Fueling Your RevOps Engine
On this episode, we talk to Volney about creating an even playing field across your go-to-market teams, the blocking and tackling of selling, and enhancing your sales velocity.
Welcome to Rise of RevOps.
I'm your face on CEO of Caspian Studios and today we are joined by a special
guest,
Bolny, how are you?
I'm good, thanks.
Excited to have you on the show, excited to chat.
RevOps, excited to chat about templify and everything in between.
So let's get into our rev opening.
How did you get started in RevOps?
The whole first half of my career, actually two-thirds I spent in sales enable
ment.
Actually, a long time ago.
But I was fortunate to join Salesforce.com about 12 years ago and saw that CRM
and Assistant
Administration around CRM was becoming a huge thing.
And I think even back then none of us really saw how far sales ops was going to
go, much
less the idea of RevOps and focusing on all the go-to-market channels.
So I made the transition into sales ops at the time.
And I loved it because back in the sales enablement days of the time, it was
really mostly known
as sales training.
And there wasn't a lot of strategy involved.
There was a lot of just responding to what was believed to be needed in the
organization
and go off and try to do it.
The great thing about morphing into sales ops and now RevOps is that in a Rev
Ops role, you
have the opportunity to do the analysis and find what some of the productivity
challenges
are.
And then if you have an enablement background, you actually have the ability to
go drive
the needed change through the organization.
So you can do the assessment and the analysis as well as provide the remedy all
from the
same focus area.
Yeah.
And what's your definition of RevOps?
I've been doing this a while.
And when I think about it, let's just go back 20 years.
RevOps was a finance person who was good at territories and sales compensation.
That's pretty much what RevOps was.
It was a finance role.
Then CRM came along and the whole idea of being system administration for your
CRM environment
morphed into sales ops.
And it was all about managing your, keeping the lights on and making the sales
systems
work.
And that was all great.
But as the tech stack grew and got more sophisticated, it became not being just
keeping
the lights on.
Those are table stakes.
You've got to do that.
But because you have access to all the data and all the reporting and all the
analysis,
the role has morphed into making sure that all the go-to-market channels are
operating
smoothly and fluidly.
And so that we can derive insights out of all the data across all the go-to-
market functions
so that you can do all your growth planning and make recommendations to the
executive
team about where to make their investments and what changes to make on a yearly
basis.
So it's gone from keeping the lights on to literally being the true north of
the guidance
to the organization.
And tell us about your role at Amplify.
I'm excited about being in RevOps professional.
And I'm super excited about being at Amplify.
What we do if people aren't aware is we're the next-end document generation
platform.
We make it so that people with knowledge don't have to struggle with how to
build the presentation
decks and simply focus their knowledge.
And the decks pretty much build themselves.
And I know that sounds a little bit nirvana, but it's not too far from the
truth.
So it's an exciting opportunity at a company that has a chance to really
transform how
enterprises message and communicate.
I was asked to come to Amplify to lead the RevOps function, which was exciting
to me
because there was already a lot of folks on the ground doing really excellent
work.
And what they needed was somebody with a little bit longer term vision.
Somebody had seen the movies before and could look around corners and help lead
the function
to provide more of that and insightful guidance to the executive team.
Yeah, and obviously this is something that feels like table stakes for a
startup of Amplify's
size now, right?
That didn't used to be the case, but now it is if you want to create a high-
performing
machine.
Absolutely.
I think a lot of startups, they wanted to be the lean startup and they didn't
want to
over-invest in support resources.
And they wanted sales to go out and make stuff happen.
And eventually the support would follow along behind it.
I think a lot of SaaS companies have realized how important it is to have an
operational
machine supporting the sales effort because consistency across the team, access
to data
and insights, as well as as much as we try to maybe hold back on the
proliferation of
the tools and the tech stack.
It's just so important to have people there with some experience that can build
with a
strategy as opposed to simply responding to requests in the organization
without really
knowing what direction to take the entire thing.
So I'm excited to see that companies are investing more in ops earlier and are
willing
to aim at more experienced and frankly more expensive resources.
To use a simple example, in fact, a handful of years ago, the growth at all
costs start
up and you just expand to 100 salespeople.
You're like, we invested heavily in sales and we'll do the rev-op stuff later
and they're
all 2% less productive because you never had the sales ops function and it's
like, imagine
if that whole time you had a machine that was actually being optimized rather
than just
being run that way.
