Sell Like A Leader – Episode 37

David Kreiger sits down with Jason Mironov of TA Associates to unpack how growth-focused investors evaluate sales organizations.

With over a decade of experience leading investments in tech-enabled services, Jason brings a rare “outside-in” lens to what revenue leaders must do to build an investment-ready business.

In this episode, he breaks down:

  • Why gross vs. net retention tells the real story of your repeatability and why you should be tracking 10-15 key data points from day one
  • Why spending an extra month upfront on sales education pays the biggest long-term dividends for rep productivity
  • Why vibe coding your way into an enterprise customer base is a myth, and how AI is leveling the playing field for analytics
  • What founders and revenue leaders should be building right now if they ever want institutional investment

If you’re a revenue leader who wants to understand how world-class investors evaluate talent, culture, and the “direction of travel” for your revenue, this conversation is for you.

About Jason Mironov

Jason is a Managing Director at TA Associates, helping lead investments with a focus on technology-enabled services across North America. He brings more than 13 years of experience in private equity and financial services.

He invests across a wide range of sectors, including information services, e-commerce, energy services, entertainment, integrated payments, insurance, consumer, and travel.

Podcast Key Takeaways

  • Gross retention and net retention tell two completely different stories, and you need both.
  • Investors talk to your customers without you in the room. Through expert networks, they ask whether customers would fight to keep your product, and those answers carry serious weight in the investment decision.
  • The companies that win on sales know their customer at the segment level, not just the surface level.
  • Pedigree is a head fake when evaluating talent. What investors actually look for is malleability, the ability to keep learning and adapting as tools, markets, and conditions change.

Connects

Connect with Jason Mironov: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jmironov/

Connect with David Kreiger: https://www.linkedin.com/in/davidkreiger

Subscribe to the podcast and follow our Podcast LinkedIn page so you don’t miss any episodes!

Transcript

David Kreiger: Welcome back to another episode of the Sell Like a Leader podcast. The podcast for revenue leaders who are on a mission to cultivate a high-performing sales team within their organization. I'm your host, David Kreiger, the founder of SalesRoads, America's most trusted appointment setting and lead generation company, and today I am super excited to bring you an amazing leader, Jason Mironov. 

He comes from TA and he has helped lead investments with a focus on technology-enabled services across North America. He has an amazing portfolio of companies that he has helped to fund, to grow, to go public, not least of which ZoomInfo. And he brings well over a decade of experience in private equity and financial services. Jason, thank you so much for being on the show here today.

Jason Mironov: Oh, David, thank you. I hope I can live up to that introduction. It's an honor to be here.

David Kreiger: It's great to have you here and I'm really excited for this conversation. First of all, we had a chance to connect a few months ago. You're just an amazing guy with amazing perspective on revenue, on sales, and for the CROs, the VP of sales, and the contributors who are on this show and tune in, I am excited to hear your perspective not necessarily from somebody who's in the seat, but somebody who's collaborating day in and day out, evaluating CROs, helping them to succeed, helping them to understand their markets from a venture perspective. 

And so we're going to dive into it, hear your perspective, and let's jump in. The first thing I would love to be able to ask is when you're evaluating an organization, what are the top three to four things you're looking for in that company's sales org and revenue leadership?

Jason Mironov: Yeah, it's a great question. And I should caveat this by saying, my dad likes to say free advice is worth exactly what you pay for it. So hopefully I'll deliver on that promise today. But look, you're entirely right. We spend a tremendous amount of time evaluating the go-to-market function within an organization. Obviously, in many cases, that starts with the CRO. But it's also about the culture. And so maybe I'll start with the metrics we think about.

The first is the repeatability of that business. The number one metric I spend time thinking about when evaluating a business is the quantum to which that business is repeatable, right? We are consistently looking for recurring revenue businesses here at TA. 

And that has paid huge dividends for us over time. And the way I think about that is fundamentally, if I'm coming in and spending a dollar this year, I'm hoping to find somebody who's spending a dollar ten, a dollar twenty next year. And there's a variety of ways to get there. You can cross-sell product, you can add additional product, you can increase your price by seat, but really for us, it's about finding the ability to see inherent organic growth in our existing basic customers.

