More Bullseyes, Fewer Arrows with Tim Richards, Head of Global Sales at Nextdoor
On this episode, Tim discusses his go-to-market fundaments, the importance of harnessing a learning mindset, and how to hit more bullseyes with fewer arrows.
Welcome to Rise of RevOps.
I'm Ian Faison, CEO of Caspian Studios, and today I am joined by a special
guest, Tim,
are you?
Ian, great to be with you today.
Yeah, excited to chat with you today about all things next door.
One of the truly great apps of our generation.
Love it.
Couldn't imagine being a little homeowner out here in the DP Spay without good
next
door.
So excited to dig in all that, of course, your background.
So how the heck did you get into revenue?
It's a long story.
It's thinking about you and I did some reflection and it's funny.
I was actually part of the world's worst corporate merger at Time Warner and
AOL.
And I was on the Time Warner side at the time.
And ultimately when AOL was spun out, I joined AOL to help resurrect that brand
, which was
you know, with quite distressed and spent about 10 years there building it up,
working
closely with Tim Armstrong and a number of people to ultimately sell it to
Verizon.
And it was a fabulous experience because we had basically touched every kind of
facet
of digital media, crazy amount of own and operated, it's like Huff-Poe Tech
Crunch, world's
greatest ad network and ad.com, which was the OG programmatic pioneer.
We acquired millennial media and had a great mobile business, data companies
and so forth.
So it was a really fantastic place for me to grow my career and not only just
learn and
grow in all these different areas, but work with like tremendous people.
We sold the business to Verizon and then I left corporate America and then had
been doing
venture back startups for the last five years or so, mainly in the distributed
economy space
and very happy doing that.
All local companies got the call from next door to come over and I was always
been so
intrigued by the company kind of for the reasons you noted and couldn't pass it
up.
So I joined about four or five months ago now and off to the races and you know
, building
a great company that's having a big impact on the world.
So very happy to be here.
Yeah, it is quite the journey for you in touching so many different areas of
revenue,
running sales for all sorts of different size companies and scope and volume
and all that.
I'm curious like how the heck do you think about rev-ops?
I got the religion on it at AOL.
It was the context of one, just as a revenue leader, just being buttoned up on
the context
that we were providing our salespeople and leaders in terms of driving the
business.
But the other part that I think it's missing a lot of the time is when you're
acquiring
a lot of companies and knitting that together.
So what happens is there's a set of people, very smart people that knit these
deals together,
but it's the rev-ops team and the operators that have to make it work.
And that's where all the heavy lift is.
And that's where I really grew a huge admiration for the function and the
people who do it.
And so I worked with some like really legendary people in the space.
It's a set of skills and rev-ops that it's really hard to replicate.
But when you're working both in terms of driving the business but also knitting
acquired companies
together, it's imperative to have a very muscular rev-ops group.
So I appreciated the chance to talk to you about it because it's meant so much
to me.
And the success that I've had is having strong rev-ops partners for sure.
Yeah.
And I think one of the things that this show really wants to do is to establish
that point
of view of the revenue leader of how they view rev-ops and who better to talk
to than
you about it because you've seen it from so many different angles and so many
different
companies.
What's your definition of rev-ops?
As you probably tell, I'm a very simple person.
And the way I describe it is sometimes people have a hard time distinguishing
it between
what finance does or what rev-ops does.
And so I just try to paint the picture of a very fast car driving down the road
And rev-ops is the headlights that you need to anticipate the curves, drive the
business,
adjust as you go, finances the rear view mirror of what happened and so forth.
And they're both important, serve a really valuable purpose of the company.
But if you have a very strong rev-ops team, you're going to be arching those
turns.
You're going to be optimizing your speed down the hill.
And if you have a sub-optimal rev-ops situation, you're going to be knocking
over your neighbor's
garbage cans.
You know what I mean?
So I think of it as a very fast car and the headlights and the high beams
looking down
the road to guide where you're going.
And I've always looked at it that way, both in terms of operating the business,
but also
on a strategic level.
And you roll it next door.
Obviously, everybody knows who next door is.
If you don't, you should go download the app.
But what does revenue look like at next door and how do you think about it?
Yep.
Well, it's advertising based model for sure.
That's a great model.
It's a great business for us.
It dovetails very well because the advertising actually serves an important
function in the
neighborhood.