And it's so obvious in retrospect, but I don't think we really thought that way
, you
know, 5, 10 years.
And also there's a transition point.
Let's say you're in between zero and 10 million in ARR.
Yeah.
If you're thoughtful, you probably think, well, once we're hiring more than one
or two people
a month, we need some sales enablement.
And so what do we do?
We go find maybe a great SDR, somebody who's really passionate and likes
helping people
who wants to transition into sales enablement.
And the trouble is the job can quickly get bigger than that person can actually
bring.
Same thing happens on the system side.
Sometimes salespeople or SDRs realize that the systems are pretty cool and they
'd like
to kind of, they volunteer to go do it and someone says, sure.
And the next thing you know, you have people very early in their careers
responsible for
your system environment and your enablement.
And it can be a great thing, but there is a transition point probably around 10
million
in ARR where you have to think more seriously about the experience you have in
those roles.
Tell me about your RevOps team.
How do you organize it?
How do you like to organize RevOps teams and how have you done it in the past?
Yeah.
And I have to admit, I've changed a little bit.
Originally my bias was all around sales.
And the sales ops function was always very focused on everything having to do
with the
sales machine.
So it always got the preference and always got even though marketing and
marketing ops
is certainly important.
It's the gas that fuels the engine and sales is the car that converts all that
gas into
energy and revenue.
And so I was always very biased about reporting to sales because I wanted to be
dynamic and
I wanted to have a great relationship with the sales leader.
I templified it's different.
We report into the finance organization and I have actually found it to allow
me to be
more even handed and more like Switzerland than I found when I was reporting to
sales.
In fact, when I was reporting to sales, the relationship with finance could
sometimes
see natural enemies.
But the reality is if you do things well, then it could be a real productive
relationship.
So we report to finance, but we still do, as you might expect, we've still got
a lot
of focus on the marketing ops side and also on the CS ops.
So in terms of how we're organized on the team, it doesn't really matter where
we report.
We have really strong relationships with each of the go-to-market functions and
we work
really hard to make sure that they collaborate smoothly.
Yeah.
And that's I think why we've seen this function even be spun out in its own
thing entirely
and to not report to sales, marketing or customer success and to just be its
own thing because
we've seen it.
We've talked to a number of leaders that view it that way.
It's its own function entirely or reporting into the COO or however you think
about ops
because it is holistic life cycle revenue now.
And especially as times change in different things matter, retention matters
more than
ever in this exact moment rather than net new logos and things like that.
Those are the sort of things where if you have a rev ops team reporting to
sales or reporting
under marketing or you have functional leaders within all of those, but it's
not have that
one view then it gets really siloed.
And then you can't pivot the organization at all.
It's absolutely true.
I think a lot of organizations have hybrid situation where they might own the
sales stack
but not necessarily own the marketing stack or the CS stack.
In our case it's two thirds but not all three of them.
But what's important is not so much the reporting relationships.
There's got to be somebody driving a go-to-market meeting of some meeting of
the minds in a
regular communication.
And I think that easily falls in the lap of the sales ops or the rev ops leader
so that
we can balance the requirement on the marketing side to build quality pipe and
the requirement
on the sales side to execute well against that pipe.
As long as things are going well, it's really not a difficult job.
But in most companies that are growing, there's challenges.
And so what I think is essential regardless of how you're organized is you
create that
environment that playing field for all the functions to collaborate and talk.
And as long as there's an interest in growth and learning and fixing problems
instead of
pointing fingers, you get what you need.
It might be easier if they all reported to the same place but it isn't in my
mind essential
today.
Anything else that's unique about your rev bopzorg?
Yeah, I'm blessed to have a strong analytics team.
We have several people whose focus is to gain the insights out of the system.
And as a result, we are able to do deep analysis with all the go-to-market
functions and provide
them with that insight and also make recommended solutions.
So instead of reporting the news, we're writing the news.
What I'm most proud of is that because our analytic function is so mature,
there's really
nobody in the organization who challenges the quality of our data.
So that when we go to meetings, no one ever argues about is the data right and
whose data
is better.
I'm actually able to bring the challenges or the gaps that we see and talk
about recommended
solutions.
And my team is seen as leaders in this area.
And it's great because it's what really we're here to do.
