Leading with a Growth Mindset
On this episode, Bobby talks about aligning executive leadership around RevOps, understanding the company and customer journey, and why revenue operations is the glue.
Welcome to Rise of RevOps. I'm Ian Faison, CEO of Caspian Studios and today I'm
joined
by a special guest, Bobby. How are you? Good. Thanks for having me. Yeah,
excited to have
you on the show, excited to chat about Interible and all the cool stuff y'all
are doing from
revenue perspective, from a RevOps perspective and all that stuff. You've been
with the company
not super long. It's an exciting time to jump in right before that 90 day mark
to see how
it's been going in your approach to coming into the company. But before we get
into all
of that stuff, how did you get started in revenue? For me, it's been a long
journey.
It's spent about 20 years in what you would call now SaaS in various revenue
leadership
positions, leading individual sales teams all the way to running an entire
business segment
for a now public traded company to where I am today at Interible, running the
revenue
operations function within Interible. So it's been about a 20 year journey,
like I said,
multiple roles and functions primarily focused on go to market. And obviously,
I've seen revenue
operations evolve over that time as well. So excited to talk about it.
Yeah. So what's your definition of RevOps? Yeah, I think first of all, RevOps
is a what
I would maybe call a more recent, maybe last several years type of new
definition. Think
if we look back at least in earlier part of my career 20 years ago, you defined
it as
sales operations and you had finance operations function in a different part of
an organization.
You had marketing operations sitting within marketing. And I think as companies
evolved
and SaaS became the market that it is today, a lot of leaders started to look
at when you
look at revenue across the entire business, whether it's direct business,
indirect business
through channels, marketing and how all of these teams work together. I think
the revenue
operations role, which like I said, maybe you started as sales operations many
years
ago, evolved into what it is today is looking at the entire business, not only
go to market
business, but also from a finance lens as well, looking at all of that under a
lens of
how do you operate revenue across all of these different areas that businesses
drive their
revenue. And so for me, that's the evolution that I've seen happen. So I'll
pause there.
Yeah, we'll get into more in a sec how you think about building a RevOps team.
Zooming
out what is iterable do and who are your customers?
Yeah. So iterable is one of the most powerful customer engagement platforms
that enable
brands, brands that we all use every day to engage with their customers by
personalizing
data and communicating with customers in cross various channels. As an example,
someone
like DoorDash, all of us use at least I use DoorDash and significantly over the
last few
years. No, I don't use it. I got to say DashPass was like the ultimate save,
right? I have
a 18 month old kid and the wife and I. We've made use of our DashPass
membership that is
for sure.
Exactly. So what iterable does, we enable brands like DoorDash to understand
their customers
by understanding how their customers engage with their brand. So we look at a
lot of that
data and we understand the night step. For example, Ian likes to go out with
his family
and either go out to dinner or order dinner in. And so that we understand a lot
of that
data and then engage based on that personal level with you through email,
through SMS,
through push notifications, all of that stuff to various places. So we
basically enable
our brands to communicate with our customers in a personalized way.
Obviously coming into the role as CRO, how did you think about RevOps? What was
that a
priority for you coming into the role, thinking about how you wanted to build
your team? What
was your thought process coming into the job?
First of all, I'm the first CRO for iterable. And I think one of the reasons
for that is
as the business has evolved and as the business has matured over the last 10
years, there's
a lot of different avenues of revenue that have formed. You've got your direct
business,
new business side of revenue, you've got your channels and partnerships, you've
got your
customer success organization. These organizations were functioning great, but
they were functioning
in a very silent manner that were led by different leaders. And as the business
was looking to
go into that next stage of growth, one of the things that was important for
iterable and
for me was for someone to come in and take a look at the entire business, the
entire
customer journey from the time we market to them all the way to how we manage
that relationship
under one organization. And one of the biggest things for me, and I think for
iterable as
well, what was very important was what is the strategic function that enables
the revenue
leader to do that, to be able to understand the business as a whole, and that
is revenue
operations. And we folded revenue operations into the entire CRO organization.
