Back to the Data Basics
Mindy Fields, VP of Global Sales Operations and Enablement at LastPass, shares how RevOps and sales should work together.
[Music]
Welcome to Rise of RevOps. I'm Ian Faison, CEO of Caspian Studios.
This show is presented by Qualified, go to Qualified.com to learn more.
Mindy, how are you?
I am doing great on this particular Friday. How are you, Ian?
I'm doing great as well. I don't know when our listeners are going to be
listening,
but I hope that whatever day it is is a great day for you.
And we're here on a Friday. It's a great day to talk RevOps.
Super excited to learn about all the cool stuff you're doing at LastPass,
and of course your background. So how did you get into RevOps in the first
place?
When I was younger, I always had, I don't want to say an obsession,
but I always liked numbers. I was like being able to play around with numbers.
When I was younger, I really wanted to do forensic accounting.
But it was something that I just thought would be super cool to dive into
understanding the
business finances where the money was going and how individuals could take
money from a business
to be able to help stop it. As I started going down that path,
I actually ended up switching gears and going into marketing analytics.
So I ended up working for an organization that focused on education and
advertising,
and they were kind of a full-scale advertising company.
Within that, I really learned that you could do a lot of fun stuff with a
marketing team,
which really fit my personality, as well as being able to play around with
numbers
and really grew my career from that. And then it was about 10 years ago now,
I started an analytics manager gig, and that really took over from the sales
ops perspective.
And then once I went to a sales kickoff, I mean, I loved sales, so count my
people.
That's kind of how it stuck. So that's how I got into it.
And flash forward to today. Tell us about your role at LastPass.
So my role here at LastPass is a little bit too fold, I will say, at this exact
moment.
So part of the role is supporting our sales organization. That is things around
helping them
with their productivity, providing visibility into the metrics of the leading
and lagging
indicators of performance to help drive them to close deals, as well as working
with cross-functional
teams to make sure that the sales team has what they need for support. So
product marketing,
focusing on competitive intelligence of our competitors and what's out there.
And how do we sell best against them or using that information? We also work
with the finance
team and the sales force administration team or business applications. Try to
make the systems
what they need to be so that sales can get their jobs an easier, quicker, less
hurdles to kind of
get through from the business perspective. And then as well as that here at
LastPass,
we are going through a carve out from the organization of GoTo. So with that,
we are also
building brand new systems, including our CRM, which is almost like a second
day job in and of
itself. Yeah, only that really is. That's exciting. Super, super interesting.
And we'll get into that
here in a little bit. What's your definition of rev-ops? Rev-ops to me is
different than sales
operations. So you'll hear me say, I am definitely sales operations. My mind
always is focused on
the sales organization first. Certainly, of course, always thinking about the
company as well,
but how to support sales. Rev operations to me is really after that contract is
in the hand of
its sales team member. And they are really helping after that contract is
signed. How do we bill?
What are regulations that we have? They're really focused on the after effect.
But LastPass does
separate that out today. So our sales organization or sales operations
organization reports into
our CRO and Rev Operations reports into the CFO. Definitely a little bit more
finance driven
from that perspective. So interesting. I mean, we have this conversation all
the time on the
show primarily what we talk about of where does rev-ops live and how does it
live and what is it
tied to and all that. So very interesting sort of distinction there. And is
that, you know, I know
in previous roles, is that something that's been different every time, I'd
imagine? It has been.
For the most part, though, it has reported into a CRO. And I think as the
organizations have gotten
bigger in my experience is when they really roll sales operations and revenue
operations into one
versus having them separated. That's not to say that's rule thumb or how most
companies do it.
But in my experience, typically as the organization has gotten bigger, they end
up moving it into one
and moving operations in general under the CFO up until they have a COO.
And you talked a little bit about organization, but how is your rev-ops team or
sales-ops team a
little different? How do you think about organization for maybe not just for
your company, but just in
general, how would you organize a rev-ops team? I think that there are really
five arms to a sales
operations team. A large piece of it is around analytics. So being able to
share visibility into
the metrics of the organization as well as the performance metrics of our sales
team members.
So that way they understand how they're being measured. So that way they can
continue to perform
and the leadership has the ability to coach them as well. And the more
visibility that you give
into analytics, I think that really drives more of the behavior that we intend
to see.
