How to Not Go Bankrupt
On this episode, Brian explains how to build a solid RevOps strategy and how to gather actionable data. He also describes how to expand enterprise, mid-market companies internationally.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
Welcome to Rise of RevOps.
This episode features an interview with Brian Tully,
Chief Revenue Officer at GoldCast.
GoldCast provides strong tools and dashboards for you,
the marketer, to measure the ROI of the event
and get strong lead qualification insights.
Brian's specialty is quickly growing SaaS companies
year over year.
In this episode, Brian explains how
to build a solid RevOps strategy and how
to gather actionable data.
He also describes how to expand enterprise mid-market companies
internationally, but first a brief word from our sponsor.
Welcome to Rise of RevOps.
I'm Ian Faison, CEO of CastMean Studios.
And today I am joined by a special guest, Brian.
How are you?
Very good.
Thank you very much for having me here.
Excited to have you on the show.
Excited to chat RevOps.
As always, talk about GoldCast.
We're going to talk about webinars and events
and all the cool stuff that y'all are doing.
This show is always brought to you by the good people
qualified.
You can go to qualified.com to learn more.
Turn your website into a sales machine.
Lots of love and exciting RevOps stuff here for today.
Wonderful team.
What was your first job in revenue?
First job in revenue?
I'm actually going to say investment banking.
My first job in revenue--
investment banking is just glorified sales.
So Lean In Brothers, Glitchin' At West, selling $1 billion bond
offerings.
And then basically went startup with a company called
Taxstream, a bootstrap, just two of my friends
in the county we got together.
And at that role, I was in charge of sales, customer
success, support, basically everything but product and
death.
And flash forward to today.
What does it mean to be CRO of GoldCast?
Fast forward to today, CRO of GoldCast.
It's a very exciting company, a very exciting role, great time
to be part of it.
So I have a long history.
I'm pretty old.
But this is the best dev team I've worked with.
Full stop, which is amazing.
They can push out high quality product and an amazing clip.
But it's fun because I come through the challenge of, OK,
now marketing, sales, and client success have to step up.
You have to constantly be innovated.
And constantly learn how to pitch and sell and market.
Who's the best persona fit for the new product all while
moving upstream and moving internationally at the same time?
So it's almost kind of easier when your dev team's a little bit
slow because they have time to catch up and set it and then go.
This is like, oh my god, it's Christmas every single day.
And you have to play with the new toy.
That's really fun.
That's exciting.
And it seems like, gosh, how needed is gold cast as a solution
right now because data more important than ever, obviously
with the rise of AI and everything, just having a solution
to be able to help us go to market is so critical.
Yes, definitely.
I mean, the core has to be an amazing experience.
Otherwise, no one's paying attention anyway.
We're here talking.
If we're not engaging, no one's going to care.
The second has to be easy.
Otherwise, no one wants to do it.
And then the third is you have to rely on it
because if it doesn't work, then you're
going to be scared and it adds a lot of stress.
So those are the basics.
And then you get into repeatable so that you can do things
once, keep it going forever.
You get AI snippets, 15 seconds, 30 seconds right out
of the box afterwards.
And you get to edit it.
And you have an event hub so the content lasts forever.
So 10 years down the road, someone
can watch this glorious discussion and glean some knowledge.
And what's your RevOps strategy?
RevOps strategy aligns with the business strategy.
So I always start with what is the business goals?
What did the executive sign off with?
Once you have that, you say, OK, what
do we currently have in place?
And then what do we need to add to get there?
And I actually like to start with an Excel spreadsheet
of just what is the forecast of traffic to our web page,
to the amount of leads we're going to get
inbound to the conversion of those leads,
outbound prospecting.
How many BDRs do we have?
Where are we going?
And then from the initial first touch point
all the way through scheduled demos, to closed demos,
meaning to actually happen to proposals all the way through.
And I'd like to start with the measurement
because the first forces are team to think it through
about what needs to happen.
