RevOps Isn't New
On this episode, Jamie believes that revenue operations have been around for a long time, but we haven’t always called it “RevOps.” He describes how investing in your RevOps team will result in a great ROI, and how to focus on what really matters when building your bottom line.
[MUSIC]
Welcome to Rise of RevOps.
This episode features an interview with Jamie Anderson,
Chief Revenue Officer of Imburse.
Imburse is the global leader of
spend optimization with
expense, travel management, and payment solutions.
Jamie believes that revenue operations have been around for a long time,
but we haven't always called it RevOps.
Today, he'll describe how investing in your RevOps team will
result in a great ROI and how to focus on what really
matters when building your bottom line.
Welcome to Rise of RevOps.
I'm Ian Faison, CEO of CastMean Studios.
Today, we are joined by a special guest, Jamie.
How are you?
I'm doing great, Ian. Great to be here. Thank you.
Great to have you, excited to have you on the show.
My brother's name is Jamie because my grandfather was Scottish.
It's all familiar here today on Rise of RevOps.
I should I guess Ian as well is a very Scottish name.
Oh, indeed.
Yeah, exactly. My grandfather grew up in Glasgow.
Well, we're not just talking about Scotland, a wonderful place.
We're also talking about revenue.
We're talking about RevOps and all the cool stuff that you're doing at Imburse.
Zoom out here. Tell me a little bit about what it means to be
Chief Revenue Officer of Imburse.
Well, it means that everything to do with revenue across the business,
whether it's new business bookings,
whether it's existing customers, cross-sell, up-sell, professional services,
retention, then it all falls under my remit.
We look at it quite scientifically at times with all the tools that are
available.
We look for trends. We try and spot things that look right.
We try and look at things that perhaps aren't where they should be
and take corrective action.
I think just the array of tools and the maturity,
a lot of the tools in the market today helps us do that.
How do you view RevOps as a Chief Revenue Officer?
That's a very, very open and philosophical question.
Yeah.
It's amazing.
I think that if I go back to my days at Seabull Systems over 20 years ago now,
and I look at moving from there to SAP,
I saw two businesses which were very, very focused on running the numbers
and had incredibly strong discipline installed,
and still rather than people to pay attention to those things.
Now, the tools that we use to get to the numbers,
but a lot less sophisticated today,
certainly did not have artificial intelligence built into them.
But we did notice enough in trends
that enable us to accurately predict
where we thought we would land as revenue teams.
So there's definitely been around a long time.
We probably just didn't call it RevOps.
There certainly wasn't RevOps teams.
That's for sure.
Then tell us a little bit about Inverse and who you sell to.
Well, Inverse is a leading travel and expense management company.
So we're probably most known for expense management.
And really our goal is to simplify TNE for everyone.
Something that over the years creates a great deal of pain
for people on the road and sellers.
We make it super easy for people to obviously log expense receipts
for businesses to ratify, reconcile expenses
across the business, categorize them correctly.
And there's really three big buckets to spend.
You have your spend, which falls into that TNE.
You have your departmental spend,
and you also have the spend that would typically be associated
with invoice purchasing.
And Inverse gives you incredible visibility into all of that
and enables you to manage it in a very, very simple fashion.
And we also have cards which support that spend as well.
So there's a very, very strong cards business within there,
which simplifies again for the traveler or the employee.
They spend.
And then how do you think about RevOps specifically at Inverse?
How do you think about how it affects both the sales side,
the customer success side, and of course marketing?
Well, first of all, it gives us real strong insights
into how the business is performing.
I think just giving us that visibility into our pipeline trends.
So we have several different businesses.
We basically serve 18,000 customers globally as a company.
So being able to see the patterns where those customers,
and particularly from a customer success perspective,
where those customers are using the technology,
where we can actually see how they're engaging with us.
If we're creating opportunities to support that engagement,
and so for things like retention and cross-sell and upsell,
we have that visibility in the business.
And similarly, as we look at what constitutes our ideal customer profile,
I think it enables us to look at the pipeline in each of those areas
and accurately predict outcomes for the business as well.
Obviously, it's like the name of the game as a CRO
is being able to predict and forecast effectively,
which in uncertain times like we've had over the past year,
is that, well, really the past three years,
has been even more difficult.
