Time Kills All Deals
On this episode, Charles Lu, VP of Operations at LexCheck. Charles explains how he uses RevOps as a strategic tool for not only tracking revenue, but assessing performance and identifying areas for improvement.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
Welcome to Rise of RevOps.
Today's episode features an interview with Charles Lou,
VP of Operations at LexCheck.
LexCheck accelerates contract review and streamlines
negotiations by delivering red lines and issues lists in minutes.
Today, Charles will explain how he uses RevOps
as a strategic tool not only for tracking revenue,
but assessing performance and identifying areas
for improvement.
He'll also describe the biggest challenge
in modern sales leadership, balancing creativity and process.
Welcome to Rise of RevOps.
I'm Ian Faizan, CEO of Cast me in Studios.
And today, we are joined by special guest Charles.
How are you?
I'm doing great.
And thanks for having me.
I'm excited to have you on the show.
We'll be talking rev-ups and all the cool operational stuff
you're doing at LexCheck.
So first, let's get into it.
I know you're not technically a diet in the world,
rev-ops person.
And yet, here you are.
How did you come to be someone who is leading operations?
Yeah, yeah.
Definitely don't fit, at least what I know of as the typical persona
for operations.
Originally, I was trained as a mechanical engineer.
And then I practiced corporate law, actually,
at a large firm in New York City after I went to law school.
So I actually came to LexCheck originally
as a refugee from Big Law and then
into a product and a business analyst role, actually.
And so my path to now leading operations of the company
actually went through product and business development,
if you will, initially building out features of the tool,
like very technical stuff, and then from there
into more dealing with our clients,
figuring out how to maximize value for them.
And from there, really taking charge
of a lot of the operational aspects of the business.
And at this point, that mandate includes sales and revenue.
So my title now really reflects that not only
is the operations of the company in terms of delivering
and just day to day, making sure employees are taken care of,
but also our sellers and how they're going to go out
and help people solve their problems, get LexCheck,
and for us at least close those sales and then get them going.
So yeah, that's a little bit of the history.
And what's your definition of revenue operations?
It's a structure that my sales team needs to fit themselves
into so I can help them be better at what they do.
That in a nutshell is the way that I look at it.
It's a tool, right?
It's a tool for me to, one, get information
about how the revenue acquisition aspect of the business
is working, right, evaluate whether it's doing well,
whether it needs to be improved in certain areas.
But also it's a tool to help me experiment, right?
With different tactics, different ideas,
to be able to kind of implement those things
in an efficient way and get learnings out of them
that I can implement and deploy and kind of get value out of.
Obviously coming into a role where you didn't have
like a dad in the law, operational background,
or operations background and now leading rev ops
and seeing the business holistically, obviously,
you are, if you have a background in law,
so you know the product intimately from that perspective,
do you think that sort of gives you an advantage
in like the rev ops lane because you understand
the product so well?
I think it definitely does and I think it does in two ways,
right?
So first coming from more of a product operations
and just general kind of operations pathway
through the company to rev ops, I think I'm a little bit more
in tune with the kinds of problems that we're actually
trying to solve for our clients first and foremost.
Some of them might actually solve with our internal tools,
right?
It's great to be able to eat our own dog food,
be able to kind of take these tools that we spend so much time
developing and get some real value out of them.
And in that process, that gives me even more insight,
right into the kinds of things that go into an implementation
cycle or even a buying cycle and things from those,
from essentially those being able to take things
from the act of implementing or setting up the tool
and actually using it in practice that are going to translate
or need to be reflected and measured at different parts
of our sales cycle.
So I think it definitely adds a layer of a perspective
that wouldn't otherwise be there and I'm really glad to have it.
Yeah, you know, so often on the show,
there's sort of the more strategic level revenue,
life cycle decisions that get made.
And then you have the like underlying technical sort of ability
and the team that can sort of build that stuff out
and bring information back to sales and marketing
and customer success.
Yeah, yeah, I think particularly for us,
because now revenue operations and our product
are very intimately linked not only through myself
but also some of our other sellers, right?
Who we brought in over actually from our implementation side
since I kind of took over.
We're closing that gap even more, right?
We really want that gap to be as small as possible.
What the client experience is and how to maximize that
should be front and center in the minds of all of our sellers.
Yeah, zoom in out.
