Escaping the RevOps Vacuum
On this episode, Daniel discusses how to escape the RevOps vacuum, the importance of data taxonomy, and how to keep up with your customers’ growing needs.
Welcome to Riser RevOps, I'm the
CEO of Castoring Studios and today I'm
joined by a special guest, Daniel, how are you?
Awesome, thanks for having me.
Yeah, excited to have you on the show,
excited to chat RevOps. So let's get into it.
First, can you tell us a little bit about
blend localization?
Yeah, I'd be happy to. Blend is a company that
provides localization, translation services to the market.
So if you think of your quintessential brand like an
Apple that's launching an iPhone and they've got to make that
functional and usable in 50 different languages,
a bunch of different GEOs. Blend helps companies like Apple
and many others take their products to the global market.
Yeah, and can you dive into a little bit more about your
customers, who do you sell to, what size companies and all that?
Yeah, so we actually operate from, if you want to go bottom up,
from SMB, mid-market, emerging enterprise enterprise.
Typically the larger enterprises, I used Apple as just as an
example, but if you use that as an example,
those companies will have lots of different products.
They serve lots of customers in every single GEO that you can
think of. So it's typically those types of customers,
but you also have emerging enterprise and SMB that are
growing their revenues and to help grow their revenues and
diversify revenues that are going to go and internationalize
or localize. So it really can be from even the smallest of
companies that are localizing a website to the largest of
companies that are localizing very complex products.
We help them take their products to the global market.
As a Chief Revenue Officer, I'm curious, how do you define
revenue operations?
Yeah, such a great question. So just as a backdrop,
I've been in enterprise sales for good 25 years, and I've
worked with sales ops and then more recently sales ops combined
with RevOps and/or the delineation between the two.
The way I define, right, wrong or indifferent, the way I define
sales ops are folks that are helping to get sales to function
and operate the infrastructure for sales specifically.
And RevOps is really across the entirety of the organization.
So sales, customer success, marketing, support, finance,
the whole ecosystem. So for me, RevOps is really how do you
manage the totality of revenue across the entire organization,
across the entire customer experience.
And we might get into it a little bit later, but I've actually
got those kind of compacted into one, just based on the size of
the organization I am. But yeah, I love this topic of sales ops
and/or RevOps. It's a huge part of my success as the leader for
sales.
I'm curious, like, do you ever kind of look back in time and say,
I can't believe this wasn't a thing. Like I can't believe
that we didn't have these people. Like, what would we do?
Yeah. So, you know, sales ops was very insular to just sales.
And then, you know, you get marketing and you get finance and
you get customer support and then, you know, even customer success
being a whole other kind of newer outcrop of the overall sales
organization.
And then I think natural, at least what I saw happen was sales ops
got pushed to, you know, act as RevOps. But there's a really
great community in LinkedIn that really understands the difference
between sales ops and RevOps. And yeah, so 100%, you know,
should have been a thing a long time ago. But for me, it was
fulfilled, you know, a right-runner indifferent was fulfilled
through sales ops.
Right. And tell us about your team and how you all are organized.
Yeah, you know, you got me at a great time. Our organization,
based on where we are in our growth trajectory, we're just
deploying customer success. So, I'm responsible for global
revenue. We serve customers in the United States or the
American, America, and the APAC. So, I've got SDRs. I've got
AEs. We're now launching and literally in the process of
launching customer success. So, that's really the totality of my
sales organization. We're a small, medium-sized business
clinically speaking, so we're sub $50 million in top line
revenue. I've probably got an organization, a sales organization
of 20, 25 folks, with one sales ops rev ops person really at
the helm of that. We'll talk about that in a little bit more
detail, but that's the responsibility that I have for our
current sales team.
Like, how do you think that your rev ops team compares to other
orgers? Obviously, you mentioned, you know, small team, you know,
team of one and all that, but like, do you think that your
company is fundamentally different in some way or is it
pretty similar?
I'm actually really interested to learn, you know, from the
greater community. I'll tell you, I may have a point guard for
sales ops rev ops, but there's really an ecosystem of folks
around that. So, we have business intelligence engineer,
we've got growth, marketing, we've got finance. So, there's
actually a group of folks that kind of surround the sales ops
rev ops point person. It's really just out of our start
upish culture, where we run a really lean operation, a lean
organization. I do think that that person most definitely could
benefit from having one or two additional. But, you know, I'm
not sure because I've actually operated at multi-billion dollar
companies where the sales ops rev ops organization was also not,
you know, four or five deep. Yeah, you might have the support
from, say, a business intelligence engineer and some other folks.
