Systems to Success
On this episode, Asia discusses the importance of internalizing RevOps frameworks, the strategy behind her techstack, and why developing your management style is a gamechanger.
[MUSIC]
Welcome to Rise of RevOps.
I'm the Phasile CEO of Caspian Studios, and today we are joined by a special
guest,
Hijia, how are you?
>> I'm great, how are you?
>> Doing wonderful, so excited to have you on the show,
talking about revops, talking about the cool stuff that you all have going on
at Bread Financial and everything in between.
So first off, tell us a little bit about Bread Financial.
>> Yeah, so we're a FinTech company.
We have, I primarily support the organization that's our by now pay later
product.
So I think like Clara and I after pay a firm and
the larger Bread Financial suite is like in banking.
>> Awesome, and tell us a little bit about your role in revops.
>> Yeah, so I'm one of two senior revenue operations managers on the team.
We are currently a team of five, which is awesome because I've been on smaller
teams in the last couple of years.
So it's kind of cool to be on a team again.
I'm primarily responsible for supporting sales, our solutions team and
marketing.
Then our other senior manager supports success and partnership.
So we really do cover like the full revenue flywheel,
all of the core revenue generating departments.
It's a mix of project management, process improvement.
I do some systems, stuff and reporting, building a lot of reports and dash
boards.
>> You've been in the field for a little while, how would you define revops?
>> Revops is, it's the discipline that supports the business processes,
the systems, the data insights reporting,
and enablement that power your revenue generating teams, all of them.
So it's not just sales, it's not just marketing.
It's whatever your teams are, we have sales marketing solutions, partnerships,
success, all of those teams are revenue generating functions.
They impact our revenue generation.
So our team is really supporting all of the underlying foundation that
allows them to do their jobs.
>> And so do you think your revops team is different from other folks?
How does it stack up?
How does it compare to other revops or go to market teams?
>> Yeah.
So I've been in operations for a long time and different operational roles.
Some of them, business operations, some of them are specialized like sales ops.
And what I've noticed over the years, even in more mature organizations,
the way that operations teams run is,
they're still like we can improve the way that we operate as a team,
the revenue operations teams.
And so we kind of have adopted sort of a agile product or
approach to revenue operations and how our team works.
So for example, we have a sprint cadence.
It's how we're organizing our work and
trying to lean into project management principles.
Because lots of things that we're working on to have stakeholders from
different departments and a lot of moving pieces and dependencies.
And so those are important things to include in your practice.
So I think there's a couple of other people who appears in the community I've
talked to that are doing some sprints and they're using agile frameworks.
But I think that is still not the norm.
A lot of teams are still trying to figure that out, especially teams of one.
And I came from that side of things too, or is in series A, small companies
where
I'm a team of one and I'm like, okay, what do I, how do I manage being in
revenue operations, even as a team of one, right?
>> Yeah, and so I'm curious, you came into this role as a senior revenue
operations manager, what were those first 90 days like,
how did you come into a, what was your mindset like, what did you do,
what did you not do?
>> Yeah, it was funny that you say that, because I actually had a plan
of what I wanted to kind of do.
A lot of the first 90 days of learning, you have to learn your company and
the go-to-market motions, just kind of the high level stuff,
how everything is organized, stakeholders you'll be working with.
But we were finishing like a merge and the bread financial and
the startup arm that I joined merged into one company.
And so there, we're going through this whole brand transformation.
I joined like at the tail end of that.
So instead of getting to do my proper rev ops onboarding,
I kind of got quickly thrown into a lot of things.
We did like an email client migration,
which impacted the entire company, not just our team, but
there are a lot of, with sales and marketing, email is
core part of your business processes.
So there were lots of things that we had to work on and
jump in on that had nothing to do with me, my onboarding and me thinking,
okay, well, let's get operating cadence is set up.
Let's get our PM tool set up.
Those were things that I was kind of thinking about doing in the first 90 days.
Didn't get around to doing until later, because we're going through that whole
sort of company wide merge.
But a little bit post 90 days, getting our sprint framework established,
that was big, building out some sets of dashboards,
I mean, doing an analysis on what we have and what we can keep and
what needs to be built new.
My boss has been there for three years, so she's built a pretty good foundation
like especially around Salesforce, which is our CRM and our source of truth.
So there's a lot of, there are a lot of things established already.
So then there's a process improvement element that we're thinking about,
okay, how can we optimize?
How can we iterate? How can we grow?
So those were things I was thinking about in the first 90 days, but really,
it was a lot of chaos because of company stuff that was outside of our team's
control.
