing. It's the compounding effect of three simultaneous shifts. Privacy is table stakes now, not a feature. Our entire targeting paradigm has been disrupted in the last 18 months. Meanwhile, our customers are getting schizophrenic about whether they should invest in first-party data, or just consolidate onto platforms like Google and Meta. And honestly, that's rational. Why build when the walled gardens are so convenient? **Sarah:** That's a really clear picture. The walled garden point is interesting because that's not just a product problem—it's a go-to-market problem. Do you find that your sales team is having those conversations differently than they were two years ago? **Timothy:** Fundamentally different. Two years ago, we had a clear value story: "We'll help you bypass platform limitations and reach people across open web." Today? That value prop is getting compressed. You can reach the same people—arguably better data—through Google's audience solutions. Our salespeople are feeling it. --- **[02:30-07:45] Privacy Changes & Product Roadmap** **Sarah:** Let's dig into that first point you mentioned—privacy disruption. How much of your product roadmap have you had to reprioritize because of privacy shifts? **Timothy:** *pauses* Honestly? It's maybe 40% of new development bandwidth. Maybe more if you count infrastructure changes. We were building predictive targeting models around third-party signals last year. Those are now... let's call them "legacy." We're rewriting for first-party contexts. But here's the thing that's actually more challenging than the engineering—it's not the technical pivot. Every company in our space figured out that cookie-less doesn't mean capability-less. The challenge is **how you communicate that to your customer base without spooking them.** **Sarah:** That's the revenue ops angle I was hoping you'd touch on. Walk me through that. How are you thinking about customer communication on privacy? **Timothy:** We've had to segment our messaging completely. For our enterprise customers who are brand-side—CPG, insurance, financial services—they want to hear "we've got you covered." They want compliance certainty. They're scared of data regulations, GDPR implications, state privacy laws. For agency customers, it's different. Agencies are actually **opportunity-focused**. They're thinking: "How do I use this privacy shift to differentiate myself from my competitors?" They see it as a wedge. So we're telling them, "Look, you can now be the consultant who actually understands how to build audiences without relying on third-party data. That's a service offering." **Sarah:** How are you handling the risk mitigation piece in contracts and customer agreements? I imagine there's legal concern about guaranteeing targeting performance when third-party data is depreciating. **Timothy:** *nods* We've completely restructured our SLAs and guarantees. We used to have performance guarantees baked into contracts—"You'll reach X% of your target audience." Now? We're moving to advisory models where we're saying, "Here are the best practices for measurement in a privacy-first world. Here's how to establish your baseline." It's actually created a different kind of stickiness. We're moving up the stack into strategic partnership rather than tactical tooling. But it requires a different sales motion. **Sarah:** Different sales motion—can you be specific? What does that look like operationally? **Timothy:** More discovery, longer sales cycles, more executive involvement. I used to have a team selling our platform to media directors and programmatic managers. Now, the champion is often the VP of Marketing or Chief Marketing Officer. That person cares about business outcomes, not platform features. Our sales team had to completely retool. We're not longer selling "platform benefits." We're selling "business outcomes in a privacy-first era." Our ACV went down initially—we're not licensing as much platform. But our NRR is actually better because we're embedded deeper. And the churn is lower because we're harder to rip out. --- **[07:45-12:15] Agency vs. Brand Direct Segmentation** **Sarah:** I want to hang on that segmentation point because it's interesting. You mentioned agencies and brands are fundamentally different customers. How are you operationalizing that difference at Salesloft—I mean, at your company? Are you literally running separate GTM motions? **Timothy:** *leans forward* Separate is almost understating it. We have different sales teams, different product managers owning different feature sets, different marketing messaging. On paper, it looks like we're running two companies. Agencies are optimizing for margin and differentiation. They want things we can plug into their current workflow—integration with their existing DMP, their analytics stack, their client reporting tools. They want our IP, but they want to white-label it. They want competitive advantage. Brands are different. They're trying to reduce vendor sprawl. They're consolidating. They want one platform that can handle identity, targeting, measurement, and reporting. They want something that looks like a CDP, feels like a CDP, but isn't a CDP. It's a subtle difference but it matters operationally. **Sarah:** How