On this episode Mahesh discusses using rev ops to find your target audience, the biggest misconception about rev ops, and what happens when you combine strategy and execution.
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Welcome to Rise of RevOps. I'm the in phase on CEO of Castwind Studios.
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Rise of RevOps is always presented by Qualified. You can go to Qualified.com to
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learn more.
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I have a special guest, Mesh. How are you? Thank you, Ian. Thank you for
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welcoming me here.
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It's a happy Friday. Really, really big pleasure to come and speak to you.
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Yes, super excited to chat about Marchetta, about all the cool stuff you're
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doing, and of course your background. So let's get into it. Can you tell me first job
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in RevOps?
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Well, my first job in RevOps was sales planning and comm design.
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I've been in the payment industry for over more than 20 years.
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I've worked across AMX PayPal and now at Marketa.
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Interestingly, my role has evolved. I didn't start in revenue operations.
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I've done several sales roles, B.D. roles, including deal pricing, account
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management,
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and P&L. In fact, my team was instrumental in launching one of our key products
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For the last few years, I've been very heavily involved with revenue operations
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, pricing,
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sales and comm design. It's been a really exciting journey, both at Marketa and
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prior to that.
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Yeah, and tell us a little bit about your current role.
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So in my current role, we have a small but a very effective revenue operations
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team at Marketa.
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And the way we look at revenue operation at Marketa is kind of defining it as
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the connected issue,
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which combines the effort of sales, marketing and customer success team to
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streamline processes
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and propel revenue growth at Marketa. We are the team which strives to be the
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revenue machine,
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driving operational excellence driven by innovation to support Marketa's growth
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and operational efficiency objectives. What that means is,
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which basically means we try to grow revenue through new and existing customers
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increase the deal velocity and viability and enable new revenue pursuits
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to support our strategic business objectives. At Marketa, we touch almost every
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aspect,
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what I call from lead to deal and from deal to dollar.
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So right all the way when some lead comes in, even like downloads a website or
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a paper,
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all the way to signing the contract and launching it and that ultimately ramp
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ing up the customers
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to the full ability of Marketa and using its platform to grow and propel the
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business.
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What's your definition of rev-ups? I think I touched a little bit about when
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you mentioned
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revenue operations. I think for me, revenue operation is that single cohesive
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unit that
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kind of brings together marketing, sales and customer success teams together.
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And it brings that in a unified manner so that the customer experience is one
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touch experience.
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At the end of the day, the customer is dealing with one single entity and it
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doesn't have to go to marketing
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or sales or customer service. And what that does, it creates a unified journey
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and it helps
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both the customer and Marketa to achieve growth in different vectors.
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It's so funny, right? When we talk about this all the time on the show,
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it's always only been one customer journey. We just broke it up into all these
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different departments.
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And there's never been an organization that oversees that journey and now you
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have this rev-ups function that's looking at this snake that's cut into a bunch of
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different pieces
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and being like, "Hey, do you know that this thing is just kind of all one thing
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and it doesn't need to be
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sliced and diced all these different ways?" It seems so obvious now in
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retrospect, but it just wasn't that way
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for a long time. You're absolutely right. We have a seeing at Marketa that the
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customer should not know what our org structure is. At the end of the day, we should be
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one. Like if it's reaching out to Marketa, you should not know whether I'm in sales
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or marketing
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or customer service. It's basically like, "I'm serving the customer at a single
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touch point
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and the handoffs are seamless." And I think in the past, you would have that
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disjointed experiences.
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I think the tech industry's adoption of revenue operations as efficiency
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driving machine
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and an engine has really got that whole element together. Now we have X-Tacks,
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which supports that as well.
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So you have data which kind of helps you that. You have tools and processes in
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place,
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which helps you manage the customer journey and the handoffs in a very seamless
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manner.
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And it makes the deal velocity go faster. It makes your RAM go faster. It prop
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els revenue
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and it has a lot of other effects. It improves your efficiency and return on
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investment
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on your sales teams, your marketing teams and your customer service teams.
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How do you organize your RAV app team?
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It's interesting question. So we actually have two teams. My team is organized
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around two vectors.
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One is the go-to-market strategy team. And the second vector is the go-to-
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market revenue operations team.
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What we do is, along with those both the vectors, on the go-to-market strategy
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team,
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there are some key areas where we focus on. I'll talk a little bit about that.
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Some of the key areas which we focus on are the deal renewal strategies and
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achieving our dollar-based net retention goals. We have company-wide dollar-based net
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retention goal and the
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steam is cast to kind of figure. We renew all those deals and we achieve our D
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BMR goals.
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We also have a pricing team. The idea of that team is to help figure out what's
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the best price
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we can charge to our customers and also help our sales team understand that
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pricing.
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One other piece which this team does very well is come out with the KPIs for a
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strategic alignment
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across sales, marketing and customer service. The other team which we have in
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the GTM operations team,
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which is more traditional revenue operations team, which does more day-to-day
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and activities
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associated with revenue operations. That team is broken down into four people
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as. We have a deal desk team, which basically looks at end-to-end deal management
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process. The second team is the sales planning and marketing and that designs and
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manages effective compensation
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and incentive structures. The last time we have the revenue enablement, which
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basically creates
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all supporting sales collapse and RFP process for the revenue teams.
