Making Good Decisions with Bad Data
On this episode, Renee discusses the importance of knowing the key players in your organization, going from zero to one in a tech start-up, and being right vs being a good partner.
Welcome to Rise of RevOps. I'm Ian Faizan, CEO of CastMean Studios, and today
we are
joined by special guest Adam, how are you?
I'm doing great. Thank you so much.
Excited to have you on the show, excited to chat about active campaign, we're a
customer
here at CastMean. So it's fun to hear the inner workings of how you all go to
market.
And we have a bunch of podcasts that we do that have newsletters and use an
active
campaign stuff. So it's fun digging in. And obviously, of course, we're going
to talk
about all of your rev-ups. So let's get into it. Tell me about your background.
How do
you first get into rev-ups?
I was dragged in, to be honest with you. So it was fun. I've been with active
campaign
for about 10 years. I started in a support role. Did that very early days when
we were
like sub 10 employees. So we did a lot of everything and then started a sales
team in
2015, opened an international office overseas in Sydney, Australia. And when I
was coming
back from that, I realized I didn't want to be a director of sales anymore. So
I had
this kind of existential crisis where I was looking at my long-term goals. Like
, where
do I want to be in 10 years? And I realized there's a big gap in my skill set.
And that
was the operation side of the house. I had been doing ops kind of like under
the radar
for a while, but I didn't really know anything about it. And so when I came
back, I just asked,
I said, I really don't want to lead a sales team anymore. I want to get into
operations.
And so I did that. And then I was doing a lot of side work for our former vice
president
of rev-ups at active campaign. And she basically just secured my time. She said
, 40% of your
time is mine, no matter what. And then eventually I went full time with her.
And so that was
at the start of this last year, actually. So it's been a really fun journey,
though.
It's an awesome field to be in right now. It's growing. And I think there's
just a tremendous
amount of opportunity. Truly it is on the rise. Hence the podcast name. So what
's your definition
of rev-ups? Yeah, I think that rev-ups is going to change depending on the work
, right?
And that's something that I've been learning a lot over the last few months is
I realized
once I got into rev-ups officially that I didn't know what it actually did. And
so I was like,
oh, no, I need to figure this out. And then I realized that everyone does it a
little
bit differently. But at the end of it, I think that there's really a core piece
of that.
And that is to give a sales org, success marketing, whatever it might be,
whatever
orgs that you support, a mechanism to build a foundation upon and have success,
right?
And that's the pieces. What you're doing is you're laying a foundation for the
organization
or the organizations that you support to be successful in their day-to-day jobs
. And
that's it. And tell us a little bit about Active Campaign for our listeners who
don't
know. Yeah. So Active Campaign has been around for almost 20 years, which is
pretty wild.
And one of the things that we've grown from is we started as just an email
marketing platform.
But in the last few years, we've really pivoted to what we call a customer
experience platform.
And so what we are is a really simple to use platform that embodies email
marketing,
automations, CRM, and kind of takes all of those things that makes them work
together
to help you as a small business or large business, whatever it is, to give your
customer a great
experience to the entire funnel or journey that they're on with you.
Tell me about how your RevOps team is organized and what approach do you kind
of take looking
at RevOps and how it fits in. Yeah. So RevOps is only a couple years old with
an Active
Campaign, as it is within many companies, right? It's a kind of rising star in
the operations
community. And what we've decided is that we're going to build our RevOps org,
especially
on kind of four main tenants or pillars. And those are really simple. It's
people, policies,
processes, and systems. And so what we try to do is look at everything that we
do to
drive success within the teams that we support. We want to focus on exactly
those things,
the people, the policies, the processes and the systems. And if we can do that,
or if we
start to deviate outside of that, we know that we need to pull it back in. So
it acts
as a kind of a foundation for us to always make sure that we're pointing in the
right
direction as well. How do you think you all differ from like other RevOps teams
or what's
maybe unique about your org or active campaign? So historically, Active
Campaign has had RevOps
really under the sales org and some under success. A lot of RevOps orgs are a
little bit broader
than that. So they might do sales, success, marketing, even support at times
and sales.