The metrics we look at to do that would be what I think of as traditional gross retention, which is your customers last year and what they spent on your product this year. And that's just on the exact same product. And then net retention, which would capture the upsell and downsell function of the organization. 

It'll capture price increases. And the reason it's important to look at both is that gross retention will tell you, "Hey, we're losing customers at the bottom of the funnel," or "We're losing our repeatability." And then the net will tell you, "Hey, here's the expansion opportunity, right? If we're doing a good job, if we have a world-class CRO, we're cross-selling that base. We're getting price every year." Those are the metrics I look at.

So that's on the revenue generation customer cube side. The second place where we spend time is thinking a lot about that marketing function. Now, in some organizations, the marketing function reports into the CEO. In many organizations, it's reporting into the CRO, but different companies have different styles. But I do spend a lot of time thinking about things like customer acquisition costs, bringing in new customers, adding to the top of that funnel, what's our most profitable channel? Are we going direct? Are we getting referrals? What's that cost look like over time? 

And really, a lot of these metrics I'm describing, David, are not just about a single moment. It's about really that direction of travel. Like, how is it trending? Are they improving? Are they getting worse? Are we selling more product? Are we selling less product? And so it's important to look at these things over time.

This would be an important time to plug. I think having a really good revenue optimization partner right within the organization, whether that's inside sales, whether that's a revenue optimization colleague, but really tracking and measuring this data. 

Because I promise you any investment firm, especially in the later stages of venture or the growth-focused private equity arena in which I spend time, they're going to request this level of data. They're going to want to see that granularity, they're going to want to evaluate that customer cube. And so if you track that data from day one, you're going to be in a much better position.

So to sum it up: Gross retention and net retention, cost of acquisition, and then really the last piece of it is how we think about the organization itself, assessing that culture, whether that's a leadership test of some kind to assess the quality of that organization. It's seeing that tenure and the ability to evaluate and change that system over time and really the compensation schemes, the commission schemes, the sales plans for us. 

Getting a good understanding of all of those is critical to assess the quality of the talent that's managing the organization. And so those are really the key focus areas I spend time on as an investor evaluating a sales and marketing organization.

David Kreiger: Yeah, so I think that's great. And that's really clear the way you broke it down. And so when you see those numbers and maybe you're seeing before an investment, some are strong, some might not be. You sort of alluded to it, right? It's the management team, it's the talent that you have that's been driving those numbers. 

And so I'm curious from your perspective, when you're looking at an investment, how do you look specifically at, like, if there's a CRO, or maybe they're a VP of sales, whatever the sales leader is, and thinking through whether they have what it takes either to scale those numbers to the next level, or if there are certain weak pockets, but you see that there's lots of other parts of the business that you like that they have what it takes to actually scale the business. Or vice versa, if they don't have that leader or you want to replace that leader. How do you look for someone like that and what are you really looking for?

Jason Mironov: David, I think this is such a critical topic, right? Because talent and management of organizations, in this current climate where artificial intelligence is leveling the playing field when it comes to things like analytics and dashboards and measuring these metrics, you really have to differentiate on leadership quality. You have to find best-in-class talent across the board.

So here's the nuance, right? I think any investor who's been an operator will have a perspective on this. Most investors have not been operators, and so part of my job is having some self-awareness about my own strengths and weaknesses. And so there's been a bunch of empirical evidence along the way that any of your listeners can read about. People getting lulled into a sense of security by historical pedigree or smooth-talking individuals. 

The trick is not getting captured in that trap. Some of our best executives didn't go to college or didn't go to a college that you'd think about or didn't go to grad school or had rough and tumble backgrounds, and those are some of the best executors in our portfolio.

So for us, I really rely on external folks who we've trusted, who maybe come out of the portfolio, who've been successful in the portfolio, who are well known in their field, or trusted by us in some capacity to help me do that evaluation. Because at the end of the day, unless I'm on the ground making cold calls, getting to know customers every day, it's really hard to make that evaluation. And I try to be very transparent with our management teams about our limitations.

And what that means is when we make an investment in a company, take a giant step back, right? When we make an investment in a company, we try to only add one or two people from TA to the board. The idea is you get 80% of the incremental value from the first person. You get the remaining 20% from the second. We don't need a board of sycophants, right, who are really trying to push a specific agenda. I sort of joke with a little bit of sarcasm that I'd rather be rich than right. 

