On this episode, Sean talks about prioritizing efficiently during growth, what he thinks are important qualities in GTM teams, and how he balances data driven decisions with gut instincts.
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(upbeat music)
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- Welcome to Rise of RevOps.
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I'm Ian Faison, CEO of Caspian Studios.
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And today I am joined by a very special guest,
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Sean, how are you?
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- I'm all, thank you.
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Thanks for having me, Ian.
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- Thanks so much for joining the show today.
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Super excited to chat with you about RevOps.
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Maybe perhaps the term that you think
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should be slightly different.
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Get into all the stuff that you're doing at Weka.
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So let's get into it.
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What does your company do and who do you sell to?
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- Yeah, so at Weka, we're the biggest smallest company
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most people have not heard of yet,
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but a very exciting place to be.
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And we are the data platform for AI.
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And what we're selling is just that data platform
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for really large enterprises are those companies
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that are on the cutting edge,
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that are gonna be the future,
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Fortune 50 companies moving forward in this next tranche.
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We also sell to quite a few university,
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medical research centers, government, science labs.
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Anyone that's moving and are consuming
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enormous amounts of data.
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- Wonderful.
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And tell me about your RevOps team,
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or perhaps maybe you don't call them that.
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- We don't.
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So I actually very purposely named my team,
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go to market operations.
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And I think we'll probably get into that
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a little bit more.
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But like the thing that makes us like
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every other operations team I've been on is very small.
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In operations, we tend to run really lean,
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probably too lean in most cases.
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And we love to find resources for everybody else
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and don't advocate enough for our own resources.
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But I run a global small team,
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got six people working for me right now.
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And the way that I've structured my team
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is about roughly half of the team
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is focused on the business side of it.
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So policy process governance of the end-to-end selling motion.
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And the other part is focused on the technology
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and all the kind of backbone that enables
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our sellers to be successful.
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But it's not just sellers,
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it's the marketing team and the customer success as well.
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But we consider those selling teams.
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- Yeah, so let's just get into it now.
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Why did you decide to change the name to go to?
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I'd love that by the way.
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So, and this obviously,
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part of the reason why we're making the show
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is this is all brand new.
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It's all everyone's kind of trying to figure it out.
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- Yeah, and so first of all,
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I don't want to put anybody out, say one's better
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than the other, but we purposely,
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I really wanted not only my team,
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but the company to understand
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what I considered the remit of our team.
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And what I mean by that is,
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in my experience, oftentimes when we say revenue ops,
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what we're talking about is sales ops,
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or an established sales ops team
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that has kind of picked up the couple of marketing ops people
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under their wing.
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But it's more focused on sales operations,
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which is an important part of the function
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and important discipline.
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But I purposely wanted us to think about
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the end-to-end experience for our internal stakeholders.
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And what is that customer outcome that we're after?
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So, purposely, it's the marketing,
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top-of-funnel marketing,
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through the selling motion,
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all the way through the advocacy
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on the customer success side.
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And then bring that full loop again.
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I also wanted us to be thoughtful of our data sets,
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and really understand that there's more
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to how we're gonna measure the business
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than just our pipeline and Salesforce,
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and really think about the business holistically
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and plan holistically.
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So, purposeful in calling it good a market,
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I've tried to bring people from multiple disciplines,
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and I've personally done both sales operations
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and marketing operations roles in my past,
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as well as Ben Aseller,
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and Ben Appear Play,
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marketing person, product marketing,
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field marketing, demand gen.
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And so, I wanted to have that environment
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and continuously remind people of
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a little bit,
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regardless of your actual title,
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we're all here to support that end-to-end process.
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- I love that, and that's really what,
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I think that's why revenue operations is the new normal,
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is the new name,
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because of that exact same reason that
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it doesn't matter if it's sales marketing,
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customer success,
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it's all these different functions,
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driving revenue and opts has to see across all of those.
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- That's right, and again,
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revenue ops is a great term.
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In my company culture,
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I just really wanted to first the issue of one selling team,
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and not splitting it out that way
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in terms of, again, in my experience,
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it's been having on sales ops, super important,
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but kind of wanted it to be an equal pie, if you will.