It allows us to then take it up to the tower
of pie, the board, and the execs to say, hey,
this is what we think we can accomplish
to make sure we're aligned.
And then once it is, then you start
enacting that whole process for your funnel,
for your persona, or your different products.
So you're able to be effective, and you're able to measure
what's working and not working, and why,
and then adjust along the way.
- Tell me about the first six months in the row.
What did you learn?
- I gave them a product vision for a year and a half,
and they basically accomplished it in seven months.
So I needed to recalibrate my mindset
for the speed of which this can actually happen.
Once I got over that, it was a couple of core things,
and I'm pretty standard.
Persona, who's your real ICP?
'Cause any startup, especially when you're founders,
and you get to a certain size,
and you can still be like 10, 20, 50 million ARR,
you're just excited that people want to buy your software,
and you say yes to everybody, and they all flood in,
and it's fantastic, and you go, yay, result are good.
But then you kind of realize, wait a minute,
we're not a fit for everybody.
There's not one Swiss Army knife
that can really make everything work.
So where's your true match?
And you start with the end,
you start with what is actually renewing.
What clients are really getting value?
And then you back into the equation of,
this is really who we should target,
'cause we're gonna be able to help them
the most with our current product set.
So it was ICP was one,
and then to your point, structure and digital journey.
A lot of it was done with, you know,
Hutsva and a couple tools,
but are the tools put together in the proper way?
So data just flows and everything just works.
No, is there manual reporting on the side, of course?
So because of that, you know, okay,
we need to create the proper structure
in order to support our clients,
our real ICP effectively.
So that was one, the people in the process.
But then okay, now that we have the people in the process,
we have 16 different tools, which I'm happy to list off.
These all have to work in harmony,
and we need to reduce the seepage of data and time along the way,
so that our clients can truly have a magical experience
and our employees also enjoy their jobs better.
- I love that, that's great.
All right, let's get to our first segment of Rev Obstacles,
where we talk about tough parts about RevOps.
What makes a horrible client experience?
- Oh, that's a wonderful question.
My first is always looking at Comcast.
Comcast once got a score.
The client success score worse than the IRS.
Now, if you think that you could do worse than the IRS,
that's like the pinnacle of being awful.
So directly answering your question,
ask the customer 15 times for the same information.
Ask them for their name and their profile,
and what do they care about,
and what's their use case when the BDR has already said it
and not documented it.
The AE got it, but didn't transfer it to onboarding,
didn't transfer it to the CSM.
CSM doesn't transfer it to support,
so when they call and they have a challenge,
supports like, "Hi, who are you?
"What is your name?
"What is your event type in the Goldcast?"
Or something, like it's just miserable.
And by that point, even a core advocate
is pulling out their hair,
saying you do not care about me.
So I would say the first thing is when you get information,
make sure that that RevOps flow
is documenting it and making sure that's
in the right places for the right teams in the right systems.
And if you just do that,
clients will at least feel you're listening to them.
Clients will feel like you care about them.
And that goes a long way
before you even really start your journey.
Part of that is not gathering the proper information
in the first place.
All throughout that journey from BDR to AE,
marketing, BDR, AE, client success, onboarding,
support are always amazing opportunities
to gather the proper qualifying questions,
to make sure, "Wait a minute, are you a fit or not?"
from the sales side.
Once you're a fit or not and the property is stored,
then you go into, "Okay, well, is it documented
"in a project plan?
"Is it documented in a place
"where it is very clear to the client and you
"that this is what you're agreeing to
"when they sign that little piece of paper
"with a number on it?"
And then your onboarding team can take that and go,
"Okay, I'm gonna follow that plan that we talked about.
"And if I do that, we should be in alignment
"and be successful."
And then that needs to be documented so the CSM
and support, "No, wait a minute, we did this thing for you.
"Now you're talking about something different.
"Let's go from there,"
instead of just rehashing or misaligned expectations.
And that's really what Cross causes a lot of friction
in the entire journey and drives clients up a wall.
