GTM Alignment for a Healthy Pipeline
On this episode, we talk to Art about crafting your rev ops roadmap, the importance of leadership alignment, and Art breaks down his rev ops swim lanes for us.
Welcome to Rise RevOps. I'm the
Invis on CEO of Cast me in studios and today we are joined by a special guest.
Heart, how are you? Do well Ian. Thanks for having me on the show.
Yeah, excited to have you.
Excited to chat RevOps with someone who's been there, done that and everything
in between.
So let's get into it. How did you get started in RevOps?
So what's interesting is my journey at RevOps started well before the word
really started
being thrown around the industry. The first 20 years of my career was primarily
field
roles, either in sales, in professional services, customer facing, no desk at
the office type
job. I was fortunate enough to be part of a great company called Riverbed
Technologies
that grew to a billion dollars quite quickly. It wasn't on-prem hardware
company. SaaS was
just starting to take off 2010, era post 2010. And we stopped growing along
with some market
challenges, et cetera. It went through private equity, takeout and during that
process, some
of the senior leadership liked how I was running the post sales business for
Riverbed. And they
were very impressed with the rigor and the process and the results and I think
also predictability.
So they asked if I'd be interested in running global operations in this post-
private entity.
So my first role in RevOps was actually in a billion dollar company for a
global sales
operations team and post sales team and enablement team. So the first set of
functions I had
were everything from order management to enablement the forecast sales
operations and it was
at a global scale. We had teams in Amsterdam, Singapore, and here in San
Francisco. Marketing
operations was still reporting directly into marketing. So that was my first
experience
partnering with another operating team where we had sales and services and
enablement all
reporting into the organization that I was running at the time.
And we'll get into people AI here in a little bit. But zoom out for a second.
What's your
definition of RevOps? It leads us to our second chapter after a few years
working in private
equity and learning a ton about driving e-bita and profitability, et cetera. It
was hard
to ignore the SaaS explosion and a background in observability performance
management and
was fortunate enough to get engaged around an opportunity to a company called
New Relic
when they were just north of $200 million SMB commercial PLG company that was
looking
at Penitrate the Enterprise. And there was some interest in having me run a
sales operations
team. And this was the first time I think I was consciously talking about what
we now
call RevOps. And during the interview process, I actually pitched to the senior
leadership
team this idea that I called go-to-market strategy in operations as someone who
understands Rev
Rec, et cetera. I always thought revenue was more of a finance thing. And we
were the bookings
department over and go-to-market. But that's more of a debate for CFO and a COO
. So to New
Relic's credit, they were very data driven, very modernized organization with a
lot of
SaaS infrastructure, although the infrastructure was about 10 years old. And I
actually was fortunate
enough to get the support of the CMO, the CRO, and CCO to integrate all their
operating
functions. And so that was a really neat role for a few years as we went from $
200 million
to $600 and shifted the revenue mix from S&B commercial into enterprise. That
was an organization
where my responsibilities ranged everything from deal strategy and monetization
, marketing
operations, sales operations, post sales ops, and what I like to say from
inquiry to
renewal and from the board deck to the weekly forecast call. And we had
responsibility for
all the systems, the data, as well as the buyer and customer journey, as well
as executing
strategies to impact New Relic's business. And that was probably my first
exposure to
a real integrated RevOps function at scale.
Yeah. And how does that look at people AI?
As we're talking here, Riverbed, billion dollar on-premise hardware company,
right? Order
management was actually putting kit on trucks to recognize revenue, New Relic,
enterprise,
mid-market, observability, SaaS company, people AI, pre-IPO, you know, Andre
essen, iconic
YC Lightspeed company, really AI-driven, born last five to seven years, much
different
scale. So, you know, we're not in the hundreds of millions of dollars as a pre-
IPO company,
much smaller.
What makes people interesting is because we sell to revenue operations leaders
and go
to market leaders, we have historically really taken RevOps very seriously. So
it's been
fun to both recruit, attract, and build RevOps talent and also really have
permission from
our leadership team to be cutting edge in terms of using a lot of automation.
For example,
I saw one of your questions today was, "What's your favorite spreadsheet?" I
can actually
look you in the eye and say, "After three years, people AI, we don't use spread
sheets,"
right? We're a very modernized automated go-to-market operating structure. So
people AI is kind of
the newest, coolest toys on the bleeding edge of what enterprise go-to-market
selling looks
like today.
