Working Cross-Functionally to Overcome Rev-Obstacles with Seth McGuire, Chief Revenue Officer at Galileo Financial Technologies
On this episode, Seth discusses the importance of working cross-functionally to overcome obstacles, putting people first internally and externally, and his recipe for RevOps success.
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[MUSIC]
Welcome to Rise of RevOps.
I'm Ian Faiz on CEO of Casping Studios.
And today we are joined by a special guest, Seth.
How are you?
>> I'm doing great today.
How are you?
>> I'm doing wonderful, excited to chat about RevOps,
excited to chat about Galileo and
all of the cool things in between.
So taking a step back, can you tell us how did you get into RevOps?
>> Yeah, well, for me, it's been a bit of a journey to getting to business in
general and
from there, RevOps.
So my parents are both professors, liberal arts professors.
And so growing up in my household was a lot of focus on business per se and
what business is.
And it wasn't really until I got to college that I discovered what was a really
interesting
entire world I had explored before.
So I went to Georgetown for undergrad and
Georgetown has a student operated student owned business called Students of
Georgetown.
That manages a grocery store, several coffee shops, book reseller business,
shipping and storage business for summers.
And I took a part time job there just to pay the bills of the grocery store.
And over four years made my way into the upper management of it that time.
Eventually running the movie store, which for those who are old enough to
remember is where you
would go to rent a movie on a Friday or Saturday night before returning that V
HS.
And so as part of that was really my first exposure to business.
It was getting a mesh to excel spreadsheets and looking at a P and L and trying
to figure
out, oh, these are expenses.
Oh, they have a word for that.
Oh, here's how we made money.
Oh, they call that revenue.
And so that was really my first introduction to business.
I won't argue I was very good at it.
They let me do it for the years I was there.
But upon graduation, I went into consulting, spent a few years of consulting
and then went
back to business school.
And really coming out of business school is where joining a startup out here in
Boulder
called Gennip.
That I was really exposed to what I'd call revenue operations by my definition,
which
has to do with bringing together all the different functions that you need to
cross team, align
and collaborate on to deliver revenue to the org.
And so that startup Gennip was really where for the first time I began to see
how marketing
and sales and partnership and all these pieces can come together to help an
organization grow.
And so I think that was the journey.
But business was really that first thing in college.
And then by the time I got taken it, it was really starting to pull it together
to say,
well, how do these operations work together to kind of grow an organization?
And flash forward to Galileo, tell us a little bit about the company who you
all sell to
and that customer profile.
Galileo is a really fun organization.
So our parent company is so far, which is a publicly traded and chartered bank
that
serves consumers.
What Galileo does is provide a platform for builders, brands, banks, neo banks,
FinTechs,
really anyone who's looking to create a payment or banking organization to be
able to leverage
the platform we've built to deliver on that promise.
So it's very customer centric.
We take a range of different products and API products and enable our customers
to build
financial products for their customers.
And so that extends again from all the way from banks to an organization that
may just
want to create simple virtual card payments.
So wide range of solutions there.
We work with a lot of well known companies out there.
So a lot of the banks you would know there are people who've built upon our
infrastructure.
And tell me about your RevOps team and your definition of RevOps for Galileo.
So again, for me, revenue operations really comes down to the cross-functional
collaboration
and the strategy and the execution on a strategy to grow revenue.
Sales is a piece of that.
And I do think that's one of the common mistakes about revenue operations,
which is thinking
about sales or it's about the itemized pieces that go into a sale.
But for me, it's really about a lot of the behind the scenes collaboration that
goes
from building a product that you know will serve a customer's need and market
to bringing
that product to meet them at their point of pain to developing the surrounding
ecosystem
of partners to help serve that solution.
And then finally to deliver that solution to your customers in a way that helps
them
grow while helping you grow.
To me, that encompasses revenue operations because it is a very cross-
functional and very
company oriented piece of the puzzle.
You need the entire company thinking about revenue operations for it to be
successful.
Anything specific about Galileo and the RevOps team that you'll have that's
different perhaps?
Well, I think our people are pretty amazing.
I know that's different, but I think they're one of the best teams in the
business.
You know, maybe what's unique about us is, and I hope this isn't unique, but in
my experience
it can be unique, which is we have a very tight focus on the client and really
building
from who the client is as we think about not only our products, but our go-to
market as
well.
My team is organized by functions.
So we have a sales function, which is new logos or new clients.
We have a marketing function whose job it is to help tell that story both to
existing
clients and new clients.
We have a partnerships team whose job it is to do kind of non-direct revenue
relationships,
whether that's product partnerships or channel partnerships or various other
third parties.
And then we have kind of a solutions engineering or design team whose job it is
to assist sales
as well as be a conduit back to product.
Those are what falls within our revenue work today.