This isn't about evil for me; it's about finding really talented folks to make this business successful. And so what I'll frequently do is I'll call a person who was a chief revenue officer, a successful one in the portfolio who may have come up the ladder and been a great mentor and say, "Hey, will you help me evaluate this business? And if you help us evaluate this business, why don't you join the board?"

Because at the end of the day, having someone who is a world-class manager who's demonstrated success in the past, who has that pattern recognition, do the evaluation, gives me so much more comfort than paying a big-name consulting firm or relying on a third-party assessment. At the end of the day, you want people you can trust and you want replicable and repeatable talent across the board.

The other thing we do, David, is we have a lot of usual suspects, right? People who've come from the portfolio, who've gone business to business, who've demonstrated their ability to scale and to grow. For me, the biggest quality set I look for is the ability to be malleable, to grow, to continue to educate themselves on current products, current platforms, and best practices because all of this stuff changes, right?

When I started in this industry 20 years ago, people were cold calling. World-class data products like ZoomInfo or some of the other telephone monitoring products or some of the other sales cadence tools, they didn't exist, right? People had spreadsheets, they were hobbling it together. And then you had companies like HubSpot and others who came to the forefront of people's technology stack that helped better enable it.

And so it's a long-winded way of saying: bringing people to the table who've demonstrated success in the past, assessing people's ability to grow and to develop, and the third is surrounding companies at the board level with go-to-market leadership who can help mentor and continue that development process for the people in place.

David Kreiger: Yeah, I think the concept of bringing in somebody from the outside who just really knows the space is a critical insight and I think an unlock, not just in VC, but just for everybody because we all have our own, as you started, our own biases, our own prism of looking at things. And even if we did understand the industry, somebody coming in and looking at it from a different perspective and being able to peek under the curtain and really go deep for you with another perspective helps so much. 

I mean, the first startup that I worked at, we had an executive team and the VC company brought in a bunch of flashy names with big resumes. But that's all they judged them on, right? And they did not go deep. They didn't see whether they really understood the internet space, all those types of things, because it was all so new. They didn't even really know how to evaluate that. So I think bringing in a third party is a great unlock, not just for VCs, but just for founders, for folks in general.

Jason Mironov: I think this is a really critical point because one of the investments I was lucky enough to lead was in a company called ProCare. ProCare is the preeminent provider of early childhood software, ERP software, and also integrated payments. So, an incredible founder had built the business over 30 or 40 years, had written the code himself, and this product effectively, when you dropped your kids off at daycare, it had information on their allergies and parent communications and your ability to manage that student's day. 

And the demographic of that customer base wasn't the same demographic that we see in our utility billing business or at a subscription business for e-commerce data. And so you really had to find people who not only understood sales, but understood the fact that, hey, when you call during the day, that person is typically with the children, right? So you can't cold call in the old-fashioned way. You needed to find them after hours. You needed to find word-of-mouth opportunities. 

And what I'd say is this founder and the management team that took over the business was truly exceptional at really driving customer engagement where the customer was, right after the kids had gone home, providing them efficiency so they could get back in the classroom with the kids. And so it is so industry-specific, especially when you think about vertical technology companies and vertical services companies.

David Kreiger: Yeah, and it's hard, especially when you're managing a lot of different portfolios to really understand all of those. So I think the best way you put it is you've got to know what you're great at and where you can find partners who are great at things and helping you to support you in the right way.

Jason Mironov: And never be afraid to ask for help. I think that's such a hundred percent.

David Kreiger: So many people feel that they need to have all the answers and that is the wrong answer for sure. Zooming out a little bit, and you touched on some of the metrics that you look at when you're evaluating businesses. I'm curious, after being in this industry for two decades, seeing a lot of different companies in a lot of different industries, are there any patterns that you have noticed in companies that generate the most consistent sales, the most repeatable sales, as you mentioned in your first answer, year after year?

Jason Mironov: This is such a fascinating thing and I appreciate you asking good questions because it's caused me to reevaluate what have been some of the threads that go through these businesses. Many of the companies with whom I've been lucky enough to partner are in a variety of different end markets, right? I wake up one day thinking about real estate data and analytics and I go to bed thinking about fire safety. 

