Small Team, Strong Network
On this episode, Todd describes how to organize your startup for success, and how to make RevOps reflect your go-to-market strategy. He also dives into which decision-makers are most important in his process.
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Rise, rise, rise.
Rise, rise.
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Rise.
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Welcome to Rise of RevOps.
I'm Ian Faizan, CEO of Caspian Studios.
And today, we are joined by a special guest, Todd.
How are you?
I'm doing great.
How are you doing today?
Excited to chat with you.
Excited to chat about Aiden and all the cool stuff
that you're doing.
Chat about revenue.
Chat about revops and everything in between.
And as always, our show is presented by Qualified.
Qualified is the absolute best.
Go to Qualified.com to learn more.
They're a tool that every single rev ops person
needs in their toolkit.
If you're selling with Salesforce,
if you're using Salesforce, you need
to use Qualified, go to Qualified.com.
Let's get into it today.
Todd, tell us a little bit about your first role in revenue.
So I've been doing business development and sales
my entire career.
It's just always been where I found myself.
But really, the first big opportunity in rev ops
was when I joined Zendrive.
Zendrive was a very cool new tech startup out of San Francisco.
And I joined there in 2017 as the first BD hire.
It was basically a bunch of really smart engineers
and they needed to start building partnerships.
And so they brought me in.
And over the next three and a half years,
built out the entire revenue function.
So we built out a sales team and a BD team,
built out a PR and marketing team,
built a fantastic customer success,
and also added a couple of solutions engineers.
And really built it out as one coordinated operation.
And it worked really well.
And loved it and never looked back.
And so, fly forward to today.
Tell us what it means to be CRO of Aiden.
So Aiden is a fantastic new startup, just founded in 2020.
And playing a similar role to what I did at Zendrive.
I, again, was the first BD hire.
And we are just in the early stages
of building out a sales and a BD team,
starting to build out a customer success team,
as well as PR and marketing.
So we're in the very early stages of building those outs,
defining what our customer journey looks like
and what the procedures for each one of those different groups
bring to the table.
So we're really in that high growth, very fluid,
some would say chaotic time,
that's always fun to start up.
- The perfect time to be talking about rev-ups.
And it is one of those things that I think is so fascinating
with startup world, which is when you get to build
everything from scratch and you get to build things
the way that you want to do it.
Obviously resource constrained, of course,
but it's a fun time to build.
- It is.
I mean, every startup has limited resources.
So you're always trying to do everything you can
with what you have.
But how you structure your revenue ops
really can be one of the keys to whether or not
the startup makes it or not.
So make sure that you're amplified
and getting the most out of the resources you have available.
- All right, let's get into our rev opening here.
How do you define revenue operations?
- So I define it as everything that touches
the generation of revenue for the company.
So I have a pretty broad umbrella.
I definitely think it begins with PR and marketing.
Certainly sales, sales management, the BED team
and customer success.
I think that's all probably pretty standard.
But I also would include solutions engineering in there
because it's really part of the sales process.
If you're moving into a POC
and your solutions engineer is integral to that,
particularly if the actual process of integration
is part of your value proposition.
If you have a faster integration or an easier integration
or no code integration,
those are keys to your selling
and the solution engineer is key to it.
So I would include all of those different groups.
And I would say you really need to maximize revenue.
You need really good collaboration and cooperation
across all of those different teams.
- And how does Aiden go to market?
Who are you selling to?
- So Aiden really, we reach out in two places.
So primarily we reach out to auto manufacturers,
auto OEMs to provide our solution,
provides them a way to monetize access to their vehicles,
to connected vehicle data, not just data,
but also to communicating and talking with the owners
and drivers of the car.
At the same time, we also reach out to service providers,
anybody that wants to provide a service into a car,
like an insurance company or a parking company
or an EV charging network.
And one of the keys to where we are right now
in our growth is maintaining balance.
So we have auto manufacturers that have cars that provide data
and then we have enough service providers
to provide value to those auto OEMs.
So it's people often say, well, it's the chicken or the egg
and we kind of respond, look, maybe it is the chicken or the egg,
but at the end of the day, if you want either chicken or egg,
you got to buy one of them.
- That's right.
And what does, you know, it's early days,
so you don't have an entire massive RevOps team yet.
So what does RevOps look like at Aiden?
- So for us, one of the first positions we filled,
we actually hired Angela Samos as our PR and marketing person
'cause the first step was to build awareness.
And she's done an amazing job of getting us to the right events
and getting the right analysts and the right journalists
to cover us and we've really, in a short period of time,
generated some pretty fantastic awareness
and we run some really nice awards.