Those two put together.
- So who do you think should own that?
Like what does RevOps's role in that process?
- I think RevOps owns the execution strategy of that
and facilitates the entire journey for sales,
for CS and for marketing.
So once RevOps understands the strategy,
it's essential to understand the strategy and the goals,
what they wanna accomplish.
Outlines who's involved in the process internally
and from the client.
And then at each step understands
what needs to be collected and why,
then they basically give, whether it's the sales force form,
the sales force fields,
but then that feeds over automatically to catalyst
or Monday or some of the other tools.
And then it feeds over to Zendes.
So Zendes has the profile right there.
Like that's how RevOps materially reduces cost
'cause it's not just wasted hours.
Enhances revenue because there's not drop leads
and the stuff that closes is actually a better fit.
And because it's a better fit,
you're gonna have higher retention.
So I really see RevOps as the facilitator
and the strategic partner of all three of those divisions
to make it successful.
- How does a company go from mid-market to enterprise effect?
I mean, this is one of the big RevOps
that's out there in any format
because it's so hard and so many people are trying to do it.
- Yep.
And I think some of it is a lot of people
have only seen one side or the other.
So you've only worked in small companies.
So you know how a small company works
and I can talk to you and go, "Hey!"
And I understand you.
And other people have worked at really big companies
and really big companies have really different problems.
But they understand what that is.
I think my advantage is I've actually done both.
I've worked for very big companies, very small companies.
I grew a company from zero to half a billion dollars.
So I saw the journey all along the way.
And what that does,
it allows me to sit down with a team
that's really good at doing mid-small market
and saying, "Okay, first, let's educate.
"This is what enterprise means."
And I'll back up a step.
Normally the founders that I talk to here enterprise,
like we're gonna go enterprise
'cause they have really big dollar figures.
Get ahead.
I like big dollar figure deals
and that's how we're gonna move the needle
and it's very exciting.
But I have no idea what that entails.
You're gonna have a longer deal cycle.
It's gonna be a six month to a year deal cycle,
not a one to two months.
You're gonna have to invest in product improvements
or product changes to specifically address enterprise.
And that focuses on non-redundancy and templates
and making things easy and locked down
and security and compliance
to a much greater extent than you see in small market.
Founders need to know that.
People who really are gonna go on this journey
need to at least grab an expert or get a course
or understand what enterprise really means
and what they need.
Then you can build the journey in the path
and then you need sign off from the board and from execs
so that you get the proper investment of time and resources
to have that year period.
Otherwise you can be like, we're gonna do enterprise
and then they go four months and they're like,
oh my God, we don't have any enterprise clients.
Cancel the whole initiative.
We're gonna move on and do something else.
Well, did it work or did it not work?
You don't know yet.
- I mean, you have to at least do one full budget cycle, right?
Like if it's something that's like a net new,
so like this is with us, with the Caspian
when we go to a company
and we're selling to an enterprise company
and they go, okay, well we have X amount of marketing dollars.
We could use some discretionary budget on this thing.
But ultimately we got a budget this,
so we just have to look at 2024.
Like this chunk of money doesn't exist.
So if we were to be selling there and we're like,
well, it didn't work, you know,
we got all these leads but nobody closed.
And it's like, yeah, well, they haven't even budgeted it once
and then that person comes back around in January 1st
and they're like, yep, got a budget ready to rock, you know?
- Sure.
So I'll give you the flaw
and then I'll give you the right way to do it.
The flaw that I see over and over again
is some execs or a finance creates a top down model
of like, I'm gonna hire three executive reps
and three executive reps are gonna bring in
two million dollars by the end of the year.
Great, you know, two million dollars
and then they have some sort of blur up on the quarters.
Well, but they don't think through product
and they don't think through a lot of the other steps
or marketing or that's probably a new brand
for that environment.
And that's all headwinds that you're gonna have to address,
not just hire three senior sales reps
and go after this 'cause they've done enterprise in the past.
