Tell a Story with Your Data
On this episode, Kiva will describe the importance of breaking down marketing silos while building a strong RevOps team.
[MUSIC]
>> Welcome to Rise of RevOps.
I'm Ian Faiz on CEO of Cast Me in Studios.
Today I am joined by a special guest, Kiva, how are you?
>> I am good. Thank you for having me.
I'm happy to be here.
>> Yeah, super excited to chat about
AlphaSense, a lot of cool stuff that y'all are doing from a revenue perspective
Of course, we're going to talk about revenue operations and everything in
between.
So, starting off, what is your definition of RevOps?
>> My definition of RevOps, RevOps is about bringing teams together.
It's about breaking down silos.
It's about aligning everyone toward a common goal, revenue growth.
And what RevOps is responsible for to some extent is orchestrating
this seamless collaboration between sales and marketing and customer success.
And all of that is fueled by data.
And so providing all of those teams, all of those leaders,
the data that we need to inform all the decisions that we make.
>> I love it. That's great.
We might have to put that on as the opening of the show.
I think you saw it.
Taking a step back, what does AlphaSense do?
>> The easiest way to understand AlphaSense is we're a Google for business.
But what we really do is we're an AI powered search engine
that sits on top of tens of thousands of sources of content
that was previously found in lots of different places.
In this one platform, content like sell side research from every bank and
SEC and global filings, earnings call transcripts, transcribed expert calls,
press releases, news, all of this content sits in this platform,
layered upon which is an AI powered search engine that enables you to find
the very specific thing that you're looking for more quickly than you would
if you were using any other tool.
>> One of the things as we're prepping for this interview,
which was super exciting for me because I knew of AlphaSense for a little while
is that you'll have a cool free trial.
So our listeners can just go try a free trial to learn what we're talking about
And I didn't know that before we were doing our research for the bot.
>> Have you tried it?
>> No, I'm going to do it after this.
>> Yeah, I'll know.
We'd love to have you try the platform and engage with a seller.
>> I know, I'm super excited.
It speaks to the importance of data.
It speaks to how much content is out there,
how many different sources are out there, and
how important getting insights is.
And that's like you said, that's what RevOps really does is finding the truth
from the chaos.
>> Well, I'll tell you, it really is an interesting time you're working for
a company like AlphaSense.
If you think about it 100 years ago, we were living in the industrial age with
an economy built around manufacturing.
Today we're living in the information age with an economy built around
information.
And so a tool like AlphaSense that organizes all of this information that is
available to all of us all the time is a really cool and exciting place to be.
>> And it's a cool and exciting RevOps problem.
I'm curious to hear how you're taking it on.
How have you organized your RevOps team and what is your approach?
>> So the RevOps team is now 17 strong.
>> Wow.
>> And we split them between presales, sales and post sales.
So presales, everything from top, top, top of the funnel,
all the way through to the initial inquiry.
Then we've got a team that's responsible for
measuring every facet of our pipeline.
And then a team that's responsible for all of our existing clients.
So once you become a client, we're a land and expand business.
So we want to understand how quickly we grow within our client firms.
And of course, renewal and referral.
And so that's how the team is organized.
They specialize in one of those three sections.
>> And how do you think about building this team as a CRO?
Because we've talked to certain CROs that definitely don't have a 17 person
RevOps team.
Clearly it's something that I think you're more on the cutting edge of.
>> They're crucial to our success.
They inform everything that we do.
But I'd also say they're a secret weapon.
I think there are sort of two secret weapons in scaling a global sales
organization.
The two are sales enablement and RevOps.
And of course here we're talking about RevOps.
But to me, there isn't a decision that I make without being informed with data
from
the RevOps team.
And so like I mentioned, they measure every facet of the business.
They're feeding me, not just the information every single day, but
every sales manager, every individual contributor.
So that each of us has a really developed understanding of the business that we
're
running and can press the gas pedal down or pull it up based on what we're
seeing.
What we're seeing by geography, what we're seeing by vertical, subvertical,
persona, the velocity of opportunity as it moves through a funnel.
Macro economic impact on one portion of our business.
Anyway, it informs sort of everything that we do, our hiring plan, entering new
markets, bolting on new products.