But I've actually operated to be at a billion dollar organization,
if not, you know, the smaller area that I'm operating now, one
or two folks at most. I've never really operated with other
sales ops or rev ops with a team of more than one or two.
Yeah, that's fascinating. Super interesting. And what are the
types of stuff that they're working on for you all?
One of the unique things about Blend in the localization space,
and I'm hopeful that this might resonate with others.
Traditionally, our offering to the market was really services
based. And as such, the revenue type was what's called non-recurring
revenue. So project based transactional. Over the last year or so,
we've been on the march where we're actually also selling our
technology platform. So now we have a combination of committed
revenue, which could be in the form of AR, MRR, along with
NRR or non-recurring revenue. So you have technology plus
services and committed revenue regardless of the recurrence
and non-committed revenue that might be more like usage or
consumption based. So working with sales ops rev ops to
instrument that back to your question about what is rev ops
and how does that serve the totality of the organization?
How does that resonate throughout the entire org and being
instrumented on the front end with sales and all the way in the
back end with finance? Our systems sales force and
beyond re-instrumenting all that so you can actually capture
committed or recurring revenue along with non-recurring revenue.
That's really where we are in our transformation. A lot of
overhauling happening, but it's really, really exciting.
I love it. And we'll get into that a little bit more here.
In our next segment, rev ops tickles, what we talk about.
All the tough parts of rev ops. What's the hardest rev ops
problem that you've faced in the last six months? Obviously
going through a little bit of a change there. I'm sure you've
faced a number of them. Yeah. You know, related to that, I
think was also rev oops that I've committed. But one of the
biggest challenges was and remains instrumenting sales force
at the opportunity object record with a product catalog that
if you think about it, if I treat my sales reps like
customers and I try and make their customer experience as easy,
fast, lightweight as possible, the ability to go in and say
forecast an opportunity, select from your product catalog,
which for me is a combination of technology, packages, and
service offerings. That right now is not fully instrumented the
way that it needs to be. The organization moves faster than
the systems, the processes, and the people can instrument.
I certainly didn't have the foresight to work on that
before because we were servicing so many other things.
That's probably one of the biggest things that I would say is
how do I make the product catalog at the opportunity object
record, which then instruments me right for better forecasting
revenue attribution, you know, data analysis all the way back
through to operations and finance, et cetera. So again,
that's where we are in our journey is probably having to
launch right the complexity of a product catalog and making it
easier for sales reps, making it easier for finance, making it
easier for the production and the product team. That's really
where we're at right now. I love that example. It's such a
great point that I think a lot of rev-ops leaders struggle with
where they're running all these dashboards or trying to look at
all these projections and it's just trying to make magic with
with lima beans, you know, with non-magical beans, trying to
be a beanstalk, right? It's just it's not going to work if
fundamentally at the at the beginning you're working off of
incorrect information. That's right. You know, another
question that comes to mind that I think you got, you all
shared with me is, you know, what was I working on during my first
100 days? And I'm going to guess like a lot of folks that are
leading sales, I actually inherited a lot of what I've come to
learn is called technical debt, right? And so servicing that
technical debt, which could be everything from how your sales
force or CRM is organized, the interconnectivity of the
different tools in your tech stack. But servicing that
technical debt was something that I had to do in a compressed
period of time with very few resources in order to get
myself just to operational mode, much less, right? Look six
and 12 months out and instrument myself for what's coming six
and 12 months out. So you kind of play that challenge of what do I
have to do to keep not just the lights running, right? But keep
things operational and growing. And then also looking forward and
what are we going to have to evolve and transform for the
future? So that's part of the reason that I did not work on the
technical debt catalog right earlier, because I was servicing a
lot of what I would refer to as technical debt, which can come in
different forms. But yeah, you have to do with what you've got
and there's always a level of constraint. And there's the fire
or fire is burning right in front of you. That's where I'm at
right now. A lot of that technical debt has been serviced. But
now is the next right? It's always the next level up.
How do you think RevOps should balance sales marketing and
CS because sometimes you have three mouths to feed and not
enough, not enough food, especially if you have a small team?