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- Yeah, so obviously,
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your team a little similar in some ways,
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like you said, lean team, global team,
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obviously you have a lot of background,
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as you mentioned,
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on all the different sides of the aisles,
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but a little different kind of in naming
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and positioning within the company.
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How does your team compare to other rev ops teams
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that have other companies when you talk to your colleagues?
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- I think our structure is similar.
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The challenge, my unique challenge is,
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and I keep telling my team,
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we have the best problems you can have in the world,
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meeting our company is growing so fast.
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The results, the sales results are incredible.
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The future outlook is incredible.
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And so where we've been challenged is,
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the operations part of it,
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the actual, like how do we support and bring forward
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and help the sales teams execute on that?
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We've not kept pace and size with the selling teams.
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And so we're just completely outnumbered right now.
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And how that manifests is,
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you have your work of today,
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and if you are executing or surviving today,
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depending on your day.
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But we also have to build for the future, right?
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I have to be thinking about,
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okay, if our company is at size X right now,
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let's hypothetically call it,
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and these are hypothetical numbers right now,
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but let's call it $50 million of ARR.
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I need to figure out what does the team need to do
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to support that 50 million now,
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but also how do we build for 100, right?
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And how do we peel off time to be strategic thinkers,
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to get us ahead of that,
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to make the purposeful, sometimes not so fun,
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uncomfortable, conscientious decision of like,
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hey, we're just not gonna get to that other stuff.
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It's important, but if we keep living in today's importance,
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we're not gonna be able to build out for tomorrow.
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And so trying to find that balance
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has been kind of our struggle and our team size right now.
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But I think from a structure standpoint,
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we're pretty standard, marketing ops, sales ops, discipline,
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customer success, and again, I've got some technologists,
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some, I,
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I have habitually call it MARTech,
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but it's broader than MARTech, right?
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But the kind of MARTech technologists
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that are really helping us to thread everything end to end.
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- What were your first 90 days like coming into this role?
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- This is, it's been a really interesting company.
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I think like most people, right,
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I come in with a lesson in learn mentality.
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Obviously did my research,
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did had the opportunity to interview quite a bit
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before I came in,
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which for me, maybe a ad hoc career tip here.
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I was interviewing the company and the people
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as much as they were to me,
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and so I had a pretty good understanding
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what I was coming into.
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The unique thing about my company
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is it's completely engineering led,
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meaning our three founders of our company
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are engineers by nature.
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They spent the first three plus years
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of the company building our product portfolio,
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and then we started selling it.
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And so what's been interesting is a lot of our
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then go-to-market processes, technology, governance,
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all of that was best decision,
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but from non-practitioners in some regards, right?
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Again, a lot of engineering perspective,
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a lot of textbook perspective, which is not bad.
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It's actually a good place to start,
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but then when you start putting things in practice,
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and then when you put the growing on top,
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we're running into, oh wow, is this scaling?
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How we wanted it to?
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How we painted ourselves in the corner, et cetera, et cetera.
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So for me, it was listening to learn very hands-on
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against starting in a smaller company,
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and just like everything, all on it,
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we had very little documentation, a lot of tribal knowledge,
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so a lot of just asking a ton of questions,
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not being shy about questions,
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building my relationships across all of the functions,
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and again, not just in the go-to-market, right?
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But finance, who's my finance partner?
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How are we doing that part of it?
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What's our book to build?
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And just building all of those out,
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doing a lot of documentation and a lot of hands-on,
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that's how I learned personally,
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is just like, okay, can you show me what you just did?
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Yes, I get it, I'm probably not gonna be
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the one doing that day-to-day,
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but I really wanna understand how we're doing it,
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because I wanna understand, is that good for now,
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and is that good for the future?
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So just a lot of that,
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and then thinking about doing a lot less talking,
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especially for the 30 days, and a lot more listening,
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formed some opinions pretty quickly,
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but wanted to be thoughtful about my opinions
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before I started kind of being like,
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okay, here's where I wanna shift the team,
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or here's where I want us to be focused moving forward.
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- All right, let's get to our first segment, Rev Obstacles.
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Where we talk about the tough part.
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- I love it.
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(laughs)
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- I know, right?
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The tough part is about RevOps.
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So what's the hardest RevOps, or go-to-market GTM problem
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that you've faced in the last six months,
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and how did you solve it?
