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.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
Welcome to Rise of RevOps.
Today, we'll hear from Kieran Snath, VP
of Revenue Operations at Qualified.
He and Ian talk about BDR, how to increase productivity,
and driving action from something as simple as a website
click.
Welcome to Rise of RevOps.
I'm Ian Faison, CEO of Caspian Studios.
And today, I am joined by a very special guest,
and an expert in RevOps.
Kieran, how are you?
Doing well, Ian.
How are you?
Excited to have you on the show.
It's very fun because you were there
from the very beginning of the show,
lurking in the background with me on a Google Doc,
figuring out what questions we wanted to ask RevOps people.
So it's full circle to bring you, finally, on the show,
to chat RevOps and everything you've seen over the past year
plus in a field that's honestly changing quite literally
every month.
I would agree.
Yep, changing every month.
Very excited to be here.
And we got the last episode, so I can't complain.
Yeah, that's right.
The hammer, as they call it.
So, Kieran, what's your definition of RevOps?
My definition of RevOps is essentially a singular department
whose job or role it is to standardize the data processes
and technologies that each department used
to get to a singular goal.
In our case, that would be ARR.
You're the VP of RevOps.
How did you think about building your team?
How did you think about coming into the organization
and building RevOps function?
Yeah, we really took a brick-by-brick approach.
I joined the organization early on.
It was employee number 40 or 41.
And I was kind of a singular RevOps lead at that point.
What we began doing-- so at that point,
I was running marketing operations, sales operations,
customer operations.
I also had a unique situation.
I continued to have the situation to this day
where I had the inside sales team.
So the BDRs and SDRs also roll directly into my department.
What we started to do is just identify areas where we needed
to improve, where we need more bandwidth.
And that started with sales operations.
So we made a very strategic sales operations hire.
That person was responsible for really standardizing sales
processes, quotas, things like that.
From there, we actually made a very fast hire as well
in our customer operations department.
Responsible for all things, kind of net retention,
gross retention, expansion, renewals, customer satisfaction,
things like that.
And then moved into marketing operations as well.
So very kind of brick-by-brick.
We made those strategic hires.
And we continue to build out each of those groups,
also our systems team.
It seems like in the interviews that we've
done over the course of the series so far,
you have sort of like two types of orgs
where you have like brand new single point of failure,
RevOps person that's coming in at a similar sort of time
that you did and building out the function,
or like a single person operator.
Or you have the more senior person that is coming into a team
that is a little bit established, but sort of like needs
to go to the next level.
And then I guess the third one would be like,
you know, obviously a massive team that is very siloed
with like, you know, there isn't a pure RevOps function.
There's just silos within the different things,
and they need to sort of like crowd all together.
Because you came in as that single operator
and could build it brick-by-brick and sort of do it
in your own vision, do you feel like there were advantages
there to be able to build it how you wanted to do it?
Or do you think that it was almost a little more challenging
because you had to, you know, drink
from so many different firehoses and you had to really focus
your time on building that sales ops function first?
I think there are major advantages to getting early
and being able to start from scratch.
You avoid kind of tech debt and, you know, maybe coming in
and kind of adopting, you know, ways that things
have been done that maybe weren't correct.
So huge benefits to kind of being here
and starting that program.
You know, I worked really closely with the CEO
and founders, it continued to, to till this day.
But in the first year, you know, the primary goal was
to give visibility into what was happening inside
of the business and that hadn't been done before, right?
So it really started on a white board with the CEO,
the founders, COO, the go-to-market leaders of like,
what questions do we need answered?
What do we need to see?
What do we need to measure?
And we were able to build that structure
from the ground up.
Sometimes that data is not even available.
So we had to implement workflows,
processes, different kind of sampling mechanisms
inside of our data models,
so that we could deliver these types of answers.
So we got to build from scratch
in a fast moving organization.
And eventually we were able to kind of deliver that,
like visibility from there.
We're now able to ask really intelligent questions
and we get better and better at this every week,
every month and just providing visibility,
predictability to the overall business and outlook.
- Yeah, well, we're some of the types of questions
that you wanted to have answered
or the types of questions that you're curious
about back then.
- Going back two and a half years ago,
I think that we had 10 really large questions
that we were trying to answer.
I won't be able to cover them all here.
I don't have them off the top of my head.
But first it started with like,
how are we looking from an overall ARR perspective?
Okay, now the things that impact ARR
are net new business sales, expansion sales,
your gross retention.
So we wanted really high level visibility
into our ARR outlook.
And then from there, what you start to do is like,
okay, well, what impacts this?
You know, let's start at the top of the funnel
for this conversation.
Okay, so pipeline, right?
How many, you know, MQLs or marketing qualified leads
or marketing qualified accounts do we have entering the funnel?