And as you not only operate at people, AI, but you also advise a bunch of
people in kind
of a variety of different formats. So you're not only thinking about RevOps in
terms of
yourself, but also in terms of other size organizations today on our call, we
're going
to be talking more about the enterprise. We're going to be talking about more
of the larger
type companies, but you also advise startups and different folks who are just
starting out
in figuring out what the heck they're going to do with RevOps in general, right
Yeah, I think the healthiest way to view RevOps is one, it is still a
relatively new concept.
So anyone who's very rigid in their definition or structure of RevOps, I would
already start
cautioning them to slow down a bit because just like an organization is going
to be going
through transition, as you introduce new products, as you penetrate new markets
, it's going to
put new stressors on the business. As you scale internationally, as you just
scale in terms
of sheer size, the difference between someone who's sub $10 million, maybe
early on in their
lifecycle versus someone who's expanding internationally, those RevOps
organizations,
while they may have some consistencies, are going to look very different. I
like to think
of RevOps just like the rest of the business. It has to evolve in terms of not
just what
it's doing within the RevOps org, but how it's connecting to the business that
it's actually
empowering and enabling. I'm curious though, because as someone who's a smaller
organization,
I find it's just so difficult to, they always say, I think like a bigger
company as you grow.
And I think that's one of the things that's really struggled for me personally
is the constant
evolution of like our go-to-market operations and technology. It just seems
like I fritted
the exact number. I just might see if I just told me of how much we spent on
technology last year.
And it's pretty staggering. But the thing that's so interesting to me is like,
I don't really,
there's no life without it. And I wonder like how many founders and executive
teams do you
talk to that are product people that don't really have a background in sales
marketing,
definitely don't have a background in RevOps, who don't really understand like
necessarily the
power that this has, or someone else has just always done it for them. And they
don't have that
background. So I'm just curious, how do you think big when you are small and
make sure that you
are investing the right way? Yeah, there's a bunch there. It's interesting. We
can, if we get to it,
we could talk about how product and engineering teams operate versus go-to-
market. But to answer
your first question, I don't think this just applies to RevOps. I would
actually back up and start,
we're all clear on the idea that when we build a product company or even a
service company,
you're looking for a product market fit of what it ever is you're bringing to
market.
The very next question that we need to write alongside that is, what is your go
-to-market fit?
We're not even at RevOps yet, which is, are you a PLG company? Are you an
inside, inbound,
high-velocity sales machine? Are you a top-down named enterprise account
selling team?
So as you look at who your buyer is and you look what problems you're solving
for that buyer and
you look at how they buy, that starts to define what your marketing, sales, and
services organization
looks like. I think the RevOps function is a derivative of those two large
rocks, right? Like
what product or service we're bringing to market? What does the go-to-market
motion that best fits
our buyer's buyer journey in the sales cycle? Your operating function, really,
ironically enough, the most common piece of advice I give it at RevOps leaders
is they should think
of themselves as product managers for go-to-market capabilities. This means you
have a roadmap.
This means you are bringing capabilities, not tools, to the business. So I
always encourage
the stakeholders of RevOps capabilities. Please communicate to us in terms of
the capabilities
you need. I need improved lead routing. I need to improve visibility into my
pipeline.
We need to launch account planning. Don't come to me and say, "I want to buy
tool X because I used
it at my last company." I really think the tooling decision is something that
should be made between
RevOps and IT professionals. We should be looking at materiality and priority
of these solutions
within our tech stack. I think in your good company, lots of people have made
massive investments
over the past 10 years in go-to-market tooling. I think there's a couple
reasons for that.
The first, we've experienced digital transformation and the benefit of using
technology in so many
areas of our lives. We're always hungry to apply it to more. But more
importantly,
SaaS really a lot of business owners to start moving much more quickly and more
independently,
which has cut both ways. It allows us to do things faster quicker. It also has
resulted in the fact
that a number of us are sitting on some Lego sets we've been building for 10
years. We bought
everything from the Death Star to the Millennium Falcon to the Raiders of the
Lost Ark set and we
put them all together. They were all independently really good decisions. I do
feel this collective
tool fatigue in a lot of our customers' prospects and myself and my peers.
When we're looking around at everything, I think you said it. It's a non-
starter that we can do
without these. But I think if you just scratch below that question and you
start focusing on
what's most material for your business right now in which tool is moving that
lever,
it will help us make some of those prioritization decisions if we're looking
rationalize.
Yeah, I think part of it is just the reliance on data and having such a strong
data input and
like, architecture for me from the very beginning. That's like what I wanted to
build when I started
this company because I was like, I know that I'm going to wake up three years
from now and be like,
hey, let's look at whatever something three years ago and if you weren't
capturing all that information,
things change, whether it's actionable or not, all those things. But it's like,
at least if you have
that stuff and you can go back and look at it, but if you don't do those things
, then you really can't.