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- Yeah, and so again, I feel like I'm embarrassment
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of riches here, like our biggest problem
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is keeping up with our growth, which is, again,
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I tell my team all the time, like,
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it's okay to have a bad moment, a bad day,
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but we have the best kinds of problems over here, right?
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Which is everything that's growth related.
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The other side of that coin is not fun.
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And so keeping up with our growth, like I said,
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and really getting to prioritize
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what we're gonna execute on now,
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how do we carve out strategy time,
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how do we get ahead of the growth?
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And I think fundamentally,
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most of us who go into operations,
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we do it because we're helpers, we're doers, we're team,
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I'm personally, and I think my whole team is this way,
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and I would imagine the most of our industry is like this.
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Very team, we before me, kind of a scenario.
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And so just keeping up with the state of the growth,
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with the resources we have,
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and getting a seat at the table to say,
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"Okay, this is amazing,
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"but if we're going to be growing our selling teams
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"by exponential amount,
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"this is what's gonna be required
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"from an infrastructure standpoint,
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"from a people standpoint,
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"to be able to best support those selling teams."
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If you throw a bunch of selling teams on top,
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and we kind of enable them properly,
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we can't support them,
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those are our most expensive resources in the company,
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and we want them to be as successful as possible.
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So we also need to make the investment
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on the upside, on the foundation side,
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to make sure that we're setting everybody up
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for the most amount of success,
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and getting the most outcome that we can
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from the business side.
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- Yeah, definitely a good problem to have.
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(laughs)
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- For sure. - For sure.
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Again, like I feel super fortunate,
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and it's challenging and really fun,
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and it can be frustrating and all those things,
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but it's pretty awesome.
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- You mentioned some of those mistakes,
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and obviously we all make those curious,
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any setbacks that you've had,
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as you're trying to grow
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and kind of keep your hands on the rocket ship.
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- Yeah, I,
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sure, of course, like a ton, actually.
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I think,
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as I think about that, right,
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we, I try to bring a very objective,
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and get a driven perspective to the company.
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Or, again, the, the, the stage of our company
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and the growth we've been going through,
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what's been an interesting challenge is,
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Ian, when we start, we're like, okay,
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looking at historic trends,
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what do we project next year to look like?
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And I was like, guys,
12:47
six months ago, when I started to now,
12:51
we're an entirely different company.
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So while we can model off of what happened
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a year, a year and a half ago,
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it kind of doesn't matter anymore, right?
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And so we really have to get comfortable
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with small data sets or small sample sizes anyways,
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smaller data sets and get this comfort level with,
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how do you look at the, you know,
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make the data-driven decision,
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but bring your experience and your gotten all those things
13:16
and merge those two together.
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And, you know, we had, again,
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that the, there's a ton of great things
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that come with working with a bunch of engineers.
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The challenge is we, gosh,
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do we like to really analyze data at my company.
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And again, I'm not against that, right?
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But at a certain point,
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it's the data's gonna tell us so much.
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And so let's take that for what it's worth,
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move on, you know, make our decisions and go forward
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and just not get stuck in this,
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trying to find the perfect data set, doesn't exist.
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I'm not, I'm not convinced,
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I've had the chance to work out like huge enterprise,
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like fortune 50 companies, startups,
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doesn't, perfect data sets doesn't exist anywhere.
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There's degrees of good and not so good,
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but it's never perfect.
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And we just have to get comfortable with the imperfection
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imperfectness, help me out with the word there, Ian.
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- Yeah, I mean, well, yeah, we gotta,
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we gotta be smart people don't at me after this
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of whatever word I'm making up.
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- Well, I think that one of the things you're talking about
14:23
is kind of like great is the enemy of good, right?
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And I think that so much in startup where we're like,
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well, let's create the perfect model based off of how things
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have been going the last six months.
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And you're like, yeah, but that's not predictive, right?
14:35
Like it's not gonna predict the future.
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Like you said, we changed entirely as a company
14:39
in the past six months.
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So if we look at everything historically,
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is that really gonna tell us like that much?
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And I think that and smaller sample sizes, right?
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It's like, you know, if you have 20 sales reps doing something
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versus 50 sales reps doing something, you're like,
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it's a, you've doubled the two and a half times
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the amount of inputs that you're getting in.
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- That's right.
15:05
Yeah, and in my universe, it's actually three X, right?