And so what we have focused on historically was we kind of were birthed out of
the concept
of a sales ops org. And then we started expanding that a little bit. And I
think what we're
seeing now is the opportunity to say, okay, hold on, how do we centralize ops a
little
bit better with an active campaign? Is there opportunity for us to say that Rev
Ops is maybe
a bigger part of the puzzle as we try to solve that? I think what makes us
unique is, you
know, again, we were a pretty small team to start with and trying to really
make sure
that we had our processes nailed down and things like that. Again, a lot of
businesses
are in this journey of solving for what is RevOps to them. But that's
definitely been
like the piece for us that we focused on is building that out and making it
successful
within our business.
Yeah, it's funny how it usually grows from one area, whether it's marketing or
sales
or probably at least common being CS. And then it sort of starts merging into
that kind
of combo thing. I'm curious, you know, when it has that initial DNA and you
were in sales
and it has like a sales ops DNA, bringing those marketing and success kind of
pieces.
How did you go about doing that? Did you kind of like, you know, fold in some
marketing
folks into the conversation or how did you do that?
I think what has been really outstanding is in the last year, the marketing
teams and
the RevOps teams have been very, very intentional about saying, hey, there's a
gap between our
relationships and we can't operate and continue to be successful together if we
don't fully
support each other. And so there has just been iteration after iteration after
iteration
of really taking the time to make sure that all the stakeholders are brought
into the
conversations that we're having, that we're not planning any changes to how we
function
or work without at least notifying like someone in marketing ops at a minimum,
but more likely
actually bringing them into our process. And so it's all about that intention
ality to
say, hey, yes, we have to do what we have to do. We have our mission, you have
your
mission, right? We all have different projects that we work on. But realizing
how much those
projects actually probably overlap if we allow them to. And then just again,
like I said,
being really intentional is to say, hey, you know, marketing ops director, you
are a stakeholder
in my project on RevOps. I'm bringing you into every conversation on it. I'm
going to allow
you to have a voice. I will be cognizant of what you need to be successful from
your
side to ensure that we work together and create a really unified approach. And
it's
been really awesome to see that take place and that relationship build to a
point where
I'm like, I feel that our ops teams are more aligned than they've ever been
before. And
that really we're just getting started, which has been really exciting.
Let's get into some of what of those things are in our next segment. Rev
obstacles. We
talk about the two parts of RevOps. What's the hardest rev ops problem you
faced in the
last six months? I've been chewing on this one, trying to figure out what
actually is
the hardest problem. One of the things that is maybe been a unique challenge
for us, right,
is that active campaign has a CRM. And so we use that for our inbound teams and
we have
used that for our inbound teams for years. But for a small point in history of
about
two to three years, our outbound teams use Salesforce. And the reason for that
was because
our CRM needed to have some more capability added, some more functionality
added, to really
allow us to do outbounding in a cohesive way. And so as the platform's been
growing and
changing, it came time to move back. And moving off of a CRM to another CRM is
often a challenging
point of view. But also moving off of a CRM into your own CRM when you have
direct access
to the engineering teams and things like that. And you have to now manage how
are we going
to actually take this move and make it successful. That's been a humongous
thing that we've been
working on over the last six to eight months. We're kind of on the tail end of
it now.
But there's definitely some big challenges that came along with that. And you
can imagine
that it was quite a lengthy process.
After going through all that, any takeaways of, I mean, obviously that's kind
of a unique
scenario with you all because you're, you know, working into your product. But
we all
know what it's like to change technologies and kind of bring in those
stakeholders and
trying to get kind of that unified data approach. So any takeaways there?
I think the biggest takeaway for me personally as kind of the person that was
like leading
this this project was if I could go back in time and like give myself the
advice, I would
have said just spend more time on the planning upfront. Like really, like sure,
you've got
a seven month timeline to get this done. Spend four of those months planning
and spend three
months implementing. And I think that that we spent a lot of time planning, but
because
there was a restricted timeline, our planning was often, you know, we laid the
foundation
and then we were building upon that as we were going. And I think that that
quickly exposed
some gaps that we didn't realize like in our own product or pieces that we hadn
't thought
about just, you know, pain points, right? That are going to be a part of this
no matter
what tool you're switching from. So I think this is applicable to anyone in rev
ops. If
you're switching from tool A to tool B, it's just ask more questions and really
get the
stakeholders involved of, you know, how do you use this function? Is there
anything that
we're not doing? Because I think for me, you know, coming out of a sales
background and
having working on the system side, you can make assumptions unintentionally
that, oh,
I know how dial pad works or I know how X software works. And so I know how we
use it.
We dial the numbers and we make calls. But it's like, well, yeah, but how do
you segment
those and how do you bucket these and how do you record, you know, the messages
and
where do those go? Where's that data stored? And you have to ask those types of
questions.