The team has grown alongside the revenue organization.
We're now 500 strong.
Wow.
And so we weren't always a 17 person RevOps team.
But that is the team that I believe is required, the size of the team,
to support our business in the way that we need it.
Yeah, it's really cool and it's really interesting.
I should also add that your 500 person team is also growing and
you're hiring right now.
So for our listeners who are looking for the next role in revenue,
Q is hiring.
But yeah, it's really interesting to me because I think you have this shift
from just the folks that were just doing things, knocking stuff out day to day,
the sort of more ticket taking type mentality.
And now you have this sort of like elevated go to market strategy and
operations, blending with RevOps, like where does one start?
Where does one end?
What do you feel like is RevOps getting a more strategic role in
addition to the tactical role?
I think it should.
In out the sense that absolutely is a more strategic role.
Of course, we handle the day to day, those tickets that you mentioned,
people having trouble with sales force instance or
there are things that are happening all day, every day across the revenue
organization that the RevOps team is responsible for helping themselves.
But the team at Alphasens is absolutely strategic.
They're thinking about territory creation and
our SAM serviceable addressable or TAM total addressable market relative to
the target by vertical, by subvertical, by personas that we're selling into.
In Alphasens land, we sell the financial services corporate
big corporations and consultancies which adds a bit of complexity.
I'll give you an example, every Sunday night, I get an eyes and
ears email from my two leaders of RevOps who are sharing with me what they're
seeing and hearing on the ground.
Not just in the data, that's a really important part of it,
what they're seeing in Tableau or in Salesforce about pipeline,
about forecast, about velocity of opportunity.
But also what they're seeing by rep, by SDR in terms of how much pipeline was
created last week, by vertical, by geography, where we're perhaps getting
hard hit, where we should press the guest pedal down a little bit harder and
higher perhaps more AEs into that vertical or that region.
And so every Sunday night I get this eyes and ears email that gives me a sense
for what they're seeing and hearing on the ground that I might not be paying
attention to or may have missed.
It informs a lot of what I do the upcoming week.
>> Interesting to hear you take such a, take the long,
approach to both.
And I think that more of things.
>> Just real quickly, I think to some extent it's about how data driven,
how process-oriented you are as a leader or your business is in terms of
using data to inform decisions.
And so in our case, we are a hyper data driven revenue organization using
that data that we pull out of whatever tool to inform every single thing that
we do.
The other thing that RevOps does for me is helps me use the data that I might
find in Salesforce or Tableau or GONG and tell a story with that data.
I'm telling a story to an investor, to a candidate, to the board,
to the broader sales organization.
And so what they become a bit are storytellers,
helping me tell stories with the data that they pull out.
Really, really important.
>> And especially when you're looking at the entire customer life cycle.
>> Okay, any other thoughts on sort of like team organization or RevOps
strategy or
anything like that?
>> I think one thing I might add is it's important to understand how best to
use.
Not just as a CRO, but the relationship that begins to exist between RevOps and
SDR and SDR management and AE and AM and marketing, right?
Those are relationships that don't form overnight.
And so each of them have to figure out how best to collaborate with each other
and
use the data that's being provided by RevOps to inform the strategy in that
specific function.
And so we spend some time on that thinking about, okay,
this is what RevOps is sharing with the SDR leadership team.
What do I do with that information?
How do we get higher quality meetings?
How do we decrease the time between meeting and opportunity?
How do we identify the right targets?
What tools are we using to do that?
Are things that the RevOps team assists the SDR team with doing?
And of course, we can say the same kinds of things for AE, AM, etc.
>> Considering this is not your first rodeo as a CRO,
do you think kind of coming into this role, you had a little bit more of a
refined look at how you would sort of build a RevOps team?
>> Yeah, I think just generally you recognize what works and
you're trying to build the playbook that delivers on the promise.
And so for me over the course of my career, through failures and
successes, it's identifying where the blind spots have been or
the things that have been missing, the missing ingredients in terms of the team
that I was building to deliver on the goal.
And so joining Alphasyns that I joined six years ago, I mentioned sales enable
ment RevOps.
Those were the two first functions, support functions, if you will,
that I hired to help me scale the business.
