Burn The Playbook

The Margin Playbook for Sales and Marketing | Karena Bell – Founder & CEO, ProfitLinz

• Digital Rebels Consulting

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Summary

In this conversation, Marc Crosby interviews Karena Bell, a financial strategist, about the importance of profit optimization in businesses. They discuss common mistakes made by B2B leaders, such as focusing on revenue over profit, and the various profit leaks that can occur within organizations. Karina emphasizes the significance of effective contract management, tariff considerations, and the role of AI in enhancing profitability. The discussion also covers pricing strategies, sales incentives, and the need for a culture that values profit across all levels of an organization.

Karena Bell – Founder & CEO, ProfitLinz
Forensic Financial Strategist | Organizational Profit Optimization Expert | Turnaround Leader

Karena Bell is a seasoned financial strategist with over 25 years of experience advising Fortune 500 executives and mid-market leaders. As Founder & CEO of ProfitLinz, she has built a reputation for uncovering hidden profit opportunities, driving distressed business turnarounds, and helping executives stabilize and accelerate enterprise value.

Her specialty is organizational profit optimization, getting down to levels of financial detail most leaders need but rarely have access to. Through forensic-level financial analysis, Karena exposes inefficiencies, hidden losses, and untapped revenue streams that traditional reviews overlook. Her work consistently delivers transformative results, often unlocking gains of 6, 7, and even 8 figures in net profitability.

Beyond optimization, Karena has extensive expertise in distressed business turnaround, guiding organizations through critical inflection points. From repairing cash flow and restructuring capital to stabilizing operations, she ensures companies emerge stronger, leaner, and positioned for growth.

What sets Karena apart is her ability to combine rigorous financial forensics with practical, hands-on execution. She partners directly with C-suite leaders and business owners to ensure strategies move beyond theory into measurable results. The outcome is accelerated profitability, enhanced valuations, and long-term resilience.

  • Recognized for uncovering hidden profit opportunities overlooked by standard financial reviews
  • Proven history of driving measurable performance improvements in under 90 days
  • Trusted partner for CEOs, CFOs, COOs, and business owners navigating high-stakes financial decisions

Takeaways

B2B leaders often chase revenue at the expense of profit.
Profit recovery involves multiple elements, not just cost control.
Contracts should be treated as mini P&L statements.
Tariff management is crucial for pricing and profitability.
Sales teams should be incentivized based on profit, not just revenue.
Dynamic pricing can significantly enhance profit margins.
AI can improve decision-making in sales and marketing.
Pilot AI projects should be small and focused.
Profit responsibility should be a company-wide culture.
Understanding profit leakage is essential for sustainable growth.

Karena Bell's Contact Info:

Email: Karena@ProfitLinz.com

Website: 

Views expressed are our own and do not represent any organizations

© 2025 Digital Rebels Consulting. All rights reserved.


Digital Rebels Consulting (00:01.722)
Welcome in I'm Marc Crosby and this is burn the playbook today. I am joined by Karena Bell founder and CEO of profit lines She's a financial strategist with more than 25 years helping fortune 500 execs and mid-market leaders find what others miss Karena is known for forensic level financial analysis uncovering and efficiencies hidden losses revenue streams that most companies overlook Her work has driven six seven eight figure gains in profitability, which sounds very exciting

beyond optimization, she's a proven turnaround leader guiding companies through cashflow crunches, restructures, and critical inflection points. What sets her apart is combining hard financial detail with hands on execution, turning insight into measurable results. So if you've ever wondered where the money is hiding in your business, and some of you probably are, or how to stabilize when things get tough, this conversation with Karena is going to open your eyes. Welcome Karena.

Karena Bell (00:56.184)
Thank you, Marc. Thank you for having me here. I'm excited to jump in this morning.

Digital Rebels Consulting (01:01.335)
Very cool. Great to have you here. We'll jump right into it. Most B2B leaders are under pressure to grow, as you probably know, and we see this all the time. What's the biggest mistake that they make in pursuit of revenue, chasing quantity over quality, and what are some of the long-term implications of doing this?

Karena Bell (01:20.258)
Yeah, that's a great question. You know, what I see a lot is the focus on poor lead management, inconsistent sales processes, weak customer handoffs, and that leads to high value opportunities slipping away. Sometimes sales folks can over discount or they're using misaligned incentives and outdated pricing models. And all of these things, when they add up, erode the margins.

of a business. And, you know, there's so many other areas as well, like, you know, churn prevention and LTV and expansion opportunities that can drain long-term value when it's a short-sighted vision.

There's a number, in fact, there's between 80 and 100 different elements of a business that can create profit loss in a business. Profit loss is not, or profit recovery is not cost control or cost reduction. And a lot of people misunderstand that verbiage, that profit strategy is typically a number of elements across your business that you need to pull levers on to create that optimization for that working capital.

Digital Rebels Consulting (02:39.053)
Gotcha. A lot of companies probably just chase revenue and then just miss profit altogether. And how does this happen? Like what do leaders get wrong about focusing on maybe the wrong numbers? What do you typically see?

