Ep. 147 - Building the Revenue Engine with Chris Kobus - Part 1

In Part 1 of Selling Intelligence, Chris Kobus, Chief Revenue Officer at Genlogs, joins Mark Petruzzi and KK Anderson to explore what it takes to build a revenue engine that can scale across people, markets, and changing business priorities.

Chris shares his leadership philosophy around developing talent from within and explains why experience alone does not determine whether someone can succeed in enterprise sales. He discusses the importance of finding people with the right attitude, drive, and willingness to learn, then giving them the coaching, playbooks, and real-world exposure they need to grow.

The conversation also examines the expanding role of the modern CRO. Chris explains why revenue leadership goes far beyond managing sales and hitting the current quarter’s number. From pipeline and ICP strategy to marketing, business development, channels, pre-sales, and revenue operations, the CRO must understand and manage the full revenue lifecycle while preparing the organization for what comes next.

Chris also shares how Genlogs approaches verticalization across very different buyer markets, why specialized go-to-market playbooks matter, and how leaders can introduce change without creating unnecessary chaos across the organization.

What You’ll Learn:

• Developing Talent from Within: Why attitude, curiosity, drive, and willingness to learn can matter as much as previous enterprise sales experience.
• Leading from the Field: How revenue leaders can build trust and develop stronger teams by working alongside sellers instead of managing from an “ivory tower.”
• Coaching Beyond the Playbook: Why frameworks like MEDIC only create value when leaders continually challenge sellers on discovery, economic buyers, budget processes, urgency, and deal strategy.
• Owning the Full Revenue Lifecycle: How the CRO role extends beyond sales to pipeline, ICP strategy, marketing, business development, channels, pre-sales, revenue operations, retention, and expansion.
• Balancing Today and Tomorrow: Why CROs need to manage current-quarter performance while anticipating future growth needs and identifying where the revenue engine could break.
• Verticalizing with Purpose: How specialized go-to-market playbooks can help teams navigate different buyer environments without creating organizational chaos.

Key Topics:

• Building and developing high-performing revenue teams
• Promoting BDRs and other talent from within
• Hiring for attitude, drive, and growth potential
• MEDIC, discovery, and enterprise sales coaching
• Consulting skills and value engineering in go-to-market leadership
• The difference between a CRO and VP of Sales
• Owning the end-to-end revenue lifecycle
• Pipeline, ICP, TAM, and annual operating plan alignment
• Balancing short-term execution with long-term growth
• Building trust through transparency with executive leadership
• Verticalization and specialized go-to-market playbooks
• Scaling the revenue engine without creating organizational chaos

Guest Spotlight: Chris Kobus

Chris Kobus is Chief Revenue Officer at Genlogs, a freight intelligence company. His career began in consulting at Accenture before he moved into value engineering and technology go-to-market leadership. That background shaped his approach to customer value, team development, and building scalable revenue organizations. At Genlogs, Chris oversees a broad revenue mandate spanning sales, marketing, business development, channels, pre-sales, and revenue operations.

Resources & Mentions:

• Genlogs
• Accenture
• MEDIC
• Ideal Customer Profile (ICP)
• Total Addressable Market (TAM)
• Annual Operating Plan (AOP)
• Accelerant Growth Solutions (AGS)

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Mark Petruzzi (00:29)

Welcome to Selling Intelligence. I'm Mark Petruzzi.

KK Anderson (00:33)

And I'm KK Anderson.

Mark Petruzzi (00:34)

And most revenue leaders inherit a title before they inherit the job. You get handed a quota, a team, and a seat at the table, and you spend the next few years figuring out how much of the business actually belongs to you. Our guest today runs one of the broadest CRL mandates we have covered on this show: sales, marketing, biz dev channels, pre-sales, and revenue ops.

would have done in line into customer success as well.

KK Anderson (01:04)

Chris Kobus is Chief Revenue Officer at Genlogs, a freight intelligence company that recently closed a $60 million Series B. He started his career in consulting at Accenture before moving into a value engineering role at a supply chain technology startup. And that background shapes how he builds go-to-market motions today. He's also selling into a market that has never had to buy what he's selling before.

Which means his team has to help buyers see a problem they didn't know they had. Chris, welcome to selling intelligence.

Chris Kobus (01:38)

Hi everyone, thanks for having me.

Mark Petruzzi (01:40)

Yeah, we're happy to have you here, Chris. Thank you. So let's jump with our first topic, leadership philosophy. And a real core point on that, team development over just our recruiting. So you said that developing a rep

who didn't originally know enterprise go to market can be just as important a win as landing a new customer. What does that development process actually look like on your team?

