Breaking Down Department Silos
On this episode, Matt talks about avoiding department silos, the importance of being prescriptive, and his secret sauce for success in RevOps.
Welcome to Rise of RevOps.
I'm the Faze on CEO of Cast Meon Studios.
And today I am joined by a special guest, Matt.
How are you?
I'm Duke Eddy.
And how you doing?
Excited to have you on the show.
Excited to chat revops, or perhaps some other terms
that we will talk about later in the show.
And all the cool stuff that you are doing at Bombora.
So let's get into it.
What does Bombora do?
And who do you sell to?
Yeah, so we are in the intent data space.
We essentially are helping sales and marketing teams
align on what companies may be in the market for their solutions
or their competitors.
So we help you sell to who wants to buy you a lot faster.
And you have a new role.
So tell me a little bit about what you do.
Yeah, so I am the VP of Sales and CX Operations for Bombora.
My team supports all three of our business units,
our agency business, our publisher and co-op business,
as well as our direct sales units.
And everything, reporting and dashboarding, tools and systems.
If it touches Salesforce, we're going to be involved.
If it's part of the tech stack, we're going to be involved.
And then one big thing that we're pushing now
is scalability and repeatability, sales process,
renewal process, things of that nature.
And how big is the team?
How big is the company?
Yeah, so we're just under 250 employees.
In our ops team, we've got five.
So that's myself, a dedicated CX operations person.
It's actually a former CSM that's been invaluable
in helping us design some of those processes.
We have a full-time analyst and then a full-time systems
admin that supports all of our systems that touch Salesforce.
And then we have an admin that's kind of a jokingly
called the puppet master occasionally,
because if it's coming into Salesforce or it's data being
ingested, it's going to come through.
And do you feel like RevOps is unique in your organization?
How does it compare to other RevOps teams, do you think?
Yeah, I think you see a couple different schools
at that, where you can just slap a RevOps title
on everyone in ops and hope that that leader knows sales
and marketing.
When I came into Bumbora, we had RevOps titles,
but they were very focused.
Where I think some of our RevOps folks
were marketing-specific, some were sales-specific,
and then you had a couple.
I think they were kind of in between.
So what we've learned from our uniqueness
is we don't necessarily need to be--
it's not about reporting line, it's not about title.
It's how do sales and marketing need to interact?
And how can we improve those processes,
the data management and hygiene?
Processes and tools like Outreach,
where maybe that's not somewhere where marketing lives,
but we can be taking some of our marketing strategy
and building it into those tools to help that alignment
between sales and marketing.
So I think for us, it was unique, and we had the titles,
but we didn't quite do RevOps where today,
myself and my counterpart shout out to Dave Kennedy,
who's our VP of marketing ops,
where he and I work side by side
in making sure that when we're addressing problems
that are going to be cross-functional,
that we're doing that together and not in silos.
- And so tell me what it was like coming into this role
for you, what were those first 90 days like?
- Yeah, fire drill, for sure.
- I think I was looking enough.
I started here as an SDR leader.
I've got an operational background.
I started at a company when we were about 30 large.
We scaled to about 220 by the time I left.
So I've learned how to build tech stacks.
I've learned the inner workings of how that communicates
with marketing platforms like Marketo and HubSpot.
So I had a unique view of where I had been through it before,
and we had an opening with our sales ops leader
leaving for another opportunity.
So it became more about how can I be beneficial
to the company outside of just my current role.
So a lot of it was really just digging in,
what aren't we doing today that we have to be doing?
It's looking at the table stakes, forecasting,
opportunity management.
Do we have the right sales stages?
And that was kind of where we started
was really ground up of taking a step back and saying,
just because we have been doing it a certain way,
doesn't mean we should be.
That might have been the right option at the right time,
but I think that we needed to iterate
on quite a bit of stuff.
So a lot of it was really that 30,000 foot view
taking a step back.
What do we have today that we're good with?
What are we missing?
And then what do we have today
where we think we can improve upon it
and then prioritizing from there?
- And we're gonna get into all that
here in our next couple segments.
So let's get to our first segment, Rev Obstacles.
We talk about the tough parts of Rev Obst.
What's the hardest rev-ups from that that you faced
maybe in those first 90 days or in the past six months?
- It's just like for me so far in my career,
it's been alignment, right?
Where it eventually comes through,
but you have an executive team
that maybe hasn't been used to, you know,
a very high level of operations, right?