We won the editor's choice best of mobile world congress.
So a couple of awards and really driven a lot of awareness.
So that's been great.
So that certainly is a fantastic tool for our BD folks
as they're reaching out to auto manufacturers
and to service providers to kind of share with them
all the coverage we've been getting
and the great analysts coverage
that we've been getting as well.
So that's been really helpful.
So kind of step two is starting to build out
our business development team.
And we've done that in kind of a unique way.
We have some direct employees
and we've also used some contractors
with some highly motivating compensation in place.
So that's worked out pretty well.
And right now we're in the process of building out
our customer success to really support our initial clients.
And so pretty excited about that.
Yeah, how do you think about building,
you know, with think like a big company?
You know, you always hear that with regards
to your go to market strategy
and how RevOps sort of fits into that.
Well, I mean, the RevOps should be a reflection
of your strategy and your go to market plan.
And for Aiden in particular,
we have a, I would say highly focused outreach.
We have a very small team,
but a very well connected team, a very strong network.
And so we leverage that network of the members of our team,
as well as our advisors and our investors
to try to compress the sales cycle
by getting in front of decision makers as soon as possible.
And I know everybody says,
we want to compress, compress the sales cycle.
I get that.
But the way that we do that is by using existing connections
to reach out directly.
So ideally, our very first meeting is with a decision maker.
So we can move really quickly,
instead of having to go, you know,
months of going through gatekeepers
and using drip campaigns, that's just expensive.
And startups don't necessarily have the money for that.
So we very specifically selected people to join the team
that were highly connected in the auto
and connected car ecosystem
so that we could use existing networks
to go right to decision makers.
Yeah, that's fascinating.
It is that sort of like any types of type of sort of bottom up
approach when your startup is like,
if you're not talking to a decision maker,
not only is it not helpful from a sales perspective,
but it's also not helpful for like a product feedback perspective.
Like when you're a startup,
you need to know why they're saying no.
And if they're saying no,
and it's not an actual no,
then you're not getting any information from that exchange either.
Yeah, that's absolutely true.
And for Aiden Auto,
our product is a services platform.
So we can deliver any service.
We're really, we're service agnostic as well as auto OEM agnostic.
We can work with any auto OEM,
we can work with any service provider,
but really valuable feedback is what are the use cases
and services that the OEMs really want?
What are their top priorities right now?
And so just as you just mentioned,
that information really needs to come from well-informed decision makers
within the auto OEMs.
So the more we can get in front of those people
and get their feedback,
whether it's a yes or no,
or hey, we need to see you build out this first,
that's all invaluable feedback.
- Well, let's get to our first segment, RevOps,
Sicles, where we talk about the tough parts of RevOps.
What's the hardest RevOps or just revenue problem
you faced in the last six months?
- So, so the biggest challenge for us at Aiden Auto is
we are really a brand new technology.
We're not a data aggregator,
we don't use mobile apps,
we don't use hardware,
we are a software only solution
that connects directly to a connected car
and streams real time data directly off the car
to our service providers
and provides two way communication.
So these service providers,
whether it's an insurance company or a parking company
or an EV charging network,
they can communicate directly to the car.
We actually allow them to deliver web pages directly into the car
so they can deliver their web pages,
deliver their URL directly into the vehicle user interface
and it can be interactive web pages
so they can communicate directly with the drivers.
So this is really a new way
for people to deliver services into the car.
And so our biggest challenge is bringing people up to speed
on what Aiden is, how it works
and the incredible opportunity for OEMs
to monetize access to their vehicles
and the incredible opportunity for service providers
to deliver their services directly to the drivers
and the vehicles.
And again, it's new.
So people will always compare us to data aggregators
or to mobile apps or hardware providers
and we're really different.
And so a lot of our initial pitches
is really educating people on the technology
and how it works and what it unlocks.
>> Yeah, when you're thinking about sort of such a,
such a new product offering,
is there any things either,
obviously this company is still very early days
but something in your previous role
where we're getting that like,
just brand awareness of just being even on the map,
how that can help or any best practices
that are where that can help.
>> I think that's a challenge that a lot of startups face.
The other great advantage we have at Aiden is
this isn't just slides, it's not slide where,
we're actually live.
We are live with Volvo Group vehicles,
we're live with Lincoln Co vehicles.
So we can actually give live demos and show that,
yes, we are in production, this is live,
this isn't an idea, this isn't just a concept,
it's live and it's out there.
And if you go live on our platform today,
we can connect you to vehicles tomorrow.