It's all about connecting consumers and we call neighbors to businesses, both
local
businesses and small businesses, but also large-scale businesses that want to
localize
their offering or tailor what they're putting together.
And so we have some very differentiated things that we do at next door that
throws off a
high-attent signal.
So mainly everybody on the platform is verified down to their address.
And so that's highly unusual.
We have a very high degree of home ownership and you're emblematic of someone
who may have
moved from the city out to Walnut Creek.
And all of a sudden you're like, where do I find a plumber?
I play in a soccer league.
How do I find someone to walk my dog?
Can I volunteer?
Or how can I help my neighbors?
Or someone who's elderly, you can't go get their medicine and so forth?
Next door exists to help facilitate that.
And we want to do it in a way that, through kind conversations and be kind of
the social
network that once oriented to the neighbors' neighborhoods, but also cultivates
kindness
and creates engagement through kindness rather than through distraction and div
isiveness.
And so we have about 700 employees and we have a high degree of diversity and
diversity
of thought here.
But the throughput, the thread that comes through all 700 employees that I've
seen is
that notion of like improving neighborhoods, bringing people together.
You can talk about the value of people's lives and their mental state when they
're more
connected with their neighbors.
And there's very important things, especially in the context of the last few
years, COVID
years and a lot of divisive things happening, certainly in the United States.
It serves an important function that way.
So what we're trying to do is create an online platform or application that
allows people
to connect offline as well.
And so it creates a very unique opportunity for brands to talk to consumers in
that context.
And so we have a lot of people that when they come to the platform, they either
need to
do something with their house, they want to join a community, a participant in
community,
and they habituate over half of our users come on a weekly basis.
And so the frequency and the intent that's part of that platform creates a
really interesting
combination of signal that our brands can tap into.
And so my job is work with our team to evangelize that, explain it to people,
provide thought
leadership or domain expertise in that space.
And so it's a really great, unique thing to be able to talk about on a daily
basis.
I love it.
Yeah, I'd say you pretty well have me pegged from Oakland, Walnut Creek.
The one thing you forgot to mention is trying to figure out how to get rid of
the raccoons
because my goodness gracious, that is like next door is popping for trying to
get rid
of these, get rid of these raccoons.
We got to relocate these things.
They're tearing up our yards.
Yes.
It's important subject.
But what's cool though is you get a read on what people are thinking about.
You know what I mean?
There's really no other place where if you're a homeowner and you have a rac
coon issue,
that is taking up some headspace, right?
So learning how to solve it, communicate with people.
Are you the only one?
It is interesting to play out.
And it's actually what's happening out in the real world.
And you might find a neighbor that helps you solve your problem.
We see instances of that happening on the platform constantly.
And it's very rewarding to see that is what's on your mind out in Walnut Creek
is solving
that raccoon issue.
So it's okay.
Don't I know it.
But no, I think it brings up a great point about the sense of community and
where does
technology fit into that?
And ultimately, like, where do advertisers fit into that?
And like, how does that evolve?
How does that experience evolve?
How does it stop being, you know, shoving 700 pieces of paper into my mailbox
every
day with all sorts of different offers, but also from an advertiser perspective
, like
you said, to get that access to a group of people that are looking for ways to
improve
is really advantageous.
How do you think about going to market and who are those next door customers
that you're
looking at?
Who are those advertisers?
So we do especially well, you know, it's just driving that high intense signal
and a
high degree of homeownership.
And then also there's a proxy for wealth in there too.
So there's a lot of spending power.
And so we do especially well in things like home services, for instance, that
might not
be like the most prominent ad category generally, but for us, it's ultra core
to what we do.
We do very well in financial services.
We do very well with CPG and retail.
And so for instance, if you're working like with a Home Depot is a good example
, we're
a large retailer that helps you take care of your home or improve your home and
so forth.
But every one of those Home Depot stores has something unique about it.
So like my main Home Depot is in Corda Madeira.
There's one guy who runs the paint department in the Home Depot in Corda Made
ira that's like
a legend in Marin.
And so it creates an opportunity for them to almost produce like local influ
encers in
their areas of like people you go to for answers and so forth.
And so it creates a chance.
So people aren't looking at Home Depot in the aggregate.
They're looking at like the Home Depot store in Corda Madeira or the one in Wal
nut Creek.