Or maybe the process hasn't mattered
as long as you got to the number
where I think it's trying to get, you know,
trying to build a business case for executives
to show the value of what a true focused operational unit
can do for, especially for a growing business like Bumbora is
where, you know, it's hard to get budget for your rev-ups
by the be it your tech stack, be it headcount.
You know, you have to invest in that stuff
to help your business become more predictable
so you can balance those budgets better, right?
Where if you know, if we have this process
and on a giving quarter, you know, taking,
we have X seasonality, we have Y headcount
to hit the number that you can put all of that together
and be able to make sure that you're meeting those budgets
where you're not having to readjust quarter by quarter, right?
And really flying by the CD or pants,
you can do all that planning in October, November, December
and feel confident in that operating plan
and that, you know, your plan to generate leads,
how much pipeline each of your reps needs to hit their number
and really what the company needs to do
to hit a given operating plan.
You can be a lot more prescriptive in that
rather than being reactive
to the things that are popping up, you know, every day
where you get these small requests where you're like,
"Oh yeah, we can fix that when you're looking at fixing it."
It's all of a sudden like, well, we don't have these three
processes to even like hold like have data hygiene
on this field you're asking us to create.
So we've got to create a process around it.
We have to train and enable on it.
And I think that the more focus you put into operations,
the better you're able to address that
rather than making it up as you go.
And how do you balance supporting sales marketing
and CX or customer success?
- The Calm app's really good for meditation.
You know, a lot of it is just like over-communicate, right?
I think it's, you know, there's a lot of Zoom burnout.
You know, there's a lot of unnecessary,
I'm sure everyone working from home knows
there's a lot of unnecessary meetings
that were a lot more necessary when you were in an office.
So I think a lot of it is, how can you better collaborate?
How do you turn some of those meetings into working sessions
where, you know, I've seen, you know,
my team does a phenomenal job of this where it's,
okay, let's talk through the business problem
you're trying to solve.
Don't give us the solution you want us to build.
Let's talk through how we can do that.
And I think it's just, it's communication.
I know it's way more simple.
It sounds more simple than it is,
but over-communicating, making sure that you're staying
on top of not just creating the process and rolling it out,
but is it measuring what you thought it would?
Is it be, is that process being enforced?
I think if you don't have that cross-functional buy-in,
it can create silos where ops is just creating process
for a sales leader that's asking for it,
but that sales leader's not enforcing that process.
So it's work for the sake of work
where if you have a really tight unit between, you know,
sales marketing, ops, even finance for that matter,
if you can work as a unit, the amount of stuff you can get done
and plan for becomes a heck of a lot more broad
than just saying, hey, here's the number we need to hit.
Here's your budget, go figure it out.
- What's your biggest rev oops that you've made?
Mistake in the past year?
- I tend to, of course, correct way too far
on one side or the other.
I can think of, you know, we've moved towards a shared goal
where it's not necessarily, is it inbound?
Is it outbound?
It's, do we have enough pipeline and deals
for our team to hit the mark?
And my biggest oops was, I didn't think through
some of the downstream effects of how's that going
to affect tracking?
How do we still measure SDR efficacy?
How do we manage, like, what the AEs are doing
from an outbound perspective, is that impacting the pipeline?
And I think it's just these new grand ideas
that you hear them all the time in rev ops, right?
I feel like it's every six months, there's a new big idea
that companies are following this and it's helping alignment.
And I think it's hearing that big idea and wanting
to pounce on it, but not necessarily talking about your org
and thinking through all the downstream effects
that changing that type of you can really have on a company.
Luckily, we were able to pivot on it,
but there was a good three months there where
I don't think you could really trust that source reporting
is because that just wasn't in our minds
because we were trying to move away from that
where it's not, you know, your sales
and marketing team doing this.
It's more about how are we going to arrive at the goal,
but the efficacy piece kind of suffers
when you don't think of all those downstream effects.
- Yeah, so what would be your advice to someone
who is listening, how to rev ops,
how to sort of avoid that sort of thing?
- I found it's not taking a step back, right?
It's, okay, if we do this, what is going to touch this process?
So if it's source and you know that's an opportunity
and you're measuring when you're grouping the data by,
okay, where are all of our opportunities being sourced?
Then you know, okay, so the executives are going to want
to see this from a team by team breakdown.
You're going to want to see SDR payback here.