Another piece of sales-ops would be our tech stack. So the tools that we use
or that we expect our sales team members to use that are really outside of the
CRM. So our CRM
that we use today and that I use pretty consistently is the biggest name,
probably Salesforce.
But it's the tools that you work with outside of Salesforce. So prospecting
tools like outreach
or LinkedIn Navigator tools like Calendly. So I think that's a big piece of it
as well.
We also have enablement that I think is part of sales operations or could also
live separate
from sales-ops. But that is really what is training our sales organization,
trying to make it in a
way where they can learn as well as understanding the knowledge gaps we have
within sales. And so
you can go through an onboarding experience, but maybe you're not picking up
some of the
information that's needed. A big piece of enablement too is understanding what
those knowledge gaps
are, having that supporting training for those team members that maybe didn't
pick up on the
initial because everybody learns differently. The last two pieces are kind of
one and the same,
but a little bit differently focused on where they support. So last pass and
some of my other
experiences as well has focused on sales as well as the partner team. So part
of sales operations
is the true sales-ops perspective and the partner-ops perspective, which is
really helping with the
day-to-day of the sales and the partner organization. Helping with data hygiene
, helping commissions
and questions that the sales team has. I mean, it's really my opinion outside
of analytics,
one of the best parts because within sales, you never know what questions you
're going to get.
But when you ended up being that trusted partner with a sales organization,
everything comes through your desk. So you're constantly learning something new
, which is
one of the things that I really love. And the other things that unique or
things that have
changed in the last six months or anything top of mind there with regards to
organization or strategy?
Yeah, I would say like I could also share part of it too is making sure that
you are collaborating
across the organization. So much of what we do within rev operations or sales
operations
is absolutely just driving the strategy of the sales organization or of the
company and trying
to align everyone across the organization. Okay, let's get to our first segment
, rev-opsicles.
We talked about the tough parts of rev-ops. What's the hardest sales-ops
problem that you
faced in the last six months, how did you solve it? This is a good way. Very
circumstantial at this
moment. So remember how I told you we were going through a carve out of go to?
That has probably been
one of the most difficult things, but more specifically around time management.
Because when
you are truly doing ultimately two jobs, trying to maintain the day to day of
our sales organization
and still providing the support that they require and need, as well as building
out all of the new
systems, it is so difficult to try to manage the day. I think one of the best
ways that I could say
around how am I solving it or at least actively solving it still to this day is
communicating
and over communicating with my peers, as well as my cross-functional teams.
There are certain
weeks that we will have through the carve out where we're going through data
validation.
And as you can imagine, data validation is never a fun experience. It's a lot
of excel spreadsheets,
it's a lot of pulling information and validating that it was mapped correctly
and that all the
information came over as you'd anticipate. Sharing these weeks are going to be
really tough on our
sales apps team. And my peers have been really amazing to back off for those
particular weeks to
say, you know what, we are going to reduce the number of requests that we have
for your team,
or we're going to take meetings off of your calendar that you don't need to be
a part of,
at least for that time. So being able to share that information and being able
to know that your
peers are supporting you and respecting you through that has been really
helpful. But I imagine if
you're not sharing that information, like, hey, we're going to be overwhelmed,
this is upcoming,
this is happening, then nobody knows what's going on in your day today if you
're not expressing that
to them. We've also relied on other teams throughout the organization as well.
So when we are getting
overloaded, we'll reach out to product marketing or sales leadership and say,
look, like, can you
help in this area? Because we are falling behind or we need some support here.
And everybody has
really stepped up to be able to help our sales apps team to be able to be
successful in our day
today and in the car valve. Any rev oops moments for you in the past, either
for this or something
else? I don't think I've ever heard it called rev oops before. So that's pretty
good. I actually
thought it was a misspelling when I saw some of the questions that could come
up during this.
Oh, funny. I see. Here you actually say that. I think in a career, you have a
lot of oopsie
daisies that can't transpire. And it's really how you learn from them and what
you do from that. So
one of the ones that I can think about is actually specifically around enable
ment. So enablement
will end up doing live trainings for your sales organizations. Sometimes that's
in person. Now
a day is it's also, of course, done virtually. And we do them pretty often. One
time though,
we had a presenter that I had never actually seen present. This individual is
like,
absolutely would love to present will be great at it. I saw their presentation
deck looked great.