So tell us a little bit more about LexCheck
and who are your customers?
Yeah, sure.
So LexCheck is an automated AI powered contract review solution,
right?
So in a nutshell, we can actually make edits
to foreign documents.
So documents that are coming across the desk of your sales
team or your procurement team contracts
that your business is entering into.
LexCheck can actually read those even if it's not your document,
even if it's coming from somebody else,
it can actually go in and make automated changes
to the language, right?
So it's actually taken a first cut
and marking up that document, something
that typically you would have to wait for legal to be able to get to.
I mean, we all know legal departments are strapped everywhere,
right?
And I've never heard of a legal department that
isn't short of short on bandwidth.
But to be able to do that first pass
and be able to take some of that lift off of legal's plate,
what we're really doing is helping
legal kind of serve our business teams a little better.
And then obviously, you're not just out of operations here.
Maybe you've observed also the council, the announced council,
how involved are you in the actual deals?
You're seeing things from the one inch view
and from the 30,000th of you.
Yep, no, that's exactly right.
I do serve the role of in-house council
when it comes to any agreement that we're signing.
So I'm essentially a team of one.
And we're serving all of our customers, all of the entire sales
team, our procurement team, our product team,
when they're looking at new tools,
all that kind of has to run through me.
So let's just say I'm really, really grateful
that I have a great tool internally that I can use to help me do that
and help me make sure that nobody's waiting too long for help from legal.
OK, let's get to our first segment.
Rev obstacles.
Let me talk about the tough parts of RevOps.
Would have been some of the hardest problems
that you faced leading a team that includes RevOps?
Yeah, I think when I came in and kind of took over
the mandate, one thing that I noticed immediately
was our sellers had some friction with the infrastructure
that we had put around them.
So exit criteria for stages in our pipeline,
requirements for escalating issues, all of those kinds of things.
Do we have a product sheet?
What am I selling?
And how do I sell different things?
Do we have the right collateral?
We had a very comprehensive infrastructure set up,
but it actually became a bit of an obstacle
because it prevented folks from getting creative.
We've been around for a while, and we've been fairly successful
in a lot of ways.
But I think that we are still, as far as I'm concerned,
always experimenting to be able to do things better.
In the space where we're at, especially as one
of the first movers in the AI space,
in order to stay ahead, right, and stay ahead of the competition,
not only do we need to be creative from a product perspective
and a delivery perspective, but also from a sales perspective.
And so the biggest obstacle that I've had to face in this role
so far has been creating an infrastructure or process
points around our sellers that is flexible enough to let them
be creative and let them do what they do well, which
is help our customers identify pain points
and get them on a tool that's going to provide them value.
But at the same time, I still need
to be able to get that insight around how they're doing their jobs
and how well they're doing their jobs.
So being able to take that really complicated infrastructure
and turning it into something powerful but manageable
was probably the biggest overall challenge.
I love this stuff because it's totally
where the road meets the road.
And it's like, obviously, in a smaller work,
it's like you can see it all if you're running,
if you're running Ramos for a 20,000 person company,
it's completely different.
I want to talk about the stages.
Yeah.
It's like, what was it about exiting the stages that was creating
the challenge?
So I'll give you a real easy example.
So our pipeline for sales opportunities that are qualified
starts with discovery.
But the exit criteria from discovery
into the later stage in the pipeline,
at that point it was evaluation or proposal,
something like that.
The exit, there were something like 12 or 14 different exit
criteria that needed to be filled in around what the customer
was doing, what kinds of documents
were they looking at, what kind of throughput
or in the workflow were those clients seeing, right?
Estimated time savings, all of that kind of stuff.
And don't get me wrong, those things
are super, super important for us to know, right?
To be able to get maximum value for our clients.
And so I understand why they would have been there
to begin with.
That being said, though, as we--
I mean, one of the monitors that I live by--
and this actually comes from our CEO
is the time kills all deals, right?
Inactivity kills all deals.
Open decision points will kill a deal.
Yeah, right.
And so what the challenge that we saw coming in
was taking those exit criteria and boiling them down
to, can you write a proposal for this client, right?
Not a proposal that they need necessarily to sign, right?
But can you write a proposal that will basically
set out something that we can provide them
that will provide them value, right?
At a price point, that makes sense
to solve a problem that exists.