Yeah, I think in two areas. One, I really, if I was drawing a visual on a white
board of a go-to
market org, I would draw three columns, marketing services and sales, and there
'd be three swim lanes
across those three departments. The top swim lane is your business process. The
second swim lane
are the automation software and tools that empower or bring that business
process to life. And then
the third swim lane is your data layer. I believe your data layer is the one
that you can make the
biggest bets on being the most persistent over the lifecycle of your company.
So if you, from day one,
if you think of data as a persistent and permanent asset of your business, you
're going to want to
capture as discrete information as you can for as long as you can about
everything you can. Right now,
that doesn't mean you're using it immediately or all the time. I think just
because we capture data
doesn't mean we have to use it today or that we need to try and operationalize
it. I think as you
start moving up the stack into your business process in your software
automation layers,
you should expect to have to retool those every few years because your business
is going to be
evolving and changing. And I think this is really where sometimes we may even
over engineer things,
where we try and build things for 10 years in terms of your Martec stack or
sales tech stack.
And I don't know many people that can run a business today the same way they
were running it 10 years
ago, particularly in technology. So I try to encourage people like think of
your data layer as really
the foundation of your house, a lot of infrastructure. You want it very
discrete. You want a lot of
trending data points. You have the ability to move it, snap it, curate it and
present it. But the
business process in the workflow layer, that's something that should be looked
at as you're part
of your annual planning process. I think a healthier, more productive way to
look at it is those three
columns, the marketing, sales and services column, are actually supporting one
business process,
which is your buyer and customer journey from the moment of prospect. So when
you're not sure
what to prioritize or whether it's a tool you want to invest more in or
somewhere you're going to cut,
I think the best North Star is your buyer and customer experience.
So continuing the thread on enterprise. Any kind of unique setups that you've
seen in terms of
creating a high performing or higher impact revops team?
I think sometimes people start talking about setting up a revops function or
some sort of
centralized go-to-market operating fabric. There's this initial fear of like,
oh my gosh,
how many people are rehiring? What's the headcount investment? Where if you
actually step back,
most organizations have this operating fabric. The only question is,
have you organized it? Have you named it? Have you structured it to perform as
one team?
Or is it distributed around the business? And a lot of us that run centralized
orgs will call that shadow ops, like the old shadow IT days where a lot of
program managers out
there and project managers and departments that are actually performing routine
and regular
operational functions. If they're reporting into the business they support, the
business gets
that great intimacy of having that close right hand, the person they know to go
to.
But the downside is that operator's on an island, and they're very segmented.
So something that's
maybe nuanced but not unique is standing up a revops org by not just
incremental hiring,
but just actually taking an authentic perspective of who around here is
actually operating and
will we benefit by putting them all on one team so that we can centralize
resources prior to
decision-making. So that's the first thing is that a lot of us probably can
construct a revops
organization with the headcount that's already in the company by simply real
igning them differently.
Where things get really unique comes down to that concept of go-to-market fit I
talked about.
If you look at PLG companies or high velocity selling companies, I've even seen
where the faster
and more digital the business is, the revops or marketing ops function actually
starts performing
what maybe 10 years ago we would have called marketing. In the marketers, I
think the line
between operations and marketing is the one that is the most transformed over
the last 10 years in
terms of the way we marketed 10 years ago in the role of marketing ops versus
now. Marketing ops
is hand-in-glove like genetically integrated with marketing, whereas sales and
sales operations
have been running in parallel with each other for decades and they're only just
now starting to
integrate with some of the integrated cadence tools and things that we're
seeing. I believe post sales
has evolved similar to marketing in that a lot of post sales orgs were
professional service,
time immaterials, fixed price, and now you've got customer success with
embedded offerings just
in time real time learning. CS and marketing, they're operating partners are
starting to become a part
of what they do day in, day out in terms of how they touch their customers. If
you turn the channel
to a non-PLG company, heavy field marketing, heavy thought leadership, top down
executive base
selling, you'll start to see the role of those operating teams change. You'll
see enablement
and the importance of enablement start to really play a big role. So what I
find unique
is as I go around, if I lined up 10 or 20 of people as customers, the
difference in their sales
organizations, you're either selling to SMB commercial with a short sales cycle
or enterprise is relatively
the standard deviation is not that big. One sales org looks very much like
another sales
organization, a weekly forecast call, say their ASP at sales cycle length may
be different,
their hiring profile might be different, but the way you run a sales
organization, you have a sales
methodology, you have an annual kickoff or training event, you do your QBRs, it
's pretty consistent.