At times, our account management has fallen within there as well.
And at times not depending upon where the organization is at the moment.
But if I look at that functional basis, well, that's how we're organized from a
reporting
level, the way we approach go-to market and really the way the team is
organized and how
we think and how really we talk and interact and the way our metrics are built
is around
the client.
So it is to say we have several segments we serve.
We look at those segments and say, well, we're going to attack their pain point
What are the pains that they're feeling there?
How can we think about those things?
How can we reach them at the point of that pain in our marketing or in our
sales conversations?
And then how can we deliver a solution that serves it?
And despite the reporting structure, again, that's functional, organizing
around that
client is I think the most important thing for us.
And it's what we spend most of our meetings on.
It's how we think about metrics.
It's how we think about success is within each of those client bases because
each is
different and they require different focuses.
And I found that that isn't always true at organizations.
Once you get into functional lines, it can sometimes be hard to break out of
them and
think cross-functionally across how do we solve this problem or work with this
customer.
Yeah.
And so as a chief revenue officer and obviously this show thinking about rev-
ops being obviously
increasingly critical, maybe it always was, but now it has a better name to CR
Os, do
you think like how do you think other CROs are thinking about rev-ops?
It's a good question and I do see this role appearing more now.
But I look back 20 years ago to almost the transformation that the marketing
office went
through.
We saw CMOs really grow.
Originally CMOs are very much a consumer product company branded item, right?
It's how do you have these big thoughts coming out of agencies in the 1950s and
60s?
How do you have someone who can take that internally to a consumer brand and
then push
that broad narrative or story out market?
But the CMO really developed across the last 20 years to more of a focus on
that sales
piece and how we think about revenue.
And I think from there 20 years ago you had the chief customer officer or the
chief success,
customer success officer, can grow out of that, which was, well, how do I take
that same
lens to how we serve our customers?
I think CRO is the next step in that conversation, which is thinking through,
again, not from
a functional basis, but how do I think about the root of revenue for our
organization?
And so that's different in every company I talk to because how they generate
revenue
can be different.
How a SaaS company might do this might be very different from a company selling
actual
goods, right?
But at the end of the day, what CROs I think have in common in revenue orgs is
that inherent
focus on the underlying levers of revenue and how to get there by bringing
together those
functions.
But in my mind, it does follow a little bit of that path that CMOs and CCOs
laid out before
it.
And I think this become the new term for gathering those cross-functional
groups as you think
about how you can pull those levers.
In the course of this series, what's so fun about talking about revops is there
's so many
different ways to do this thing.
Yeah.
So some folks have the VP of revops report directly to the CFO.
Some people have a beat to the CRO.
Some people have it go into just have siloed functional areas where it's sort
of like
not holistic.
Do you have a take on that of where it should live?
I don't, primarily because again, as you say, it is different for each org.
I do have a general precept that your organizational model should follow your
strategy rather than
vice versa.
So I think that question becomes more important as you think about the overall
go-to market.
If it is primarily product-led growth, heavy marketing drive inbound, you might
have a
different approach than enterprise sales with SWAT teams that are swarming an
enterprise
deal to talk about it.
You might organize differently in terms of who do I need to make the decision
here.
I think there's also a leadership background component to that.
My background, while I have some sales background, it's really more on the
partnerships and kind
of revenue generating partnerships and large deals was the initial entree for
me into revenue
operations that might be very different.
You might structure differently if the leader in your organization has a
heavier marketing
background or is a pure sales background.
So I think all those pieces play into the puzzle.
What's right for the company in terms of the go-to market and then who are the
strongest
players we have on the table and what's their background?
In a way, the interplay of those two, I think, starts to dictate that
organizational structure
and how you'll achieve the most.
You've been in the role now quite a bit, but thinking back to those first six
months or
even the last six months, how has your view of RevOps changed?
In the last 10 years, I probably had three major C-level roles, if you will.
And each of those was in a different industry.
I spent several years at Twitter where I eventually ran an active GM for the
developer platform
business for Twitter, which is one of their business lines.
And our clients in those cases were enterprise developers who were building
solutions on our
APIs.
They then went to a startup here in Boulder called Backbone, which is design
software
and kind of product collaboration software for direct to consumer goods and
then came
here to Galileo, which again serves banks and payment organizations who are
building
these products.
So each of those clients that are very different in many ways to have some
themes across them,
which is certainly there's a developer focus a lot that I do, an API platform,
a lot that
I do.
I like platforms that people can build on top of and create their own unique
goods and
services on.
But as I think about each of those roles, the first six months in a way is
always the
same, which is the people.
It's one who are the people on this team.
What are their strengths?
What are their gaps?
What are the things that they're missing?
What are the places they're blocked?
What are the things that frustrate them?
And then there's the people which are our clients.