And if you have that information,
you can move it into proposal, right?
So that's super, super concrete example of kind of one thing
that we did.
Another example, actually, is taking that proposal document
and moving it way further up in the process, right?
And this is a little bit counterintuitive,
I think, for our sellers when we first did it,
maybe not for your listeners, right,
who have kind of thought about this problem a little bit
more broadly.
But for our sellers, I think, they, in bless their hearts,
they really want to get it right.
So they want to know the information.
They want to be able to serve our clients
in the best possible way.
They want to get all this information,
get it down, basically down the line,
know everything that they possibly can
before they put a very detailed proposal in front of the client.
And one thing we changed was we took that proposal
and actually moved it right after discovery, right?
And what that helped us do was one,
create a tangible, achievable goal for our sellers
as to what they're discovering it to accomplish.
And two, give us a measurement point very early on about,
is this a deal that makes sense for us
to continue spending time on, right?
Our clients at this point know because we've,
we've kind of optimized the way that we communicate this stuff,
that this proposal document isn't a final,
it's not meant to be signed right now, right?
Nobody's saying that you need to take this proposal,
take it to, you know, your investment committee
or your procurement committee
and have them sign off on it right now.
It's just meant to be a vehicle
to make sure that we're on the same page, right?
Is this a need for you?
Is this a product that you're interested in?
Is the price point in the right ballpark?
And getting that out very early in the process gives us
some certainty in terms of, you know,
this is worth making additional investment, right?
Working with the client to kind of get this
across the finish line,
but also it's really, really beneficial to the client.
'Cause then they have a piece of paper
that they can use to have internal discussions, right?
They have a piece of paper that they can ever refer back to
or show people and it helps them solidify in their minds
that this is a sales process.
It's not just, you know, we're up in the air talking
about interesting problems to be solved by novel technology.
It's a really tangible, okay, we can,
if we sign this up next week,
we can get started within, you know, two weeks
and my problem is gonna go away, right?
That's the kind of, that's essentially
what we're trying to achieve.
- That was a great answer.
So obviously, you know, you're a growing company,
how do you balance managing sales,
which we talked about, a bunch, marketing
and customer success?
- I mean, the short answer is there's not much
balancing, right?
It's just three different firehouses, right, if we're honest.
- Right, flops.
- And ideally, they're all kind of,
you can point them all in the general direction
of success of the company, right?
Which is really for us, success of our clients.
So, whether it's, you know, marketing and sales,
it's really about finding a way for our clients
to understand that they have pain points
that can be solved with our software, right?
They can be better off using our tool than otherwise.
And then our customer success,
it's really about the practical nitty gritty
of helping them get there.
Making sure that once things are implemented,
they can find that value.
I guess where the balancing comes in, right,
is the better job we're doing from a marketing
and a sales perspective, the easier a job
our customer success department has, right?
So being able to kind of create some process
around, you know, marketing and sales, right?
What kinds of points we're pushing
in terms of highlighting value and pain points
to how those things can be solved
when we really get into the sales process.
What are the must-haves when you're doing the demo, right?
In terms of being able to communicate that
with the client and being able to show them
what the value looks like.
If you can map those things on
to how customer success is also doing their jobs
and bring it all back, right?
You get past that, the biggest problem,
which is always that loss and translation piece, right?
We're experts in our tool, the client is not.
The more we can hit consistent,
the same consistent points over and over again
from top of funnel, right, in marketing
to, you know, the real heart of the funnel
with our sales team and then kind of post-sale activity,
the more we can be consistent
and be hitting the same things,
the more success we have.
- Obviously, legal review is incredibly hard to scale.
This is something that like every single company deals with,
like no matter who you are, you deal with,
legal problems you deal with legal review.
It's incredibly expensive and time-consuming,
but you also have to deal with this too.
And so, yeah, just curious how do you,
how do you make the legal stuff easier for a customer
and then how do you deal with it sort of internally?
- It's interesting, right, because, you know,
Lex check is really on the cutting edge
if you're using AI to solve a lot of these problems,
but the fundamental principle of what we do
is actually very simple, right?
And it's not, you know, we're not a company
that's rooted in LLM, even though we use it.
We're not a company that's rooted in NLP,
even though we use it, right?
We're a company that's rooted in just simplifying
and scaling legal.
