Kieran Snailth & Ian Faison 45 min

Go Beyond the Click with Post-Website Engagement


On this episode Kieran describes how, in a world of inbox overload, we can catch the attention of potential customers. He also explains how his team harnesses the power of real-time engagement to drive conversions.



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[MUSIC PLAYING]

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Welcome to Rise of RevOps.

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Today, we'll hear from Kieran Snath, VP

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of Revenue Operations at Qualified.

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He and Ian talk about BDR, how to increase productivity,

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and driving action from something as simple as a website

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click.

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Welcome to Rise of RevOps.

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I'm Ian Faison, CEO of Caspian Studios.

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And today, I am joined by a very special guest,

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and an expert in RevOps.

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Kieran, how are you?

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Doing well, Ian.

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How are you?

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Excited to have you on the show.

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It's very fun because you were there

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from the very beginning of the show,

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lurking in the background with me on a Google Doc,

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figuring out what questions we wanted to ask RevOps people.

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So it's full circle to bring you, finally, on the show,

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to chat RevOps and everything you've seen over the past year

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plus in a field that's honestly changing quite literally

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every month.

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I would agree.

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Yep, changing every month.

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Very excited to be here.

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And we got the last episode, so I can't complain.

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Yeah, that's right.

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The hammer, as they call it.

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So, Kieran, what's your definition of RevOps?

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My definition of RevOps is essentially a singular department

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whose job or role it is to standardize the data processes

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and technologies that each department used

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to get to a singular goal.

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In our case, that would be ARR.

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You're the VP of RevOps.

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How did you think about building your team?

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How did you think about coming into the organization

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and building RevOps function?

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Yeah, we really took a brick-by-brick approach.

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I joined the organization early on.

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It was employee number 40 or 41.

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And I was kind of a singular RevOps lead at that point.

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What we began doing-- so at that point,

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I was running marketing operations, sales operations,

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customer operations.

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I also had a unique situation.

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I continued to have the situation to this day

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where I had the inside sales team.

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So the BDRs and SDRs also roll directly into my department.

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What we started to do is just identify areas where we needed

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to improve, where we need more bandwidth.

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And that started with sales operations.

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So we made a very strategic sales operations hire.

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That person was responsible for really standardizing sales

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processes, quotas, things like that.

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From there, we actually made a very fast hire as well

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in our customer operations department.

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Responsible for all things, kind of net retention,

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gross retention, expansion, renewals, customer satisfaction,

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things like that.

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And then moved into marketing operations as well.

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So very kind of brick-by-brick.

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We made those strategic hires.

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And we continue to build out each of those groups,

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also our systems team.

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It seems like in the interviews that we've

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done over the course of the series so far,

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you have sort of like two types of orgs

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where you have like brand new single point of failure,

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RevOps person that's coming in at a similar sort of time

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that you did and building out the function,

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or like a single person operator.

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Or you have the more senior person that is coming into a team

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that is a little bit established, but sort of like needs

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to go to the next level.

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And then I guess the third one would be like,

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you know, obviously a massive team that is very siloed

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with like, you know, there isn't a pure RevOps function.

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There's just silos within the different things,

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and they need to sort of like crowd all together.

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Because you came in as that single operator

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and could build it brick-by-brick and sort of do it

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in your own vision, do you feel like there were advantages

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there to be able to build it how you wanted to do it?

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Or do you think that it was almost a little more challenging

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because you had to, you know, drink

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from so many different firehoses and you had to really focus

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your time on building that sales ops function first?

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I think there are major advantages to getting early

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and being able to start from scratch.

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You avoid kind of tech debt and, you know, maybe coming in

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and kind of adopting, you know, ways that things

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have been done that maybe weren't correct.

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So huge benefits to kind of being here

4:06

and starting that program.

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You know, I worked really closely with the CEO

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and founders, it continued to, to till this day.

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But in the first year, you know, the primary goal was

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to give visibility into what was happening inside

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of the business and that hadn't been done before, right?

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So it really started on a white board with the CEO,

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the founders, COO, the go-to-market leaders of like,

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what questions do we need answered?

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What do we need to see?

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What do we need to measure?

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And we were able to build that structure

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from the ground up.

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Sometimes that data is not even available.

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So we had to implement workflows,

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processes, different kind of sampling mechanisms

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inside of our data models,

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so that we could deliver these types of answers.

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So we got to build from scratch

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in a fast moving organization.

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And eventually we were able to kind of deliver that,

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like visibility from there.

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We're now able to ask really intelligent questions

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and we get better and better at this every week,

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every month and just providing visibility,

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predictability to the overall business and outlook.

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- Yeah, well, we're some of the types of questions

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that you wanted to have answered

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or the types of questions that you're curious

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about back then.

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- Going back two and a half years ago,

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I think that we had 10 really large questions

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that we were trying to answer.

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I won't be able to cover them all here.

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I don't have them off the top of my head.

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But first it started with like,

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how are we looking from an overall ARR perspective?

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Okay, now the things that impact ARR

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are net new business sales, expansion sales,

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your gross retention.

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So we wanted really high level visibility

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into our ARR outlook.

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And then from there, what you start to do is like,

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okay, well, what impacts this?

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You know, let's start at the top of the funnel

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for this conversation.

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Okay, so pipeline, right?

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How many, you know, MQLs or marketing qualified leads

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or marketing qualified accounts do we have entering the funnel?

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How many are we then moving into a working state?

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How many opportunities have we been able to generate

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from that?

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How many have converted to stage two?

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How many are progressing through the pipeline?

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How many of one, right?

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And that's just an indicator of our pipeline funnel health.

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So that was one question.

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The next would be sales.

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So the question is, well, how much open pipeline

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do we have in this period?

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And how much can we expect to maybe come in

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in this period and close very quickly?

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And then with that, what is our forecast going to be

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this month, this quarter, the next six months?

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And then the third question is always around kind of

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gross retention and net retention, right?