And what are their concerns?
What are the areas that we deliver well for them or the areas that are
challenged?
And I think the first six months in any role, spending time with those two
places is really
important.
Before you make big process changes, before you make broad stroke strategy
changes, it's
really getting deep with those.
So for me, products at a root basis, from the people who work with you and from
your
clients, you use those products.
And that's the best use of those first six months.
I'm now two and a half years in this role.
And so for me in the last six months, you're starting to approach that time
where one,
you feel like you really know the things.
So decisions get a little bit easier because for the first year, you're kind of
like,
"Well, thanks for asking me that question.
I'm going to get back to you in a minute and then you've got to go ask three
other people
about something."
You're like, "What am I missing here?
Why wasn't this decided before?"
By two and a half years in, you know a lot of those pieces.
So you're able to move a lot more quickly.
But the learning and the lesson there then is to spend time pausing yourself
and asking,
"I've been making this decision quickly because of my own bias and my own
internal call to
action.
And is that okay?
Maybe that's okay.
Or is this a place I do need to refine and ask opinion?
And should I be making this decision?
Or am I stepping in the way of my team?"
And so I think increasing as you mature in a role, that becomes the thread to
unpack,
which is where am I needed and where do I need to step out of the way of my
team.
All right, let's get to our next segment, Rev Obstacles.
These are about those tough parts of Rev Obst.
What's the hardest or some of the hardest Rev Obst problems you faced in the
last year or
so?
Well, I think the most interesting, and I'll say hardest in some ways is
because it's
not a bad challenge, but it's a really interesting challenge because it's a
complex one, is
that SOFI has made two acquisitions across the past few years.
One was a Galileo, one was of a platform called Technosys, which serves a
slightly different
customer type than Galileo was more focused.
It serves both non-banks and banks, but it's very focused on banking
architecture and
infrastructure.
And as a series of products that help to modernize bank architecture and
processes for banks.
And then Galileo, which did that for a lot of non-banks, who do want to have
banking
and payment solutions.
And after the Technosysys acquisition, we have integrated pieces of that puzzle
together
so that our go-to market is able to accurately serve any problem that a client
has.
So again, taking that customer view of insane, well, who is this customer?
Well, it's a bank.
What's the problem today?
Well, the problems that they were built on bank core from the 1970s, and that's
the system
they maintain customer records on, and they can't ship or build new products
quickly,
and it costs a lot to maintain.
Let's say that's the problem set.
The solutions that we would bring then is a range of those Galileo and Technos
ys products
where we'd say, well, let's build this together and how can we solve their
problem?
The interesting challenge there is, of course, you have two separate teams with
two different
backgrounds, potentially two different cultures, two different go-to markets,
different marketing
brands.
How do you start to weave those things together?
And that's what our team has been working on a lot the last six months is just
to make
it simpler for our clients.
How do we just tell them a simpler story?
It's not about changing or moving any technology.
It's just making that a simple story to say, we're here to support whatever
problem set
you have.
You don't need to see how that's made behind the scenes.
We'll go do that work for you.
We need to bring it back as a unified team and say, well, here's how the pieces
work together.
That's a really fun challenge because it is one of the one plus one equal three
math
equations you want to see in an acquisition.
But it's deep work.
We're very internal saying, how do I fit these pieces together?
And so that across the last really year has been a fun and interesting
challenge, both
getting to learn some of those new technologies in the sector, but then
thinking through how
we can bring that to light for clients.
That's awesome.
Any other rev-ups specific problems, maybe not quite as hard, perhaps?
Some of the others are just navigating the current market, right?
We're in a really uncertain time.
We've had COVID the last few years.
Certainly there is a lot going on.
I'd say in the capital side of things, you have a lot of VCs and private equity
pulling
money back from startups and others or not funding them.
I think in that dynamic, oftentimes revenue has to react the most quickly
because you
are the tip of the spear to customers and to clients.
You're spending your time in market, hearing their problems, hearing from them.
And so I think across the last six months, tightening the communication between
our go
to market team and our product team, for example, really critical, making sure
that
we're bringing that feedback back from the market.
Here are some of the challenges that our clients have, right?
Here are the products they need to ship.
Oh, they're going to have an uphill revenue battle in this place.
So we need to help them by supporting here or this geography is becoming really
important
to them.
So Galileo has done a lot of expansion to Latin America, a lot of that driven
by it,
no other clients who are saying, hey, I really want to invest in these new
markets as I see
softening in some other markets.
So making sure we're staying attuned enough to what we hear from our clients
and partners
to bring that back to internal teams to execute on.
That just requires us balancing the needs of today from a revenue standpoint
with giving
that information for tomorrow.
Yeah.
And the forecasting stuff is crazy.