And that starts with a word that everybody has heard,
not a lot of people actually do this,
but it starts with playbooking, right,
the way that you actually conduct the legal review.
And that's easier said than done, right?
If it was easy, everybody would already,
like they'd already have it done,
everyone would have a super easy to understand,
super easy to follow, you know, call it a Bible, right,
for how you review legal documents.
But because it's such a difficult thing
for a lot of people to wrap their heads around,
the alternative is let's rely on lawyers
to just exercise their own judgment, let's basically
bring in expensive resources to be able
to do this job for us.
And that's where we get into the problem
that we were describing, right?
Which is, it's really difficult to scale
because all you're doing then is you're stacking body
on body on body, each of those bodies are super expensive
and the only return that you're getting on them is linear,
right?
So you're not really setting yourself up for good growth,
right, especially if, you know, your revenue takes off.
By playbooking things gives you two advantages.
First, it actually makes the on-the-ground task
a lot simpler, right?
You take out a lot of the discretion,
you make it so, you know, somebody with less experience,
right, somebody with, you know, somebody with less
of a proven track record on judgment,
you're more comfortable having them take the wheel, right?
Because they have guardrails from that playbook.
The second thing you can do is actually take a look
at the playbook holistically and think,
does this actually, does this playbook make sense
for our organization, right?
Are the things that we're doing,
do they actually make sense for a company our size?
Now, those are things that you can do without LexCheck, right?
If you're really disciplined and you take an eye
on all these things and you kind of see it all holistically,
you can do that kind of stuff without LexCheck.
But with LexCheck, we are able to actually, you know,
with LexCheck, I'm able to support all the departments
of the company by myself, right?
I don't have any help.
I can do it all by myself.
And that's because instead of delegating to another person
that I need to train up, instead of, you know,
delegating the analysis of the playbook to somebody
that I need to train up, what I can do is actually delegate
this to our own software.
So I have a playbook.
I know how I like to mark up NDAs, right?
I know the, you know, three or four things in NDAs
that I really care about that make,
that are important to the company to LexCheck.
And now I have a piece of software that whenever one
of our sellers has an NDA, they need to enter in two.
Instead of coming to me with it,
they can run it through the software.
And if the software says, you know,
I don't see any big issues here,
I'm not making any big changes, they can sign it then.
Yeah.
They don't have to come to me anymore, which is great.
For stuff that's a little bit more complicated, right?
For stuff like when we're entering into sales agreements
with our clients, and they want us to use their form,
obviously, right?
Especially when you're dealing with Fortune 500 clients,
like, you know, we are, they're often saying,
no, we're not using your paper.
You gotta use ours, right?
Like we're, we're XYZ Fortune 1 company, right?
Like, we're not using your paper, come on.
They're sending it to us.
And at that point, what I can do is I can look at, you know,
running it through our tool, I can see, okay,
here are the points that I actually need to push back on.
And it helps me out a little bit, right?
'Cause it makes it so that review process
is actually quicker on me,
and I can get it back around to myself
rather quickly.
But in addition to that, when you start running more
and more of these documents or more and more
of our clients through the tool,
what I can see is essentially a heat map, right?
What are the things that are sticking points, right?
Having the software be a layer on top of the playbook,
having it actually apply the playbook
gives me a ton of information about
what are the sticking points of legal review?
What are the things that are holding back
our performance from a RevOps perspective, right?
And then, you know, because these two functions
are consolidated here, I can make a judgment call.
I can say, okay, well, you know,
and if I had a colleague who was representing legal,
you know, apart from me, I would go to that person,
I would say, these things are, on average,
taking us, you know, they're adding a week or two weeks
to our sales cycle, right?
We think that that's projecting out
to killing X percent of our revenue, right?
If we get rid of this, we think we can see the benefit.
Do you want to keep that, right?
Is that something that you really want to keep?
And we can have that conversation
because we have the data, because we're measuring it.
Specifically on the legal documents,
because anybody, I think, who sells, you know,
especially enterprise stuff, right?
It's gotten to that point where legal is doing their best,
but ultimately, you know,
frustrating a lot of the other stakeholders
because they have a job that's so hard to understand, right?
And being able to take that job,
codify it, simplify it, and be able to optimize on it,
one increases transparency,
so everybody's on the same page, right?
This is not because legal wants to slow anything up.