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So how's the customer health looking?

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Do we have, what percentage of our customers

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are green, yellow or red?

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What can we do for these red customers to ensure

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that they're getting ROI, they're satisfied

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and they're ultimately set up for renewable.

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And those are really like the high level,

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like three pillars I would kind of highlight here.

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It's kind of like got it like pipeline sales,

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GRR and NRR and you've got that overall ARR outlook.

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We did a ton of additional stuff as well.

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Like we wanted to better understand our competitive landscape.

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We wanted to better understand what was like impacting

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our deals to maybe like slow down

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and each of these would actually require

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its own analytical kind of packet that we would deliver.

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So anytime we had a question, they couldn't really fit

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within that any of the structures I mentioned before,

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we would deliver a new one and a new kind of way

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that we would maybe look at like competitive landscape

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for an example.

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- That's really cool.

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Did you explain a little bit more about the green,

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yellow, red and building that out and what that means?

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- Green, yellow and red is, you know,

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a very high level way of like classifying a customer

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and that's like the highest exact language

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that we would maybe like speak.

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What we actually do is I think we've got maybe like

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five to 10 different scoring mechanisms.

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Grant Guerrero is our director of revenue operations.

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So he works under me and then he owns the success area.

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He actually measures like 10 different plus points

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on a customer to identify their health.

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And then what we do is we wait those,

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we take averages to eventually give us an overall

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highest level score of red, yellow or green.

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But it encompasses a ton of different different stuff.

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And this could be customer usage.

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Are they logging in and using the software?

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Are they receiving ROI from the platform?

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What is their sentiment on us?

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So like how do, you know, how do they actually,

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how do we feel they feel in any given conversation

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or in any given quarter?

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We'll do other things like CSAT and customer satisfaction,

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net promoter score, things like that

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to also measure overall health and like being a store.

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- I love it.

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Quick note back on just strategy here.

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Any other sort of just like strategic things

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that now you've been sitting in the seat for the past

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two and a half years, any changes to your strategy

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or how you think about rev-ops and building your team?

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- Yeah, so I mean, there've been a lot of changes

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over the past few years and it's really,

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we start with identifying a problem

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or an area that we can like build further efficiencies.

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So, you know, we might specialize a function further,

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look for ways that we can kind of take one role

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and break it into three specialization

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of those kind of like functions

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so that people can become more productive.

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You know, that's one, we're always trying to reassess like,

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you know, how can we make an individual more productive?

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What are the things that we need to change

9:13

so that they can do more pipeline, close more deals,

9:16

cover more accounts from a success standpoint?

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Sometimes this involves like systems, processes,

9:21

other times it involves kind of specialization of teams

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and I think that's always something

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that's kind of like ongoing.

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You know, outside of that,

9:28

when you build visibility into some of these problems

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so that you can ask the hard-hitting, you know,

9:33

intelligent questions,

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you search for identify areas of improvement.

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And some of the things that we've just gotten a lot better at

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is just classification and categorization

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of accounts, opportunities, customers,

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and really getting a really good lens

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into like, okay, got it.

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Like if it's this type of account or this type of deal,

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we know how to predict this differently than like the whole pie.

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And that's something that's been really exciting to see

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is just us getting sharper and sharper and sharper,

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being able to better predict kind of what's going to come

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from a particular opportunity, a particular deal,

10:13

or particularly just based on technographic

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and thermographic information that we're able to collect

10:18

on that account.

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- Yeah, so what would be examples?

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I know you can't share the secrets out here,

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but like the types of technographic

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or thermographic information that you'd be looking for,

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that would base that decision.

10:31

Is it like, you know, company size, revenue size,

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industry, stuff like that?

10:36

- Yeah, exactly.

10:37

So yeah, I'll run over at high levels.

10:39

So at Qualified, we're purpose built for Salesforce.

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So first thing, Salesforce, you've got to have it,

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you've got to use it, your salespeople have to be in it,

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marketing people need to use it.

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We sell the Salesforce customers.

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So we use a few different tools

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that help us kind of collect that information

10:54

and identify like, hey, are they running on Salesforce CRM?

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That's kind of the first thing.

10:58

What we've typically found is that our sweet spot

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is actually driven by website traffic.

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So we typically look for folks that have

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above 10,000 website sessions monthly,

11:10

unique monthly visitors actually per month.

11:13

So if they've got Salesforce, they have a traffic website

11:16

where they're receiving 10,000 monthly unites,

11:18

we're in a good spot.

11:20

Then we typically look at like revenue range,

11:22

employee size, things like that,

11:23

and that's a good indicator.

11:25

That's kind of the basic for us.

11:27

That's an indicator for our ICP.

11:29

But then we also go look at additional things.

11:31

Like we play really well with account-based marketing vendors.

11:34

Like if you're using an account-based marketing vendor,

11:37

we're really going to work well together.

11:39

You're already doing sophisticated things

11:41

in the marketing landscape.

11:42

We're going to complement that ADM offering

11:44

and allow you to kind of maximize the ROI

11:47

of your ADM investments.

11:49

- Yeah, I love that.

11:50

It also, that's one of those things

11:53

that is so helpful from a marketing perspective

11:56

and a sales perspective, right?

11:58

Because if you can dig in and say,

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hey, you're using ABM software,

12:01

that little bell goes off for the salesperson.

12:05

And then you can create product marketing materials

12:08

and say, hey, this is all the people who use Sixth Sense

12:10

or this is all the people, whatever.

12:13

But then also from a marketing perspective,

12:14

it allows you to go back to the marketing team

12:16

and say things like, hey, we should do more joint content

12:21

or co-created content or webinars or events with Sixth Sense

12:24

because we're seeing XYZ

12:27

and that's where the data actually fuels

12:30

marketing and sales strategy,

12:32

which is rather than the reverse way, right?

12:36

Which is not as helpful.

12:38

- Exactly.