How many are we then moving into a working state?
How many opportunities have we been able to generate
from that?
How many have converted to stage two?
How many are progressing through the pipeline?
How many of one, right?
And that's just an indicator of our pipeline funnel health.
So that was one question.
The next would be sales.
So the question is, well, how much open pipeline
do we have in this period?
And how much can we expect to maybe come in
in this period and close very quickly?
And then with that, what is our forecast going to be
this month, this quarter, the next six months?
And then the third question is always around kind of
gross retention and net retention, right?
So how's the customer health looking?
Do we have, what percentage of our customers
are green, yellow or red?
What can we do for these red customers to ensure
that they're getting ROI, they're satisfied
and they're ultimately set up for renewable.
And those are really like the high level,
like three pillars I would kind of highlight here.
It's kind of like got it like pipeline sales,
GRR and NRR and you've got that overall ARR outlook.
We did a ton of additional stuff as well.
Like we wanted to better understand our competitive landscape.
We wanted to better understand what was like impacting
our deals to maybe like slow down
and each of these would actually require
its own analytical kind of packet that we would deliver.
So anytime we had a question, they couldn't really fit
within that any of the structures I mentioned before,
we would deliver a new one and a new kind of way
that we would maybe look at like competitive landscape
for an example.
- That's really cool.
Did you explain a little bit more about the green,
yellow, red and building that out and what that means?
- Green, yellow and red is, you know,
a very high level way of like classifying a customer
and that's like the highest exact language
that we would maybe like speak.
What we actually do is I think we've got maybe like
five to 10 different scoring mechanisms.
Grant Guerrero is our director of revenue operations.
So he works under me and then he owns the success area.
He actually measures like 10 different plus points
on a customer to identify their health.
And then what we do is we wait those,
we take averages to eventually give us an overall
highest level score of red, yellow or green.
But it encompasses a ton of different different stuff.
And this could be customer usage.
Are they logging in and using the software?
Are they receiving ROI from the platform?
What is their sentiment on us?
So like how do, you know, how do they actually,
how do we feel they feel in any given conversation
or in any given quarter?
We'll do other things like CSAT and customer satisfaction,
net promoter score, things like that
to also measure overall health and like being a store.
- I love it.
Quick note back on just strategy here.
Any other sort of just like strategic things
that now you've been sitting in the seat for the past
two and a half years, any changes to your strategy
or how you think about rev-ops and building your team?
- Yeah, so I mean, there've been a lot of changes
over the past few years and it's really,
we start with identifying a problem
or an area that we can like build further efficiencies.
So, you know, we might specialize a function further,
look for ways that we can kind of take one role
and break it into three specialization
of those kind of like functions
so that people can become more productive.
You know, that's one, we're always trying to reassess like,
you know, how can we make an individual more productive?
What are the things that we need to change
so that they can do more pipeline, close more deals,
cover more accounts from a success standpoint?
Sometimes this involves like systems, processes,
other times it involves kind of specialization of teams
and I think that's always something
that's kind of like ongoing.
You know, outside of that,
when you build visibility into some of these problems
so that you can ask the hard-hitting, you know,
intelligent questions,
you search for identify areas of improvement.
And some of the things that we've just gotten a lot better at
is just classification and categorization
of accounts, opportunities, customers,
and really getting a really good lens
into like, okay, got it.
Like if it's this type of account or this type of deal,
we know how to predict this differently than like the whole pie.
And that's something that's been really exciting to see
is just us getting sharper and sharper and sharper,
being able to better predict kind of what's going to come
from a particular opportunity, a particular deal,
or particularly just based on technographic
and thermographic information that we're able to collect
on that account.
- Yeah, so what would be examples?
I know you can't share the secrets out here,
but like the types of technographic
or thermographic information that you'd be looking for,
that would base that decision.
Is it like, you know, company size, revenue size,
industry, stuff like that?
- Yeah, exactly.
So yeah, I'll run over at high levels.
So at Qualified, we're purpose built for Salesforce.
So first thing, Salesforce, you've got to have it,
you've got to use it, your salespeople have to be in it,
marketing people need to use it.
We sell the Salesforce customers.
So we use a few different tools
that help us kind of collect that information
and identify like, hey, are they running on Salesforce CRM?
That's kind of the first thing.
What we've typically found is that our sweet spot
is actually driven by website traffic.
So we typically look for folks that have
above 10,000 website sessions monthly,
unique monthly visitors actually per month.
So if they've got Salesforce, they have a traffic website
where they're receiving 10,000 monthly unites,
we're in a good spot.
Then we typically look at like revenue range,
employee size, things like that,
and that's a good indicator.
That's kind of the basic for us.
That's an indicator for our ICP.
But then we also go look at additional things.
Like we play really well with account-based marketing vendors.