So that's a huge advantage.
But yeah, awareness is that first step.
And then I say the second step is building a sales
and business development team that is really tenacious
as well as really well connected.
And I think on the tenacity piece,
you need BD people and sales people
that push that boundary of they wanna be tenacious
without becoming a pain in the ass.
And it's easy to cross over
and I think we all have had experiences with those sides,
but if you can push that envelope again,
it helps you to kind of maximize your output
of what the effort you put in.
>> Yeah, especially when you're selling something new,
like some people just aren't ready to take the plunge
on something new, even if they,
you feel like it's in their best interests, you know?
And that can be kind of challenging.
>> Well, that's certainly true in our space, right?
We're selling to auto manufacturers
and really the biggest service providers
out of the door are insurance companies,
both of which are very big, typically,
big legacy companies that are very risk-averse
and they don't change direction quickly.
So yeah, that's always a challenge
in building their confidence, building their awareness,
making them aware of all the opportunities
and the problems that we can help them solve.
So that's a challenge.
>> You mentioned investing in customer success.
Obviously, you've already invested in sales
and in marketing, how do you sort of balance
the resources for those three groups?
Or do you even see them as three distinct groups?
Or do you just see them all as part of revenue?
>> I actually like to build a team.
So you've got one BD or sales rep
with a customer success rep that worked together
on a daily basis, so they get to know each other
and know each other's flow.
Yeah, the solutions engineer in there to help out
with the integration and the technical work.
So you've got all of those individuals working together.
So it's not just the teams working together,
but I actually like to team up the individual people.
So you're working with the same folks every day,
and I think that really builds a fluidity
and helps you have a seamless experience
for your end user.
>> Yeah, and then as you layer on marketing on top of that,
how do you think about driving demand
and that marketing function?
>> So again, I think you need to have really tight collaboration
between your sales and BD team
and their initial outreach and your PR and marketing.
So that all is telling a consistent message
and communicating a consistent value proposition.
And then that comes back to the point you were making earlier
about quality feedback from your customers,
from your end users.
We can get that feedback either from the BD and sales folks
or from the customer success folks,
and we can then build that into our messaging
and reflect that in our marketing
so that we're constantly iterating
and constantly improving the message, improving the value,
and making sure that all of those different pieces
are communicating that in sync.
I think that's where you get the most efficiency.
>> Any rev-oops moments over the past year or so,
or any mistakes, if you had a magic wand
and had to do over anything that you would do over?
>> You know, it's always hard to keep all of those pieces
in balance so that you are delivering the people that you need
and the roles that you need
based on the client base that you have.
So it's easy to start with your sales and your BD
and ramp up sales as fast as you can,
but if you don't have the customer success people
in place to support those clients,
you risk having an early client failure,
which can be disastrous for a startup.
So I think even though startups tend to want to put
ton of resources into sales and BD right up front
and ramp up client base and ramp up revenue,
you have to balance that.
You have to have the customer success folks in place
to make sure you're supporting those clients
so that you don't have that catastrophic early on client failure.
>> Let's get to our next segment, the tool shed.
We're talking tool spreadsheets, metrics,
like everyone's favorite tool, qualified.
It'll be to be tool shed is complete without qualified.
Go to qualified.com right now and check them out.
Todd, what's in your tool shed?
How have you set up the technology
in the early days for ADEN?
>> So at ADEN we use Google.
So we use Google Mail and Google Docs.
And so right now we are using a CRM tool called monday.com.
This syncs with all of our Google tools
and makes it very simple and easy for our folks
to track their interactions with clients.
Before monday.com we were on Notion,
which is great 'cause it's super cheap,
but we did find as regrew we needed more functionality,
but we didn't think we were big enough
to really need all of the resources of Salesforce.
And so Monday is a fraction of the cost of Salesforce.
So again, it's a great place for us to start as a startup,
but also one of the things that we made sure was true
as we move forward with Monday
was that when we are ready, when we feel we're big enough
and we need all the functionality of Salesforce,
we can very easily transition and move all of our data
from Monday over to Salesforce.
So that was kind of the ability to move forward
to Salesforce at some point was a criteria
in us selecting Monday.
But it's worked really well.
And then on top of that we need to train our sales
and our BD and our CS to really live in the CRM
and make sure they're capturing everything there.
Honestly, I think that's often one of the biggest challenges.
Even if you're an organization, you've gone out
and you've bought Salesforce and you've hired some consultants
and you've customized the whole thing,
it's all fantastic.
If your sales and CS folks aren't using it,
it's a little value.
