Illuminating the Dark Funnel
On this episode, Daniel discusses the importance of fostering organic lead flow, the secret sauce of service lines, and how SaaS invented RevOps.
[MUSIC]
Welcome to Rise of RevOps.
I'm your face on CEO of Castamine Studios,
and today I am joined by special guest Daniel.
How are you?
Good. How are you, Ian?
Thanks for having me.
Yeah, excited to have you on the show,
excited to chat about all things GenPact,
and how you think about RevOps.
As a VP, it is top of mind.
Let's get into it.
How did you get started in revenue operations?
Well, it's interesting because I would argue that revenue operations is a
fairly modern construct,
which was really an invention of SaaS companies,
which I think is interesting as well.
But for me, I was in graduate school in London,
and most of my classmates were going into consulting companies and investment
banks,
and I had started out working in Web 1.0 startups.
Following graduate school and in graduate school,
I really wanted to work in tech.
I worked at Google for five years in the European office,
and then in New York, and then back in Europe.
Back then, I don't think revenue operations,
I say back then about 15 years ago,
was defined in the same way.
So for me, I started out in sales,
and very quickly I moved into management.
So I've been in management in different facets my entire career,
and management in sales constitutes strategy on some levels.
So to me, I think that's part of the revenue operations piece,
and as the industry evolved,
and that's kind of how I got into it from that side of it.
What's your definition of revenue operations?
My definition and the actual definition are probably not too far off.
I would call it the revenue ops is the holy trinity
of sales, marketing, and customer success.
And I think that's right in the sense that common wisdom
is those three departments of an organization working together
in the most seamless manner,
all of them accountable to revenue.
I think that's right.
However, I do think that there's nuances, right?
So I mentioned a few moments ago, SaaS.
So it's pretty interesting because my take and other people may disagree
is that this construct of revenue operations,
and customer success, and marketing, and sales,
and go to market more generally,
has been an invention of SaaS companies.
But what about other companies that are not SaaS,
that maybe are services companies that are B2B,
or companies that are B2B to see, like Google or Meta, right?
Those companies also sell to businesses,
but their go-to-market motion may not be the same as SaaS.
So what are those differences, and how do those articulate themselves?
And I remember about 10 years ago, I had a friend
who's been in hardcore SaaS,
TechSail's his whole career.
And he said to me, "We would never hire somebody
that comes from digital advertising,
because they don't know what they're doing.
They wouldn't understand how to sell technology.
It's too complicated for them.
They're the wrong profile."
And I actually think that's wrong.
And I do think that there are some synergies,
for example, between SaaS B2B and B2B digital advertising,
in the sense that they may both be focusing on small and medium-sized
businesses.
So what is the go-to-market there, and how does it parallel, right?
Or how does it not parallel?
Where does an SDR, BDR make sense, and where it doesn't make sense?
So I think that's pretty interesting.
It's kind of a long way of saying that the industry seems to be shaped
by the point of view of SaaS.
And I think it would be helpful to get other points of view
when you think about revenue operations as a discipline.
And zoom in out, what does GenPAC do,
and how have you organized your RevOps team?
So GenPAC, many people may not know, GenPAC.
So I'll give you sort of a brief one-on-one.
We are defined as a multinational consulting and professional services firm,
which is to say part of our business is management consulting,
and you may be familiar with some of the big names in that industry.
In fact, we were recently named as the top management consulting firms in the
world.
The second part of our business is professional services,
which means we take areas where we have deep domain,
and we do work on behalf of our clients to optimize their operations
or to do digital transformation, moving them to the cloud,
or to create a target operating model for a financial transformation.
So that's kind of what we do as a company.
We were started in 1997, and in fact, we were part of General Electric,
which is in very, in a lot of ways, an iconic American company.
And a lot of the success of GE actually was a product of what's called Lean Six
Sigma.
So you've probably heard that term before, and I'm assuming some of your
listeners know what it is,
but maybe don't know it intimately, but to really kind of simplify it,
it's a way of optimizing and improving process efficiency,
which makes any company more efficient.
And that's something that Gen Pack practiced on behalf of GE.