And so I think it's just really talking out loud,
whiteboarding for me has always been a huge help
and just document out loud or on that whiteboard.
What are all of the things downstream of this change
that could even potentially be affected?
And then you start to process of elimination of,
okay, well, if we handle it on this singular piece,
then it makes a couple of these other downstream pieces
go away because we're handling it at the top.
But I think you got, I think in my experience,
people don't take into account how granular of a problem,
even one small change can make,
especially with how much automation exists
between tools and systems these days.
So I think it's really back to the overcommunication
and it's out loud, brainstorm,
everything you possibly think that change is going to touch
with all of their cross-functional owners
and then try to arrive.
I mean, are you always going to get it?
No, if we got it right every time,
there'd probably be a lot less of us, right?
Because that's because it's just run itself.
But I think it's striving for that perfection
of just always making sure that you leave no stone unturned
and then making sure that you're bringing in anyone
that you think from a business leader standpoint
is going to be a recipient
or that's going to be negatively affected by that change.
- All right, let's get to our next segment,
the tool shed, we're talking tools, spreadsheets, metrics,
just like everyone's favorite tool, qualified.
There'll be to be tool shed is complete without qualified.
Go to qualified.com right now and check them out.
Matt, what is in your tool shed?
What's the software you're using?
What are the dashboards?
Where are you spending the most of your time?
- Yeah, so qualified, new customer,
but I will give them credit where credit is due.
I have never had a tool launch without a huge pickup
like we have.
We launched last week, it's been live, it's phenomenal.
It's everything that I thought it would be.
So massive shout out.
I'm not getting paid for that comment by the way.
- Hey, now.
- But we love it.
We love to hear it.
- So the big ones for us, obviously Salesforce first CRM,
we use HubSpot for marketing outbound.
We've got some really cool process between Salesforce
and HubSpot where we're actually ingesting Bumbora data
and building scores.
So we've got three different main scores that we use
and account score and intense score
and an engagement score.
That's a combination of HubSpot data, Salesforce data
and Bumbora's own data.
So obviously Bumbora's part of our stack
because if it wasn't, that'd be crazy talk.
Sales navigator, Gong, we use outreach as our SEP.
And then we've got for the CX team,
we use a tool called Plan Hat that's really great
that helps with lifecycle adoption, health scores
and things of that nature.
That's our core stack and then cognizant
from a prospecting standpoint.
- Awesome.
Well, let's talk metrics.
- Yeah.
- What matters to you?
- Kind of everything, but top-top level,
do we have enough pipeline to hit the operating plan
and do we know where that pipeline is coming from?
Those are the big ones, right?
I think it's building the executive dashboards
that have what is the top-top level metrics we care about
and how can we plan accordingly for that?
How do we know in a given quarter
where we think we're gonna land from a forecasting standpoint?
I think the next level down from that is
we're gonna have a lot of time to do
and then we're gonna have a lot of time to do that.
And then we're gonna have a lot of time
to get to the bottom level.
And then we're gonna have a lot of time
to get to the bottom level metrics.
And then we're gonna have a lot of time
to get to the bottom level metrics
and then we're gonna have a lot of time
to get to the bottom level metrics.
And then we're gonna have a lot of time
to get to the bottom level metrics
and then we're gonna have a lot of time to get to the bottom
level metrics.
And then we're gonna have a lot of time
to get to the bottom level metrics
and then we're gonna have a lot of time to get to the bottom level
and then we're gonna have a lot of time to get to the bottom level
and then we're gonna have a lot of time to get to the bottom level
and then we're gonna have a lot of time to get to the bottom level
and then we're gonna have a lot of time to get to the bottom level
and then we're gonna have a lot of time to get to the bottom level
and then we're gonna have a lot of time to get to the bottom level
and then we're gonna have a lot of time to get to the bottom level
and then we're gonna have a lot of time to get to the bottom level
and being able to have a holistic view of maybe where your big gaps are
in that data hygiene and even data collection.
So I'd say those are probably the core dashboards for me is
really forecasting, pipeline, do we have enough to hit the number?
And so we have enough, not just hit the number,
do we have enough for every rep to be successful?
Right? And if we don't, how do we make those,
how do we make those adjustments?
And that's where that sourcing piece comes in
and then the data hygiene piece,
I think is something probably every company could benefit from
because that's never gonna be perfect.
But I think the more that you can know where those gaps are,
the better.