So the proper way to do this is start off again
with the business plan and write up who you're gonna go after,
write up your targets, write up how many leads,
how many inbound requests, how many outbound meetings
I'm gonna do first out of those meetings,
what percentage is actually going to turn into opportunities,
when that's gonna happen, which is probably Q2, Q3, Q,
and then how many of those are gonna go to contract
and then how many of those are gonna go through?
'Cause otherwise you're gonna hit that four month
breaking point where maybe things aren't going that well
and then all of a sudden what initiatives are we gonna kill
and the first thing they're gonna kill
is a thing that's not bringing in anything
and they're gonna move on.
You have to be able to write off the bat, say,
"Hey, month one, we were gonna have 12 conversations
"with random people just to identify the industry."
And we had four.
Nobody would even give us the time of day.
Well, that's pretty scary right there.
And if you, okay, change your persona, change your ICP,
do some adjustments.
If by month two, you're not getting it.
By month three, you didn't get those.
Then you can actually make a legitimate, okay,
are we even a fit?
We need to do a market study about what's happening,
what do they care about, what are their value props.
Are we even in the zone with our current products
and software suite service offering
to address any of those?
And do we need to change our messaging
or maybe you do have to kill it a month four,
but it's an educated decision.
And if it's happening and you're on trend
and okay, I had the meetings and the meetings
turned into two opportunities and two opportunities to that,
when there's that panic moment, we need to kill something,
you're like, we are actually on track
for that $2 million over here and here's the proof of it.
And that's what a lot of sales, marketing, CS,
especially first time journey,
if they've never done this before,
don't have to prove it to get to that Nirvana state.
- And how do you know it is working?
- You know it's working by tracking on a weekly basis.
You know, what was supposed to happen,
what is not happening on a monthly basis,
you do a real review and you flag those results to the execs,
you flag those results to the board,
hey, just wanna let you know,
here's an update on our initiative
and where we are and the progress we've made
and be very honest about it.
Some months are gonna be great,
some months might be awful.
You know, keep pushing it through.
You need to track that scale.
So you basically come up with a forecast of the future
and you need to track against it.
And it's really that guess of the future
that's going to give you the best estimate of,
okay, is this working great?
Is this kind of working?
Maybe not, do we need to change or do we need to just hold
and give it more time?
Or no, it's not working.
And if it's not working at all,
what's Plan B Plan C that we can do
for the remainder of the quarter
to kind of get back on track?
- Anything else about sort of taking
in market enterprise?
- Yeah.
- From a RevOps perspective,
first you need to have the actionable data.
You need to get your data source,
get your data lake, identify your ICPAs,
the ones you're going to go after, enterprise, how,
what you're going to find is there's not just four contacts
inside the company, there's probably 400 that you can contact.
So which ones are you going to go after first
and how are you going to use marketing
in order to do it on a rep-by-rep basis?
You need to have the measurement and reports
in Salesforce in your prospecting tools
so that you're able to track the right data
so that you can have that weekly meeting.
And you need to then chase that whole journey
and as it begins to go down into opportunities
and to closes, into implementation,
into renewal, you need to track that whole journey
to be able to show on one clean chart
to the execs and to sales management
what's working, what's not working,
bonus points, get it by persona
because what you might find is it's not the company,
it's the person you're talking to in the company
is actually the real defining factor.
Who is your real evangelist?
You'll find that out and then you need to loop that back
real quick into your BDR tool to say,
great, your ICPA just changed
and you're only targeting CMOs
or you're only targeting operations people
or you're only targeting this
'cause we're finding success.
- How do you view retention?
- I view retention as G-R-R,
I like G-R-R better than N-R-R
'cause G-R-R is your client getting value
out of your product.
N-R-R means you found a niche with a couple clients
that might even go triple, quadruple,
they might go way up, but G-R-R is,
you know, are you going after the right persona
from the very beginning and are they going through
and do you have a real business model?
Because if your G-R-R is sub a certain number,
you're really only selling sugar
or you're selling services.