Okay, let's get to our first segment, Rev Obstacles.
We talk about all those tough parts of RevOps.
What's the hardest RevOps problem you've had to face in the last six months?
Systems integrations, I think.
It's challenging in the go-to-market tech ecosystem when you have lots of tools
in your tech stack.
And you have to manage all of these integrations and
make sure that data is standardized,
flowing into different places at the right time, the right place for the right
people.
And then helping other teams also understand that.
That's been a challenge in my entire career.
That's a challenge everywhere I've gone.
And it's like, well, you can't just add another tool to the tech stack.
You have to think about, do we really need a tool?
Are there tools that also have that functionality where we can consolidate a
little bit more?
Because what happens is you got to monitor all those integrations and
make sure that nothing's breaking like tub spot and sales force, for example,
is a really classic one.
If one of the forms that we change doesn't get updated in another landing page,
leads don't get routed.
And that's actually a problem we're fixing right now.
So we have an email alert send a queue and like, okay,
these are not getting assigned, why not?
And you got to go into the systems and see a sales force issue or a hub spot
issue.
So and that takes time and only a few people on the team can do that.
So it's like, how can we make that better?
Yeah, I'm curious, like, how do you balance supporting so many departments with
sales,
marketing, customer success and it's a little bit different at your,
but supporting all the different revenue functions when there's many mouths to
feed.
Oh gosh, I mean, it's a challenge for sure.
Prioritization is really important by having a that process on your team,
but also the senior leaders, like the revenue leadership needs to have goals.
And you have to understand how all the work that you're doing is aligning to
those goals,
even if you don't have, like, even if you're not using an OKR framework,
specifically or a goal framework, having like, OK, in Q3, we're going to do X,
Y and Z.
So how is all the work that's bubbling up from all the departments
align to that and driving those initiatives?
And if they're not, you have to say, hey, you realize this thing that you're
asking
me for, it doesn't align with those things.
That's really important because otherwise it's hard to say, hey, I can't do
this
because it's going to not it's going to negatively impact these initiatives
that we're doing.
On the sides where your team is smaller or your team of one, that like sort of
the PM part
of it, the project management side of things is going to be really important
because I was able to organize all my work in the tool and sort of build out a
roadmap
or things that I would be delivering.
So and I would do it for a year and then break it down by the quarter.
And then with understanding that, of course, things can change, but like, here
's sort of the plan.
So there's a section for sales stuff.
There's a section for marketing and there's a section for CS.
And then you can see kind of how all the projects, you know, overlap or where
they might cross.
And it's then you can take that to the department and say, hey, here's all of
your initiatives.
But guess what?
These also touch these other departments.
Here's all of the things that we're working on.
I'm I'm where we're working on.
And something is just like, don't get done ultimately, even on a big team,
things aren't always going to get done.
So we're doing now similar and it helps that there's a little bit more.
There are a few more people to spread the work around, but I'll put in my stuff
into our tool,
which we're using is called nifty.
And I'll categorize it as sales or marketing or solutions or whatever and put
it into the we have a sprint planning meeting every Monday.
And we kind of go through the backlog, move things around.
Or like, is it still going to be released in this sprint?
If not, we'll move it and then we sort of manage it that way.
We are working on building out a more formalized intake process.
So when people have requests of our team, they can submit a form and then that
will like go into a queue.
That's how I've done it in the past.
Our stakeholders have a form and they can say, I need a new field in sales for
us or I need a data, mass data change or I want to.
I want a new sales tool and it goes into a form and it goes into a queue and
then it gets prioritized that way.
Love it.
Have you had a revoops moment in the past year?
Yeah.
So typically the best practice for making changes in sales force specifically
is to go through sandbox environment, right?
So you can test everything and then then put push it into production.
And I did there were just there a few times where I just built directly in.
Production and then I'm like, oh, yeah, should have should have done that in
the sandbox first.
As I was trying to be fast and I'm like, this one's a low, probably a low
impact change.
It gets just a new field.
It's not connected to anything else, not connected to automation.
But it didn't hit the sandbox refresh interval.
So it didn't make it in the sandbox.
So then the sandbox refresh and then it pushed changes back to production.
So it overrope my changes.
So I'm like, what should have gone to the sandbox?
I've had also some in my previous positions where that hub spot, the sales
force integration in the back end, there's this like sync sync health settings
page that you probably should monitor because it'll tell you like how many
records are affected by the sync errors.