And so for
me, and I can, whether it's at iterable or previously, when I was at my
previous company,
revenue operations was the most strategic function for me. It is my right hand
function, right
hand person, as I look at the business across all of the different various
functions and
how we operate the business and how we look at it, all the strategic decisions
we have
to make all comes with my partnership with my revenue operations organization.
So we
folded all of that into one organization so that we can have one view across
the entire
go to market motion.
Yeah. And so sales, marketing, sales ops, marketing ops and customer success
ops being
in one place. Or is there any turmoil of like pulling those out of those
individual functions?
Or is it you feel like that the important part there is to have it all in one
place so that
you in the whole life cycle?
Yeah, I think look, the people of iterable have been great, right? Not only in
the two
months that have been here, I've been speaking with the iterable team for
several months.
And so I think everyone has a common goal of we have to grow the business. And
so I
think everyone understood that why it's important to have this in one place.
That's number one.
But we also as a business as an entire business, we actually run a phenomenal
OKR process.
And so a lot of things that we do as a business, we align around our objectives
, our annual
objectives that we do and the quarterly KRs that we run. And so we get the
entire all
the GTM functions aligned around our OKRs. And it works generally well. I think
there's
obviously nuances between all of these different functions between like you
mentioned customer
success ops or marketing ops. I think ultimately revenue operations does
support variety of
different functions. So they have customers between different BU leaders like
our CMO or
our head of product event because we revenue operations also at iterable runs
business
insights. A lot of insights that we want to get for our product leaders will
come from
the business insights team. Not only the sales ops piece of it or the channel
ops or the
CS ops, but also broader business insights. It does certainly take a lot of
work for our
revenue ops leader to make sure that teams are aligned. But I think we do a
phenomenal
job of like I said, managing all of our business through the OKR process, which
has helped
keep everyone aligned.
So how do you think is it unique to your organization is this kind of I know
this is how you're
building it. But do you think that this is something that other CROs or other
rev ops
teams should mirror? Does it depend on your organization or is this sort of
like the best
practice that you see out there right now?
Yeah. Well, look, every organization is different, right? And my personal
belief is revenue under
one leader does make a significant difference. And so I think that's the
starting point of
getting the executive leadership team aligned around why that's important. And
then obviously
the revenue operations that glue that brings it all together. I do think that
when you
have a broad revenue organization, revenue operations organization in a
business, like
I said, that handles sales, marketing, CS and all of the business insights.
What I'm
learning, even an iterable for me is organizational alignment around our key
objectives, right,
that we want to drive. I think that to me, even in my two months here, I've
seen what
a different set makes. I think a lot of organizations aspire to do really good
OKRs. This is probably
one of the best places that I've seen it operate in my two months. One, I was
involved in last
quarters OKRs, but we're also in the process of FY 24 planning. So we're
defining our OKRs
for our at least our O's and KRs for Q1 of next year. And I mean, it's the
middle of that
right now. And I think that is the piece that is in my mind getting the
executive team
aligned around that makes a significant impact on just making sure that this
function, this
revenue operations function is tightly aligned to the company's objectives. And
I think that's
the piece to me that getting that alignment between the executive leadership
team makes
a big difference in how the revenue operation team operates.
Any interesting learnings in the first two months in terms of setting this up
or setting
up new rev ops team and corralling all those assets into one place.
As a revenue leader and as someone who prior to coming to Interval, I built a
business
for Freshworks that essentially in the Americas region, right, I let the entire
business as
president of Freshworks Americas, I built a business that was at the time when
I joined
about 35 million. And this year, Freshworks will be a 500 million dollar
business. Obviously
America's being 50% of that overall revenues, building your business from the
ground up
and understanding all of the strategic things you have to make a decision on,
right, how
you do segmentation, how you do territories, how you do your compensation plans
. Those
are things that I had to do in that previous role. And instead of just leading
a sales
team or leading a customer success organization, a lot of the strategies that
had to be defined
and executed of building that business really helped me get deep into the
upside of things,
right? How do we ensure that territories are balanced as much as possible? How
do we make
sure quotas are balanced? How do we make sure all of the key things that
operations revenue
operations focuses on is ensuring that there's a predictable way of achieving
numbers. That's
the piece to me that's important for CROs to really get deeper into and really
get a lot
more deeply engaged. And so I think as a CRO, if you're able to get into the
details and
the operating part of the role, I think it helps you really sort of set the
foundation
of how the entire revenue role executes its plan, right? So I think that level
of engagement
for a revenue leader is to me the difference that I notice in people really
understanding
the role and how to execute it.
