Replacing Anecdotes with Data
On this episode, Mark talks about being the sole RevOps team member at his startup, how he collaborates with sales and marketing teams, what metrics he cares about most, and much more.
[MUSIC]
Welcome to the Rise of RevOps.
I'm Ian FaZe on CEO of Cast Me in Studios.
And today I'm joined by a special guest, Mark, how are you?
>> Drink it, Ian, how are you doing?
>> Great to have you on the show.
Excited to chat with you today and learn all about RevOps at Embrace.
So let's get started.
What does the company do?
>> Very simply Embrace is a mobile observability platform for all mobile
devices.
If you are an engineer and don't understand why you're at scratching,
we give you that information.
>> Awesome.
What are the types of companies that you all sell to?
Who are your customers?
>> It's varied across industries.
We work with app only or mobile first companies.
Home Depot is a customer of ours.
PNG, Hilton, they all utilize us to ensure their mobile app is working
effectively 100% of the time.
>> And tell me a little bit about your RevOps team,
like how are you all organized?
>> So today we are a startup.
We just released series B this past summer.
And I came in right before that raise.
Today, RevOps is structured where I'm the sole ops person.
And that's due to our size and scale at the moment.
So I'm responsible for all things revenue operations,
looking at 10,000 feet thinking strategically, but also at one foot double.
Occasionally in Salesforce updating records myself.
>> Awesome.
>> And tell me about your first 90 days in this role.
What was it like for your mindset?
>> I mean, going into it, especially because we were at a point of scale, but
yet still young.
A really main focus for us was ensuring that our business systems were in place
and
set up in a way that would allow us to essentially capture data in the future
or
really set up for the future of our company.
And so the first 90 days was thinking through the architecture of our business
systems.
And also assessing the business process that were in place and
needed to be in place for our future.
>> All right, let's get to our first segment, Rev Obstacles, where we talk
about all
the tough parts of RevOps.
What's the hardest problem RevOps problem that you faced in the last six months
or so?
>> A constant problem that we're always trying to face in RevOps is ensuring
that
our data is utilized appropriately, which also means ensuring that reps are
able to
input the information that we need in Salesforce.
But let me tell you, one thing that SalesOps people, RevOps people love to say
is,
it's like our favorite saying.
You can add it to any list of sayings that we love to say.
And if it's not in Salesforce, it doesn't exist.
And what that essentially means is that Salesforce is the record of truth.
And we want it to be the record of truth.
But this requires a few things that requires reps to input information.
But we also don't want to burden the reps at the same time.
And we want to be able to ensure that the information that we're leveraging
is can be useful and beneficial to us.
And so how do we reduce administrative burden on the rep but
still gain insight into that at the input?
And that's a hard balance to sort of figure out.
And so that's one thing that we're constantly thinking about in this role.
>> I love it, yeah.
I mean, if it doesn't happen in Salesforce,
it doesn't happen is pretty classic at this point.
I'm curious to talk about RevOps being kind of like this zipper,
between sales, marketing and customer success.
How do you balance kind of supporting sales, supporting marketing and CS?
>> The importance of RevOps is really to bring these groups together.
It's the ability to bust silos.
And part of that is regularly meeting with leaders within these three
departments
to ensure that we are aligned, to ensure that no one is going off siloing.
And I am essentially in many ways the glue that brings everybody together.
I might oversee a project or sometimes I'm just simply informing these
departments
what other departments are doing to ensure that it's aligned with our overall
goals.
>> Specifically as it relates to sales,
being a sales ops person for a while.
How did you kind of lean that way with your thinking of having to be more sales
ops?
How does revenue operations kind of expand the role of just sales ops?
>> That's an interesting question.
Because it's more than just thinking sales first.
Though at the end of the day, we're focused on revenue retention.
We're focused on closing new business and
in marketing, we're really focused on converting those top and final leads and
booking meetings.
The end goal though is still more revenue.
And that's in many ways the North Star.
Ensuring that whatever department is heading up,
that our goals are aligned in that way.
So, even though I would say even with Red Ops in general,
it's really interesting because you see a lot of Red Ops professionals might
just
be sales ops people who are calling themselves Red Ops.
It's not uncommon.
>> Sure.
>> And they're taking on these an expanded role.
And so with that, I mean thinking about marketing or even customer success is
really just thinking about those main goals of those three departments.
And ensuring that those goals are met.
So.
>> All right, let's get to our next segment here.
This is the tool shed where we're talking tool spreadsheets, metrics.
Just like everybody's favorite tool qualified.
No B2B tool shed is complete without qualified pipeline cloud.