It's because legal has a mandate, right?
But then we can have a conversation about that mandate.
And then form a conversation, you know,
that is based on actual facts and actual documents,
and we can have a conversation about smoothing things out
and making things easier for everybody.
- Gosh, I cannot even tell you how many deals
I feel like I've lost in my life
because the legal review is so slow.
And so it's like those sort of things
that every single sales leader, you know,
loath the wait time of that legal review,
forget the deal getting killed, but just like the actual time
time kills all deals.
And like, obviously you must see that all day, every day.
Like, would you have any like data about that?
About like, how much time things go into legal review?
How much time is wasted there?
- Yeah, for sure.
So, and I'm gonna speak for us at this point,
just on kind of data that we have internally, right?
I think before we started using our product internally
to help us review our sales agreements, they were taking,
and this is my time, right?
This is just actually my time.
They were taking me on average between six and 10 hours, right?
And typically that would be spaced out
over a couple of days.
And these are fairly robust agreements.
I like to think I was already taking
a pretty commercial approach, pretty middle of the road,
not trying to hold up the sales team.
At that point, you know, I was working with the sales leader
and the sales team, I really need them to succeed.
I'm an early employee at the company, right?
And ultimately my goal here is growth, right?
But since we've implemented that software,
that time has shrunk down to less than half.
And, you know, it's actually shrunk down probably more,
but I'm gonna say half 'cause I don't wanna create
just like an unbelievable situation, right?
I think a lot of people, they might not necessarily
understand exactly how much time you can save
when you have something you can go in
and make some changes for you,
and actually streamline your review process.
The real benefit though, is that instead of having
to sit down like two or three times with that doc, right?
Like open it up, you know, after I have my coffee
in the morning, if I don't have other meetings, right?
Like what kind of day is that?
Being able to come back to it, you know,
having to come back to it the next day
because my afternoon got totally destroyed
by a bunch of fire drills, right?
That, you know, that right there,
that's another 24 hours in the cycle.
If I can do this thing in half the time
or a quarter of the time, I can do it in, you know,
maybe a third or a fourth as many days, right?
So that review time actually gets magnified
when it comes to how much you can save in a sales cycle, right?
Saving four hours of review time can equate
to way more than four hours in a sales cycle
because of all the handoffs.
So-- - Oh, it's like a week, right?
- Yeah, it's amazing. - Because the thing is,
I mean, you know this way better than I do,
but I have from a sales perspective,
the problem is that they have a review time too.
So it's like you have two rounds back and forth
of red lines. - Yeah.
- And plus there might be another call in there
where the lawyers have to get on the phone
and hash some stuff out. - Yeah.
- And that's a negotiation in of itself.
So it's like, yes, let's say it's like, you know, 10 hours,
but it's also that 10 hours ends up getting broken up again
by each of those different iterations.
And like, those are much shorter,
but still you have to work all those in.
And it's always a week. - So if I can't--
- Yeah, at least a week.
I think, let me, so ideally where we wanna get
is where we currently are with NDAs, right?
The MSA problem is always gonna be bigger,
it's always gonna be more complicated,
it's always gonna be a little bit more specific
to each of our clients, which is why our focus right now,
especially for our commercial clients,
is down to the NDA, right?
The big problem with the NDA is not necessarily
that the review itself takes in anordinate amount of time.
The docs are short, people kind of get them, right?
But really to your point, the problem is all the handoffs.
Comes in from the business, it's gotta go to legal.
Legal's gotta pick it up, it's at the bottom of a stack.
You're not getting it, even if it's the easiest thing
in the world, even if it only takes 20 minutes to do,
to your point, it's not coming back in less than a week, right?
- Yeah. - 'Cause they got a 20 page MSA,
they gotta go through.
- Yeah, or they're reviewing, you know,
chat, GBT, or open AI, it's like fair use policies
or whatever, right?
Like they're looking at other things,
they're helping everybody else out in the company.
And so that, who knows how long it's gonna take
to even get to that NDA, right?
So for us, right, being able to have our sellers
and our technical sales guys,
be able to just use the software, run it through,
get an answer back.
And if there's nothing in there that, you know,
jumps out at them as, or if there's nothing in there
that the software has flagged as needing escalation,
they can just go ahead.
And that right there, that's the real value, right?