Karena Bell (02:52.319)
I see a hard emphasis on the top line revenue that they're chasing the top line piling on low margin customers over discounting to win deals, scaling headcount faster than efficiency can keep up with. And a lot of times celebrating big logo wins without checking the profitability of that deal or that project. They're mistaking activity for growth.

and measuring success in the number of bookings in the top line expansion, while ignoring the churn in the CAC payback in the true contribution to margin. And you know what, the result of that is they look great on paper, but they don't have a long term sustainable profit engine behind the scenes. It's that old cliche of revenue is vanity.

number and profit is your sanity number. That if you want to talk about numbers that are braggable it's your profitability in your industry. If you're exceeding your industry's standard profitability that's those are braggable numbers.

Digital Rebels Consulting (03:52.171)
Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Digital Rebels Consulting (04:10.45)
What do you typically see as profit leaks?

Karena Bell (04:16.566)
Like I said earlier, they could be 80 to 100. The most common that I see are within contracts, vendor contracts and customer, client contracts. Software is a big leak or facility management, energy. And most recently this year is tariff management. There is significant loss in the tariff sector.

Digital Rebels Consulting (04:18.322)
Yeah.

Digital Rebels Consulting (04:26.027)
Mm-hmm.

Digital Rebels Consulting (04:37.579)
Mm-hmm.

Karena Bell (04:46.334)
If people are not looking at tariff management on a daily basis, it's surprisingly, it's surprising how many organizations don't have that designation within in their business. Those are just a few of the top. There's a, there's a lot. Yeah.

Digital Rebels Consulting (04:58.677)
Mm-hmm.

Digital Rebels Consulting (05:02.986)
I'm sure it's a long list once you start digging and you start going by line by line and you just uncover all sorts of just interesting facts. And I'm pretty sure that there's probably things that, know, CEO's CFO's and just people just don't have time to do.

and I think that typically, you know, even in my business with my clients, it's just doing a lot of the activities that they, you know, they're bogged down with the day to day. They don't have time to, you know, zoom out or even in your case, probably dig in, to really get into some of the issues as far as just profit loss. You said two things there, as far as maybe the, maybe the top five, which was software and also contracts. let's start with software real quick, because I think that one's interesting and then there's gotta be a lot of low hanging fruit there with just, licenses that they paid for. No one's using, multiple platforms, probably.

Karena Bell (05:24.066)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Karena Bell (05:39.256)
Yeah.

Digital Rebels Consulting (05:46.877)
doing the same solutions across the board for people and the business. Tell me more about that as far as like when you find these, how you find these like unused licenses, how do you get rid of them? Is that like a culture shock too when you start like cutting platforms that businesses are using or not using efficiently?

Karena Bell (06:06.894)
It can be, it can be. It depends on who brought them in and why. Back when I worked in corporate, that was part of my responsibility was to optimize the operational processes of the enterprise and then go to market and find the technology to support it. And there was ongoing endless debate with leadership of we just need a new software tool to solve the problem.

Digital Rebels Consulting (06:25.247)
Mm-hmm.

Karena Bell (06:34.894)
And it's like, no, no, no, no, no. Our processes are what is broken. The tool will just support the processes that we build out. So, yes, with software, there's a couple opportunities there. Redundancy, latest, greatest, have to have it, FOMO, went to a convention. It's the latest thing out there, have to have it. In a lot of software,

Digital Rebels Consulting (06:42.666)
Mm-hmm.

Karena Bell (07:00.842)
is implemented as a multiple viable product. They implemented at its most basic state. the dialogue is, we'll optimize it later. And later never comes. But then when the need arises that optimization would have solved.

Digital Rebels Consulting (07:13.961)
Hmm.

Karena Bell (07:18.156)
The default is we need to go back to market and find another solution. When in reality, and I've sat in that seat and I've had those conversations in reality, we had the software, we didn't optimize it, we ripped and replaced it with something else. And we repeated that process over and over and over again at a high cost. Not just the dollar cost, but the time and the talent of people to do that. When in reality, what they needed to do is just

Digital Rebels Consulting (07:43.581)
Mm-hmm.

Karena Bell (07:46.957)
take a hard look to see if we optimize what we had, could we get what we need? And at the time, we just didn't do that. And that's one area where the optimization is so key. If you're going to invest money in your company, invest it in...

Digital Rebels Consulting (07:53.384)
Mm-hmm.

Karena Bell (08:05.262)
the short time it will take to identify do we have it and we're just not utilizing it or do we truly need to go out to market and get that and oftentimes it's a technology expert that can help you do that.

Digital Rebels Consulting (08:10.653)
Mm-hmm.

Digital Rebels Consulting (08:19.338)
Yeah, I imagine that there's just a lot of software platforms that also get purchased by people who are probably not even at the organization anymore. So they were evaluated.

that person leaves and you someone else comes in and they're like, I don't like that platform is use something else. They probably don't cancel the previous one because maybe they're under contract or whatever that looks like. But do you just find like a lot of unused tools along the way just for people who have bought them and then left the company or what do you see as far as just that, that adoption and maybe a, a turnstile for people.