The marketing and post sales motions take a consumption based company that's
driving a product
with a consumption based licensing model. The RevOps team supporting post sales
or supporting CS
is going to have a heavy data, heavy analytics working with product teams in
terms of driving
that consumption. So I think the uniqueness really comes out of which market
you're in
and what product you're bringing to market. And then that manifests itself in
the role that
RevOps plays for that team. Well, yeah, so this is something that we talk a lot
about on a different
podcast on demand to visionaries with CMOs is about if you are a PLG CMO, it's
like you literally
own a number, right? That's like you write like the no sales person gets their
fingerprints on
percentage of the deals that your organization is driving. And so how does that
change especially
if you had siloed mops and sales ops back in the day or now, how does that
change things?
And what does that look like from the CRO's perspective to say this mops team,
which is
let me exactly what you're talking about. He's like literally driving revenue.
They're responsible
100% for it. There's no one else doing it other than them. So should this be
two different functions
or should it be one? Again, I'll throw up that caution at anyone who's sure
they know the answer.
I already have alarm bells and red flags going off because it should be your
answer
for your stage of the company. And that answer is going to need to change in a
few years as that
company evolves because you bring up a PLG, the how PLG impacts marketing and m
ops.
Let's go to a consumption company and how does that impact CS? So now you have
a sales team
forecasting the potential revenue of the land, but the revenue actually doesn't
come in until the
customer starts consuming your technology. And now you've got a sales team and
a CS team and who's
driving the revenue versus in a consumption model, the sales team may be
landing the potential for
revenue. The actual driving of the revenue comes from your product team and
your CS team, right?
The product team through viral features and your CS team through the engagement
adoption of
annualism that they'll do for your customers, right? And so we work with a lot
of people that are
asking those types of questions, how do you forecast consumption-based revenue
models, right?
Who's responsible for forecasting it? And I think the RevOps team's
responsibility is to drive
clarity and drive clear boundaries and force trade-offs in the business within
whatever your
operating budget is or your capacity to deliver. Speaking of trade-offs, let's
get to our next
segment, RevOpsicles, where we talk about the tough parts of RevOps. What is
one of the hardest
RevOps problems you faced in the last six months? And how did you solve it? Oh
geez, there's no question
this was not just the hardest problem I faced. I think it's the hardest problem
a lot of folks
have faced, which has just been the big shift in the macro. And it happened in
the middle of most
people's operating year. I'm sure some people were different, but most of us
about midway through the
year couldn't ignore the fact that something had changed. And you started
hearing phrases very
similar that we heard when COVID kicked off. The only budget is the CFO's
budget. I don't know if my
champion or buyer actually still has access to the dollars they have. So in
terms of RevOps,
the question we were asking ourselves and helping our customers answer is, are
pipelines still the
same pipeline it was three months ago? If you had a long sales cycle and you
were working in an account,
you could have been working with a very sincere buyer and a very sincere pain.
And then suddenly,
their organization's responsibilities changed. So I know we in many folks
experienced late-stage
changes to very well-qualified opportunities. So what we did is we were a med
pick shop. So we're
big on talking about champions and EBS and decision-making process, etc. What
we did is we just
dropped all of our qualification scores for the decision-making process and the
EBS for our
opportunities. And we asked our sales teams to actually explicitly go out and
re-qualify
all of those opportunities with very specific questions. Do you still have the
budget that you
thought you had when you started this year off? When was the last time your
organization spent
money of this sizing caliber and is the process for spending money of the
sizing caliber the same as
it was six months ago? And we got a lot of new answers. And so leveraging what
we thought the
state of our pipeline was along with our sales methodology to drive our field
organization to
re-qualify it so we can actually know what happened to our pipeline in a very
measurable and mathematical
way, leveraging our sales methodology. We talked a little bit about balancing
the different
departments, sales marketing CS. Do you have trouble with feeding the different
heads of the Hydra when
all of them are asking for different things? I know it's a little probably
different at people
AI than other places, but it's a common thing that people are struggling with.