It looked like it was going to be way more focused on really hearing the person
. So the slides were
more picturesque, not a lot of words. So I was like, this is going to be great.
They're going to talk,
they're going to be engaging, but never actually saw them present before. Come
the day of the
presentation and we get into the training. I don't know how else to say it
other than the whole thing
kind of fell flat within the first 10 minutes. You saw people on their phones,
you saw people
giggling, people pulling out laptops, like just the presenter had an inability
to hold the attention
and more importantly, had an inability of delivering the message, which is
absolutely what you need
to do. So learned very quickly from that experience that we have to always see
the presenter present.
And now I've started to build out and have used in my career as well a way to
see here's kind of
like a list of all the things that I would expect this presenter to do. Basic
things, can they hold
eye contact? Are they engaging? Do they have energy? So something about the way
that they present,
but then also if you're trying to train a team, what are the takeaways that we
want them to have?
Did the team actually understand what happened? And here's like a little quiz
or something afterwards
or even doing live questions to make sure that you're keeping engagement as
well.
So it's definitely an area where I was disappointed in what happened, but we'll
certainly never
let it happen again. All right, let's get to our next segment, the tool shit.
We're talking
tools, spreadsheets, metrics, just like everyone's favorite tool, qualified,
they'll be to be
tool shit is complete without qualified. Go to qualified.com right now and
check them out. And
they're the best. They've been with us since the beginning of the show and they
're awesome. So
go to qualified.com right now. Mindy, what is in your tool shit?
Oh, man, we have a pretty good tech stack for our sales organization. So first
and foremost is our
CRM, which of course is sales force. We also use the prospecting tool of
outreach. We also have
gone and we use that a lot for recording calls as a way for coaching and as a
way for building
training. So we can get really into the weeds when we hear calls that go really
well from SES.
We also use Clary from a forecasting perspective, which sits inside of sales
force partner tap.
So partner tap is one that I actually haven't really used before, but it is one
that LastPass
has. And it's definitely a really great tool if your organization is working
with partners.
So partner tap connects into your CRM and lets you know of the partners that
are out there that
also use partner tap, which customers do they have? So that way if you're
prospecting into a
particular customer and you have a relationship with a particular partner, do
you have a relationship
with this customer? So that's a really good tool. And then my last favorite
tool, which I think
every organization should have is Power BI. I am in love with Power BI. It is
one of my most
favorites and it works directly with Excel. So here at LastPass, we are in the
process of building
out Power BI and we're working with a contracting company called Jinton BI. And
I have been thoroughly
impressed with what they've been able to build for us. They build beautiful
dashboards, which of
course our executive team and our leadership team loves to be able to access
because it makes it
super simple to see the information. But for the individual analysts as a user,
you get to use it
as if it's Excel. So you can create a pivot table from using the core model or
you can also create
your own spreadsheet that is essentially formulas from Excel, but they're cute
formulas. And it
refreshes within seconds. Like it's truly one of my favorite tools. I could not
do my day job without
it. How did you do implementation of Power BI? You mentioned it as some pretty
cool partner there.
Yeah, so implementation, we'd actually scoped out a couple of different tools
to see what would be
best for us. Certainly in my experience, you can tell I already love Power BI.
So it was a no-brainer
for me, but still wanted to do my due diligence to see what other tools would
be out there,
be best for us. And some of the other team members as well across the
organization was familiar with
Power BI, which makes it a bit easier. So then we go down the path of picking
out who's the best
contractor to be able to work with. When we got to Jit and BI, they already
knew so much about the
behind the scenes of Salesforce. So for them to connect into our CRM and build
just basic stats
that you always want to have from the RevOps or SalesOps perspective, it seems
to be something
that they're already highly experienced in. So when we're talking about close
rates, when we're
talking about pipeline creation, they already knew what was out there inside of
Salesforce.
So I think it took less than one month to have the full connection, our core
model,
all of that that we needed basic information built from Excel spreadsheets to
the dashboard.
It was one of the quickest implementations. What metrics matter to you?