Being able to get into these simpler documents
and getting rid of that,
getting rid of that hand-up altogether.
- You know, when we look at sort of like operational challenges,
like one of the ones that was identified
for a lot of organizations is like,
does the rep actually have approval authority
to do XYZ, right?
Do they have approval authority to give a discount?
They have approval authority, like,
what is the back and forth between that stuff?
Like all that, right?
Like we've identified that's a huge sticking point
for many reasons, and we try to optimize that.
And then on the legal side, like we never did that, right?
- Yeah.
- It's like, even though it's just as time consuming,
just as painful, like giving the power of the rep
is like generally speaking, as long as they have guidance,
like, it saves us way more time than money.
- Yeah, and I think the added benefit of having some,
like having the software as a check on that
is that we have an audit trail.
- Right.
- Right, we have an audit trail about what's acceptable
and what's not.
The software's already made a call.
And so it's way more conducive to building trust
because we know that there's gonna be an audit trail.
We know that the rep is seeing the issue, right?
And then we can trust that they actually saw it
considered it and made a call.
So being able to have that has been really, really helpful.
- Any rev oops moments that you've made since you took the role?
- Ah, rev oops moments.
I mean, I'm sure there are plenty, right?
And I think we run a lot of experiments and some of them don't pan out.
I think early on for us was, again, this is maybe a,
maybe vestigial of kind of where we started before I took over.
But I think, you know, we were a little bit too specific
with some of the experiments that we were running early on.
And that was sort of a miscalculation on my part.
I think I think, you know, obviously you come in
and you wanna make impact, right?
You wanna make some changes,
you wanna be able to kind of show improvement.
And so you have, you know, really specific ideas
about things you wanna do.
And so we tried a couple of these things
and luckily, you know, it didn't burn too much time for us,
but the results were just not what we wanted.
- And either thoughts on sort of coming into the role
new to rev oops, any other things
that sort of lessons would take place there?
- I mean, I think I knew generally kind of what
the mandate was gonna be,
but I don't think I really appreciated coming in,
just gonna have broad, right?
How complicated, how many moving parts there were.
One thing I've definitely learned is, you know,
I'm not here necessarily to reinvent the macro wheel, right?
There's a lot of great thinkers out there.
There's a lot of great literature.
People have, you know, published a lot of really great stuff
about how to kind of think about this stuff
from like a high level, where the rubber meets the road
is being able to actually execute on those things.
And so that's where I focus most of my time now.
I can really leverage that my background
as a lawyer and an engineer, right?
To kind of break things apart.
I think in a lot of ways lawyers and engineers
are have a lot more in common than you might think,
'cause both of them are just taking something
that's more complicated, breaking it up
into its constituent parts
and fixing it to be able to achieve a goal, right?
And that's now what I'm doing here.
So the takeaway is,
be able to leverage some of the really good thinking
that other people have done, and be creative and applying
into kind of actually getting it to our sales reps,
to our marketing guys, right?
To our customer success team.
Be able to kind of compartmentalize,
a little like compartmentalize things
so that they can run their experiments.
And then so as they're running their experiments,
you get real-time feedback, right?
With our sellers, it's okay.
You're trying some very specific outreach
into five specific organizations, right?
You need to, like every two weeks,
you're gonna have to report back
what are the things you tried that have worked,
what are the things you tried that haven't worked?
We're gonna dig into those things.
It's gonna influence how we do our marketing.
It's gonna influence how we do our customer success stuff,
right? That kind of thing.
- Let's get into our next segment, the tool shed.
We're talking tools, spreadsheets, metrics,
just like everyone's favorite tool.
Qualified, you can go to Qualified.com.
To learn how no B2B tool shed is complete without Qualified,
head to Qualified.com right now and check them out.
They're our best friends in the whole world,
and they've been with us since the very beginning
of Rise of RobOps.
So go check them out at Qualified.com.
Charles Woodson, your tool shed.
- Right, tool shed.
So we're a HubSpot shop.
So we're using it from a CRM perspective,
but beyond that, I'm actually trying to keep it
as simple as possible.
Right?
And that gives me as much flexibility as possible.
So we, I mean, like, I'm sure like a lot of other people
in this space and in this role,
I just live in spreadsheets.
Love them, love pivot tables.
If I can pivot in, it makes me happy, right?
