Frank Nardi, Chief Revenue Officer at Cin7, explains why active and latent buyers need different sales journeys. He also discusses how connected data, nuanced discovery, and stronger handovers support predictable growth.
Why we asked Frank
As buyers grow more cautious and efficiency-focused, revenue teams cannot treat every demo request, trial user, or sales-qualified lead alike. Nardi explains how active demand and latent interest require different discovery, messaging, follow-up, and cycle lengths.
The company
Cin7 provides connected inventory management for product sellers across ecommerce, physical retail, marketplaces, warehouses, and other channels. It helps sellers track and replenish inventory as their businesses grow.
What you’ll learn
The conversation covers the CRO’s role across the customer lifecycle and the data and language that connect teams. It also examines 30-day and 60-day sales paths, personalised enablement, onboarding, adoption, and expansion.
Nardi sees the CRO as responsible for every dollar flowing into and out of the business, not only new-logo sales. That starts with awareness and positioning, helping suitable prospects understand Cin7, its relevance, and how the product addresses their needs. Marketing, product, free trials, enablement, and sales must work together throughout the buyer journey.
The remit continues after the sale through activation, adoption, and sustained value. Renewals show whether the customer’s experience matched promises from marketing and sales. Nardi therefore considers the entire lifecycle, from awareness and buyer selection to long-term value and customer growth.
The foundation is consistent systems and data across the lifecycle, not only a well-instrumented acquisition funnel. Systems should carry useful context forward. An automated handover can combine recordings, summaries, and sales information into a concise onboarding brief covering the customer’s original needs and goals.
Teams also need shared language. Marketing, sales, and product must define terms such as MQL, SQL, hand-raiser, and meaningful trial activation. After onboarding, nuanced definitions help customer success distinguish independent customers from those needing more enablement, services, or one-to-one support.
Active and latent buyers both qualify as opportunities, but they need different discovery, messaging, and sales-cycle paths.
Frank Nardi
Nardi views breaking silos as a C-level responsibility, but no single executive or department should own the work. Revenue leaders must collaborate with marketing, product, sales, development, support, and customer success. Revenue operations can manage systems, data, definitions, and reporting, while functional leaders agree on each metric’s meaning.
Ownership should follow the journey. MQL volume belongs mainly to marketing, MQL-to-SQL conversion spans marketing and sales, and SQL-to-win sits closer to sales. Definitions must evolve with buying behaviour and market conditions instead of remaining fixed.
Active buyers show momentum: they request demos, attend meetings, and willingly progress through discovery and evaluation. Latent buyers can explore a trial before disengaging or request a demo but miss it. Both can represent genuine opportunities, but classifying them identically as SQLs distorts the pipeline.
Sales journeys should reflect those differences. Active buyers often respond to clear next steps and a brisk cadence. Latent buyers need time to research and connect the product with their efficiency problem. Nardi describes roughly 30-day and 60-day paths, with tailored discovery, content, and follow-up.
During the shift toward online commerce, product sellers added digital channels and sought resilience beyond physical retail. Many active buyers understood the problem and wanted fast progress. A demo request served as an MQL, and one or two demonstrations established value within a roughly 30-day cycle.
More cautious buyers extended evaluations from one or two demonstrations to five. They asked how the platform would improve efficiency amid tighter margins, not only whether specific features existed. Discovery had to uncover the need behind each request. Nardi says this pressure improved product positioning and sales discipline.
Nardi rejects the idea that go-live marks a single finish line. Activation and adoption indicate health, but customers need different configurations and support as their businesses develop. Added volume, channels, fulfilment relationships, or operational complexity can require changes. Everboarding provides ongoing education and enablement at those milestones.
Support should match each customer’s experience and configuration. Confident users with straightforward setups need less help than first-time users connecting external systems. As in pre-sales, complex configurations require subject-matter experts. Similar coordination after the sale depends on smooth handovers to customer success and account management.
In acquisition, Nardi treats ghosting as a diagnostic signal. Rising rates can reveal slow responses, weak discovery, limited representative capacity, or poor communication before demos. In SMB and mid-market sales, missed meetings do not always signal lost interest. Teams should ease re-entry instead of abandoning or overwhelming buyers.
After the sale, teams can turn support tickets into positive relationship moments. Speed, accuracy, and coordination matter, including whether customers remain in onboarding. Clear communication and cohesive resolution demonstrate care. Nardi argues that metrics should prompt context-sensitive action because response quality can outweigh the event itself.
Cin7 does not use ABM as its primary go-to-market motion. However, Nardi says companies can combine useful elements from ABM, product-led growth, sales-led models, and hybrids. ABM adds personalisation, while product-led methods make complex products easier to learn. The mix depends on customers, buying behaviour, growth paths, and operating models.
AI should support tailored journeys instead of generating generic outreach. Repetitive automation recreates familiar problems at greater scale. Nardi focuses on internal enablement, giving newer representatives fast access to expertise and prompt answers. This approach can reduce demonstrations, require less buyer effort, and communicate expertise sooner.
Key takeaways
— The CRO’s remit spans awareness, acquisition, activation, adoption, renewal, and customer growth, not sales alone.
— Connected systems, consistent data, and shared definitions unite marketing, product, sales, and customer success.
— Active buyers can follow focused 30-day paths; latent buyers need more educational 60-day journeys.
— Efficiency-focused buying requires discovery that uncovers the operational need behind each feature request.
— Everboarding provides ongoing enablement based on adoption, confidence, complexity, and growth milestones.
— AI should surface expertise and speed relevant responses, not scale generic messaging buyers recognise and ignore.
About the guest
Chief Revenue Officer · Cin7
At the time of recording, Frank Nardi was Chief Revenue Officer at Cin7. His perspective covered the buyer and customer lifecycle, from market awareness and sales through onboarding, adoption, renewal, and expansion.
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