And I think that that was one of the big learning lessons of as we're going
into more projects,
it's really getting the stakeholders involved that are like the users very,
very early and
taking like deep dive upon deep dive to really understand the ins and outs of
what makes someone
successful in their day to day with the current tool. And then how is that
going to translate
because there's going to be times where you have to say, this is not important
to us in
the future and we're willing to sacrifice that functionality for something else
. But you need
to make those decisions intentionally, as opposed to saying like, Oh, shoot, we
didn't
think about that and it's too late now. Right. And then you're like kind of
stuck in a rock
in a hard place.
I love that that's really cool. And it's such such great advice. Do you have
any other
sort of rev ops problems that little fires, do you even putting out that you
want to talk
about at all or? Yeah, I think like one that I would suspect is a very common
theme amongst
rev ops leaders. And I've been on a few rev ops training classes and different
things
like that. And you kind of start to hear these common themes. And the big one
is always like
the data, right? Where is the data? How does it live? What is painting the
story that you
need to make a good decision? Right. And I think that what happens sometimes is
we think
we're making a good decision, but it's predicated on bad information. And that
ends up being
just a bad decision at the end of the day. And so one of those things that you
're always
or we're always trying to figure out. And again, I don't think that this is
like uncommon,
although it's maybe not talked about is, you know, what is your source of truth
? What is
your source of truth? Not only that you align to as rev ops, but maybe
marketing ops, maybe
your finance teams, you have to have this this piece where everyone's looking
at data. But
if you're you're looking at data and it's just sliced a little bit differently,
or it's
maybe the same data, but with just a little bit of a twist that's slightly
different,
it's actually different. Right. And that can cause problems. And so those are
the things
where we've been actually really going through and being intentional of align
ing across all
of the teams and saying, what are the pieces that are feeding our data sets
across every
single team that's going to be using it? And then also making sure that as we
look at
that, that we're evaluating what is like, what is our source of truth? Because
other
thing too is with any company that's growing quickly, somebody built something
two years
ago, the data has since changed or the method in getting that data has since
changed and
that person's left. So they didn't update the dashboard. Nobody did right. So
it's just
making sure like, you know, Hey, if this person leaves, here's all the things
that they've
built. And this is what we need to do to make sure that these things are
accurate at all
times. So that way we're not making bad decisions unintentionally.
It was one of the things we thought about for the show of like making a segment
called
like data lies. I was like, where's the piece of information that you found
that actually
didn't tell the truth? Yeah, I did dig in further or something. But yeah, it's
a it's
fun. I mean, we're so data driven now. And that's not a bad thing or so data
driven.
But like you said, sometimes you draw the wrong conclusions because of how you
set up
the inputs.
Yeah, and it doesn't take much, right? It can literally just be like one filter
out of
10. That's different. And that just changes everything just enough to make a
huge difference
for you.
Any rev oops moments or mistakes that you want to share? I'll go back to what I
said,
like, what was one of the biggest problems, right? Again, kind of going back to
this idea
of this project of moving changing systems. I think just again, looking back at
it, had
I been able to better deep dive and really understand the ins and outs, it
would have
made not only the process smoother for me, but it would have made it smoother
for our
sales teams. And I think like that's the piece that is like the rev oops is
sometimes
you forget that in rev ops, it's not just you or your team that gets affected.
It's like
the end sales rep that's like three steps down from you. That is like having a
really
tough time because something wasn't communicated to them properly or well. And
I think these
things are always going to happen. It's just part of like being in a business
that's moving
at an incredible pace. But you have to be honest with yourself and be willing
at least
to step back and say, okay, this person's coming to me. And what I used to find
is I
would get like kind of offended by it or like put off right where I'd be like,
you know,
why are you asking me this? Like I can't control everything. But then I have to
also
be willing to step back and say, you know what, you're right, I can't control
everything.
But what could I have done differently that would have helped this person not
have a crap
day? And so I think like it's it's just being aware that sometimes our actions
and rev
ops have ripple effects that can go down pretty deep. And just being willing to
like, even
when you have those, be willing to go like talk to someone and say, Hey, I made
this
thing, it hurt your team. Let me get on a call with your team, explain why we
did what
we did, try to like smooth it over and just be willing to like have those
relationships
and those conversations with people. And I found that when I make those
mistakes or when
I've had situations that just were like awkward or maybe not handled. Awesome.