Karena Bell (08:45.559)
Mm-hmm.

Karena Bell (08:50.42)
Absolutely, especially if a software is per seat. It's licensed.

Licensed per seat that's very common that Folks that have moved positions within the company or they've moved out of the company are just lost in the background Especially with auto renewal contracts that can happen That's very common and then software also is one of those areas where we can renegotiate those contracts, you know, it's it's not uncommon for us to Recover over six figures and saw and a lot of software packages for the order

Digital Rebels Consulting (08:56.873)
Mm-hmm.

Digital Rebels Consulting (09:08.297)
Mm-hmm.

Karena Bell (09:25.104)
organizations that we work with.

Digital Rebels Consulting (09:28.073)
Gotcha. Let's talk a little bit about contracts and how it relates to go to market and just as far as sales and marketing and maybe there's points of leakage either in the contract process or maybe leading up to that as far as maybe not having a standardized process. So what do you find as far as just points of leakage as it relates to business contracts that we're doing to deal with a customer or a client and where there might be opportunity or potentially pitfalls there?

Karena Bell (09:54.056)
This is a topic I really like to talk about because part of...

Part of my corporate experience was I worked directly with corporate counsel for over 20 years. I'm not a lawyer, but they taught me how to look through the lens of a lawyer when looking at contracts and how contracts are structured truly are the P &L of your business. And what I mean by that is that every deal that you sign locks in the revenue, the cost, the risk, and the margin, and essentially becomes a mini P &L statement for that customer.

A truly profitable contract sets the right price for the value that's delivered, protects against scope creep, includes terms that cover costs like service levels, tariffs, renewals, and creates room for upsell or expansion. And ownership of that should not be one department. It should not be sales.

it really to be implemented effectively, it's a cross-functional responsibility between finance and rev ops, because they'll set the guardrails. Legal will ensure the enforceability, and then the sales and the customer service team executes within the contract. So the contracts consistently drive profitable growth rather than just be a closed deal. And that is not just profitable.

Digital Rebels Consulting (11:06.642)
Mm-hmm.

Digital Rebels Consulting (11:23.719)
Mm-hmm.

Karena Bell (11:26.934)
growth but predictable profitable growth. So what I see a lot of is contracts are not given that weight. They're not treated as a mini P &L statement and there's so much lost opportunity and lost profit in that for the business and it really protects both your client and the business as well and creates a deeper longer lasting relationship because it's highly transparent.

Digital Rebels Consulting (11:50.278)
Mm-hmm.

Karena Bell (11:56.257)
And everyone knows where you sit, especially when it comes to renewals of contracts as well.

Digital Rebels Consulting (12:02.183)
Do you help clients get out of bad contracts?

Karena Bell (12:05.854)
We have, yes. We have. I know very clearly where the boundaries of my expertise lie and when we need to bring the legal beagles in. But yes.

Digital Rebels Consulting (12:06.856)
You

Digital Rebels Consulting (12:25.285)
Yeah, I imagine that you probably come across quite a bit of those either in your corporate career or even today at profit lines as far as just bad contracts or why did you guys sign off on this? But there's I mean, in some cases, there's probably nothing you can do about it. But, you know, you mentioned tariffs and I guess how does that tie in as far as just tariffs and contracts? just be interested to know, I guess, what is

Karena Bell (12:33.774)
Mm.

Digital Rebels Consulting (12:47.751)
What does that look like if you signed a deal, you know, a year or two ago, and now you have all these tariffs that are coming in and kind of just complicating things. How do you see businesses handling that?

Karena Bell (12:57.318)
Yeah, it's how do I see them handling it? A lot of them aren't there. And the reason I say that is a lot of the tariffs that were.

Implemented were implemented without process and without procedure And you know case in point there was a tariff implemented for aluminum and aluminum and steel on August 15th, which was a Friday at 729 p.m. On a Friday evening It was effective that Monday at 8 a.m. so

Digital Rebels Consulting (13:32.891)
Mm-hmm.

Karena Bell (13:40.695)
businesses were not left, they had no option to respond, they had to react. And the only way they could react was to pay the tariff that was implemented two days ago, just before the weekend, or technically after business hours. Now, how does that affect pricing? How does that affect contracts? If you are importing or exporting from the United States,

Digital Rebels Consulting (13:45.958)
Mm-hmm.

Karena Bell (14:07.244)
That should be written into your contracts. There should be a tariff addendum in the contracts to allow for adjustments in tariff. You know, the tariff directly affects pricing. It affects margin. It affects your ability to compete. And they sit right in the intersection of supply chain and go to market. You know, in the supply chain, it raises costs and it influences your sourcing decisions.

Digital Rebels Consulting (14:12.922)
Mm-hmm.