And then in 1997, we were created in 2005, we spun out of GE in 2007,
we listed publicly on the New York Stock Exchange,
and we're a multi-billion dollar company with over 100,000 employees all over
the world.
And we do this work now for approximately 800 companies in a very large
percentage of the Fortune 500.
So it could be a lot of things.
It could be helping them create a target operating model to create cost
efficiency.
It could be helping a large social media platform moderate content.
It could be helping a manufacturing company with their supply chain.
And the list goes on and on. And in fact, in the SaaS space,
we actually help companies become more efficient when it comes to sales,
generating leads end-to-end, inside sales, SDR work, that sort of thing.
So, and then for us, I think the second part of your question is,
how do we think about revenue operations?
We're a large company, right?
If you want to say a large company, I mean companies that have our size of
employee base, 100,000 plus.
And so we do have customer success, right?
We certainly have sales and we certainly have marketing.
And those three divisions, 100 percent work together.
I think what's interesting, and I'll just give you one data point that I find
fascinating about
GenVAC specifically, is that for us, the definition of customer success is
everything, right?
And what I mean by that is that we have a set amount of accounts that are very
strategic
to us. And for those accounts, we put very, very senior people on them, right?
So if you think about like a traditional SaaS company, they may have, let's say
, I don't know,
100 million dollar run rate SaaS company, maybe they've got five SDRs, 12 AEs,
two VPs,
and five customer success managers, right? I'm making this up, but let's just
say it's correct
directionally. Those customer success managers, they're probably going to be
people between,
let's say, from an experienced perspective, four to 15 years experience,
something like that,
right? At the high end. What we actually do is we look at our strategic
accounts and we put our
most senior people on those accounts. So for example, somebody with 20, 25
years experience
who has either been in consulting professional services or maybe client side,
and we tend to
deal with a lot of C-suite. So when we're dealing with a C-suite, we bring
somebody with a pedigree
in the document to match and we invest in those accounts to grow them and to be
a trusted partner.
So I think that's where we differentiate, I would argue, for the better, is
that investment
in growing those accounts, but more so providing solutions to problem
statements and helping
companies grow more efficiently as time goes on. Yeah, that's super fascinating
and so cool to
hear from a big company perspective and all of that piece. Within RevOps,
obviously, customer
success being such an important part of your RevOps motion here. How do you all
think about the
customer success as it relates to RevOps? Well, it's kind of, I think as I
described,
which is just an over investment into the account or to the partnership. I
think what's really
interesting about GenPAC, and I'll give you kind of an anonymized obfuscated
example, right?
Perfect. Yeah.
But we, as I said, our clients are Fortune 500, so it could be everything from
one of the largest
social media companies in the world to a large bank to a large retail company,
and we work
obviously across industries. But we will answer RFPs in our industry that's
fairly common place.
And we were in the final throes of an RFP process, and the prospective client
asked us,
well, can you please give us three examples of clients that churned, and what
was the reason
they churned? And we have a channel that taps in, so kind of like a Slack type
Microsoft Teams type
channel that taps into senior leadership across all of our accounts. And we
posted on it, and we
said, hey, we're looking for three examples, you know, where this was the case.
And the response we
got was, I don't know that we have three companies that we can highlight in
this particular regard,
because our clients, our partners tend to be multi or contracts that we do. Am
I saying that
we never lose a customer? No, absolutely not. Things change. The business world
is dynamic.
But that's our special sauce is that investment in that customer, because we
have so many different
what we call service lines or areas of domain, like finance and accounting
where we're ranked
one of the top in the world, or supply chain or sales and commercial, or
enterprise risk and
consulting or trust and safety. There's multiple different ways that we can
help the business,
right? So if we come in and we help a company with financial transformation,
for example, say we help
$502 a billion SaaS company, they're maturing they need more mature financial
processes and target
operating models and efficiency models. We can come in, we can create that
strategy, do the work for
them, maybe year down the road, they're looking at expanding their Salesforce
internationally.