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So in my last six months, we've gone from five dollars to 20.
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Five selling teams to 20 globally,
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and we're gonna be doubling that again in the next year.
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So it's the, that behavior, you can see a trend.
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It can be interesting, data can be really interesting,
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but we can't get paralyzed by that.
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And you're spot on with the, you know,
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we call it the perfect is the enemy of the good.
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And so the other thing that I push my team really hard on
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and push my executive team as well is,
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we've got to get comfortable with 80% good, 80 plus percent good
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and have a bias for urgency and action
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versus, you know, solving for every corner of case
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in every perfect scenario, we're never gonna get there.
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And we're never gonna catch up with let alone,
15:48
get ahead of our growth stage here.
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So in those competing priorities,
15:54
obviously you have sales, you have marketing,
15:56
you have customer success.
15:57
How do you balance those three when they're all asking
16:00
for Sean's team's help?
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Yeah, and so I'm a little bit sneaky with this Ian,
16:07
but I stand by it, right?
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So I focus on our customer outcomes and experience first.
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I always try to take that outside in lens
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instead of the inside out.
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A, I believe it's the right thing to do.
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B, it's hard to argue with what I want
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when I frame it that way, right?
16:27
So just from a successful standpoint of,
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hey, if we're thinking about this customer experience,
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about what this looks like for them,
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they go end to end with us to become a satisfied,
16:36
happy customer who's advocating our product,
16:39
our company on behalf of, what does that look like?
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And how do we need to think about that?
16:43
And so when I position it that way, right?
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I actually start with strategic planning
16:49
with each of the functional leads.
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So my peers at, right?
16:52
The person that runs sales,
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person that runs marketing,
16:54
person that runs customer success.
16:57
And look at things both from a functional level
17:00
of how do we align to our kind of corporate North stars?
17:04
And then bring them together on a so about regular basis,
17:07
actually, to kind of re-establish.
17:08
'Cause to me, this is part of this is this ongoing planning.
17:12
Planning shouldn't be a once a year checkbox,
17:15
like big bang kind of project,
17:18
but for me, rather your plans are living document.
17:21
And so we're revisiting this on a roughly monthly basis,
17:26
maybe not that quite much, but maybe eight times a year.
17:29
And when you do that,
17:31
it's not this enormous investment in time, right?
17:33
So we're then spending an hour like,
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hey, how are we doing, what's working well?
17:38
Where are we going?
17:39
Does the rest of the year plan look good?
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How do we kind of take what we carved out for agility?
17:45
What makes the most sense to do that, et cetera, et cetera?
17:48
So my long-winded answer, Ian,
17:50
is frame things for the customer first,
17:53
and continuous open dialogue and communication
17:55
with the cross-functional leaders,
17:58
plus taking the initiative to bring the teams together
18:01
to have a holistic conversation.
18:03
All right, let's get to our next segment, the tool shed.
18:08
We're talking tools, spreadsheets, metrics,
18:10
just like everybody's favorite tool,
18:12
which is qualified, no B2B tool shed
18:14
is complete without qualified, go to qualified.com
18:17
to learn more about them.
18:19
Sean, let's get into your tool shed.
18:22
What do you got?
18:22
What software, dashboard systems
18:25
are you spending the most time in?
18:26
Yeah, so the other thing that's really interesting
18:29
about our company is we have embarrassment of riches
18:32
from a technology stack.
18:33
We have just a ton of best or breed stuff,
18:36
frankly, probably more than we can consume
18:39
at this stage of like kind of at our size,
18:42
but a lot of amazing stuff.
18:44
Depending on the hat I'm wearing,
18:46
I'll go deeper in one versus the other,
18:47
but I was thinking about this,
18:50
and here's where I spend most of my time, right?
18:52
So we're Salesforce shop,
18:55
so obviously a lot of time in Salesforce,
18:58
a lot of spreadsheets, a lot of dashboards
19:00
and reporting as we go through.
19:02
I actually start my morning in Salesforce,
19:05
so I don't know if that,
19:06
on the degree of nerdiness that makes me
19:09
or not for this audience, probably not so nerdy.
19:13
I'm also, we've recently implemented Clary,
19:15
and so I really love Clary as well for my sellers
19:19
because I think it's got a great mobile experience.