On the first
try, feeling willing to go have a conversation with a team, an individual, et c
etera. And
just be honest, Hey, I totally didn't think about this. Or, you know, we did
this for
this reason, but that reason wasn't communicated to you properly. So that was
the miss. It's
not that the decision was bad or the implementation was bad. It was just that
like we we missed
this final step. And I wanted to own that. And I find that people tend to be
really receptive
to that. And you know, very forgiving. Okay, let's get to our next segment, the
tool shed,
we're talking tools, spreadsheets, metrics, just like everyone's favorite tool
qualified,
no B2B tool shed is complete without qualified go to qualified calm right now
and check them
out Adam, what's in your tool shed?
Well, like I mentioned, we are one of our biggest users in the world, which is
pretty
cool. So from the size of our sales team to the amount of automations that we
use, like
at any given point, we'll have somewhere between 2500 and 3000 automations
pumping through our
account that are live. So we we use our tool on a very high, high level for our
own purposes.
So active campaign is the number one tool that we use day in and day, I know
that obviously,
of course, like you all use it a ton, but you're also the best at it. So I'm
curious, like,
when you say that number of automate, I mean, that's like, that's a huge number
That's a huge amount. You know, and I know you have like, you know, way over
100,000
plus customers and all that sort of stuff. But like, what is in all those autom
ations?
You guys are breaking in the bite size chunks. So it's not just rev ops. It's
our education team
and our marketing team and our, I mean, we send things to internal people,
right? It's all of
those those pieces put together. The thing that I find really fascinating about
marketing automation
tools as a whole, right? So let's be agnostic to active campaign for just a
second is that a lot
of users, when they hear marketing automation, they think, Oh, that sends email
. If you were to
break down, let's just say 2000 automations, and you were to break those down,
probably only about
a couple dozen to a couple hundred of them, right? If you so we'll say a higher
dozen. So one to 200
send emails, maybe 10%. The rest are actually doing a lot of work behind the
scenes to manage our data,
to build funnels for our sales teams, to correct things. When mistakes happen,
like,
there's a lot going on behind the scenes. And that is where that number really
grows,
because you might have a lot of like micro automations, which is an Adam Tuttle
original
coin term, but micro automations that really are there just to do like one very
simple task,
like, Oh, this happened at a tag. You know, and so there's a lot of those. And
when you stack them
up, then you get thousands. So yeah, what's an example of that that like
something happened at
a tag? I'll actually give one. This is like one that I set up in all my
personal accounts. And I
always have told customers since back in my sales days to set up right away for
themselves. So for
anyone listening, again, doesn't matter the system that you're using, you
should be doing this.
One of the big things as you talked about is metrics, right? Data is really
important.
Inactive campaign, for instance, what I will do is I set up an automation that
says any time that
someone opens an email, update a last open date field to today's date. And I do
the same thing for
link clicks. And I usually do the same thing for site visits. So that's a one
step automation.
It's literally like someone clicks a link update that link click field to today
's date.
What that allows me to do though is say, Oh, hey, I've been sending emails and
this person,
I know that on average, I send, let's say, six emails a month. It's been two
months. This person
has an open a single one by sending it to the same people over and over and
over again that
don't open that's going to hurt my deliverability over time. So I'm going to
actually push them off
of the list, or maybe even send them an email that says, Hey, it doesn't seem
like you're interested
anymore. I'm going to remove you from my list. But if you want to come back,
here's a form of how to
resubscribe. And I can do the same thing for link clicks. Like if you're a
business that's really
trying to drive revenue off of link clicks, I can e-commerce store or something
like that.
If you have someone that has opened a hundred emails, a hundred out of a
hundred, but they've
never clicked on a single link, that's maybe not a high value customer. Maybe
you need to target
them through something like Instagram or something else. Like you need to find
another medium because
the email piece isn't working for you. And so I think sometimes it's just those
really simple
things. It's a trigger and a one action step. It takes about five minutes to
build,
less if you know what you're doing. And that can be a pivotal data point for
your business. So it's
looking for those things that can really add value off of very simple steps.
That's awesome.
Thanks. Yes. So where are the rest of your sales marketing and your CS people
living and what metrics
matter to you, what metrics matter to them? We use looker and like snowflake to
you, you know,
manage our data and then look at it helps aggregate that and make it pretty.