12:38

So by doing all of that

12:41

and getting all of that information integrated

12:43

on the account level, we're able to have a more cohesive,

12:45

go to market approach with marketing sales,

12:48

our inside sales team, all that great stuff.

12:50

You mentioned making the bell go off.

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In our case, it was about actually making the bell

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not go off, right?

12:57

Don't make that bell go off

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if they don't have these attributes, okay?

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They've got to have these attributes on the account

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and then we want to alert these folks to kind of go after them.

13:06

So for us, the more that we're able to kind of get

13:09

smarter on that account level,

13:11

the more we're able to limit the noise for our reps

13:15

and go to market teams.

13:17

- You said that that BDRs and SDRs fall under your org

13:22

that's pretty neat.

13:23

Can you kind of share a little bit more about that?

13:27

- Yeah, certainly.

13:28

So I joined Qualified at an early stage

13:32

and one of the things I've got actually a lot of experience

13:34

in is kind of inside sales operations, BDR, SDR motions.

13:38

How do we look at like organizing those teams?

13:40

How do we do comp plans, things like that?

13:42

So it was really kind of right place, right time, I guess

13:46

where I was, I joined the company,

13:48

my role was director of revenue operations

13:50

that we knew that I was going to manage that inside sales team

13:54

for the foreseeable future and kind of build it

13:57

from the ground up, you know, standard operating procedures.

13:59

How do we measure, how do we comp all that,

14:01

all that great stuff?

14:02

It was certainly a unique thing that it sat, you know,

14:04

under like revenue operations, but it was working quite well.

14:07

I work for the CRO, the CRO is responsible

14:10

for the sales number.

14:11

So he and I are directly aligned on the types of deals

14:13

that we want to produce to get to that sales number.

14:16

And then I also was responsible for the marketing operations side,

14:19

right? So I have a vested interest in, you know,

14:22

our leads being followed up with

14:23

and hitting our marketing pipeline number.

14:26

So it's a very good like neutral zone for them to sit in,

14:29

you're at qualified.

14:31

Also, you know, we sell a conversational marketing platform,

14:36

right? It's Martech, it sits on your website.

14:39

So one of the big things is, you know,

14:41

being able to integrate all of the infrastructure

14:43

for these individuals just around the role, the website,

14:47

all those different things has been a big kind of reason

14:49

why we've kept it under revenue operations.

14:51

- I'm a pretty firm advocate that

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outbound is a marketing function.

14:56

I firmly believe that it's not a sales function

14:59

because it's a one to many thing.

15:04

And I think it's changing a ton.

15:07

And I think that the sort of old ways of just, you know,

15:11

emailing high and emailing them a million times

15:13

is getting less and less fruitful.

15:15

And so, and I think that how you communicate

15:18

to the masses is a marketing function.

15:20

Sales close deals, marketing communicates the masses

15:23

in a variety of different ways.

15:25

So it's fascinating to me that it lives in rev-ops

15:27

and I understand why for y'all.

15:28

And I think that that's probably a pretty good,

15:31

why it's working, I think so well for you

15:35

is because of sort of like all the reasons

15:36

that you outlayed there.

15:38

But I'm curious in those type of outbound pieces there,

15:43

how are you thinking about it from a marketing perspective?

15:47

How are you working with marketing

15:49

as those things happen?

15:50

Like, you know, I didn't, you know,

15:53

finish this very long question with,

15:55

I was talking to a CMO the other day and they were like,

15:58

our CEO was like, hey, we're gonna pull a bunch of money

16:02

out of marketing budget, we're gonna hire 10 more BDRs.

16:04

And the person was like, you know, I'm just like,

16:07

I'll just quit if we do.

16:08

(laughs)

16:09

Because that's like crazy to me.

16:12

And I thought that was like such an interesting conversation

16:16

to have, which is like, would you rather have X amount

16:19

of dollars in a marketing budget

16:21

or X amount of dollars for BDRs?

16:22

Not that it always has to live in a vacuum,

16:24

but just the idea that those two things would be at odds

16:27

as if it's not all sort of like one joint

16:30

go-to-market sort of function.

16:31

So anyways, BDRs and sitting places, let's say you.

16:36

- Yes, so I agree with you.

16:38

Like I actually think that the best place

16:40

for the BDR team to sit is typically under marketing.

16:45

And the reason why I believe that is because marketing,

16:48

product marketing is really, they should be leading

16:52

the charge on what we wanna say to the market

16:54

and who we wanna say it to, right?

16:56

So it's really important that that BDR team,

16:59

their messaging, their call of action are aligned

17:01

to that of the corporate messaging

17:02

that marketing is delivering.

17:04

So I think that's why I feel that it's a great fit

17:07

under marketing.

17:08

The area that like we are able to say in like lockstep

17:12

and why it's worked under revenue operations

17:14

is because we're very organized and targeted

17:17

about who we want to go after.

17:19

Okay?

17:20

I gave you a rough idea of like our ideal customer profile.

17:23

We actually get far more specific internally

17:26

about what we want to go and do.

17:28

And we lock this every quarter, every year,

17:30

and it's like, these are the accounts we wanna go, all right?

17:33

Let's go do it.

17:34

So now the big thing is orchestration.

17:36

There was a world back in the day EN

17:38

where a sales leader would kind of give the BDRs

17:41

a list of accounts and they would say,

17:42

hey, here's the territory for the quarter.

17:44

You know, call down the list.

17:46

We do not take that approach at all.

17:48

Our territories are actually dynamic.

17:49

And I believe they're actually set by marketing

17:51

and I'll tell you why.

17:52

Based on, you know, we use Sixth Sense,

17:56

we use our own tool here internally.

17:58

And Sixth Sense is an AVM platform that allows us

18:00

to essentially measure intent and accounts

18:03

from a third party perspective.

18:05

We use our own products, which is tied into our website

18:07

to measure first party intent.

18:09

These things work really well together.