Go to qualified.com right now and check them out.
Mark, tell me what's in your tool shed?
What's the software?
What are the dashboards?
What are the systems that you're spending the most time in?
>> Of course, a CRM that's like the heart and soul of revenue operations.
But I mean, the tech stack is more than just cool tools.
The tech stack is the foundation of your data.
And in many ways, the foundation of many process that can be automated.
And so it's more than just a CRM and a marketing automation system or a kicking
in system.
We have all of those things.
We use Marchetto, we use Salesforce.
But we also look for tools that in many ways are add-ons that can't be
maybe leveraged natively in Salesforce.
And the goal of doing this is to ensure that reps and
users like myself aren't doing a ton of manual work.
One goal of revenue operations is always to automate, make more efficient.
And so when we can use leveraged tools that create contacts in Salesforce or
write back activity in Salesforce, show us intent of people who are on our
website.
It automatically assign tickets.
It's something that helps expand capacity for the team, which means we can do
more
or focus on other things like actually going into the data and
finding insights that can shift in shape.
How we do business?
>> And is there like one tool that you started using in the past few months or
recently that you're like, wow, this is something that pretty incredible?
>> I will definitely get on the bandwagon of a lot of
folks who are using gong or a choreist or even not related, but
outreach is also great in terms of the main tasks.
But for outreach to really,
to have a tool to give you insights really into the sales call and
to tell you what the rep is saying and coach them live.
It has been pretty useful.
And in fact, we were able to utilize, we track certain words,
sales rep say, or the prospect says, and we call it out on the call or
feed it back into Salesforce reports to try to see if there's any sort of
variable or keyword or some sort of indicator that can help us on the sales
call in terms of converting it to the next stage or even closing.
>> What's the most important metrics that matter to you?
What are you constantly obsessing about?
>> Yeah, it's interesting.
RevOps is, there's no magic metric.
There's no perfect number that's going to tell you everything that you need to
know.
I think of it like, if I bring my car into a mechanic and
I say, hey, my car's not running, the mechanic might check any number of things
from the belt to the starter to whether or not he'd even has gas.
In RevOps is the same way, there's any number of metrics that I need to look at
from top of funnel to renewal to mid funnel to sort of understand what is
performing well.
Oftentimes, the day to day is just ensuring that the cogs are running in the
machine
and ensuring the wheels are greased here and there.
But other days, it's identifying proactively where there might be a problem in
the future.
So that being said, one metric that I mean,
I love to analyze the pipeline and understand why and how our pipelines perform
in a certain way
is looking at win rate by stage and any variant of it.
And by variant, I mean adding in a different variable or slicing it by a
different category,
such as rep, SDR, overtime, lead source.
And from there, we can start to understand why pipeline converts a certain way
through each stage of the sales cycle.
Is it a particular lead source?
Is it a particular behavior?
Is, are we getting more efficient over time?
All of those things can help really give us insight into why we're performing
in a certain way.
And I've found it to be really useful.
Yeah, do you have an example of that?
Something that was happening in the pipeline that you saw wasn't working and
how you fixed it?
Yes, I can think of an example where there was a particular lead source that we
were setting
meetings from.
And we were able to set meetings from these lead sources, but we weren't
converting them
once they got to demo.
And it was really interesting because you could narrow in on that.
It was true across all reps and it was true across time.
And so looking deeper, we could then start to understand that's the lead source
of it.
We don't want to put our poker chips in.
We don't want to waste resources on that.
And by essentially eliminating it, not only does our conversion rate increase
because
of that lead source dropped, but we end up at the end of the day and that's
going to
need money on that unverified, not good lead source.
What about something that you noticed that was working and you're like,
oh, we want to triple down on this?
So thinking back to prior experiences, there was an interesting, once you get
micro level,
you can really start to get more insights.
But there's not always the time and the day to be able to take on a full
research project,
especially at the activity level.
But one particular insight that was interesting was we found that there was a
particular message
that if we sent to a customer at a very particular time in the funnel, right
before they were
set to buy essentially, that the conversion nearly doubled.
And it was only through analyzing really all of our activity at all times in
the sales cycle
and the specific messaging that we were able to hone in on that exact message.
And it had that exact time, which was also key.
But through that ultimately led to higher conversion, which meant more
opportunities and more closes.
What is your relationship with spreadsheets?
Is it healthy?
Not so healthy.
I mean, it's as healthy as it needs to be.
I would probably answer that question.
Do you have a top three spreadsheets that you have as tabs open on your
computer right now?
I mean, I do.
