Building a Solid RevOps Foundation
In this episode Joshua discusses the importance of building deep relationships with leadership teams.
Welcome to Rise of RevOps. I'm Ian Faiz on CEO of Gasping Studios and today we
are
joined by a special guest, Josh, how are you?
I'm fantastic. It's a pleasure to be here, Ian.
Yeah, pleasure to have you on the show, excited to chat about user testing and
all the cool
rev-op stuff that you're doing there. As always, our show is presented by Qual
ified.
Go to Qualified.com to learn more.
Josh, let's get into it. How the heck did you get into RevOps?
Yeah, I'll give a bit of an atypical answer here. I'll go back before my
professional days.
I was editor-in-chief of my high school newspaper and I can think back to those
days and just
being fascinated in the interplay of content and the business aspect.
I went to a public school. We absolutely had to be selling ads to fund our
paper for the
breadth of the publication. We needed to provide a quality product to drive up
our readership
to get those advertisers interested to place. I can just remember from those
early years
being kind of enamored with all the interrelations there. It even taken me
through to college
years at Berkeley. Shout out to all the Cal Alums there. I kind of followed up
that again,
working up the newspaper at the Daily Californian and focusing on sales. I was
pounding the
pavement, walking the streets, selling to local restaurants and shops. Again,
in retrospect,
I very much thinking about territory planning and analyzing what was giving me
better win
rates, highlighting to competitors how they were being upstaged by one another.
I remember
serving pizza clients like fat slice and blondies on Telegraph Ave and kind of
comparing and
contrasting which ads were running and what was effective with the student
population.
Building on that, my professional career actually started in finance, which I
don't
think is unusual for rev-ops, professionals, but core financial planning as
well as control
or ship responsibilities. I started my career with Cybase, forecasting and
planning processes,
and really getting appreciation for the inner workings of finance with the
frontline sales
teams. It was outside base that I had an opportunity, which should have been
just a six-week
assignment, went out to Hong Kong and filled in for the FP&A leader in Asia
Pacific. Really,
for me, it was the act of getting outside of company headquarters, being on the
ground
with the local country representatives in Asia Pacific at the time. So much
growth and
diversity between China, India, Southeast Asia had the opportunity to be
offered a full-time
role out there and it turned into an 11-year run, really pivoted into
leadership positions
in strategy planning and operations for the regional outfits of larger tech
companies,
such as Cisco Systems, BT Global Services. When coming back to the states 2015,
what
was most important to me was really building and leveraging those experiences
of what good
looks like at scale. I was very much targeted on seeing how best I could
leverage my skill
set to smaller companies that were on a growth journey. For me, the past five
years, having
the pleasure of leading the revenue operations team at user testing through a
successful IPO,
a recent acquisition and merger by Tom Abravo has just been a fantastic
experience.
Yeah, and so tell me more about the RevOps team at user testing.
So it's gone through quite a few iterations from the time I joined five years
ago. I mean,
we were pretty lean and scrappy when I joined a team of about four that were
focused on
what I'd consider more core sales operations and commercial management, deal
with us type
of functions. As we scaled on our journey, 200 million plus on the way to an
IPO, there
we really structured ourselves to cover the entire lifecycle of the customer.
So starting
top of final marketing ops, the core sales operations function, also customer
success
and getting a deep understanding and appreciation for what drives retention.
And at user testing,
we couple those building blocks with a very critical focus on enablement to
make sure
that we're bringing the customer facing critical team members along on the
journey and equipping
them to be successful. We also carry the outbound, the business development
reps to drive pipeline
creation and still the commercial aspect of the business. Surprising strategy
coupled
with the deal desk reporting to RevOps, that user testing.