Yeah, I mean, do you think data hygiene is a RevOps problem
or like should RevOps be solving it?
It depends on what day you ask me that.
Today, my answer is really, I think it's a group effort, right?
RevOps should be prescriptive, you know, when you can be,
should be prescriptive in how that data should be collected
and like what object it could be effectively captured on.
That way that RevOps can provide actionable reporting,
not just where you are, but like, here's the data
and here's what the data is telling us, right?
Where I think that some companies,
it's a lot of, you know, and I experience it a lot today,
personally, where you're reactive, right?
You're reactive to requests where maybe a field didn't exist
and you weren't collecting data and now you need to start.
So people try to balance, oh, well, should we create this
and collect all the historicals?
Or should we create this, measure it going forward,
fill out the historicals as we need to?
Because in my career, what I've seen so far
is that that can really slow a project down, right?
If you want to do historicals for a field
that doesn't exist today, that's work on your AEs,
on your CSMs, on your leadership team,
to go back and fill out that information
that could potentially drag that project on for weeks.
So I think, you know, we've just recently ran into that
with a couple of things that we want to track and see X
of not just why people buy, but what did they justify
the spend on, right?
Like we could say, oh, they bought because they want
more qualified leads.
So they bought because marketing wants a mechanism
of where to focus their time.
But at the end of the day, how did they justify that, right?
And that's not something we collected.
And that's going to be a lot of work on the CX team
to go back and collect historical.
So I think it's more about focusing on how to build
that process and measure it going forward
than doing the full look back.
You can do the look back at any time,
but you got to start somewhere from the collection standpoint.
- What about an example of something that happened
in your pipeline that you noticed wasn't working.
Maybe you saw metrics or maybe it's coming from leadership.
How'd you go about fixing it?
- Yeah, so early in my career, when I first started
really running forecasting and understanding,
you know, taking that the best case, most likely worst case,
we noticed a lot of stuff was getting stuck in one stage.
But we didn't have a lot of understanding of why
it was getting stuck on this stage.
Like, is it how we qualify?
Is it what we're telling reps to do in this stage?
'Cause it was a guided sales motion
where each stage had a path to success essentially.
And so what we found was that was just where reps
were parking deals because the next stage was proposals.
So they hadn't quite shared pricing,
but they weren't quite ready to close the deal out
and be done with it and move on to the next one.
And so what the problem that created was we had a lot
of dead pipeline that probably should have been wiped out,
you know, quarters in advance.
That we're just pushing out quarter over quarter.
So it helped us A, understand we need better
qualification metrics in stage zero and one where A,
are the reps actually moving what's a legitimate
evaluation of our product into the pipeline.
And what it ended up doing was the cascading effect.
We realized we were probably under qualifying accounts.
We were over qualifying opportunities that most
of which probably should have never made it
to the pipeline in the first place.
And it was making us look like we had a horrendous win rate
in that second stage, but realistically,
we were just doing a bad job qualifying those opportunities
and so it helped us rebuild those paths to success of,
here's some questions we suggest you asking
in the qualification phase in the discovery phase.
And it helped us really draw some hard lines where SDRs
to feel comfortable handing something off.
Here's the type of information we want.
And then using something like MedPIC, Bant
to tie your sales stages to better influence that data.
And then what we learned after that was we're losing
in proposal because we were priced too high in the market.
But we would have never caught that previously.
Had we not stopped and said, why are all of our deals
failing out in stage or stalling out or failing out in stage?
- Yeah, that's super fascinating.
And a really interesting insight because you had basically
like the Oreo sandwich of either side of it
were both pressing into the same stage
when neither of them probably should have been
in that stage to begin with.
And so you're kind of like, not triple reporting
but you're essentially just, have it kind of completely
wrong there.
I'm curious, what were the questions that,
I don't know if you remember some of the questions
that you wanted them to ask?
- So it was like we had one that was talking about,
so the software was like verification software
for like students, teachers, they support like those programs,
like Spotify student discount program, for example.
So it was more about, we were asking what we wanted to know,
right?
Where like, what's your budget?
What's, how do you view a tool like this?
Instead of asking the questions of like,
what's your marketing spend look like this year?
How do you have your promotions laid out
on your promo calendar?
And things where that would give us a far better signal
that it's an active evaluation that we're moving
appropriately through a funnel, where I think some
of those questions we weren't asking,
so we were asking during the pricing phase,
where we started to realize we needed to ask them
about that upfront because we just weren't doing it.