19:22
It puts the keeping updated forecasting
19:26
and opportunity management
19:27
kind of right at their fingertips.
19:29
It's all things, or mostly things you can do in Salesforce,
19:32
but it's just making it that much easier
19:34
for the team as we go through.
19:36
Also, we're a HubSpot shop
19:39
from a marketing automation standpoint,
19:40
so a lot of time in HubSpot.
19:42
And gain site is what we're using,
19:45
implementing for our customer success team
19:48
and kind of thinking about that,
19:49
our customer cockpit or customer dashboard
19:52
of what that looks like.
19:54
In addition, a couple of the other side tools
19:56
we've been using have put in recently,
19:58
and you just did a shout out,
20:00
also give a shout out for Qualified.
20:02
We're a recent Qualified customer,
20:04
think I'm about four or five months in now.
20:08
Really amazing how they're tying together a data set
20:12
with the visitors and IP matching.
20:14
And for me, when I thought about Leadflow
20:16
and how do we best enable our sales team,
20:18
right, and getting our customers
20:20
on the digital buyers journey,
20:22
it's been an incredible tool for us.
20:25
So been really happy with that.
20:27
And the other one I'm looking at is Atrium.
20:29
And again, that's kind of a BI tool
20:32
that lets me understand where my sales teams
20:34
are spending their time,
20:35
what's the kind of effort versus reward
20:37
in terms of pipeline build, efficacy,
20:40
activity, those kinds of things.
20:42
So lots of tools on top of those,
20:44
but that's probably my main kind of table of stuff
20:48
I'm interacting with on a daily basis.
20:50
- I love it, that is what a breakdown.
20:54
- And there's more, and there's many, many more.
20:57
- Of course.
20:58
- I think a lot of people, yeah.
20:59
- Of course.
21:00
And so within all of that,
21:03
what metrics matter to you?
21:07
- So I love this question
21:09
because it's such a brutal question.
21:12
And as I've thought about this a lot during my career
21:15
and my perspectives evolved a lot in this,
21:18
about this in my career.
21:19
And I think especially as my scale and scope
21:22
of my job roles have changed.
21:24
And now I have the good fortune
21:29
of sitting between the executive team
21:31
and I think the doers.
21:32
And I mean that with respect, right?
21:34
But there's the,
21:35
how do you think about your corporate level metrics
21:38
and what are the leading and lagging indicators
21:41
that let you know on an executive level?
21:43
Are we doing well?
21:45
Are we on target, right?
21:47
We're not gonna look at 100 plus things.
21:49
Although again, some of my executives
21:51
would love to spend an afternoon looking at 100 things.
21:54
But I steer them away from that
21:58
because if you're curious, that's one thing,
22:01
but it's not how we're gonna manage the company
22:02
from an executive standpoint.
22:04
On a functional level, right?
22:06
So whether you're running digital,
22:08
you're doing demand-gen,
22:09
you're a customer success, what have you,
22:11
we may end up with,
22:12
and we likely do actually should do the count now.
22:15
50 plus metrics that we're looking at
22:18
like across the go-to-market motion
22:21
on a functional level that let us know,
22:23
was that ad buy successful?
22:25
Did this event give us the results we wanted?
22:28
Is our sales motion, you know,
22:29
creating the velocity we need in the funnel, et cetera, et cetera?
22:33
But I've spent a lot of probably the last five plus years
22:37
of my career really focused on getting executives focused on
22:42
a really top-level dashboard.
22:44
And to me, the common things are revenue slash bookings.
22:48
I think we're here to make money, right?
22:51
New logo acquisition, which is the proxy for
22:53
how is the company growing,
22:55
and what does the future look like?
22:57
Our pipeline coverage,
22:58
which is a leading indicator for sales rep performance,
23:01
and our weekend ahead are numbers.
23:03
On the marketing side,
23:04
some combination of share of voice,
23:06
and customer and prospect engagement.
23:09
And then lastly, some sort of a customer advocacy metric,
23:13
right, whether it's an MPL score,
23:15
or some other CSAT score or something like that.
23:18
Those are the ones that I continuously try to bring
23:21
my executive teams back up to, and focused on,
23:24
and that's where I like to start our conversations
23:26
when we're doing QBRs or what have you of,
23:28
how do we feel about these things?