Digital Rebels Consulting (14:24.454)
Mm-hmm.

Karena Bell (14:37.046)
might need to find different sourcing in different countries. A lot of people are scrambling, a lot of businesses are scrambling right now and they're doing that. And then on the go-to-market side, it shapes how you price and position and sell in the global markets. If tariff exposure isn't managed strategically, sales teams may over discount to stay competitive. Marketing may misjudge value propositions and profitability is gonna erode significantly. Tariff management.

should be part of go to market, just as much as the supply chain is, because that is an integral part of the profit chain in the business. so often between the revenue and the profit, everything in between is not given the attention that it should, that that margin between profit and revenue should be as short as possible.

When in the reality, oftentimes the gap is significant. But tariff, you know, tariff, that is a hot one right now. In fact, we're doing a lot of work with tariff management. Or companies that are not equipped, we're actually coming in and helping them with their tariff management. And a lot of people don't know this, that when a tariff changes, when the regulation changes, there's an opportunity to reconcile previous tariffs that have been paid that could

Digital Rebels Consulting (15:46.693)
Mm-hmm.

Karena Bell (16:04.034)
potentially reduce your tariff costs by 50%. And if you don't have someone that is managing the tariff aspect of your business, that could be millions or tens of millions of dollars going back into your working capital on the bottom line of your business.

Digital Rebels Consulting (16:20.324)
Yeah, it's a very dynamic environment. And I think just as far as pricing, that's got to be a lot to manage from a sales perspective. And you had mentioned that previously that sales shouldn't own the pricing. so

Karena Bell (16:30.222)
Mm.

Digital Rebels Consulting (16:37.028)
I tend to agree with that in some sort of ways, but you know, I think there's a lot of confidence that comes in having confident price discussions with your customers. But if sales shouldn't own the pricing, who should? And I guess what does that look like as far as how much ownership a salesperson does have a pricing.

Karena Bell (16:44.462)
Mm-hmm.

Karena Bell (16:52.266)
Yeah, and I appreciate that, Marc, because I know you're on the rev-op side. Pricing is a profit system. It's not a closing tactic. When sales own it, quota pressures can drive over discounting, inconsistent deal terms, and long-term margin erosion. Pricing should sit between rev-ops and finance. Again, they have to set the guardrails of what's our floor.

What's the variable? And then also, and you and I talked about this earlier, is how is the sales and business development team, how are they incentivized? How are they compensated? Are they compensated on rev or are they compensated on profit? Because we're all gonna work to what we're incentivized to. It's very common where we're having discussions about restructuring sales team compensation.

and compensating sales team based on profit. And oftentimes leaders are a little bit hesitant to be that transparent, to share that with the sales team. But the sales team is, you know, they need to know that. They need to know the variables and the constraints that they can work within. And they need to know how they're going to be compensated because if they're compensated on profit,

trust and believe they are going to drive the profit if that is what is going to drive their personal bottom line.

Digital Rebels Consulting (18:22.245)
Mm hmm. Yeah, I imagine you see this all the time and I was just going to kind of say that similar.

you know, aspect as far as incentivizing to the margin itself and a lot of, you know, previous roles that I've ever had, they weren't, we weren't incentivized to margin or incentivize your revenue, or maybe it was quantity or volume or whatever that looks like. But if you give, you know, somebody a price band or at least room to negotiate, so you don't have to say, let me get back to you. I have to go talk to my boss or something like that, or I have to go talk to the CFO and get approval. Then it's just a little bit disjointed. So I think that that's a great approach to at least give them room to work with and

Karena Bell (18:55.042)
Mm-hmm.

Digital Rebels Consulting (18:58.662)
then they're incentivized not to just go to the bottom as far as a closing tactic, as you said before. It could be a closing tactic, but if I'm going to close at a higher margin, at least there's some incentive for me to do that and leave some money on the table on my side as opposed to the other side. But I mean, to me, I think that makes the most sense, but I don't think a lot of organizations have that approach.

Karena Bell (19:18.602)
In close on value, not price. That's, you know, keep price as firm as possible. And, you know, we talk about pricing as well. We look at pricing and we actually build pricing engines for organ or we have pricing engines for organizations that oftentimes they're pricing by what their competitors are doing instead of the value that they're delivering. Dynamic pricing.

Digital Rebels Consulting (19:21.924)
Mm-hmm.

Digital Rebels Consulting (19:44.547)
Mm-hmm.

Karena Bell (19:47.021)
You know, is a company's pricing static? How often is it revisited? And it's surprising how infrequent pricing is revisited. And the opportunities with dynamic pricing that, you know, the market, what is the market driving? What are clients willing to pay? Are you driving on value? Are you driving on price? And value-driven products and services is going to net a higher margin.

Digital Rebels Consulting (20:17.474)
Mm-hmm.

Karena Bell (20:17.568)
in the end. And especially if you're utilizing dynamic pricing, that can be a significant profit multiplier for an organization, for both their clients and their vendors.