It's really not fast.
It's not, you know, renewing every year.
You're really doing a one-off service to solve a need
and you just move on.
- What's that number again?
- I think the over-under is about 70.
If you're sub 70 G-R-R,
then either your ICP is way off
or you just are not delivering enough value to your client.
- Let's talk international expansion.
How the high T-Knock go bankrupt
when you expand internationally?
- Better.
(mumbles)
- Don't go bankrupt to expanding internationally.
First of all, you need to have a base
to know what works first.
Full stop.
Like you need to have the US and find a niche,
find a persona, find an industry,
find a problem that you solve better than anyone else.
You're like, yes, this is working.
'Cause if you don't have that yet
and you think you're gonna solve it by going international,
that's probably like getting married
to solve the bickering that you have.
It's probably not going to work.
So start there.
Once you have a solid foundation of I know that.
I really know my ICP.
I know the persona I'm going after.
I have my systems in place too.
I need to have my data cleanliness
and I need to have my onboarding ready.
All those have to be good
because when you go international,
not only is it kind of a big distraction,
but it can really mess up your existing businesses
from marketing all the way through to client retention
because of the additional challenges that they have.
So how do you do it?
You start off with your US customers that are larger
if you have say enterprise,
any kind of mid-market or enterprise.
And you find the local team internationally
and you start working with them there.
So a good example and you start with English speaking countries.
And the only reason you're starting with English speaking countries
is because I assume if you're starting off in the United States,
you're probably not internationalized.
Even if you can handle 3K or two digits,
can the entire panel, can the entire back and front end
be translated into a certain language, probably not.
So start with UK, Ireland, South Africa, Canada, and Australia, and India.
Like those are the places to test your strategy.
Start with the companies that you currently have
to have a presence there and see if they can use you in the local department.
Not being sponsored by core in the US.
Are there local users there that you can turn into advocates?
And the reason why is if you can get enough of that to start,
then you can leverage them up with marketing,
you can leverage them up with case studies,
you can have a local presence and a local reference
when you start prospecting.
Because the first thing, they're not going to know your brand internationally.
They go, "Who are you? I know these five companies that do this locally.
Why should I even pay attention to you?"
Got to get over that.
That means your ICP and your core messaging have to be pretty sound.
Great.
Now that that sound, they're going to go, "Okay, prove it,
and prove that you could do the support for me.
I'm six hours off. I'm nine hours off.
Prove to me that I'm not going to be screwed when I have this challenge moment,
and you can do that.
You have to be able to map out the implementation,
and you have to be able to map out the support.
And this is part of the go-to market.
Like before you even go there, don't even go there unless you figure this out.
Because if you're trying to make it up on the fly, it's going to be pretty won
ky.
And then finally, now that I've done that,
they're going to be like, "Mean anyone else who have used you,
because people rarely want to be the first in their country to use your product
."
And that's where you pull like, "Oh my gosh, I know Ian,
and Ian's in this company, and he is amazing.
You should talk to that person."
And that gives you the pseudo-presence to get into UK and really land your
first true native UK Ireland client,
and then you start building your base that way.
That's kind of the magic recipe for success.
And that didn't cost a lot of money.
I didn't have a local base.
I didn't hire any local reps.
I'm basically playing it out for the US until I could prove it
to make the investment to make sure it's going to work.
Have you had any revoops moments in the last year?
Yes, there's always revoops moments.
We switched from one tool to another tool.
That was core to our BDR prospecting.
And we did not ask the proper questions,
because one of our employees, you actually came from that company.
So we kind of thought they knew everything about it.
And then of they say it's good, it has to be good.
So we didn't do all of our property diligence.
Lo and behold, the way pricing and structuring works,
we actually probably have one tenth of the value
of the previous product under the current nature.
And we now need to unwind that, or we have to have some real
conversations in order to fix that.
And that's basically just a classic example of we made
some assumptions along the way.
And we didn't document our needs,
and we didn't document our process before going into it.