18:11

All of our BDRs team's actions are based off

18:14

of these intent engines, which are all driven

18:17

via prospects response to our marketing materials.

18:20

They click on an ad, they read a blog,

18:21

they do a search on Google, maybe they land on our website

18:24

and they don't convert.

18:26

All of these are the different activities or events

18:29

that essentially make our BDRs go and do something.

18:32

Anything that comes to the website

18:33

and is not able to convert or we don't hook it there,

18:36

it is immediately handed over to the BDR team

18:38

and in real time they are going to go reach out.

18:41

And I think because we have built this flywheel,

18:44

and we're obviously in a unique position

18:45

using our own software on our website,

18:48

but I think that because we've built this flywheel

18:50

where we know, okay, got it, people are gonna land

18:52

on the website, they're not gonna convert.

18:54

We then send them an email and we reach out

18:56

with kind of personalized outreach

18:57

to get them back to the website and convert.

19:00

We've built this like really great like kind of synergy

19:02

between sales and marketing where the BDR

19:04

is essentially a another engine,

19:06

another microphone to get those people back to the website.

19:09

Now, that's why it works well here

19:11

and why we continue to have it like sit under revenue

19:14

operations, but everything that I just said is a case

19:17

of why it should sit under marketing, right?

19:19

If you're doing really good real time orchestration

19:21

from your website and from your intent engines,

19:24

it should just be a continuation of what marketing

19:27

wants to say to those accounts and those prospects.

19:29

- I love it.

19:30

As succinct of an answer as I have heard on the topic,

19:34

we're gonna pull that quote and throw that

19:36

on the website.

19:37

I just love, you know, I love the way

19:41

that y'all think about it.

19:42

I think that you think about revenue.

19:44

I have often been very flattering towards

19:46

qualified sales and marketing,

19:49

or, but I think your revenue org is like truly a revenue org.

19:52

It's like there is such blurred lines

19:55

between everything in the best way possible,

19:57

whereas so many other teams,

20:00

like it's just so, so, so siloed

20:02

and it's really cool to see all that,

20:04

well, that stuff happened.

20:05

And I think what's so important for y'all too,

20:08

is because you use qualified and I wanna get, you know,

20:11

into the qualified and qualified conversation too.

20:14

But because the website is where all of this stuff

20:16

is happening and how important it is to get people

20:19

to your website and how that is like,

20:21

all we're doing in marketing is like getting someone

20:23

to the website, which I think like everyone forgets,

20:27

sometimes it's like every action, every single thing

20:30

that we're trying to do, everything always,

20:33

100% of the time boils down to getting someone back

20:37

to your website, right?

20:38

And then the fact that you have this engine behind it

20:40

and are able to use qualified allows it to work, you know,

20:43

and respond much more quickly, much more timely

20:47

and much more personalized.

20:48

- Exactly, yes, 100%.

20:50

- So tell us a little bit about sort of why,

20:53

why it's so important to respond quickly

20:57

and why it's so important that your team

21:00

is structured that way and how do you use

21:03

qualified to do that?

21:04

- The whole speed to lead kind of concept

21:08

has been around for a long time.

21:10

A lot of studies have been done on this,

21:11

prospects are more likely to buy from the vendor

21:15

that kind of gets back to them first

21:16

in their initial request.

21:17

This was published maybe five to 10 years ago

21:21

and people continue to kind of like republish things like this.

21:24

We know that speed or lack of speed can be a killer, okay?

21:30

So, you know, we take that to heart.

21:33

Everything that we do is, you know,

21:34

really trying to drive a real-time motion

21:36

over here at Qualified.

21:37

I think the other thing to say here is that

21:40

we are now in a world where inboxes are incredibly crowded.

21:43

People are digitally burnt out.

21:47

They receive too many emails to get through in a day

21:50

and you really need to strike all the irons hot

21:52

and it's top of mind.

21:53

If you are waiting two days to get back

21:55

to a demo request form, you know,

21:57

that's gonna be a problem because, you know,

21:59

we're busy individuals.

22:00

Even last night, I was in our office around 7.30 PM

22:04

and I was having a conversation about a problem

22:07

and we submitted to vendor demos at 7.30 PM

22:10

before we left the office.

22:12

You know, those individuals probably have 24 hours

22:17

to kind of get back to us before we have kind of

22:20

mentally moved on to other things.

22:21

That's the need for kind of speed to lead

22:23

and then I think that it is going to become increasingly

22:26

important as people become digitally burnt out

22:28

or when this virtual world, everything is over email

22:31

and overslack and you really wanna cut through that noise

22:34

and get to the top.

22:35

- Yeah, when I first met Craig, the CEO

22:39

and he was talking about this and the thing that

22:42

crystallized it so obviously in my head was he was like,

22:45

"If the CEO of your biggest prospect walked

22:48

in the front door of your office,

22:52

literally the entire everyone would stop working,

22:54

you'd go get some drinks, you'd go lay out the red carpet,

22:57

you'd get them into a comfy chair and all this sort of stuff

23:02

and if that same person comes to your website,

23:07

they get treated the exact same as everybody else.

23:10

And if you're lucky, that person submits some type

23:15

of demo request or whatever and then what happens to them

23:20

is they get routed to a 23 year old to hop on a 15 minute

23:26

call to see if they're fit to buy from them.

23:29

It's the most archaic backwards thing and like so many

23:33

companies still do this motion and it is infuriating to me.

23:38

It drives me absolutely bonkers because it's so,

23:42

I'm like, it's just crazy.

23:43

It's like so crazy that you would operate this way

23:46

and yet everybody does this.

23:48

- Yeah, 100%.

23:50

We believe in delivering kind of bespoke tailored experiences

23:54

on the website to increase the website conversion, right?

23:57

Like let's keep in mind the website is a game of failure.

24:00

You know, if you can convert 5%, 2%, 3% of your website

24:04

traffic to fill out a form, you're doing an incredible job.