And so, sometimes there's some cognitive dissonance. So it's a good exercise to go back and evaluate what really made people successful.

The first, and for me this was a big piece of it: you really got to understand who your customer is. And so, I don't really subscribe to the "if you build it they will come" mentality in this space. And part of that is as a private equity investor, I do think about the world slightly different than my venture capital brethren who are building it every day. Many of the companies I'm lucky enough to partner with are established businesses that are growing. They're profitable, they have a key customer segment, and so there's probably less of that development piece.

But the themes that run through many of the successful businesses that we've been blessed to partner with: the first is really understanding not just the customer themselves but the segmentation, right? So maybe you're thinking about real estate data and analytics. 

How do you think about bulge bracket investors versus mid-market family offices versus debt funds versus lenders, and how do you customize the product to each of them, right? And so in each of those segmentations, they need to have the voice of the customer and they have to look at that data empirically and understand how to customize the product for each of those end markets.

The second is—I think it's so funny—a lot of companies think about onboarding as an afterthought, and education and training as an afterthought. I'm a huge advocate of really focusing on developing content and having a best-in-class human resources effort on getting people up to speed. The more work you do upfront with your sales team, with your sales reps, identifying what makes people successful, educating them on best practices, the more that's going to pay dividends. 

I'd rather have our team spend an extra month upfront educating the people who are getting onboarded about what the right sales model looks like and what that can happen on the backend. I think it's just so huge for their ability to continue to be successful.

And then the last piece is nobody likes flying blind. This is a huge piece of what I believe is successful. My father, who lives here in California now, spent 50 years selling paper. I can't think of a harder industry to see the entire life. He retired in January of 2020 and he had to be an amazing salesperson and really was the whole way, because paper is the definition of commodity, right? It's hard to differentiate. And people bought from him because, like me, they loved him too.

And so, finding that model in a new wave organization or a current infrastructure, it's just harder, right? And so what I think is you got to empower people with data; you have to have best-in-class forecasting. You have to have tight operational discipline. You can't think of pipeline management as an afterthought. When people are at the end of the day rushing and scrambling to get everything in their systems, you got to figure out their workflow and you got to gather that data. 

So again, I think it's a combination of good segmentation, great operating analytics, and really onboarding and training and education. That can be really the thread that goes through many of these successful sales organizations.

David Kreiger: Yeah, I think that is really clear and powerful, and I'd love to just double-click into the first one because it's something I've been thinking a lot about in the age of AI where it is easier to create more products, more software at least, launch new things.

Jason Mironov: Yeah.

David Kreiger: It seems like the companies that really understand the market are going to be the winners because the execution, at least on the surface, is becoming a little bit easier. You have a lot more leverage in your coding and things like that, and so I feel like it's always been a best practice from the sales side: you've got to understand your customer. 

You got to understand the voice to your customer. But it is, I think, going to become so much more important because if you don't really understand your customer, first of all, you might use all these great tools and build all these tools or apps and things like that that are misaligned. But more than that, you're going to have so many more competitors who are coming in to fill those niches. 

So you've got to really understand them and each of the niches, because we're going to have so many more software platforms that are catered to each and every niche in the marketplace moving forward than we ever did.

Jason Mironov: You couldn't be more spot on and look, you did mention ZoomInfo earlier. TA is no longer an institutional shareholder in the business, although we certainly track it from afar. I'm a customer of the platform. There are a variety of products today, including they have Chorus. Gong is obviously a popular one as well, but there's so many different ways now to collect that feedback in an ambient way: listening to customer calls, gathering that feedback. 

And with the advent of AI, we also have the ability to move much quicker, right, and make adaptations to our product category. And so I'm a big fan of monitoring sales calls. I personally have taken the opportunity during diligence and after we've invested to listen into these calls and to get the perspectives from people because you can't just expect the customers are going to show up. 

And that's a big piece of how we really train portfolio companies and work with portfolio companies to make sure they are being customized to their end markets. And I think if you have the chance to do that, I think it can be wildly creative to your investment.

David Kreiger: Yeah, that's it—it has been game-changing on the sales side, but you're right, on the PE side, if you can listen—if you're thinking about an investment and you actually can listen to the customers and how they're representing and what's happening behind the numbers, that is extremely illustrative.

Jason Mironov: Yep.