And usually we spend so much time just trying to keep the lights on that hard
to be strategic
or proactive.
I know you've been in the role for a little while now, but I'm curious to those
first
six months.
Any lessons or experience that you had in the first six months that led to some
particular
lessons learned?
Yeah, sure.
You know, if you've done similar size companies for a while, you see common
things and you
take certain things for granted.
I think I took data hygiene, Salesforce hygiene a little bit for granted when I
got there
and realized we have a lot of work to do to get basic things so that we can
analyze our
pipe and particularly our forecast.
Also certain practices around order management just aren't necessarily
universal.
So some things that I thought were basic and just always in play needed to be
built.
The great thing though is everybody that I talked to, especially when I was
being recruited,
said please come in and challenge us.
We know that we need the expertise of somebody who's been doing this a while
and has seen
the movie before.
Please challenge what we're doing.
And I've found that the company is very good at reacting to recommendations to
improve process
and quality and overall growth.
We've done a lot of work to improve the data hygiene and we're making progress
there.
And certainly our forecast is when we first started, there was maybe seven or
eight different
managers and literally seven or eight different ways of talking about forecasts
when I arrived.
And we now have an alignment and a standard methodology and it works remarkably
better.
If I could say that.
All right, let's get into our next segment.
Rev obstacles.
Where we talk about the tough parts of RevOps.
Any specific problem that you've faced in the last six months?
Yeah, I think a lot of companies are facing similar headwinds and in terms of
getting
new customers.
And as a result, the emphasis on pipeline is tremendous.
And so what we struggled with was first of all, making sure that our ICP was
accurate,
that we had a well-defined ICP and we were able to target it.
We put a lot of energy into that and we accomplished that and felt pretty good
about it.
And then we realized we're so spread across different industries and verticals
that we're
not able to develop a lot of domain expertise inside the company.
So we did a ton of analysis to figure out where are we most effective?
Where do we have the shortest sales cycles?
Where do we have the biggest return and the biggest net retention?
We did rigorous analysis in that area and pivoted the organization from the
territories,
the talk tracks, the messaging, the personas that we focus on, the enablement.
We did a lot to make a pivot and it seemed like it wouldn't be that hard at
first, but
it turned out to be actually pretty hard.
We made that change so that we could make sure that the pipeline is so
incredibly valuable
in times like this and challenging economic times.
You can't afford to clear cut.
You have to make sure that you make the most of the pipeline that you have.
So I think we did a lot to improve our focus in that area.
The other thing that we discovered was we just had, maybe this was part of the
previous
problem, but we had very high loss rates, close loss rates in our earliest
sales stages.
My perception was we had a lot of variability in how we handled those initial
conversations
and how the SDRs did hand off to the AEs and how the initial discovery was
going.
So rather than focus on sales execution and med pick and all the things that we
do in
mid-sales cycle, negotiating, we focused really hard on that early stage sales
process so
that we could define it very clearly, have very well established exit criteria
for each
of those early stage one, stage two situations so that we could start measuring
what's working
or what's not working.
The first thing that you mentioned almost sounded more like a marketing or a
positioning
problem than you would say is a RevOps problem.
Very strategic conversation, right?
Yeah, it's a RevOps problem if there's not enough pipe because our job is to
drive not
only quality pipe that sells execution against that pipe.
And when you have high quality pipe and enough of it and you've got great sales
execution,
your job is pretty easy.
All you do is go hire more salespeople and spend more on marketing, but it's
never that
easy, right?
We did have to look at where's the focus because we can collaborate closely
with marketing.
It wasn't about finger pointing.
It was about saying how do we get more focus and how do we narrow the comp, how
challenging
this issue is because we're an emerging enterprise product.
A lot of companies don't know they need something like templify yet.
For sure.
And imagine I've managed sales kick offs my whole career.
I have had times where I've had 50 product managers building content for 30
breakout sessions
or more.
How hard is it to get even product managers who are good content people?
How hard does it get them to get them all to align around a single template in
a way
that's smooth and easy for the entire organization?
Imagine if you're responsible for all that content and how easy it would be to
ensure
that all the content came together with the same template, with the same
imagery, everything
that you try to accomplish manually when you don't have a tool like this.
And yet there are rev obstacles that you face?
Addressed forecast, certainly.
We're fortunate in that we don't have a lot of competitors.