And so what was happening was, we are getting people through
that had an understanding of what we did,
that admitted that they thought that our tool
could solve their problem, but that was about us.
It wasn't about them.
We weren't asking customer focus questions
that would help us understand, are they really going
to buy something like us?
'Cause we're an investment, right?
I think we're 10x higher than our next competitor.
And so we needed to be able to build that business case
and where I saw us fall down a lot was early
and luckily we were able to catch it,
but I think that it'd be easy to just say,
well, we lose most of our deals in stage two.
- Yeah.
- And then be done with it, move on to the next thing, right?
And I think that was the first time my career
where I realized there was always more to the story
than what the data is telling you.
It's about figuring out the narrative behind it
and using that narrative to help you inform change.
- Yeah, and I think that a great RevOps leader
may or may not have a great VP of sales, right?
That is like being able to dig in
and figure that stuff out and to say like, oh, hey,
and it's easy for the rep to just say, hey, it's pricing,
right? Or, you know--
- My response is my favorite one.
- No, for sure, yeah, yeah.
And that's exactly right.
And it's like, and then you have the abandoned deal
and you're like, man, we abandoned,
we can no response abandoned, all this stuff.
And yeah, maybe like you said, maybe it is pricing
as the root cause of that, but it's also, you know,
it's being set up poorly from the jump street
because they're like, yeah, I would love to have a Maserati,
but you know, like they're gonna test drive the Maserati
and they're gonna check it all out.
But at the end of the day, like they never even identified
that they had Maserati money, even though they have a,
I don't know, a need for speed.
- Yeah, I think there's plenty of tools out there
that have really big price tags on them,
but they add value to your company.
It's just all about where your company is, right?
And if you can't help your sales team understand
why they're losing deals, then you just keep going back to,
well, here's all of our closed-loss reason codes.
I don't know why this isn't telling us what we're doing.
And I think it's trying to be more prescriptive
and there's a fine balance of being reactive
to the fire drills and then being proactive with a sales leader
whether they're operationally savvy or not.
It's helping them understand what you could be doing better
and then like letting them help you make the decision of,
okay, here's our suggestions of what we could do,
but are they gonna enforce all of that with their team?
Because the work that a lot of ops teams put into
building process ends up leaving a bad taste in their mouths
and why I think sometimes you see like an AE go at odds
with it with a sales ops team of,
you're not helping each other, right?
Ops is saying put in this data,
but that's all you're getting.
It's not, hey, if you put in this data
and we can keep it clean,
here are the insights that we can give you
to help you close more deals, right?
And I think it's just that small piece of miscommunication
maybe or like poor expectation setting where,
hey, we need you to put this data in,
but there's no rationale behind it.
We just need you to do it versus,
hey, if we do this, here's the end result
that we can provide to you.
And I found in my career so far that's been a big,
that's been a big differentiating factor for me.
- Yeah, and it identifies,
and I think that the rep never understands the like,
hey, if you put this in there
and then we learn a bunch of stuff about this stage
and then we learn that, okay, it turns out
because of the fact that we've been able to categorize this
for six months as this,
we need to actually build a whole 'nother piece of content
around this topic or we need to create,
whatever it is, additional sales assets
or create another deck or, oh, it turns out
we're losing to this one competitor a bunch.
Like, you don't realize we're losing to this competitor
a bunch 'cause you don't see the whole field
and they never mention this competitor,
but from all the activity on the website that we're seeing,
we put a link up there that said us versus them
and everybody in this stage of conversation
seems like they're clicking on this.
Like, there's so many different third and fourth order effects
that the rep doesn't necessarily see there
and that's where it creates work on the backend
that can go back and solve the problem for all the reps.
- Yeah, and I think it's just helping him understand
what's in it for me, right?
Like, we're only human, like it can't just be,
oh, we're mandating this and you need to do it.
I think it's being able to work with everybody and say,
here's why we need to do it.
And if you still arrive with a sales leader
that, hey, that's not important,
then sometimes as an ops leader,
you're just gonna have to defer to that person.
Yeah, I think I have a bad habit of like,
but here's where we could be, right?
Where I think sometimes it's trying to balance
the where you could be, but where you need to be today.