23:30
And then we can double click down from there.
23:32
- And so Sean,
23:35
do you have an example of something that you noticed
23:40
in your pipeline wasn't really working,
23:43
and that you kind of were able to diagnose and fix?
23:47
- Yeah, a couple of things actually,
23:51
and they're interrelated,
23:53
and again, I go back to really fortunate,
23:55
we have a lot of good problems to tackle here.
23:59
I think one of the first things I noticed is,
24:02
and I don't think we're unique in this,
24:04
in the kind of size of company we are,
24:06
and where we're at in our maturity level,
24:08
but we were living, our pipeline was living quarter to quarter,
24:12
meaning the entire pipeline was set up to be in this quarter,
24:16
and then whatever didn't close, right,
24:19
close one ideally, but even close loss,
24:21
whatever didn't close,
24:23
that just rolled over to next quarter's pipeline.
24:26
And so building out the maturity of,
24:28
okay, we're an enterprise sale,
24:30
it's not a one quarter sale,
24:32
it's pretty very technical, high-end technology,
24:37
very complicated, sophisticated stuff that we enable,
24:41
it's a six plus month sales process
24:45
from a qualified lead for us.
24:47
And so teaching the team of the importance
24:51
of trying to land realistically
24:53
where you think this opportunity sits.
24:57
And so part of that process, Ian, was first of all,
25:00
and by the way, I married to a sales executive,
25:03
and so I lived this, right,
25:04
and I'm not speaking ill of any salespeople,
25:06
but creating an environment where people felt like,
25:11
they weren't gonna get in trouble for missing a number,
25:15
because I think in that environment,
25:17
what happens then is people,
25:18
I don't wanna say sandbag, but they get very conservative.
25:21
I don't wanna get beat right for missing a number,
25:24
or be like, where's this amount,
25:26
I said it at a,
25:26
so I'm gonna put in the lowest I can possibly get away with,
25:29
and hopefully nobody's gonna call me out on it.
25:31
And so trying to create a more of an open environment
25:34
where we discuss things,
25:36
try to pull out what we think is more of a real number,
25:40
but not crush people as we're maturing and learning
25:45
the business and hey, how good at that were we, right?
25:48
How good are we at forecasting,
25:50
and how do we continue to develop that muscle?
25:53
So part of it was just kind of like,
25:55
where do we land and what's the size of it,
25:57
and getting comfortable with being realistic,
26:03
but to the right of center on aggressive, not insane, right?
26:09
But not to the left of center of Uber conservative,
26:13
because I'm safe if I just put in a low number.
26:17
And so that's the big push we've been doing
26:19
is just again, as we mature it,
26:21
as we bring in new sellers to say,
26:23
this is our way, this is why we're asking you to do it.
26:26
And that's the other part is explaining to them
26:28
how this data is used with the executive team,
26:31
with our board of directors, et cetera, et cetera.
26:34
This is not a setup for a gotcha.
26:38
Ha ha, Ian, you said you were gonna do 100,
26:40
and you did 80, boom, you're in the penalty box.
26:44
That's not what we're after.
26:46
And so that's, I think the biggest kind of pipeline issue
26:49
I've come into is just being more thoughtful
26:52
about landing the amount and when.
26:55
- I love that, great story.
26:59
Let's talk spreadsheets.
27:03
- Love it, let's talk spreadsheets.
27:06
I never in a million years thought I would be
27:09
spent so much time in spreadsheets.
27:10
- Ha ha, there you go.
27:13
What are your top three?
27:14
- For me, for the job I have and what I'm looking at,
27:19
it's a combination, or the three,
27:21
I'm probably going to the most of our pipeline.
27:23
My rep ramp, and I mean that just in terms of,
27:28
do I feel like we've done what we need to do
27:30
to enable them to help them build a territory
27:33
to get them set up for success?
27:35
And some combination of mix and lead flow, right?
27:40
So where are we at in terms of our velocity
27:42
and where are things coming from
27:43
and is at the right balance that we're expecting
27:46
between marketing contribution,
27:48
sales contribution and our partner channel contribution.
27:52
Any spreadsheet tips or tricks for the audience?
27:56
- My biggest spreadsheet tip is dumb as the sounds,
28:04
or as basic as the sounds maybe,
28:08
it's a better way to say it.