So along with your investment in the technology,
you've got to invest in training your teams
and making sure they're really using that CRM team
and capturing everything in there.
What metrics matter to you?
Well, we are an early stage startup.
So right now we really care about quality engagement
with potential clients.
And for us, that means a balance of auto manufacturers
and service providers.
So again, we don't want outreach to a thousand different
different prospects. We want outreach to a hundred high quality
prospects that can move quickly and can convert to actual
production and revenue in this calendar year.
So we are pretty focused on a limited number of high quality
prospects.
Yes, is there any, is there anything that you measure
within that word like to score those type of engagements
or score those type of like ICP sort of accounts?
Well, we always look at yield from outreach.
So if we do a LinkedIn outreach or email outreach,
whatever that is, we're looking for where we can get the
highest yield.
And that comes back to kind of one of our original strategies,
which was to hire highly connected people that have really
strong networks in our specific ecosystem,
which is automotive and even within automotive,
it's connected cars and connected car data and services
into those cars.
So it's a pretty defined niche.
And so by finding people that are already well established
in that niche that have known names,
it really increases your yield.
So instead of getting a cold LinkedIn outreach from someone
you're not even connected to, you're getting an outreach to
someone you've been connected to for years and have had previous
conversations, which and maybe even have done business with
in the past.
And so instead of going from one to 3% yield,
we hope to get 30 to 40% yield out of every campaign.
Yeah, what types of, you mentioned a couple of the types
of campaigns that you're doing.
Outbound to Flington and outbound with email and things like
that.
Any other ways that you think about your go-to-market
strategy and how you're doing stuff and tracking it?
We do use LinkedIn a ton.
We are heavy LinkedIn users.
That's kind of a critical tool for us.
But again, just kind of related to our highly targeted
strategy, we use our advisors on our investors a lot.
So we have a pretty defined target list of auto manufacturers
and parking companies and insurance companies,
EV charging networks, predictive maintenance companies,
fleet management companies.
So we have defined list within each one of those verticals.
And when we bring in a new advisor or we bring in a new
investor or talking to one of those advisors or investors,
we share our target list.
And we compare, who do you know these different companies?
What introductions can you make?
And really, a warm introduction from an investor
can be your most powerful tool.
Because they can put you in touch not only with the decision
maker, but they often can put you in front of executive or sea
level people that can, number one,
give you fantastic feedback on whether they believe your
solution has legs or not.
They can point out holes that maybe you haven't seen.
And ideally, they love your solution and can fast track
moving from conversation into actual production and ideally
revenue.
So we really leverage our advisors and our investors
and their networks.
Any blind spots that you wish you could measure better?
That's a great question, but kind of by definition,
I wouldn't know what they were, would they?
But I'm sure we have blind spots.
It's always great to get someone that has a completely
fresh perspective to look at your product,
look at your value proposition, and look at how you are
bringing that to market.
I love it when someone that I would not think of as part of
the automotive ecosystem reaches out and sees a clear
connection and explains, look, we can service your clients
as well, and this is how we do it, and this is a use case
you haven't thought of.
I love that.
So I always enjoy getting that outside perspective that
points out something you haven't thought of yet.
Any tool that you're excited about investing in sometime in
the near future?
Well, actually, I've been talking recently with the
Angel Squad from Hustle Fund, and I think we're going to use
them to help us, but they have a lot of energy and a really
connected network, and they seem to be able to move at a
higher pace than your typical VCs.
Certainly since the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank and the
subsequent additional couple of collapses, the VC world has
gotten really competitive, really tight.
It's a little bit harder to get VC money than it was before
those collapses.
And so, you know, like the Hustle Fund and startup boost are a
couple of the companies that you can go to now that still
seem to have a lot of momentum, have a lot of energy, and get
things to happen quickly.
So I would definitely do a shout out to Hustle Fund and
startup boost, a couple of great organizations.
So yeah, we're excited to be working with them and also both
companies that I would invest with personally.
Any other thoughts on tool shed or spreadsheets or rat
tricks or anything like that?
Spreadsheets get a bad rap as, you know, old technology, but I
think the reality is all of us, if we're being honest, we'll
admit we use spreadsheets all the time, and they definitely
have value and they have function.
And I mean, the problem obviously is they don't scale.
Although Google Docs helps a lot.
If you can share a Google Doc that extends the use of spreadsheets.
But ultimately, yeah, you need to convert over to a larger
system that's more scalable because the next step for every
startup, once you've got your base clients and you've reached
production and you've got revenue coming in, now you need to
scale and ultimately spreadsheets and the processes that go
along with spreadsheets are not scalable.