>> That's sort of the old school way of sort of building a business was like,
hey, I'm gonna go hire a bunch of salespeople and we'll get at it.
And now it's like you hire one, one marketer, one salesperson, one customer
success person.
And then you hire a RevOps person to make sure that all of that stuff is built
on a tech stack,
the right way from the very beginning, getting the right data.
It's just so different than it was a decade ago where it's like, yeah,
let's go hire four sales reps and just have them beat down the doors and close
to what's.
>> It is, and I'd say even more so in a business as complex as ours is,
where you're communicating value to so many different client types.
>> Sure.
>> Between every sector of the economy and all of these personas within these
companies,
financial services and corporates and consulting and all these geographies,
it would be nearly impossible for a seller to come in and
not only take your product to market, but begin to evaluate the market,
determine where we win, where we lose, how fast we win, how predictable the
business is
over here versus over there.
And so to me, that's what RevOps is delivering on a daily basis is the
information that we
need to figure out where to go faster, where to continue to invest.
I think still companies fail to recognize the importance of that function in an
organization that is trying to scale.
>> Well, and I think that what's so tough for the sales manager, the sales
leader in
those situations is like the data lies to you all the time, right?
You talked about the story.
There's a great story that we did on a different podcast where it was a
marketing
leader where they ran a trial where they'd give you a $100 gift card to demo it
And it was like the worst performing campaign, and I guess that doesn't work.
And then six months later, their bookings shot up like crazy and
like what do we just do?
And it turns out all the people who did those demos weren't ready to buy at
exact moment in time, but they were in the exploratory phase.
And then when they were ready to buy, they all came back and
it was like it was the best marketing campaign we ever did.
And so it took a very sophisticated understanding of data and
being able to go back and look at what was the common threat of all those
accounts.
There was this thing, a sales leader would have never been able to pick that
data point out if there wasn't a holistic look at data for that organization.
There are countless examples that I can share where there's a false
positive that we see and the knee jerk reaction is to pivot away from the
opportunity as a result of something that we're seeing in the moment based on
client reaction.
But if you have this team like you're describing who's really thinking about
this in the long term and across all of the sellers, not just the one that you
're
sitting alongside, generally speaking, you're going to come out with a better
answer.
And so it's really about building a decision matrix, it's about the pros and
cons, it's about really like thinking about how are we going to build our
business in this market with this vertical against this persona, with the
sellers that we have.
How do we think about a territory that gives each of our sellers an opportunity
to achieve their target?
And the RevOps team is able to dive into every single customer prospect at
AlphaSense and pick out the people that could respect the potential buyers.
And so one of the things that we're delivering on a regular basis to our
sellers is not just a territory that includes X number of accounts, but the
very specific people within each of those accounts who should be buyers of
AlphaSense, thousands of them.
And so you walk in the door and you really have a good sense for your service
and your service is a very visible adjustable market, these are the folks
that we've identified as able to buy from you.
And I'm sure there are more, right?
But we believe that just by selling to some portion of the folks that we've
identified, you'll significantly exceed your target.
That's a really important job that the RevOps team plays in building
confidence across the sales team.
Right, right, 100%.
So we're going to talk about some of those things, some of those tough
parts of RevOps.
What's the hardest RevOps problem that you faced an example in the last year or
so?
RevOps and just the revenue organization in general, we're constantly thinking
about how to be better today and tomorrow than we were yesterday.
So it's increasing our conversion rate, it's increasing our, the number of
people we have on at any given time.
It's increasing penetration rate inside of our existing client firm.
So I mentioned we're a land and expand business.
We've got about 4,000 customers and we have a lot of room to grow inside of
almost every one of those companies.
And so how do we go deeper and wider inside these firms?
How do we think about, in alpha sense land, the combination of content in our
sales communication of value to make it appear as though alpha sense was
purpose built for you?
Not just for the personas that are in our wheelhouse that we've been selling to
for the last 10 years, but all of these new and different people who exist
inside these client firms who could potentially buy from us.
And so I don't know that that's been a, you know, that's not an acute challenge
that I think about over the last six months or year, but it is absolutely a
rev ops challenge that we are constantly trying to solve.
And so there isn't a day that goes by that I'm not thinking about talking to
our rev ops team about, you know, the entire sales cycle from top of the funnel.