Any thoughts on how you're looking at forecasting when it comes to enterprise
deals because
it's so difficult with uncertainty, right?
Yeah, absolutely.
I mean, I think we use a lot of historical data.
And this has been a really interesting piece of kind of our toolkit lately has
been thinking
through benchmarks and just understanding what we can learn from the data we
have from
existing clients, especially as you think about forecasting.
So as you think about successful programs, as you think about product adoption,
as you
think about your own client success, what can you learn from the data you have?
Third-party external source is always useful too.
And you certainly want to hear from the client their expectations and then do
some waiting.
But really looking at the internal data you have as you think about new sales
or think
about additional forecasts for existing clients is really critical.
Everyone always spends as much time as you should on the data you have in house
because
it's a lot easier to take a cold call with someone saying, "Hey, I'm going to
give you
a lot of data if you want.
You can learn how the economy is going.
Let me give you this report versus, well, what do I have inside the house that
I can
use?"
The problem for me that I've seen with our company is the velocity that you see
if you're
selling the tech, for example, pre the past three or four months.
The velocity that you saw in 2022 versus the velocity that you see in Q1 to 20
23, getting
to contract seems identical.
This is just totally anecdotal for us, but just painting the picture seems
identical.
And then the responses instead of saying, "Hey, we're going to do it or hey, we
're not
going to do it or hey, we're going to kick the kid down the road."
It's a lot of like, "Oh, we really want to do it.
We would buy it right now.
We have to wait until second half.
If you were to model it the same way, how do you figure that stuff out?"
It's been tricky.
Yeah.
Yeah.
You understood.
And I have been in sales cycles before.
That's definitely been the case.
At the start of the mention, back bone at the beginning of COVID where you're
something
like, "No one is returning any calls because no one has to be what's happening
."
You're saying, "What do we do?
How do we forecast?"
It was a whole board meeting, which was like, "How do we think about deals
right now?
Should we be spending on money and go to market?"
For us right now, because our clients do tend to be making multi-year
investments in
critical architecture and infrastructure, we don't see as much of that shift.
In fact, some ways you could argue this exacerbates the need for it because you
're like, "Well,
this is a rebuild time."
You need to be putting this in place right now because if the economy is
ticking up again,
if you're responsible for generating more data for our clients or banks and all
of a
sudden, there's going to be more scrutiny from regulators, post-SVV, et cetera.
A lot of our architecture name structure can help with some of that data in
those programs.
We're like, "Hey, you really need to have the right system and the right setup
and to
be locked up."
It's not actually bad for us necessarily.
You'll always run it as someone who might be a little more wary of those
investments at
a downtime.
Given the current product we have and who the clients are in the need, we're
not seeing
that today.
I am sympathetic to that again, given historic experiences.
I think the route we usually took through is just real rigor with the sales
team where
it's like, "Is this worth our time right now?"
Being able to segment things into, "We'll put them in a holding nurture pattern
, no,
really spend more time with them.
Revisit, do we get the pain point?"
They're saying this is interesting, but it's not now.
Is there another layer deeper we can go in the problem we're solving to make it
more
critical immediately?
I try to go that route versus getting creative with deal solutions.
I would rather not discount to get someone in quarter if the better answer is
prove the
validity of the pain for this quarter.
I think a lot of times companies default too fast to that discounting versus, "
Did we
tell the right story?
Is this critical for them?
Do they have a path to value?"
If you can't get there with that and they're saying, "Yes, yes, all that's true
, but the
economics for this?"
Then start to discount.
Until you know the economics are what's holding back.
If it's fear or inability to connect to that value, making sure you're not
giving a discount
to solve that problem is critical at a time like this.
It's an absolutely great insight and it's a great point.
These are the type of times where the discounting might literally save you from
them going to
competitor that they're not going to want to rip in six months.
That part being outstanding and is very tricky and very difficult to know.
I think it's such a great point to say this person is locked in on us.
All the data is pointing to this is the type of person who's locked in to us.
It's still saying that everybody's saying, "Everybody's in agreement here.
We can just wait for six months for this deal and it'll probably close.
We can discount them again.
They'll want to buy in the second half of the year," which they said they're
committed
to.
That's a great insight.
Or even rather, to be able to say, "If they're not buying now, is it truly just
the economic
or is it we didn't show them how we would deliver value immediately to them?"
A lot of times when I see a delay there and someone says, "Yeah, we're really
interested.
We're going to visit them in three months."
I think you don't understand the value we would deliver in the next three
months.
That's the problem, is that I need to tie what we're solving for directly to
what your
objectives are for the next three months.
If we've done that and you see the value and you're saying, "I wish I could.
I see this value.
I want to buy it now.
Here is my budget.
Then let's get creative on my numbers."
If I'm just hearing, "Yeah, it's valuable.