So we don't get deals all the way down to the finish line and then lose them to
a competitor
that outsells us.
The main thing we need to do is get a lot better at our sales execution.
The changes I talked about at the early part of the sales cycle, the precision
and consistency
in stages one and two, we need to now extend that deeper into the sales cycle
so that all
the reps are doing deeper discovery, making the business case, finding the
economic buyer
and making sure that we've got a compelling business case that we're attaching
to the
largest problems in the organization and getting more than one person to care.
And of course, operating with a good mutual plan that is an actual working
document, those
are all things that we need to do more consistently.
And so I'm going to put a lot of focus this year in making sure that we have
that level
of sophistication in our sales methodology.
The other thing is we've been good at sales and marketing, but unfortunately
our customer
organization hasn't had the benefit of all the analysis and data mining that we
've done
for the other team.
So we're going to put a major focus into that this year as well.
We are fortunate not only do we not tend to lose deals to a competitor late in
the sales
cycle, but our product is very sticky.
So right now the growth that we're experiencing is from our customer
organization.
And so we need to double down to make sure that they're getting as much support
as the
new logo team and the marketing teams have had in the past.
Cool.
Do you have a Revueps moment or a mistake that you made?
Not at this company.
No.
I've been here just about a year.
So far we haven't made any big mistakes.
We haven't stopped sales.
We haven't done anything to throw a wrench into the mix, not that I haven't in
the past.
I've certainly probably the biggest mistakes I've made is too quickly and not
thoroughly
implementing new tools into the stack.
You toss something in there.
You think everyone will embrace it and adopt it very quickly.
Next thing you know, no one knows how to use it, what it's for, why we're even
doing
it.
And you can create not only waste money and waste time and implementation, but
you can
also create the tea around the stack.
You mentioned balancing sales and marketing and now that you report to finance
how you
balance that is probably a very different type of relationship.
Any other piece of advice or lessons on how to balance the, for a lot of people
it's the
three headed Hydra of sales marketing and CS, but in your case balancing sales
and marketing
demand for getting a little piece of only in the team.
We've been fortunate.
We've been able to assign specific individuals to each one of the functions and
make sure
that everybody is getting some of our focus.
Now at certain times of the year, like we just came through the end of the year
and right
now a lot of rev ops teams are building the compensation plans for the
organization and
that tends to be extremely cycle consuming.
Also budget planning and demand planning, growth planning and target settings
for the
organization is very consuming.
And so at certain times of the year, we just know that we can't be as
responsive to the
go to market functions as we'd like to be, but we do try to contain those areas
so that
once all the budget planning and we're well into the new fiscal year, we could
go back
and put our focus where it needs to be with the go to market functions.
All right, let's get into our next segment.
The tool shed where we're talking tools, spreadsheets, metrics, just like
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If only what's in your tool shed.
Pretty much everything.
We've got pretty much everything.
If it's especially in the marketing stack in the sales stack where we've got
gone, we've
got everything we can put together to help sales teams.
I mentioned boost up, which is our new forecasting tool.
Claire is very popular and it's a great tool.
It's very powerful.
I found this one to be a little bit more lightweight, easier to implement and
easier
to get the sales leaders to adopt.
Right now it's in transformational in terms of our transparency and our
visibility into
our pipe.
We're able to forecast quite accurately by the end of the first month of each
quarter
based on the changes that we've made.
I'm not saying that boost up is the only tool that can do that, but I am saying
that putting
the right methodology is worth every penny.
A couple of comments about that.
It's funny.
I've seen, I know myself, I've worked for sales later once who as we were
implementing
forecasting software, he asked me to build a spreadsheet that he could use in
the meantime.
The trouble is people get so enamored with their spreadsheets that they can't
let them
go even when they've got a great platform that can replace it for them.
I think if the forecasting tools are facing any headwinds, it's simply that
because a
lot of RevOps people built their careers on their ability to build spreadsheets
that
sales leaders can use for certainty in their and to de-risk their pipelines.
I find that pretty interesting.
I also noticed now one of the things that's been great for us is, and we're a
little behind
the curve on this, but we just recently, I would say within the last six months
, I've
gotten pretty good with Power BI and have been able to shift a lot of the
organization away
from Salesforce reports and really look at it in a more dynamic way through
Power BI.
Most people react to it in a very positive way, but they cling to what they
know and
stick with their spreadsheets and stick with their Salesforce reports.