And so what we like to think about is like helping these national partners
tailor their
messaging to the local community.
And that creates a lot of very unique combinations that we can put together for
them.
And so that's a big part of what we focus on with with us.
So Home Services is a great place to start, but we're burgeoning in a lot of
different
categories across the board.
For the same reason, there's a lot of buying power.
There's a lot of interest in putting things in local context for a broad
spectrum of brands.
Yeah.
How as a rev ops problem and thinking about how to go after those accounts and
getting
to a predictable revenue point, which rev ops is a role in that.
It's a couple things.
It's sizing the market.
So I'll add a couple that we're spending a lot of time right now, healthcare
and pets.
If you're a homeowner, there's generally a high degree of interest in owning
pets.
And so sizing that market is really important.
Identifying like the top partners to kind of go develop is really important.
Same with healthcare and developing our story, but wrapping it around where the
opportunities
are.
And so that's what I mean, like in terms of the combining the strategic part of
what rev
ops does and setting kind of direction, kind of where we want to go run and
develop opportunities.
But also the rigor against that.
And so I'm kind of a maniacal about making sure the top 5,000 mathematics
accounts are
assigned to the person and we can track that.
And so I want to understand the pressure that we're putting on development, the
development
pressure of those accounts and so forth.
And so having an accurate read on that, think about it in the form of a
dashboard.
So just like you're driving your car, you need a speedometer that's accurate to
pump
the brakes or accelerate and so forth.
And that's how I want our rev ops flow to feel for every single person in our
distributed
sales force.
So we have about 52 frontline sellers.
And I want that information to get out to the edge to them so they can see
where they're
at.
So they have their own speedometer of the pressure that they're putting on the
accounts and the
categories that we want to develop.
I also want a really tight feedback loop on what's working and what's not, what
's resonating
and what's not.
I know you asked about tools in some of your other podcasts and I'm very
bullish on game
film now.
Like using tools like GOM.
IO is an example where we can get feedback not just from notes but by watching
the game
film ourselves and also counting the comments that go into it.
It's such a great time to be a sales leader and work in rev ops because the
tooling is
so fantastic and just building out your stack that kind of suits our needs.
It needs so exciting right now.
So we're definitely trying to take advantage of the contemporary set of tools
available
to us to drive both the strategic kind of aspect and where we're going but the
tactics
and the rigor that we need to get there.
So where does your rev ops team sit?
So they're part of the revenue organization.
So we have our rev ops sales, our measurements all tightly bundled together.
The only thing that kind of sits outside that is marketing for now.
That rolls up to our CEO Sarah at the moment.
Cool.
Okay, let's get to our first segment.
Rev obstacles where we talk about the tough parts of rev ops.
What is the hardest rev ops problem you faced in the past year or so?
In the last year it was just getting accounts straightened out where we had the
proper distribution
and that's a pretty big lift with a fast moving organization.
The company set up a mid-market team about a year ago which was the right
strategic move
for sure for our type of business.
But there was a lot of work to be done in terms of just shaping it and honing
it in.
So that's been the biggest thing to have a single source of truth that was
reliable in
terms of coverage not only on the account level but on agency level.
And so that sounds, if that sounds mundane it might but to me it's like so
fundamental
to kind of having the strongest go to market we can with the widest, deepest
net we can.
I will tell you though, nothing here can compare to the challenges we had when
we were doing
AOL where we had eight revenue lines, acquired companies, completely different
systems.
And so the degree of difficulty and scale of that was much harder.
So while I'm not minimizing the work to be done here, it's definitely pales in
comparison
to what we were up against straightening out AOL.
But having the right people in place, we got the right tools in place.
The people who are in a growth mindset that want to learn and change.
And I guess maybe just to add to that too is hitting a big emphasis on learning
culture
in terms of having people that in the mindset of learning, changing, growing
and want to
do that.
And so when we're doing training that they feel like a kid in a candy store
versus feeling
like we're dumping the dump truck on their desk, you know what I mean?
And so we recruit curiosity.
We want to develop that.
We just hired a very top notch head of sales enablement.
And so that's going to be a fundamental part of what we do too in terms of
getting training
on tools, we're migrating to a new platform and also just having a learning
culture in
general to make us fast and agile.
You mentioned marketing sits in a separate organization and rev-ups falls into
revenue.