So sorry, it actually reports into RevOps or we're saying that you manage the
outbound
piece of that. I directly manage the outbound piece of that. It's a part of the
RevOps team. Yes. Oh, that's super fascinating. I didn't realize that. Yeah,
why the switch
to consolidate those things? Yeah, great question. For us, it was a matter of
understanding what
was working, what wasn't working throughout the go-to market and how we could
best pair
like-minded teams to drive results. For user testing, we've been blessed with a
really healthy
inbound lead flow and generation that contributed healthily to our growth. And
as we focus more
on the enterprise business, we recognize we really needed to separate out an in
bound focus
SDR responsibility from an outbound focus, what we call business development
reps today.
So having those BDRs report into revenue operations, be coupled with the enable
ment team, have
a tightness in the relationship with sales leadership, as well as the closeness
with
marketing campaigns and the messaging has proved to be super valuable.
Yeah, I've never heard of that. I mean, I hear on our marketing podcast that we
do,
we talk all the time about how having outbound be a marketing function, but I
've never heard
of it as a RevOps function. It's super fascinating. Yeah. And in my mind, the
reporting line
isn't always the critical piece. Sure. The management, the common KPIs that we
look at,
we actually made a recent switch to have our sales development group report
directly into
marketing, which I think is going to be a fantastic move to get even greater
closeness
with a demand gen team. So I think the outbound piece has been very valuable to
be a part of
the RevOps family and really promoting for that whole unit a career growth
trajectory
and into sales as well. How unique is this about your organization? Because
this is super unique
and I'm so fascinated by it. So it seems like with that setup, you would have a
really good
understanding of how the pipeline looks and the different triggers if it's
reporting into you.
And like you said, I guess it doesn't really matter who a reparse to, but for
you all it is this way.
One of the common problems that a lot of people have is sort of that RevOps
falling
primarily under sales or primarily under marketing or sort of not being able to
look at it holistically.
It seems like you're looking at it extremely holistically in terms of these
functions of
inbound and outbound, not being even under sales functions. Do you feel like it
adds a level of
increase like transparency and visibility? Is it like why? Yeah, just curious.
Yeah, in my mind, RevOps very much needs to be perceived as this neutral agency
within the company.
Having probably grown up with a finance background and having that different
companies reported
into a function led by the CFO, by the COO or the CRO. I mean, my motto has
always been
regardless of reporting line, I'm going to reach out and build deep
relationships with the leadership
teams throughout the company of those supporting functions. And in this case,
with the BDRs,
it's absolutely about ensuring you've got the closeness in relationship, clos
eness in agreement
and understanding on the go-to-market priorities with the CMO and the CRO.
And to your specific question, Ian, it's an ongoing study on what's happening
in the pipeline.
And we're constantly looking at the lifecycle and where does the deal velocity
slow down?
Is it there's been periods during the last five years where it could be early
stage,
where we've seen for specific campaigns, perhaps the messaging wasn't reson
ating,
and we needed to find a different way to connect with certain buyers and person
as.
And we wanted to utilize a different type of approach for opening the door.
At other times, especially over the last few years, be it when COVID first hit
or the financial
downturn of the last year, there's other levers and there's other specific
points within the
sales cycle that can trigger slowness and can trigger concerns with the buyer.
And in my mind, it's very important to look at your sales lifecycle on a
trend basis and understanding what's changing quarter to quarter, year to year.
Because if you think the buyer-seller relationship is just static, you're going
to be
surprised unpleasantly, very frequently.
Yeah. Any other things that are unique about your RevOps team?
I would highlight our enablement function. I think we have a world-class enable
ment team.
And again, on the growth journey, when I joined 12 sellers, heavily focused SMB
and mid-market,
and we've built 100 plus that are very focused on enterprise and global,
the enablement team has really done a fantastic job at allowing us to go
through periods of
hyper growth, getting new hires up to speed, understanding our product
positioning, but also
treating it on an iterative basis, providing coaching, feedback.
And very important to me, it's a two-direction measure. I always take the
approach as a RevOps
leader. You absolutely do not know everything. You need to be listening. Your
customer-facing
employees are the ones that can give you the latest and most important critical
information.
And our enablement team, having that close relationship with our sellers, is
able to really
constantly feed back what's resonating, what's not, where do we need to
consider tweaks.