All right, let's get to our first segment. Rev obstacles. We talk about the
tough parts
of RevOps. What are the key challenges that you think RevOps leaders are facing
right
now?
Yeah, I think one of them I highlighted, right? I think it's there are so many
different stakeholders
and it's really tough for a revenue operations leader when you've got so many
different customers,
right? So many different leaders that you've got aligning that to a care is
number one.
I think that's one of the biggest things. I think data is the other piece of it
, right?
We get data from a lot of different places and a lot of times you hear people
say, hey,
the data tells me this versus it's not that the data tells you, it's just how
you define
how you're looking at the data, the period of data you're looking at. So I
think that
piece of like looking at data and trying to make sense of what the data is
telling you,
it requires a lot of work. It requires a lot of analysis, a lot of work by the
teams that
capture the data and put that data together. So I think those two along with
just making
sure that you have a plan and a strategic plan that is achievable. I think that
's the hardest
thing, right? I think all of us as revenue leaders, I think there's a even with
a down
market and everything that's happening in macroeconomics, there is an
expectation and
rightfully that we drive revenue and we continue to maintain a high level of
growth in our
business. And I think obviously the revenue operations leader feels that just
as much
as the CRO does, I know my rev ops leader, we're always constantly thinking
about how
do we maintain this level of growth, right? And so I think that challenge that
you're
always faced with is how do you maintain growth? How do you make sure teams are
set up for
success? How do you have a predictable model around forecasting and all of that
? I think
those are the things that really make the job more challenging, but that comes
with
the territory. I think it's more of just that those are the things that myself
and my revenue
obsolete are constantly thinking about.
You talk a lot about like, okay, our isn't aligning objectives for sales,
marketing and
CS, like under revenue. I think that most companies are moving in that
direction and understanding
that those three functions, like how important they all are, especially if you
have like a
self-serve function and marketing owns a number or something like that. I'm
curious
like how you think about aligning objectives around seasonality as well,
because part of
the thing it seems like for those three different departments is end-of-quarter
obviously always
brutal for sales, end-of-year obviously always brutal for everybody, but
marketing a little
bit more flexibility there in terms of how they're running campaigns and how
you can
divert resources. Like at the end of the day, I think most rev-ops leaders are
like, I only
have so much time in bandwidth in the day. We have to triage and if it's always
sales
that wins or if it's always CS that wins or if it's always like new logo
creation that
wins, like other people do suffer and there's a little bit of a fixed pie there
. So curious
how you think about other ways to split the pie to make it more even and have
all three
functions get some attention.