Chris Kobus (02:04)

Yeah, it's a good question, Mark. I think there's a couple of things that I would address there. I think that at the end of the day, having quality people is incredibly important. But I also think that it's just as important, if not more important, to make sure you have the right people and the right skill set and they're not always one and the same. so in my experience, I've worked with several folks that maybe didn't have the right set of experiences as they got into more of an enterprise sales motion, but were very eager to learn. They had the right

perspective, the right appetite, if you will, to understand what it takes to win, to understand what questions and tasks and what they need to pursue with customers, and to understand what winning looks like and and sort of what the the task at hand is. in terms of working with those individuals to develop them, I think it takes a couple things. And there's a couple things that I would certainly highlight that I think are relevant for my experience.

number one, and this is sort of philosophy I have as a go-to-market leader, is the team has to see you sort of in battle, right? I have always been very against what I think many call sort of the ivory tower approach, which is, you're sitting in front of Salesforce or in front of Slack or in an office or whatever, and saying, like, hey, where are the numbers? What's happening here, et cetera. and I think what's really important as a leader is the team sees you in battle with them.

And that can be your presenting to a customer a business case or helping them to find a use case. It could be you working with a customer to help them negotiate. It could be you working with other teams to make sure we're driving all the right, the right motions. so I say that and I relate it back to the question around what does it take to sort of develop those people. I think having that mindset of being in battle with them, I think is really important. I also think what's equally important is you have to have the playbook.

Right. So one of the things that I'm very passionate about that I know many, if not all, sales leaders in the enterprise tech space are passionate about is medic, right? And understanding it's more than just an acronym, which is a phrase I've heard thrown around quite a bit. so constantly challenging sellers that maybe don't have the experience with Medic or don't, maybe haven't figured out how to identify a champion in an account or an economic buyer or so on.

Challenging them when they think that right they have the right answers in a proper way to say, hey, you think maybe what a budgeting process looks like or who the economic buyer is. But have you asked them if they have budget authority? Have you asked them, if they don't have direct budget authority, how does budget get released? Have you asked them simple, simple questions around like how do they typically partner with technology vendors? What needs to get done? And I think that appropriate constant challenging.

is where I've seen people that have the right perspective, they maybe have the right experience, get ramped up very quickly. and the last point I'd mention on this particular topic is to me it's really important. and the reason it's so important is everyone's Rolodex will eventually come dry. Right. And I say that in the following sense is you can have several open head count and have all the confidence in the world that you have the right folks in your network with the right experience and the right perspective that are going to come in and be successful.

But that will not work every time. That will either run dry or you will have to rely on folks that maybe, that would had been with the company that are that are entering a new role or getting into the business by some other channel that don't necessarily have the right experience, but have the right perspective, right, on what it takes to win. So I think, being in the field, demonstrating to them sort of that you want to be in the field with them.

that you're willing to put in the work yourself. and then constantly challenging them. It's not like here's a lesson on medic. I'll go back to that example, and we're all done, but constantly challenging them on how they're doing discovery, how they're thinking about budget release cycles, how they're thinking about working with closed plans, driving urgency, I think is what balances out how coming in with the right perspective and then rapidly building that right skill set.

KK Anderson (05:24)

Good stuff, Chris. it's the attitude. And if when you say perspective, like it's their attitude. If they've got that grit, the unconditional commitment, the will, the personal accountability to be able to execute, then with your playbook or your process or your structure around how your customers buy and how you sell.

then they're gonna have a much greater chance of being successful. And, they don't need to have, 20 years as an enterprise at seller to be able to come work with you. So I love that. so take me through like the the interview process. Let's say, you're promoting from within. I imagine that's like a BDR role. what are you listening for in an interview, that tells you that someone has all of that or and

they've got that grit and that attitude.

Chris Kobus (06:09)

Yeah, it's a good one. I think the one of the first things I look for are they eager, driven, and motivated and to your point, have the right attitude to go above their swim lane or outside of their swim lane. So we have a really amazing team of BDRs here at Gen Logs. And I am very passionate about and and I know Gen Logs is as well, if we have the right people in the business to find ways to promote from within.

And one of the things that I look for is has that individual, and let's use the BDR, a business development rep as maybe example, typically their mandate to the business is to work with business development leadership and then their their account executive teammates to go after target accounts, to create healthy dialogue and conversations with accounts that would fall in line with our ICP, our ideal customer profile, to generate quality pipeline for the reps to then push to closure.