And so when you expand a Salesforce international, I've been on this side of
the table, and you're in
North America, easier said than done. Genpack can come in in that particular
example and say,
well, we're in these 12 countries that you want to get into. We've got our Lean
Six Sigma
lineage heritage. We've got people on the ground. We've got the analytics. We
've got our SMB academy,
and we can sort of create the go-to-market for you. So that would kind of be an
example of
we evolve with a client. Anything's obviously emphasis on customer success,
being one of them, but any other things that you feel like are unique or
different about your
RevOps team or the way that you think about RevOps? I think that's probably the
thing that in this
particular question, that's what strikes me as being the most differentiated
nexus between marketing,
customer success, and sales. It's always an evolution, right? And over the last
few months,
I've seen that we've gotten even that much more tightly integrated,
specifically in terms of
sales and marketing. And in fact, I can tell you one other thing that's
different from us
is that we have, depending on how you define sales, we have a relatively small
sales team and group
for a company that has over 100,000 employees. One of the reasons I mentioned
is because we work
to help grow partnerships and accounts based on needs and as they evolve in
multiple years.
But the other reason is because a lot of our pipeline is actually referrals. So
it doesn't
require as much outbound sales. Obviously, that's still very important to us in
building
an organic pipeline, which is something that I'm tasked with is incredibly
important. It's a life
budget company, but traditionally, the referrals have been a really good source
for us. And that
has everything to do with satisfied customers. Yeah, you're not going to have
that traditional
gigantic funnel where you have all sorts of leads left, right and center. It's
just not a
lot of people just sitting there cranking out a lead for them, trying to figure
this stuff out,
I'd imagine. Well, so that's right. And I think the way that I would respond to
that for us,
it's all about quality versus quantity. It's not a commoditized, I don't mean
commoditized in a
negative connotation, but we're not a SaaS product that's commoditized in we
have one,
two or three products and those one or two or three products have a rate card.
A lot of what we do
is very much bespoke. So when we think about how we go to market, let's say as
a sales organization,
it's more complicated. And in fact, we hire people typically with 20 years
experience VP level sales
on an individual contributor level with advanced degrees in some cases, etc.
Because they need to
understand a potential client's business and through the help of their
colleagues on what we call
the service lines, the subject matter experts understand actually, can we help
them? How can we
help them? What are their problem statements? We're never going to, let's say,
approach a new
prospective client and say, please buy option one, two or three or product AP
and C, and we're never
going to waste their time. We'll always do our research and we'll always
understand to some extent
that we can based on publicly available information, what's going on in the
company and have some sort
of thesis on why it makes sense for them to have a conversation with us. When
things are so relationship
driven and there's so much research in these huge deal sizes, sort of like
blend and expand
type stuff, sometimes there's not as much data as you would get from a
traditional SAS product or
a PLG type product or something like that, where you get tons and tons and tons
of data. How do you
think about data from a revenue, ops perspective, or just in general, from a
growth perspective?
So if I'm thinking about, let's say, an SMB advertising model, where you have
tens of thousands
or hundreds of thousands of customers, even a SAS product, where your price
point for a yearly
license is 30 to 50,000, you've got a large funnel, everything in that funnel
is statistically
significant because they're scale, whereas in a funnel like ours, we don't have
that
steam to statistical significance for pipeline efficiencies. That's kind of
what you're suggesting.
Yeah, exactly, exactly. So it's like those RevOps folks that are normally
sitting there
looking for trends in the data and saying, hey, this is something, this is an
outlier, this is something, this is an opportunity, it's just, it's slightly
different. You have to
dig in probably a lot further. Yeah, it is different. That's a great call out,
and it's much more, let's call it manual. And I say manual with mixed emotions
because we're
a company that creates automation for our customers to improve their processes,
like
robotic process automation. And many other examples, because we're a data
analytics company in so
many ways. But when you think about ourselves as GenPACT and how we go to
market, it's
a much more thoughtful approach. And yes, we use data, but I'll give you a
couple of examples
how we use data. So first of all, the average VP of sales at our company, that
's only exclusively
trying to foster new partnerships with prospective customers, fortune 1000,
fast growing tech
companies, sales companies, whatever, they don't have a huge ICP. Right. And
when I say
ICP, I mean like ICP as it cascades down to the individual level. So for the
sake of conversation,
they may have 15 or 20 accounts that they would like to partner with. So what
does that actually
mean in the go to market? It means that you become an expert on that particular
prospective client's
business. You're doing a lot of research, we actually have a growth operations
team. They help us do
very, very, very deep level of research on the company, what's going on. Again,
as I said earlier,
we're never going to talk to a company unless we think that they have a problem
statement that we
can help them with or they have a way that we can help them grow or a way that
we can help them with
efficiency. And we're going to have a point of view. We have to be careful,
right, because we don't
want to be too asumptive and say, Hey, we know what all your problems are, we
can help you.