28:10
Double check your work.
28:11
I live in Excel all day long,
28:14
like I'm sure a lot of people do.
28:17
And the amount of times that,
28:18
we get very proficient in it,
28:21
but the amount of times I've caught
28:22
where I've just done a sloppy copy or a formula error,
28:27
and in your head you know it's right,
28:29
but you've just like a fat fingered something
28:32
or something, right?
28:33
Okay, we all make mistakes, but the challenge is this.
28:37
I know, because I'm living in the data,
28:40
I know what I should be expecting or roughly expecting,
28:43
and can I eyeball it?
28:45
Oh wow, does that look right?
28:47
That doesn't look right.
28:48
Let me go double check it.
28:50
The reason why I stress this is in my experience,
28:53
if you show up with bad data,
28:56
the entire conversation that knows about the data integrity,
28:59
and not about the business topic at hand.
29:01
And so it's just a headache that you can avoid
29:05
by literally taking the two minutes to sanity check,
29:09
is this all right before I start sharing it?
29:12
And again, I know that sounds really basic,
29:14
but I've learned that lesson the hard way,
29:16
unfortunately more times
29:17
than I showed up in my career,
29:19
and I just double check everything now.
29:21
And sometimes even if I'm super tired,
29:23
hey somebody on my team,
29:24
will you sanity check this for me real quick,
29:26
and don't spend more than two minutes on it,
29:28
but does this look right to you?
29:31
That's my tip.
29:32
Not sexy, but keep yourself out of the dog house.
29:37
- I love it.
29:38
What is one tool that might be new to you
29:44
that you can't live without?
29:46
- I'm old school, so I am very big on,
29:51
so I'm all for technology, but I'll be honest with you,
29:54
I start with policy process and governance every time,
29:58
before I jump to a tool.
29:59
And for me, the tool then should be either helping us
30:02
be more productive, more efficient,
30:05
or get a better outcome as we go through that.
30:07
So again, I'm very pro-technology,
30:10
and I mentioned a couple right that we've been putting in
30:13
lately that I think are really amazing.
30:16
Qualified's one, I'm a big gain site fan, big clarity fan.
30:21
So these things are great, I'm not sure
30:23
they're so brand new in the market.
30:25
I'm not at the point now where I'm throwing stuff in,
30:28
though, just to throw it in.
30:30
But I'm kind of more of a measured person
30:34
when I approach technology.
30:36
- Anything cool that your team has done with data recently
30:42
or something that surprised you?
30:44
- I think, so as I think about that question,
30:49
I'm like, data leaks, and what is cool to do with data?
30:53
The thing that I might reframe your question
30:57
and say the thing that I'm kind of most proud of
31:00
that we've been doing with data,
31:02
and the thing that I've been really focused on the team with,
31:05
is demystifying across our entire company
31:07
how we're using the data.
31:09
So what is the data for?
31:12
I find that once I help the selling teams understand
31:16
the how, the where, the when data is being used,
31:20
there's less resistance around that conversation
31:24
and then more substantive conversations
31:26
than this kind of protecting or being afraid of data
31:29
or hiding around data.
31:30
So again, I try to set up an environment where
31:33
it's okay to be wrong, an environment where we take
31:36
some calculated risks, an environment where we're learning
31:39
and growing as we go.
31:40
And again, I like for people to understand the how and why
31:43
we're doing what we're doing.
31:45
So, you know, they can get on board with it.
31:47
It doesn't just feel like a big corporate data checkbox exercise
31:51
like, let me get done with this thing so I can move on.
31:55
- All right, let's go to our final segment.
31:58
Quick hits.
32:00
There's your quick questions and quick answers.
32:03
- Cool.
32:04
- Are you ready?
32:05
- I'm ready.
32:06
- Number one.
32:08
- The suspense is killing me.
32:13
- If you could take one animal and make them really big
32:22
or make them really small, what would it be?
32:25
- I want to make a giraffe normal size.
32:32
- I don't know why.
32:33
- I don't know, but it's like, I saw this meme on, I think
32:38
Reddit or something, right?
32:39
It was like, okay, unicorn zone exists, but giraffes do.
32:42
Unicorn is more likely to be in the normal realm of whatever
32:46
versus this thing with a crazy neck and what have you.