I have a lot of spreadsheets open from our, I mean, and I'm going to say this,
but I don't necessarily think it's best practice.
It's, you know, I have a forecast up.
I have an hour except that I'm working on and I have some,
I have some complaints up that I'm also working on.
But here's the thing when it comes to spreadsheets is that ideally revenue
operations is a central hub
of data.
We oversee that source of truth that is data.
We built it, we curated it, and ultimately we own the analysis of it.
And as soon as we start to put something in a spreadsheet,
we start to separate it from the source of truth.
And there start to then become embellishments or objectivity gets scrambled.
And it's like a game of telephone where each degree removed from that source of
truth
becomes a more verb, jumpable version of its previous self.
And so ideally, I'm not working out of a spreadsheet.
Ideally, it's my BI tool or it's my Salesforce instance that can do the
aggregation of data
that I needed to do.
However, when that's not possible, it's a, we own a spreadsheet.
And we do that level of analysis, always be mindful and careful of how it might
spread
and who might get a hold of it.
Yeah.
That's your right point.
Any, anything particularly cool you're doing with data right now or any types
of analysis?
I mean, at all times, I mean, it's always looking.
It's always, there's always a dashboard that I'm looking at,
that our head of sales, head of marketing, head of customer success, that we
all look at numbers.
But what usually happens is there's a number that is off or something's
different and it leads to more questions.
It's a matter of why is this the way it is at the moment.
And so one thing that we're looking at is, one thing that we've been looking at
recently,
it's really interesting is the number of questions reps ask on a call.
And we indicated that that is a level of success for us.
Are they being curious and inquisitive and were able to measure that?
And it's really interesting how it's what we've seen is its grown quarter over
quarter.
And which lets us know that reps, when they ask questions, they're not
necessarily
pitching. They're trying to figure out more and they're trying to figure out,
understand the problems of our prospects and customers.
And so that's what we want out of them.
So to be able to see that has been good.
That's really awesome.
That's a great insight.
I mean, it's kind of one of those things that we always intuitively feel like,
oh, the best reps, listen, but it's cool to kind of put data behind that.
Any spreadsheet tip that you got for the audience?
Yes, I have a couple.
I mean, there's one, I mean, XLOOKUP, you know, is replaced with the lookup and
index match.
But that's, I mean, that's kind of an update as of now.
You know, those great add-in I use for Google Sheets that, and XL has the same
capability of just bringing data directly in from Salesforce.
And anything that Salesforce can't aggregate, I can just repopulate some data
and then Excel spreadsheet.
What's the add-in?
Grief at Salesforce for Google Sheets.
If you go to the add-in store and Google Sheets and search Salesforce,
you should be able to find them.
Any blind spots that you have in terms of like stuff that you want to measure
better
or stuff that you're working on?
Yes, because as repops, I want to be able to say with confidence every time
that
data has a solution.
And it would sort of really interesting where I will go ahead to head to
my head of sales or head of marketing is especially my head of sales because
anecdotally,
he has been on calls.
Sales leaders know how to sell.
And it's like, it's like Moneyball.
It's like that scene in Moneyball where the scouts are analyzing the batters
and they say,
he doesn't swing right.
And, you know, I'm there and I'm like, well, I have data that says he gets on
base a ton of times.
And I want to be able to leverage data to sort of bypass or bring new points of
perspective to the
table.
But with my head of sales and in selling and marketing general, sometimes there
's just
gaps in data.
Sometimes there's things that data can't yet tell us.
There might be an opportunity that goes to close the last one day.
And it, there's nothing that could have really foreseen that in the data.
And our forecast to say that deal is going to die that day.
It was just something that just happened.
I would love for one day for data to replace the anecdotes.
And we live on Moneyball.
I don't think that it's purely going to be that.
And I'm sure the sales experts out there don't even want that future.
But I think it's something that for me as Red Lobster excites me.
We kind of touched on this a little bit about some tools that they use a lot,
but anything that
and I know obviously CRM and stuff like that, but anything that our audience
might not know of,
that you can't live without.
Other than what's been mentioned, we use salesdirector.ai, which is similar to
people.ai.
What I love about this tool is it has the ability to, besides just create, it's
an activity tracker
that logs online, typically in Salesforce.
And that's one thing.
But oftentimes we're left with who is the sales rep talking to?
And the rep gets
tasked with inputting and creating new contacts in Salesforce.
And it's usually at a level where the deal is mid-flight and new contacts are
being introduced.
These are contacts that marketing would have picked up, but we would have added
through on the marketing side.