Like if you're using an account-based marketing vendor,
we're really going to work well together.
You're already doing sophisticated things
in the marketing landscape.
We're going to complement that ADM offering
and allow you to kind of maximize the ROI
of your ADM investments.
- Yeah, I love that.
It also, that's one of those things
that is so helpful from a marketing perspective
and a sales perspective, right?
Because if you can dig in and say,
hey, you're using ABM software,
that little bell goes off for the salesperson.
And then you can create product marketing materials
and say, hey, this is all the people who use Sixth Sense
or this is all the people, whatever.
But then also from a marketing perspective,
it allows you to go back to the marketing team
and say things like, hey, we should do more joint content
or co-created content or webinars or events with Sixth Sense
because we're seeing XYZ
and that's where the data actually fuels
marketing and sales strategy,
which is rather than the reverse way, right?
Which is not as helpful.
- Exactly.
So by doing all of that
and getting all of that information integrated
on the account level, we're able to have a more cohesive,
go to market approach with marketing sales,
our inside sales team, all that great stuff.
You mentioned making the bell go off.
In our case, it was about actually making the bell
not go off, right?
Don't make that bell go off
if they don't have these attributes, okay?
They've got to have these attributes on the account
and then we want to alert these folks to kind of go after them.
So for us, the more that we're able to kind of get
smarter on that account level,
the more we're able to limit the noise for our reps
and go to market teams.
- You said that that BDRs and SDRs fall under your org
that's pretty neat.
Can you kind of share a little bit more about that?
- Yeah, certainly.
So I joined Qualified at an early stage
and one of the things I've got actually a lot of experience
in is kind of inside sales operations, BDR, SDR motions.
How do we look at like organizing those teams?
How do we do comp plans, things like that?
So it was really kind of right place, right time, I guess
where I was, I joined the company,
my role was director of revenue operations
that we knew that I was going to manage that inside sales team
for the foreseeable future and kind of build it
from the ground up, you know, standard operating procedures.
How do we measure, how do we comp all that,
all that great stuff?
It was certainly a unique thing that it sat, you know,
under like revenue operations, but it was working quite well.
I work for the CRO, the CRO is responsible
for the sales number.
So he and I are directly aligned on the types of deals
that we want to produce to get to that sales number.
And then I also was responsible for the marketing operations side,
right? So I have a vested interest in, you know,
our leads being followed up with
and hitting our marketing pipeline number.
So it's a very good like neutral zone for them to sit in,
you're at qualified.
Also, you know, we sell a conversational marketing platform,
right? It's Martech, it sits on your website.
So one of the big things is, you know,
being able to integrate all of the infrastructure
for these individuals just around the role, the website,
all those different things has been a big kind of reason
why we've kept it under revenue operations.
- I'm a pretty firm advocate that
outbound is a marketing function.
I firmly believe that it's not a sales function
because it's a one to many thing.
And I think it's changing a ton.
And I think that the sort of old ways of just, you know,
emailing high and emailing them a million times
is getting less and less fruitful.
And so, and I think that how you communicate
to the masses is a marketing function.
Sales close deals, marketing communicates the masses
in a variety of different ways.
So it's fascinating to me that it lives in rev-ops
and I understand why for y'all.
And I think that that's probably a pretty good,
why it's working, I think so well for you
is because of sort of like all the reasons
that you outlayed there.
But I'm curious in those type of outbound pieces there,
how are you thinking about it from a marketing perspective?
How are you working with marketing
as those things happen?
Like, you know, I didn't, you know,
finish this very long question with,
I was talking to a CMO the other day and they were like,
our CEO was like, hey, we're gonna pull a bunch of money
out of marketing budget, we're gonna hire 10 more BDRs.
And the person was like, you know, I'm just like,
I'll just quit if we do.
(laughs)
Because that's like crazy to me.
And I thought that was like such an interesting conversation
to have, which is like, would you rather have X amount
of dollars in a marketing budget
or X amount of dollars for BDRs?
Not that it always has to live in a vacuum,
but just the idea that those two things would be at odds
as if it's not all sort of like one joint
go-to-market sort of function.
So anyways, BDRs and sitting places, let's say you.
- Yes, so I agree with you.
Like I actually think that the best place
for the BDR team to sit is typically under marketing.
And the reason why I believe that is because marketing,
product marketing is really, they should be leading
the charge on what we wanna say to the market
and who we wanna say it to, right?
So it's really important that that BDR team,
their messaging, their call of action are aligned
to that of the corporate messaging
that marketing is delivering.
So I think that's why I feel that it's a great fit
under marketing.
The area that like we are able to say in like lockstep
and why it's worked under revenue operations
is because we're very organized and targeted
about who we want to go after.
Okay?