Digital Rebels Consulting (20:29.847)
Yeah, if you're typically stuck negotiating on price and typically that's you know, kind of my whole premise as far as just

stop negotiating on price, start leading with value. If you're stuck negotiating on price, whether it's with you and procurement or you know, you're against another supplier, then you've lost all the value. If there was any value that was built up to that moment there and you're, you're negotiating on a nickel here, nickel there, you lost all the value. And so you really have to set that up from the beginning from a, from a sales process to make sure that, you know, when it comes down to a penny per pound, a nickel or whatever that looks like for your cost per unit,

Karena Bell (20:47.084)
Mm-hmm.

Digital Rebels Consulting (21:06.37)
that's not the only value that at the end of day you're adding for your customer. And it should be a partnership at the end of the day. But yeah, there should be value added pricing. And that's obviously where we all want to be. And it's probably easy for me to say that, but I think you have to at least train your sales leaders, your sales teams in order to have that mentality and not just a rush to price because it's a lose lose.

Karena Bell (21:13.569)
It should.

Karena Bell (21:29.838)
It has to be part of the culture.

of the business. know, a process will fail if the culture does not believe in the process. So a culture is a big part of whatever you are changing in an organization, the culture must change to support it. And that has to start with the leadership because they're the ones that are creating and driving the strategy of the business. The culture has got to support the processes.

Digital Rebels Consulting (22:01.142)
Now, what if I'm discounting to close a deal? Is that where it kind of gets messy as far as, hey, you know, we're, we're focused on margins, we're focused on value and we have like a good deal on the table. And then procurement comes back and says, well, we need another two points off and then we'll close the deal. What should they do then?

Karena Bell (22:08.11)
you

Karena Bell (22:19.214)
Well, and we all have very margins that we can work within. It's making sure that the sales team is very clear on the margins that they can work within because we all know we never sign on our first price, right? We know that. But it's making sure that they don't exceed those margins. So absolutely, because we know that's part of the negotiation process.

Digital Rebels Consulting (22:25.964)
Hmm.

Digital Rebels Consulting (22:47.052)
Yeah.

Absolutely. Yeah, there's lot to unpack there. And you know, I think that even a lot of discussions on burn the playbook, we've talked about that, and I'm sure we will in the future. And it's just be a topic to debate, you know, till the end of time. But we never we never skip a topic of AI on burn the playbook. So let's talk a little bit about AI. And you know, how do you see that as far as enhancing profits and how, you know, we talked about FOMO and new shiny tools as far as just implementing new software platforms. So how do you see AI implementation being successful?

Karena Bell (22:49.932)
Mm-hmm.

Karena Bell (23:12.428)
Mm-hmm.

Digital Rebels Consulting (23:17.422)
successful or potential detriment to businesses today.

Karena Bell (23:21.71)
Mmm. I have seen more detriment than I've seen benefit to be honest and the reason for that is typically there is a strategy is lacking We need to implement AI my first question is always why share the strategy with me if

I don't feel like that's a clear strategy. I know exactly where the discussions need to start. There's two things that every company should have before they implement anything that is AI related. You should have an AI policy that protects the company. And again, this is going to go right back into the culture.

Digital Rebels Consulting (23:49.718)
Mm-hmm.

Karena Bell (24:06.732)
To have an AI culture, you must support an AI culture. And what does that mean by definition? And how AI can create vulnerabilities within an organization? How are we using AI? When are we using it? When is it walled? When is it open? Is it ever open? So having those policies, your AI policies are your cybersecurity policies as well. So think of them that they're married policies.

Digital Rebels Consulting (24:31.937)
Mm-hmm.

Karena Bell (24:36.59)
Because your AI can be a point of vulnerability that could be extremely detrimental to your business to the point of, you know, it could be devastating to your business. And then having a strategy. Why are we pursuing AI? And with AI, something I've seen, I'm sure you've seen it too, because you were probably seeing a lot of the reading a lot of the same articles is there have been

tens of millions, hundreds of millions of dollars spent in AI implementations and they still are not seeing the benefit. Pilot programs, pilot AI, start with a four to six week pilot, start small, pick one use case. One I love to do in businesses is automate your invoicing and your reconciliation process, do that with AI. That's a very common.

But start with one pilot. Go through the process, whether it's your own development team or it's a combination of an AI development team working with your team or maybe it is an AI team that is third party bringing the solution to you. Go through that process. is it like? What does it require from you and the team? And then analyze the benefit on the back end once you're through it. Pilot projects are inexpensive and they should be quick.

Digital Rebels Consulting (25:59.232)
Mm-hmm.

Karena Bell (26:04.686)
proof of concept. Let's see, is this going to work? it going to give us the benefit? And then from there, then start identifying others to start piloting. But what I have seen, the biggest failures I've seen are people are trying to boil the ocean with AI and they don't need to. AI doesn't need to be everywhere. It does not. And it comes back to your systems and your processes. AI is another tool that will support

Digital Rebels Consulting (26:22.752)
Mm-hmm.