So I would definitely put a focus and stress on the enablement aspect of the
team.
Yeah, interesting having enablement be part of it. Again, why that decision and
where else would
it go, do you think? Yeah, I mean, I can share with you when I first joined
that user testing
our enablement leader reported directly to the chief revenue officer, and that
did work very well.
I think that elevated the platform of enablement. But again, for me in our
design, it is looking
about where can you couple leadership that just kind of one plus one equals
three and get these
fantastic synergies that pay off. And with our enablement leader and many of
the operational leaders,
we're able to have this constant tweaking and constant mindset of improving our
sales process
and lifecycle to provide a better experience, ultimately for our customers, but
absolutely for
all of our internal customer-facing employees to be more effective in their
jobs.
It seems like you have sort of corralled resources around the actual sales
people in a way with like
surrounding them in a nice warm blanket of marketing and rev ops. And it feels
kind of like a lot of
times the best rev ops teams do that is they're really just allowing the
sellers to just sell and
pulling those extracting those insights and ideas and best practices and all
that sort of stuff,
pulling different levers to see how you could get deals done faster or
accelerate sticky points
and all that stuff. Yeah, curious how you think about sales?
Yeah, I think your spot on and the way you described it, where I'm at a company
where we're
selling a platform to get our customers closer to their end users and kind of
bridging that
empathy gap and the way that I look at our job as rev ops professionals to set
up
customer-facing employees for ultimate success and the sales team for success,
it is about creating that fluid best-in-class experience for the employee and
ultimately
that's what we're trying to drive. We're wanting to delight our customers but
at the same time for
our internal employees to do the job of their lives for our sellers to be high-
performing,
we need to be thinking through their lens, we need to understand what's driving
inefficiency,
what's creating roadblocks for them identifying opportunity and you're right. I
think the
rev ops construct that we've built at user testing, it's very much with the
goal of making the sales
experience optimized and creating a kind of a single intake, if that makes
sense for the sales
team rather than needing to bounce around to finance to legal to many different
stakeholders,
we want to shepherd them in a streamlined fashion to get the answers, the
guidance
and the knowledge they need to be successful in their jobs.
All right, that's it, we're done with the rev opening, let's get to our next
segment,
rev obstacles where we talk about the tough parts of rev ops. What's the
hardest rev ops
problem you faced in the last six months or so? In terms of the biggest
obstacle in the last six
months where we've recently been acquired, user testing and user zoom has
merged over the past
really weeks and as you can imagine it's going through a merger of similarly
sized companies,
it's very exciting, it's a great experience for the new combined company
but it can be a daunting task in terms of all of the dynamics of designing the
blended org,
figuring out territories that are best set up to allow our company to thrive
and to set
our sellers, our customer success representatives up for a great trajectory
ahead as well as again
delighting our customers and the challenge here was really wrapping your arms
around
two different tool sets, two different data sets and forging a path forward.
We have talked about rev ops as the zipper but truly when you're merging, it
really is a zipper.
Yeah, merging those sort of go to markets, merging those, you know, your sort
of rev ops
teams, all that stuff. Yeah, it's very much kind of a go slow to go fast
framework where
we wanted to take a step back and show we had a clear understanding about the
existing ideal
customer profile that both companies were operating under, getting a deeper
view around
existing install based territory establishments and then it's really about
ensuring that again
the partnership with the go to market leadership with your sales leaders,
marketing leaders,
customer success leaders to be on the same page as to what are we truly
building for the future
company and with all of those inputs then go through the exercise of ensuring
that
you're carving appropriately, you're setting up territories for success.
Very important to me when you go through these types of transitions for M&A
activity in the past,
I've seen cases where unnecessarily you rip away account executives that had
fantastic
relationships with their existing customers. So again, putting weight on the
health of that
continuity and coverage as well, but it's not a straightforward formula. You
need to really
take the time to understand those variables, use your tech stack to draw out
the right insights and
then land on a design where all the supporting go to market functions together
are on the same
page and can sign off together. Is it helpful in both companies have the first
first first name?