So it's like if you're relying on a functional layer of data
that is bad, then your predictions compoundly get bad.
Whereas if you're able to have that sort of like the market texture in place,
and your revenue architecture in place, and all that stuff,
and you can actually make decisions based off of what is signal,
what is noise, then it all gets a little bit easier.
It's not easy, but easier.
Yeah, I mean, look, expanding on that a little bit in.
When I think about it, I think I said, there's key industries
where we have success and where we understand the success rate.
So some industries, for example,
conversion rates are going to be 50% and above, realistically 50%.
There's some industries where it's a bit more competitive,
and maybe 20% or 30% on average.
What the insights enable us to do is to then go and teach to those industries,
and almost segment those industries by customer size.
So for example, if you take legal,
there's SMB, the small medium size legal firms,
there's mid-size legal firms, and there's enterprise legal firms.
So the wind rates will differ again between those customer segments.
So we understand that the revenue operations gives us the insight into that.
And it enables us to do two or three things even better.
One of those things is obviously, yes, predict the outcome based on the sales
stage
and the weighty pipeline that you have in each of those industries.
We also know the deal of velocity and when deals should close,
you have your sales methodology baked into sales force that says,
well, if it's a stage five opportunity, then it's got a 90% chance to close,
but this isn't an ICP.
We typically win against this competition more than any other.
Again, it enables us to be better to predict in the outcome.
So that's number one.
Number two, when we think about building pipeline as well,
the insights that we're getting from when we do win
tells us that we should focus more on doing that
unless or chasing down business that we don't often win,
which is a waste of everybody's time and marketing dollars.
Frankly, can you give an example that I know you can't get like super
in detail to the examples, but can you give an example of something that like,
you know, one of those signals that says like, hey, we're, we're, you know,
spending too much to try to acquire a certain type of account.
It's difficult to do it without, you know, giving too much away.
Give me secrets.
Given the secrets.
So I say, but let's just say, let's like, what this says for a little bit.
There are certain segments, as I said, and there's certain.
And so for example, let me give you a great example.
Before I came to the business, I looked at performance across
all the segments I mentioned.
And what I like to do is, you know, if you take a basic SMBE,
mid-market enterprise, right?
Now, let's take the SMBE segment.
It's a segment which is largely driven by a lot of inbound activity, right?
So you're spending a lot of money on marketing to drive eyeballs to your site
to potentially convert, you know, through, you know, your online tools,
which enable you to do self-driven demos or whatever happens to be.
But you drive a lot of traffic.
And there's a lot of money typically goes into doing things like Google AdWords
and doing your SEO.
Taking something like SMBE holistically as one segment,
without then breaking it down into subsegments based on either,
you know, the size of the company by employee size,
or maybe it's by revenue or however you want to do it.
And what I discovered was that the majority of the visitors that then
registered,
they created leads and all the rest of it on the site were for very, very small
companies, right?
And we've also got an SMBE sales team as well.
Where the highest conversion was was higher up in SMBE.
So the highest subsegment of SMBE created profitable business,
enabled us to cross-sell as opposed to the business,
which was being largely driven by SEO and,
and like, you know, paying for your Google AdWords and that type of thing.
That was driving very low levels of ARR return, but high volumes of touch.
And at the end of the day, the conversion wasn't great.
So then that enables you as a revenue leader to say, why are we doing that?
Why are we spending X millions driving eyeballs there when actually if we flip
this
and move maybe slightly away from that level of inbound and invest more in out
bound,
driving activity based on thought leadership or whatever else, you know, with
some real campaigns,
then we have higher wind rates and the higher propensity to win.
And you're engaging with people that actually look in and solve a problem,
as opposed to people that might be kicking tires and potentially may buy
something from you.
But what should propensity to cross-sell to them?
Again, it's low.
So it's those type of insights I think that important.
I think this gets at a really important piece, which is like, even the term SMB
is probably one
of the silliest things in business.
I think that there's a bunch of different pieces in here that is why I think
RevOps
like endlessly fascinating and whether you define this stuff as more of, you
know,
whose job it is on the revenue chain to figure this out is your own decision.