Well, it's wait a while."
I'm thinking, "You actually aren't connecting the value to your day-to-day and
that's my
gap to solve."
Yeah, it's a great point.
I think it's really tricky to dig into those numbers over the course of a sales
team that's
30, 40, 50, 100 people, 200 people, whatever the size of the sales team is to
say, "Is
every single person getting to that point?"
One question I have for you is, "Is there another stage that you need to add
for this
type of…"
We don't need to call it anything COVID anything anymore, but further I've
realized the COVID
stage or the Black Swan stage or it's something just happened that's super
crazy.
It really doesn't fit anywhere else on this thing.
Obviously, the thing that happened was Silicon Valley Bank or the tech
apocalypse, these
things that happened and you're just like, "They are saying that the only
reason for
this thing is, 'Hey, board said, 'No, not spending one extra dollar over budget
.'"
It's like you said, "You don't want to discount that person if they're going to
pay full
price in three months once this Black Swan event dies off."
What do you think about adding a stage?
That's an interesting point.
I would segment out, again, those clients, and this would require real honesty
and real
pressure on the sales team, which I think we do pretty well at Gallet.
We have a great team of really good salespeople who are very willing to put up
with some of
that head-budding to get to the right solution of, "Is this a good deal?"
We really pressure test those things a lot.
But just from my own experience, I would say, if you pressure test boards that
say, "We're
not spending another penny because of this Black Swan event," half of them are
going
to turn out, "The board is unsure of the value that you're providing in that
moment."
To me, it's the connector of those dots.
If you can get to a really true assessment of, "No, we totally get it," we just
, we can
see our runway is X number of months and we're not willing to spend any money
until that
freeze up, then yes, that stage makes sense.
But I worry that you'd have a lot of opportunities end up there that really
aren't pressure-tested
opportunities for, "Did we showcase the value of our solution right now to
someone?"
Do they understand what they're missing in the next three months by not using
this,
whether from a revenue perspective, or an efficiency perspective, or a paying
perspective?
That's the art of sales to me is in that space right there of really being able
to say,
"I know intimately my clients challenge.
I understand it, and we have partnered to develop a solution for it.
If you've done that, you've done your job."
Then there'll be a pricing conversation, there'll be a tiny one, but they're
going to be your
advocate and fight for it because they're like, "This solves my problem.
I have pain.
I need new revenue, or I need efficiency, or I need to solve this thing, and
you've given
me a solution, I'm going to go fight for it."
To me, it's very rare you'll run into a board that's absolutely not, this
solves your problem,
but I don't care about your problem.
Usually what that means, that your champion doesn't understand or hasn't
articulated the
problem well enough to the board.
I think it's tough if you're like, "You're really not going to get to ROI for
seven months."
That sort of thing that could make that challenging.
The other thing that I was just thinking of as we were talking about it, is
this sort
of if you were to add a black swan stage in the middle of your pipeline, is if
you're
using calling or something like that.
You're like, "Hey, these 70 accounts all mentioned COVID three or more times,
coincidentally,
all of these accounts are all in the nurture now."
No, probably.
Totally.
Yeah.
Anything else on rev obstacles?
No, just that the...
I mean, I think ongoing is always rev obstacles, right?
It's in our nature to be pushed, it's in our nature to have the stretch goals
and to be
aiming a team at that.
I think that's the fun of it is, again, working across functioning on those
teams to try to
overcome those rev obstacles.
How do you balance sales marketing and customer success?
To me, again, it gets back to a focus on that client and on who that client is.
I think the common language across all those functions is the client.
It's who they are and what they need and what you're doing for them.
To me and my head, again, approaching any meeting with one of my teams, right?
I'm going to say, "Hey, I'm going to meet the marketing team.
I'm going to hear their objectives, hear how they're handling their OKRs for
this quarter,
this year."
A lot of that conversation then comes down to, "Well, how was this executing
against
those client targets?"
That helps me draw a common link across.
I know, "Hey, for banks below 10 billion in assets, here's our targets for the
year."
Well, whether I'm talking to marketing or sales or customer success or
partnerships,
that conversation is consistent because this is what we're trying to deliver on
for that
client.
That helps me then to put the ball back in the expertise of the team to say, "
Well,
I know these are our objectives.
You're the experts at marketing, not me.
Let's walk through the blockers you have in getting these objectives.
Let's walk through the work you're doing.
Together, let's explore how we unlock those things."
It's referring back to that common language of the objective at the client
level.
As a CRO, one of the things who oversees RevOps, one of the common pitfalls is
that you have
either marketing or that customer success leader or whatever.
That feels like RevOps is serving potentially like sales first or whatever.
Any advice for other RevOps leaders on how to make sure that everybody's...