And when those records are affected, it means they're not pushing into sales
force because it's a box and there's a big number and there's a small number.
The big number is like the type of error.
And then the small number is how many records are actually affected.
So you might see a four and think, oh, the four is not a big deal.
But underneath it says 10,000 records affected because these pick less values
are not matching sales force.
I mean, so it's 10,000 leads are getting pushed into sales force.
If they might or, you know, the qualified ones aren't.
And so I fixed that that time and it pushed.
Yeah, about a thousand leads to sales force.
Sales team was like, what are these?
My boss was like, what are these?
Are these leads?
Were they qualified?
Because that's revenue on the table.
Because that sync error is kind of sitting there for a while.
And so yeah, so it's like, oh, you know what we need.
We need a data governance like framework and an audit cadence so that we're
managing these things so that they don't fall through the cracks.
But that's also hard to do in your team of one as well, because that's a heavy
lift.
Creating whole framework and and auditing your systems by yourself.
But important.
Yeah, that's pretty good.
I like that.
Yeah.
All right, let's get to our next segment.
The tool shed.
We're talking tools, spreadsheets, metrics, just like everyone's favorite tool
qualified.
No B2B tool shed is completely about qualified.
Go to qualified.com right now.
Check them out.
Asia.
What's in your toolbox?
Tool shed.
Toolkit.
Well, in my toolbox, my tool kit, sales force, CRM, HubSpot, marketing
automation platform, dial pad for dialer,
insight squared for visualization data, Zoom for meetings.
We're rolling out a CI for conversational intelligence.
Sales engagement platform groove.
So I think like outside of the brands, the companies, the core pieces, you
probably need CRM marketing automation.
Sales engagement platforms are like the top and an enrichment tool because you
need contact data, obviously.
And so yeah, I think those are the top four.
And I'm partial to sales force.
I know that HubSpot is coming up and coming with their CRM functionality.
So if you're a smaller company or you have less budget, like you could use that
It's really about setting the tools up correctly to support business process
and not the other way around buying the tool first because of the shiny
marketing, but not understanding if it's going to fit your use case or the
functionalities even there.
So I think those are the core, but like my favorite tool.
Yeah, that's what was going to be my next thing.
I was going to say, what's new?
What's what's the what can what can you not live without?
I can't live without, but I am living with that for right now is lean data.
Oh, yeah.
Yeah, that I mean, the three time user of lean data, I have self implemented it
before like it's just the company is a revenue operations thought leader.
Evan Lee is a thought leader in revenue operations.
They I respect their like their ethos a lot and the product is good.
So there are lead routing.
That's how like like kind of started out lead routing and lead to account
matching.
And it's a sales force app.
So unfortunately it doesn't work for other CRMs, but they have really.
Increased like the functionality over the years.
There's so many really cool things that you can do.
I think that's probably not like outside of just lead to account matching.
You can do territory management.
They have a feature called the list analyzer.
So you can check for duplicates before you upload a list.
And I use that used that for when marketing would have events and then they're
like, okay, here for the event, can you upload these as campaign members?
Like, okay, great.
Do these people exist already as leads and contacts?
And then it gives you the sales force ID.
So I don't have to go like find VLOOKUP match those to upload them.
Do you need that ID to mass upload them?
So there's that there's like if you use outreach, there's an outreach partner
integration that you can use
lean data to trigger sequences versus the triggers and outreach, which are more
limited.
Like with the like now I'm getting nerdy and technical, but the outreach
triggers are a little bit more
limited with the criteria that you can use to trigger stuff.
It's just like a smaller scope of things you can do, right?
So the automation is not as powerful on that side.
But lean data is and lean data sits inside sales force.
So you can build it all in sales force and the routing, like you can have
complex routing rules or round robin.
There's like work load balancing.
So you can say if someone has too many leads, like pass it to the next person,
you can set that up.
Yeah, I mean, there's I can't say enough good things about mean data.
And then other tool, I'm a huge Asana.
I'm an Asana diehard.
Oh, yeah, we are too.
That's how we build the show.
Everything we do is.
It's an Asana.
Yeah.
So like we're using nifty right now, which is fine.
But I do really like Asana.
And then I think another like, freebie for anyone who's in RevOps is Google She
ets.
We built a lot of things in Google Sheets.
Like I built my next question.
Tell me about the spreadsheets.
Data dictionary in Google Sheets.
Like they're just very flexible and you can use them for a lot of different
things.
So we're doing like a commission calculations in our in our Google Sheets.
Right now we're doing forecasting in Google Sheets right now.