I would say that right now,
like the most important stuff to me right now
are spreadsheets that help me track two things.
So first is essentially a product sheet, right?
Of what's going on in proposals and what's coming back.
So we keep track now of every proposal that goes out there
and the response that we get from it.
Right?
So we've centralized all that information.
So we can kind of see in as close to real time as possible
what the trends are in terms of what people are,
what people think is makes sense for our tool, right?
Actual feedback from the space in terms of our proposals
going out.
The second thing, again, and this goes back to, you know,
time-killing all deals is being able to track
how many of our deals are stale, right?
That's something that very early on,
because we had a very complicated sales pipeline
when I came in and took over the role,
was really, really hard to figure out, right?
Because you just have all these deals
and they're all in the same stage
and some of them have been there for a long, long time.
I mean, if they're not actively engaged,
there's a couple of reasons why that couldn't be, right?
But all of them are bad for us, right?
The customer doesn't have a pain point.
We might not be able to help them.
Our customer just doesn't treat it as a big priority.
You know, either way something needs to happen.
And so being able to kind of track that in real time,
see how long things have been in which stages
of the pipeline, right?
And have that rolling on a day-by-day basis
of when things are crossing a certain threshold,
gives us a process point for folks to go in and say,
okay, well, this deal has actually kind of been stale for,
you know, I've sent three emails out in two weeks,
I haven't gotten a single response, right?
Maybe I keep an eye on it.
Keep going.
You know, people are busy, they might not get to it.
Once we cross that six, eight-week boundary, right?
Maybe it's time to try a different tack.
Maybe it's time to try to, you know,
shake something loose.
Maybe, you know, it should be special.
You'll find a way to get special promotional pricing
out to this particular client based on what they do
or, you know, what other things
that they could bring to the table.
Or maybe it's, you know, maybe it's giving them a bit more
of a, you know, maybe something like a light breakup email,
right, really kind of moving the needle a little bit.
But having that process point is really, really important
because it creates some accountability again
for the sellers, right?
So that they come back and, you know, they're forced to,
'cause a lot of sellers are optimistic as they should be.
And so they always think it's gonna come back.
They always think, hey, my next hour
to my next email is gonna be the thing, right?
It's gonna shake it loose.
It always is, but being able to kind of track that,
you know, as close as real time as possible
and having, you know, that trigger be there
so that the seller can think, oh, yeah,
this is crossing that threshold where, you know,
after eight weeks, like our win rate drops precipitously.
I gotta figure out whether or not this is worth
to keep, you know, in my pipeline, right?
And then, you know, they can take that
as a process point and go get some answers.
One way or another, 'cause either way,
either they can help the client out
or if there's really, you know,
at this point it doesn't make sense for that client,
then let's focus on someone where it does make sense, right?
Someone who can get some more value out of our tool.
What are your favorite spreadsheets?
- Oh, God.
I really do love, I love our proposal spreadsheet,
which basically just has like every line item
that we've ever proposed.
Being able to kind of see that in the pivot table,
like what was the reason, how much one's progressed,
been super, super, super helpful.
And then also just being able to kind of track activity
at a really granular level, right?
Being able to see, okay, you know,
these are three or four different initiatives
that our sellers are running, right?
In terms of like being able to kind of generate
their own outbound meaning for themselves a little bit, right?
They're looking at these targets here
are how many people that they've been able to contact,
these are the kind of strategies that they're running
and what the results have been.
And, you know, if you have your seller's report
and like a relatively simple but consistent format,
you can roll that stuff up
and you can start seeing kind of trends across, you know,
which verticals make sense, which titles make sense, right?
That stuff has been really, really fun for us.
So those would be the two for me.
- Any blind spots that you wish you'd measure better?
- The biggest blind spot is probably,
what are our customers actually sending upstairs, right?
When they're talking to their bosses for approval.
And you can try to include like tags and documents, right?
You can try to include, you know, links and PDFs
that will get you, you know, get the data that you need
to see like who's opening what?
But oftentimes it's just someone's writing a summary
of that information and it's going.
So it's a problem that we're trying to tackle first
with the proposal.
It's a problem that we think like if the proposal
is moving its way upstairs and it's being like,
we want to create a document that is a no brainer
to include when it goes upstairs.
- Right.
- Right?
