Where other companies zig, restaurant marketing company Owner.com zags. At a time when entry-level sales and revenue roles are being eliminated, CRO Kyle Norton told Morning Brew that the company is investing more in training new hires—most of whom are recent college graduates—while still automating some of the work that might have traditionally fallen to low-level sales development and business development representatives. Norton explained why Owner always tries to do the hard work up front—and why that leads to a larger payoff later. This conversation has been edited for length and clarity. First, tell me a little bit about Owner. Owner is a vertical AI company that supports independent restaurants. You can think of us as HubSpot plus Shopify for the little pizza or Thai or Japanese place that you order from on a Friday, Saturday. We give them everything they need to compete and win online—website, online ordering, email/text message marketing, custom branded app, review management, business listening management, AI phone ordering, point of sale—all in this one solution. What are some of the specific revenue and sales strategies that you’ve used to get Owner from five employees to over 250? We’re most famous for our application of AI in go-to-market. We were extremely early: We were building machine learning models for lead scoring and predicting customer success in mid-2022. When the ChatGPT moment happened that year, we just went all-in really fast. There’s a biz ops and data leader, my rev ops leader, myself all being really aggressive in adopting these tools. We’ve got a whole applied AI team building internal infrastructure and optimizing customer and sales rep journeys. The numbers that catch most people’s attention? Our comp-to-close ratio is 20x—a sales rep getting paid $150,000 is bringing $3 million ARR per year. We’re just hyper, hyper efficient. We’ve stripped out as many non-revenue-generating activities as possible from the team. They don’t do their own list research and list building; we’ve automated CRM enrichment and writing their notes for them and passing deals off to the onboarding team. We’ve automated a lot of this stuff so that the sales reps can be doing a small number of things, like making tiles and building pipelines on the XDR [extended detection and response] side, and running demos and closing deals on the AE [account executive] side. Read more about Owner’s talent development strategy and workflow.—TC | 