How do we get more people in?
How do we increase our demand gen and, you know, make it a true combo between
outbound SDR and inbound marketing demand gen?
How do we increase the size of the opportunity by inviting more people to
a traditional initial meeting?
How do we engage more of the trialers?
So you've got 10 or 20 people on trial.
How do we engage them during the course of the trial, roll out the red carpet
and
make them see the value of the platform beyond what they're finding for
themselves?
So get to a higher trial to close business conversion rate.
You know, these are the kinds of things that we're thinking about all the time.
We just open an office in Singapore.
How do we get into that market and grow that market really quickly?
These are just some examples.
We acquired two companies over the course of the last 18 months and we
integrated those companies seamlessly really well.
And we grew the first company stream, which is an expert transcript library
business into our platform.
So now you've got these four voices in our platform.
So if you think about the analyst voice, you want to hear from cell side
research
analysts, you've got the company themselves who are talking about themselves
and earnings calls and filings.
You've got the journalist voice through press releases and news.
And now inside our platform, you've got the experts voice through these
expert transcribed interviews.
Well, we bought that company.
We integrated the content and now we take that to market.
That's a RevOps job to help us understand who are the
likeliest buyers of that additional content set.
How do we set incentive structure appropriately based on this new content
set that we have in?
How do we build spiffs into our annual comp plan that account for this new
content set?
Right?
How do we just drive growth in this new company that we've bolted on to.
So RevOps gets involved in all of that kind of thing.
And while these aren't, I'd say rev obstacles, they're things that are
standing in the way of our accelerated growth.
And so we've got extraordinarily high ambitions for our, that we've set for
ourselves and we set expectations really high.
And so it's really about making sure that as good as we might be as
as successful as we feel like we are based on the growth trajectory that we're
on, we can always do better.
And sure, we're always pushing each other to do better than we did yesterday.
How do we increase the conversion, increase the size of deal,
decrease the sales cycle kind of thing.
A lot of the historical data and historical information from a sales team
when you go into a new market can kind of fly right out the window, right?
It's like, average time to close average, you know, a number of people that you
need in the deal, all that sort of stuff.
Like, did you just say, Hey, we're going to take all these benchmarks.
We're going to bring them in and we're going to say, Hey, we're going to
test this out.
Like, how, what was your sort of approach there when you, when you entered the
new
market?
It's a great question.
I want to take a big step back and get right back to answer your question.
Yeah.
Four years ago, we as an ELT were becoming distracted by evaluating and incub
ating all sorts of new ideas, right?
People were coming to us or we'd come up with the idea on our own and we'd
test the idea, incubate the idea with a few sellers, with a few prospective
customers.
And if the idea worked, we'd launch it more broadly, but it was really
distracting while we were also running a high growth, high velocity scaling
startup.
And so four years ago, we spun up a go to market team, go to market strategy
team, a swap team of folks whose whole job is to incubate new ideas, whether
M&A, new markets that we want to enter, new verticals that we want to sell to,
new personas that could perhaps benefit from the opposites platform.
And they would test these ideas with small numbers of people, AEs,
account managers, prospects, customers through interviews, determining whether
or not it made sense for us to, you know, press the gas bill down a bit on, on,
on that specific idea.
And so in the case of Singapore, we put the go to market team on entering this
new region and they did months worth of research to understand one, whether
Singapore was the right place as a jumping off point for us to sell into that
region.
Two, you know, just in terms of like sourcing talent, where does talent come
from in that region?
We looked at our customer base and so some significant number of our global
customers have major presence in the APAC region.
And so how close are they to Singapore?
Do we need to be there in person?
How much can we do over Zoom?
Anyway, all this research done by our go to market team, which allowed us to
feel
a lot more confident creating an entity there and beginning to hire there.
And then we took one successful seller from AlphaSense US and moved him there,
he was someone who had formerly in a previous career sold in that region and
so it's somewhat familiar with it.
And he was our first sort of boots on the ground, did a fantastic job,
continued to
help us get the lay of the land.
And over the course of the last six, 12 months, we've begun to hire a support
system around him and additional AEs.
So I think SDRs and sales management and rev ops and go to market, you know,
other folks on the team who could support, you know, a business that far away.