So we're only a couple weeks in, but it's material enough
that we're like, whoa, and we are now backtracking
and trying to fix the problem within the next week.
All right, let's get to our next segment, the tool shed.
We're talking tool spreadsheets metrics,
just like everyone's favorite tool qualified.
You know, B2B tool shed is complete without qualified.
Go to qualified.com right now and check them out.
Brian, what is in your tool shed?
So we have about 20 different tools that we use,
which to me is always kind of fun.
Because I remember the good old days when you probably had a CRM
and a marketing platform, and that was basically all you're
using.
So Salesforce, GONG, Syntoso, HubSpot, Zoom, and Goldcast
are our primary tools.
Straight up, GONG is definitely probably one
of the sweet spots of what we have.
They actually have-- we use it for product marketing.
We use it for product management.
We use it to keep execs and the board involved.
We use it with clients, constantly sending them
their own calls and snippets of calls about what's important.
In addition to that, we have ChampFI for job change software.
That's pretty cool.
We use outreach for email and phone.
We use leadIQ for email addresses and phone numbers,
sales navigator to filter job titles.
So we're basically trying to use as many tools as possible
to automate the BDR search function
so that they could be more effective and contact as many
of our ICPAs as possible.
And then, of course, we have Catalyst on the back end
for client retention.
We use Julie for note-taking, which is a fun tool.
And we use Notion Company-wide, and we use Monday
for implementation.
So our RevOps team has no shortage of integration challenges
that they need to keep up with, especially
as we're launching new products.
Obviously, you use Goldcast, as you mentioned.
How do y'all use your own product?
Sure.
So we'd like to drink our own champagne,
that's what I'd like to say.
We have a VIP webinar series.
So we basically have once a month, a special guest come up,
talk about their marketing challenges,
talk about their event challenges.
That data, not only isn't a great experience,
but that data is real-time sent via Slack
so that our reps get notified as soon as one of their prospects
or clients is in there so they can actually join them
in the meeting if they want to, or actually answer a question
that's going on.
In addition to that, the data gets automatically transferred
into Salesforce so that you can personalize the outbound
back with a notification.
And we also get 15 second, 30 second snippets
about 20 to an hour after the video.
So most people will send the one-hour webinar.
Oh, you missed the webinar.
Here's a one-hour webinar.
I don't know anybody who's ever watched
a recorded hour webinar at normal speed,
maybe at like a five-time speed, but normal speed
all the way through.
This way, you can be like, look, here are two clips
that you care about, about this very specific thing.
Amazing.
We also do this for live events or temple events.
We chop it up and it basically creates our content stretch.
Got a love drink in your own kitchen.
It's part of every modern architecture, as for sure.
What metrics matter to you?
From a top-side perspective, G-R-R and R-R are new business,
of course.
But just as important is CAC and cash burn.
So you can close as many clients as you want,
and that's amazing.
You can make tens of hundreds of millions of dollars.
But if you can't keep your costs under control, long-term--
not in the short, you can always run red if you need to.
But you need to know the business model is actually
functioning.
So if I close you for $10 million,
people might get excited.
But if it really costs me $12 million,
every client I bring in for $10 million to service you
and renew you, well, that's actually a problem.
So cash burn CAC is always a top-of-mind.
And then client health score and support C-step.
Our client's happy.
That's insane.
We really want $45 plus every single month.
And we get pre-adammed close to that.
And that's because we want to make sure
that we're making as many clients as happy,
because that really is long-term attention.
That is building your brand in the marketplace.
That is making sure you're successful.
From a RevOps point of view, I would say full funnel--
web traffic, inbound demos, prospects contacted, demos
both demos attended, demos SQL skills opportunities,
opportunities of proposal, close to loss, close one.
Buy persona, buy industry, buy revenue, buy employee count.
You need to have those four attached to that data,
because then you can immediately address questions
when someone's like, oh my god, why is retention bad?
Well, maybe retention's only bad in this one area.