I'm curious, how do you sort of get that more holistic view of what's going on?
How do you work with marketing?
And then anytime that you're so un-advertising, obviously it's a very different
type of a
sale than like a SaaS sale.
You have a different type of relationship with your customers.
And so I'm just curious, like, how do you think sort of rev-ups supports that
type of
customer journey from like acquisition to keeping them happy?
Yeah, it actually is tightly.
Wow.
And we use a pillar system here, which I like a lot.
And that's basically across functional meetings that we have every other week,
across a variety
of different subjects, where even if companies aren't sitting in the same orb,
they're sitting
in a regular transparent discussion that's very heavily documented, very
accountable,
and very transparent.
And so you solve it to answer your question.
You solve it through communication.
You solve it through transparency and accountability.
And so part of it, too, is you're just coming out, coming in 2023 and going
through that
kind of annual planning process, which was my first at Nextdoor.
We set the priority order of things as well.
And so we have a nice system, not only of the pillar system, but very clear OK
Rs that
all map to a unified, harmonized kind of set of goals.
And so it actually has not been difficult to keep things harmonized.
And that says something for the setup and the structure and also says something
about
the people.
And very talented, cooperative, thoughtful people that work here, that want to
win, and
want to do their best work.
They're not afraid of change.
Thus far, that's been really exciting to be a part of.
And we're building on a lot of those plans right now.
Any rev-oops moments or rev-obstacles from your past lives sounds like there
might have
been a few, but I don't know if there's any that you can share that stand out.
I haven't had any here yet.
I'm still inside my first six months of here, and again, it's been as I
expected a very
pleasant, very button-up experience.
And so I haven't had some big epiphany there.
I would say one of the things that I guess that we kind of did as part of the
process
is making sure that everybody at the executive level and across functional
level was familiar
with all the tools and the systems that were in place that the sales team was
using.
And so I suggested this to our leadership team in one of our early meetings,
and they
were very enthusiastically accepted to jump in and sit shoulder to shoulder
with our frontline
sellers, frontline ad-ops people.
And that proved to be really, really successful.
That was a very positive thing in terms of understanding where the issues were.
And so to help set expectations, to help with our strategic planning, and so
forth.
And so it's less of an oops moment and more of a discovery of all the imperfect
ions that
we had to yet solve.
And so that's how I thought about that question is creating awareness and
transparency so
people can solve it at every level of the company.
I think what happens sometimes is if you have just senior people talking to
senior people
and not pulling down to the detail level, mistakes can get made there.
And so we're being very careful here at Nextdoor that we have very strong
transparency and
detailed discussions telescoping from this uber tactical up to the strategic
level when
we're doing planning and stuff.
I guess the other thing too on an oops level would be just when there's misal
ignment.
And that's more what I have in my past life when, especially with an acquired
company,
where they were told one thing, usually in a BD session or whatever, kind of
part of the
M&A process.
And then on the execution level, we've been running a different set of plays
and having
to reconcile that is very stressful, takes a lot of time, usually nobody's
happy, slows
things down.
And so I would say the rev ops oops thing is making sure you're aligned with an
acquired
basis with your M&A team and what expectations were set and the plan moving
forward and making
sure that lines up with what reality is.
You know what I mean?
And so that's definitely a big one.
And the rev ops team is always the ones stuck in the middle of solving that.
So that's just something to get about for sure.
A lot on the show, you're talking to B2B companies, we think about this idea of
this customer
success or customer journey or that piece.
But again, like I mentioned with advertising, it's really different.
It's so ROI driven.
I mean, everything is ROI driven.
But like if you're buying a piece of HR software, you either need it or you don
't, right?
Like hard to really quantify whereas like your ad dollars, you really need to
dig into
that stuff.
I'm curious, like how does rev ops support like renewals?
Yeah, that's a good question.
We focus a lot on renewals retention as an important metric we measure
ourselves against.
And I guess it starts with awareness and also just identifying where the issues
are
that we have to solve.
And I think that that's a really important one.
There's also just like a broader issue too where because of the state of like
tracking
and moving away from cookies and all the things that advertisers are up against
in terms
of how they actually quantify outcomes, there's a attribution paralysis going
on in the market.
And helping companies solve that problem is really important because there's a
lot of
time and expense that companies have to devote now to find out what actually
happened.
And they can't use the old tactics they had before.