does that change your sales structure? Are your quotas aligned to different metrics? **Timothy:** Yes and no. We still have geographic quotas, but our reps are specialized by segment. My agency team is leaner, more consultative, selling bigger deals. My brand team is higher-volume, shorter cycles. Compensation is aligned to that—my agency reps are on bigger base, lower commission multiple. Brand reps are higher commission, slightly lower base. The tricky part is coordination. You have a large brand customer who's also an agency holding company. Are they buying as a brand or as an agency network? We've actually had to create a new role—account strategist—whose job is to figure out the right fit and structure for these complex organizations. **Sarah:** That's sophisticated. Are your revenue operations and sales enablement teams aligned to support that? **Timothy:** *laughs* Are they? That's generous phrasing. We're **working on it**. Honestly, this is where a lot of our operational debt sits. Our CRM is structured too simply. Our Salesforce org treats all deals the same. Our playbooks are generic. We've got a big project to segment our entire go-to-market infrastructure, but it's slow-moving because it touches everything—ops, enablement, marketing, customer success. **Sarah:** What would help you move faster on that? **Timothy:** Fewer meetings, more clarity on what each team's priorities actually are. We have weekly ops reviews, but they're tactical. Nobody's taking ownership of the big picture. We need a revenue strategist, not a revenue operations manager. Someone who's saying, "Okay, if we're really committing to agency specialization, here's what that means for our contract terms, our deal sizes, our compensation structure." And it cascades from there. --- **[12:15-17:30] Walled Gardens & Integration Strategy** **Sarah:** Let me shift to the walled garden challenge you mentioned earlier. You're competing against Google, Meta, Amazon. What's your actual value proposition when those platforms can reach billions of users with first-party data? Where do you win? **Timothy:** *long pause* We win where they lose—complexity and flexibility. Google is optimized for Google's business. Meta is optimized for Meta's business. When you have a customer who needs to coordinate campaigns across multiple platforms, test different strategies, and measure incrementality—that's where we win. But here's the honesty: the number of customers who actually need that complexity is shrinking. A lot of our customers are just trying to solve a problem: "I need to reach people." Google solves that. It's not glamorous, but it works. So we're repositioning. We're saying: "You need orchestration, not another ad platform." We're building integration layers. We're becoming the layer between your brand and all the walled gardens. We're aggregating insights, deduplicating audiences, measuring incrementally across platform boundaries. **Sarah:** How does that change your product roadmap and go-to-market? **Timothy:** Dramatically. We're investing heavily in integration infrastructure. My backend team is now almost entirely focused on APIs, webhooks, and data partnerships. We're probably going to acquire two or three companies that have platform integrations rather than build them ourselves. From a go-to-market perspective, we're flipping our pitch. Instead of "replace Google," we're saying "orchestrate across Google." It's not a competitive message, it's a collaborative message. It changes the sales dynamic. You're not positioning against an incumbent. You're positioning as a strategic partner. **Sarah:** Does that mean your customer base is shifting? Are you losing customers who were all-in on open web, and gaining customers who are comfortable with walled garden primacy? **Timothy:** *nods* Exactly. We're losing some customers—the pure-play open web advocates. But we're gaining customers who were running consolidated businesses. Our average customer now has more walled garden exposure. They're less dependent on us. But they're less dependent on any single vendor, which is actually healthy. The uncomfortable truth is: our TAM is smaller than it was five years ago. There's just less open web inventory. But our net revenue retention is better because we're less replaceable. **Sarah:** How are you bridging this in your sales messaging? If you're losing the old narrative, what's the new one? **Timothy:** "We're not here to replace your walled garden investment. We're here to maximize it." We're helping brands avoid putting all their eggs in Google's basket. We're helping them see blind spots. We're proving incrementality. That's the narrative. But the tricky part is this: your largest customers are still probably spending more with Google than with us. So we have to be okay with that. Our salespeople struggled with that initially. They wanted to believe we were the central platform. We had to do real work on acceptance—accepting that we're a supporting player, not the lead. --- **[17:30-23:15] ROI, Measurement & Proving Incremental Value** **Sarah:** That actually brings me to what might be the most important question. You talk about incremental value. How are you actually **proving** it? Because in a world of walled