I gave you a rough idea of like our ideal customer profile.
We actually get far more specific internally
about what we want to go and do.
And we lock this every quarter, every year,
and it's like, these are the accounts we wanna go, all right?
Let's go do it.
So now the big thing is orchestration.
There was a world back in the day EN
where a sales leader would kind of give the BDRs
a list of accounts and they would say,
hey, here's the territory for the quarter.
You know, call down the list.
We do not take that approach at all.
Our territories are actually dynamic.
And I believe they're actually set by marketing
and I'll tell you why.
Based on, you know, we use Sixth Sense,
we use our own tool here internally.
And Sixth Sense is an AVM platform that allows us
to essentially measure intent and accounts
from a third party perspective.
We use our own products, which is tied into our website
to measure first party intent.
These things work really well together.
All of our BDRs team's actions are based off
of these intent engines, which are all driven
via prospects response to our marketing materials.
They click on an ad, they read a blog,
they do a search on Google, maybe they land on our website
and they don't convert.
All of these are the different activities or events
that essentially make our BDRs go and do something.
Anything that comes to the website
and is not able to convert or we don't hook it there,
it is immediately handed over to the BDR team
and in real time they are going to go reach out.
And I think because we have built this flywheel,
and we're obviously in a unique position
using our own software on our website,
but I think that because we've built this flywheel
where we know, okay, got it, people are gonna land
on the website, they're not gonna convert.
We then send them an email and we reach out
with kind of personalized outreach
to get them back to the website and convert.
We've built this like really great like kind of synergy
between sales and marketing where the BDR
is essentially a another engine,
another microphone to get those people back to the website.
Now, that's why it works well here
and why we continue to have it like sit under revenue
operations, but everything that I just said is a case
of why it should sit under marketing, right?
If you're doing really good real time orchestration
from your website and from your intent engines,
it should just be a continuation of what marketing
wants to say to those accounts and those prospects.
- I love it.
As succinct of an answer as I have heard on the topic,
we're gonna pull that quote and throw that
on the website.
I just love, you know, I love the way
that y'all think about it.
I think that you think about revenue.
I have often been very flattering towards
qualified sales and marketing,
or, but I think your revenue org is like truly a revenue org.
It's like there is such blurred lines
between everything in the best way possible,
whereas so many other teams,
like it's just so, so, so siloed
and it's really cool to see all that,
well, that stuff happened.
And I think what's so important for y'all too,
is because you use qualified and I wanna get, you know,
into the qualified and qualified conversation too.
But because the website is where all of this stuff
is happening and how important it is to get people
to your website and how that is like,
all we're doing in marketing is like getting someone
to the website, which I think like everyone forgets,
sometimes it's like every action, every single thing
that we're trying to do, everything always,
100% of the time boils down to getting someone back
to your website, right?
And then the fact that you have this engine behind it
and are able to use qualified allows it to work, you know,
and respond much more quickly, much more timely
and much more personalized.
- Exactly, yes, 100%.
- So tell us a little bit about sort of why,
why it's so important to respond quickly
and why it's so important that your team
is structured that way and how do you use
qualified to do that?
- The whole speed to lead kind of concept
has been around for a long time.
A lot of studies have been done on this,
prospects are more likely to buy from the vendor
that kind of gets back to them first
in their initial request.
This was published maybe five to 10 years ago
and people continue to kind of like republish things like this.
We know that speed or lack of speed can be a killer, okay?
So, you know, we take that to heart.
Everything that we do is, you know,
really trying to drive a real-time motion
over here at Qualified.
I think the other thing to say here is that
we are now in a world where inboxes are incredibly crowded.
People are digitally burnt out.
They receive too many emails to get through in a day
and you really need to strike all the irons hot
and it's top of mind.
If you are waiting two days to get back
to a demo request form, you know,
that's gonna be a problem because, you know,
we're busy individuals.
Even last night, I was in our office around 7.30 PM
and I was having a conversation about a problem
and we submitted to vendor demos at 7.30 PM
before we left the office.
You know, those individuals probably have 24 hours
to kind of get back to us before we have kind of
mentally moved on to other things.
That's the need for kind of speed to lead
and then I think that it is going to become increasingly
important as people become digitally burnt out
or when this virtual world, everything is over email
and overslack and you really wanna cut through that noise
and get to the top.
- Yeah, when I first met Craig, the CEO
and he was talking about this and the thing that
crystallized it so obviously in my head was he was like,
"If the CEO of your biggest prospect walked
in the front door of your office,
literally the entire everyone would stop working,
you'd go get some drinks, you'd go lay out the red carpet,
you'd get them into a comfy chair and all this sort of stuff
and if that same person comes to your website,
they get treated the exact same as everybody else.
