On this episode of Revenue Mavericks, I sat down with Dave Kranowitz, Chief Revenue Officer at Grafana Labs. Dave has spent two decades in the observability space, holding sales leadership roles at Turbonomic and Dynatrace before joining Grafana Labs nearly seven years ago. What struck me most about this conversation was how deeply Dave thinks about the human side of building a revenue organization. He has a rare ability to connect the discipline of competitive sport, the weight of formative leadership experiences, and the daily practice of staying connected to his team into something that feels less like a management philosophy and more like a way of being.

1. The Boat Gets Lighter When Everyone Pulls Together

Dave rowed competitively in high school and college. He woke up at 4:30 in the morning while his classmates slept, headed to the boathouse, and trained with people who were laser-focused on one thing: making the boat go faster. In rowing, there is a concept called swing. It happens when every blade enters and exits the water in perfect unison, everyone is pulling at full effort, and the boat suddenly gets lighter. It is rare, it is fleeting, and you cannot manufacture it. You can only earn it through consistent preparation.

Dave still remembers the race against Coast Guard where he felt it happen. His lightweight crew was behind. He pushed the stroke rate to 35, then 38. They were redlining, but the boat was lifting. They moved through the other crew and won. The losing team handed over their jerseys, and Dave's crew wore them around campus.

That feeling has shaped how Dave approaches building sales organizations. He talks about wanting to meet anyone at dawn on the river, a competitive confidence that comes not from bravado but from preparation. At Grafana, he has tried to build a culture where everyone understands the mission, everyone is willing to do the work, and every once in a while, the team finds swing.

2. Two Phone Calls That Built a Leadership Philosophy

Dave shared two stories that sit on opposite ends of the leadership spectrum, and both have stayed with him for decades.

The first happened on the last day of a quarter. Dave had a large purchase order in hand, but a SKU problem was going to prevent it from booking in time. He called his boss for help. His boss said, How could you be so dumb? and hung up. Dave was feeding his two-year-old son at the kitchen table. He fixed the problem himself, booked the deal, and resigned a few weeks later. What he wanted in that moment was someone to say, Who can I call? How can I help? What he got was abandonment. He vowed that when he became a leader, he would never leave someone alone in a crisis.

The second happened earlier in Dave's career, during a rocky QBR after an acquisition. Dave had prepared obsessively, studying every detail of every account. When it was his turn, he knew every answer. Afterward, a VP he barely knew left him a voicemail saying he was impressed by Dave's command of the material. Dave kept that voicemail on his phone for years. A decade later, he got to tell that VP what it meant to him.

Today, Dave makes a point of reaching out to people across Grafana, not just in sales, but in marketing, engineering, and customer success, to tell them when he notices great work. A Slack message, a phone call, a mention in a meeting. It takes very little effort, and the impact, as Dave experienced firsthand, can last a career.

3. The Weekly Email That Holds a Company Together

For the past 15 years, across three companies, Dave has written a weekly email to his entire organization. It is not a pipeline update. It is not a set of KPIs. It is, in his words, a way to connect with people and let them understand the things that are on his mind.

Some weeks, Dave writes about what he is seeing in the competitive market, drawing an analogy between giraffes and acacia trees locked in a constant evolutionary arms race. Some weeks, he writes about something personal: driving his son cross-country to college, a story about his parents, a reflection on a piece of history. One email about the Donner Party, which Dave used as a cautionary tale about the cost of rushing critical hiring decisions, is still referenced by his team years later.

The practice reflects something Dave said multiple times during our conversation: he is a hearts and minds person, not a math person. He pairs well with people who are great with numbers, but his leadership instrument is language. The weekly email is how he wields it, consistently, across hundreds of weeks, to build a connective tissue that meetings and dashboards alone cannot create.

Why This Matters

There is a tension in sales leadership between the things that are easy to measure and the things that actually hold organizations together. Dave's approach is a reminder that the most durable competitive advantages in revenue are not built in a forecasting tool or a compensation plan. They are built in the 4:30 a.m. mornings nobody sees, in the phone call a leader makes to recognize great work, in the weekly email that a CRO writes even when there is nothing urgent to say. Dave calls it swing. Most sales leaders have felt it at least once. The difference is that Dave has spent his entire career trying to build organizations where it happens on purpose.

Listen to the full conversation on the Revenue Mavericks podcast.