But this like strategic part of revenue ops, which is, okay, these are all of
the segments
that we're going after.
Yeah.
Like, is a 10-person company and a 100-person company, should they be
categorized in the same
group? It's like maybe, maybe not.
But like, it's a silly thing to say that like we set these arbitrary sort of,
okay, well, a 2,500-person company is mid-market, but enterprise is 5,000.
You're like, how do you even quantify that?
And then someone who's just raised a bunch of money, if they just raised 250
million,
they spend like there's someone who is XYZ, but they have a higher propensity
to churn
potentially or what, you know, all of those things.
I'm just curious how you think about those type of things.
I think that's why it's really important to have an industry focused and
specialization,
because it differs massively.
The first time ever came across this EAN was,
there were many, many years ago now, over 10 years ago, when I was working at
SAP,
we acquired this amazing company called Hybros to give us an e-commerce
capability.
And what we discovered was that the SAP model that they'd set up like this, you
know,
SMBE, mid-market general business, large enterprise, all that type of thing,
the way in which they defined that didn't necessarily work for e-commerce,
because you could have
a 40-person company generating 300 million, 400 million dollars of revenue
through the online store.
Right. But how do you categorize that?
You know, when you're looking at things differently.
Similarly, you know, if we look at things and we say,
"Sebi segment by employee count," right, which some companies do as well, right
, you say,
"Well, 0 to 50 employees, 50 to 50 to 5500," you start doing that.
And you use that as a measure of a company's spend.
As soon as you're going to construction, you're going to find that's absolutely
bonkers,
because you know, you can have a construction company of, you know, 50 to 100
people spending
several millions, you know, on materials and purchasing, you know, through
cards or invoice and,
you know, it breaks the model. So you've got to find and understand those
anomalies.
And I think also having strong revenue operations enables you to do that, to
see those anomalies.
And then sometimes it sparks, sometimes it sparks a new campaign,
or a new idea about how you go to market. Okay.
Let's get to our next segment, Rev Obstacles, where we talk about the tough
parts of RevOps.
Zoom in and hear on client experience. What do you think makes a horrible
client experience?
One which is pretty unengaging, right? One which feels incredibly scripted.
One where the customer can't pick up the phone and speak to someone,
I think doesn't make for a necessarily great customer experience. And everybody
's looking
for something different. Maybe people define customer experience in different
ways.
I think you have to be available when the customer needs you, whether that's by
digital channels,
or physically, if they want to pick up the phone and speak to you.
How do you think about the role of RevOps supporting both sales, customer
success, and marketing?
We can sort of touch on that a little bit earlier. But as the CRO is sort of
deciding
where they spend their time the most, we call it sort of like the three-headed
hydra that everybody wants to get RevOps resources to support their efforts.
How do you sort of
help decide that? So we do have marketing operations, and we have revenue
operations that support
definitely sales and customer success. I think the key to all is we're going
through this process
right now. I think the key to all is agreeing together what the priorities are.
And that is
what the go-to-market priorities are, what the key messages that we want you to
live are,
making sure that the marketing and sales programs and campaigns support the go-
to-market with the
right content and the right execution. And that way everybody's working towards
a shared goal.
One of the things I think that has always caused tension between marketing and
sales is this notion
of attribution. Where did the lead come from? The reality is customers touch in
multiple ways now.
So what people tend to measure is the last touch. And they say, "Well, that
belongs to me because
we touched it last. The customer came to an event, and it was that event that
we closed the customer
without realizing that, "You know what, guys, we're all in this together." And
as long as everybody's
touching the customer and giving the customer delivering value through that
experience every
touch point, we achieve a shared outcome. I think it's fine to measure what all
those touches are.
But I think if everybody's joined up and understands the priorities, then we're
working to the same
goal. And it shouldn't be as draconian as measuring that last touch attribution
, which can be very
misleading. I love that. Can you go into that just a little bit further?
Because that
last... I think that this is something... I think it's like one of the things
that C.R.O.s and CMOs get
wrong the absolute most is fighting for last touch attribution, which is in the
current buying
climate such a silly proposition anyways. It's so complex now, especially
before they even start
the buying process that this idea of last touch seems a bit archaic. Here's the
reality to it.