And I think that's where I think a lot of communication
breakdowns end up happening is you focus on where you could be
or you need to be, but you're not focused on shoring up
where you are today and where you can take those incremental
steps to really help everyone buy in to changing a process
or requiring specific fields get filled out
before you can move to the next stage and lose a thought.
- It also gives you a little bit more ammo
when a bunch of people are asking for something
and to say, hey, I know that this is something
that you keep coming in contact with.
You're the only record it keeps in coming in contact with.
- Yeah. - With this.
Nobody else complains of this, that's, you know, et cetera.
And so like we can figure out a way to help you in particular
with this one problem, but like this one might kind of be
a you thing, like a one-on-one coaching thing,
not necessarily like a systemic thing.
- Yeah, I think, you know, we, like one thing
that I've seen in my career is using GONG
for something like that, right?
Where GONG's got a lot of really great like rep coaching
tools where it's trying to enable your sales leadership
team to where, hey, you're gonna have to take time
out of your day to do it, but here's where you can find
this stuff and here's the type of things that we can do
with that data and then, you know, being able to roll that up
to a product marketing team for, you know, product requests
or product feedback, being able to see like,
is a rep monologuing too often and maybe that's where
it's falling down.
Like there's just so many insights that you can gather
from how complex these tech stacks are today where
a sales leader's not gonna do the homework themselves.
Like they don't have time.
They've got a big number over their head.
They gotta go hit, right?
And I think that's where ops can come in of,
you're already paying for the tool,
work with your CSM, work with your account manager
on how you could better leverage that tool
and then provide those trainings for the reps,
for the, you know, for even the execs to some extent
of help everyone buy in and understand what you're getting
out of that part of your stack to be able to change
behavior and drive and drive those improvements
at really any step of the process,
not even necessarily just opportunity management.
- All right, let's talk spreadsheets.
You have a favorite.
- You know, I've gotta say it's usually my,
my joking favorite is every time I forget to include
object ID from Salesforce and I need to do,
create a fancy V look up for it.
But I think the best one that I've seen is in lieu
of like a clarity or like an insight squared
forecasting spreadsheets because Salesforce is not a great,
as I'm sure everyone knows, is not great at moment
in time snapshots.
So it's taking your forecast every time you present it.
You know, for us we're trying to build a forecasting schedule
around that and being able to timestamp in that spreadsheet.
Okay, when we pulled it this week of the quarter,
here's where we stood.
And then being able to use those snapshots in time
to see how A, we've progressed and then B,
measure forecasting accuracy because I mean,
how many, I mean, I've only been at two companies in SAS,
but that was huge, right?
Where, hey, we wanna be like, we even had it
from, I remember correctly, leadership got bonus
on being within a certain amount of that forecasting accuracy,
right?
And you can't do that in a lot of systems
unless you're pretty advanced
and using something like Clary.
So that's probably my favorite spreadsheet
'cause it saves me time and helps me understand data trends
without having to worry about manipulating data
within a system that that system can't necessarily handle.
Any blind spots that you have
that you wish you could measure better?
You know, I think like in general,
it's like the small things like fields,
you could be tracking that could influence a health score
or fields that you could be tracking
that would maybe help you understand
why a certain persona buys more often than not.
I think it's those little things where you can get so caught up
in building the process itself
that sometimes the little things that you could really draw
like a legitimate data point on,
either to ask for more resources,
to build that piece of content like you mentioned earlier,
I think sometimes that those are easy to miss
and you kind of, it's more hindsight is 2020
but you don't find them
until you've been doing it a little bit longer.
So I think it does go back a little bit
to the over-communicate piece of it
where try and understand from people
where they feel their gaps are
so you can holistically help the company solve those gaps
rather than just focusing on the onesie-toozy requests
that come in where you're kind of treating those
as a fire drill, right?
Like, oh, we got this request, we need to build this field
and it's taking the time to ask,
well, why do you need to build that field?
And then being able to not just create a new field
but create a process that you can enforce
that you set the expectation with the team
that needs to execute on it.
I think that's really the thing
that early in my career, I miss the most.
I still miss it like every day now
but I feel like I'm doing a better job
of like taking the step back
and even just listening to what people are saying.
It's just like what we tell salespeople
we want them to do.
Active listening, listen to what that business owner
or the requester is telling you, right?
Like, why is that field important?
Who's the end audience that we want to be able to see this data?
What are you looking to achieve through it?
It's sometimes it can be as simple
as just asking those questions
and listening to how they talk about it
to provide how you think the best solution can be accomplished.