And if you're lucky, that person submits some type
of demo request or whatever and then what happens to them
is they get routed to a 23 year old to hop on a 15 minute
call to see if they're fit to buy from them.
It's the most archaic backwards thing and like so many
companies still do this motion and it is infuriating to me.
It drives me absolutely bonkers because it's so,
I'm like, it's just crazy.
It's like so crazy that you would operate this way
and yet everybody does this.
- Yeah, 100%.
We believe in delivering kind of bespoke tailored experiences
on the website to increase the website conversion, right?
Like let's keep in mind the website is a game of failure.
You know, if you can convert 5%, 2%, 3% of your website
traffic to fill out a form, you're doing an incredible job.
So it's, you know, you wanna provide those like really bespoke
tailored experiences to get them to convert on the site
and drive conversion up, but what happens when they don't?
You've got 95% let's say that are landing on the website
and not filling out a form, not taking that call to action.
So we have a really large philosophy in moving fast
after the website visit.
They don't convert, we immediately take action on that
and then deliver a very personalized email experience.
You mentioned the 23 year olds, my 23 year olds are really,
really good at this, the best I've ever seen.
The best I've ever seen and they will be incredibly
personalized, you know, one of the things that I'm constantly
hearing and what our team gets responses in is this
is the best email I've ever received, the best cold email
I've ever received in my career.
And we really pride ourselves on that in every single day,
every single motion.
So it doesn't matter whether you're a BDR manager and SDR
or whether you're a CEO of a Fortune 500 organization,
you are going to get a world class customer experience from us.
And we really worked hard to kind of get that into our DNA.
All right, let's get to our next segment, RevOps
is a close where we talk about the tough parts of RevOps.
What's the hardest RevOps cycle RevOps problem
that you faced recently had you solve it?
- You know, I think that the toughest kind of problem
is generally like getting alignment and buy in, right?
Sometimes you're able to identify problems
and you wanna go do something about that.
You wanna kind of drive an overhaul
or fix some different things and that could be a challenge.
You know, just because you're in RevOps
and your job is to kind of standardize the data, technology,
processes that, you know, these different teams like run on,
doesn't mean that you have full autonomy
or authority to go and like do so, right?
So sometimes a, you know, a challenge that I find is,
you identify a problem, you know,
you need to go and do something about it quickly,
but you need to kind of get that cross functional buy in
and have everybody kind of agreeing with you on that problem.
Agreeing, it's a tough priority and agreeing,
we need to kind of drive that change.
You know, kind of wrangling people
in this hectic remote work world can be kind of challenging.
And I think just getting everybody in the room,
agreeing to the plan is probably the,
one of the more challenging pieces
that I faced in revenue operations,
especially when it comes to like big infrastructure changes,
right?
You know, I'll be the first to admit,
we made some mistakes early on that were like,
like as far as like some data model stuff,
some stamping and we're making some iterations now,
but it has really big impact.
When I joined, you know, I was running revenue operations
and inside sales team, I was also,
our sales force admin.
I shared that responsibility with our VP of sales engineering
when we were early days.
And just some different things that I had set up,
made sense at the time, which were user lookup fields.
Like who generated this opportunity,
who influenced it, who's getting credit?
And a mistake was those were user lookup fields.
So when those individuals got promoted,
we lost our stamping.
It should have stamped those individuals as BDRs,
the teams they were on, pipeline sources.
Now that we've actually moved them into like a future role,
you know, now that changes the stamp.
So we have to go back and fix that historical data.
We kind of had to make a decision,
which was do we continue when people are promoted
to deactivate the old user and create a new user?
Or do we just get smarter and more scalable
about how we do this?
The answer is let's get smarter and more scalable,
which requires a little bit more work on the infraside.
- Basically we're moving user lookup fields
to a text stamp field.
So those things don't change as other data changes.
- That is a Rev obstacle if I've ever heard one.
One of the things that we've talked about a few times
on the show is sort of like,
how do you account for Black Swan events?
And like, what do you do?
Like, I think that we're like a massive market shift.
So you're like, hey, we renew at an 80%
and we historically close at a 22%.
But tech has been taking a beating.
That changes everything.
We can't use any of our historicals, none of those matter.
What do you do?
And it's like, that's the sort of stuff where it's like,
how do you treat those sort of like,
the boom periods on a good way
or the bust periods on a bad way to be proactive?
This is something that we at Caspian have been trying
to figure out is like, what,
and everybody's trying to figure this out of like,
how do you forecast accurately when the future
so uncertain in every single person
has been telling every single sales person
for the past year, wait till next year,
wait till December, wait till Q4, wait till, wait till,
wait till, and then what do you do?
- Yeah, great question.
I mean, we're in a Black Swan event, right?
We were able to adjust very quickly.