That's probably where
a lot of those teams tend to live. It's taking data out of our tools, whether
it be, you know,
we have some homegrown systems that do a lot of our processing for billing and
different things
like that and connecting that data to data inside of the CRM. So if I think
about it from like a
rev ops perspective, it's looking at things like, okay, how many trials came in
and how many deals
did we create out of those trials for our SDR team to try to qualify? If we see
a huge gap,
because we know that we only strip out a very few, you know, small amount of
potential opportunities,
like, you know, we don't let anything that has an active campaign email address
go through as like
an opportunity for a rep to work, right? That doesn't make any sense. So we
take those out,
but we should have like a very small margin of, it should be basically the same
. And so we're always
looking at things like that, you know, looking at how many, especially on the
sales side, looking at
how many people are progressing through the pipeline, like what are our
qualification rates?
What are the things that we're doing? And I would say that that actually is
similar to what marketing
is doing as well, right? Again, we talked about this relationship with
marketing ops rev ops,
at least in the context of active campaign, marketing is the one driving those
trials.
But if none of their trials are converting to leads, then that's a problem for
them as well. It's
not just something that matters to sales. Where we probably get in the weeds a
little bit more is
looking at like the processes that we've built around for our sales teams to do
, such as,
hey, we want you to have X amount of touch points before you close loss to deal
, something like that,
right? Marketing doesn't so much care about how many touch points we have
because they've
trusted us to take care of our processes and manage the sales team. So I think
that it's very
relational. It's usually like, you know, it's like just the next step in the
chain, right? They're
looking at like, okay, we've generated this many leads. You've got this many
conversion rates.
If we're seeing a dip in those conversion rates, they probably will come to
sales and be like,
hey, what's going on? Why are you seeing this tip? But they also are looking at
it from the context
of, are these leads still relevant? Are we making sure that we're not just
sending it through garbage,
right? Like they want to make sure that they're not giving us things that are
poor leads.
And so it's that relational communication back and forth of, you know, those
are the things that
really matter and how we address them. Gosh, I love it. I mean, that's one of
those things that
you could endlessly kind of tinker and fiddle with because, you know, you have,
hey, this sales rep,
you know, has sent five straight emails, no response. And marketing is like, I
don't know,
they read every one of my marketing emails and they click around a bunch, you
know, and so you're
like, right, that person is a very different person from, hey, the sales person
sent five straight
emails. And they haven't been reading or clicking on any emails or they haven't
engaged with the
website or they haven't done whatever. And like, that's the sort of stuff where
it's,
it's so interesting to say like, hey, they still are consuming what we're doing
, but clearly they
just ain't ready to buy it. Yeah, I think like when again, you know, when we
look at like the
tool shed analogy, right, you kind of often use a lot of the same tools.
Obviously marketing has
some that are very special to them, like what they use to drive their SEO or
different things
like that. I don't really know anything about that, nor do I get involved in
that. That's not my
my field of expertise. Yeah, I don't do anything with the SEO side.
Oh, yeah, that's just an interesting thing to note that like kind of where you
set sort of like,
you know, are you the tool master of all of these sort of things of anything
revenue related versus
your specifics and that stuff. So that's that's interesting. Yeah, I think that
that stems from
like what I mentioned earlier is how active campaigns rev ops team was kind of
created out of a sales
ops probably foundation or that's where it came from. And so we do manage the
tools for sales.
So things like LinkedIn navigator licenses or, you know, dial pad, different
things like that.
And then we work collaboratively with tools like looker, snowflake, etc, to get
all the data.
But we don't manage the tools that are outside of really outside of the sales
work at this point.
I think again, we're now looking at, okay, we've kind of gotten to this place
where things are
going well. But if we were to make a more centralized ops team or begin to
centralize our process is
a bit more, can we enhance what we're doing? Can we, you know, and we have to
ask those questions,
like you can't just be complacent with where you're at because the market
changes so fast.
The the markets always evolving. And we've seen, especially in the last two and
a half years,
that things can shift literally overnight and change almost instantly depending
on your region
or globally. Right. And so what we have to do is be always continually
evaluating ourselves on
is what we're doing today. The very best thing for us to be doing. And that's
how you grow.