Yeah. Look, I'm personally feeling that, right? I think for all the great
things that
we've done in aligning these different functions, I like to be deeply involved
in the business
and all aspects in both the marketing stuff, the sales, CS partnerships and for
someone
like me, I currently have 11 direct reports. These are all senior leaders in
the business
and just digging into each part of the business and making sure that we're
functioning and
we're aligned on what we're trying to go achieve. It's a tough task. I do think
like
anything else, I think having a strong leadership team that understands like
what they need
to go achieve in those functions is critical because you can't spread yourself
across
all of these things equally. So I think that's obviously a given that you have
to have a
really strong leadership. But I do think that the one area I personally have
really emphasized
on in the last couple of months that I've been here is really alignment between
myself
and our chief marketing officer and really just making sure that those two
functions
are completely aligned around what we're going to do because there's so much
stuff that we
do around sales and marketing both in our new business, partnerships and
customer success
that marketing gives us air cover, whether we're putting on events or whether
we're
putting on a dinner or we're doing broad based marketing campaigns or nurturing
. I think
that to me is extremely important. So sales leaders, the CS leaders, I think
those folks
are just making sure that the marketing function is tightly aligned. I haven't
been perfect
at it in my career and I think there's always been that friction between sales
and marketing
and I'm trying to break that. I'm trying to make sure that's a true partnership
for someone
like myself just to make sure that we're operating at the best possible way to
make sure that
the teams are aligned in that because marketing for all the challenges we have
on the sales
side, marketing is probably the one area that generally in the downturn they
get impacted
by and they get really questioned on, hey, what is the ROI on the spend? We're
going to
spend a million dollars. How do we ensure? And so marketing touches so many
things and
so we're constantly working with RevOps and just trying to make sure that we
can show
ROI and where marketing is impacting revenue, right? Both maybe directly or
indirectly and
the attribution and all of that. So that's a piece that really between myself,
our CMO
and our head of revenue operations, we're constantly trying to make sure that
we can talk to our
CFO and say, no, we are seeing impact in the outcomes of what marketing is
doing by the
following, right? I'll give you an example. I know one of the things we talked
about is
this is really tough for a lot of businesses, right? Because CFO is constantly
saying, hey,
how do I make sure I'm getting to return on this? And so we get into this
debate of attribution,
how does attribution? And last quarter, we had a fantastic quarter. We probably
had a dozen
very large deals ranging from 300,000 to three, four million dollars a year per
contract. And so
a lot of these customers came to our user conference event in September. And
every leader
spent time with these customers or prospects at the time, right? And so
marketing drove a lot of
that that put that customer over that decision to move forward with iterable,
with spending time
with the leadership team, with the various functional leaders, just to make
sure they felt good,
marketing drove a lot of that. So how do you attribute the cost of that event
to the impact
that it had in closing those deals? So that's a lot of the work that you
typically will do between
those key functions to make sure that you're able to back up the data.
It's a great story. And I think it speaks to the fact that the data will tell
you whatever you
want to hear. If you poke it hard enough and long enough, right? It's like, it
's going to tell
you what you want to hear. And I think that's the hard part when you're trying
to tie together sales
and marketing is there are so many the ghost stats that you don't see that you
're not measuring
that it's like, Hey, just for an example, it's like our outbound marketing,
like this works. We send
10,000 emails and we get drive X amount of business because 2% of people are
clicking on them and
whatever. That's yeah, but also 98% of people are just really annoyed by your
sales team that they
keep reaching out. So there are all these other things that have to be measured
where something
like a user conference where all those people are already in pipe, but that
pipe was now
actually closed. And it's influenced by this event, but it wasn't the final
thing that drove
them over the edge or was it? And that's where I think that a lot of rev ops
leaders, like you
have to look at that information and not be draconian and say like the event
caused all this stuff.
So no, but maybe it accelerated or maybe it's maybe we need to do smaller batch
events that
occur every month in different geographic like geographies to accelerate slower
deals or whatever
experiment test result sort of thing and not just make like sweeping general
izations. And I feel like
that is one of the big pitfalls of rev ops is to say, Hey, I think we found
something really
statistically significant and you take it to finance and they're like, Yep,
that's it.
Triple down here. And yeah, just say wait a second. That's not like the silver
bullet just because
this one function or this one thing was working quadruple down on just that
thing. It's no, we did
15 different plays. That was one of the plays that we can measure really easily
. But that wasn't
the entire reason. Yeah, no, I think you're spot on, right? Because I think
when you look at a
customer's buying journey and what they went through the people who came to
this event,
there was so much work we had done in acquiring that customer, getting them
into the pipeline,
getting them engaged. There's so many different parts of, yeah, no, obviously,
it's very easy
to look at the end result and say, this is what did it. But I think it's that
it's that influencing
fact that you try to figure out, yeah, look, I wish there was a silver bullet
that you could say,
this is the one thing and you can spend all your dollars here and you're going
to get that. But
that's not realistic. That's not how customers buy. That's not how customers
engage with you.