David Kreiger: So on the flip side, you talked about some of the patterns that are important for generating sales growth that are important that you've seen over two decades that have shown to be successful. 

I'm just curious on the opposite side, what are some of the red flags, the issues you've seen in sales or go-to-market from either the companies that you're evaluating or some of the portfolio companies that you've worked with that you think are common and are things that sales leaders should be really focused on?

Jason Mironov: Yeah, it's an interesting dynamic to me. Sometimes not drilling down far enough is the biggest mistake we make. And what I mean by this is sometimes you'll look at the broader trends of a company and say, "Oh gosh, bookings are increasing every year." 

And when you peel back that onion, you realize that the Salesforce productivity—what an individual on that team is selling on an annual basis—is actually going down year after year. That can be a symptom of poor training, inability to expand the market category, or a limited addressable market. And so for me, you got to ask the second and third derivative questions around what's happening.

I think the second thing is around pricing. And this is particularly dicey now. If I read one more AI thought piece, I think my head may explode at this point, although I've been appreciative of all the ones people have sent me. So thank you in advance. But kidding aside, there is this really interesting dynamic where I don't necessarily know or believe that SaaS companies are going to disappear. Now, you can't vibe-code your way into an enterprise customer base maybe in weeks and months.

And the parallel I like to use is when I moved to the Bay Area 14 years ago to work for TA, people said, "Why get a car? It's going to be self-driving tomorrow." And so for me, I've watched that journey here. We certainly have Waymo and self-driving vehicles today and Tesla and everybody else, but the reality is it took a lot longer than people expect. 

And I think the highest probability outcome in particularly technology investing, but services investing as well, is we will see degradation in price versus a wholesale shift. And there's been plenty of much more intelligent folks than I thinking about things like perceived pricing and consumption-based pricing and plenty of content available on that. But I think really understanding what's happening on that pricing and evaluating it over time is critical, particularly now given all the things that are happening in the broader market.

David Kreiger: Yeah, and I think it goes back again to your first point, which is just understanding the customer. And I think that's one of the things that is misunderstood in go-to-market and sales, and especially with technology and the hype around vibe-coding and things like that: you've got to understand your customer to be able to design an amazing product, you've got to understand your customer to be able to generate leads with that customer, you've got to understand the customer to be able to actually close it, and that just doesn't get completely automated away. 

And if it does—listen, obviously all of us are shooting blind with what's going to happen in AI, but we can definitely agree that it's a lot harder than people are making it out to be. And so these motions, I think people who are trying to make these motions easy are the ones who are going to fail because nothing is ever easy and you've got to acknowledge that fact.

Jason Mironov: I agree.

David Kreiger: So I'd like to finish up with, for all those listeners out there who might be growing their company, might want to position themselves and their company for a company like TA to invest in them: what from your perspective should they be building or demonstrating now? 

And that can either be on a macro standpoint as far as the types of companies that you think are interesting or what should they be building within their organization that is really important to show that type of repeatable sales and growth that you're looking for?

Jason Mironov: Yeah, it's a timely question because certainly the fundraising market is constantly evolving. But here's what I would think about if I were starting an organization where I was in the interim of scaling an organization. 

The first is, you got to track metrics, because what will happen is you can only fix what you can track, and it's easiest to start tracking metrics when you're developing an organization. And so I would encourage current entrepreneurs, CEOs of businesses: find a mentor if you don't already have one. 

Certainly, Henry Schuck, who's the CEO of ZoomInfo, produces a lot of great content about building his organization and what it took and what he tracked. And I encourage you: follow the people who've done it in the past, who've been successful in that way. There's no shortage of that content available.

But I'd pick the sort of 10 or 15 metrics that are going to really matter: gross and net retention, customer cost of acquisition, Salesforce productivity, pipeline coverage, sales cycle length. Pick the 10 metrics or so that folks are going to ask about. The other thing I tell you is, investors are always happy to talk. Get on the phone with people even before you start thinking about raising capital or taking on secondary liquidity, which is something TA provides. 

Ask them what they track. People love to talk about their journey, their job, what they do every day. I have a particular perspective, but like elbows, a lot of people have them and they're all pretty different. And so I just encourage you to engage in that dialogue early because it'll help you set expectations for your team and create those metrics.