When you have the three-headed hydras, we like to say, "When three mouths to
feed,
how do you make sure that you're feeding everyone appropriately?"
Yeah, that's a good question.
A lot of that comes down to the people, obviously.
It comes down to the people you have in seat and your ability to help them
understand the
criticality of the others' contributions.
I do think a lot of that also comes down to the objectives you set.
While I am a definite, quant-focused person, I think also you need qualitative
objectives
as well.
It's not just about hardline data, but it is about overall objectives.
Yes, you can classify brand by certain quantitative metrics and say, "Here's
how we've achieved
greater share of voice or we've increased our brand penetration."
At the same time, there are intangibles there.
I think reflecting intangibles in each of those functional buckets helps to
explain
the value across teams to each other.
The second thing then, on top of setting those right metrics that balance those
two items
is ensuring you have clearer communication and you've tied some of those
objectives to
cross-functional things.
For example, lead generation in our organization is shared between our market
engagement team,
our marketing team, and our sales team, our VD team.
It is they're all responsible for leads.
That could be challenging if you say, "Well, I want one single person to hold
accountable,"
but at the same time, if you have senior leaders enough and you're holding each
of them accountable
for some piece of that, you're really incentivizing them to collaborate against
an objective.
In my opinion, that's where you get much better results than saying one person
is responsible
when in truth it is a cross-functional initiative.
Leads are not the responsibility of one function.
They're the responsibility of an overall org.
You have to incentivize all of them to accomplish against that.
Helping to build objectives that they share and then holding them jointly
accountable and
then giving them a language to speak to each other for collaboration and then
again, getting
out of their way to let them do that, stepping in as needed to send direction
or to help
solve for specific issues.
To me, that's the recipe for success.
Yeah, I totally agree.
All right.
Let's get to run our segment.
The tool shed.
When we're talking tools, spreadsheets, metrics, just like everyone's favorite
tool qualified,
so B2B tool shed is complete without qualified.
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You can chat with someone right now about how great qualified is and how much
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So go to qualified.com and check it out.
The tool shed, Seth, what's in your tool shed?
So spend time in a range of different tools.
A lot of times I'll admit I'm not the best end user of the tool and so what I
get is
report outs or report some teams, but for that, of course, sales force, love
sales force,
love the reports we can build.
Don't ask me to construct anything in it.
We have teams that do that, but I do love the reports and the outcomes I get
from it.
I do spend a lot of time there reviewing what you would expect.
You know, leads, opportunities, you know, our target lists, reviewing our
performance
against those.
We use a range of other tools with the marketing and sales.
So certainly Marketo, I think Clue is a really cool competitive tool we use,
Chili Pepper
and then Ring Lead and Zoom Info for, you know, the generation and targeting.
So a mix of all those teams used across our teams.
As you grow in an org, I think one of the challenges with tools is always
thinking about
who needs access to this and where you can just provide the outcomes and the
insight.
And so we spend a lot of time in that, especially again with two platforms,
Galileo and Technosys,
you can come up with different tools.
And so meshing and melding those is always interesting.
But to me, it's the place I get the most reports out.
I would be sales force or then internal dashboards that are built from some
collection of those
things.
How do you think about bringing new tools onto the organization as a CRO?
Because if a rev ops person on your team says, Hey, I really want to do this.
And it's maybe a little tough to quantify like ROI because you're like, but
this increased
visibility is really important.
I'm just curious, how do you think about investing in new things?
It's a really good question.
And I tend to personally always be down for an iterative attempt at something.
So again, the lower cost of tool is to implement and test the better, in my
opinion.
Give me something for a month.
Let us use it.
Let us see if it's sticky and I do products that lead that way and I give you a
chance
to use them because I am always up for that challenge and say, yeah, let's take
a look.
Let's see if this does some value.
You have to always think about expenses certainly in that ROI.
And to me part of that right input is again, identifying, even if it's not
purely quantitative,
identifying the specific value you're trying to get out of that tool.
So rather than being like, oh, this supplements this, it's like, well, what's
our intended
outcome?
What actions are we going to take because of this?
And say, okay, let's test it for 30 days.
Then let's look at whether we can set metrics against it.
But I think that balance are really pushback like, what are we trying to
accomplish with
it?
What does it give us?
So it's not just a gap that it's filling because a lot of times gaps that are
filled,
I have found we're left there because they weren't important enough to be
filled, right?
There are definitely gaps that should be filled.
But a lot of times you'd say, well, no one solved that problem because it, yeah
, it hurts
a little bit, but it's not killer.
Right?
It's a feature built.
Yeah, exactly.
It's a feature built of some other company is just going to add that as a
feature someday.
And it's, and you're going to be, you know, some people are going to love it.
Other people will use it.
No, totally.
So pressure testing that a little bit and saying like, hey, okay, if we're
filling this
gap, it's because we need to get to X outcome.