But we do do a lot of reporting in other places.
Like we have Looker.
That's like all of the data.
The RBI tool for all of our data and then Insights Grid is like go to market
data.
So sales and marketing.
A little bit of success.
Data, but it's primarily used for sales and marketing right now.
And then of course we have a lot of Salesforce dashboards that we use.
We're getting really good at putting stuff into Salesforce and and Insights
squared, at least on the go to market side.
I love this spreadsheets.
And so that's great.
Still my next question.
Do you have any blind spots that you wish you could measure better?
I think this is a challenge for other RevOps practitioners and teams as well.
As like product or usage or for us, it's like financial data.
That doesn't get pushed into the CRM.
And so we're like have to go back and forth between Looker and Salesforce.
Like part of that's for commissions, part of it's for other like.
How are we doing or like we want to do redefine our territories or something?
Or if we want to do Tam analysis, it's kind of like.
Just very just drink it, not all tied together.
Um, so it makes that kind of analysis more challenging.
And the thing about like putting that on to the data team is that they're
farther
away from the business context than revenue operations is, you know?
So it's would be awesome if we could get some of that data into our Salesforce
environment and in other past companies too, it's been like product data.
Like we usage data, not everything should go into the CRM.
Like the CRM shouldn't be the CDP, but there could be key product data points
that can tie in with all the Salesforce information, your other go-to-market
information that you need.
Like that's I think key.
Yet it's interesting that you say that we were just having a conversation last
episode where we were talking about kind of matching the 30,000 foot view of
the
customer journey.
Yeah.
To RevOps and making sure that that's like on the exact same page so that Rev
Ops
knows like all the different pieces of the customer journey like really well so
that you can diagnose when there's issues like is this, you know, where's the
leak
and where's the actual water coming from versus where's like the water, you
know,
we were talking about like, you know, if it's, if it's the blueprint of the
house,
right? It's like, oh, it looks like we have a leak on the first floor, but in
reality, we have a leak on the third floor and you just can't see it, right?
Right.
Right.
That's another thing that I use a Google sheet for is the customer journey
template.
Yeah.
I have one.
But, but so anyway, it's interesting that you say that the product information
kind of feeding back into, because it's such a great point that when,
especially like if you're, you know, constantly deploying and product is
changing something and you don't necessarily know about it, that reporting
that stuff back into CRM might, might never happen unless you have some sort of
you know, push or automation.
Yeah.
It was, it was a very manual process to go into, um, you could do one or two
things like the, the AM, the account manager or CSM could either log into the
platform and manually click through each account and look on the account
landing
page in the platform, which is extremely inefficient, not scalable or go into
amplitude, but amplitude is really built for like product managers.
It's, and product people, it's not built for the AMs and CSMs.
And it doesn't have a good integration with Salesforce.
Yeah.
We were like going back and forth with engineering about, okay, we need to push
some, we need to write some information back to Salesforce.
Um, should we do it in house with our engineering team, like write the script
and use API, we could go buy a middleware slash integrator tool.
Then we could use that in the entire ecosystem with, you know, our marketing
automation and all the other tools.
Um, so yeah, that's a, that's a pretty big gap.
And we're like talking strategically in about how to, to bridge that gap now.
As well.
And yeah, there are spreadsheets, stuff, tips, ideas.
Oh, um, there's a, there's a couple of plug-in or,
Chrome extensions, um, one of the G sheet connectors.
So you can connect Salesforce and Google sheets.
Uh, that's pretty cool.
And there's another one that's called zapx.
So those are two like Salesforce Google sheet Chrome extensions that I'm like
playing
around with.
Anything else that you're doing with data or anything that's like surprised you
So this PM tool that we're using, the reporting in the tools and that great.
So why I've done is I export a CSV and put it into Google sheet, um, so that we
can
show like what kind of work we're doing.
Um, and it's broken out by the rev ops pillars.
So process, process strategy, um, systems, which is like Salesforce hubspot.
Or one of our go to market tools, anything that's like a configuration or
automation.
New, uh, new tools, stand up and implementation.
That's all in the systems category, um, reporting, and then, uh, enablement.
So, and then by department, so we're able to see, like I just throw it into a
pivot
table and put charts on it so that it's easy to communicate to a senior
leadership.
Like, Hey, our team in this last sprint, 50% of what we delivered was systems
based, 30% was process based, you know, 20% was, uh, enablement.
So they're able to see that very easily.
Like, Oh, this is what rev ops is doing.
And then there's a category down from the, the pillars.