Who to feed and
when with limited resources? So a couple of perspectives. One, while the sales
marketing and
service functions report into my role of people, even at New Relic where I was
in a integrated
rev-ops function, one of my clear responsibilities was the facilitation of
negotiations across
the departments and budgets, because we did have a centralized go-to-market
budget that got
allocated to marketing sales and services. So annual planning was the bringing
the heads of
state together and everyone's debating what they needed and why it was a
priority. So one, I think,
needing to keep teams aligned and focused on shared wins and shared
responsibilities is a
perpetual state, whether you're a 100 person company or 10,000. There's going
to be drift in
terms of what people are focusing on and you want to get them back on the same
page. I actually
really believe this is a huge leadership responsibility right up to the CEO,
including myself presidents
and CMOs. Nothing will drive departments faster apart than taking what is at
the end of the day
probably a shared responsibility and a shared outcome and trying to assign one
person to it.
For example, marketing, where's the pipeline? I don't think that marketing is
solely
responsible for pipeline. I think a lot of people contribute to marketing's
leadership position
in building this pipeline. But if you believe marketing is building pipelines
solely by
themselves without the help of product managers, sales reps, or the case
studies your post sales
team brings to market, I believe pipeline's a team sport. Everyone contributes
to pipeline.
So where I think the alignment starts is first the leadership letting people in
the company know
that no matter how unique or special you think you or your department is, no
one here at this
business wins or loses a loan. Everyone is a leading or lagging indicator to
someone else's job.
So if I'm in sales and I need pipeline, I think sharing a deep understanding of
leading
indicators with your cross-functional leaders and having your sales leader and
your marketing
leader look at both sales and marketing leading indicators together versus if
that's leaders,
you isolate one of these functions. And I'm like, Ian, you own pipeline by
yourself and your team,
I've already created this concept that one, you have to go fight this battle
alone,
two, you're going to get really defensive about it. So I think having shared
datasets and shared
goals, in addition to specific goals, right? Rep's carry quotas, every
department needs their
objectives just for that department. And then you have whatever the appropriate
cadence is for
your organization for a shared review of these and retrospectives in terms of
how they're tracking
and where they're performing. I think key to alignment is leading indicators
are so much more
powerful for driving collaboration than so as you look at your operating cad
ence as a leader,
or you look at how you perceive you hold people accountable, if you're only
doing it on results,
and of course we need results, right? So I'm not advocating, we don't hold
people responsible for
results, but if you only hold people accountable for results, it's a little bit
like my trainer
only holding me accountable to losing weight or not, or my financial advisor
holding me accountable
to being wealthy or not. Okay, we may agree on the outcomes, but where I can
really start to
change my behavior, where I can still be an optimist, if I've got problems, is
if you're coming to me
when my leading indicators look off. Hey, Art, based on what you're eating, you
're leading
indicators, I don't think you're going to achieve your way goal. Can we start
exploring why these
leading indicators look wrong? So I think just the practice of using cross-
functional leading
indicators is the beginning of getting better alignment. And then the last
thing is how do you
allocate budgets? And I think this is where rev-ops can really play an integral
role. If the CMO gets
a budget and the CRO gets a budget and is not running marketing, and the Chief
Customer Officer
gets a budget, they're going to deploy those funds into technology and head
count, basically like
three separate departments. And they're going to try and interlock at the VP
director level.
I believe that the integration and alignment actually starts to minute you
start allocating
budget. Before anyone gets their budget, you've got this go-to-market
investment you're looking
to drive revenue. What is the buyer and customer? What's the holistic priority
we need to fund?
And then having the trade-off conversation with those different department
heads
before your organization start going. Because your organizations are all going
to try and
prioritize their department's top needs, which is the right thing to do. Those
just may not be
the organization's top needs. So I think the budget and leading indicators are
two really good
signals. I'm like, who is managing the budget? How is distributed? And if you
're giving it to
three different groups and allowing those groups to set their priorities
independently, and all you
give them is a result goal, they're all going to come with five different, nine
different
thesis as to how to drive that result. Any rev-oops moments in the past couple
years that you've made
mistake that you don't recommend someone making and maybe they should learn
from you?
I've worked with a lot of people that are looking to rationalize tools and or
modernize their CRM.
And I personally went through a CRM reimplementation. And I would say my rev-
oops moment was trying
to address the tool and tech footprint around the CRM we were working on when
really the CRM
in the tool footprint is actually just a mirror of your procurement decision
and budget process.
So my rev-oops moment might have been first trying to tackle it as like a tool
rationalization
project when really it's a business reengineering project, which is, hey, what
do we want to buy
our customer journey to be? How do we spend money here? Who and how do we make
technology
purchasing decisions so that you can build sustainable architectures? I really
think the
organization has to think that way. Other rev-ops moments, rev-oops moments. I
'd say in general
another good one that I see on a regular basis is trying to enable the field.