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That's how the teams are organized and it's working really good right now for
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us.
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Any things about your team and building this are things that, like lessons
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along the way
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in terms of organization, it seems like you have a pretty wired in at this
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point.
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It's a very happy blend. The strategy team works more on the go-to market
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strategy size
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and it actually tries to figure out where to play and how to play.
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One good example I'll give is when we looked at our pipeline efficiency and our
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pipeline
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metrics last year when I joined, we looked at a particular set of opportunities
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and realized that our sales marketing and deal desk team were burning a lot of sales cycle
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on a particular
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set of segment of opportunities and the ROI on those were much below our normal
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standards.
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We went and typed deep into it and then from a strategy perspective, we
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actually came with
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a realization that this is not the segment but these are not the set of
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opportunities
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the sales team should be burning their calories on.
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Then we presented the findings as CEO, CRO, CFO and ultimately as a team we
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agreed that
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was not the best utilization of companies or sources.
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What that did was it actually helped us to move our sales team and pivot them
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to focus
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on the right set of opportunities and we've seen tremendous progress over the
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last two
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quarters as we kind of moved away, deliberately moved away.
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It's a good example of how strategy can influence revenue generation and
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revenue opportunities.
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Any other thoughts on strategy or organization?
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Yeah, the second thought I'll give is when I joined a marketer about a year ago
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, marketers
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go to market team had evolved over time and it was time for us to rethink our
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strategies
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and achieve the way we operate and structure our sales team.
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This becomes really important because in a hyper growth environment, we've been
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growing
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at 40 to 50 percent year over year.
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It becomes even more critical.
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Marketer was like 200-300 people literally two or three years ago and today we
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are 1,000
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people.
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We have really grown in leaps and bounds and we did not have, I would say, a
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very consistent
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revenue organization.
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Teams worked in silos and one of the things we looked from a strategy
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perspective along
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with our CRO and CIO was to create what we call a unified board structure which
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basically brought together the BDT, the sales team, the customer success team and created
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a one single cohesive unit which could act at the single touchpoint for the customers
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This change, this art design change has resulted in massive operational gains
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for us and we
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have the last two to three quarters with amazing results.
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We supplemented that from a revenue operations perspective with a new design on
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our comp
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and that's worked beautifully for us.
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Again, the results are showing itself.
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We will be releasing our Q1 numbers and it looks very promising.
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That's awesome.
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What a great story.
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Any other thoughts on strategy before we get to the next segment?
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Look, I think strategy for us is a continuous evolution.
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What I call as strategy without execution is just a vision.
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An execution without strategy is just confusion.
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Bringing them together is what revops can really do and that's what our team is
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trying to get
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together to bring the elements of strategy and execution in a seamless manner
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so that we
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can achieve companies goals and objectives.
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Alright, let's get to our next segment.
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RevOps to cross where we talk about the tough parts of RevOps.
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What's the hardest RevOps problem you faced in the last six months?
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How do you solve it?
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I think I referred a little bit like one of the things which we were like,
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where do we focus
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our RevOps team's energy at efforts and we soon figured out there were segments
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which we should
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not be going after and how do we manage that.
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The second was that our RevOps central source of information and a salesforce
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system had
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a lot of data hygiene issues and we've been in a journey over the last I would
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say one
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to two quarters to create that central source of truth and have it much more
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better organized
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so that we have the right source of truth.
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The third piece I would say is like we have also looked at enhancing our tool
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set.
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One of the challenges which we have had over the last couple of quarters I
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would say is
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attribution and anytime you're working with marketing tech stacks or RevOps
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tech stacks
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like sales teams always want to know the attribution factor because it
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ultimately affects everything
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from their compensation to how you reach out to the customer and we're trying
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to get better
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and better at that attribution model.
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It will take some time but we are engaging with the different tools, different
10:42
processes
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to kind of handle and manage it.
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RevOps moment where we made a mistake on something in the last year.
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I don't think I will call it a mistake but like we grossly underestimated the
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capacity
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we needed from a RevOps teams perspective to manage the amount of support we
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are providing
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to the RevOps team.
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I'll give you an example.
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In any given order we approve and price CPQ like 200 codes.
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To do that 200 codes roughly give or take.
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It's a large number.
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You're doing roughly two to three every working day.
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In a B2B environment you have to be very organized and make sure that you're
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passing on the correct ones.
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We are a very small team and we soon realized they needed to beef up the team
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because we could not scale
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by having such a small team support, the pricing and the deal-desk function.
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So we are now investing more time and resources to call that.
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So that we support our teams better than they can support the revenue engine.
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One of the big mistakes is you mentioned people not being able to sort of align
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things between sales marketing
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customer success.
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Obviously you're doing a bunch of stuff there.
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Anyways that you've avoided some Rev obstacles there by making sure people are
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aligned.
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Anything that somebody could implement in their business right now.