That is true. That's a unique one here. Pretty unique. What's your biggest rev
oops moment?
Biggest revoops moment is related to rolling out our what to cash solution with
CPQ.
There we did not follow the go slow to go fast mantra and in many ways again
with
all of the intent of having an end to end fantastic automated solution to
unlock efficiency.
We just haven't taken the time to think about all of the corner cases and sure
that we got
key stakeholder feedback and it was a painful deployment. There's no other way
to say it.
I mean, we have I think world class systems team deal desk with all of the
right and 10,
but we pushed ourselves on a timeline that just didn't allow that initial
successful moment.
And it was a big learning process where we did have the opportunity to go back,
get it right, make iterations, put in place building blocks, but it just really
reminds you
when you have these big structural releases that are going to be so
foundational to your company,
you want to make time for testing, you want to make time to get that key stake
holder feedback.
If you take shortcuts, it is going to burn you. I think it was a big learning
experience for
many of our team members. Yeah, any other rev obstacles or revoopsies or
anything there?
I think another thread on the revoops is jumping to assumptions. We live in a
world where there can
be anecdotes that people want to seize onto. And I think on the analytical side
, when you think about
the key KPIs that user testing or many other SaaS companies dive into,
it's so important to be multi-threaded and really understand what's changing
throughout
the entire lifecycle and certainly run into issues where we thought we had a
big
aha moment in terms of something dramatically changing with a key KPI, but then
taking a step
back and looking in the larger context. So that would be one where I'm a big
believer in
ensuring that you're looking at multiple lenses when conducting analysis. Yeah,
that's great.
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 to check them out.
The best tool in
every revoops leaders toolkit, that's for sure. Josh, what's in your toolkit?
Or your tool shed?
Or toolkit? There's a lot. It would take me a long time to go through that
entire shed, but I'll
talk through some highlights. Salesforce is our CRM. Pretty much every company
I've been at over
the last couple of decades. That's been table stakes to build out your
integrated tool set.
Mark Hetto from an automation standpoint, how we're driving the top of the
funnel activity and
insights we use Tableau for data visualization. Drift, we recently moved to for
managing our live
chat, high spot for storing our enablement assets and ensuring that it's a
clean streamline view
for our customer facing folks to engage, use outreach for sequencing. And then
in terms of
contacts, company, intelligence, Zoom info is where we've really landed in
recent years as a
best landing spot. So there's others that can go deeper on, but maybe I'll
pause there for now.
I lost your audio.
Because I was meeting myself. Yeah, that's great. And so, I think a lot of
those things, like you
said, are table stakes now. What are the things that you're pushing into that
are a little bit
more at the cutting edge and things that you're trying to push the limits of or
just stuff that
you're testing and checking out? Sixth sense and kind of gaining deeper
insights on intent data,
I mean, is one that, you know, across marketing and sales, we have a huge
amount of excitement
around the potential there. We, you know, we do follow what I consider to be a
pretty classic
sales cycle model where we start at the top of the funnel with inquiries and M
QLs. And I do see
for those of you out there that are not yet using intent data, but getting
getting that data and
insight as to who's engaging with your brand, your website, as a means to
really revolutionize
the way that we engage with our ideal customer profile and being able to over
time layer that
to understand their buyer journey, layer that with, you know, a knowledge of
which verticals we
typically win at and which particular departments do we need to engage? And I
just,
we're still early stages in terms of leveraging all the insights that that
intent data can provide.
But this is one where I'm super excited in terms of how, you know, how this can
change the game and
open up new means of us getting closer with our customers.
Yeah, it's really amazing. I mean, the tools that can give you more information
about what's
happening on your website and intent and all the ABM platforms are really
exciting. Obviously,
you know, tools like Qualified are amazing sponsor of figuring out who the heck
is coming to your
website, how to talk to them faster. I mean, if I liked you said revolutionary,
because that's
what it feels like. It feels like a shift. I mean, it feels like a huge shift.