So the first thing, again, you want to start demonstrating this clear go-to-market capability with the analytics-driven approach. I think the second is that retention number really tells you a lot of what you have to know. There is a direct correlation in most cases between the valuation of a business and your ability to sell to your existing base. And so if you can demonstrate every year customers are coming back and they're buying more, investors are going to be that much more excited.

To me, that's a measure of success. You want to be in the business—I think about, again we don't have any businesses of this type in the portfolio, but if you think about the Oura Ring business, or the Apple Watch business, or traditional consumer businesses, they've shifted, right? 

They started as you bought the MacBook or you bought the Oura ring, and now they've moved to a more recurring revenue model because they too are trying to capture this upside. Same is true in enterprise software and SaaS, in horizontal market software and services. And so your ability to demonstrate that extraction of additional value on behalf of your customers is really important.

The next thing people often forget when investors are making a decision: they're going to talk to your customers. There's a whole cottage industry of expert networks like GLG or Guidepoint Global, and any handful of companies that will help anonymously connect investors like me to customer bases so that we can better understand the customer experience. 

And so surprising and delighting those customers with frequency is something that you should be measuring, whether that's NPS score or their ability to demonstrate their passion and care for the product. That's what investors are going to want to see.

And then the last piece, and this is certainly not the least important: is the depth of the team. I think pedigree is a head-fake, experience is a head-fake. Some of our best folks, maybe it was their first or second organization, they were perhaps younger and didn't have a ton of experience. But I think investors can see pretty quickly: are they metrics-driven? Are they forecasting well? Are they delivering on what they say they're going to do? And are the customers speaking positively about their product and experiences? 

Assessing that talent, whether it's someone like me or someone far more talented who's come out of organization who understands sales and go-to-market is making that assessment, is something that is a critical piece of the diligence process for us.

David Kreiger: Well, that's great advice. And also the advice about just asking for advice and calling people up. It's amazing how rare it is that people will actually just pick up the phone and ask for advice when it is so great to get that advice. And also it's kind of the best sales call you ever can have because people want to help.

Jason Mironov: Totally. And the way I describe it is, here at TA we actually have this incredible infrastructure of pre-MBA associates who are building relationships and getting to know companies. Pick up the phone, get to know people. 

And I always laugh because there's two types of associates who come in. Some of them have tremendous backgrounds, world-class grades, great schools, studied abroad, have been training for this day since birth, and will come in and spend eight weeks cleaning their desk and getting their documents in order and making sure their degree is up on the wall. 

And we have students who come from a different area or a different background, a non-traditional background, who will just get on the phone and make a bunch of mistakes, but get out there and let the wave of origination wash over them. I can let you guess which one of those I have a preference for, but it is a big piece of the experience here.

David Kreiger: Oh, that's awesome. Jason, that was fantastic. What I'd love to do though before I let you go is we like to ask all of our guests a few rapid-fire questions. So are you ready for me to fire away here? Alright. So first, what is one thing people don't give enough value or attention to in leadership?

Jason Mironov: Clarity and concision. Most people who are sitting in my chair, most leaders of an organization, they're going to make a limited number of important decisions every single day. If you deliver them hundreds of pages of content and ask them to digest and regurgitate that, it's going to be a disaster for everyone. 

I want to see the two pages that matter: here are the metrics we're tracking, here's what's off the rails, here's how we're focused on it. Because in today's world, everybody's distracted. So giving people that clarity is wildly important to success.

David Kreiger: And it takes more time—I think it was Mark Twain said, "I didn't have time to write you a shorter letter."

Jason Mironov: Yes, exactly. You nailed it.

David Kreiger: What is one skill you advise everyone in sales to master—leaders or non-leaders?

Jason Mironov: This is going to sound ironic after I schmoozed your ear off for the last half an hour or so, but I think listening is such a critical skill. It is truly hearing the feedback from customers, guidance from the people around you, seeking out mentors and getting feedback from them. 

That ability to listen, to process, and—by the way, not all feedback is good feedback, I'm the first to admit—but the best leaders and the best organizations are able to isolate that great content, whether it's from their customer calls, whether it's from survey work with their employees, and they're able to really move the needle by adjusting to that feedback over time.

David Kreiger: Love it. What is your favorite business, leadership, or sales book?