We have to be a little bit more thoughtful about how we approach them, how we
have that discovery call,
how we learn. So that's one thing that we do is really do our research.
I love it. Let's get to our next segment, Rev Obstacles. We're talking about
the hard parts,
RevOps. What's the hardest RevOps problem that you faced in the last six months
or year?
Interestingly enough, now I'm 20 years into my career, roughly. And I have this
experience from
working what you call client side. And I have a fairly good depth and breadth
of knowledge in
certain verticals in the sectors that I oversee from a growth perspective. So
what I love about my
job is working with companies where I know their business model is very
intimately. And I can kind
of use my knowledge to help show them that I understand their problem
statements. And in fact,
sometimes even help with the solutioning. But to answer your question, I think
qualification.
So probably there was some potential pursuits that we shouldn't have qualified.
And sometimes
it's okay to say, for this particular project or for this particular multi-year
initiative,
we maybe don't think we're the right fit for you. And that's very hard to do.
If you think about it,
let's say, again, use the SAS example. If you have an ICP and you have a
customer and they're
willing to spend $50,000 or $60,000 a year licensing your software, probably
not too many
instances where people are saying, you know what, I've got a quota. I've got a
VP of sales. We have
growth goals. Why don't you go ahead and not license this software? Because I
don't get fit.
So that to me is kind of interesting. Any other obstacles or things? I mean, I
think
qualification, it's so corded like exactly what you said, the enterprise
experience, right? It's
just so tough from that space, especially when it's not a super high volume
thing. I mean, it's
hard both ways. But yeah, any other rev obstacles or maybe some rev oops
moments, a mistake that
you've made in the past year? I think pricing is another thing because pricing
is very dynamic
in what we do. And we need to strike the balance between giving the appropriate
price where the
potential customer sees value and not putting a price that's going to make it
detrimental to Gen
Pack. So because it's not every engagement is bespoke. I think there's some
areas there,
potentially for improvement. But one thing that I would say isn't so much an
obstacle
necessarily, but it's kind of a unique differentiator to our business is
because again, going back to
this notion of I have three products and three price points, right? And I know
I'm oversimplifying
it. We have so many different service lines where we excel in. So one of the
things that we've been,
I wouldn't say challenged with it, it's anybody that's coming into Gen Pack and
I have a fairly
newer team is how can you be an expert in finance and accounting, supply chain,
sales and commercial,
trust and safety, enterprise risk and consulting, source to pay. I mean, the
list goes on and on.
You can see I'm struggling to even name all of our service lines. And so how do
you, the challenge
is how do you look at a particular customer, right? And how do you say like an
on demand customer
and say, what are the four areas where we think we can help them? Or what is
the one area?
So that part again, that's a little bit of a challenge. And the way that we
overcome that is
we have a learning platform called Genome. And it's one of the largest learning
platforms in the
industry. It's got hundreds of thousands of hours of interactive content. It's
got sessions where
somebody like me, I'm a guru for high tech. So somebody's going through what we
call their high
tech wave and they're going through all the areas to be proficient in it and
the certifications.