Yeah. So this was actually probably one of my favorite
questions that I'm looking forward to sharing more
details. So I've actually talked about a particular tool that I
learned through all my sales methodology training, because I
was I was a rep prior to becoming sale, you know, joining sales
leadership. And there's a tool called a sequence of events and
different organizations have a different name for it, but
effectively like a buyer's roadmap or a buyer's plan. That's
actually a very fundamental tool in my sales process, which is a
very customer obsessed or customer focused sales process.
And I'm actually using that as a blueprint to answer your
question. I'm using the sequence of events, which is really a
reflection of how I'd like my customer experience to be from
the time they start evaluating our company to the time they sign
contract to the to the time they onboard and or launch via
product and or services. We're using the sequence of events to
take a look at the customer journey and the customer
experience and connecting that all the way through to CS and the
onboarding and launch experience or implementation experience.
Just got off a meeting today where we're evolving this sequence
of events, which is quite codified for the sales process, but not
as codified for the customer success process because we're
just launching that right now. We've hired folks that have a
lot of customer success experience, but it's likewise being
used with the marketing team and it's likewise being used with a
senior leadership team so that everybody's operating off of a
let's call it a nucleic customer journey or customer
experience. So right now, we're different or indifferent. I'm
using that as my let's call it my blueprint to drive and then my
RevOps sales ops team is following along so they're
understanding the 30,000 foot strategy. Because another thing
that I try and do with sales ops rev ops is make sure they're
connected to the 30,000 foot, the 50,000 foot business goal,
business question, business strategy and let them help
define the how to as opposed to just come to them and try and
program like like a robot tell them exactly what to do, make them
part of the solutioning right to achieve your goal. But again,
to summarize the sequence of events, which is really a reflection
of the desired or intentional customer experience that we
want to drive, that's the blueprint we're using to tie
sales, customer success, customer support, the whole group
really tied all together. I love that. And how you make that?
Like is it just something that you're making with Google Docs or
do you have a software using? Yeah, so I know there's software
out there and I've talked a lot about the criticality of the
sequence of events. I mean, it goes so far beyond the impact
or contribution to rev ops sales ops. But yeah, it's an excel
spreadsheet. It's super simple, right? Sometimes the simplest
tools are the best tools. It is a tool out of a sales methodology
from way back when, but it's probably my most favorite, most
effective tool. I arm all my reps with it. But then I also use
that, right, to drive and bring the entire organization
cohesive to that opportunity or to that account or to that
customer. But yeah, it's a simple table. That's the
origination of it. There is software out there. I understand
there's some interesting software for that that can plug in a
sales force. But right now I just keep things simple and use
an excel or Google Doc for it. You know, I think it's rev
ops people oftentimes are so numbers driven and data driven.
And if you're looking for whatever it is, you know, or the
bucket's leaking or if you're looking at all that stuff, like
you said, if you don't have the map, then it can be really
challenging to figure out like, oh, well, hey, something's
happening over here. Why is that thing happening? And if
you're not zooming out far enough, you don't realize that like,
oh, there's a, you know, there's a leak on two floors above me.
That's why there's, that's why it keeps me in all this stuff
here. It's like, yeah, every single rep always promises that we
can implement in whatever, at 60 days, every time, you know, at
90 days they get pissed off, you know, stuff like that where,
you know, your customer success team is like, yeah, no, we tell
everybody 90 days and you're like, why is everybody, why are
the customers turning or whatever? You know, like those sort of
things when you're on the same page and you have that blueprint.
I love that. That's a great, that's a great, great way to
align the three teams. I look forward to maybe sharing with you
and in another session in the future how that evolved when I
connect the sequence of events on the sales process to the customer
success, flash account management, but the connect those
sequence, the overarching sequence of events and then rev that to
improve the customer experience, get some metrics on how is that
customer experience going. You can derive metrics out of that
within right sales force or your CRM, but that's the next
evolution. The next level up for our team is the overarching
sequence of events from prospecting to, you know, full
launch and usage, which is one of my key metrics which we may
talk about. But yeah, it's, it is the blueprint for now.
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. No B2B tool shed is complete without
qualified. Go to qualified.com right now and check them out.