Oh, I think from the SalesOps perspective, we have a lot of basic ones that
most people are
familiar with, which is attainment. So how are we performing against our
targets? Certainly,
it's targets from the revenue perspective, but also targets that we start with
from the year
to build out our metrics. So are we creating enough pipeline? Are we calling
enough customers,
emailing enough prospects? So all of those associated to attainment, but not
necessarily just revenue
itself. Just how are you performing against the targets that you expect?
Pipeline creation is
definitely a big one. If you're not creating the pipeline, then you don't have
pipeline to close.
So love being able to see that we are consistently creating pipeline.
Another one is close rates. So of the pipeline that we create, are we closing
it? Are we closing
it at the same speed that we've been closing before or not? So days to close as
well as part of that.
Also activities. So that's your emails, that's your meetings, that's your phone
calls. So how
often are you doing that and how many are you doing? And is that following our
standard expectation?
And then number of prospects that you're adding into outreach or into Sales
force to let us know
that you are actively going out and prospecting into your territory and adding
people into sequences.
I would also say a little bit behind the scenes. So all of that information we
also expect to share
within Salesforce, Dashboards, reports. It's very clear to our sales
organization what we're looking
at. I'd also say from the rev-ups perspective of trying to understand
performance of the business
and making sure we've got expectations from the finance side. I also really
appreciate doing
point in time, pipeline historical reporting as well. So what did we have going
into the quarter,
the beginning of Q2 this year versus what we had last year at the beginning of
Q2?
Did that go up or down and close rates associated to that as well? And then
forecasting. So you can
also use that point in time, pipeline reporting for understanding forecasting
of the business.
Not just the current quarter, but being able to look out the next quarter and
even into the year
as well. So that way you're understanding where we're sitting from the forecast
perspective versus
what our goals and expectations are. Any tools that you're thinking about
investing in or something
that you're excited about for the future? Tools that we would be investing in.
Or even topic areas,
not necessarily what the name of the tool is, but just. I feel like we just
went through buying
so many as an organization because LastPass is now standing up completely on
its own. So we went
through and scoped so many. I will say one of my favorites that we onboarded
that I had never
worked with before is ShowPad. So ShowPad is an enablement tool. It is your
learning content
and just your content management tool, which is really amazing. It's used for
our internal team
and we can share it out with our external team members. So our customers and
our partners,
and it's super simple to use. You have so much tracking and visibility into who
's using what.
So I've been loving ShowPad and brand new tool that I hadn't used prior to Last
Pass.
Any blind spots that you wish you could measure better? Blind spots. Man, you
're giving me some
do'sies. So today, I would think some of the blind spots are just the ability
to share everything
across our organization. So I don't necessarily feel like it's a complete blind
spot, but being
able to share something in real time to everyone else, I think, is a blind spot
. So I could be
talking about a particular metric and I know where it stands year to date and
quarter to date
because I've created a quick little pivot table. But being able to share that
out with everyone
else across our organization, that's probably the biggest blind spot, which
will be solved.
What's a carve out is complete. It's more of just the influx between systems
and sharing information
at the moment. What about spreadsheets? Are you a big spreadsheet fan or do you
hate them?
I am a huge spreadsheet fan and I am an individual that will still to this day
create my own spread
sheets constantly. Ones that I'll share out and ones that are just for me. I
love the roster
spreadsheet. It's probably my very first spreadsheet that I think is one of the
most important ones
predominantly because it's your baseline for all of your other reporting. And
when I think
about the roster, it holds information of when did a team member start? That
helps you understand,
like, if they're not closing the same amount of businesses, they're peer, well,
why is that?
Well, they've only been in the role for months. So that makes a little bit more
sense. The hierarchy
or your segment and region reporting, knowing where that team member sits
typically lives inside
of a roster somewhere. It's to say that this individual supports North America
and they're
within the SMB segment. You're able to get so much information just from the
roster itself,
as long as you've got one. Another one that I love is being able to see growth
within the
organization as well. Depending on how you're maintaining your roster, you can
see that the BDR
was promoted into an SMB team member, promoted into commercial, maybe switched
gears and then
popped over to operations here with us. You kind of see the growth of those
team members within the
roster spreadsheet as well. Another one would be our activity scorecard, which
is a lot of the
metrics that I shared earlier that we focused on. How are you performing
against targets?