So we invest very heavily in that to help overcome those challenges of learning
. And it's not just
learning about us. It's also learning about the industry or learning about
cloud or learning about
how to be an effective public speaker. So that's quite a big differentiator
with Gen
Paks is that focus on learning at all levels of the company. All right, let's
get to our next segment,
the tool shed. So we're talking tools metrics, spreadsheets, data and all that
stuff. Just like
everyone's favorite tool qualified, no B2B tool shed is complete without
qualified. Go to qualified.com
right now and check them out. Daniel, what's in your tool shed? So I won't bore
you with
everything that's in our tool shed. Instead, I'll answer the question a little
bit differently
in terms of how I think about what should be in a tool shed. We kind of use the
again, I won't mention all the tools that we use, but we use kind of the common
tools that you
would think a company like ours of our size or even frankly, a B2B SAS company
with use, for example,
Salesforce or Mercado as part of Salesforce, right? Or, you know, tools like
qualified. So I
think we're very much trying to be on the cutting edge of what we need to
license to make our
business, you know, a modern sales organization and so on and so forth. But I
will tell you two
things. One is my approach traditionally, because I built, you know, a number
of tech stacks when I
was more in startups, is I always look at anything licensable or any suite of
tools within a must
have or a nice to have bucket. If you're nice to have, probably you're not
going to win a contract
with us. If you're a must have, you're a must have. And I like Salesforce only.
I know it's
so obvious, but I'll give you like a very, very short anecdote. A year ago I
was visiting my dad
and my dad is a retail investor and he invested a number of companies, like for
example, in this
particular day, he said, what about Salesforce? So he knows Salesforce. He
knows the financial
metrics, right? He can see the growth of the stock. He doesn't necessarily
understand the business.
He says, should I buy Salesforce? Now I can give my dad any piece of advice I
want on Salesforce,
because I'm not an employee of Salesforce. There's no moral hazard there. And I
said,
so I explained to him this paradigm of companies licensing software in nice to
have versus must
have. And then I explained to him that Salesforce has this thing called ARR.
And this is what ARR is.
And they're so sticky because you have to customize and you have to build your
own instance of Salesforce.
And they have all these other technologies like qualified, for example, that
bolt onto Salesforce.
So effectively their customer churn has got to be one of the lowest in the
industry. So like,
yes, it's probably a pretty safe stock to buy. So that's kind of my view on
licensing.
And then one of the things that I think is interesting, and I don't mean to be
controversial,
but this is a podcast about revenue operations. There's been some debate over
the last few years
on personalization versus automation. And what I mean by that is in your sales
go-to market.
And there are, we all know, people are listening to this podcast know who the
players are,
but there's a set of companies that create what I call sales ESPs. They don't
call themselves
sales ESPs. I'm calling them sales ESPs because essentially what you're doing
is you're using a
marketing approach to sales. Instead of doing one to one, you're doing one to
many. Now, I'm not
criticizing these companies because I think what these companies did is genius
because they're
doing well. They found product market fit. And they found customers who are
looking at the
promise of how do I make my sales force more efficiently. But in the act of
using automation,
again, we're a company that embraces automation, and we do it on behalf of our
customers. But where
does it make sense and where it doesn't, it makes sense. So if you're treating
your sales prospects
like you're treating your marketing prospects, I think it's a race to the
bottom. I think people
are trying to find what is that latest technology or what is that latest trick
to get a higher conversion
rate. And they're sending these cadences and they're semi personalizing them.
And guess what?
People are smart. Right? Decision makers at companies are smart. And when they
're getting an email,
which feels impersonal, where somebody didn't talk about their business, their
issues,
something that feels authentic, they're not going to respond. So it's no wonder
when people start
talking about I have a 3% conversion rate on sales emails like, wow, that's
amazing. Right?
Because it's a little bit if everybody's doing it, if everybody's automating
this, it's really
no different. You might as well just send emails from our keto. And those are
going to have lower
conversion rates as well, depending on what it is. And maybe it's promoting an
event has higher
conversion rates. So I think about this personalization versus automation as
being somebody that's worked
in tech companies that wants to license the best technology as a company where
we use technology
to help digitize our clients business to help them digitally transform. And
where does it become
too much? So for us, again, and this is my own personal opinion, when we're
reaching out to
potential prospects, everything is hyper personalize. Of course, easy for me to
say, because as we
discussed, we're not going after thousands of companies at scale. But if
everybody's doing it,
how effective is going to be? So I think I'm not trying to pick on these cohort
of companies,
and I'm not trying to pick on SaaS companies that use this kind of sales
automation. And I think,
by the way, it certainly works. Like if you're using it for inbound SMB
advertising with tens
of thousands of customers at scale, you need automation. But there is a rate of
diminishing
returns there. And I don't feel like that's debated in nothing industry.