24:08

So it's, you know, you wanna provide those like really bespoke

24:12

tailored experiences to get them to convert on the site

24:15

and drive conversion up, but what happens when they don't?

24:18

You've got 95% let's say that are landing on the website

24:21

and not filling out a form, not taking that call to action.

24:24

So we have a really large philosophy in moving fast

24:28

after the website visit.

24:30

They don't convert, we immediately take action on that

24:33

and then deliver a very personalized email experience.

24:37

You mentioned the 23 year olds, my 23 year olds are really,

24:40

really good at this, the best I've ever seen.

24:42

The best I've ever seen and they will be incredibly

24:45

personalized, you know, one of the things that I'm constantly

24:49

hearing and what our team gets responses in is this

24:51

is the best email I've ever received, the best cold email

24:54

I've ever received in my career.

24:57

And we really pride ourselves on that in every single day,

24:59

every single motion.

25:00

So it doesn't matter whether you're a BDR manager and SDR

25:04

or whether you're a CEO of a Fortune 500 organization,

25:07

you are going to get a world class customer experience from us.

25:11

And we really worked hard to kind of get that into our DNA.

25:15

All right, let's get to our next segment, RevOps

25:16

is a close where we talk about the tough parts of RevOps.

25:19

What's the hardest RevOps cycle RevOps problem

25:23

that you faced recently had you solve it?

25:25

- You know, I think that the toughest kind of problem

25:29

is generally like getting alignment and buy in, right?

25:32

Sometimes you're able to identify problems

25:34

and you wanna go do something about that.

25:37

You wanna kind of drive an overhaul

25:38

or fix some different things and that could be a challenge.

25:41

You know, just because you're in RevOps

25:43

and your job is to kind of standardize the data, technology,

25:47

processes that, you know, these different teams like run on,

25:50

doesn't mean that you have full autonomy

25:51

or authority to go and like do so, right?

25:54

So sometimes a, you know, a challenge that I find is,

25:57

you identify a problem, you know,

25:59

you need to go and do something about it quickly,

26:01

but you need to kind of get that cross functional buy in

26:03

and have everybody kind of agreeing with you on that problem.

26:06

Agreeing, it's a tough priority and agreeing,

26:08

we need to kind of drive that change.

26:11

You know, kind of wrangling people

26:12

in this hectic remote work world can be kind of challenging.

26:15

And I think just getting everybody in the room,

26:17

agreeing to the plan is probably the,

26:19

one of the more challenging pieces

26:21

that I faced in revenue operations,

26:24

especially when it comes to like big infrastructure changes,

26:28

right?

26:29

You know, I'll be the first to admit,

26:31

we made some mistakes early on that were like,

26:34

like as far as like some data model stuff,

26:37

some stamping and we're making some iterations now,

26:39

but it has really big impact.

26:41

When I joined, you know, I was running revenue operations

26:43

and inside sales team, I was also,

26:45

our sales force admin.

26:47

I shared that responsibility with our VP of sales engineering

26:50

when we were early days.

26:52

And just some different things that I had set up,

26:54

made sense at the time, which were user lookup fields.

26:57

Like who generated this opportunity,

26:59

who influenced it, who's getting credit?

27:01

And a mistake was those were user lookup fields.

27:04

So when those individuals got promoted,

27:07

we lost our stamping.

27:10

It should have stamped those individuals as BDRs,

27:13

the teams they were on, pipeline sources.

27:16

Now that we've actually moved them into like a future role,

27:19

you know, now that changes the stamp.

27:22

So we have to go back and fix that historical data.

27:24

We kind of had to make a decision,

27:25

which was do we continue when people are promoted

27:29

to deactivate the old user and create a new user?

27:32

Or do we just get smarter and more scalable

27:34

about how we do this?

27:36

The answer is let's get smarter and more scalable,

27:39

which requires a little bit more work on the infraside.

27:42

- Basically we're moving user lookup fields

27:44

to a text stamp field.

27:46

So those things don't change as other data changes.

27:49

- That is a Rev obstacle if I've ever heard one.

27:51

One of the things that we've talked about a few times

27:54

on the show is sort of like,

27:55

how do you account for Black Swan events?

27:58

And like, what do you do?

27:59

Like, I think that we're like a massive market shift.

28:02

So you're like, hey, we renew at an 80%

28:05

and we historically close at a 22%.

28:09

But tech has been taking a beating.

28:12

That changes everything.

28:13

We can't use any of our historicals, none of those matter.

28:16

What do you do?

28:17

And it's like, that's the sort of stuff where it's like,

28:20

how do you treat those sort of like,

28:24

the boom periods on a good way

28:26

or the bust periods on a bad way to be proactive?

28:31

This is something that we at Caspian have been trying

28:34

to figure out is like, what,

28:35

and everybody's trying to figure this out of like,

28:37

how do you forecast accurately when the future

28:41

so uncertain in every single person

28:44

has been telling every single sales person

28:47

for the past year, wait till next year,

28:49

wait till December, wait till Q4, wait till, wait till,

28:52

wait till, and then what do you do?

28:53

- Yeah, great question.

28:54

I mean, we're in a Black Swan event, right?

28:57

We were able to adjust very quickly.

29:00

And some of the things that we do is,

29:03

you know, we just can't take, you know,

29:04

like a win rate, a gross retention rate,

29:06

or like any of our conversion percentages

29:09

and kind of take them for granted.

29:10

So one of the things that we're constantly doing

29:12

is we look at conversion all the way through the funnel.

29:14

We do some waiting here, we apply seasonality,

29:17

but more importantly, we actually all get agreement

29:19

and alignment on the conversion percentages that we use.

29:22

This goes all the way up to our CEO.

29:24

So when we're forecasting, building models,

29:26

things like that, we often review the rates.

29:29

We will look at times before we were kind of in this,

29:33

kind of downturn.

29:35

We will look at our trailing six month,

29:37

our trailing three months.

29:38

We will look at different weighted averages.