gardens and first-party data, how do you demonstrate ROI when the customer could just... not use your platform? **Timothy:** *sits back* This is genuinely the hardest problem we're solving right now. Historically, we could A/B test. We'd say, "Use our targeting versus your normal targeting," and you could measure the lift. But with walled gardens, you can't run that experiment cleanly. Google controls the data. You can't see what Meta would have done if you'd used our audience. The counterfactual doesn't exist. So we've had to get creative. We're using econometric modeling—statistical approaches to estimate incrementality without clean experiments. We're partnering with measurement companies like Measured and Northbeam to offer third-party validation. We're building dashboards that show "here's what you spent, here's your ROAS, here's your cost per acquisition compared to your baseline." But honestly? That's still not bulletproof. A customer can look at that and say, "Well, my baseline just changed because Google got better at first-party data." And they'd be right. **Sarah:** So how are you differentiating on ROI methodology? **Timothy:** We're not. We can't. What we're doing instead is differentiating on **transparency and accuracy**. We're saying: "We don't know the exact lift, and we're going to tell you that. But here's what we do know. Here's what we're confident about. Here's where there's uncertainty." A lot of customers actually appreciate that honesty. It's easier to build trust around "we have confidence intervals" than around "we can prove 34% incrementality." The specificity is actually more suspicious now. **Sarah:** Are you backing that up with contract terms? Like, are you taking performance risk? **Timothy:** Some. We're offering performance floors—"If you don't see X% ROAS, we'll give you credits or a price reduction." But we're careful about how wide those floors are. We're not taking on the risk of the customer's creative quality or campaign strategy. We're only covering platform performance. What we've found is that customers who are hungry for that kind of risk-sharing are actually lower quality. They're often looking for a scapegoat when campaigns don't work. The ones we want to keep are willing to acknowledge complexity. They want a partner, not a guarantee. **Sarah:** How does your team coach reps on having that conversation? **Timothy:** We've completely rewritten our sales training. We spend less time on "here's what you'll get" and more time on "here's how we measure and why." Our best reps have become measurement consultants, not sales people. They can talk about MTA models, incrementality, statistical significance. They've read econometric papers. We're hiring different people. We're recruiting from consulting backgrounds, analytics backgrounds. We're looking for people who are comfortable with nuance and ambiguity. Traditional sales playbooks don't work here. **Sarah:** And from an ops standpoint, how are you tracking this? Are your forecasts and pipeline metrics different? **Timothy:** Completely. We used to forecast on close probability and deal size. Now we're also forecating on customer quality—how well-positioned is this customer to actually measure our value? A $2M deal with a customer who can't measure incrementality is riskier than a $1.5M deal with a sophisticated customer. We've layered in qualitative scoring. Our deal desk is looking at things like: "Does this customer have first-party data infrastructure? Do they have an analytics team? Have they done incrementality studies before?" It adds friction to deals, but it reduces churn. --- **[23:15-28:45] Cookie Deprecation & Product Flexibility** **Sarah:** You mentioned cookie deprecation. We're past the point where that's theoretical—it's happening. How is that actually affecting your customer base right now? Are you seeing behavioral change? **Timothy:** Oh, absolutely. We're in the middle of it. Third-party cookie availability has dropped from maybe 70% of browsers to 30% in the last year. It's accelerating. And the impact on customer results is real. Some customers are panicking. They're cutting budgets because they're not confident in their targeting. Other customers are leaning in—they're saying, "Okay, we're forced to build first-party data strategy anyway. Let's do it right." The distribution isn't even though. Most customers are just... uncertain. **Sarah:** How is your product evolving to handle that? **Timothy:** We're building massive flexibility into our platform. We're enabling customers to upload their own first-party audiences. We're building connectors to Google Analytics, Segment, and custom data sources. We're investing in cohort-based targeting and contextual signals. Basically, we're saying: "We don't care where your data comes from. Cookies, first-party, contextual, intent—we can activate all of it." It's a big product shift. We're moving away from "we know how to target based on cookies" to "we know how to activate based on whatever data you have." **Sarah:** Is that creating product bloat, or is it actually coherent? **Timothy:** *laughs* Honest answer? Both. Our product is more capable but also more complex. Customers with good data teams love it. Customers with weak data