I had a tool brought to me who's actually earlier today.
That was basically like we need to go from the pro to the enterprise or
whatever it is.
And it was basically double the cost.
And it's like one of those things where you're like, yeah, y'all are using it,
you're loving
it.
You're like, you want to double this and you're like, it's double the cost kind
of a lot of
money.
But you're like, is it going to double productivity?
No, but how do we calculate the work hours of like all that sort of stuff?
It's the classic CIO thing where you're like, honestly, if it keeps people
happy and they
can do their jobs better, you know, even if it's expensive, that's a retention
tool.
It's like a really good thing.
Having people do their jobs better.
And it's like, it's just something that sometimes we spend all this effort and
energy into
figuring out how to sell our solutions.
And sometimes it just boils down to like, I just like working in this.
I like my team working in this.
Totally.
No, absolutely.
Absolutely.
And again, honestly, that's really important because sometimes you might say
yes to that,
knowing that it carries certain morale or certain, you know, happiness or
general satisfaction
for your team and it's low enough cost.
You're like, okay, like listen, this is worth it for solving this general pain
for the team
of this gap versus that.
But I think honesty on that's really helpful.
You don't want 30 of those tools.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, for sure.
What metrics matter to you?
Yeah, I would love to say something unique or interesting there, but I don't
know that
we have anything.
I mean, it's within marketing and sales, we look a lot at lead generation.
We look a lot at overall digital footprint than looking at opportunities and
revenue
from them.
So certainly by the lead opportunity to client stage, we're looking at a
different range
of things developing a maturity across them.
And so some of the metrics there might be the forecast value of total contracts
within
the opportunity stage and breaking that out by the segments and then tracking
it back
to the leads and looking at the conversion there and then tracking that back to
the lead
source and looking at the cost of those leads to each of those sources.
So again, I wouldn't say anything groundbreaking there.
To me, I don't spend a ton of time trying to reinvent metrics.
I do like to spend time on analysis there versus here's the metric itself and
here's
the measurement.
It's why, right?
What's happening back there?
What led to this shift up?
What led to the shift down?
Can we trace that back and actually fix the underlying root lever we pulled to
that change?
And I think spending more time in that space to me is important increasingly as
you move
enterprise.
And in that space, it's less about those top line numbers.
Sometimes more about, well, how do I change to get two more deals, right?
If they're valuable enough.
And so spending time in the analysis of those things to me, I'm really
understanding the
why behind those metrics and how to affect change in them is where the bulk of
conversation
should be.
Any blind spots that you feel like you'd like to figure out an answer to?
Man, does anyone know how to measure TAM really well?
I know.
Great question.
I saw a TAM measurement the other day.
That was so bad.
I just think it is, no matter where you go, like startups to large companies,
you end
up with the same, which is like someone made a decision somewhere to put these
numbers
in a spreadsheet.
And yes, they started with some data that said there are so many companies and
then
they made an estimate as to the value of a contract with those companies.
And then made some conversion number in that cell.
And then you're like, boom, TAM.
And to me, so many business cases are made or broken by TAM.
And yet it's always put together haphazardly in some ways.
Even when you do it well, you're saying, I don't know how many SMBs are there
in America.
So that to me is always just the blind spot for everybody, I would say.
That's fun.
Yeah, that's a really good one.
You haven't mentioned like account-based marketing or account-based experience
or account-based
stuff?
Are you messing around with that at all?
Absolutely.
Galileo again serves, I'd say, across the gamut of organizations.
So across the last 20 years, it's been a business.
Both data and tech, it says, have served startups who are developing these
things as
well as enterprises and brands.
And so we do run across it.
And especially now in this environment, we're seeing a lot of demand from
larger enterprises
and larger banks, a lot of bigger organizations who are seeking the products we
have.
And so account-based marketing becomes really important at that level in my
mind, where
you say, well, I know that there would be a really good client fit across these
50.
We implement them well.
We know they're successful.
Like they would find value in this service or this product.
So how do we reach them with that message?
And to me, a cohesive account-based marketing strategy is really critical there
And that's again, to get to our earlier conversation on aligning 15 sales and
marketing, that's
where your token sales in the side and saying, hey, you really need marketing
here.
Marketing is going to be your best friend.
And not just from a blast-down email to 100 people.
Marketing is going to be your best friend to help you build a refined, specific
story
that talks about value to a customer that will convert well for you.
And that'll be successful.
And so that's really valuable.
But you've got to get in the mix with them.
And you've got to talk through so that you're not bombarding the same client
with ad hoc
messages while you're running a marketing campaign to try to get their
attention.
You've got to be balanced across those things.
But absolutely on ABM.
I love the phrase that it's actually you need to be the chief market officer as
a marketer
first and foremost.