One of the things I look for when we consider moving BDRs into an account executive role or at least evaluating that is do they have the drive to sort of go above and beyond their mandate? So what do I mean by that? Right. Well, what I mean by that is it's more than just their metrics around how much pipeline they've generated. It's their eagerness to say, hey, I'd love to sit on a discovery call, even though this is qualified and I've kind of hit my metric with it. I'd love to sit on a discovery call with an account executive to understand how they do it.

What questions do they ask? how do they think about defining use cases? How do they think about starting to ask questions around Medic? And I think what happens there is not only do you have resources that have been successful within sort of their mandate, but then they start to build knowledge and in many cases obtain tribal knowledge if they're sitting on customer meetings or discovery calls or whatnot, they're starting to build experience and tribal knowledge around what it takes to deliver in that next role.

so that's absolutely one of the first things that I sort of challenge on and sort of try to certainly try to understand. and I think the second thing that I'd highlight is the eagerness to just generally the eagerness to understand what you want next in your career. not every business development representative wants to be an account executive. Some want to move into leadership, some pre-sales or partnerships or something else. I always look for understanding.

What does that individual or that teammate want in the next phase in their career? and I think the importance there, and the importance with many things when it comes to promotions, when it comes to hiring from within, is finding the equilibrium between what's right for the business and what's right for the teammate. And they're not always one-on-one, but if you can find that equilibrium between here's what the business needs, here's the need, and here's what the teammate wants in the next part of their career, and we see general alignment there.

That's where I find the most success to occur.

Mark Petruzzi (08:32)

So Chris, that's really helpful and it ties back to lots of the things we do even at AGS, Accelerant Growth Solutions. we have been working, KK especially for a longer period of time, has been working with

incredible assessments that help you determine in the hiring process exactly what's behind the interview per se. if they really do have that grit or that curiosity that you're looking for in all these other areas. So that's something that we do the same way you do. just trying to figure that out on an interview, but we also love having

the good old data behind it as well.

Chris Kobus (09:09)

Yeah, I think the one thing I would address there, I like the way you phrase it, That the data is important, So if you're looking at a teammate to promote from within or bring in an outside resource, I think looking at numbers is crucially important. whether that comes from references or directly from the candidate. at the end of the day, I'll leave it here. one phrase that I love that's often thrown around sales is

It's the easiest function of the business to measure success. Like did you hit your numbers or or did you not?

Mark Petruzzi (09:31)

Yeah,

that's really what it's all about. So Chris, you started at Accenture and moved into a value engineering role at a support.

supply chain startup before you ever were in a quota carrying seat. How did that path shape the way you build and coach teams today?

Chris Kobus (09:45)

Yeah, that's one of the parts of my experience and sort of my story as it relates to my career that I'm most proud of and I often most reflect on. I started my career, as you said, way back when at Accenture. and a large part of my mandate was working with clients and and large scale enterprises to deploy technology, test technology, design technology, recommend technology, and so on. and it wasn't necessarily selling rules.

Right for the most part. but I often call it college after college, where you get on these large-scale projects and you're challenged to learn and learn very rapidly and learn about everything from how to interact with customers and clients, how to build and deliver quality deliverables, how to listen, how to relay and how to synthesize the challenges customers are surfacing and how to replay that back to them in the context of how.

you as a partner or as a vendor can help, right? And as you go through those experiences, you build all those skill sets very rapidly. and part of my career in terms of where I really kind of found my place in the tech go-to-market space is when I eventually left Accenture and left the consulting space and arrived in the technology world, where, as you said, I started as a pre-sales engineer value consultant

KK Anderson (10:48)

Mm-hmm.

Chris Kobus (10:49)

where my mandate was

working with customers to ensure there was consensus on the business case and the ROI of the the technology they were evaluating. And I was able to apply all those experiences and all those skills that I had built around, again, without repeating the full list, but like, how do you interact and talk to customers? How do build trust? How do you build quality deliverables? how do you work with a level of integrity with a customer to say, hey, listen, here's what you need, here's what you don't need, right?

how do you think about building out that robust message so it's easily ingestible for them to understand? and you're building consensus and conviction of what the technology is able to do and what it's going to deliver for their business. and that was a really profound experience for me in seeing those consulting skills translate into sort of a go-to-market role where I was able to apply those consulting experiences and skill sets.

with, great teammates that I had in the in the sales world and maybe sort of a natural, skill set, if you will, of wanting to interact with clients and wanting to help drive expansion in the business. and I often challenge a lot of folks that are earlier on in their career when they maybe don't know what they want to be when they grow up yet, but a lot of this is of interest to them is to really consider what consulting can mean at the start of your career because it can lead to hundreds of different avenues after.