We have to get out of the business of saying yes to the people that are always
asking for
a new reporter, a new dashboard and trying to point them to Power BI, which is
just so
much more powerful.
Yeah, can you explain for our listeners who don't know about Power BI because
there's
an interesting point there?
I think most people don't have your credibility to say, "Hey, we're just, I
know that you want
another report or another spreadsheet, but like no."
Yeah, and so Power BI, if it's not clear, is people have probably heard of
Tableau.
It's very similar.
It's a visualization that sits on top of multiple data sources and able to
combine data from
across multiple systems and visualize them very clearly.
Yeah, I would say that saying no to people that are used to coming, first of
all, as
a RevOps team, I define us as we're a service organization.
People should be willing, should feel comfortable coming to us to make requests
There's a point earlier on in maybe the development of the company where there
's a tendency to
want to say yes to everybody.
You train everybody to come to you, to build dashboards and people get very
dependent on
it.
To make that pivot away is not very easy.
Not only are you not giving them what they're asking for, you're potentially
creating the
perception that you're not the service organization you used to be.
Fortunately, though, if you've got a visualization tool that like Power BI or
Tableau, that can
show them the greater, the more power that you can offer and the more
flexibility people
you can come around saying no, you have to learn how to do carefully sometimes.
What metrics matter to you?
Yeah, it's all about pipe creation for us.
We put a lot of energy and focus and money into building pipe and there's never
enough.
We've asked our sales reps to get more ambitious about creating our own
pipeline.
It's known across all my peers that AE generated opportunities close at a
higher rate than
SDR generated opportunities.
But that muscle tends to weaken when you've got a whole organization that's
building
pipeline for you.
It's hard work.
You put a lot of effort into it and it seems like not to return.
Plus, you can say, well, I'm a closing resource, not a sourcing resource.
I'm paid to be a closer, not a sorcerer.
But pipe creation is everything for us and quality pipe is also important to us
So getting the organization pivoted around building pipe.
I've worked in organizations before where the SDR team was just flawless.
They were incredibly efficient.
They were generating seven meetings per week.
And that turned into quality pipe that we were able to convert in a very
efficient way.
And when you get that machine working, it's just a thing of beauty.
That's where we're putting a lot of our focus.
The other area is, of course, this win rate.
Right now, our win rates, sadly, even though we don't lose competitors, are
really quite
low.
And it's largely because we're in emerging technology.
And I think a lot of people in a tech space are emerging technology.
So a lot of people will resonate with what I'm saying.
You tend to lose mostly to do nothing.
And so maybe they come around a year later when they've thought about you and
got more
people interested and maybe have a budget line item.
But anything that we can do to increase our win rates massively helps all of
our calculations.
We get so much more out of the resources that we put in place.
If we could double our win rate, it would tremendously change the dimension
that we're
working with.
We put a lot of focus on it, but it's not just win rate.
And I know there's, I'm sure most people are familiar with, sales velocity,
because you
look at hype creation, you look at win rate, but you also look at your average
sales price,
and you divide all that by the sales cycle length, and you get a value that's
very telling.
Because each of those values in the numerator, if you improve them, your
velocity number
improves.
If you can shorten the denominator, the sales cycle length, the velocity
improves.
So those are four critical elements that you can measure very easily.
And you can see the impact of making changes in any of them.
And you can measure across sales teams, you can measure across regions, and you
can even
measure the velocity of individual sales reps.
So I found it to be a very powerful tool because it combines a lot of the key S
aaS metrics
that we all focus on.
Yeah, can you just say it again real quick for the listeners to invest it?
Yeah.
Sir, so velocity is a value, and it doesn't matter what the value is, you just
care if
it goes up or down.
So it's the leads in your pipe.
So whatever the size of the pipe is for that region or that person, times the
average sales
price, ASP, times the win rate, your close rate or win rate depending on which
one you
want to measure.
So those three variables multiplied divided by your sales cycle length, and you
will get
a dollar value.
And once you establish a baseline of that value, as those variables in the
numerator
and the denominator improve, your velocity number will improve.
And once again, it takes a few quarters to get a baseline that you can compare
against
and know what it's telling you.
But once you've done it and you've done the work to be able to access that
number, it's
a very powerful metric.
Awesome.
I love it.
Check out your sales velocity.
What about some blind spots?