And that's probably an area we shouldn't be there
in the first place.
Or, oh my god, we just closed this amazing deals.
Well, what's the profile of that deal
that we should now make our ICPA or really focus
our BDR team and marketing on?
You need that other data.
Is 1,000 your sweet spot of employees, or 10,000?
Or is it 200 or 50?
Having that data appended to all of the things I just listed
really make it sing and enable the entire business
to become a lot stronger.
For retention, it's QBR is completed,
because we do quarterly business reviews.
If we do half year annual, that's fine too.
Days from last touch.
Are they interacting with us in one way, shape, or form?
And every business has a certain metric where it should be yes.
Even if it's product like growth,
they should be interacting with your marketing
or interacting with your product or something
so that you are keeping them engaged.
And then product usage.
Now, not only are they using the product often,
what areas of the product are they using
so that when you follow up with them,
you have a very strategic follow up
and you know how to make recommendations
to improve whatever function they're trying to do.
Some metric or something that you wish you
could measure better, what would that be?
Right now, just in a goal cast journey,
we are ramping up our training, internal training
and training programs.
So because of it, it's not part of our health score.
Which really, really drives me nuts
'cause when I think of health score, yes, it's, you know,
do I have a core advocate?
Do they like us?
I have a good experience.
That's one check.
And then you think, well, product usage,
that's another avenue of the client health score.
And then are they engaging in our brand
and our marketing material?
Are they, have they shown up to any of our live events?
Have we seen them at our VIP dinner series
or at, you know, sales force or Adobe world?
And then training is a key part of that.
And not only training of your core advocate,
but if you have 10 licenses and they're being used,
have 10 people been trained?
Or do you only train one person?
'Cause I think if you get through the training
and your training's right, then they should have
an exponential chance of success on your software
and be that much more stronger
in your advocate in the industry.
So personally, it's, if I could wait in Magic Wand,
training initiative would be done today.
It's gonna be done soon.
- Any, yeah, any technology that you're looking
at investing in or excited about, or you've added recently?
- I am very curious about AI.
You know, we're doing that too,
where we've jumped on the AI,
and AI by the way is a bad word.
We should all do a shot every time we hear the word AI,
we'd probably be drunk by like a little bit of luck.
So AI that can automate and enhance
the BDR prospecting function,
especially mixed with deep fake.
I am fascinated by that,
because let's say chat, GBT6,
can actually do all the language
and respond correctly to the question.
You can bind that with a deep fake,
and that is real, that doesn't look fake.
And then it gets pretty scary what that combination can do,
all for all, you know, positions pretty much across the board,
if you have the proper knowledge base base into it.
So I don't think it's gonna happen in the next five years,
10 years, but maybe 10 years, it's out there.
It's definitely coming where there's gonna be,
it could be me, or it could be a synthetic me
that looks like me, and chat GBT6
is the one answering the questions,
and people won't be able to tell them.
So I think that is gonna be a different world
when that happens.
- Anything cool that you've done with data?
- We basically identified through a persona analysis,
exactly who is our core advocate,
and the two sponsors.
So we actually have been able to shorten up
from 20 titles to four.
And if we have those four core titles,
we will be successful or have a much higher chance of success.
And what that does basically eliminates a bunch of waste of time
and makes our higher probability of success
across the funnel.
- Looking at it from the CRO position
and looking at your team and, you know,
finding out what their, hey, what's the RFPs
that they're chucking your way, like,
hey, I wanna buy this, hey, I wanna buy this, you know.
- I guess the Lupio?
- Lupio is a really amazing tool
that we're adding to the tech stack.
You used it a couple times in the past,
but you only need it when you're going enterprise.
So a good example, if you're doing RFPs
and you're doing only one of them per month, no big deal,
when you crack a certain thing like six per month,
Lupio is an amazing tool in order to standardize
the RFP process.
- Anything that we haven't touched on so far
from revenue perspective, rev-ops perspective,
something that jumps out at you as people don't do well
or could, you know, something that you're doing
that people get implemented in their companies?