Daniel, what's in your tool shed? So I don't yet have
qualified, but I'm a big fan. I'll share with you what I've
got. I've got the base. I'm salesforce.com as a CRM. I'm
in HubSpot for marketing automation. I'm actually, I
suppose maybe hacking HubSpot for sales engagement. I did have
another tool for sales engagement, but we moved off to that,
moved off of that for simplicity sake. One of the more
recent tools that we deployed within the last year was Zoom
info. So that's been a game changer for us. Now I do have,
as I'm sure many of the providers for data, they have this
challenge when you get outside the United States, the quality of
data, the constraints with GDPR. So the quality of data say within
me and then even with Apex a lot harder to get the same quality of
data and even the intent functionality that Zoom info
brings, which is really, really cool. But I'm in Zoom info for
data. And then I've got a combination of Zoom, LinkedIn
Navigator, DocuSign, Unbound, Microsoft Teams, kind of the whole
rest of that for execution. But I'd say the big, big tools that
my reps use and my sales ops rev ops use is Salesforce Tableau,
Zoom info. And then we also have our own platform, backend
platform that we're connected, all interconnected with. And then
you know, I'm happy to comment on tools that I'm evaluating and
looking to add, but that's what my stack looks like now.
Yeah, what are you looking at? What are you looking to add and
why? So I've evaluated sales engagement tools like Outreach,
sales loft and that sort of thing. I'm quite interested in
those types of adding those types of tools. I'm also interested in
tools like Connect and Sell that allow me to produce a lot more
calls, connects direct phone engagement with customers. I
think that we have such an over reliance on email these days
and mass emailing cadences sequences, you know, and it's just
a lot of email. And at the end of the day, you know, it's this type
of personal relationship that makes such a difference when you're
selling it. I don't much care if you're selling services under
high tech products, the ability to, you know, to engage with
customers and prospects on the phone and even, you know, real
time chat, things like that. But yeah, the next ones would be
things like right sales engagement and then some level of just
increasing my calls and connects. What metrics do you care about?
I'll actually work backwards, right? Because you probably get
the very quintessential AR cost of customer acquisition and
all kind of your standard sales life cycle, stuff like that.
What's coming into focus for us right now is I suppose usage or
consumption, right? So if I'm looking at my pipeline for
bookings, if I'm looking at my revenue as a as a trailing
indicator, I'm actually trying to get it somewhere in between
and what's my actual consumption or usage. That proves to be
somewhat interesting challenge for my business as well as the
instrumentation to provide us that signal. But that's probably
one of the biggest metrics that I don't really have fully
instrumented quite yet, but that usage or consumption and that
can actually drive lots of innovation in how we sell, how
we drive and foster the customer experience. But, you know,
qualified pipeline from my SDR team, renewals, upsells, churn,
all probably a stereotypical metrics. The big one for me is
the big one for me and I don't know how much different that might be from other
organizations is the actual usage of my services and
getting instrumented for that to report on that both from a
financial point of view, from an operational point of view, that
might or might not be unique to my business, but that's probably one of the
biggest ones.
How do you know if something in your pipeline is not working and
what's an example of a time that that happened and how you
faced it?
We've talked a lot about this combination of committed or
recurring revenue with non-recurring revenue. And so when I got a
mix of that, you really talked about a unit of measurement, you
get a mix of recurring with non-recurring, you're really
mixing apples and oranges. And so because the topic, you know,
the topic here being rev ops is instrumenting sales force. And
whether or not we were hacking it or really doing what it's meant to do,
but instrumenting sales force to actually forecast those two
vectors concurrently. Organize the opportunity object record in
sales force to allow a sales person to show the difference between
my platform fee, which is going to be more of my recurring. And
then my services or consumption forecast, that was a feat of
architecture that without my sales ops rev ops person, being able
to literally redefine business workflows and rules within sales force
that I couldn't have those two concurrently living. But I found
this out because as we were working opportunities that started
having the combination of those two, one was a one-time
revenue milestone and another was recurring. That recurring could
have been monthly recurring and it could have been annual recurring,
but mixing the two was causing wrong signals in the pipeline.
We've since fixed that, but I have to hand it to sales ops rev ops
and the instrumentation of which is nowhere near my subject
and our expertise. But being able to explain that concept to the
sales ops rev ops team and then watching them work through that,
I wouldn't say that we've got it totally whipped. And this may
be very different from other businesses that either just sell
tech and or just sell services, but the combination of the two,
which is where I'm living. So I'm kind of sass, kind of not.