The idea of friction and tension is counter-productive to the outcome. Sales
can't exist without marketing.
Marketing can't exist without sales, right? Because sales is the ultimate
purpose of marketing.
And marketing supports sales and its endeavors. So to me, I think that any type
of conflict is
entirely counter-intuitive and counter-productive to the outcome. Listen, there
are reasons if you
have sat down together, if you've used the data that you possess as a company,
to very clearly
identify your ICP, whether it's multiple ICPs or whether it's a particular
geography that you can
penetrate with your product or whatever it happens to be. Once you've
identified that
priority and you go after it together, you're absolutely right. There are
multiple touches.
There are things that drive people towards the brand of the brand message. So
having a very,
very strong purpose and being able to articulate that purpose, whether it's
something like,
"Hey, we want to eliminate the expense report." It just wanted to become a
thing in the past.
We're going to simplify travel and expense management for every traveler and
every company.
Whether it's something as simple as that as a call to action, you need to make
sure that every
piece of marketing material and everything that you do stands behind that
message. Because over time,
that's the hook that's going to bring people back again and again. And then
when they come
and they're engaged and they get value from that engagement and that's critical
, that you're able
to articulate the corporate value that you bring to them. It's not about speeds
and feeds and
features and functions. Everybody's got that. But what is the unique value that
you bring
beyond the software? I'll give you an example. One of the things about
embarsed is 18,000 customers globally in 25 industries, over that period of
time that embarsed
has been going, we've built a network, a really strong community of experts who
share insights
and tips and ideas. Now, as part of the sales process, what I want to do is I
want to expose that
to the buyer. I want to bring them into that before they buy. Now,
it's marketing that are running those events that are bringing people together.
And,
does that mean that marketing one to business? Not necessarily if the customer
turned up at the
event, but it's been a process. And it's been a customer driven process. It's a
customer's chosen
to engage with us at each intersection of that journey. And they've landed here
and they've
now have all the information and need to make a decision. And I want to go with
embarsed.
I love it. You're passionate about authentic leadership and obviously, having
strong leadership
in your CRO, in your CMO, in your VP of customer success, or however you're
functioned there.
And of course, having strong leadership in your RevOps leader are all super
important.
How do you think that those leaders can be better? It can be more cohesive?
Maybe I'm oversimplifying it. But there's a lot of years and a few gray years,
but
going into this statement, I think it all stems from communication. I think you
have to have a
consistent cadence of communication as a leader, which reinforces what's
important to the business
and by omission what's not important, because that gets people really focused
on what matters.
When I think about the leadership, it's about being able to provide clear
direction to people,
to be able to articulate, as I said, the things that are important.
If you're having challenges, or if someone who's listening is having trouble
hitting targets,
how do you start to identify the challenges with hitting targets and how do you
come up with a
credible plan? Well, I think a business, you're looking for the patterns. For
example,
you can see pretty quickly, you can drop it down to a team level. Under
performance tends not to
happen in every segment, in every quarter, all at the same time. It tends to
happen in pockets.
What you're looking for is you're looking to see within those individual
pockets whether it's
a geographical thing, whether it's to do with not having enough sellers on the
street,
which it can be, so they can actually meet the demand that's coming in.
Sometimes it can be a
leadership issue. In one area, we are now giving you an example of, look, if
you look at a team
and you have a team of eight sellers and six sellers are underperforming, and
it's been
consistent over two or three quarters, it's likely you've got a leadership
problem,
as opposed to if you look at a team with those two individuals underperform,
and they underperform consistently over a few quarters, it's probably an
individual thing,
and you're looking at potential performance improvement plans and that type of
thing.
As leaders, as a business, you're looking at, first of all, you're looking at
those insights,
and you're looking to spot those trends. I think having a keen eye on the data
is really, really
important. About an individual level, I think you start asking yourself things
about your territory.
Is it the right territory? I'm a set up for success. As long as you can prove
that you're doing
the cadences consistently and you're executing against the plan, as long as you
're doing those
things, I think you can have a sensible conversation with your manager about
where you may need help.