- Do you have something,
whether it's a tool or otherwise that you can't live without?
- I think it's gone.
I mean, it's starting to, you know,
to shred into the forecasting area, right?
I mean, Salesforce is the easy answer
but with Gone, they're starting to come up with like data points
where, hey, when you have this many contacts
and an opportunity, you close them X amount more, right?
That's not a data point
that's gonna roll off the top of my head or an analyst head, right?
Because we're in that fire drill.
We're in the reactive mode
of all of the requests you're trying to do
where Gone just gives that to you in its insights piece.
And I think we're so busy worried
about all this tech that's out there that can do this thing,
this one thing really well,
where we're not focusing on all of the things
where Gone outwardly is call recording, right?
But there's forecasting elements.
There's, hey, this is slated to close this quarter
and you don't have a call booked for the next three weeks.
Like explain to me why you still think it's gonna get done
where I don't think we could do forecasting
without it in the way that we do it today.
And then rep coaching, I mean, building trackers,
the fact that you can add those anytime,
looking for product feedback,
a lot of what we're trying to evolve into
is gonna revolve around having that stuff in Gone
and making it actionable material
coming out of what we learned in those conversations.
- Do you have a,
any other tip from whether it's spreadsheets
or anything that you're doing with data
or any piece of advice around those pieces?
- I think from a data standpoint,
account scoring is one I've seen
that's like a, it's always a moving target
where I don't think I've seen people give enough time
to a model that they build.
- Sure.
- So like I think the big tip I would give is work really
closely with whoever is managing your marketing platform
be it Marketo, HubSpot, Acton, doesn't matter what it is.
But there's gotta be an element of scoring model
that's coming from all of your different systems
and a marketing leader that's in charge of that tool
isn't going to have all of that information
at the tip of their fingers.
Neither is a sales ops or a rev ops leader, right?
And you have to have all of the people involved
that that data is going to influence
to make sure you're building the scoring correctly.
Yeah, I mean, there's people out there saying MQL's are dead.
Like I wouldn't say they're dead.
I would just say it's time to look at them
in a completely different manner.
Like one thing that we're working on here
is account based SLAs.
So it's not one person,
but hey, this account has shown interest
have we started outreach to them, right?
Where that's an easy mechanism to tell your sales team,
hey, here's everyone that's showing a high level of intent.
Here's who we should prioritize.
And we wouldn't have that here
without a really strong marketing ops team
that was able to build that scoring
in association with the sales team.
And we look at it, we've got a meeting on Friday
where it's been a while since we looked at that
in our target account definition
and just continuing to iterate on that kind of stuff.
I think we'd probably be the biggest tip for me.
Never be scared.
You're never gonna get it perfect the first time.
Always be ready to iterate.
Let's get to our final segment.
Quick hits.
Quick questions and quick answers.
Number one,
if you could make any animal really big or really small,
what would you choose?
Ooh.
I think tiny hippos would be rad.
Like tiny domesticated hippos.
- How tiny are we talking about?
- Are we talking like hamster?
- Like corgi-sized hippos.
- Corgi, okay.
- Yeah.
- Do they still have the hippos mean temperament
or are they docile?
- I mean corgis are pretty mean too.
So let's give them the same, yeah, let's look.
They're corgi temperament.
- Okay.
I like that.
- Corgi's attitude and a hippos body.
(laughs)
- I was like that hippos can eat a watermelon.
I feel like it's very satisfying watching that,
but maybe this so you could throw them
like an orange or something.
- Yeah.
I mean, same.
You probably even see what they could do
to a watermelon at that size.
Who knows?
- That's true.
- Do you have a top three dinner party guests?
- Ooh.
- George Carlin.
- FDR.
And Dane Cook.
And where I'm coming from on Dane Cook is,
I just wanna know what happened.
- I think he made a lot of money.
(laughs)
- I think it's hard.
- I'm very fond childhood memories of Dane Cook
and then he just disappeared.
I'm like, for some reason,
that's my unsolved mystery in the back of my head
is what happened to Dane Cook.
- Yeah, it's a great question.
I think he probably made a ton of money
and probably the inspiration to be really funny
probably subsides a little bit when you--
- But could you imagine the conversation
between FDR and George Carlin,
like just the absolute goal that that would be?
- Dane Cook standing there like,
I was in a movie with Jessica Alba.
- All right, rom-coms, am I right?