That's been probably one of the most unique challenges right in
our pipeline and our sales force instance.
Do you have situations where someone comes in to look at services
as sort of a one-off thing and then they end up graduating into
a sass? Because that's where you really start to get the rev ops
wheels turning, I'm sure. Yeah. 100%. That is 100% happening.
And we're trying to provide a path for customers because,
interestingly, that you asked that question, the industry that we
operate in has traditionally purchased and project-based
engagements, a standard start, stop, purchase order, right? And
then if they want to buy more, it's a repeat purchase. Well, we're
trying to do is to help customers see the annual picture, right?
Because usually the engagement that we have, which may or may not
be similar to others, it's a long-term engagement. Customers
can spend three to six months just evaluating suppliers. That
comes with pretty comprehensive technology ecosystem that they're
also evaluating. We call it their localization technology stack.
Here, we're talking about our go-to-market technology stack. But
yes, we have customers that will come in and just start with a
project and over time graduate to a more termed engagement or
annual engagement. And they're also progressing from maybe just
the services to some level of the platform that we offer along
with services. And the reason I say it's transformational is because
the customer psychology is also changing. And I actually found
this at the last organization I was at, where you're also trying
to change the customer psychology to move from just buying
services to buying a platform upon which you render those
services. And now you're also creating feature functions that
used to be service-based. You're actually building that into the
platform and it becomes a feature function or go-and-wistle on
the platform and it's more automated. It's not human-driven,
it's AI-driven. So we're seeing this transformation and I've seen
it across a couple of different industries and company sizes.
But yes, and then providing a path for customers to walk over
the bridge, as I like to say, and you can help them walk over
the bridge, you don't have to try and force them to jump over
that bridge. But yes, we're doing that right now as we speak.
I love it. We need to check in with you in a year to figure out
how all that's going because I love that sort of thing. I'm sure
you can have a thousand dashboards. They show all those
different perversions makes it much more complex. And it really
blends, I mean, this is why RevOps is so important, right? It really
blends marketing and sales, right? And customer success. Like,
when do you upsell or cross-sell or how does that relationship
change? When does that mindset change? Something like, you know,
the financing and the culture changing, affecting your, you know,
your entire kind of go-to-market strategy. It's that's
endlessly, endlessly cool. Any other examples of stuff that you
did that was work in, that worked well, or something that wasn't
working, that you needed to fix? One of the things that I thought
about that I found that I have found super interesting is call
it your sales process or your rules of engagement. No,
fundamental stage by stage process for the sales team to run,
right? Call it your sales play, whatever it might be called.
I've gone to a point now that because my pipeline is a
production of my sales process and my rules of engagement, one
thing that works really well is the combination of certain data
points that I personally measure in my pipeline, which again is
instrumented by sales option RevOps, is just the correlation
between my stage, my closed date, which by the way ties to my
sequence of events, my age of the opportunity, I literally have
gotten to the point and maybe it's just having done this for so
long, but we've got that instrument in the sales force, is
being able to quickly adjudicate either problem opportunities and
or problem areas in the pipeline. And again, I have to hand
it to the sales ops RevOps team that if I can lay out the
sales process and we can mimic that in sales force, I get a
wash rinse repeat cycle. What's really working well for me is
that correlation of the sequence of events, which ties to my
customer's closed date, my duration, right? I've got
myself down to specific math and how long each stage lasts in
the pipeline. And I can actually adjudicate the quality of an
opportunity without any additional clicks. It's just a real
easy way of the way that the sales ops team has presented that
in my pipeline that I can quickly identify problem ops and or
problem processes, challenges that our rep might be having and
or problems in my pipeline. So this has been working well for
us. I would not say that my forecasting is perfect and that
I come within 5 or 10% of forecasts every single month. We're
not there quite yet because we're evolving the maturity of the
team. But this is something that again has everything to do
with instrumentation in our systems that's tied to our sales
process and that is working well that we can quickly identify
problem ops and troubleshoot them. So that's one of the things
that I'm glad to see is working well for us. Do you have any
blind spots? We discussed this a little bit, but any blind spots
where they wish you could measure better? I'm sure like
everybody. I've got my biggest blind spot is conversion rates.
Yeah. So conversion rates at the top of the funnel. So I got to
tell you this quick story. Would you believe that in a recent
board meeting, the board wanted to know conversion rates from
MQL to SQL to stage one. So everything above the funnel.