29:41

We will pull that in and out of our subset

29:44

so that we can get to kind of the rates

29:46

that we believe are going to stick.

29:47

So there's a lot of homework done here

29:49

to just help predictability,

29:52

set smarter goals, things like that.

29:54

Cool.

29:55

Any, yeah, anything else?

29:57

What about revoops moment?

29:59

Any mistakes that you made?

30:01

You know, I mentioned how important technology capture

30:06

is to us in reporting on the technologies

30:08

that accounts use.

30:09

You know, tech data's never perfect.

30:13

And it doesn't matter where you go

30:15

to any of the vendors out there in the space.

30:17

It's not gonna be 100% accurate.

30:19

People churn off of vendors every week, every month,

30:22

and it's not gonna be accurately reportable in real time.

30:26

You know, one of the mistakes that we made is

30:28

we kind of took like a data vendor, like for granted,

30:31

in the sense that what we get from them

30:32

is the single source of truth and go.

30:35

But what we actually have is we have an army of salespeople

30:38

and BDRs, SDRs that are truing up this data all the time.

30:41

And they're like, oh, well, I went to their website

30:43

and I could see that this was an on and this was off.

30:45

And they go and actually they make updates to the account

30:49

on all of these different fields and they true it up.

30:52

What we didn't do is we weren't stamping those updates.

30:54

We didn't know that a human had actually gone back in

30:56

and said, hey, no, this is incorrect data

30:58

that you're feeding into my account.

31:00

So what would happen?

31:02

The vendor kept writing it back in every week, right?

31:05

So they would remove it and try to true up their accounts

31:08

but we had an situation where we continued

31:10

to override that information.

31:12

So we kind of had this realization where we're like,

31:15

okay, we need to trust the humans over the systems, right?

31:18

They know the right thing to do

31:19

and we need to just do a better job of prioritizing

31:22

those edits, not really kind of overriding.

31:24

So I think that was a big thing

31:26

that we're kind of working on as well.

31:31

Another rev-oops moment I think for us is,

31:34

I joined the organization

31:36

and a unique thing that we were doing here

31:39

is we were just taking an opportunity of stage one

31:42

and kind of like classifying that as like pipeline.

31:45

We had a lot happening in that early stage of a deal.

31:51

And I think that was an oops moment

31:53

that we didn't act on that sooner.

31:55

What I mean by this is like everybody has opportunity stages,

31:58

everybody has a stage one, okay?

31:59

R is his name's Prospect.

32:01

What was happening in Prospect is too many different

32:06

and we're not going to be in Prospect.

32:07

So meetings were being scheduled, meetings were being canceled,

32:10

meetings were being rescheduled.

32:12

We had multi-threading, building out the buying team,

32:15

we had follow-ups occurring,

32:16

and all of this was kind of happening

32:18

within a singular stage.

32:19

So you could imagine the amount of visibility loss

32:22

that we had on all those different things that I mentioned

32:25

because it's just parked in one singular stage.

32:29

And one of the things we did is we kind of decoupled

32:31

our opportunity objects.

32:33

Vek, our systems administrator,

32:35

we call a pre-opportunity,

32:36

which helps us measure the meeting effectiveness

32:38

and how we actually do in these early stage calls.

32:41

So this is kind of a meeting scheduled, meeting rescheduled,

32:45

multi-threading,

32:46

meaning that you're trying to get to additional contacts

32:48

within the organization, except it in D2.

32:50

And I think this was a really good move for our organization

32:54

just to get better visibility and measures

32:56

within the early stage pipeline.

32:58

'Cause before what it looked like is we just had drop off,

33:01

we couldn't necessarily explain like,

33:02

"Oh, well, these people know showed,

33:04

"are these canceled and these people rescheduled

33:06

"or we were below the line here."

33:08

And now we're in a position where we can answer

33:10

all of these questions after kind of decoupling those stages.

33:13

So these are things you learn over time.

33:15

You're never gonna get it right the first time.

33:16

That'd be advice I have to anyone listening to the podcast.

33:20

You're gonna build something and you're gonna grow.

33:22

You're gonna scale and you're gonna be like,

33:24

"Oh, okay, right.

33:25

"We're now finding this nuance.

33:26

"We were kind of blind in this area

33:28

"and you can need to adjust."

33:30

But yeah, I would say that's one of the RevOps moments

33:33

that I have here is kind of the lack of granularity

33:36

that we had in our stage one deals.

33:40

- Yeah, I totally agree.

33:41

To me, I think lack of stage one,

33:43

and then for me, it's the freaking ghosting.

33:46

That's what kills.

33:47

Ghost accounts where it's like super high intent,

33:50

super interested, took a sales call.

33:53

It was like, this is the best thing since sliced bread

33:55

and then just don't respond forever.

33:57

That those, I'm like,

33:59

"Where do you put these things?"

34:01

Like, it's like, you can't email them 500 times, right?

34:06

And they're like, "Hey, yeah, just sorry.

34:08

"I've been busy."

34:09

And you're like, "You've been busy for a year.

34:10

"You still respond to emails?

34:12

"I don't know, what do you think?"

34:14

- I think there are, I mean, this is,

34:17

we're facing a huge challenge.

34:18

We're feeling this right now.

34:19

Like reschedules, no shows, the ghosting,

34:21

it's certainly something that we're kind of facing right now.

34:26

I believe that there are two kind of parties

34:30

in that camp, right?

34:32

They're the end of the prospects that you talk with

34:34

that are going to, if something comes up,

34:36

they're gonna let you know.

34:37

They're gonna write you and they're gonna say,

34:38

"Hey, time's not right."

34:40

And then you've got other individuals

34:42

that have full intention of talking with you again,

34:44

but they are not going to take the time

34:45

to respond to your email and let you know what's going on.

34:48

You've gotta be able to identify those two parties

34:51

and understand who you're kind of dealing with.

34:54

That's first and foremost.