And so it's a combination of rev ops and measurement in that case that can help
kind
of solve like a genuine business problem that most of our major brands, brand
partners
have right now.
And so that's a work in progress.
There's not a silver bullet on that one Ian, but you could be creative in many
ways.
And it's not just building beautiful work, but you could be creative in how
people solve
that problem.
That's where the art form of rev ops comes in to kind of help us solve that
with partners.
I love that you said attribution paralysis because that is what it feels like,
right?
I mean, in the B2B world, you hear this dark funnel, dark social, all these
things that
you're trying to figure out how you can go acquire accounts and get people
interested.
It is attribution and it's and there is that fear of the unknown and like we
just don't
know how we're going to prove anything anymore.
I'm curious, like just how many people do you get?
Do you talk to companies that have like never even tried next door before?
Because it's like I've been pouring money into Google and Facebook forever in
the day
and like we're looking to check a new channel.
Yeah, it's a lot.
And again, that's what creates an exciting opportunity for us that our
penetration, while
we've been very successful and growing like crazy and doing and continue to
move up and
to the right, there's still so much work to be done in terms of market
penetration.
I spend in my role, as I've been at this a long time, I tend to talk to more
senior
people in the industry and I've close friends with many of them.
And so we, you know, over a glass of wine, you know, talking about kind of what
's expected
of them and they'll say, hey, Tim, budgets are flat or down.
When we talk about it, I say, yeah, I totally get that.
I live in that dream too, but like you have to innovate and you have to kind of
show
your brand or your CEO, you're doing new things.
They're like, absolutely.
And so the next is like, well, if you're kind of default, if the default
setting is
on meta and Google and God bless those companies, like they've done a great job
I'm not anti either of them, but if people are just kind of producing the same
plans
over and over and over again, somebody's getting fired, right?
You still have to demonstrate innovation even in a tight market like we're in.
And so the commentary or discourse is like, look, try out next door and talk to
have your
brand talk to those consumers in a novel way.
And by the way, this testing environment actually is likely going to work
because of the high
intent signal that we can demonstrate.
And so it's a nice combination of something where you can demonstrate
innovation, but
also have a high degree of certainty you're going to have a nice outcome,
especially when
they're focused on more omni-channel measurement.
And so we're doing developing partnerships or have partnerships with NuStar,
using live
ramp data and so forth.
And so these brands that are a little more evolved on getting out of like ultra
rudimentary
click through measurements and looking at more what's actually tracking things
more holistically,
our story gets very, very good.
So demonstrating a way to innovate, but also think about measurement
differently is like
really important.
And then finally, it's just education.
And I like that part of our job to our role of our team is to constantly be
educating
people not only about next door, but being subject matter experts on reaching
people in
a localized way and how that works and so forth.
And there's a lot of misconceptions about it and so forth.
So there is definitely a big kind of educational kind of part of what we do in
our daily kind
of go to market sales motion in the field.
All right, let's get to our next segment.
The tool shed, we're talking tools, spreadsheets and metrics, just like
everyone's favorite
tool qualified, it'll be to be tool shed is complete without qualified.
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They're the absolute best tool in the entire tool shed.
Go to qualified.com.
Tim, what's in your tool shed?
What do you like in these days?
You mentioned the listening tools like gong and things like that.
What else is in the tool shed?
I kind of core obviously sales force.
We religiously use that sales loft, looker to develop our dashboards.
I think a lot of what we're one of the things we're up against right now at the
kind of
like life cycle of next door is lots of good stuff dissipated around the
company and putting
it in one place is like a major kind of like focus right now.
And so I like dashboards a lot better than I like spreadsheets and RevOps teams
believes
in that as well.
And so that's a big focus of ours.
But I will say back to your question, I'm semi obsessed on gong right now.
I am a nut about game film.
I played sports growing up and coach always used to say the film don't lie.
And as much as someone can kind of give you a killer recap and they can tell
you what
happened.
The chance to watch what actually happened in a meeting is so fabulous and so
genuinely
helpful in terms of how we respond to people and you and I could watch game
film together
and you could pick up something completely differently than I saw.
And it's just so nice to have that.
We've had many instances where I've sent that to our product team.
So there's a really nice chance to provide feedback and notes.
So I could be sitting on a plane.
I'm big on craftsmanship.