There's a variety of things, right? What marketing does on the website, what
they do in nurturing,
how we support current customers. We have a lot of customers who talk to their
peers and they say,
hey, what are you doing to engage yourself? And it's what we do in our customer
marketing side of
things and how we market what our customers do, like what I mentioned earlier
about how Dordash,
you use this like, Dordash is a great example. They talk to a lot of our
customers about,
here's what we do. And here's we run our entire platform on, on itable. And I
think that's also
a component. So yeah, I know it's really tough to just narrow down to one
little area and double click
while that would be great. It would be just a quick follow up question on the C
FO piece,
because I know that this is something that obviously every CRO faces and is a
difficult decision.
And part of the thing that is frustrating when you're talking to the CFO is
every second that
you're speaking to them, trying to justify all the stuff that you're doing. You
're not actually
working on all those things, but it's obviously a key part of the business to
be able to hit projections
and do all that stuff. And that's their job. But how do you find that balance
to say like,
hey, are we going to just spend every day trying to justify our existence? Or
can we just actually
go do the work? Yeah, no, I think, look, just like I mentioned at a business
level, you have to have
key metrics that you're tracking towards, right? That OKRs, whether it's here
or previously, I think
you've got to get aligned on what the revenue metrics is. Is it the magic
number? Is it the payback
period? Whatever that is, that you've got to get alignment with your CFO on,
you've got to work
towards that. That's the metric that you're tracking towards, right? If the
magic number is
what the CFO cares about and the CAC and obviously the payback, then everything
else is feeding into
that, right? So I think getting alignment on that is critical. And so that once
you get alignment on
that, and you both have agreed that, look, yes, ideally, we want to get to a
payback of this,
the following this year, sometimes it's your first year, you're investing in
maybe scaling a new
segment. And so the payback on that segment is going to be different, right?
You're going to go
into the enterprise segment and you're going to take a bet and your payback is
going to go from
from 12 months to 18 to 24 months because it's enterprise, you get alignment on
that with your
CFO while you still say, hey, our mid market business or SMB business to pay
back is 12 months,
and maybe we're going to try to get it down to 11 months. So I think those are
the things that
you want to know, it's like anything else, right? It's aligned around the key
metrics you want to
track, then agree on it, right? And then you track towards it and you're not
constantly debating
what the metrics should be. And so that to me is to me, the way that I found it
to be most productive
of working with my CFO. And so that's really what we've aligned on. Like,
easier said than done,
when you have a fantastic quarter and things are looking great, it's an easier
conversation.
When you have a rough quarter and you don't hit those things, it's a different
conversation,
but I think that's the world we all live in. And at the end of everything else
that you throw out,
it's all about execution, right? So a lot of times we spend time on what are
the leading
indicators that we need to focus on to make sure that we can hit the numbers
and the pipeline metrics,
the conversion rates, the enablement, a lot of things that we need to do for
the revenue teams
to make sure that happens. But that's really where I try to make my time and
the time we spend with
RevOps and the sales leaders. And we're going to get more into metrics here in
a second and our
next segment, the tool shed, where we're talking tools, spreadsheets metrics,
just like everyone's
favorite tool qualified, no B2B tool shed is complete without qualified. Go to
qualified.com
right now to learn more, check them out. We love qualified. They're the best.
Go to qualified.com
to learn more and fill out your tool shed. Bobby, let's talk about your tool
shed a little bit here.
Starting with metrics, what metrics matter to you, you talked a bunch about how
important they are.