And some of the things that we do is,
you know, we just can't take, you know,
like a win rate, a gross retention rate,
or like any of our conversion percentages
and kind of take them for granted.
So one of the things that we're constantly doing
is we look at conversion all the way through the funnel.
We do some waiting here, we apply seasonality,
but more importantly, we actually all get agreement
and alignment on the conversion percentages that we use.
This goes all the way up to our CEO.
So when we're forecasting, building models,
things like that, we often review the rates.
We will look at times before we were kind of in this,
kind of downturn.
We will look at our trailing six month,
our trailing three months.
We will look at different weighted averages.
We will pull that in and out of our subset
so that we can get to kind of the rates
that we believe are going to stick.
So there's a lot of homework done here
to just help predictability,
set smarter goals, things like that.
Cool.
Any, yeah, anything else?
What about revoops moment?
Any mistakes that you made?
You know, I mentioned how important technology capture
is to us in reporting on the technologies
that accounts use.
You know, tech data's never perfect.
And it doesn't matter where you go
to any of the vendors out there in the space.
It's not gonna be 100% accurate.
People churn off of vendors every week, every month,
and it's not gonna be accurately reportable in real time.
You know, one of the mistakes that we made is
we kind of took like a data vendor, like for granted,
in the sense that what we get from them
is the single source of truth and go.
But what we actually have is we have an army of salespeople
and BDRs, SDRs that are truing up this data all the time.
And they're like, oh, well, I went to their website
and I could see that this was an on and this was off.
And they go and actually they make updates to the account
on all of these different fields and they true it up.
What we didn't do is we weren't stamping those updates.
We didn't know that a human had actually gone back in
and said, hey, no, this is incorrect data
that you're feeding into my account.
So what would happen?
The vendor kept writing it back in every week, right?
So they would remove it and try to true up their accounts
but we had an situation where we continued
to override that information.
So we kind of had this realization where we're like,
okay, we need to trust the humans over the systems, right?
They know the right thing to do
and we need to just do a better job of prioritizing
those edits, not really kind of overriding.
So I think that was a big thing
that we're kind of working on as well.
Another rev-oops moment I think for us is,
I joined the organization
and a unique thing that we were doing here
is we were just taking an opportunity of stage one
and kind of like classifying that as like pipeline.
We had a lot happening in that early stage of a deal.
And I think that was an oops moment
that we didn't act on that sooner.
What I mean by this is like everybody has opportunity stages,
everybody has a stage one, okay?
R is his name's Prospect.
What was happening in Prospect is too many different
and we're not going to be in Prospect.
So meetings were being scheduled, meetings were being canceled,
meetings were being rescheduled.
We had multi-threading, building out the buying team,
we had follow-ups occurring,
and all of this was kind of happening
within a singular stage.
So you could imagine the amount of visibility loss
that we had on all those different things that I mentioned
because it's just parked in one singular stage.
And one of the things we did is we kind of decoupled
our opportunity objects.
Vek, our systems administrator,
we call a pre-opportunity,
which helps us measure the meeting effectiveness
and how we actually do in these early stage calls.
So this is kind of a meeting scheduled, meeting rescheduled,
multi-threading,
meaning that you're trying to get to additional contacts
within the organization, except it in D2.
And I think this was a really good move for our organization
just to get better visibility and measures
within the early stage pipeline.
'Cause before what it looked like is we just had drop off,
we couldn't necessarily explain like,
"Oh, well, these people know showed,
"are these canceled and these people rescheduled
"or we were below the line here."
And now we're in a position where we can answer
all of these questions after kind of decoupling those stages.
So these are things you learn over time.
You're never gonna get it right the first time.
That'd be advice I have to anyone listening to the podcast.
You're gonna build something and you're gonna grow.
You're gonna scale and you're gonna be like,
"Oh, okay, right.
"We're now finding this nuance.
"We were kind of blind in this area
"and you can need to adjust."
But yeah, I would say that's one of the RevOps moments
that I have here is kind of the lack of granularity
that we had in our stage one deals.
- Yeah, I totally agree.
To me, I think lack of stage one,
and then for me, it's the freaking ghosting.
That's what kills.
Ghost accounts where it's like super high intent,
super interested, took a sales call.
It was like, this is the best thing since sliced bread
and then just don't respond forever.
That those, I'm like,
"Where do you put these things?"
Like, it's like, you can't email them 500 times, right?
And they're like, "Hey, yeah, just sorry.
"I've been busy."
And you're like, "You've been busy for a year.
"You still respond to emails?
"I don't know, what do you think?"
- I think there are, I mean, this is,
we're facing a huge challenge.
We're feeling this right now.
Like reschedules, no shows, the ghosting,
it's certainly something that we're kind of facing right now.
I believe that there are two kind of parties
in that camp, right?