Like I love that idea that it's like you understand where the market is going,
how people are behaving
in the market, all that stuff, how the accounts behave in the market.
That gives all of that information back to sales who is super granular focused
on closing
these deals.
Yeah, absolutely.
I think that matters a lot for the context as well.
Good sales people are obviously hyper-focused on getting to the decision maker
and to the
right committees there.
I do think sometimes, however, sales people being who they are think, hey, let
me get
a contact and I'll sell my way up to the org.
Whereas you say, well, marketing can help you be a little bit more structured
there and
potentially reach people that it's not a warm intro that you had and it's not
you cold
calling someone, it's actually getting someone interested in coming to have a
conversation
with you.
And if it's the right buyer, that's going to be a much better conversation.
So it's spend a little time there versus maybe just wailing away at the project
manager
from high school who end up working there and you're like, they're not getting
you up
the ladder.
So you go and you're like, I've been working this account for two years and we
just put
their CIO on one of our podcasts and now we have a conversation going with the
person
at the top of the organization.
Yeah, exactly.
Exactly.
Any other thoughts on a software data tools, dashboards systems?
No, to me again, it's all about integrating those things into a conversation.
It's about how can you use those systems and tools to bring together in one
place.
And that's we do weekly pipeline meetings where we're bringing together
marketing, sales
and partnership content to get to have a conversation across all those entities
so people understand
where pieces fit and they're able to kind of relate to each other and
understand those
objectives and the chime in or supportive.
So to me, the systems are on tray to the data that is on tray to a conversation
amongst
the cross functional team that gets really to the actions that need to be taken
All right, let's get to our final segment.
Quick hits.
Quick questions and quick answers.
Seth, are you ready?
Mm hmm.
Number one, if you could make any animal any size, what animal would it be?
What size?
Hmm.
I think having tiny elephants would be pretty awesome.
Like just little elephants that were like fun home pets, you could have like
roaming around
your house in any moment.
That'd be pretty awesome.
Those cute little tropes.
Exactly.
Yeah, absolutely.
Do you have a rev-ups misconception?
Yeah, to me, it's sales or it's spreadsheets, right?
So like, oh, rev-ups is the people who do like sale compensation.
Lean into the forward, lean into the future prediction that you have, either
for rev-ups
or about rev-ups or anything like that.
I think there's some really interesting structures you could get to that are
not functional based
but certainly segment and team orientation based, which is to say, thinking
about really
your entire functional setup in terms of the client versus the functions,
having the
spoke little engines of revenue that are the mix of the right marketing and
sales and
partnerships people towards it.
I think you see a little bit more of that in markets today.
It's harder to pull off because so many of those investments and expenses reach
a cross-team.
And so from a P&L perspective, you start to get into challenges when you're
breaking up
expenses across those, but it's solvable.
And then you get to the talent issue of, well, how do I have the right team
leaders in these
places?
But I think if you could execute on that, I think it's definitely a great way
to go to
market and increasingly important right now when buyers require you to have
expertise
in who they are.
And they're like, I don't want to talk to four different people in your
organization
as I know.
So the more you can be cohesive around that client and go to market there.
And I think there'll be a lot more interesting structures built around that in
the future,
especially look at some of the technologies out there, things like convers
ational AI,
where it's like, well, you can start off a conversation here to bring into your
sales
team this way.
I think there's a lot to build on there.
Last question, Steph.
What is your best advice for someone who is newly leading a RevOps team?
This is general advice, but I think particularly important in RevOps, where it
tends to be a
lot of people who are in some ways extroverted or at least client and team
focused, but your
job is always people, right?
And increasingly as your responsibility grows and you own more teams or own
more functions,
like your responsibility and your job is even more so always people.
And I think sometimes with RevOps and go to market that can get lost in the, no
, my job
is to be a salesperson.
Like, I am not the best salesperson by far on our team.
I would just tell you that.
Like I would rather have any of our salespeople talking to clients than me, but
my job is to
support them.
It is to support our clients.
It is to support those team members.
And no matter the size of your work for RevOps or go to market, no matter who
your client is,
your job is people.
And that's just a thing worth remembering no matter what changes.
Seth, it's been awesome having you on the show.
Any final thoughts here?
Anything to plug?
No, thanks for having me on.
This has been fun.
Really enjoyed it.
I love going to market.
I love our team and our Galileo team.
And we're having a lot of fun going to market right now.
And I do think the more of these stories we could tell, I think the more
interest people
have in this as a career path.
I think sales gets a bad rap sometimes.
But if you look at the amount of strategy and coordination that goes into
revenue, I
think it's a really interesting career path for a lot of people who may not
consider it.
I'm excited for podcasts like this to reach some of those people.
So thanks for having me on and thanks for the conversation.
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