I couldn't agree more. I think it's really tough to see some of those autom
ations go out,
and you're like, yep, this is just automation automation. Like you said, it's
different when
it's coming from marketing. But when it's coming from sales, it's a little
tough to be like email
number four in the automation. And it's like, don't think I haven't forgot
about you. Have you seen
our latest webinar or whatever? And you're like, no, I didn't. And no, I didn't
want to see it.
Do you have any examples of the personalization stuff that you're doing that
has worked well?
It's a great question. And I can give you one example from the recent past.
There's a company
in our ICP. And my team had been reaching out to that company for some time
without success.
And we know for a fact that there's two particular things that we do, where we
're ranked number one
or number two in the world. And I'm not saying that they have to work with us.
But what I am
suggesting is that given that these are things that are important to them,
given that they would
work with either us or our competitors and given how highly we are ranked by
third parties,
it certainly makes sense for them to understand how we differentiate and to
have a relationship with
us, even if that's just to have a call to understand a little bit more. And for
one reason or another,
and this is a vertical where we have a lot of success. And frankly, we have a
lot of customers.
And when I say we have a lot of customers, it's a finite grouping of companies.
And we have a
high percentage of those companies as customers. So we felt very passionately
that this relationship
we should have, at least just to understand what they're up to and them to
understand what we're
able to provide as a partner. But they just weren't getting back in touch with
us. So at a certain
point, and frankly, I actually used sales automation, because we do license a
platform
that where I was able to see a decision maker in that company, a C-suite
decision maker,
was opening certain emails and interacting with us. And so I emailed her, and
this is me,
personally emailing her. And I said, essentially, we've been trying to reach
out to you for some time,
we haven't been able to connect. We're very well positioned in the industry. We
really think it
would make sense for you to talk to us, and so on and so forth. So it's just a
very sincere email
coming from Daniel, being very honest. And she responded in 15 minutes and said
, let's set up a
conversation. So I think for me and for how we coach our teams that go out
there and sell,
is have that sincerity of voice. And I'll give you another example as well,
which is a little bit past the discovery phase, which I really loved. So there
's a gentleman on my
team, and he owns, he's the go-to-market lead for on-demand customers. So on-
demand exactly as you're
thinking of it, like the oovers of the world, etc. So that's a vertical within
one of the sectors.
And we were invited to an RFP process. And in the RFP process, we submitted the
RFP,
it was comprehensive, and we like to write welcome letters and show the
personalization,
right, and show that sincerity of intent. And the first two or three lines of
the welcome letter,
he wrote something very hokey in corny that had to do with being a customer of
their business,
to being a consumer of their business, because they're essentially a consumer
company, right.
And so he asked me, do you think I should write this letter in this way? And I
said, I wouldn't do
it because it's not who I am. But I know you very well. I'm not saying he's h
okey by any means, but
it fit with his personality. So this is like sincerely who you are. So go ahead
and write it.
And funnily enough, we're on a call with the decision maker about three weeks
after that.
And she was asking about sort of dry things, pricing or solution or what are
you offering here.
Then at the end of the call, her tone changes. And she says, by the way, I just
wanted you to know
that when I read your RFP and I saw that you wrote this little blurb, I thought
it was so witty,
so funny, it entertained me, it made me laugh. And by the way, when you're
reading RFPs,
B2B, it's very dry stuff. And it's not super interesting all of the time. And
this actually
made me chuckle and made me happy. And we thought, and you don't usually get
that kind of feedback
from customers, especially in formalized RFP process, processes. But we thought
that was great. And so
again, not to belabor the point, but having these sincere, genuine moments with
clients, whether it
be a cold email to try and generate a discovery, a call, or when you're in the
sales cycle. It's
important. Even if you're a large B2B company like us, we're all people, people
buy from people,
you want to show who you are, you want to build that connection. That's super
important to me.