And instead of the rep manually creating this task and being bogged down with
the
administrative burden of doing this, we are able to use utilized salesdirector.
ai to
create this contact force and it attaches it to the opportunity in a compact
role.
And it's incredibly useful.
So now there's no gaps in who our reps are talking to and the personas they're
talking to,
which ultimately feeds back insights into marketing.
Because we want to know the titles that our sales reps are talking to,
who are they getting the deal done with?
So we definitely love that tool.
There's another tool for LinkedIn that we use that helps us find contacts
and contact information called Tri-Prospect.
And that has been very useful for our research team to help find new leads.
I love it. Great stuff. Great tool shed over there at Embrace.
That is for sure.
Okay, let's get to our final segment.
Quick hits, quick questions and quick answers.
Number one, do you have a favorite podcast or TV show or book that you've been
checking out
recently?
The Rise of RevOps is now my new favorite.
I love what VCs are thinking about because I'm not often involved.
I'm at the ground level working.
So any like A6VZ had a good podcast for a while that really gave me perspective
from their angle from the VC point of view, what they're looking at.
But I mean, that's in terms of professionally, that's I found that one to be
pretty helpful.
Do you have a RevOps prediction for the future?
Yes, and that is probably a theme of what I've spoken to already.
And that is more data and more tools primarily to inform us in ways that we don
't know about,
primarily to give us insight into things that we don't know about and to
automate the test that
can be automated.
I could see a future where a tool like Gong might even be able to read our
facial expressions and
the tonality of a voice to then query a back-and-dead database and inform the
rep live,
whether or not the word they just said or how they said it helped them in any
way or will help them.
And so I can see coaching live getting better.
Do you have a favorite cartoon character in history?
I mean, the entire history is pretty broad.
I mean, today, I mean, I've always loved South Park for its creativity.
So it's hard to locate one because that show has almost no main character than
both.
But they've all been great.
Food Chef to Kenny, to Carmen.
What about favorite food to eat with your hands?
I mean, it all can be eaten with your hands.
It should be eaten with two shet.
It should be eaten with no rules around it.
If you really love the food, why put a barrier between you and why put a utens
il there to slow you down?
But pizza.
Pizza.
If you could make any animal the correct size that you could write it, what
animal would you choose?
Probably a butterfly or a dragonfly.
Just because the flapping is different than a bird, it's not necessarily gl
iding.
It's intense sports.
It's aesthetic.
I like that.
That's a great answer.
What would be your best advice for someone who is a brand new head of rev-ops?
I would say focus for sure.
If you're in a startup coming on as that first hire to definitely focus on the
foundation of
your process and your tools to hopefully ensure that the future,
hopefully ensure that in the future you can really leverage what you've built
out and the data that
you've essentially built out.
Any misconceptions about rev-ops that you want to clear up here today before we
get out of here?
I mean, yeah, I mean, the sales rep's out there.
Yes.
I mean, one, if it's not in sales force, it doesn't exist.
This is true.
But at the same time, it's kind of BS when we build out 50 validation rules in
Salesforce
and then say it's not in Salesforce, it doesn't exist.
It shouldn't be that way for sales reps.
It should be easy for them to use Salesforce and they shouldn't want to use
Salesforce.
Other than that, maybe the misconception that we love spreadsheets.
I think sales up.
We're testing that theory on this show.
We're asking everybody about spreadsheets.
For sure.
Because I think sales ups love spreadsheets.
Our predecessors love spreadsheets.
But today spreadsheets become a separation.
And so it's, yeah, I love getting an Excel as much as an X-4.
But knowing necessarily what is an essential tool or essential in our tech
stack or process.
The answer is no.
All right.
Last question.
Do you have one question for the RevOps community at large?
What do you want to know about RevOps?
Yeah.
I would want to know when I think about the really also the future of sales ups
and revenue
up, really revenue operations.
I want to know how far alignment can really go.
Does it go beyond sales, marketing, and customer success?
Will there be a time where there's maybe with me about the entire revenue
umbrella in different
slices?
I definitely think about what it will look like in the future and really how
far
RevOps can expand.
It's still stay aligned.
And I don't know where that inflection point is.
Mark, awesome having you on the show.
Any, any final thoughts?
Anything that we didn't get to that you want to talk about?
Not for me.
Thanks for having me on the show today.
I really appreciate it being here.
Yeah.
Awesome chatting with you for our listeners.
Go check out, go to Embrace.io to learn more about Mark's company and how to
achieve your
mobile future if you need anything from Embrace.
Go to Embrace.io.
Mark, any future RevOps stuff we will be in touch.
Thanks so much again for joining.
(upbeat music)