What do you wish you could measure better?
What do you wish you had some metrics for?
Oh, really what I wish I could measure is really the sales activity and across
the team
and how consistent we're being or how inconsistent we're being.
I don't yet have a mechanism to do that.
I can listen to gong calls and I can get some evidence of certain things.
But I can't tell you with precision where we're losing ground, where we're
failing to
drive momentum.
I think momentum is a critical element of enterprise sales.
And when your company is run on a quarterly basis that tends to be, I don't
know, there's
that dead spot in the middle of the quarter where things just don't happen and
then they
accelerate.
So I think momentum is tremendous.
We've got MedPIC, which is an incredibly powerful qualification tool that if
used correctly
and effectively is very telling, but we haven't fully embraced the concepts.
Even though some of the salespeople are operating along the MedPIC lines, we're
not necessarily
capturing that information in Salesforce and therefore I can't come to any
conclusions
about it.
So back to what I said about Salesforce Hygiene, a lot of the blind spots I
have are simply
because I'm used to having greater data hygiene in Salesforce.
Sounds too that when you have a seasonality of a product, like we have this
with Caspian
where most people want to start a new podcast or video series at the beginning
of the year
or like, hey, let's at least get something in market at the end of Q1 or
beginning at
QQ, then you have the summer low and then it's like a bunch of people want to
start
in August, September after summer.
We want to hit that Q4 and have that.
So we have some definite seasonality for our customers.
And sometimes it feels like all the pushing in the world, all the discounts in
the world
are never going to solve the seasonality of that's just not when they buy.
I'm curious how you think about that.
I completely agree with you.
The artificial constraint of a given quarter, whether you're on a fiscal or a
calendar year,
your quarter ends doesn't mean anything to your customers.
And if anything, they're probably using that against you.
Yeah, I know I ignore it.
That's what I do.
I just ignore it.
If the nature of your product doesn't lend itself to compelling events, which I
think
all of us would like to think that we had compelling events that we could just
attach
to and have the problem to solve, failing an obvious compelling event and
dealing with
seasonality that you can't avoid.
To me, once again, it's about momentum.
The reps that sell to me are extremely good at understanding that I besides
their software
solution, I've got a lot of other stuff I'm actually responsible for, not just
helping
them sell more software.
And they're really good at understanding that and making sure that I don't lose
focus,
compelling way that doesn't irritate me, but is helping me along this journey
that we
said we were trying to accomplish together.
And I just think it takes relentless focus.
And I also think it takes, this is going to sound funny, but I think a lot of
selling
is just doing the blocking and tackling, which is following up when you said
you're going
to follow up at value every single time you engage, which is to say you've not
just taken
notes, but you turn them into insights that the customer can use.
If you're building an ROI case that's compelling and you're attaching to a
large problem that
you can get more people involved than just a single champion, if you're working
really
hard to do those things and you have truly developed a champion, as we all know
, if we
have a champion who wants us to win, they will work really hard to make you
both successful.
And I think oftentimes we refer to people that are friendly and responsive as
champions
and they may not be true champions.
So I think it's about being relentless in a respectful way and driving momentum
and not
allowing the rest of the customer's difficult world to derail their focus.
And I think that's all about blocking and tackling in sales execution.
And I think it's a bit of a lost art, to be honest, in some of the sales
organizations
that I've seen.
Yeah, I would agree with all that stuff.
And I think it's a really important thing for a RevOps person to know right now
, particularly
because one of the things I just did a bunch of predictions for 2023, because
why not?
But one of the things that I think is a focus is like, fight harder to win
deals.
And like, I would challenge the sales organization to say, are you really hard
fighting as hard
as you possibly can to win deals?
Not fighting hard as in sending more annoying emails to your point.
Are you leaving space for things to happen?
Are you creating more assets or are you creating more tools or better ROI
calculations or
getting them in touch with more customers that they can talk to or doing all
those sort
of things, getting them on your company podcast, doing the things like that
that can accelerate
the relationship and be like, no, trust me, they will have our back no matter
what.
And I think that's like a key part for going forward and RevOps can help the
sales marketing
teams with that.
Yeah.
And you all back on challenger sale concepts really clearly here.
I remember a time when I was trying to replace a data source, a data platform.
I was in a company and I know that leadership wanted me to not increase the
cost, just get
better tools, better quality.