Jason Mironov: It's more local to the Bay Area, but Ben Horowitz wrote a terrific book called The Hard Thing About Hard Things. I quite enjoyed that one. I think it was very honest about building organizations, about what it's like to lead a company. 

And I think it's helpful for people to have that candor. Sometimes it's easy from afar to romanticize my job or entrepreneurship jobs, and I think having a sober perspective on that stuff is really important. So I'd give that a shout-out.

David Kreiger: That's awesome. Favorite quote, mantra, or saying that inspires you as a sales leader?

Jason Mironov: You know, this one's quite personal. I was lucky enough to start my career at JP Morgan in 2005, and I started around the same time as Jamie Dimon. 

I think he probably gets more credit for the bank's success than my two years as a junior analyst there, but I'll never forget, he came to our training class and he said to us, "Americans are so silly. When they want to lose weight they go out and they spend forty dollars on a book about how to lose weight." He said, "Let me keep it simple. Let me save you some money: eat less, exercise more."

And I think it's such an interesting and funny line, and I think about it all the time in the context of this job, because we have a lot of high-achievement personalities, highly educated folks, everybody's got a framework for something. We're getting AI content coming out of our eyeballs at this point, and at the end of the day, if you want a business to be successful, you need to sell more. 

You need to be popular with your customers. It's really quite simple, right? And you got to manage expenses over a long period of time and measure the metrics that matter. So at the end of the day, I try not to overcomplicate this job because if we show up and our companies grow and we're able to find great next investors for these businesses, we've been successful. So "Keep it simple" is usually the mantra I try to stick with over time.

David Kreiger: I think it's powerful. I've learned that over the two decades of running SalesRoads too. The more I can make things simple for people to understand from a strategy standpoint, from an execution standpoint, the easier it is to scale the company for them to actually do what our strategy is.

Jason Mironov: Yes.

David Kreiger: Lastly, what is the most important goal or project you're working on right now?

Jason Mironov: My biggest thing right now is we're finding pockets of success across the portfolio in a variety of different areas. Some companies are world-class in using AI to drive go-to-market, or identification of customers, or general marketing, or development of marketing content. Some companies are finding efficiencies by scaling their organizations using AI for coding or for efficiencies across the org. 

And what I can do better than anything else—at the end of the day, again, I'll end where I started—is have tremendous and endless respect for the operators with whom we work because they are the ones out there on the front lines every day.

And I get the ability to evaluate these metrics and to think about companies and to invest because of the incredible spirit of entrepreneurship that happens not only within our portfolio, but across these United States and across the world. And so I am humbled by that honor and it cannot be stated enough just how much that's meant to me and certainly to my family over time.

And so my job is to find those pockets of greatness that exist in every company. And if I'm doing my job right, I'm cross-pollinating those so that people are learning from people who are on the front lines every day. Me lecturing the portfolio or standing on a soapbox with a specific view isn't going to be productive. So I want to bring great people who've lived it every day. 

I want to bring them together. I want them to trade those best practices. My favorite event we do is our CEO conference, where they're in there trading ideas; our CFO conference, where they're in there trading best practices. That is how we can make a difference as investors, and that's a big piece of my experience here at TA.

David Kreiger: Well said. That's awesome, Jason. Well, I think I speak for all the listeners here: really appreciate everything you said today, what perspective you brought for all the sales leaders out there on how they can focus on the metrics that matter and be able to help their companies grow in the right way. And Jason, if folks don't want this conversation to end and they'd like to know how to find you, where can they find you? Where can they learn more about TA?

Jason Mironov: Yeah, thank you for asking. Our website's ta.com. You can email me, jmironov@ta.com. Email me anytime. I'd love to hear from you. Love to engage on the topic. It's an honor to be here, David. I appreciate you giving me this opportunity and if there's stuff I can do please let me know. Otherwise, good luck.

David Kreiger: Well, thank you, Jason. Thanks for taking the time. I know you're really busy and really appreciate it. And so for all of you listeners out there, thank you for joining and spending your time with us today. And don't forget to subscribe on your platform of choice. You can always reach out to me on LinkedIn with any questions, guests you want to hear, any questions in general about go-to-market and sales. And until next time, keep it simple. Thanks.

Jason Mironov: Thanks, David.