Karena Bell (26:34.656)
what you have in place. you have siloed data or you have processes, bad data, yeah, data cleansing is something that is the first step in everything that we do with the analytics that we work with is cleansing the data. If you don't have processes documented or the processes are not efficient, it's only going to amplify what you have in place.

Digital Rebels Consulting (26:41.876)
Bad data.

Karena Bell (27:02.528)
And it will fail because you're expecting it to do something it's not capable of doing. Because it's only going to take what you give it and spit back out and then, and as you program it, as you program it, and especially with LLMs, you you have to be very mindful of the data that is going in and the validation of it. An AI tool should never be without human oversight.

Digital Rebels Consulting (27:02.88)
Mm-hmm.

Karena Bell (27:31.951)
Uh, the AI and this is touted out there. AI is like another employee. Okay. If it is, then that employee needs oversight. They need management. They need feedback. They need to be corrected where they might've done something wrong or the data was not quite as accurate as it should have been. So there has to be that, that, um, back and forth and there has to be that oversight and you always want to monitor it. Yeah. I would never, um,

Digital Rebels Consulting (27:44.489)
Mm.

Karena Bell (28:01.55)
trusted on its own. And I'm thinking like mid-market businesses, I'm thinking large scale implementations for LLM model, LLM application and that. So yeah, it's just another high performance employee that needs to be managed.

Digital Rebels Consulting (28:06.719)
Mm-hmm.

Digital Rebels Consulting (28:23.167)
Well, as you mentioned, policy strategy, I think you also have to have potentially just AI teams that are established within businesses before you start to implement anything. Cause there just has to be that responsibility. I think within organizations, I just can't imagine, you know, globally how many people have, you know, been plugging in sensitive information into, you know, chat GPT over the last few years, as far as just,

Karena Bell (28:33.71)
Mm-hmm.

Digital Rebels Consulting (28:50.131)
margins and profitability and pricing and just all these things that, organizations try to keep under wraps. And we talked a little bit about transparency earlier, as far as giving some of your teams the information that they need to negotiate deals with price bands and things of that nature. But how are they using that with chat GPT? Are they plugging that in to figure out what's the best deal or options that I should have for my customer and things of that nature? So, but you don't know until at least you educate them on, you know, why they shouldn't do that and have policies in place.

But I guess with that question, do you think that AI can help improve margins, whether it's in just negotiating deals or maybe just from a CFO perspective, or do you see AI and profitability and how they can work together?

Karena Bell (29:35.339)
I see great advantage there. Sales and marketing both. know, AI can help sales and marketing improve margin by client fit by turning raw data into precision decisions. You know, on the sales side, AI can score leads by profitability potential, likelihood to close.

They can help with pricing strategies depending on if you're using static or dynamic, you know, it can plug right into whatever your pricing engine is and help with the models. It could also flag, you know, if someone is, if they're a chronic discounter or they can flag if discounts are eroding into profit, if it's not being monitored.

Digital Rebels Consulting (30:10.482)
Mm-hmm.

Digital Rebels Consulting (30:26.238)
Mm-hmm.

Karena Bell (30:27.298)
There's a lot of opportunity, a lot of opportunity. And with the AI, one thing I want to emphasize is that, from an organizational standpoint, there's that protective wall, I call it a walled garden, where there is so much opportunity to work within your own organization's data that you don't have to go externally. There's a tremendous amount of your own internal data.

Digital Rebels Consulting (30:48.723)
Mm-hmm.

Karena Bell (30:55.404)
that you can utilize. On the marketing side, you know, it really sharpens the...

attracting that high margin ICP client. That everyone is after their ICP and a lot of people don't know how to get there. They don't know who to talk to. They don't know how to talk to them. can personalize campaigns at scale. The neuroscience that is being used with AI today is extraordinary. I've been on the receiving end of it where people are showing me their products and how it performs.

Digital Rebels Consulting (31:18.216)
Mm-hmm.

Karena Bell (31:34.369)
and some of it is dead-on accurate. Not all of it, but some of it is like, wow, you know, that is really how you... If you came to me and spoke to me like that, it would be a very productive conversation. You know, and so from the sales and marketing side, think it'd be an extraordinary tool as long as it is used in the way to personalize the interaction and not do a mass market, very sloppy...

Digital Rebels Consulting (31:39.678)
Mm-hmm.

Karena Bell (32:03.79)
you know plug and chug type of because every we have to remember in sales and marketing everything we push out to a potential client is our brand it is our brand and it's our reputation so we don't dare do anything that is not aligned with the brand and the reputation of the brand and of the individual and the people as well but i i think if

Digital Rebels Consulting (32:16.285)
Mm-hmm.

Karena Bell (32:32.798)
if implemented correctly, that it really could be long-term profitability for a business and create just extraordinarily strong sales and marketing pipelines. And I think that the challenge there is partnering with the prompt engineers.

that are very deep in sales and very deep in marketing. For AI, I think you definitely want to work with people that are specialized in those areas of where it is you want to go deep.