So that's when you need to look to your larger tools, your
enterprise tools.
And I think that's why ultimately everybody ends up with
Salesforce and high usage of LinkedIn because those two have
proven to scale.
And I think you kind of have the network effect with both of
those.
All right.
Any other thoughts on like go to market strategy or any other
go to market type things that you've seen best practices?
Well, whenever you talk about strategy, you need to have an
alignment.
So strategy and company culture typically come from your
CEO.
The strategy and the culture is a reflection of theirs.
And then that needs to be tied in with your value proposition
and your product so that you go to market and your outreach all
aligned with that same strategy.
And so for us, we have a very tight niche.
We have a very tight focus, you know, a laser focused outreach.
But that's just for us.
If you have different companies that are, you know, have broad
application across B2C, you're going to need a completely
different outreach and you may need a different strategy and
you may need a different culture within your company.
So I think the key is to align your CEO's vision and your
CEO's strategy and culture with your revenue ops and you're
going to market plan and how all of that is communicated out to
the market.
That all needs to be in sync and all needs to be collaborated
and all the different teams cooperating together to present
a single unified vision and value proposition.
All right, Todd, let's get to our final segment.
Quick hits.
These are quick questions and quick answers.
First question.
If you could make any animal any size, what animal would it be
and what size would it be?
Well, maybe, maybe you could do something with bees.
So bees are pretty amazing animals.
They are incredible at collaborating and cooperating.
And, you know, these little teeny creatures with very little
individual strength can accomplish so much and get so much done
through really tight cooperation and really good communication.
And I think kind of a good metaphor or aspiration for any team
that has a complex problem.
If you can cooperate and communicate as well as bees,
you probably have a good chance of being successful.
In the world needs more honey.
So, you know, more honey is always good.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And more pollinators.
Do you have a rev-ops misconception or perhaps a prediction for us?
I say the biggest rev-ops misconception comes to bee-dee folks.
Everybody, I think, thinks they're the fun guys or the fun gals that are
at the party and buying drinks.
And while the engineers are back at the office working their butts off,
the bee-dee team is out schmoozing clients.
And while schmoozing clients is absolutely a part of the job,
you know, that's the icing on the cake.
All of the extremely detailed planning and research that goes into
who exactly you're going to schmooze and what exactly you're going to tell
them when you have them at that nice dinner.
You know, all of that work kind of gets overlooked.
But I would suggest that bee-dee and sales and CS and all of the research
and preparation that goes into that outreach often gets overlooked
because all they see is the fancy dinner.
So I say that's a big misconception.
There's a lot of work that goes in before you get to ideally sit down
with your prospect at a nice dinner.
If you, or do you have a favorite book or podcast or TV show or something
like that that you're checking out and you recommend?
You know what?
The bold favorite that just came up in conversation recently is the
Challenger sale.
It's a great book and most people in sales or business development
have read it at some point.
It's Dixon and Adam Sender, the authors.
And it's just a classic approach that says, you know what?
Your client isn't always right.
And sometimes you need to challenge your client and help them take a new
perspective to grow their business.
And you can use that to help move from transactional into
relationship-based conversations.
But it is a little bit different perspective and one that's, I think,
worth finding on your shelf and rereading.
I love it.
That's a great one.
It's such a good book.
I really do.
I feel like they need to challenge your sale like 3.0 that's mixed
with our today's go-to market, which is a little bit crazier.
That's probably a good idea.
If they updated that with some new use cases, that would probably
be great.
I bet that would sell.
Well, especially with like everyone on earth being available on
LinkedIn and like how to do things the right way and how to scale
efforts and what social selling is now and all that sort of stuff.
Like there's an element to that Challenger sale that I think is
pretty fascinating.
But yeah, great, great, great shout.
One of my faves.
Excellent.
Any final piece of advice here that you would have for someone who's
newly leading a go-to market team?
Focus.
Every startup fights the challenge.
You get all sorts of people bringing new ideas and things that you
can do.
And you can only do so many things.
And every startup has limited resources.
So maintain your focus.
Stay focused on things that you can do right now.
Don't let yourself get pulled in too many directions at once.
Awesome.
Todd, thanks so much for joining.
Great to have you on the show.
For our listeners, obviously, if you're in the connected car
space for your OEM or service partner, check out adenauto.com.
Any final thoughts?
Anything to plug?
Thank you so much for having me on.
It was a great conversation.
Awesome.
Thanks, Todd.
Thanks, Todd.
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