Are you a spreadsheet person? I like to look at spreadsheets. I'm not great at
building spread
sheets. And I would say like for me, what I try to do is we have several
analysts on our team
that are excellent. And I work with them to define what we need, what reports I
'm looking to get,
right, how those need to look and feel. And then I work with them to build out
what we need so that
we can be up to date and current on things at all times and make sure that we
do. I have a few
things that I look at, you know, quite a bit, especially like with, again,
related to trials
and conversion rates and different things like that. That's something that we
were constantly
paying attention to. But I allow them, the analysts that are really skilled at
in the
the spreadsheets to build what they need to build. And then I am lucky enough
to be able to
digest that data and try to make decisions off of it. Have you noticed
something in the pipeline
that wasn't working and that you had to kind of go about kind of digging in
doing the research and
fixing it? There definitely have been at different times, one from a few years
ago. This was an
early day. So I was still a director of sales, but at that team, our ops org
was like two people,
right? So when there was a problem from my side of the house on the director of
sales side, like,
I was involved in it. And having been at AC for so long, I tend to just like
get my hands into the
weeds. And basically what was happening is I had a two week span where there
were no deals coming to
my team, for whatever reason. And at first, I was thinking that in Australia,
where I was living at
the moment, the Christmas holiday, like the country effectively shuts down. So
I think that it's,
I was like, Oh, maybe it's just because everyone's going on holiday. And then I
was like,
Hmm, this feels off. And so what we had to do is go look through what were the
reasons for
that? What was the routing? And then we went through our automations. And I
think like this is the
piece of rev ops, right? That can be applied to a lot of things is when you
have a problem,
you have to be able to quickly identify what tools could be causing that
problem. Right? So if data
is not appearing properly, you can say, well, is my data not refreshing? Maybe
the data is there,
but it's just not refreshing. If you can rule that out, then pretty quickly you
can recognize
that you actually have a tool problem that you need to address. And in our case
, because I,
like I said, we use a lot of automations, we are constantly watching our autom
ations to make sure
that they're functioning properly, that they're putting people through them
properly, that our
routing is going where we want it to go, and that there's, you know, something
didn't break. Like,
again, we use our own tool pretty aggressively. And so we have to constantly be
watching
the different things that we have in place within our own system, just to make
sure that
everything is going right, or that someone didn't make a change and forget to
take like, you know,
we had one similar thing just a while back where luckily it was kind of small
potatoes. It didn't
really impact things. But someone said, Hey, man, like, I'm not getting what I
need. And we realized
that when someone was changing in automation, they put a wait step in at the
top will often do that
just to prevent people from flowing through while we're like working on things.
And they forgot to
remove the wait step. So everything went through everything corrected itself.
But there is this
like four hour gap where everyone's like, Hey, nothing's coming through to us.
And so, you know,
again, we were able to fix it, but we had to know where to look. And that was
really like the key,
the key of that piece.
Any other just like blind spots with data or something that you wish you could
be measuring
better, or maybe a tool that you're going to start messing with here coming up
or anything
that you'd like to prove? Yeah, I think for us, and this goes back to when I
talked about like
building the relationship with operations, especially related to marketing, is
one of the
things that we've realized as we've built this relationship, and especially
over the last 12
months, is that sometimes marketing says one thing. Revop says the other thing,
they kind of mean
the same thing, but they use different terminology or, you know, they might use
a different tag
inside of an automation that's just slightly different or a different field to
be updated,
right? And again, you're kind of getting to the same result at the end of the
day.
But I think one of the things that we're really trying to work on is creating
this unified like
language for operational teams within our company. And that can be like from
again, how the data
is used, what tables are used, it could be your tagging mechanisms or naming
conventions.
It could be even things like how do you build an automation and title it so you
know which team
owns it and who is the last person to edit it. And those are the types of
things that we're like,
if I look at the next coming 12 months, that's one of those areas that, you
know, there's been a
tremendous amount of work done, but there's still a lot to go. And it's worth
it though, like the
alignment is only continuing to gain momentum. And that's really exciting. And
so what we're doing
is trying to look at ways, okay, how do again, this talks about like bringing
in your stakeholders,
right? Yes, I could go through and I could just say, okay, here's all my source
fields.
I'm going to like put those in place, easy peasy marketing has their source
fields. Well,
if there's not alignment, then we're our data is now skewed, right? So then we
have bad data.
And so it's really making sure that, okay, hey, we're going to do an audit
together.
We're going to go through this and we're going to agree that nothing changes in
this,
unless like we again, mutually exclusively agree together as a team that we're
going to be
willing to make that change. And I think that that's really important. Or if I
add something new,
where do I record that? And what we would see is again, marketing had their
documents,
their Google Docs that they recorded their stuff in, we had ours. And now we've
had to,
we've brought those together. And then therefore we have a much more unified
approach and we don't
waste time, you know, just talking to each other and trying to figure out like
where we went wrong.