And it's like, was this built a report and dashboard or was it, uh, a new
feature
quest or was it a business process change?
Was it an automation?
Like there's more, a little bit more granularity.
So if we wanted to pivot that as well.
Um, and then so it's by each sprint, right?
So every month, what is the breakdown of the work and which department is it
for?
Like right now it's mostly sales, but that could change.
That's cool.
Um, and then we have data around our, our territories, which are vertical based
Um, so the next kind of interesting thing that we'll be doing is looking, um,
as
we're like further, you know, solidifying our ICP and all that stuff is looking
at,
is checking in looker to see which verticals perform best.
Um, over time, that's the next kind of maybe big analysis project that's on my
mind.
All right.
Let's get to our quick hits.
Questions of quick answers.
Boil.
I'm ready.
Let's go.
Number one, if you could make any animal any size, what animal would it be?
And what size?
Whoa.
Oh my gosh.
Um, hmm.
I know this is supposed to be quick.
Oh, that's all right.
It's a question.
Any animal.
Um,
it'd be kind of cool to have something to put in my pocket.
Maybe like a mini elephant.
I know.
A mini elephant pocket size elephant.
I wouldn't like it.
Yeah.
Like a, like a doxon sized elephant.
Oh, yeah.
Little baby.
Yeah.
Elephants are good luck in my culture.
There you go.
I feel like, yeah, they're, um, perfectly pocket size if we just had more of
them. Um, yeah.
Right.
Exactly.
Do you have a favorite movie character of all time?
Oh, maybe you like.
Mm.
Man, like I watched so many movies, but I don't remember, like not a lot of
them are super
memorable.
Huge Harry Potter fan also read the books.
So.
Yeah, Harry Potter, um, watch the Matrix trilogy.
Trinity was my favorite character from that.
Um, I also really liked to learn the rings.
All three of my faves as well.
Yeah.
Okay.
I got to three.
What is one skill set that rev ops leaders should invest in improving.
Project management process management skills, hands down, become the best PM
that you can.
If you could have one super power, what would it be?
I wish I could fly.
Is there a rev ops misconception that's out there that you want to clear up?
I believe this is still a misconception because I see it all the time.
Revenue operations is sales operations rebranded and that centralized
operations
doesn't work, but it does revenue operations is all you support the core
revenue generating
departments.
That is includes marketing and it includes wholesale, CS, whatever account
management,
whatever that side is, whoever's responsible for upsells, cross cells and renew
als.
That team that should also be included in the revenue operations wheelhouse.
Do you have a rev ops prediction for the future?
I see companies starting to really.
Internalize the rev ops framework.
So that's the important piece, right?
The process, the systems, the insights, the enablement, that's the pillars.
And you have to have those and understand those and the leadership has to be
bought
into those, those pillars that support all of the revenue generating functions.
If not, you're not setting your team up or your organization up for success.
But I see this future moving that way.
Final question.
What is your best advice for someone newly leading a rev ops team?
Newly leading.
Yeah.
So I would say that like people management skills are really important.
Cause managing processes and like managing stakeholders, that's completely
different from having to actually manage direct reports.
And companies don't always give you that training.
Yeah.
So understanding like that people work differently and people have different
skill
sets and sometimes sometimes you have people who need a little bit more.
And holding than others, or need a little bit more attention.
That's like normal.
I mean, it's part of the people are you're, you'll have a range of people on
your team.
And the more that you can try to understand, you know, like what drives them
and like how they work and how they communicate, the better you'll be at
getting
them to do stuff.
Cause I've had to manage people before.
And that's something I had to realize.
I'm like, yeah.
Oh, I see people are adults and they will do their jobs, but you just have to
understand them a little bit more.
So like leadership style sort of define developing your leadership and people
management style for leading a team is important.
And then the other part is like the operating the framework as much as you can.
Get your team on like a sprint cadence.
That's a way to manage the work, right?
So that you can like manage that, but then also report it up to the
organization
and say, here's what my team is doing.
Cause that's, that's a thing that gets asked a lot.
Well, you don't know what RevOps does.
Well, here it is.
Here's our roadmap.
Here's our, our sprint release schedule.
Here's what we're going to deliver.
I love it.
Asia, that's it.
That's all we got for today.
Any, any final thoughts?
Anything to plug?
Um, oh, plugs.
Oh my gosh.
Uh, I, I mean, I'm a huge advocate for people getting into revenue
operations and empowering people in that sense too.
So like, I'm always open to.
questions or people want to reach out to me.