They're the end of the prospects that you talk with
that are going to, if something comes up,
they're gonna let you know.
They're gonna write you and they're gonna say,
"Hey, time's not right."
And then you've got other individuals
that have full intention of talking with you again,
but they are not going to take the time
to respond to your email and let you know what's going on.
You've gotta be able to identify those two parties
and understand who you're kind of dealing with.
That's first and foremost.
Next is we're really trying to get sharp
about bringing the pain and identifying those compelling events.
Okay?
Because we have a really good focus on the technology stack,
their website traffic, their revenue,
we can kind of connect some dots
and make some assumptions of what that business
might be dealing with and what that demand-gen leader,
that marketing leader probably has
his priorities entering into next year.
And we're really trying to hook on that, right?
Use those compelling events,
use that pain that we identified early on
in our conversations to get that meeting to occur.
We're also experimenting with all types
of personalized incentives.
You know, the time of year where Starbucks comes out
with all types of holiday drinks
and we're like trying to buy coffees to get them on the call,
like, "Hey, can we send you a $5 coffee gift card?"
All these little touches that just make it
that much more personal,
we're leaning in as much as we can.
So we really want the prospect to kind of feel that.
And we want them to understand that they're going to get
something from our meeting.
They're gonna understand how to be more efficient
with pipeline, how to generate more pipeline
from their website.
They're gonna understand how to make their BERs more productive.
They're gonna understand how to orchestrate website visits
to their BERs.
These are really important topics in today's landscape
that not a large percentage of people are really nailing.
And I think that that's one of the things
that we're really trying to drive home
is these are problems that we are faced with today
and we can help with that.
And if you're really just focused on that
and the value they're gonna get from the call
and you're staying personalized
trying to build that relationship,
that's all we can really do to get people to show up.
But in the event that they're not,
we've got a really good motion for kind of getting people
like back in the loop,
but again, it remains a challenge.
We're always improving.
I've got a team of 11 BERs
that are the most creative writers I've seen
in a BER team to date.
If anyone can get it done, it's them,
but we are still battling the no-show rescheduled issue.
My biggest thing is the demo and then ghosting,
which is like, oh my goodness.
You never really know what's going on inside of a business,
especially in this time of year.
People are in Q4 and they're being told to wait
to see where they land before they kind of get their budgets,
allocated or the budgets finalized.
You never know what's happening inside of an organization.
So Ian, your example,
may I call it podcasts as a service?
Indeed.
Okay, awesome.
So podcasts as a service.
Like you're probably talking to the demand-gen leaders,
the marketing leaders, things like that.
They talk with you, they kind of get like a scope of work
and they're like, wow, I really like what I'm seeing here.
And they kind of go back and they're like,
no, your budgets actually being cut further
and you're being asked to wait and like,
no, we can't get the same as an additional line item.
So I think that there are things that are happening
at the board level, the CEO level,
the finance level that are impacting this.
And again, that goes back to there are two camps in the party,
the ones that will take the time to write you
and explain to you what is going on,
which they don't need to do.
And then there are the folks that have full intent
to circle back, but it's not the right time
and they can't get into it.
- Yeah, I couldn't agree more.
All right, let's get to our next segment,
the tool shed, we're talking tools, spreadsheets, metrics,
just like everyone's favorite tool, qualified.
Have you ever heard of that?
- I have for sure, 100%.
- Well, no B2B tool shed is complete without qualified,
go to qualified.com right now and check them out.
I mean, if you've been listening to Karen
for the last 45 minutes, you know that he is just as smart
as they come on this stuff.
You can reach out to him, he'll tell you exactly
how they use it and we'll link up his LinkedIn
in the show notes, you can shoot him a note too,
or you can just go to qualified.com right now
and you can talk to someone right this second,
go to qualified.com.
Karen, what's in your tool shed?
- Yeah, we've got a lot.
So let's maybe start with some of the basics.
Obviously we operate on Salesforce CRM.
I'm then gonna kind of move into like pipeline generation
tools.
So qualified is obviously very important to us.
That's what converts our website traffic.
It allows us to engage our website traffic,
but more importantly, it measures the accounts
that are on our website so that we can give that
to the BDR team and they can go after the folks
that matter the most.
Outside of that, Sixth Sense is very important for us,
being able to kind of really understand,
who out there is showing intent towards these buying topics,
these different products, different keywords,
things like that is very important to kind of our motion.
The next thing is kind of orchestration.
So the big thing that I would highlight there is like,
we've got just a series of processes and flows built
inside of Salesforce that are enabling us to kind of get
things to the reps at the right time.
We use a tool called Rattle, go Rattle.com.
Anybody hasn't heard of it.
They're doing really amazing things.
I'm super impressed by what's going on there.