- Yeah, I would say when you're,
a lot of people think internal and external
and they don't merge those together.
There's actually a lot of information that you collect
in Salesforce and other systems
that if you may transparent to the client at the same time,
they will actually correct data, they will enhance it,
and they become one with you in order to expand
within the organization.
So a good example, we've created an enterprise template
that is a full breakdown overview of a lot of information
that's actually in Salesforce and a catalyst.
And it basically gives our core advocate
an amazing overview of not just, oh, I licensed the software,
but these are all the different teams,
all the different divisions inside my organization
that are using it, here are the ones that are interested in it,
and then here are the ones that aren't interested in it.
And by doing that, they feel ownership
of the entire relationship.
They're like, oh my God, I didn't even know
you were talking to these people, that's amazing,
and you're actually helping them do their job
and it helps get buy-in from procurement,
executive management on their side.
There's no additional work if you do it right.
And they set up the reports,
but a lot of people think, okay, I have my data,
and then they have their data.
And by merging it together and figuring out
the right proof points to show to them,
you can really build an amazing amount of points
and expand relationships.
A previous company is a marketing company,
expanded a relationship from $15,000 to over a million dollars
using that technique for Amazon.
- Let's get to our final segment,
quick hits, these are quick questions and quick answers.
Brian, quick hits, are you ready?
(upbeat music)
- All right, all right, all right, let's do it.
- If you could make any animal any size,
what animal would it be, what size?
- It'd be a tiger, it'd be a really big one,
'cause they are beautiful and powerful, I love them.
- Do you have a biggest rev-ops or revenue misconception?
- Yes, biggest revenue rev-ops misconception
is I'm gonna buy this tool and I'm gonna hire this person
and all my problems are magically gonna be fixed.
Because what you need is in addition to that,
a plan to roll out, also employee buy-in
and management buy-in.
'Cause if the employees don't wanna use the tool,
guess what, they're barely gonna use the tool.
And if management doesn't support your efforts,
you're just gonna do a bunch of time and effort
and not be successful.
So that has to be, you need the time,
you need the buy-in of the employee,
buy-in of the manager and a good plan
on top of amazing people and amazing technology.
- Do you have a rev-ops prediction?
- Rev-ops is gonna be a real certification.
There will be universities, master programs, PhD,
saying, yep, I graduated Harvard for rev-ops.
And it will be a standard thing
because it is that important in the organization.
- Any piece of advice for someone who's getting into rev-ops?
- Touch as many tools as you can.
So you're not just stuck in one platform.
Definitely get the certifications and the badges
for whatever your court is so that you have
the pedigree that way.
And then really focus on being able to do basic code
for integrations 'cause any amazing tool,
it's always, I need to get my product information
into there or I need to get the information
from this amazing product, sales force to catalyst
or catalyst as end does.
And I need to do that.
If you have that trifecta, you are amazingly skilled
and powerful and every single company on the planet
should want you.
- And last question, what piece of advice
would you have for a Chief Revenue Officer
who is leading a rev-ops team?
- Give them support.
Make sure they understand the plan.
Make sure they understand 2024 and every single quarter
and what you wanna do and why.
And then give them the support
so that if you agree on the initiative,
you're gonna help encourage the employees
and management to have buy-in
so that the rev-ops person will be successful
in their initiatives.
- Awesome.
- All right, this has been fantastic.
Having you on the show, really appreciate the conversation.
For listeners, go check out Goldcast.io
for revenue-driven event marketing platform.
That's super awesome.
And I've used it before and it's really cool
so everybody check that out.
Brian, are you final thoughts?
Anything to plug?
- I mean, it was a blast to meet you.
Have some time on a Friday afternoon
and I really think this is a great show, great program.
- Awesome.
Thanks so much, Brian, and take care.
(upbeat music)
(upbeat music)
(upbeat music)
(upbeat music)
(upbeat music)
[BLANK_AUDIO]