And so I was just driven by this belief that anything that was going to
increase cost was
just unacceptable and just not possible.
And the sales rep did a great job of recognizing that's how I was struggling.
But he pushed me pretty hard.
He said, how can you allow a decision this big to be driven by that one
variable?
He needed to get me to think beyond the, oh, I've just got to solve for this
requirement
that I don't spend any more money.
The reality is building pipeline, the quality of the data in that pipeline was
an important
enough problem to rethink the spend and the strategy.
And he got me to think differently about how I approached the CEO and the sales
leader
about how we should fund this problem.
And I wouldn't have done that if the rep didn't grab me by the lapels and kind
of shake
me a little bit.
I would add one thing to this, to that conversation is when we talk about the
stuff that you just
said, the people who are not in the room or the people who are signing off on
the checks
or whatever are the people that really need to be influenced.
And that's where maybe the RevOps person needs to go to the marketing Oregon
say, hey, do
we have any campaigns that are targeting the bosses of this stuff?
I know there are three clicks above this and they're going to think about this
problem
for five minutes when they see that PO come across their desk.
But do we have any type of coverage here?
And the other thing I would add to that too is if your business doesn't really
have seasonality,
but your customers have seasonality because they need to hit their quarters,
which is,
hey, if you want to hit Q4, for us, it's like if you want it for a podcast
series, hey,
I know you don't want to start a podcast in the middle of summer, it takes 60
days to
get one live and 30 more days to get it into market and get to ROI.
If you want to crush Q4, we should start this thing in June.
That's just how the math looks, for example, for us.
And so there is pushing to that seasonality.
That is the language that a senior leader understands, is like, I don't want to
miss
Q4.
No, I agree.
And I just think that in addition to that air cover, the confidence and the
maturity
of the sales organization to understand that they need to take control of the
sales process
as much as the customer might want to prevent that.
When I look at the activity traffic and the email traffic and all the ins and
outs of
the typical deal, especially deals that slip, it's clear to me that we have
allowed the
customer to control the entire process.
And we have got to have the confidence and the willingness to sometimes push
through
what can be some resistance and just some people distracted by other problems
and the
things.
But I find that that willingness to drive momentum in a respectful way is
critical.
And the other thing I think I've seen so many times is especially in enterprise
deals as
deals that slip because of just what you and I talked about, which is customers
don't
care about the quarter end.
Their legal and procurement process is what it is and we can't generally
influence it.
All we can do is understand it and get out in front of it.
And I know I'm a bit of a broken record on this topic, but all those years ago
when I
worked at Salesforce, I think the most powerful tool that we use so
consistently was the mutual
action plan.
If you actually have a working document with a champion with a timeline and a
schedule
and a go live date, not the close date, but a go live date and how are we going
to get
there?
Regariously challenging every assumption in that mutual plan so that when we
ask the
champion how long is your legal process take and they say, oh, it's probably
going to be
three days, let's try and get like that.
Let's find out if it's two weeks because it probably is and deals that have a
working
mutual plan are the deals that aren't the ones that surprise you by slipping at
the
end of the period.
Yeah, the legal review definitely will take longer than three days.
That's for sure.
Obviously, you're super passionate about salespeople and about SDRs and all of
that.
I'm curious, what have you been doing?
What are you working on in the SDR world and how are you supporting those folks
I know you're doing a lot.
I have seen SDR organizations that are skilled discovery weapons.
They can take you through the sandalar painful from the application layer to
the business
impact to the personal impact and they're not afraid to do it.
They're good at it.
I've seen a lot of sales organizations that think, now they're there to ask
bent questions
and quickly introduce this prospect to an AE.
I have found that the SDRs that get good at discovery are the ones that turn
into excellent
salespeople and really hit the ground running.
Plus, we have higher quality pipe in the meantime.
Everything in the SKILLs, the SDRs and the DISCOVERY SKILLs and the STRs, I
think is huge.
Personally, I think it's a really tough time to be an SDR and I think that a
lot of companies
lose a ton of deals because of SDRs.
I just think, I know for me personally, for my friends who are executives, if
they fill
out a lead form or if they come to your website and they want to talk to
somebody right now
and they get put on with someone who's 22 years old or whatever, it's just it
is a struggle
and that's just a lot of times not who a senior leader wants to talk to.