I'm big on working on it together versus just relying on that meeting happening
And then it dissipates and you're going off notes and second party stuff.
And so I just think there's a really fascinating way to kind of learn, develop,
get better
and also socialize those conversations with our clients who are busy so we can
get more
mileage out of those conversations with more important people at our company to
help do
our best work and return.
So that's one I'm very bullish on because I want to build a rigorous
organization that
provides feedback and have a provide sounding boards and genuine help to our
team.
And so I just think there's a really interesting set of things that are so
constructive with
using Kong.
The one thing I'll say too that I understand and always want to work through is
like earning
trust with your team that we're not watching game film like judging that, like
picking
them apart.
And I think that's the initial feeling or sentiment that people have for some
of that
stuff.
And so my job as a leader is to make sure that we're building trust with the
team and
like how we're using that properly.
We're using those assets, we're using those tools in an appropriate way and not
to pick
you apart or be critical, but to learn and to grow and understand what our
clients want
so we can get more bull's eyes with fewer arrows on the solutions that we
provide back
to them.
I always kind of like rev ops is seeking the truth, right?
I mean, I know we as leaders like we always are, but rev ops is like trying to
put numbers
to the truth.
Like you said, when you're looking forward, when you're a forecaster, that's
impossible,
right?
We know it's impossible to be perfect.
And so when you have a tool like a gong where you're creating new metrics, both
from a leadership
standpoint, like you managing your managers or from all the way down to the
account level,
it's ridiculously valuable.
And we have a question that I'm going to ask you here in a second, what's a
blind spot
that you wish you could measure?
I think that this was a clear blind spot that every single head of sales wish
they could
be there with every rep all the time.
But in and of itself, that is super interesting.
But then you look at the rev ops use cases and like, what are they saying?
What are they not saying?
How many times are they bringing up our competitors?
How many times are they?
We talked about this in another episode.
How many times are they bringing up the word COVID?
How many times they bring up the word tech apocalypse and like all these things
like budget?
How many times there's so much richness to this information and like imagining
as a
leader, you're like, if the rev ops person comes to you and says, Hey, I built
a dashboard,
the prospect says the word budget seven times in a call.
They're much more likely to buy in eight months than in two.
That is transformational data.
Well, that's right.
And the other thing is it's there's always like bias that you happen.
Those humans have bias and kind of everything that we do.
And that's a great example of like, yeah, they said budget eight times.
We might want to pay attention to that.
Or what does that mean and correlate that?
And that's impossible.
I don't care how strong of a note taker you are, you know, you're focused on
doing a
good job and reading the room and those things.
You're not going to pick up how many times they said that word.
And so I do think it does lead to like really cool things.
I do think though, to make that work, there's got to be trust though that the
team has to
trust you.
That's how you're actually using it versus some other kind of judgy, critical
way.
And I think that's just work that you have to develop with your team to have
them feel
that way.
And frankly, you know, with your partners too, they'll be like that they're
open to do it
and they understand how we're using it and how we're not using it.
You know what I mean?
And so it's novel enough that we have to work at that part too.
And I don't, I never underestimate that either.
Like that's a good one.
Because that's absolutely true.
Yeah.
I mean, that's the value.
Like we've talked to a lot of rev-opsizers where they don't sit in any
department or
it's just like they're an independent entity and it's like they're just trying
to be like,
hey, not that it's marking versus sales or whatever, but they're just kind of
saying
like, hey, this is just what the data shows, right?
If someone downloads 70 books, they're a lot more likely to buy in the next two
months.
That's not a sales metric.
It's not a marketing metric.
It's like it's a rev-ops thing.
That's where the true data blends with the art of sales, the magic of marketing
Agreed.
Do you believe that they should be independent?
You talk to a lot of people in this space.
Do you think just having that complete independence is like the right setup?
And leaning that way now, I think definitely under finances.
And this is totally like just Ian's call from talking to a ton of rev-ops
people and being
really interested in this.
But I definitely don't think it should be under finance.
I feel strongly about that.
I feel that they have to be really aligned with both marketing and sales.
If your pathway to promotion is through revenue or through marketing, then you
probably lose
some amount of objectivity just naturally.
And then rarely customer journey is going to be tracked as well.
And like this is the classic sales thing is like those new logos.
And then to the chief customer officers, we keep turning accounts because we
keep closing
these logos on a premise that's like our product is seven months out from.