That has actually kind of been a backbone of like connecting
all of our different systems and alerting the people
at the right time Ian earlier.
You mentioned the bell going off.
We want the bell to go off at the best times possible,
but only when it's actionable.
It's all these systems together and provide a really great
experience for the BDR so that they're alerted
on everything that matters.
We're assessing a number of different kind of AI tools
right now, some were in trial with, some were kind of looking
at further down the line.
But just things that are going to be able to enable our BDRs
to be more personalized faster.
On average, I think some of our reps spend five to 10 minutes
just to find the nugget on which they're
going to personalize around, which Ian, that could be that you
like a football team.
It could be like dogs, you like cats, whatever.
We're going to figure it out, right?
But I want to find a tool that makes us more productive
and efficient in finding that information.
And I want to standardize a way to store that inside of Sales
Force to kind of save time.
So I think I kind of hit on like the big main platforms
that we're running on right now that are kind of like driving
their emotion.
Yeah.
And I just chatted with the Rattle team a few days ago.
So that's very, very timely.
Any other thoughts on tools or metrics or anything like that?
Always looking, tooling.
I mean, one thing I'm always saying is always innovate,
always improve, always break things.
Just do it quickly and fix it quickly.
The big thing that I think on the horizon for us
is just how can we make people more efficient?
Is there areas where AI are going
to be able to make recommendations to us?
Are there areas where AI is going to help our reps become
more productive?
We're not using too many tools in that space right now.
The one thing I will highlight is gong, gong.
We use for conversational intelligence.
They're doing a decent job with that AI transcript.
But what I found was actually that GoRattle,
they have their own way of kind of plugging into that transcript.
And it is just night and day compared
to what kind of what we're getting from gong, from being
able to prompt and get proactive insights after our first call.
So gong is just one other thing I would mention.
But that enables us to do a lot of other things
with that transcript now.
It's not per se that gong is helping us get all the value
from that call.
There's a lot of other tools that are kind of plugging in
and analyzing that now.
OK, let's get to our final segment.
Quick hits.
These are quick questions and quick answers.
Are you ready?
Yes.
If you can make any animal any size, what animal and what size?
I would make a cheetah the size of a cat.
And I know these exist out there.
There's savanna cats.
I love them.
I would love to get one.
But I'd love love cheetahs.
It would be great if they could be a little bit more sizable.
I like it.
Tiny cheetah.
Tiny cheetah.
RevOps misconception.
I think the biggest rev-ops misconception
is that maybe all rev-ops teams follow the definition
that I provided earlier, standardizing data processes
and technologies across marketing, sales, and customer
operations.
I have talked with individuals that run RevOps team.
And they focus on deal desk and quoting
and LTV type calculations, things like that.
So I think that there's a varying definition with everybody
that you talk to.
That would be the biggest misconception.
There is no standardized definition of rev-ops.
Rev-ops prediction for us?
Rev-ops prediction.
I think more people are going to adopt this model.
We've seen this really take off, I think, over the past two
to three years.
But I think this is going to become more standardized.
Rev-ops prediction.
I'm really interested to see the tools that are going to come out
here that are like rev-ops in a box.
Connect us to Salesforce.
And we give you Curran's analysis in 30 minutes.
So I think that a lot of things are going to become AI-driven.
I hope that the tools are going to become a lot more
kind of malleable.
But I think that that's what I would say.
I think that a lot of things are going to move to AI.
I think that there will be a world where there's
AI rev-ops in a box.
I'm excited to see it.
All right, final question, Curran.
What is your best advice for a person who
is VP of rev-ops?
My best advice would be, this stuff is hard.
There's a lot going on.
You're going to be surrounded by challenges.
Really work with the cross-functional leaders
to get that buy-in on the top priorities,
focusing on those.
We've been in times where we've just
had too much going on at a given time,
and we're doing too many things at 95%.
Really focus on the things that are going to impact
the metrics that matter the most.
Do you prioritize that?
Get the cross-functional buy-in and take those on.
And the next thing I would say is be reasonable with yourself.
You're not going to be able to get everything done.
Don't have that expectation.
It's all about prioritization and moving the needle
with the changes that you're driving.
If it's not going to move the needle, maybe you shouldn't do it.
Karen, it is amazing chatting with you.
As always, thank you Ian.
Pleasure to be here on the last episode of the season.
If anyone ever wants to chat, learn more about what we've
discussed today, feel free to look me up on LinkedIn,
send me a message.
You can go to qualified.com and say, get me here in,
and I will do my best to be there.
So that's also a more fun example.
qualified.com and talk with one of the SDRs
and say you want to talk with Karen,
and we'll get it figured out.
I love it.
That is awesome.
That's so sweet.
Thanks Karen.
Appreciate it.
Take care.
Awesome.
Thank you.
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