KK Anderson (11:59)

You know, sales is everywhere. I feel like I'm selling with my kids every day. So supply chain, any role that you're in, like everything is sales, isn't it? okay, let's move on, Chris, to the second topic. And we've heard a lot about this on the show. And I'm really curious to learn more about your perspective and how kind of you're redefining the CRO role and really embracing owning.

the

full revenue engine. And and we chatted about there being, like what's the difference between a VP of sales and a true CRO? So just give us a kind of a brief overview of how you see that. I think that's going to be valuable for our audience.

Chris Kobus (12:34)

Yeah, absolutely. I think when you think about the CROC, that means owning the full life cycle of revenue, And that's not just selling deals and renewing deals. That's as you consider the overall AOP, the annual operating plan. What is the business trying to achieve for that given year, for that given quarter, and so on and so forth? and then backing into how it's achieved. Everything from hey, if this is our bookings target, what is the pipeline needed based on

Conversion rates and all that fun stuff that's needed to get there based on renewal weight, renewal rates. How should we think or rethink about our ICPs and the customers we're going after based on growth goals? What new TAM or addressable markets do we need to unlock and further explore? So to me, that's what the CRO seat is all about is the end-to-end lifecycle of revenue from the start of it, which is brand awareness and an early stage pipeline to qualify pipeline.

And when I say qualified pipeline, I don't just mean that you're checking the boxes on Bant as an example, but I mean that qualified pipeline directly correlates and falls in line with the targeted customers that we want to go after, right? the customers that we know will be sticky and healthy revenue that will continue to contribute of that revenue life cycle where they're taken through a very value-oriented process so they understand the value associated with making the investment in the technology.

But also that they're geared up for a proper and a linear journey as a customer, where it's like, hey, here's why you invest in the technology today. Here's your journey as a customer, where you have expansion opportunities throughout the next year or three years or whatever it is, where not only are they continuing continuing their use and being a good partner and a good customer, they're expanding their use and they're sharing their use and they're advertising their use that continues to sort of contribute to that circle. So to me.

that is the basis of the role of the CRO is you own sort of the how do how do we achieve the and exceed the plans in the AOP? And it truly is the end-end lifecycle. Whereas I see a VP of sales living in the field with the account executives, or those account executives are working directly with a VP of sales on deal mechanics, on account strategy and deal strategy, on

Going back to some of our earlier comments, coaching reps on medic and having and ensuring that's aligned and supporting discovery and things like that. so to me, it's CRO is like the end-to-end life cycle of revenue and ensuring that that circle is continuing to spin and expand. Whereas a VP of sales is the day-to-day field general, if you will, that's in the field with sellers, ensuring that the forecast is being hit.

highlighting issues, providing coaching and so on to the account executive. So they're in a position to only not only meet, but also exceed their number.

Mark Petruzzi (15:05)

Right on, Chris. so with all of that, how do you keep a board or your CEO focused on the health of the full revenue engine when the instinct is always to ask about this quarter's number and you what each sales rep is contributing this week, this day, this hour?

Chris Kobus (15:22)

Yeah, what I would say is the following. It's a good topic. I am very blessed in my role here at Gen Logs to have just phenomenal leadership and phenomenal founders where to me it's a balance of I try to I ensure I do my part in being super transparent and sharing all the good and the bad, right? It can't all be good, it can't all be bad, right? Of how the business is performing, and then what issues we may have and what we're doing to resolve those.

and I find providing that level of transparency leads to really good trust, right? So I'm in a position where I'm very blessed. I certainly have had those experiences in the past, where you have, CEOs and other leaders going, like, hey, what's happening this quarter? and not taking that more macro, broader look at the business. I'm in a position now where we have just the the best founders and leadership that I've had where they have a really good macro view of the business and there's an inherent trust.

that I think's been been established by being transparent and again, sharing, hey, here's what's working, here's maybe what's not, but what we're doing, what we're doing to resolve. I know in my in my prior lives when maybe I've had some of those experiences, it's challenging, right? Because especially in the role of a CRO, it can't be all what numbers are this quarter? It can't be all what are the numbers going to be next quarter, and it can't be all, how do we think about the year and how do we think about current year plus one and so on.

It has to be all of it, right? And I think what really allows you to think about all of it candidly is proper hiring. Right. I think you've got to have the right folks in seat. I'm also very blessed in my current role. I have an an exceptional group of sales leaders that support what we're doing in the go-to-market organization, know their mandate and how they're what they're accountable for to the business and are able to deliver it.