And I think there
are some, you know, scuttle butt about sort of like using ABM as a term and the
vendor is creating
it all of this or something, but it's like, it's true. I mean, it is, it is, it
feels really different.
And it feels like when you're not investing in those things, you kind of don't
know what you're
addressing. Absolutely. And I, I think doing, again, kind of doing the homework
, understanding how
other companies are leveraging some of these newer technologies, but you're
absolutely right. If
you're not leveraging intent data, you're missing an entire, you know, sea of
data and insights that
can be shaping your sales cycles in an entirely different way.
Okay.
between leading
What about some metrics that matter to you?
Yeah. I mean, with metrics, it's, I mean, this is an area I'm very passionate
about, where,
you know, philosophically, it's really about establishing that balanced view
and lagging indicators for demand gen all the way through to sales, where,
again, if you're only
focused on one piece of the puzzle, you can pretty much fall off a cliff in
terms of the business
health quickly. So, you know, today, in terms of that life cycle, you know, I
break it into different
quadrants where we're looking at the demand gen. And like we talked about
earlier, understanding
marketing qualified leads, earlier in the conversation, we talked about our BDR
s,
and they're pairing with account execs to generate, you know, sales qualified
leads, sales generated
leads, and understanding what are the win rates there, which specific campaigns
and efforts are
paying off and where we see in the ROI. But then following that, you know, it
turns into activity.
And with our SDRs and BDRs, what is the activity be it? Number of emails, calls
, buyer interactions
that are taking place that allow for that sweet spot where we know not every
single buyer is the
same. I mean, I've got colleagues that will pick up the phone for every unknown
spam potential
call days. Again, they're crazy. I don't. I can't. I don't.
No way. Are you kidding me? There's no. I mean, I get 50 emails. I mean, maybe
not a day, but I get
at least 15 just emails. Absolutely. And then it's about finding the balance. I
mean, knowing that
yes, there's those outliers that will pick up their phone on all those
occasions, but others that
need prompts via email or LinkedIn and making sure that we find the sweet spot
for that multi-touch
reactivity. And then, you know, measuring there, where are we finding our sweet
spot? It really gets
into understanding the pipeline. We're here. We can go super deep. And at our
company, it's very
much about we bring together leadership to study the pipeline deeply in terms
of knowing what's
changed in the average sales cycle, you know, getting forward looking in terms
of that
pipeline to quote a coverage ratio, understanding win rates and where they
spike in or where they
challenge on an ongoing basis. And kind of connecting the metrics on the
pipeline side,
you know, it is about turning your lens to performance. And obviously, on the
journey,
when we were VC backed, fairly high growth on the road to be IPO. And
definitely,
once a public company, that forecast accuracy becomes so paramount and
important. And again,
knowing when to add kind of fuel to the fire and when to add reps and get that
total target
attainment balance becomes critical. And for SaaS, you know, it's all about
retention as well. So
getting those customer insights as to where, you know, where is adoption
successful, where is
healthy usage or where are there gaps? And then, you know, we're very deep in
analyzing
gross retention. So ensuring that we have a healthy amount of our existing
customers renewing
and coming back and focus, as well as net retention. So understanding what's
the growth on top of
that existing contracts to ensure that we're driving some healthy expansion and
showing more value to
our customers. Specifically with outbound, because you run it, I'm curious, any
metrics on
that stuff that you're talking about, number of calls, number of emails, any
things that you see
out there? Yeah, it's I call it a delicate balance where the
I've been at companies where there's such a focus on ensuring there's volume
that, again,
you can get into kind of what many term that spray and pray approach where we
're very much
focused on inspecting the quality, making sure that the BDRs are taking the
time to research
companies, understand the person that they're speaking out to and relate to
topics that are
going to be relevant for them. So for us, it's sure we don't want to see a
number of
outbound touches fall to an unhealthy level, but it's more so important to
ensure that the quality
of the interaction, the partnership and the planning with the account exec to
understand
what are those high priority companies and verticals and personas that you want
to be engaging with.