Yeah, so I think there's a variety of things, right? I think when it comes to
the sales function,
we talk a lot about obviously what is our pipeline coverage by segment. I think
it's easy to say,
hey, we need to have 4x pipeline. But that's not always the case, right? So we
look at each segment
that we have, an interval, we have a SMB mid-market and enterprise segment. And
so obviously the pipeline
conversions and pipeline coverage are all different for those segments. We
spend a lot of time on
just figuring out what those metrics are. But it's around pipeline needed, how
much pipeline we need
to add on a weekly basis and to get our pipeline to a healthy state and then
obviously work on
the conversions. Conversions are, they can vary also in different segments in
the enterprise segment
for us. When you get into half a million into three, four million dollar deals,
the conversion rates
are different than $50,000 average deal size in our mid-market segment. So that
's primarily what
we focus on. And then on CS, we have different metrics. So those are the
primary ones that we look at
is around pipeline and conversions. Not to say that any leaders are tools here
in the tool shed
section, but I am curious that the key part of building a tool shed is choosing
a leader that's
going to manage it. I'm curious, like, how do you think about hiring a rev ops
leader? What do you
look for in a rev ops leader? What are the qualifications and the things that
you would say,
like that's someone who I want on the team? Yeah, I think for me, overall,
anyone I hire in the
organization, whether it's a revenue ops leader or sales leader, even an
individual contributor,
I generally look for people who have a growth mindset, right, who either have
been part of a
growth story before and they know what that feels like or just the way they run
their business,
they think about growth. And so I think that's number one, I think,
particularly for a revenue
ops leader, you want the person to be able to think what is possible, right?
Because when you're in
that role and you want to just look at data and say, data tells us we can only
grow at whatever
X. And I think you want that person that says, but why can't we go 10, 20%
higher? And so I think
growth mindset is obviously very important for me. Obviously somebody who can
roll up their sleeves
and really get into the data and not just only relies on their analyst to do a
lot of the work.
I think that's also very important. And then I really look for somebody who's
my, like I said,
who's my right hand person, it's my strategic counterpart that I can bounce a
lot of ideas off of.
And they can give me the data mindset, but they can also say, I think if we
stretch this, we can
have this type of outcome. So I think just that strategic partner that I can
lean on and have
candid conversations with have somebody who can push back on me and challenge
my thinking. I think
that's really somebody I look for in this role that I'm in right now, where I'm
only two months
and I have my ideas and I'm maybe naive about what's possible. So it's good for
somebody to
push back on me, but I do like that back and forth and help push the entire
organization towards
more of a growth mindset. Do you have any examples of something that happened
in the pipeline that
you noticed wasn't working that you fixed? I tell my team here, maybe it's a
bit of a control freak,
and I'd like to get into the details and mask and a lot of questions. Okay, why
is it like that?
Why did we do this? I think sometimes when you build models and you're building
a revenue model
and you're building the growth model, right, and saying, hey, we need X amount
of opportunities,
we need X amount of conversion, and you have those key metrics around how much
pipeline needed,
what your conversion rates are. And you don't look deep enough. And hey, how
many accounts are we
assigning to the team? And how many accounts are we focused on on a monthly and
quarterly basis?
Sometimes the math doesn't add up. And so that's the piece to me, at least as a
CRO,
I like to be deeply involved in a lot of those details to make sure that I
understand it
and what we're doing makes sense. One, because 20 years, it's been a long time,
but 20, 22 years ago, I was a sales rep. So my thinking always goes back to how
do we make
these salespeople successful, right? What do they need to do? Of course, we're
going to push
and we're going to push them to do more than they think it's possible for them
to do. And so
we're going to do that. And I tell my team that all the time, you've got to
lean in, you've got to
be an entrepreneur, you've got to know your territory, you've got to know your
accounts,
we're going to push you. I want to make sure the logic, the math makes sense of
like,
how many accounts we're giving you, what the conversion rate is and all of that
. So that's
the piece to me that I've sort of sometimes noticed is we make decisions
without necessarily
going deep enough into it. And I think it's very common for leaders in a
business to
speak from a very high level and say, we're going to do this and this. And so
to me, that piece of
it, it's not one thing. I know you asked what's the one thing I caught in the
pipeline or in the
business. It's more of just a level of detail to make sure the conversion rate
and the math makes
sense that it's rooted in some realistic outcome, right that you need to have.
Yeah. And how to take action, it's to the point earlier with user conference,
it's like, hey,
this thing went really well. We saw a bunch of these big deals close. This was
clearly
something that influenced pipeline. Now what? Okay, what does this mean we're
going to do more of
these? Does this mean we're going to make next year's bigger? Do we need to do
satellites? Do we
need to do is it was at the in person aspect of it? Was it just that we'd never
got on a plane and
met any of these people? And this was the first time because of COVID or
something like, it's just
like all those secondary effects of like, why was this impactful and what is
our thesis? And then
how can we take actions that accelerate the things that are working and what
the data is telling us
and then testing or if you do one of these next time and it doesn't work? Well,
it's like, oh,
I wonder why that is, et cetera. It's drawing a direct correlation into some of
these things.