And if we can do that, then we have some more confidence
and we can try to optimize around, okay,
how do we get that satellite out there
in the universe that is, you know, the client's atmosphere,
like they're Jupiter, like you know, it's going in
and it's making a pass or the atmosphere
and it's going to send some signal back, right?
That's what we want to kind of create.
But I'm sure it's not unique to us,
but like being able to know like what they're actually
valuing and trying to get more of that.
We try to do it a little bit with like surveys
and just asking folks, but it's still a big blind spot
for us in terms of, you know, what ultimately
is moving the needle upstairs.
- I love that.
So true.
Like are you using the tools that we're making you?
Are you using the ROI calculator?
Like are you like, is that making the slide?
- Exactly.
- Who's on the slide with us?
- Right, right.
Which, yeah, and if you have like a deck, yeah, sure.
The deck goes out there, but like which slides
like actually matter, right?
Which slides are people actually looking at it?
Like all that kind of stuff.
So for us again, like we're going to try to keep it simple.
Definitely, you know, obviously we try to do
with case studies now, but like those things get, you know,
pass around so much, it's difficult to separate the noise,
right?
Okay, if like an executive assistant's printing
something out, like does that mean that it went
to the executive?
Does it not?
You know, which executive did it go to?
Who does that person work for?
Yeah, a lot of interesting stuff that we,
a lot of really, really interesting wood
that we still let the child for us.
- All right, let's get to our final segment, quick hits.
These are quick questions and quick answers.
Number one, what is your favorite thing to watch,
read or listen that you've been checking out recently?
- In terms of industry publications,
I'm still in above the law sucker, right?
I like to see kind of, you know, what the trends are
in terms of hiring, right?
What the trends are in terms of like tech use, obviously.
I think a lot of the macro sort of forces
that are affecting, especially in house council,
a lot of them will start in private practice.
And so it's like a bit of an early warning signal,
which has been really, really helpful.
Outside of the office, you know,
there's all sorts of stuff,
but I've really gotten into just like, you know,
I've always loved Anthony Bourdain stuff,
but his publications, his writing is just so great.
I really just love it.
And it's a great way to kind of take a step back,
do a little bit of meditation almost, right?
When you can kind of take a look at that kind of material.
- If you could make any animal any size,
what animal would it be and what size?
- Let's see.
I think what I'd want to do is
make a corgi the size of a horse so I could ride it.
- Who doesn't want a huge corgi?
What advice do you have for someone
who's newly leading a rev-ops?
I'm going to mark a team.
- Two things.
So first, I would say,
do your research on the landscape of best practices.
There's a lot of really good stuff out there.
Don't feel like you need to reinvent the wheel, right?
Especially on a high level.
The second thing is,
try to be as specific as possible.
Try to be as specific as possible
with the problems that you start with solving, right?
So it shouldn't, don't bite off more
than you can chew all at once.
Run your experiments in tangible, practical pieces,
because otherwise you're not going to be able
to get a signal back.
And at that point your experiments are the next to useless.
- Charles, awesome having you on the show for listeners.
You can go check out LexCheck.
Clearly, there's gaps in the legal review process.
So check that out from your rev-ops perspective.
Charles, any final thoughts, anything to plug?
- No, I think anybody who's having trouble
with getting things back from legal, right?
You should definitely hit us up.
We're probably going to be able to help you.
The last thing I probably will leave for folks,
and this is something that we hear from our clients
all the time and are really successful,
is that there isn't a problem that's too small
to start with.
I think a lot of people will generally feel like,
okay, I have some contract bottlenecks,
but I don't know if they're a big enough problem
to do like an IT procurement exercise for.
The solutions in this space,
and especially ours, are really, really lightweight
from an implementation IT perspective,
and they're not super, super expensive, right?
Being able to start with something small
also gives you the ability to get a quick win.
And that is instrumental, especially for our clients
and building up the capital that they need internally
to be able to affect even more change.
So don't be shy about reaching out
if you have something that you think is,
this is something that LexCheck could help out with.
It probably can, and our guys are always,
always ready to spend some time just breaking it down, right?
At the end of the day, our priority is helping
our clients solve problems, right?
So if you have something that we can help you solve,
we're more than happy to help you break it down.
- Charles, it's awesome.
Thanks so much, and we'll talk soon.
- Yeah, absolutely.
Thanks so much for having me.
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