That becomes such a critical aspect of the job and the coaching and the
inspection that we want
to provide for their success. Any blind spot that you have that you're like, oh
my gosh,
I wish I could measure this better. Blind spot, I would lean towards sales
place where, you know,
we have this fantastic solution. User testing can provide insights to any
customer, any vertical
to get closer to their users and informing them to make better decisions about
the way they run
their business, the way they design their product solutions and experiences.
And for us, designing
sales plays and thinking through the right messaging and making sure we're
getting that feedback loop
from our reps as to what's landing and what's not. That's the one I haven't
fully cracked. We've
created the fields, we've tried to capture the particular plays being run, but
unless you take
the time to really listen to calls or survey reps at large, which obviously you
can't conduct
on an ongoing basis, we need to find a way to better capture those insights as
they're happening.
That's a sales play insight is one that definitely high on the list to solve
for.
Yeah, that's great. Any thoughts on marketing attribution?
They're sort of boring thoughts on attribution and having to not work in this
new sort of the
self-identify thing working really well to find out more information there just
curious on
on attribution and also multitouch and ABM and all this stuff. It's like you're
not
sourcing a lead in traditional ways a lot of times anymore anyways.
Absolutely. I'm a big believer in studying multitouch attribution. I've been at
companies
where we go back and forth in terms of analyzing is the lead source, the holy
grail. Where did this
individual originate from? I've always believed it's critical to understand
what are the touch points
on that sales journey that get you across the line. We do. We're blessed with a
fantastic
marketing ops team that recently actually spun out from our RevOps team reports
into a group that
we call the digital demand center. Very delete. I didn't know that.
Yeah, exactly. They're able to give us just really fantastic insights into
different segments,
different campaigns that are providing effectiveness on the sales journey.
Again,
as you start to learn about that multitouch attribution, you can think through
for different
segments and verticals of the market. Where do we want to place a campaign if a
sales cycle is stuck?
Where do we want to nurture leads that have gone cold? Where do we want to
provide
supporting information or invite groups to important events as they're at later
stages as well?
Absolutely getting that insight to not just understanding the lead sources, but
the influence
of multitouch is critical. Any other cool stuff that you're doing with data or
any,
I don't know if you're pro spread sheet or anti-spread sheet, but are any other
spread sheet thoughts?
Lots of spreadsheet thoughts. I would say we're trying as much as possible to
build automation and
scale through tools like Tableau, where we can build can reports and set a
broad array of users
up to be more self-serve because I certainly don't have the number of RevOps
analysts that can be
engaging with employees throughout the company on a regular basis. I think in
terms of broad
spreadsheet thoughts, it's interesting. I think one is really about visual
representation. I've
definitely worked at companies and with colleagues that love to experiment with
all sorts of views,
beautiful pie charts and others. I'm very much of the mindset that a trended
view is usually your
best default position where you're wanting to understand how things change over
time.
I view RevOps as needing to be historians that can understand how we got to
present day and
helping to predict and guide our go-to-market leaders on where to make the best
decisions for
the path forward and getting just a snapshot view of data at one point in time
via pie chart.
It just tells such a small slice of the overall story. That would be one. In
terms of favorites,
there's a few that I'd point to. I think one is very much studying and
understanding
your close loss reasons and your churn and downsell reasons. This, again,
understanding over time,
what's changed has there been a new competitor that emerged? Has the economy
changed so that budgets
are drying up? That's one where you just need to stay on top. Another of you,
like I alluded to in
the metrics discussion earlier, very much important to understand pipeline
trends over time from
a few perspectives. We like to layer win rates as well as seeing deal slippage
and what pushes
to future quarters in the same view. You can understand over time, look, are my
number of losses
piling up? Am I having a sales cycle slowness? What's truly happening here?