Activities around calls, emails, all those basics. Are you creating pipeline?
What's your coverage
ratio? And then being able to stack, break that information as well as
everybody on sales loves
competition. So it might as well make it that way everybody has the ability to
get to number one or
wants to get to number one. And then the last one would be forecasting. I think
it's such an
important part of the organization to be able to know where we think our
quarter is going to end,
where we think our year is going to end. How's that measuring up against our
goals? And then where
are we falling short or where is our surplus to go and try to dive in and get
some more information
there? Anything that you're doing with data that has surprised you or is
particularly cool?
I think with data in general, I'm always about simple and basics. I think like
when you're working
with data, always have that unique identifier. It's one of the most important
things. So that way,
you're always able to connect information across the board. If you don't have a
way to do that,
then you're struggling to connect customer information to one information to
who closed
the opportunity. You always have to have a way to connect information back. And
I do think sometimes
as businesses grow, they forget that tiny piece of information that is so
critical to being able
to understand what's happening. Last question for our tool shed here. Any
spreadsheet tips?
When I think about unique identifiers, let's just stick with something simple.
VLOOKUPs.
I use VLOOKUPs every day all day. It's my whole life. It's the simplest thing.
It's something that
allows you to connect to that data associated to that unique identifier. So you
can pull multiple
pieces of information into one view. Same with pivot tables. While I do not
love pivot tables
for sharing out information, I think to be able to answer quick questions or
quickly understand
some insights, I'll typically start with a pivot table, but I will never
actually present a pivot
table as my final findings because I think that they are hideous. But I do
think that they're good
for quick analyzing. So that way, you know, weird to focus your attention and
then be able to dive
a little bit deeper. Final thoughts on any tool stuff? I would say a final
thought around a tool,
which actually sounds kind of weird, but it's your team. Your team is a
resource that we have,
and the team that you have is so incredibly important. And being able to
empower your team
members to go out and help the sales organization to be involved the more they
know, the better
resources we have across the board. Wonderful. Okay, let's get to our final
segment. Quick
hits. Quick questions, quick answers, quick hits.
And here you go. Let's do it. Number one, if you could make any animal, any
size, what animal
would it be and what size? I would make an ant massive. Like, I think an ant
should be the size
of an elephant, mostly because like, don't you think it'd be kind of funny to
see them running
around on their legs and trying to burrow underground? Like, I think that'd be
pretty entertaining at
the zoo. Just picking up like cars. Yeah. Well, elephants don't really do that.
And they could,
they've got the trunk to be able to do it. True. Do you have a
rev-ops misconception? I think from the sales side thinking of ops, we're not,
I feel like sales
always thinks that we are the commission's team. And that's not necessarily the
case. I also think
too that that sales believes that we are the business applications team. Like,
I can go
create development all the sudden inside of sales force. And that is not
necessarily the case.
I also think from the ops to sales perspective, numbers are not every single
thing. So why we
drive a lot of information from numbers, the context always has to be there.
And oftentimes,
ops will not know the context every time. So I think it's super important to
remember
that you have to have those conversations with others regardless of what the
numbers are saying.
What is your favorite podcast TV show movie or thing that you're checking out
recently?
Favorite? Well, right now I'm following succession because it's in its final
season. And I love it.
I also always have modern family in the background of anything because I think
Phil Dumphey is one
of the funniest people of all times. And it makes me still laugh out loud no
matter how many times
I've seen an episode. What's your best advice for someone who's newly leading a
rev ops or a sales
ops team? I would say listen, hear what people are telling you. Understand the
company. Not every
company is exactly the same. Yes, some of the stats are the same, but don't
make assumptions
around the data. Understand where the company is and what their successes are,
what their challenges
are, who are the people that you need to connect with? What are their standard
operating cadences
so that you can get involved? Don't rush in and make a ton of assumptions
around something.
Just sit back here, listen, and you'll be able to quickly tell where you can go
and make an impact.
Mindy, awesome having you on the show. For listeners, you can go check out Last
Pass,
go to lastpass.com. Any final thoughts? Anything to plug? Nope, just Jitten BI.
Everybody should
be calling them. Great Power BI company. I love them. That's awesome. Well, we
really appreciate it.
Thanks so much. Take care. Thank you.
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>> Thank you.
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