Maybe you're just in a territory that's really tough right now. Maybe you've
got an industry
that has pulled back from buying because of some macroeconomic pressures that
affect in that industry.
Maybe you need a fresh impetus of marketing support. I think there's a bunch of
things you can look
to, but as a seller, I think, look, you should always find a way to build your
own pipeline
prospect effectively. If that's a challenge, I think you speak to your manager,
but you're going to see what support the business can give. That's why the
manager is there to lift
you up, to be frank. I don't know if you have the answer to this one off the
top of your head here,
but what's one of the best things that you spend money on over the past year or
so?
That's ROI. Best ROI. That's a really good question. The best ROI so far has
been additions that we've
made to the revenue operations team by far, and that's been investing in people
that have brought
a stronger focus on sales cadence and delivering what I would call kind of like
not marketing
campaigns, but sales plays. Something that's a lot more agile than building out
a big campaign.
We recently invested in bringing in a team who consistently monitor the sales
pipeline
and look for gaps in pipeline and work with the sales leaders in something we
established called
demand generation councils for every single theater that we have. The demand
generation
councils and the team and revenue opposite run that basically bring together
our partner leaders,
our marketing leaders, our SDRs, and our sales leaders in each of the theaters
and say,
here's where pipeline is strong and looking three and four quarters out, here's
where pipeline is
development. Marketing, this is what we need from you, but sellers, here's
where you can take
accountability and drive this. To me, it's very much process improvements that
we've made
and bringing in the right people have driven that transformation to certainly
help us measure things,
but they're never the answer themselves. To me, it's always been about people,
process,
and then technology. To get the right people, establish the right process and
the right cadencies,
and then use the technology to implement, reinforce, and measure.
It's something I've been thinking about a lot because we're going through a
tech overhaul
here at Caspian. Without that base knowledge and without the people that can
figure out
what is happening in the data, you can never go as fast as you want to go, and
you can't really
do anything. I love that that's the best ROI thing is building out a rev-up
scene. Obviously,
self-serving for us on this podcast, but it is so true. It's like, how could
you even do
your job without it? Look, I'm a huge exponent of using science, using the data
and spot in the patterns in the data because, look, data is great. It doesn't
really lie.
What it does is it either dispels a theory or a thesis that you may have or it
supports it.
That's the science part. Sorry, the art part is, hey, I've got an idea. I think
we should do this.
Everybody gets super pumped about it and everybody's really excited, but if the
data does validate
that kind of emotional, artistic impulse, then you don't do it. You have to be
very disciplined
about it. I do think it's a perfect blend of those things.
Let's get to our next segment, the tool shed. We're talking tool spreadsheets
metrics just
like everyone's favorite tool, qualified. No B2B tool shed is complete without
qualified.
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out.
Jamie, what is in your tool shed? How do you think about technology and tools
and data?
Absolutely required. First of all, you can do it without it. We're now
processing so much data
in real time that the insights we're looking to get are immediate. I'll give
you a little example.
So if you look at some of our rev-op stack and I think we've got too much, a
factor of the fact
that the market itself is convoluted and there are so many different tools. Now
everybody's
trying to eat each other's lunch a little bit. You probably see this in.
Whether you've got
gong or chorus, whether you've got a visa, insight squared or clarry, whether
you've got sales
loft, high spot and all of this stuff is in your rev-op stack. So we've got
some of these tools.
And now everybody's trying to get into each other's landscape. Conversational
AI
is a huge thing as well. And deliver on real time insights from calls, how
often were the
competitors mentioned? Does this create a risk? It's using that discord deals.
All that's going on
right now. So we've got every tool you could possibly imagine in a revenue
operation stack.
I'm looking for the person that's going to come out with a first sweet,
true integrated suite that's going to challenge that. I'd be interested to talk
to them.
Couldn't agree more. Yeah, you've talked about this idea of maybe we're getting
a little lazy with
AI. How do you think that that is going on? I have spoken about that. You're
right. The notion of AI
is fantastic. AI is a great way to gut check and sense check a forecast.
Now it's not trying to tell you lies, an artificial intelligence engine. It's
trying to interpret
lots and lots of data in real time as things happen. For example, if you say
something like
Clary, it's AI engine. It prides itself on its ability to be predictive and
accurate.