infrastructure are overwhelmed. We've had to expand our customer success team and our professional services. We're essentially doing data strategy consulting now, not just activating audiences. **Sarah:** Are you pricing for that? Or is professional services on the side? **Timothy:** Mixed model. Core platform is SaaS. Data integration and strategy is services. But we're using services as a wedge—if we can help a customer build good data infrastructure, they're stickier and worth more on SaaS. We're actually trying to train customers out of needing our services, which is weird economically but probably good long-term. **Sarah:** How is your sales team handling that transition? Are they selling services, or are they handing off to customer success? **Timothy:** Still figuring that out. Ideally, a rep closes a platform deal, and customer success sells them into services during onboarding. But timing matters. Some customers need services from day one. Others don't need them for six months. So we've created a "services architect" role that sits in sales but owns the services engagement. It's a new kind of skill. **Sarah:** From a forecasting perspective, how are you handling that? Services revenue is typically less predictable than SaaS. **Timothy:** Less predictable is an understatement. *laughs* We've had to separate our forecasts. We forecast SaaS on a traditional model. Services we forecast like a consulting business—project-based, with longer sales cycles but typically higher margins. It's a bit schizophrenic because you've got a SaaS company and a services company running in parallel. But our CRO math is actually better—blended gross margin is higher, customer value is higher, and churn is lower. The volatility is higher, but the business is more resilient. **Sarah:** How are you communicating the flexibility piece to customers who are nervous about cookie deprecation? Is it a roadmap message, or are you already activated? **Timothy:** We're being very careful here. We've had customers ask specifically: "Will you be able to reach people when cookies go away?" We can't say, "Yes, guaranteed." We're saying, "Here's what we're building. Here's the timeline. Here's what you need to do—which is build first-party data." Some customers hear that and get comfortable. Some get more nervous. The ones who get nervous are usually the ones without first-party data infrastructure, which is fair—cookie deprecation is actually a real problem for them. We're being very transparent about this in our customer communication. Our CEO did a blog post on "The cookie deprecation roadmap," and we're publishing transparency reports on what's actually happening to cookie availability. It's risky to be that honest, but I think it builds trust. **Sarah:** Are you losing customers because of cookie deprecation? **Timothy:** *sighs* Yes. We're probably seeing 2-3% of churn directly attributable to cookie deprecation. Customers who have no path to first-party data are choosing to reduce spending or consolidate onto platforms where first-party data is native. It's painful, but it's reality. --- **[28:45-32:00] Closing & Action Items** **Sarah:** I want to wrap up by asking: what would actually help you solve these problems faster? If you had three resources tomorrow, what would they be? **Timothy:** *doesn't hesitate* First, I need clarity on our product direction. We have too many cooks in the kitchen right now. Every team thinks their vision is the priority. We need a real product strategy—what are we saying no to as much as what are we saying yes to? Second, I need a revenue strategist. Someone who can look at our segments, our pricing, our GTM, our team structure, and say, "Here's what actually goes together." We're trying to run an agency business and a brand business and a consulting business, and we haven't actually decided if that's our strategy or just what we've fallen into. Third, and maybe most important: I need real transparency into what's actually driving customer value. Not "we know our platform is great." I mean: "Here's what percentage of our NRR is driven by user growth versus price increases versus new products versus professional services." Right now I'm flying half-blind. **Sarah:** Those are interesting because they're not really product problems—they're organizational problems. **Timothy:** Exactly. And honestly, they matter more than product right now. We can build features faster than we can organize around an actual strategy. **Sarah:** I appreciate your candor, Timothy. This is really helpful context. What I'm hearing is: you've got product-market fit at scale, but you're going through a major business model transition, and your operational infrastructure isn't keeping pace. Is that fair? **Timothy:** *nods* That's exactly it. We've got $170M ARR. We're not going to fail. But we're at risk of optimizing locally instead of globally. We're making good decisions within our silos that don't add up strategically. **Sarah:** Let me think about how Salesloft and Clari can actually add value here. I'm thinking this isn't about more pipeline. It's about better decision-making with the pipeline you have. **Timothy:** Bingo. We need to be smarter about which customers we say yes to and how we