So this isn't you're not helping us by doing this sort of stuff.
My hypothesis is that for the companies where it lives independently, it
creates a little
bit more objectivity.
But you also have to be dug into like again, the art of sales, which like
someone convincing
another person to sign a document that commits you together.
And then that sort of like art of marketing, which is this crazy multi-touch,
new, not even
a funnel crazy world that marketing is now so much of the sales before they
even get to
you.
So it's all interconnected and it kind of feels like that rev-ops is we used to
say the zipper
between sales and marketing.
And now it's sort of like a foundational layer for all of the customer journey.
That's actually a really interesting point.
I hadn't fully thought that through.
That was a I'm glad I asked you that question.
I think especially as like the stacks build out to and there's just more ball
ast around
what it does.
It does becoming its own kind of discipline.
So for the reasons you describe, I think that's a pretty good idea.
I have to take that one for me.
Yeah, go for it.
I was talking to a VP of rev-ops the other day off of camera and they were
saying that
they were basically like, I don't know why this stage exists.
Why CRO thinks that it should be here?
And I'm like, it makes no sense that this stage exists.
Why don't you just change it?
That's so silly.
It's like, oh, well, you know, reasons.
And that's the sort of thing where it's like collectively like you have to have
that conversation.
We'd also talked about this idea of like when someone a Black Swan event
happens of like
putting a Black Swan thing in your pipeline of like, hey, everyone keeps saying
it's because
of SVB.
And like those sort of things like, who's call is that, right?
Is it the CRO?
It was called like probably, but like, should there sort of be an independent
late look
from a rev-ops person who can challenge the CRO and be like, I think you're
wrong on this.
And if they report to them, it's a little trickier.
Yeah, I think that's a good point.
And you can replicate that independence depending on like the seniority and the
juice that
person has in the company.
So back to Eric Filler here, he has that.
So I guess in next door's case, we do have that measure of independence just
because
of his stature in the company and so forth.
But you're raising like really good points about neutrality and just being
truth seekers.
It's a good way to think about it.
All right, let's get to our final segment.
Quick hits.
These are quick questions and quick answers.
Tim, are you ready?
I am.
You could be any animal.
No, sorry.
If you could make any animal any size, what animal would it be and what size?
I love this question.
And I definitely think I have two rescue doggies.
They're like carriers.
They're like 30 pounds.
I would love to see them like the size of water buffaloes.
Oh, that's a great answer.
Just to walk around with them and just like see how many cheeseburgers they can
eat and
just like how they would just run around and now they're bigger than the other
dogs.
And I would just love to see what happens.
And if I could saddle up and ride one of them, that would even be better.
I love it.
Great answer.
I'd like advice for a head of sales who is partnering with a brand new rev ops
leader.
Being clear, striking like very strong communication cadence, being super
transparent, clean, well
lit environment with regards to strategy, the issues, like just genuinely
treating that
person like a sister or a brother in the sense of bringing them along,
definitely not avoiding
like creating any kind of adversarial type of relationship and understanding
that person's
there to help the company win and so forth.
And I think just establishing that like clear line of communication that again,
trust is
an important one.
Candor is an important one right off the bat.
Definitely the foundation for everything else you do because you're going to be
solving
problems.
There's going to be sensitive situations.
You're going to have to navigate.
You're going to really have to be able to work problems with someone who you
trust and can
rely on and so forth.
So that's probably, I kind of go in that direction because I've had so many
instances
where that was such a prominent part of that working relationship between me
and the rev
ops team that that would probably start there.
Tim, it has been absolutely fantastic chatting with you today on this very
rainy Bay Area
weekday.
For our listeners, go check out nextdoor.com.
You could go download the app if you haven't already.
Tim, any final thoughts, anything to blow in it?
If you're an advertiser, of course, a go advertise on next door.
Tim, any final thoughts, anything to plug?
That's our main thing.
Just keep follow us.
We have great ambitions for this company.
We've got a lot of talented people working on some very interesting things.
And so we can't wait to kind of show those to the world as we move forward.
So my email is [email protected].
If anybody has any questions, definitely shoot me a note.
Any friend of Ian's is a friend of mine.
And we'll look forward to seeing you out there.
Awesome.
Thanks, Tim.
Take care.
Thanks, Ian.
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