There has to be some sort of, like you said, it's so important, there has to be
some sort
of really sharp formal training with those hopes living, marketing, or sales or
wherever
they live.
There has to be some sort of really sharp stuff that you're doing because I
think you can
just personally, I think you can burn a lot of good will.
You can and I'll acknowledge I've had a lot of really bad conversations with S
DRs in the
past.
I have occasionally come across really good ones and I tell you I'm so
impressed when
I come across an SDR that has a grasp of the opportunity and knows how to talk
and knows
how to ask a good question, get an answer back and then do something with that
answer
instead of just going to the next question.
They don't have to have all the business acumen in the world if they're
comfortable
and I understand how to ask questions and how to deal with the answers in a
smooth way.
If an SDR can do that for me, I will make their life so much easier.
I will play the part of a prospect, an interested prospect.
I'll give them what they're looking for and I get excited because I'm happy
because it
looks like this is a salesperson.
This is a person who's going to turn into a great salesperson someday.
I love it.
All right.
Let's get to our final segment.
Quick hits.
These are quick questions and quick answers.
If you could make any animal any size, what animal would it be and what size
would it
be?
Dog, I guess even bigger dogs I think would be pretty cool because dogs are
generally
friendly and not terrifying.
So they could be as large and as powerful as wolves but not as dangerous.
I think that would be entertaining.
Huge dog.
I love it.
It's a great answer.
Any rev-ops misconception you want to clear up?
Oh, we've talked about some of it.
I think the idea that we're just there to keep the lights on and keep the sales
machine
moving and be the report monkeys, I think that one needs to go away as rev-ops
evolves
and we deliver more value and insight to the organization.
If someone was to play you in the movie of your life, who are you selecting for
the actor?
Oh, man.
Matt Damon.
But he can't buy a zoo or he can in fact buy a zoo.
He could buy a zoo.
I would probably actually do that.
That's really funny that you bring that up.
Yeah.
Matt Damon.
More for the Jason Bourne character than for the buying a zoo character.
Sure.
Yeah.
Best advice for someone who is newly leading a rev-ops team?
Most people will be under-resourced probably.
They won't be fortunate to have the...
And I'm not saying I've got tons of resources but I do have enough people to
focus on each
go-to-market function.
I would say don't let your people get siloed.
A person who's a great admin may want to have nothing to do with sales
compensation but
the fact is if they don't go down that path, it will be very limiting for them.
And if they want to grow as a rev-ops person, they have to have as broad a
portfolio as
they possibly can.
So allow the team members to share responsibilities.
Another example is don't allow somebody to become an expert at reporting and
have that
be what they do.
It's great to have that capability but try to build a way to spread that
capability across
the rest of the team so that you've got a bunch of generalists and not people
that
are focused on area and then you're in trouble when any of them take vacation
or leave.
This has been absolutely wonderful having you on the show, Voni.
I took a ton of notes.
We'll link them up in the show notes here.
Thanks so much for sharing all this stuff.
And then for our listeners, go to templified.com especially if you're in
marketing and sales,
branding comms, H-R-I-T.
Everybody needs to templified, go to templified.com.
Any final thoughts?
Anything to plug?
A couple of shout outs.
First of all, anybody listening to this is probably familiar with Modern Sales
Bros.
It's an online community that has great signal to noise ratio.
And the operators of that site are relentless about not allowing vendors to
come in and
pitch their products every time someone like me asks a question.
So it makes a great flow of information.
Sometimes it's very technical.
Sometimes it's very high level and conceptual.
It's great.
I think if you're early in your career, you'll learn so much just by seeing the
questions
and answers that may or may not apply to your own world.
But it's a tremendous resource for any ops professional.
Another one that I would love to point out if I might, which is an entity
called Sassy
Sales Management.
This is run by Matt Cameron and it's a bunch of classes for sales professionals
that assume
that you have made a transition.
Let's say your sales rep has become a manager.
That's the classic example of we can give people new experience in how to be a
manager
when they're early on their sales and leadership careers.
I in fact support Matt with a class for Relops people who are early in their
career.
They just joined RevOps and they want to figure out how can I grow in my career
and not get
pigeonholed.
Those are two entities that I feel really strongly about and would just love to
be able
to give a shout out to them.
Awesome and we'll link them up here in the show notes.
Boni, thanks again.
We really appreciate it and take care.
Likewise again, thanks.
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