So I think obviously
rev-ops and enablement have a very tight partnership or sometimes even part of
the same organization.
We all anecdotely will say things like, we need to enable the field on the new
product. We need to
enable the field on the new account planning process. We need to enable the
field. I think it's
a good red flag for us. Anytime we say that, we need to enable the field. I
really believe that
we're skipping a step. If you've got 500 sellers, you've probably got 40, 50,
60 managers or leaders,
maybe even more in there. I really believe pound for pound, enabling your
frontline leaders
and enabling your second line leaders. We often just skip over the leaders and
we just train the
field. We say, hey, why aren't they doing this? Then sometimes I'm like, we
have millions of
dollars at larger organizations in management structure. So I've seen a number
of rev-ops
oops and experienced them where you train the field to do something. But if you
don't train that
front line on their role of reinforcing and inspecting that training, that can
turn it to a
rev-ops movement where you spend a lot of time the money educating the field
and you skip
over your part of your governance structure, which are your leaders.
All right. Let's get to our next segment. The tool shed where we're talking
tools, spreadsheets
and metrics, not that you would know it's spreadsheets. So like anymore. And
all these tools are
just like everyone's favorite tool qualified. It'll be to be tool shed is
complete without
qualified. Go to qualified.com right now and check them out. We love qualified.
qualified.com. Check them out. Art, what's in your tool shed?
So we're a go-to-market technology company, right? So I'm going to start with
the obvious answer,
which is the tool I personally use the most. Now this is also relative to my
altitude in the
organization. So I'm responsible for the pipeline and revenue number across
marketing, sales and
services, as well as having the rev-ops function. I am sure that some people
are using some spreadsheets
that people I just have the benefit of having a great data team and a
commitment to curating
that data into dashboards and repeatable use. So outside of people AI, which I
do really believe
we're in the era of this we're no longer in people owned accounts. People rent
accounts, right? The
rent payment is pipeline and ARR. This is not a trust me. I'm going to bring
the number back in three months.
I really believe that if you think of the essence, if we really want to
simplify go-to-market,
it's the creation and disposition of opportunities, right? For the purpose of
creating revenue,
creating a retaining revenue. Lots of things we can do around that. So your CRM
, I've primarily
worked with Salesforce, but we also do work with Oracle CRM and I'm familiar
with HubSpot,
but obviously you need a CRM for a centralized repository of a lot of your data
, but also your
workflows. Huge fan of Snowflake or other large data warehousing technologies,
most of the
tooling vendors have not cracked the code of how to be the backbone of complex
data in context.
When you want to start looking at product usage, along with financial data,
along with your go-to-market
data, I believe having a data warehouse, Data Lake and solid ETL strategy. So
in terms of your three
big rocks, one, I want to be able to measure my customer facing teams
engagement with my prospects
and customers. Number two, I need a centralized CRM platform. Number three, I
need the data platform.
And now as I move into marketing in sales, I want intense signals. I want lead
routing.
I want marketing campaign automation. You obviously want standard automation
capabilities around email
marketing, messaging, et cetera. And then post sales, I really think has a very
big responsibility
to bring automation to market, not just for renewal opportunity management, but
also for
customer training, customer engagement, and engagement with your product team.
I think the
relationship between customer success and product is one of the big areas the
industry can really
make a lot of headway in terms of really tightening that up because the
customer success team has
such a huge opportunity to scale the right or wrong way with an organization
based on how
effectively A, they use automation and B, how they provide feedback to the
product team to bring
those in product experiences out there. In terms of naming specific vendors,
maybe in the rev
tool shed, maybe this is blasphemy. I've actually been a big fan of the day of
believing most of
the tools are actually mostly good enough. I like that. That's a good answer.
If you're in the top three vendor in any of these categories, the tools
probably good enough. The
real question is, do you as the customer or as the rev ops leader have a clear
vision of how you're
going to put these things together? There's so many overlapping features and
functions in the
good market space. It's on you as the customer. I hear a lot of times I'll talk
to my peers like,
"Ah, everybody in this space says they do the same thing." Everyone's just like
, "Yeah, I know.
It's because they're the vendors." It's on you as the customer to start saying,
"They do this really
well, so I'm going to prioritize this feature from them and I can replace this
other vendor
with this tool." That comes down to us as customers. The vendors are going to
be trying to grab as
much wallet share and market share as they can. I like it. Great answer. It's
true though, right?