It's really cool to hear how the innovation that you set in like years ago
bears fruits because that's like always one of those things like those,
it's like what's the ROI of building that sort of like innovation muscle that
Eric Reese who wrote Lean Startup, he always talks about sort of like,
I think it's him that like innovation is like a muscle like you have to like
actually work on it, otherwise it sort of like atrophies.
And I always think about that, how difficult it is to be in sort of like
innovate mode and be in like get the job done right now.
Similar to like strategy and, you know, tactics there, but that's really cool
to hear about sort of like innovation bearing fruits that are extremely outside
the box, I guess.
Well, also it's not just entering new markets and new verticals and new
personas, but as you think about sort of the evolution of an organization like
an alpha sense, you move from what was historically exclusively organic growth
into a mix of organic and inorganic growth.
And so whether it's M&A or partnerships or channel sales or other kinds of
things that might help us accelerate revenue, it's great to have this team who can
evaluate the likelihood of that thing working before we actually go through
with whatever relationship we may be interested in exploring.
Because every single day there are opportunities that get presented to me,
we should be selling to government, of course we should, we should be selling
to business schools, we should be in the Middle East or Africa, right?
All of these things are really good ideas and absolutely we will one day take
advantage of, but how do you evaluate whether or not was the right time
without distracting yourself from continuing to run a high growth business
like we're doing?
Yeah, it's such a great point.
I mean, like everybody, well, you should sell to government, you should sell to
this, you should sell to that and you're like, yeah, but that's taking our playbook
and potentially throwing it completely out the window because like that subset
of customers or whatever it is has different sales cycles and different
velocity in the way that they can be sold to like literally the way they can be
sold to.
You can't give them gifts, you can't do it.
There's like so many different things that are probably embedded in your go to
market that you can't just drag and drop it and yeah, that's super fascinating.
All right, let's get to our next segment, the tool shed where we're talking
tools, spreadsheets and metrics, just like everyone's favorite tool, qualified,
no B2B tool shed is completely without qualified, go to qualified.com right now
and check them out, the perfect tool for someone in RevOps.
Turn your website into a selling machine, go to qualified.com.
Kiva, what's in your tool shed?
What are some of the things that you're using?
Or are you spending most of your time?
Most of my time spent in Salesforce, Tableau, Slack and GONG.
I'd say those are the four most important tools I use every day.
And GONG, we use GONG for everything from listening to calls that have been
recorded to helping us forecast.
And of course Tableau, if you're not familiar, just visualizing.
I mentioned earlier sort of telling a story with data.
That data visualization for me is key.
Putting them into sort of something that is easier to visualize helps me tell
the story.
Okay, what about your relationship to spreadsheets?
There aren't a lot of spreadsheets that I use every day.
Most of the time I need to understand a forecast or a pipeline, how we're doing
against our hiring plan.
It exists in dashboards and in one of the tools I mentioned.
What are some of the key metrics that you zoom in on?
Or maybe some of the common ones and then maybe some that might be unique to y'
all?
Sure, so the common ones are most important to us too.
So it's top of the funnel, it's meetings and pipeline by source, pipeline by
vertical, pipeline by subvertical.
And what I mean by that is life sciences is the vertical, pharmaceutical,
biotech and device would be the subvertical.
Of course you can take that across every sector of the economy, energy,
industrials, TMT, CPG, financial services, hedge funds, banks, asset managers,
private equity, big consultancies, pipeline by rep, pipeline by rep with tenure
pipeline by rep, who's on ramp.
So pipeline, but pipeline broken down in a number of different ways.
So trialers are a great indication of how we'll do next month, next quarter.
So trial or conversion, we pay very close attention to.
And then of course, close business and revenue.
Those are the most obvious for us and we track them very closely.
Maybe some of the less obvious is how is very specific content performing
by vertical and subvertical.
If you think about opposites, we've got these sort of two modes, if you will,
technology and content.
The technology is chickass.
It's undisputed.
Great search.
You're not going to find a better search engine anywhere else.
The search engine means little unless the content beneath that search engine
matters.
And so we spent the last 10 years building an extraordinary platform of all the
content
that knowledge professionals need to do their jobs every day.