Digital Rebels Consulting (33:14.458)
Yeah, there's certainly a lot of benefits. I think if you were to use AI for profitability, there's got to be faster and probably more accurate ways to figure out, you know, if you're integrating pricing models, customer lifetime value, market conditions and things like this.

dropping them all in and trying to figure out what is the best price. And at least it kind of gives you that confidence of knowing that as a business, you're making the right decisions as opposed to maybe just long form waves of getting to those results that may or may not be as accurate. But yeah, certainly you can put more variables in to get these results for profitability. Do you have any favorite platforms or as far as just like AI as it relates to financials and profitability, or are we just using off the shelf platforms

Karena Bell (33:49.943)
in

Digital Rebels Consulting (34:00.144)
chat GPT or like a Microsoft co-pilot since it's built into like Excel spreadsheets and stuff like that.

Karena Bell (34:06.208)
I was going to say before you ask that question is always question the source of where the information is coming from as well. Because you want to make sure the source is valid source. If it's outside the organization and you always want to question the source inside the organization as well. So to your point, perplexity, I like perplexity because it does show me the sources and I can go validate the sources.

of what I'm looking at and chat GPT-5 I actually will play perplexity against chat GPT-5 for market research and that to see what the results are.

Digital Rebels Consulting (34:43.836)
Mm-hmm.

Digital Rebels Consulting (34:47.748)
Yeah, I do the same thing. It's just a B C testing just to kind of see like the results consistent or they different and try to understand at least the why behind it. But then in some cases, that's not saving me any time by using AI. It's just taking just as much time because I'm validating all the sources.

Karena Bell (34:56.738)
Mm-hmm.

Karena Bell (35:03.052)
Yeah, I can run down that rabbit hole. Yeah, I can definitely run down that rabbit hole.

Digital Rebels Consulting (35:09.08)
It happens. let's move on to our next segment, burn it or build it. Everyone's favorite rapid fire segment on the burn the playbook podcast. So I'm going to shoot off like some hot takes, for sales and marketing, go to market and profitability. and you just tell me burning or build it and maybe a quick reason why. so I think we already touched on number one, but we can touch on it again, AI content without a human in the loop.

Karena Bell (35:26.978)
Okay.

Karena Bell (35:34.104)
Burn it.

Digital Rebels Consulting (35:35.504)
Burn it. Yep, we did talk about that and there's many reasons why to burn it. Number two, contracts that auto renew.

Karena Bell (35:38.688)
Needs, needs oversight. Oversight. Yep.

Karena Bell (35:49.869)
depends on what side of the table you're sitting on. If you're the provider, auto renew contracts. If you're the customer, burn it. At the renewal point, and unless these are very clear, fair contracts, auto renew contracts typically are in the advantage of the person presenting the contract, providing the service.

Digital Rebels Consulting (35:53.173)
Hahaha

Digital Rebels Consulting (36:16.271)
Gotcha. I hate auto renew contracts for my own personal use just because I forget to cancel stuff and I get charged again. But that's a different story.

Karena Bell (36:23.36)
It's that auto renew that there's a lot of, oftentimes there's surprises in the auto renew that were not obvious in the initial contract signing. So I always encourage clients to turn off the auto renew and set up reminders to revisit your contract 60 days before the renewal because oftentimes you have to renew 30 days or more before the renewal. So you want 60 days so you can.

Digital Rebels Consulting (36:42.265)
Mm-hmm.

Karena Bell (36:50.656)
negotiate or do anything you need to before you land inside of that 30 days where you've lost that opportunity.

Digital Rebels Consulting (36:57.691)
Seems like a good opportunity for AI. Dump all your contracts into a LLM and just set up those reminders for you. I don't know.

Karena Bell (37:04.148)
and not to mention compliance. I work with lot of companies that deal with OFAC, international compliance, and AI can monitor and keep track of not just your vendor compliance, but your vendor's vendor's compliance. Because big organizations are on the hook for that. If their vendors and their vendor's vendors aren't compliant, they could be fined heavily for that.

Digital Rebels Consulting (37:12.218)
Mm-hmm.

Digital Rebels Consulting (37:23.748)
Thanks.

Digital Rebels Consulting (37:32.858)
Good to know. Number three, uncapped commissions. We're incentivizing our salespeople. Let's just give them all a commission.

Karena Bell (37:44.751)
Build it. Build it. I'm a firm believer if without sales you don't have a business. If you have rockstar people that are out there beating the block and they're closing the deals you should be paying them very very well.

Digital Rebels Consulting (38:01.434)
long as they're closing the right deals, right?

Karena Bell (38:03.128)
closing the right deals. Yeah, let me refer, let me review the mini PNL of that contract and then we'll decide the commission. But yes, yes, absolutely. Absolutely don't get cheap when it comes to your sales,

Digital Rebels Consulting (38:11.834)
as long as you have a good contract.

Digital Rebels Consulting (38:17.07)
Nice. Love that.