Now we have that calculated, but we have to do it manually, right?
You have to do it manually for every month, every quarter. Any
time you're going to go to a board meeting, any time you're
going to go to a senior leadership team. And this is
something that we might talk about later is, you know, the
future for rev ops. Marketing and finance. Finance wants to know
where marketing is growth, marketing is spending its dollars
and it actually wants to see the conversion rates that I need
to see conversion rates within my pipeline from stage to stage.
And then I see conversion rates from for us bookings to actual
revenue and then even tucked in between there are my usage
statistics, which is a leading indicator of revenue and is kind
of post post my booking. So broadly speaking, blind spot for
me conversion rates and it's up and down the chain, right?
From above the funnel in the pipeline after when or after
contracts. And we're doing that manually is really the story.
So I would love to have that more auto magical so that I can
move levers and knobs to improve those conversion rates.
What are your top three spreadsheets that you've been
checking out? Yeah, so I'm a little bit embarrassed maybe or maybe
not because maybe everybody else does the same thing. But I had
to write these down because I thought it was such a great
question. So budget number one. So my budget is managed in a
spreadsheet, meaning when we start out the year, we lay out the
revenue segments and how much we're going to achieve from each
revenue segment on a monthly quarterly basis. That's simple
budget management. I meet with my team twice a month using that
spreadsheet to track actuals to budget on a per revenue segment
and group level quota, quota calculation, quota assignment,
quota management, I'm also tuning that in spreadsheet. So it is
one of my go to spreadsheets. And believe it or not, account
mapping. I do not have any sort of, you know, auto magical or
fancy solution for account mapping. I sort of thousands and
thousands of customers. So it's an unwieldy, not the funnest
thing to do in a spreadsheet. But truth be told, budget quota
account mapping, you know, when I think about my go to market
and the priority of where I'm spending those dollars, the
very few dollars that I have, those are nice to have. They're not
must haves because I'm, you know, I'm inventing and simplifying,
which is a leadership principle. I'm inventing and simplifying
with the spreadsheet. So those are my three, my three biggest and
go to spreadsheets right now. Any spreadsheet tips? I've
spent way too many hours working on spreadsheets. I've learned
the hard way. So I didn't, I didn't figure this out until later,
but my, you know, my keyword would be taxonomy. So the reason I
say taxonomy is when you build these types of spreadsheets, let's
take the budget, for example, if you build with the right tax
onomy, I actually get a lot more mileage, right, out of the use
of my spreadsheet. Whereas if I build to even a hard coded taxonomy
or an overly simplified taxonomy, that's really like parent child
relationship, right? And how I structure that. If I can get
the taxonomy right, I actually have learned the hard way that I can
get a lot more scale and a lot more mileage out of the spreadsheet
as opposed to having to reconstruct later on. I've learned
this the hard way and learned that if I take a little bit more
time up front, think through, right, the tree structure, if you
think about it. If I can organize that correctly, I literally
have spreadsheets that I've been using for years. And then the
taxonomy might change a little bit, but the structure, and even
things like grouping, which became one of my favorite
functionalities in Excel, you know, if you can group columns
and or group rows, you can get to the plus or minus sign on the
side where you can expand and collapse things. So that's
another tip that has been great for me because when I need to go
to a board meeting or an SLT meeting, if I need to communicate
something really complex, but in simple form, I collapse
everything to a really simple table. And then if I expand
from there, I can go to run to an operational meeting and get
into the nitty gritty, you know, speeds and feeds and weeds. So
those two things, believe it or not, they're big go-tos for me
in spreadsheet management. How about something new that you've
been using that you can't live without? So zoom in for us kind
of a shiny, shiny new toy for us. It's about a year.
But the intent data or the intent functionality that zoom
in for has is quite interesting. We're still building the
muscle around it. I suppose everybody can say, well, it's, you
know, my industry is different and my industry is unique, but, you
know, we're trying to use that intent data across multiple
geo's. So like I said, America is a Mia APAC. You don't necessarily
get all the same intent signals in all three geo's. I'm not
going to go to market tech stack. I think the sales teams that
win are the ones that really harness the totality of the go-to
market tech stack. The individual tools are the tools that
you can use to do that. So I think that's a great way to
think about the go-to-market tech stack. That
is a great way to think about the
tools that we're building. So I think the sales teams that win
are the ones that really harness the totality of the go-to-market
tech stack. The individual tools, the artificial intelligence, the
machine learning that's in those tools and the combination of
those tools. But that intent data is probably where we're building
the muscle the most right now. And it's, you know, like I said,
the shiny new toy for us in the tech stack.