But, again, I know that as I said in in prior in prior lives, I have had those challenges. And look, I think at the end of the day, the best thing to do is to have that balance, right? It can't be all current quarter. It can't be all next quarter. It can't be all

KK Anderson (17:02)

Right.

Chris Kobus (17:03)

what's next year. You have to sort of think about how the puzzle pieces are building. You have to be able to predict. I think this is a really important role as a CRO. Is I often use the analogy with my team. My job.

was, and I'm using a little bit of the past tense here, was to build the go-to-market machine. and I'm not saying it's perfect and I'm not even saying it's done, but well we've got a lot of the foundation built. My job now is to how to make the machine go faster and and just as important, if not more per important, predict when it's gonna break and where it's gonna break and have a remedy

KK Anderson (17:31)

Mm, mm-hmm.

Chris Kobus (17:33)

plan ready to fix it. and I think that's often that's something that's often missed. So yeah I think all those things that's how I weigh all those things and all those factors.

and I think, again, having that balance of what does the current quarter look like, what does the rest of the fiscal year look like, what does that mean for future years within the company, understanding how to make the machine go faster, being able to anticipate and predict where the machine is going to break, I think just super important.

KK Anderson (17:55)

Really,

really good stuff. So walk me through we've we talked about verticalization as part of your go-to-market strategy. And so, you described in our prep call that you're selling into buyer worlds as different as like a government agency and like a commercial insurer. I don't know how you get much different than that. Like how do you, organize a team around those specialties without spreading everyone too thin, but still honoring

and encouraging them to specialize. Like tell me a little bit about how you do that.

Chris Kobus (18:21)

Yeah, it's a topic that's very top of mind for me. most go-to-market organizations as they navigate through the maturity and growth curves within their respective businesses, soon verticalize, right? And that's something that we're undergoing a bit of today. but I also think it's a really good balance. And what I mean by that is the various customer channels you're going and selling into, whether that's commercial auto insurance, shippers and brokers, public sector organizations.

There's certainly a lot of common denominators because we're all selling for the most part the same, the same solution. But there's also a lot of idiosyncrasies that come with selling into those into those channels. And one of the things that I think is really important is making sure that as you start to verticalize, you're equipping your teams for

KK Anderson (19:00)

Right.

Chris Kobus (19:00)

success. So one of the things we've invested very heavily in is to build out the proper go-to-market playbooks, if you will, that really break down those verticals on.

Here's what that vertical is. Here's why they're interested and have appetite for our technology. Here's idiosyncrasies that come with medic. here's what an economic buyer most likely will be in this space versus this space. here's the target accounts that we want to go after. Cause just so just because we say like commercial auto insurance as an example doesn't mean every company that's involved in commercial auto insurance wouldn't necessarily be a customer today. Maybe they would be in the future. But how do you think about prioritizing that?

I think the most important thing I would highlight here, and all that is certainly important. but one of the things that I've learned in my career, and I'll go back to some of the comments and conversation for earlier, it's really important to know what good is. It's equally, if not more important to know what doesn't work and what bad is. And the reason I say that is this I've been in many organizations that it's like every week there's something new account reassignment, verticalization, territory mapping.

And while the intentions might be noble, the challenge that comes with that, with doing that very rapidly and it not in a false way is complete and utter chaos, right? Where you have account executives and pre-sales teammates and ramp ops all in disarray because maybe accounts were moved out of their name or they have new accounts in their name or what have you. And there is a there's an impact, and in many cases, severe impacts to having that level of chaos in a business. So I think it's really, really important to make sure

KK Anderson (20:20)

Yeah.

Chris Kobus (20:20)

you.

balance out doing things in a very thoughtful, proper way, but also moving with a with an element of velocity to ensure that you're working towards your ICP goals, your revenue goals, and ultimately your AOP plan.

Mark Petruzzi (20:34)

Excellent, Chris. So, Chris, all of this gets at many of the things CROs are wrestling with today. Where the job actually starts and stops, just in general, how do they focus on making sure they balance, as you put it, the short-term goals with the long-term term approaches and initiatives that you need to be successful? We're going to pick right back up here.

KK Anderson (20:56)

So, Chris, let's close up part one here. And I know the audience is gonna be waiting excitedly for next week's drop. but for those out there listening, what Chris just described about building the vertical motion, building a vertical motion from scratch is exactly the kind of work that we live for here at AGS, because so much of winning isn't about doing more, it's about really spotting the small shifts in seller.

behaviors like around medic and discovery and getting in the trenches with them, just as you described, Chris. And that's a lot of what we do here at AGS. And if you're interested, come and check us out. you can learn more at www.get-ags.com. So join us next week for part two with Chris Kobus.

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