We want to make sure as we ingest new and different content or we license newer
different content, it matters to these new personas that we may be going after.
And so thinking about by persona, by vertical, by geography, how well the
content may be performing
or how much of it is being consumed by all of our trialers and users is a
really important metric for us.
There's the correlation between usage, the time you spend in our platform and
the likelihood you are to buy or to expand or renew is another thing that we pay very close
attention to.
What about like a blind spot or something that you wish you could measure
better?
I think as we expand into new personas.
So you think about who gets the greatest benefit from the AlphaSense platform
today. It's a knowledge professional working inside of any company you can with any
degree of complexity.
And so it's strategy and corporate development and competitive intelligence and
business
intelligence and investor relations on the corporate side.
But as we expand into other places, R&D, early R&D,
market research, marketing, strategic marketing, enterprise sales.
WebOps.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I wish there were a better way to evaluate not whether the content in our
platform and our
platform would be valuable.
No doubt all of those additional personas would extract value from our platform
But in running a business that I can forecast, so a predictable business, how
predictably
they would buy.
The goal is to build a forecastable, a predictable business.
And we have a very good sense for how the current users of our platform and the
folks that
are in our wheelhouse buy from us and how they use and extract value, how fast
we expand,
how quickly we close new logo business.
But as we want to go deeper and wider inside of our client firms and sell to
new perspective
users sort of outside of that wheelhouse, there's always a challenge in
understanding
how predictably they'd buy.
Yeah.
The go to market challenge for a company like AlphaSense is so, so cool to me
because when
you're selling to potentially any company and any persona, there's like endless
ways, literally,
that you can go to market to those folks.
And it's just, you know, it's so complex.
So it's interesting that you sort of mentioned that is like, I think about this
all the time
where the tactics can be so different for what some people might like webinars,
some people
might like, you know, to have in-person events, some people might hate that.
And it might be a persona or an industry that likes certain things because that
's the way
that's always been done, or it might be an age thing of like, well, younger
people like
this, but older people like this, like it's just, anyways, endlessly
fascinating.
Yeah.
No, look, I think that's, well, that's well said.
That's a good point.
And I think you're right.
You know, but that is also, you know, the challenge in expanding to these new
personas is making
sure that you are supremely confident.
You understand how they buy.
I'll give you a good example.
So we sell the consultancies and consultancies consume alphasense, but use the
platform and
pay for the platform different than other kinds of companies do, mostly because
they're working on behalf of customers and clients.
But if you're a strategy consultancy, you've got a client engagement and you
use alphasense
to serve you well during that client engagement.
And so we had to build an entire pricing model to support that way of using our
platform,
where it's not necessarily always on.
You're using the platform when you're working on very specific engagements over
the course of a year.
But I'd say the other thing, which we spend a great deal of time, this bleeds
into sales enablement, but it has a rev-ops element to it.
Training our sellers on, and I'd say the evolution of our revenue organization
over the course of the last six years since I've been here,
this one concept is connecting the dots between what's going on in the world,
what's going on in an industry,
what's going on at a company, and what's going on at the contact level.
Right, because what you're trying to extract from our platform is information
that you'd likely not find anywhere else or you know,
hard time funding anywhere else, or it's getting you to the answer very quickly
And you're using the information to make big investment decisions or big
strategic decisions.
What we're delivering to you is the ability to connect those dots.
And just back to your point about back in the day, handing someone a computer
and saying, you know,
we'll see how you do, we're as far away from that at alphasense as you could
possibly be.
Because when we're now taking our product, our platform to a new persona and
talking to business development who's responsible for in licensing inside of a
pharmaceutical company,
we've got to be able to connect those dots with them and help them understand
how they're going to extract vertical specific information from our platform
that they're not getting from anyone else.
And that takes a really sophisticated sales professional.
Yeah, it's that's so cool. And I'm glad you mentioned sales enablement as part
of this because I think it's like,
we've been able to start bringing data from sort of the chaos of where we used
to be of like understanding and being able to say like,
Hey, our sales team in this vertical, they're not sophisticated enough, like
full stop.
They might be great sellers, but they are not sophisticated enough for this
group of people. If you have the capability to take someone and make them 10,
20% better like you have to do that you have to invest in that.