Getting those
multi-dimensional views into pipeline analysis is another big one. Then a
simple one that tells
more of a story than you'd expect. Really measuring out the count of new logo
or expansion deals
and the average sales price over time. You're able to understand, are you
relying on new logo
acquisition versus not leaning into your install base enough as well as
understanding, is there
a healthy baseline to preserve the average sale price, the healthy margin for
the business over
time? Those would be a few of my favorites. Are you building that stuff in
Tableau or were you
building that stuff? Mostly Tableau. The goal is really to build everything we
can in Tableau so we
can get it out to the masses and the self-serve format and not allow our teams
to scale for
success. Okay, let's go to our final segment. Quick hits. These are quick
questions and quick
answers. Josh, quick hits. Are you ready? I'm ready. Yes. Number one, if you
could make any
animal any size, what animal and what size would it be? I'm tough one because I
consider myself
a naturalist but if I had to choose one, I'd probably go with a miniature tiger
Oh, well, I feel like tigers are something that deserves to be miniature.
Just as long as it doesn't start eating all of our birds. It's got to be an
indoor pet maybe.
Yeah, an indoor tiger. I like it. Is there a RevOps misconception out there
that you have?
I think a big misconception I see that's really emerged over the last few years
is that automation
and AI can solve all your problems. I think taking the time to establish work
flows that fit your
business's needs and being thoughtful in the way you feed your analytics tools
with the right
data sets and ask the right questions to understand risks and opportunities is
critical. I worry
sometimes with the breadth and the strength of the tech stack that's emerged,
it can make people
lazy in some respect and taking a step back and asking the right questions for
the business health.
Do you have a RevOps prediction for the next year? My RevOps prediction would
be there's a major
consolidation of tools coming. On one hand, I think it's the customer's desire
where I just,
I talked to a lot of my friends and contacts in the industry and I think
managing the current tech
stack with a lot of niche solutions has become unmanageable in some respects. I
've also seen
the current challenging economic environment we're in. It's pretty ripe for
bringing some of
these tools together. That would be that consolidation of tools would be my
prediction for the next year.
It's funny, you really see it, and I think maybe this sort of VC market
landscape will really change
that, but you really do see some of these unicorn tools where you're like, two
or three of these
jammed together and you're like, this would be an extremely formidable thing.
It would be very
fascinating if there's more interoperability with some of these things. But
yeah, there's a few
vendors in certain spaces where you're like, it's just, I like this part of you
and I like this part
of you and you guys should just merge together. Absolutely, yeah.
If you weren't in RevOps or business at all or sitting hanging out with all the
editors at the
Californian over at the great University of California, what do you think you'd
be doing in your career?
Yeah, that's a good question. There's a creative side that I feel like I get to
use in the RevOps
job in terms of the way you explore business, but I'd love to create content. I
'd love to maybe take
a step back, try my crack at writing the novel. So I think doing something more
in the creative
realms would be a treat for me. What's your best advice for a first time? Rev
Ops later?
Best advice would be do your homework. Don't take shortcuts in terms of
understanding the business.
Building a network is critical and inviting feedback. In many cases, unless it
's a truly unique business
model, RevOps is about approaching opportunities and challenges that have often
been solved before.
And I think the key is being humble and inviting that feedback and seeking it
out. I think many,
many companies try to create their own bespoke alternative processes when there
's absolutely
no need for it. So that would, my ultimate advice would do your homework, but
ultimately focus on
building a network of reliable friends and resources that you can be engaging
with to test ideas on.
Love it. Josh, thanks so much for joining. For listeners, you can go check out
usertest.com.
To learn more about the cool stuff that they're doing. Josh, any final thoughts
? Anything to plug?
I'd plug user testing. Again, fantastic platform for delivering human insights
to your business,
to being able to design stronger solutions, better business processes. I wanted
to thank you,
and really enjoyed the conversation and the hour. So really appreciative of the
opportunity.
Awesome. Thanks, Josh. And take care. Thank you.
[Music]
[ Silence ]