Any final thoughts on data before we head into our next segment
we're actually launching an enterprise level dashboard or
console to help again improve the overall customer experience.
And Tableau is great. I mean, I'm a fan of Tableau. We used to
have another tool prior to Tableau. But what Tableau does for us
is allows us to do a lot of visualization and slicing and
dicing with all kinds of data. So we're actually feeding the
customer portal or dashboard based on data that really was just
I suppose hidden not intentionally, but hidden from the
customer. And we're bringing that to the front. So be it, you know,
work in progress, cost efficiencies, delivery times, and
other key metrics in terms of usage and consumption. We're
leveraging Tableau, which houses all of our data and then
feeding that to the customer console, which will be both
accessible via desktop, desktop, but also in the future via, you
know, mobile app. So really what you start to do is you start
to put 24/7 accessibility to a customer's experience and, you
know, their specific usage of our product and our services in
the palm of their hand and giving them that data and that
accessibility to that data I think is so critical. So that
for us is where we're at. And again, it ties, it all ties back
to the customer experience.
All right, let's get to our final segment. Quick hits.
Good question.
Quick answers.
Daniel, good.
Shoot.
Number one, if you could be an animal, or sorry, if you could
make an animal any size, what animal would it be and what size?
Yeah, that's an easy one. I'm a golden retriever and I would
make them the size of a big teddy bear. So that's dog
I ever had was golden retriever and the cuddly, cuddly
this thing you can imagine. So just super size that thing. So you
could sit on it like a bean bag and hang out with how to hang out
with your dog.
There are rev-ops misconception that's out there that you want to
you want to clarify.
I love taking this opportunity to again promote the
criticality of sharing business strategy, business goals,
business questions that you're trying to accomplish. Technology
by itself doesn't solve anything, right? It's a means to an end.
And the rev-ops and sales ops folks, if you give them on the
opportunity to be truly connected to the 30,000 foot view where
the organization is trying to head, they understand that 30,000
foot view, I have found they actually, you know, enjoy their
work much better and you give them the creative flexibility to
solve the technical challenges to accomplish those business
goals. However, they may contribute and or think is the
faster way, better way to solve it. I am not a technologist. I
rely on sales ops rev-ops to help me accomplish or answer the
business question that I have or accomplish the business goal
that I'm trying to accomplish for the business. That requires
having them connected to the bigger picture. And sometimes I
have seen that they don't get connected, they're operating in a
vacuum. So that'd be my biggest suggestion and or learning.
Make sure they're connected to the big picture.
Do you have a rev-ops prediction for the future?
You know, I talked about it earlier, but it's really this,
I'll just focus on this one topic that again came up in a
board meeting, but marketing and finance. I've never really
seen right that connection. You talk about sales and marketing
needing to be connected. But what I'm seeing now, at least in
our organization, all the way through to the board is show me
how, right, finance and the board asking, show me how growth
marketing is creating that qualified pipeline that's serving
the overall sales organization and the effectiveness and the
productivity of those marketing dollars going in to create the
qualified pipeline. But that for me is where I see us going.
There's so much more connectivity between say the board,
senior leadership team with marketing and finance.
Do you have a favorite book or podcast or TV show you've been
checking out recently? I do. I'm a huge podcast fan. I'm
on a podcast every single day. And one of my favorite is Ed
Lee. I listen to Ed. My let a lot. He interviews really great
people. I'm also a big fan of Super Soul Sunday with Oprah.
Also some amazing, very spiritual and light and folks that
she interviews. So those are probably two that I listen to
the most. Great to hear the year huge podcast fan. Of course,
we love that. If you weren't in business at all, if you're in
some other profession, what would you be doing? Huge. Do it
yourself. Landscaper, hard scaper. And if I could do that.
24 hours a day. I would. So I've on lots of property and I've
done a lot of work myself and I just. I don't know. There's
something about being outside nature and working on working on
your ranch that is the most therapeutic thing in the world. So
that's that's where I'd be at this point in my life. I used to be a
soccer player, but those are those days are coming gone. Yeah.