Of course, there's differences like you said a million times. Cavillating, what
size you're at,
what type of company are all those things. I think it's a good point that this
is marketing
101 is like nobody ever in marketing 101. It's like nobody ever got fired using
IBM. It's like
that same sort of idea. This is why the Gartner wave and all these things exist
is to allow people to
say, "Hey, these are the three things on the slide." If you're not one of the
companies on the slide,
your life is to figure out how to get on the slide. Totally. If you're a RevOps
leader or a
line of business leader looking to make a technology investment, you have this
amazing
analyst community that's doing a lot of work for you. You make a handful of
phone calls to peers
and peer groups to find out their experience. I would argue your bigger risk in
getting value
is the effectiveness of your organization's ability to adopt that technology
than it is you
picking the wrong vendor. That's where I think the bigger risk is. I can buy
three or four different
types of cars that all get me from point A to point B. Me knowing which type of
car I need for my
family and for my commute and how to drive it is a much bigger risk than the
feature function
difference between Hyundai, Honda, Toyota. I think there's a million RevOps
lessons in there to be
on-packed as well. Any stories about something you noticed that wasn't working
in your pipeline
and how you sussed it out? Again, we have the benefit of not only building
tools in this space,
but asking lots of questions about our business and also learning from our
customers and prospects.
We see them on-packed things. One of the more interesting ones for us, I was a
customer
people. I asked for two years before I'd been here. For the last five years, I
've had data
that tells me questions that I did not have as an operator six years ago. That
what I think is
really compelling. That is not only the health of our engagement and accounts
in a territory.
Are we working all of them? Are we working some of them? What's the optimal
territory size
for any given revenue responsibility or segment in your business? Having real
data that tells you
how many accounts your top sellers can get to effectively to get a result is, I
think, a really
modernized, important piece of information versus debating do enterprise reps
get 20 accounts or
10 accounts or eight accounts. You can put some real telemetry around that. But
more importantly,
as you, so when I look at pipeline health, my very first question is, are we
actually engaging
with the accounts that we claim there's pipeline? At the end of the day, I
always remind people
pipeline still is coming from this as people are typing in what the human
thinks is going on in
the real world. I at least want to know that they're engaging with these
accounts. They claim they
have pipeline. The second thing is the personas. What are the actual titles and
roles of the people
of Ian and Art are both calling on eight accounts? You're hitting the key
personas.
I have the same level of activity, but I'm not hitting the key personas. We're
going to get
very different results in terms of the pipeline conversion. I love it. Man,
it's seeing it again from the rooftops. That's not just on sales. That's on
marketing too. This
is the thing that drives me absolutely crazy is when I sit down with a
marketing team and I'm like,
what are your key personas? They're like, we have a lot. I'm like, you should
be able to rip them
off here pretty quick. I'll give you a great answer in terms of ripping off the
rooftop.
Yeah, specific problem. I've had the benefit of every sales kickoff I've been a
part of for the
last five years. It's a very data-driven sales kickoff. We show all the stats
and data from the
last year. One of the big ahas for us in the good-o-market space was we've had
CROs,
drive investments in people AI. We've had CMOs, drive investment people. I've
had CCOs,
drive investment people AI. What we found was the presence of a RevOps leader.
Early in the sales cycle, with any one of those, shorten the sales cycle and
dramatically
increase the size of the deal. Right now, maybe some of us knew that anecd
otally,
UNI's RevOps professionals kind of giggle like, of course, lots of reasons why
you're going to
get a really organized person running everything from the procurement process,
etc. But we also
know that the RevOps leader is important in terms of long-term sustainability
of the good-o-market
solution. Being able to show our sales team that when you have a RevOps leader
engaged at stage X,
with a minimum activity level of Y, your deal goes up dramatically and your
sales cycle goes down,
was a big learning for us. Something we've actually shared with a lot of our
prospects and customers
as well. That's great. We talk a lot about the champion that's something so
common in sales
parlance and core to the strategy. Who's your champion? Are they going to do
everything that
needs to get done? Are you enabling them? Part of that process is do they have
the collateral to
pitch their teams? That's something we've been really focused on lately as an
organization is
because so much of this process is now, people just ripping stuff off your
websites and putting
together decks and doing all that stuff without you even knowing that that is
even happening.
How do we give them the tools to just, "Hey, if you're going to rip all this
stuff off of our
RevOps, that anyway, it's like, here's all the stuff that you really need to go
pitch your boss
without us in the room, which is we always want to push ourselves in the room,
but they're not
going to invite us in there anyways in most cases." Sometimes your job may be
prepping. We like our
champions to have professional wins, personal wins, sell when we're not there,
etc. And so
we're always encouraging our champions, especially when they claim to be a
champion like, "Hey,
can we do role reversal? Let me play CFO for you." When you go sell this, these
are the questions
I'm going to ask you. Do you have a deployment plan ready to go? What was the
last time you
deployed a tool like this? And so we try to teach our sales teams that it's fun
to help your champion
prepare because you don't want them making up their own answers when you're not
in the room.