32:48
I want to see like a household dog size giraffe.
32:51
I don't know why, but that's what I want.
32:53
- Do you have a favorite book or TV show or podcast that you've
32:57
been checking out?
33:00
- I do, I go back to, I really love the Martian, Andy Weir.
33:05
I love this notion, you know, I think he'd hurt for me,
33:10
really nails in the, you know, my self-proclaimed nerdiness,
33:15
nails the science fiction genre of having enough science
33:20
in a book, but being very readable, you know, kind of taking
33:24
on a journey, getting you to think about stuff as you go
33:28
through.
33:29
So I'm a big fan of those kinds of books and I try to get away
33:34
from that, I'll be honest with you, I don't do a lot of like
33:38
business books and those kinds of things.
33:40
I know there's a lot out there, certainly read a lot of blogs
33:43
and those kinds of things, but when I'm reading, reading,
33:45
I kind of want to escape.
33:46
So I'll go for that type of a novel.
33:49
- Do you have a biggest rev-ops misconception?
33:56
- That we are here to say no to everyone for everything
34:03
they ask for.
34:04
We're not, I'm not, my team's not, I think most people
34:08
are not.
34:09
I think sometimes as rev-ops or go-to-market-ops people,
34:14
we can maybe reframe the question and how we try to think
34:17
about it.
34:18
I don't want to say no, I want to help people.
34:21
Sometimes with the solution or the way that my teams want to go
34:26
about getting to the end state, no, we're not going to do it
34:31
that way, but I don't want to say no to your ask or no to
34:36
helping you execute to what that is.
34:38
We want to help.
34:39
We're helpers by nature.
34:41
It's in our DNA.
34:42
I know it's in our DNA.
34:43
I hate saying no.
34:44
- Do you have a?
34:46
Top three dinner party guests.
34:51
They have to be alive.
34:56
- Ooh, I hope this doesn't come across as dark with the
35:01
recent thing.
35:02
So I'm going to age myself.
35:05
I'm going to cheat.
35:07
I want to go back in time.
35:09
I want Van Halen during the 1984-19.
35:14
I want to go back in time.
35:16
I want to go back in time.
35:18
I want to go back in time.
35:20
I want to go back in time.
35:22
I want to go back in time.
35:24
I want to go back in time.
35:27
I want to go back in time.
35:29
I want to go back in time.
35:31
I want to go back in time.
35:33
- I want to go back in time.
35:35
- I want to go back in time.
35:37
- I want to go back in time.
35:39
- I want to go back in time.
35:41
- I want to go back in time.
35:44
- I want to go back in time.
35:46
I want to go back in time.
35:49
I want to go back in time.
35:51
- I want to go back in time.
35:54
- I want to go back in time.
35:57
- I want to go back in time.
36:00
- I want to go back in time.
36:02
- I want to go back in time.
36:04
- I want to go back in time.
36:06
- I want to go back in time.
36:08
- I want to go back in time.
36:10
- I want to go back in time.
36:12
- I want to go back in time.
36:14
- I want to go back in time.
36:16
- I want to go back in time.
36:18
- I want to go back in time.
36:20
- I want to go back in time.
36:22
- I want to go back in time.
36:24
- I want to go back in time.
36:26
- I want to go back in time.
36:28
- I want to go back in time.
36:30
- I want to go back in time.
36:32
- I want to go back in time.
36:34
- I want to go back in time.
36:36
- I want to go back in time.
36:38
- I want to go back in time.
36:40
- I want to go back in time.
36:42
- I want to go back in time.
36:44
- I want to go back in time.
36:46
- I want to go back in time.
36:48
- I want to go back in time.
36:50
- I want to go back in time.
36:52
- I want to go back in time.
36:54
- I want to go back in time.
36:56
- I want to go back in time.
36:58
- I want to go back in time.
37:00
- I want to go back in time.
37:02
- I want to go back in time.
37:04
- I want to go back in time.
37:06
- I want to go back in time.
37:08
- I want to go back in time.
37:10
- I want to go back in time.
37:12
- I want to go back in time.
37:14
- I want to go back in time.
37:16
- I want to go back in time.
37:18
- I want to go back in time.
37:20
- I want to go back in time.
37:22
- I want to go back in time.
37:24
- I want to go back in time.