- Right.
- Do you have a biggest RevOps misconception?
- We just take requests.
I think it's very easy to step into an org
and say, my team needs to do this, here RevOps,
here's the bullet by bullet list of what you need to do,
go implement this.
I think that's probably the biggest one
of all of that should be a conversation,
even as small as out of field.
You wanna understand, like I mentioned earlier,
what are we trying to accomplish here?
'Cause if I had a nickel for every time
I've seen us create a field in my career
where six months later, no one was using it
or enforcing the data being in that field,
I would probably not even need to work again.
It's crazy, so I think it's anyone
that's not in RevOps needs to understand.
It's a conversation, like RevOps should be a partner,
they're not someone that's just knocking out your to-do list.
- Is there a question that I haven't asked you
that you're like, wow, I wish Ian had asked me
a question about Blink?
- I mean, I definitely was probably expecting
a sales and marketing alignment piece,
but that might be a layup because Bumbora's,
the whole idea behind us is that we help sales
and marketing the line, but I promise
it's not perfect every day.
- Yeah, well, no, it's a key question.
Well, it's funny coming from the RevOps perspective
of serving sales marketing at CS.
It's kind of core, but yeah, tell me sales marketing.
What's going on?
Are we ever gonna line?
- I think a lot of it is just,
it's like open communication and I think just surfacing
information, right, where I think it's easy in my career
where I've seen, you know, you put up a deck
for a sales team or an all hands
and you're talking about all these ad impressions, right?
Or you're like, here's how many press mentions we had.
And from a sales perspective, having been a sales person
previously, that means nothing to me, right?
I think it's about how do you help the really great work
that marketing teams are doing to drive those metrics
and how do you tie dollars and cents to the metrics?
Because marketing would love credit for that, right?
Like marketing just wants to be recognized
for the work they're doing.
Same thing with sales.
And I think a lot of it is that recognition point
is where it breaks down and you have people arguing
for like sourcing credit on opportunities
rather than worried about, hey, we're doing all of this work.
We generated $8 million in pipeline this quarter
and based on all the different activities that marketing did,
marketing was able to influence 5 million of that.
Like that sounds and looks and is easier to interpretate,
it can't even speak, interpret rather than just say,
hey, look at all these press mentions we had, right?
Like what did that KPI that marketing is measuring?
What did that do to the bottom line?
Did it help us drive more pipeline?
Did it help us drive more revenue?
'Cause if you can't answer one of those questions
with some of it or find a way to tie it into that answer,
I think that's where you see a lot of the headbudding
come in because then it's just like,
okay, so you did a bunch of ads,
what are we supposed to do with that information?
Where that's not quite the case.
Over-communication's a theme in my career so far.
- Yeah, you're kidding me, right?
- Okay, last question.
Best advice for someone who just came into a role
as head of RevOps, what's your piece of advice?
- I mean, just talk with everybody.
Don't make changes into you, learn more about the business.
Take stock of your system and your tech stack.
It's really, it's like what I mentioned
at the top of the conversation.
Take a step back, ask what's working,
what's not working, interview everyone you can.
Now, combing through that information's gonna be a lot,
but I think you gotta hear it from the reps,
you gotta hear it from the leadership team,
you gotta hear it from the executives.
You gotta understand how is each person's day
effective positively or negatively
by what your RevOps team should be doing?
And that can help you figure out at the end of the day,
our job and RevOps, make everyone look like the hero,
surface the great work that everybody is doing
and help the executives understand,
yes, we are on pace to hit our number, no, we're not,
because then that leaves the one-to-one meetings
where that meeting with sales leaders,
where you're getting bugged every day
of where we are in the forecast,
what's our most likely, where do we think we're gonna land?
If you can work with sales leaders
to be able to roll that data up,
it saves a lot of people a lot of time
and you help make the people look like heroes
and get the credit where the credits do,
rather than worrying about how you're gonna figure out
who should get credit.
- Matt, been fantastic chatting with you.
Thank you for all the insights.
I really appreciate it for listeners,
you can go to Bumboro.com to learn more.
Any final thoughts, anything to plug?
- I know it's just, I'm glad you guys are doing this,
but I think we need more podcasts out here about RevOps.
It's good to see RevOps finally getting its due
and I hope everyone starts to jump on the bandwagon
and realize it's really the backbone
of any of these successful orgs out there.
- I love it.
Awesome.
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