Now I don't want it for that. I want it to show me where my risks are. I want
it to show me when
I'm my leaders. It's a little over the skis that Colin Warden Clary says, I'm
going to use that
to really drive in and interrogate what that sales leader's rolling up. By the
way, if that
sales leader is ahead of Clary, I want that sales leader he went. I don't want
Clary he went.
Right. Secondly, if my sales leader is calling under what Clary's calling, then
I want to know
what they're holding back. I'm speaking to sales leader and go, are you low
balling me here? Why is
Clary calling you at say 5.5 million, but you're only rolling up 4.5. You're
not confident in the
call. Why is Clary more confident? Because it's looking at your historical
performance,
it's looking at data and it says you can do better. It's great for that
conversation.
I wouldn't look at what Clary gave me at the beginning of the quarter and go,
well, that's how
my quarter is going to go. That's what I'm going to manage to. Absolutely not.
But I think it's a
great tool to enable you to interpret and challenge the patterns that it sees
in the data.
Any other thoughts on data or metrics or anything like that?
There's lots of metrics. I used to work for someone that said,
hey, everything that matters can be measured, but not everything that is
measured matters.
That's when they were talking about a place we used to work together.
What matters to me is, look, what matters to me is things like
our managers reps focused on their full rolling quarter pipeline.
Are they taking a long-term view of the business? I don't know how many
businesses
can a lot from quarter to quarter, not quite known where they're going to be
one quarter out.
And to me, that's very, very scary. We've got all the tools in the world, but
you can still come
across a business and speak to someone else. It's a CRO and a grow Jamie. It's
unbelievable.
I came to this business x months ago and they couldn't tell me where they
thought they were
going to land next quarter. And that's frightening. And by the way, it's not
uncommon.
I hear this more and more. So I think we've got to be careful that
tools don't make us lazy, that we focus on always as leaders. What is our four
rolling quarter
on weighted pipeline? Is it sufficient? Is it 3x? Is it 4x? Is it sufficient to
meet
revenue goals? And is our two rolling quarter, our current quarter plus one
weighted pipeline
sufficient to actually meet the not the near-term, short-term priorities,
revenue priorities of the
business? Those things matter to me. Okay, let's get to our final segment,
quick hits, quick questions
and quick answers, quick hits. Jamie, are you ready? Yeah, I'm ready. Best
places traveled recently.
The outer hebrides. Best meal you've had in the last month. Oh, I had some
fantastic tacos
last night. They were really amazing. Where was that? I can actually look at it
from my tail window.
I can't read the name of the place. I'll send you a note later. It's very, very
good.
Perfect. Do you have a favorite hobby? Yeah, I love running. Love running.
Do you have a RevOps prediction for us? RevOps prediction. That someone will
build an all-encompassing,
all-in-one sweet, fully integrated with CRM and you'll never need to go
anywhere else.
What advice would you have for a new CRO who is trying to figure out how to run
their team?
Meet everyone. Spend half an hour getting to know everybody in the business.
What motivates
them, what excites them and ask them if there was one problem that you could
solve in this business
today and wave a magic wand and make go away? What would that problem be? I
love it. Jamie,
it's been absolutely awesome having you on the show. For listeners, you can go
to embers.com to
learn more about them, to check out their marketing, their RevOps, all that
stuff. Go to embers.com
and then go talk to your finance folks. Figure out how you're doing all of your
expense reimbursements,
all that stuff. Go to embers.com. Control your expenses, streamline payments
and reclaim your
weekend. Jamie, any final thoughts? Anything to plug here? Visit Scotland. Yes.
One of the best
places I've been in my entire life. It was absolutely incredible. The hairy
ginger coos of Scotland.
And listen, in the world's largest arts festival happens in Edinburgh every
year, as well the Edinburgh
Festival. And it's a true arts festival. It's everything in art. It's on right
now. It's the
biggest one in the world. Oh, cool. I didn't know that. That's awesome. Jamie,
thanks again. We
really appreciate it. Now you're in the middle of travels for making time with
us and we'll talk soon.
You're welcome. Thanks for taking care.
[Music]
[ Silence ]