34:56

Next is we're really trying to get sharp

34:58

about bringing the pain and identifying those compelling events.

35:01

Okay?

35:02

Because we have a really good focus on the technology stack,

35:05

their website traffic, their revenue,

35:08

we can kind of connect some dots

35:09

and make some assumptions of what that business

35:11

might be dealing with and what that demand-gen leader,

35:14

that marketing leader probably has

35:16

his priorities entering into next year.

35:18

And we're really trying to hook on that, right?

35:22

Use those compelling events,

35:23

use that pain that we identified early on

35:26

in our conversations to get that meeting to occur.

35:29

We're also experimenting with all types

35:32

of personalized incentives.

35:33

You know, the time of year where Starbucks comes out

35:36

with all types of holiday drinks

35:38

and we're like trying to buy coffees to get them on the call,

35:40

like, "Hey, can we send you a $5 coffee gift card?"

35:43

All these little touches that just make it

35:46

that much more personal,

35:48

we're leaning in as much as we can.

35:50

So we really want the prospect to kind of feel that.

35:55

And we want them to understand that they're going to get

35:57

something from our meeting.

35:58

They're gonna understand how to be more efficient

36:00

with pipeline, how to generate more pipeline

36:02

from their website.

36:03

They're gonna understand how to make their BERs more productive.

36:06

They're gonna understand how to orchestrate website visits

36:09

to their BERs.

36:10

These are really important topics in today's landscape

36:13

that not a large percentage of people are really nailing.

36:16

And I think that that's one of the things

36:19

that we're really trying to drive home

36:20

is these are problems that we are faced with today

36:22

and we can help with that.

36:24

And if you're really just focused on that

36:26

and the value they're gonna get from the call

36:28

and you're staying personalized

36:29

trying to build that relationship,

36:31

that's all we can really do to get people to show up.

36:34

But in the event that they're not,

36:35

we've got a really good motion for kind of getting people

36:38

like back in the loop,

36:40

but again, it remains a challenge.

36:43

We're always improving.

36:44

I've got a team of 11 BERs

36:47

that are the most creative writers I've seen

36:50

in a BER team to date.

36:52

If anyone can get it done, it's them,

36:54

but we are still battling the no-show rescheduled issue.

36:58

My biggest thing is the demo and then ghosting,

37:02

which is like, oh my goodness.

37:04

You never really know what's going on inside of a business,

37:07

especially in this time of year.

37:09

People are in Q4 and they're being told to wait

37:12

to see where they land before they kind of get their budgets,

37:16

allocated or the budgets finalized.

37:18

You never know what's happening inside of an organization.

37:21

So Ian, your example,

37:22

may I call it podcasts as a service?

37:24

Indeed.

37:25

Okay, awesome.

37:26

So podcasts as a service.

37:27

Like you're probably talking to the demand-gen leaders,

37:30

the marketing leaders, things like that.

37:32

They talk with you, they kind of get like a scope of work

37:36

and they're like, wow, I really like what I'm seeing here.

37:38

And they kind of go back and they're like,

37:40

no, your budgets actually being cut further

37:42

and you're being asked to wait and like,

37:44

no, we can't get the same as an additional line item.

37:46

So I think that there are things that are happening

37:48

at the board level, the CEO level,

37:50

the finance level that are impacting this.

37:52

And again, that goes back to there are two camps in the party,

37:56

the ones that will take the time to write you

37:58

and explain to you what is going on,

37:59

which they don't need to do.

38:01

And then there are the folks that have full intent

38:04

to circle back, but it's not the right time

38:05

and they can't get into it.

38:07

- Yeah, I couldn't agree more.

38:10

All right, let's get to our next segment,

38:11

the tool shed, we're talking tools, spreadsheets, metrics,

38:13

just like everyone's favorite tool, qualified.

38:16

Have you ever heard of that?

38:18

- I have for sure, 100%.

38:21

- Well, no B2B tool shed is complete without qualified,

38:23

go to qualified.com right now and check them out.

38:26

I mean, if you've been listening to Karen

38:27

for the last 45 minutes, you know that he is just as smart

38:30

as they come on this stuff.

38:32

You can reach out to him, he'll tell you exactly

38:35

how they use it and we'll link up his LinkedIn

38:38

in the show notes, you can shoot him a note too,

38:40

or you can just go to qualified.com right now

38:41

and you can talk to someone right this second,

38:44

go to qualified.com.

38:46

Karen, what's in your tool shed?

38:48

- Yeah, we've got a lot.

38:49

So let's maybe start with some of the basics.

38:53

Obviously we operate on Salesforce CRM.

38:56

I'm then gonna kind of move into like pipeline generation

38:58

tools.

38:59

So qualified is obviously very important to us.

39:01

That's what converts our website traffic.

39:03

It allows us to engage our website traffic,

39:06

but more importantly, it measures the accounts

39:08

that are on our website so that we can give that

39:09

to the BDR team and they can go after the folks

39:11

that matter the most.

39:13

Outside of that, Sixth Sense is very important for us,

39:16

being able to kind of really understand,

39:19

who out there is showing intent towards these buying topics,

39:22

these different products, different keywords,

39:24

things like that is very important to kind of our motion.

39:29

The next thing is kind of orchestration.

39:31

So the big thing that I would highlight there is like,

39:34

we've got just a series of processes and flows built

39:36

inside of Salesforce that are enabling us to kind of get

39:39

things to the reps at the right time.

39:41

We use a tool called Rattle, go Rattle.com.

39:45

Anybody hasn't heard of it.

39:46

They're doing really amazing things.

39:47

I'm super impressed by what's going on there.

39:50

That has actually kind of been a backbone of like connecting

39:53

all of our different systems and alerting the people

39:56

at the right time Ian earlier.

39:57

You mentioned the bell going off.

39:58

We want the bell to go off at the best times possible,

40:02

but only when it's actionable.

40:03

It's all these systems together and provide a really great

40:06

experience for the BDR so that they're alerted

40:08

on everything that matters.