All right, let's get to our quick hits. These are quick questions and quick
answers.
Adam, are you ready? I'm beyond ready. If you could make any animal any size,
what would it be?
I would make a blue whale able to fit in my fish tank. That's a good one.
You have a bigger rev ops misconception that rev ops means one thing and that
every company
does it the same way. Do you have a favorite movie character of all time?
Ooh, John Wick without a doubt. If you could have a superpower, what would it
be?
I'm going to go with the classic of flying. I think that would be just
unbelievable.
Do you have a best concert that you've ever been to? Yes, ironically, it was
Josh Groban back in
college, but unbelievable musician and an unbelievable concert at the XL Energy
Center in Minneapolis.
If you were sitting right here for our next interview with a fellow rev ops
leader like yourself,
what would be something that you would ask him? How do you buy in from key
executive stakeholders?
So I'm talking like your C-suites and above quickly. How do you get buy in?
I usually slack our owner and complain to him. If you're being an employee
number nine,
I suppose there. No, I don't actually do that. That's not the right way to do
it. That was a
bit facetious. I think that it starts with trust. When you go to an executive,
they have to believe
in your brand enough to hear what you're saying. And if you say that something
's urgent,
because, and you need to be able to back it up, but you can't just go off of
guts. My gut says that
things are about to explode. You have to be able to show the why, but they have
to believe in you
enough to be able to take it seriously. And I think that building trust is like
Lynch, Pinn, critical, the most important thing that you can possibly do as a
rev ops leader
with both directions. You have to build trust. What advice would you give to
someone who's
newly leading a rev ops team? I think it would be to stay humble and get
involved with groups.
There's a couple. I go through a group called say with sales assembly. I take
some of their
classes. They have monthly meetups for rev ops leaders. I try to participate in
those from I
can and just listen, right? I think that I've learned a lot on those calls, not
because of the
brilliant things that were being said by maybe a speaker, although some of them
have been truly
brilliant. But it's also listening to my peers. And I would say that like, if
someone's brand new,
the more that you can get involved with other people and other businesses, one
is going to
foster ideas. You're going to hear that one sentence or that one phrase that
you're like,
Oh, that totally makes sense. And that's why we've been having this problem. Or
it might say,
Hmm, in a future state, we need to get to where we have like a really kick butt
deals desk. And
that's something I haven't thought about before. So I think it's just building
those peer groups
getting involved with groups on LinkedIn, etc. And that'll take care of a lot
of your woes.
Adam, it's been awesome having you on the show. Anything that I missed,
obviously our listeners
should check out active campaign and go to active campaign dot com to learn
more. But yeah,
anything I missed anything to plug? I don't think so. I think just the last
thing that I would state
is really figuring out your tool set and sometimes realizing that the
complicated answer isn't
necessarily the best answer, right? And I'll give you a really simple example
of that as my
parting words. But one of the things that we've realized right is like we can
utilize Zapier a
lot of times to send data back and forth. And so for instance, when we need to
do big data sets
and upload data into our CRM, it's often better for us to go through an API.
And we can do that
via Zapier without too much coding. I don't have to get a developer involved. I
've got a guy on my
team that knows API is enough to like make it work. We grab the data, we put it
into a spreadsheet,
it uploads, we can catch all of our failures instantly. We can correct a men
data, which is
fantastic. And Zapiers are really simple tool to use, right? And it's really
powerful. And so for us,
I could go the route of, man, I need a tool that does this and I need a
developer to build it to
me. Well, one that takes away resources from the company from other projects.
And two, for a couple
hundred bucks a month or however much Zapier costs, I'm sure we pay more than a
couple hundred. But
you get the point for a small fee, certainly cheaper than a developer, I can
have things built
for me that I can implement same day most of the time. And that to me is worth
like speed is of
the essence. So I try to find a simple solution and make sure that I'm not over
complicating thing
because I tend to get shiny objects and drums. So I, that's a fancy new toy.
And I just did this
and it will all work perfectly. And sometimes like the answers right under your
nose and it's
not shiny, but it's it works. I love it. Great. Great advice and final thoughts
, Adam.
You're awesome. Thanks so much for giving your time and we'll talk soon.
Thank you so much. Take care.
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