Yeah, it's a great point. Great takeaway. Okay. Any other tool thoughts, data
thoughts?
I happen to be a big Tableau user. I just have been part of that is I don't
think Tableau
compared to other visualization tools is the important part of the story. I
think I really do
kind of view the go-to-market stack as either business process automation
workflow, platform,
or data. And I think the least appreciated and the least understood is the data
layer.
And I think there's a lot of frustration at the systems and tool layer from
people
that it's much easier to understand a workflow tool that is mimicking something
you have domain
expertise. If you're not a data modeler, you don't understand ETLs, you don't
understand the
difference between data engineering, data visualization, data modeling, you
just have a data problem.
And so when you talk about the tool shed and what's most important, I happen to
believe the
architecture of your data, the data model, how you do you have data management,
sorry, do you have
data governance and master data management in place? If you talked about as an
early stage company
thinking about the future, very clear roles or responsibility around what your
systems of record
are and who is responsible for not just providing you access to it in some
visualization you want,
they have a night job and a weekend job of protecting that data, curating that
data.
And it's probably one of the areas I think is least invested in in
organizations that don't
maybe think in a more modernized way. Lots of appetite for automation and
blasting things out
and seeing pre but that plumbing I think is crucially important and helps
drives your ability on top
of it. All right, this is an absolutely wonderful conversation and it was so
wonderful that we don't
even have time for all of our quick hits. So I'm going to give you one quick
hit. What advice would
you give to someone who is newly leading a rev ops team? The most common piece
of advice I've given
is nine times out of 10, the person leading the rev ops team is leading it for
a couple of reasons.
Someone trusts them to be able to have really complex and maybe at times on
settling conversations
and to be an effective rev ops leader, you have to have a high degree of trust
with the people
that are depending upon this shared service you're providing back to the
business called revenue
operations. So the first thing is know that you really can't take a side, right
? You can't love
beating up on marketing or love beating up on sales or love rolling your eye at
post sales.
You should have a deep understanding and empathetic connection with all the Go
ToMarket functions,
not just the one you happen to. Because most rev ops leaders will have come up
through
one of the operating channels and I really challenge them to be much more
holistic in their
view that GoToMarket is all about the buyer customer journey, not about
marketing sales and services.
That's the first piece of advice. The second piece of advice is they're
probably pretty
intelligent, okay? Probably a systems thinker, probably a degree in some sort
of engineering,
mathematics, they've got a lot of intellectual horsepower. Unfortunately, as
the rev ops leader,
especially if your team starts getting beyond say 5, 10, 20 people, your job's
not to be the
smartest woman or man in the room, your job's to be a leader and you're going
to spend more of
your time leading your organization to ensure that they are prioritizing the
intentional and
material things you wanted to tackle. Not just what their latest ask was from
the latest
titled customer from one of the departments, just because the VPSL's runs up or
the VP of
marketing runs up is not enough for your team to suddenly break rank and I'll
use the analogy
with a new rev ops leader. If you do not understand one of your full time jobs
is leading,
your organization is going to look like six year olds playing soccer and the
ball is going to be
the biggest title in the loudest mouth from outside of the business. If you
want to run like a World
Cup team or an MLS team or a Premier League team, everyone on your team needs
to know their position,
the rules and responsibilities and your job is to keep them in position and
keep them performing
as a team. And so for a lot of people not being hands on in the numbers and not
being the person
who comes up with the aha moment or that analysis or installs the software is
uncomfortable for them
because they've been doing it for so long. So I really encourage them to
understand that they're
a leader first and foremost and let their team be the smartest people in the
room and get those
wins. I love it. Great advice. All right. Thanks so much for joining. We really
appreciate it. I
need the final thoughts. No, it was a lot of fun. And thanks for having us on
the show. And I think
the future is going to be more and more dependent on rev ops. And I think
whether you're in the line
of business or you're on a rev ops team, there's a huge opportunity for us all
to get smarter on this.
It's an emerging field. And I think it's going to be more and more relevant for
digital businesses
of the future as this amount of technology increases. Agreed. And if everybody
wants to learn more
about people, I just go to people.ai and learn more and follow our on the
socials, which will
come from the show notes. Thanks again.