Any other final thoughts on tool shed tools metric that you particularly care
about or any
blind spots that you're trying to measure in a different or better or unique
way?
Yeah. So from a metric perspective, if I look at a funnel, for me personally,
the number one
thing that I care about for my teams is discovery calls. Because as I mentioned
to you earlier,
we're not beneficiaries of being an industry for a while and having a really
good reputation for
being a partner that exceeds expectations. So we do have a very healthy, in
bound, organic lead flow.
But of course, every company wants to grow. So for me, what keeps me up at
night is how I build
that inorganic pipeline. And I very much gauge my success and I gauge very much
my team success
based on how good are you at building inorganic pipeline? Because we're a
company that's filled
with very smart intellectual people. And when we have an opportunity to bid for
some work,
we're pretty good at converting. And I'm not saying that's an easy skill, but I
'm saying that's
something that as a company, we're very, very good at we're very intellectual
company on the employee
level. However, building inorganic pipeline, it's an intellectual exercise. It
's also a soft
skill exercise. There's a lot of things that play into that. So every for me,
it's all about
building inorganic pipeline. And it's all about generating discovery calls. So
again, going into
this topic of quality versus quantity, we don't need to have 2010 discovery
calls a week necessarily,
but what we need to have our discovery calls were this sincere interest in
having a thoughtful
conversation. So that's it. That's what I would say to that is pretty simply
discovery calls. And
then in terms of what would I like more visibility into, it would be the dark
funnel. I think the
dark funnel is very important. And I know that speaks to what qualified does,
what other companies
do as well, but how can you engage with people before they fill out a lead form
on your site?
Once they fill out a lead form on your site, it's depending on the business you
're in, it might be
too late. That just means you're going to be in a competitive RFP process. You
have no advantage.
And that's probably fine for the company if they're reading Gartner or they're
reading some other
third party in terms of who are the highest ranked companies in the industry.
And that happens
in B2B SAS and other industries as well. But for me, how can we have those
conversations? How can
we illuminate that dark funnel before you get to that point? I know that's very
important to
our marketing group. It's very important to me. Yeah, it's arguably one of the
most important
things that we're all dealing with right now is just like the change in buyer
behavior and
dark funnel being sort of this, you can just do so much research on your own
now without talking
to a salesperson. Then you get so many of the calls like, "Yeah, yeah, I just
give me the price,
giving the price, giving the price." And you know they want to get on there and
then salespeople are
like frustrated by it. Yeah, 100%. 100%. All right, let's get to our final
segment. Quick hits,
these are quick questions, quick answers. Daniel, are you ready? I'm ready.
Number one, if you could
make any animal any size, what animal would it be and what size? An elephant
the size of my dog.
My dog is 55 pounds. She's a Portuguese water dog. All right, 55 pound elephant
. What's the
55 pound elephant in the room? Do you have a... They're a good one. Do you have
a favorite podcast
or show or book that you've been checking out recently? Yes, I'm reading this
new... I'm sorry,
I forget the author. This new book on the metaverse, it's still in hardback. It
doesn't have like a
super large distribution. But I think GenPact and me personally, we're very
interested in how we
can help customers in the metaverse. And we're actually starting to do that
with a couple of
select customers. Any rev-ups, misconceptions or predictions? So, misconception
is I think that a
lot of people think that it's a technocratic exercise. And I think it's less
technocratic than
people think. I think it's a lot of it has to do with art and science. Pred
ictions, we've probably
already touched on. I think that the pendulum is going to swing more to
personalization versus
automation. In fact, I think it shouldn't have been pretty vocal about that.
What would be your best piece of advice for someone newly leading a rev-ops
team?
That's a very good question. I know this is supposed to be short and fun sheet.
Oh, that's all right. I think it would be get into the weeds and don't just
focus on the strategy
in one sentence. Daniel, that's it. That's all we got for today. Any final
thoughts here for the show?
No, I don't have any final thoughts, but I very much appreciate the time and
the opportunity
to discuss revenue operations. I think it's a really interesting and evolving
field.
Yeah, indeed. And for our listeners, you can go to GenPact.com to learn more
about
the company and everything there. Thanks so much, Daniel, and we'll talk soon.
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