So well, first off, I need to send you a photo of my my I just
got a house and my front yard looks like absolute disaster zone.
Said so does my backyard. So I'll send you some you can do some
some amazing landscape design. Amazing. Are you who's your
soccer team? So my family's from Brazil and I actually used to play
soccer with Sean Whitley. I qualified as long long long time ago.
So yeah, I'm a big Brazil player and or fan rather and I'm also a
huge fan of English Premier League. So every almost any team as long
as soccer is playing on my TV 24/7. That's my religion. I love it.
What do you think of USA's World Cup World Cup chances here? We got
the U20s is qualified for the U20 World Cup for the Olympics.
American soccer on the rise. It's it's on the rise. I'm a big fan.
What would be your advice if you're sitting now with someone who's
who's newly running a rev ops team? What advice would you would
you give him? Same that I shared before. It's probably one of the
biggest I'm going really kind of 50,000 foot view without getting
any any speeds and feeds. But from all the sales ops robots folks
that I've worked with giving them connectivity to the bigger
picture, the North Star, where is the organization going and having
visibility of that three six plus months out. My job is to
constantly communicate and re-communicate and fine tune that
narrative and then share it with right the folks that are going to
be the doers, the operators, the enablers. Sales ops rev ops is
that group for me. They are my right hand. The only reason I'm successful
is because they instrument me to be successful and the way for me to
help them be successful is make sure they have an understanding of
the overall narrative. I find that, you know, everything works so
much better. Nothing goes as fast as the organization wants.
Everything takes longer. It's harder. But connecting sales ops
rev ops to that big picture, I think is probably one of my
biggest recommendations and learnings.
Daniel, that's it. That's all we got for today. Any other thoughts?
No, I mean, I love this topic. I really enjoyed the conversation.
Would love to, you know, engage with the community more.
There's so much more to learn from a lot of the operators that
actually do the rev ops and sales ops that I think if you
flip it around, sales leaders can learn a lot from those folks.
So I've got a lot of respect for the whole world of sales ops
rev ops and the tech stack. It's my passion.
Well, I mean, I think that that's, it's part of the reason why we
wanted to have you on the show. I mean, I think that we're at a
point now where if you were to look at the best CROs of tomorrow,
every single one is going to understand how and where to
deploy a rev ops team and the type of question you have to be
asking. And like, that's part of the reason why we're making this
show, right? Is like, this stuff is not obvious right now.
No, no. And there's a lot of people who don't have a rev
ops team at all or have one person and that's it. And, and if
you look at just like how much revenue created these teams are
making like value added like, like high ROI initiatives to build
a rev ops team. Like, again, it's going to be a no brainer that
we continue to build these out over the over the coming years.
Yeah, for me, it's like Michael Jordan and Pippin. I know I'm
dating myself, but Michael Jordan, one of the best players, but
you can't look at Michael Jordan without Pippin. It's kind of
the same thing for me, you know, sales leadership and rev ops
sales ops. It's a dynamic duo. 100% agree with what you just
said. Yeah, I mean, it, it, it reminds me of, of our good,
or good US national soccer team, right? Where it's like when all
the guys are on the team and the link up play starts happening
and you know, you get the beautiful soccer and you know, you
can go from playing out the back all the way to an opportunity
seven seconds later. It's, it's like a very different thing than,
oh, you have one or two star players. And then there's all
these kind of breaking points. Like that's what rev ops is.
It's the, it's the thing that allows you to see, oh, okay,
well, we keep breaking down in midfield or oh, we keep breaking
down, you know, we can never push to the left side of the field
or whatever it is and continue the soccer analogy as far as we
could possibly take it. But, but that's what it feels like, right?
It's like you're sitting there as a, as, as a CRO and you're like,
why can we never figure out this thing? And it's like in the
data is telling us something that's, that might be wrong. And it
turns out, oh, like there's a reason you need someone to look
into that and figure it out. Yeah. Yeah. 100% couldn't agree
more. Well, I appreciate you having me today. It was awesome.
Yeah. Thanks so much for joining. For our listeners, go to
get blend.com to learn more about localization. If you know
someone who's looking for localization services to grow your
business, check out blend. Thanks again, Daniel.
And now we'll talk to you. My pleasure, Mount Thanks.
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