I could not agree more sales enablement just like rev ops is, is the is the
secret weapon.
You have to invest in a team who spends their time training your sellers to
stand toe to toe with very sophisticated buyers.
You've got to be able to communicate the value of your platform, differentiate
it from every other tool that that person is using to the most sophisticated
buyers inside of the most sophisticated buying organizations in the world.
And so, if you're relying on a sales manager to do that, or the sales person to
figure out how to do it on their own.
You're missing something. Yeah, to have a team that's that's solely dedicated
to spinning up the training, whether synchronous or asynchronous right both
that is required to keep your sellers sophisticated enough to have the
conversations that they're having with these very senior people inside of these
very complex organizations.
That's what leads to success. Right. That's what leads to persona based selling
to vertical based selling. And we're moving into a more specialized world where
generic sales just don't work.
Yeah, that's exactly right. And nobody wants to freakin time wasted. That's the
other piece. Like, hey, if you have an actual I mean this is why qualified,
shout out qualified exists.
If a CEO ready to buy comes to your website, you better roll out the freakin
red carpet. You cannot like be like, hey, do you want to talk to like our, you
know, 22 year old SDR like no way.
Like that person needs to talk to the person right now who can get them the
best answers right away and like that is just, it ain't the old way is is so
far gone at this point.
You have to embrace the new way. Okay, let's get to our final segment quick
hits. These are quick questions and quick answers. Keep on you ready.
If you could make any animal any size, what animal would it be and what size
would it be.
I would shrink an elephant. Put him in my backyard because my children love
elephants and they would get to play with the elephant without fear of getting
stomped.
Me too. I'm huge fan of elephants. Do you have a favorite book or podcast or TV
show that you've been checking out.
So favorite book that I read recently is called unreasonable hospitality, the
remarkable power of giving people more than they expect.
It's about the hospitality industry, but I think about it just in terms of
customer success and account management and rolling out the red carpet and just
delivering more than you promised.
So really good read I can't remember the name of the author, but I highly
recommend.
Do you have a misconception or prediction as it relates to revenue or rev ops
or go to market in general.
I think we've hit on it. I think I think you said it. I think rev ops is
becoming more strategic.
That is a prediction.
I think just in general.
This idea that the more specialized the more persona based the more vertical
ized.
Generally speaking, the more successful your sellers will be, but it requires a
significant upfront investment.
You have to be convinced that that sophisticated sales approach and the
conversation with a sophisticated buyer requires that you can stand toe to toe
with them.
And it's partly sales enablement. We're talking about that, but it's really
being given the data that you need to run your business.
What I'm forecasting and it's not just the AEs. It's the AMs on gross and net
retention. It's the SDRs on meetings of pipeline.
And we, the attendees of these meetings are meant to serve as their board.
And so we're poking holes and we're testing assumptions and we're asking
questions, but we're not necessarily giving advice.
This is their plan in very much the same way that we, I, the CEO show up to a
board meeting once a quarter and do the same kind of thing.
So I, you know, this all goes back to this idea that RevOps is really strategic
, but it's really strategic in part because they are, they are serving all of
our many CEOs in helping them run their many businesses.
I love that. That is so great. What a, what a fantastic insight and a great way
to, to finish here.
Um, give it's absolutely awesome having you on the show. Final questions. Do
you have a piece of advice for someone who is a CRO who's, who's leading a rev
ops or go to market team.
Pay attention. Um, pay attention. I think I mentioned earlier, the eyes and
ears email I get on Sunday night.
I think what you find is that your rev ops team works so closely with your
revenue organization that they may see things that, that you don't see.
Pay attention to what they say, invite them to weigh in, you know, give them a
seat at the table and have them participate in these strategic conversations
about where we, where we should invest or where we should pull back.
Absolutely awesome having you on the show for listeners. Check out alpha sense.
Like I said, you can do it. You can do a trial and check it out right there.
Um, Kiva's hiring in the revenue or, uh, Kiva, any, any final thoughts,
anything to plug?
No, I appreciate you plug in the hiring. We are hiring across all functions and
globally. So, um, if you're looking, we'd love to hear from you. Please reach
out on LinkedIn or email.
Um, no, look, you know, thank you so much for having me on. This is a fun
conversation.
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