structure deals. We need better forecasting. We need better measurement of what's actually working. **Sarah:** Let me put together some thoughts on that and send them over. And Timothy—thanks for being so honest about where you're struggling. A lot of executives won't go there. **Timothy:** *smiles* After 15 years in this business, I've learned that pretending you've got it figured out is the fastest way to get it wrong. You? **Sarah:** Completely agree. I'll be in touch. --- ## Key Takeaways ### Revenue & Business Model - **Shifting from tactical tooling to strategic partnership** - Moving up-market and moving from feature-based selling to outcome-based selling - **Business model diversification** - Layering services on top of SaaS to improve NRR and reduce churn, but adding complexity and volatility - **Customer segmentation requiring different GTM motions** - Agency and brand customers need different go-to-market strategies, sales structures, and product positioning - **TAM compression offset by higher customer quality** - Losing volume but gaining depth; walled gardens are winners despite reducing open web inventory ### Product & Technology - **Privacy-first product architecture is necessary but not sufficient** - The real value is in flexibility and orchestration across walled gardens, not competing with them - **First-party data is now prerequisite infrastructure** - Moving from "we know how to target" to "we can activate whatever data you have" - **Measurement complexity growing** - Can't rely on clean A/B testing; moving to econometric models and third-party validation, accepting uncertainty - **Product sprawl risk** - Adding first-party audience management, contextual signals, and cohort-based targeting is necessary but creates complexity that weak data customers can't handle ### Sales & Go-to-Market - **Longer sales cycles with higher executive engagement** - Moving from media director to CMO/VP Marketing conversations; discovery becomes more important than demo - **Sales team professionalization** - Need measurement consultants and analytics background, not traditional sales hunters - **New role requirements** - Services architects, account strategists, and measurement consultants are becoming essential to close deals - **ROI conversation reframe** - Transparency about incrementality uncertainty is more credible than false specificity; risk-sharing is attractive only to quality customers ### Operations & Org Structure - **Operational infrastructure lagging strategy** - CRM, forecasting models, and enablement materials are too generic for a segmented go-to-market - **Revenue strategy gap** - Need coordination across sales, marketing, product, and services; tactical reviews aren't solving strategic misalignment - **Forecasting complexity increasing** - SaaS and services need different models; customer quality scoring is now part of deal evaluation - **Transparency and measurement infrastructure deficiency** - Not clear which levers drive NRR or which customer cohorts are actually profitable ### Risk & Challenges - **Cookie deprecation churn is real but contained** - 2-3% churn directly attributable, but customers without first-party data infrastructure face genuine risk - **Walled garden dependency risk** - Platform differentiation narrowing; need to accept supporting role rather than central position - **Acquisition complexity** - Holding companies and multi-business customers require new deal structuring approaches - **Trust environment shifting** - Honest uncertainty about measurement is building trust better than false confidence ### Immediate Priorities (Next 90 Days) 1. Develop coherent product strategy with clear prioritization and "no" statements 2. Hire or assign revenue strategist to align GTM infrastructure with segmented strategy 3. Build measurement infrastructure to track NRR drivers and customer profitability by cohort 4. Develop specialized onboarding paths for agency vs. brand customers 5. Create services demand generation and delivery model that reduces custom consulting burden --- ## Context for Sales Follow-Up **Timothy's State of Mind:** - Confident in product-market fit but worried about strategic coherence - Realistic about competitive landscape (walled gardens are winning) - Focused on operational efficiency and decision quality over growth-at-all-costs - Values honesty and transparency; skeptical of vendors who oversell certainty - Open to partnerships that genuinely solve organizational problems **Likely Receptivity:** - High for solutions that improve deal quality and forecasting accuracy - High for tools that help with customer measurement and ROI methodology - Medium for traditional sales acceleration (he's not primarily constrained by pipeline) - Low for additional marketing or demand generation without clear segmentation **Red Flags to Avoid:** - Overselling ease of attribution or incrementality measurement - Positioning walled gardens as threats rather than realities - Suggesting that more data = more revenue (he's already struggling with complexity) - Focusing on top-line growth without discussing business model implications --- **Interview conducted by:** Sarah Chen, Enterprise Solutions Director, Salesloft + Clari **Documented:** January 2, 2026