Karena Bell (38:18.082)
That's an investment. That's an investment. That's returning investment.

Digital Rebels Consulting (38:23.514)
Leading into this one, go to market with no profit goals. So this one's kind of just selling to everybody. But I think we just covered that is that you have to have the right customers. You have to have the right profitability. Everyone has to be aligned, cross-functional teams, lot of the stuff that we kind of talked about before.

Karena Bell (38:38.622)
Mm-hmm. You have to measure it. You have to measure it. You can't improve what you can't measure.

Digital Rebels Consulting (38:46.157)
Bind tools before fixing processes.

Karena Bell (38:49.858)
Burn it. We talked about that too. You have to have your processes solid first and then find the tool to support it. The tool will only amplify your processes.

Digital Rebels Consulting (39:01.443)
Gotcha. Six month AI pilots.

Karena Bell (39:05.048)
Burn it. Pilots should be four to six weeks. They should be smaller scale. You know, six months, it's probably gonna be a big project. I wouldn't recommend it. Doesn't mean it's gonna fail. I wouldn't recommend it. Stay small. Start small. And then scale with the maturation of the organization and the culture.

Digital Rebels Consulting (39:25.943)
Yeah, be nimble at the end of the day, especially with AI and how fast it's evolving a six month pilot. By the time you finished that six month pilot, everything's going to change anyway. So you're gonna have to start a new six month pilot. You'll always be behind the yeah. Behind the curve. pricing without tariff insights.

Karena Bell (39:35.756)
So fast, so fast. Yeah.

Karena Bell (39:46.233)
Burn it. You have to have end-to-end cogs in your pricing. And it's interesting how many cogs are missing from the pricing model in most organizations that we work with. just, yeah. A lot of times the model was inherited and re-inherited and never revisited.

Digital Rebels Consulting (39:48.269)
Burn it.

Digital Rebels Consulting (40:15.545)
I agree. this one, talked a little bit about, redundant tools in the tech stack. let's just talk about a tech stack real quick because you know, in my business, your business, a lot of businesses, there's just all these seemingly like unique tools that solve this one problem. So should companies be like consolidating tech stacks into just like a few, or do they really need all these, special unicorn tools to, do these like one-off things?

Karena Bell (40:45.28)
I would say it's going to be situational. It's definitely going to be situational because it depends on what it is that that tool is doing for the organization. However, again, you know, with the evolution and advancement of technology at such a rapid rate,

You may need to have a number of disparate integrations that ultimately in year two or three you could consolidate into a centralized solution. If you have a number of disparate or third party integrations, I would always keep that in the forefront of your strategic thinking of where can we consolidate this.

Digital Rebels Consulting (41:09.689)
Mm-hmm.

Karena Bell (41:28.45)
I don't think it's a black and white answer. I think you really have to look at the environment and what they're doing. And as we talked about before, there's certainly overlap and bloat in technology. There's a lot of technology that is just dormant technology that's being paid for on auto renewal contracts.

Digital Rebels Consulting (41:38.594)
Mm-hmm.

Digital Rebels Consulting (41:47.336)
Yeah. In a lot of cases, probably just use what you got and, uh, know, squeeze everything you can out of that. And then maybe add onto that. Um, so I think that one was a burn it. Let's, uh, final takeaway. What's one question that we can have every commercial leader asked their CFO this week that they can implement, uh, ASAP.

Karena Bell (41:55.308)
Yeah.

Karena Bell (42:09.038)
that is where are we generating revenue that isn't actually generating profit and how quickly can we see it by customer product or segment? And the reason the reason I say that and the reason I'm so detailed about it is because you have to get down to that level of detail to really see what is profitable and what is a loss leader in your business and this forces visibility into profit leakage.

It aligns with go-to-market and finance, and it sparks conversations about pricing, client fit, operational inefficiencies that directly impact the margin. And profitability is not just the CFO or finance responsibility.

It's everyone's responsibility in the organization. Again, it comes to culture. Profit is not a bad thing. Profit is the best thing in business. Without profit, our businesses don't stay in business. They don't support and feed the families that are helping to build the business and grow the business. So we should all be very concerned about the profit of the company and looking for areas where we can increase the profitability of the company.

Digital Rebels Consulting (43:02.104)
Mm-hmm.

Karena Bell (43:27.948)
The line item level of detail is where you get that. And that is actually one of our core offerings is our Profit 360 analysis that we're able to provide that insight in days versus months compared to big four consulting firms.

Digital Rebels Consulting (43:45.783)
Love that. And where can people find you, Karena?

Karena Bell (43:49.919)
LinkedIn, Karena Bell or our website, ProfitLines, Profit, L-I-N-Z, dot com.

Digital Rebels Consulting (43:59.145)
Awesome. Thank you for joining Burn the Playbook. Alright. Thanks. Bye bye.

Karena Bell (44:01.071)
Thank you for having me, Marc. This was pleasure. This was a lot of fun. Bye bye.