40:10

We're assessing a number of different kind of AI tools

40:12

right now, some were in trial with, some were kind of looking

40:16

at further down the line.

40:17

But just things that are going to be able to enable our BDRs

40:21

to be more personalized faster.

40:24

On average, I think some of our reps spend five to 10 minutes

40:27

just to find the nugget on which they're

40:30

going to personalize around, which Ian, that could be that you

40:32

like a football team.

40:34

It could be like dogs, you like cats, whatever.

40:36

We're going to figure it out, right?

40:38

But I want to find a tool that makes us more productive

40:42

and efficient in finding that information.

40:44

And I want to standardize a way to store that inside of Sales

40:46

Force to kind of save time.

40:49

So I think I kind of hit on like the big main platforms

40:52

that we're running on right now that are kind of like driving

40:55

their emotion.

40:57

Yeah.

40:57

And I just chatted with the Rattle team a few days ago.

41:02

So that's very, very timely.

41:05

Any other thoughts on tools or metrics or anything like that?

41:10

Always looking, tooling.

41:11

I mean, one thing I'm always saying is always innovate,

41:14

always improve, always break things.

41:16

Just do it quickly and fix it quickly.

41:20

The big thing that I think on the horizon for us

41:22

is just how can we make people more efficient?

41:24

Is there areas where AI are going

41:26

to be able to make recommendations to us?

41:29

Are there areas where AI is going to help our reps become

41:32

more productive?

41:33

We're not using too many tools in that space right now.

41:38

The one thing I will highlight is gong, gong.

41:41

We use for conversational intelligence.

41:44

They're doing a decent job with that AI transcript.

41:47

But what I found was actually that GoRattle,

41:50

they have their own way of kind of plugging into that transcript.

41:52

And it is just night and day compared

41:55

to what kind of what we're getting from gong, from being

41:57

able to prompt and get proactive insights after our first call.

42:01

So gong is just one other thing I would mention.

42:04

But that enables us to do a lot of other things

42:06

with that transcript now.

42:07

It's not per se that gong is helping us get all the value

42:10

from that call.

42:11

There's a lot of other tools that are kind of plugging in

42:13

and analyzing that now.

42:15

OK, let's get to our final segment.

42:16

Quick hits.

42:17

These are quick questions and quick answers.

42:19

Are you ready?

42:20

Yes.

42:21

If you can make any animal any size, what animal and what size?

42:24

I would make a cheetah the size of a cat.

42:28

And I know these exist out there.

42:29

There's savanna cats.

42:30

I love them.

42:31

I would love to get one.

42:32

But I'd love love cheetahs.

42:35

It would be great if they could be a little bit more sizable.

42:40

I like it.

42:40

Tiny cheetah.

42:42

Tiny cheetah.

42:43

RevOps misconception.

42:45

I think the biggest rev-ops misconception

42:47

is that maybe all rev-ops teams follow the definition

42:51

that I provided earlier, standardizing data processes

42:55

and technologies across marketing, sales, and customer

42:57

operations.

42:59

I have talked with individuals that run RevOps team.

43:01

And they focus on deal desk and quoting

43:04

and LTV type calculations, things like that.

43:07

So I think that there's a varying definition with everybody

43:10

that you talk to.

43:12

That would be the biggest misconception.

43:14

There is no standardized definition of rev-ops.

43:17

Rev-ops prediction for us?

43:19

Rev-ops prediction.

43:20

I think more people are going to adopt this model.

43:22

We've seen this really take off, I think, over the past two

43:27

to three years.

43:27

But I think this is going to become more standardized.

43:30

Rev-ops prediction.

43:31

I'm really interested to see the tools that are going to come out

43:35

here that are like rev-ops in a box.

43:38

Connect us to Salesforce.

43:40

And we give you Curran's analysis in 30 minutes.

43:45

So I think that a lot of things are going to become AI-driven.

43:48

I hope that the tools are going to become a lot more

43:51

kind of malleable.

43:52

But I think that that's what I would say.

43:54

I think that a lot of things are going to move to AI.

43:56

I think that there will be a world where there's

43:59

AI rev-ops in a box.

44:02

I'm excited to see it.

44:03

All right, final question, Curran.

44:04

What is your best advice for a person who

44:08

is VP of rev-ops?

44:11

My best advice would be, this stuff is hard.

44:13

There's a lot going on.

44:15

You're going to be surrounded by challenges.

44:17

Really work with the cross-functional leaders

44:20

to get that buy-in on the top priorities,

44:24

focusing on those.

44:25

We've been in times where we've just

44:27

had too much going on at a given time,

44:28

and we're doing too many things at 95%.

44:33

Really focus on the things that are going to impact

44:36

the metrics that matter the most.

44:38

Do you prioritize that?

44:39

Get the cross-functional buy-in and take those on.

44:43

And the next thing I would say is be reasonable with yourself.

44:47

You're not going to be able to get everything done.

44:50

Don't have that expectation.

44:52

It's all about prioritization and moving the needle

44:57

with the changes that you're driving.

44:59

If it's not going to move the needle, maybe you shouldn't do it.

45:02

Karen, it is amazing chatting with you.

45:05

As always, thank you Ian.

45:07

Pleasure to be here on the last episode of the season.

45:10

If anyone ever wants to chat, learn more about what we've

45:13

discussed today, feel free to look me up on LinkedIn,

45:15

send me a message.

45:16

You can go to qualified.com and say, get me here in,

45:19

and I will do my best to be there.

45:22

So that's also a more fun example.

45:24

qualified.com and talk with one of the SDRs

45:26

and say you want to talk with Karen,

45:28

and we'll get it figured out.

45:29

I love it.

45:29

That is awesome.

45:30

That's so sweet.

45:32

Thanks Karen.

45:32

Appreciate it.

45:33

Take care.

45:34

Awesome.

45:34

Thank you.

45:35

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