It's harder, right? It's harder. We've even done things where we've gone back
and studied and
asked customers, hey, how did you engage with us? Why did you engage? And a lot
of that, it's not
like, oh, you sent me this email and that's what did it? No, it rarely is that,
right? It's our
people in a buying cycle. Are they not in a buying cycle? Sometimes you're not
in a buying cycle,
but you're so frustrated with the solution you have that is breaking and it's
causing impact
that you finally make a decision. And so it's really hard to draw one specific
things. I think
the best that we try to do is to understand what are the most common things
that happen and really
focus on the few and try to make the best decisions possible based on the few
examples that we see.
That's a hard piece of the job is figuring out where you should really invest
your dollars and
your focus. Any blind spots that you feel like you wish you could measure
better?
Yeah, I think I came from Freshworks, which is in the sort of sales cloud,
service cloud space,
right? Solutions that customer service organizations run and then at Interpol
now,
which we work with a lot of marketers about how they communicate with our
customers. And so
a lot of companies already have solutions, right? And we're going after a mid
market or an enterprise
size company. They're not buying a marketing automation solution for the first
time. They've had
solutions. And so the blind spot a lot of time, obviously we believe we have
the most modern,
powerful platform that's built on all the new technology stack versus the
legacy players.
But understanding the blind spot probably for me would be when is the buying
cycle, right?
When is the right time that we should be speaking to this customer? If there
was tool sets out there
and there are tools out there that tell you they're running this legacy system
and they're on a
contract for another two, three years, that doesn't mean that you prevent
selling into that customer.
There's ways you can work with that customer in its new department or new
product division and
get a land deal in that. But I think that's the piece that's really if you're
selling a solution
that is replacing an old platform, the blind spots are when and how and where
in the company you can
get a footprint into that company to use your platform. That's the piece
probably that we still
try to fine tune of in your total addressable market. Where should you go focus
as the highest
likely to convert? And that's probably the part that we really spend a lot of
time on,
which we still don't have a clear path to right now. All right, let's get to
our final segment here.
We're just going to do some quick hits quick questions if the answers quick
hits popular.
Yes, I am. Number one, what advice would you have for someone who is newly
leading rev ops or go to
market team? Listen and learn if you're doing it for the first time. Just
observe and learn.
Don't be quick to just make decisions. Do you have a favorite book or podcast
or TV show that
you've been checking out recently that you enjoy? No, maybe I'll pick this one
up.
Listen to some rise rev ops. I like it. It's great. A lot of good nuggets. If
you were an animal,
what animal would you be? Oh, wow. Okay. Something in the ocean, maybe a
dolphin or something.
Just I'm always been very intrigued by the depth of the ocean and what's
possible because
obviously a place that many of us have not gone. And that's, yeah, I would say,
a dolphin. Maybe
a shark. I like it. Anything to plug? It's been awesome for listeners. They can
go to iterable.com
to learn more. We'll link it up in the show notes. Any final thoughts for our
audience here?
No, I guess the one thing I'd say you probably have a lot of practitioners, a
lot of revenue
ops, practitioners and leaders. I guess what I would say is you guys have a
critical role in the
business, probably at least from a CRO's perspective, probably the most
critical role.
And just being a business partner for not only the CRO, but the rest of the
organization
is something that I think is instrumental into a company's success. Being
aligned around the
business schools of the company, I think that is a great place to be for a
practitioner in revenue
operations. Just partner, challenge yourself, challenge your own thinking. The
data doesn't
always give you everything. I think there's some in-sensual things that you
need to focus on.
But I think that's the piece I'd say continue to be a great partner for the CRO
and other
leaders in the organization. Bobby, it's been awesome having you on the show.
Thanks so much. I'm going to talk to you. Great. Thanks, Ian.
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