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It's aligned sales marketing CS.
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What we have done is with the new board structure we now have individual goals
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and team goals.
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And these are aligned all the way from marketing to sales to customer success.
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And there are clear metrics and they're measured on a quarterly basis both at
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the individual level and the team level.
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What that has done is there's a clear KPI which anyone in the team can go and
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see and understand what their goals is
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and what the team's goals is.
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What this has done is much more aligned resourcing, much more aligned capacity
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planning and also much more focus
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on the right activities to get to the right outcomes.
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I think that KPI framework of all the way from marketing to customer success I
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think is the key to make sure that everyone
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buys into it and then you're aligned and then you're incentivized once you hit
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that KPI.
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I think that really makes the organization work as one single unit.
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Okay let's get to our next segment the tool shed.
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We're talking tools spreadsheets and metrics just like everybody's favorite
13:10
tool qualified.
13:11
No B2B tool shed is complete without qualified.
13:15
Start conversations with your buyers directly on your website go to qualified.
13:21
com right now.
13:22
To learn more tool shed.
13:24
Mahesh what do you got the tool shed?
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So I'll start with the top of the funnel all the way to the bottom of the
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funnel.
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From a marketing standpoint we have a very healthy tech stack that keeps our
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team both efficient and drives revenue growth.
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We are currently implementing a marketer to unlock improved both lead flow
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automation and reporting.
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Along that we are very excited to utilize target lysing I would say Adobe
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measure and that helps us to provide
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multi touch attribution modeling and better cost analysis by channel.
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We also have the land days which is integrated with our sales force which
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enables our marketing and sales team to understand
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where the prospects are coming and where they are in the buying cycle and they
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get detailed reports
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on who is engaging with marketer how long they've been engaging with us.
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It really helps our marketing and the SDR teams to do that.
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But that's on the top of the funnel.
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If you go have a sales standpoint our main system is sales force that supports
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the workflows for our revenue teams
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in areas of lead, account management, opportunity creation, CPQ.
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The sales force CPQ supports many of the workflows by pre configuring our
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products, pricing and goods
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and it bundles it in a very simplified and automated way.
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In addition to that once we have that we have a document management system
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which we use for our contract management purposes
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and then for our reports and dashboards and KPIs we have sales force which
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integrates with a robust
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electrical tool called Looker.
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I don't know if you ever use that and then we have Intelligence 360 which is
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now called Insight Square
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to extend the functionality and gain further insights.
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We use DocuSign as I briefly mentioned, Streamline our contract management and
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customer agreement processes.
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We have some other tools but these are like I would say the primary 70 to 80%
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of our usage.
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We have tools like LinkedIn Sales Navigator, 25 and Build Relationships.
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We have gone, we enable our sales teams for Constraining and Insights
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and last but not the least once we have signed the contract we have Asuna which
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we use by our customer
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and product onboarding teams to help manage the delivery and implementation
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process.
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So there's a variety of tools which we use, we keep on going back and forth
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with some of them
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but these are like from the central tools which have been in the company for a
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few years and we're holding on those.
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Is there something you're excited about investing in over the course of the
15:50
next year?
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One of the things that we've mentioned we have had huge challenges is the multi
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-touch attribution.
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It is extremely hard and especially our marketing team in this environment has
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to justify every dollar invested,
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not only justify but how do you optimize if you cannot measure the dollar
16:08
correctly.
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And I think we are very excited about Adobe to come in and help us with that
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multi-touch evolution model.
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I think that would be a big gap which we will fill.
16:19
We also invest in, we haven't decided yet but we are looking to invest in a
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sales compensation tool.
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We're currently doing it mostly offline so we want to have an integrated tool
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for sales force to do that
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and we're evaluating two to three vendors.
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I think those two areas are a big focus for us as we build and scale our
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systems.
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Yeah the multi-touch attribution stuff is so hard because yeah obviously so C
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aspian we make video podcast series
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for the enterprise and so we see a lot of attribution stuff because we're in it
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every day.
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And so what you see all the time is someone who converts on an ad and then they
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say that the reason why they convert it
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is because they listen to the customer's podcast or they do that stuff.
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So the impetus for the conversion was the learning all that other stuff was
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sourced from a different area
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but then the final touch and that's where it's like it's just so hard and
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marketing is ridiculously complicated now.
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It's so much more complicated than ever.
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Buying is so much more complicated than ever so it's like helping the marketing
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team and sales team figure out
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where that pipeline is because it's not just sourced pipe it's just not like it
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used to be.
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It's a great point that we're all trying to figure out.
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Yeah it means like to date our sales force has been more of a first touch
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attribution model
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but we all know B2B sales cycles are anywhere between six to nine months at the
17:44
low end and then could be multiple years
17:46
and a lot could happen between the first time we went to the website and
17:50
downloaded a case study or a report
17:52
to contacting an SDR or having a direct contract with their executive team
17:57
members
17:57
and figuring out that multi-touch attribution really helps all we believe will
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help us to figure out
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what are the marketing channels and how we are doing against them.
18:07
We spend a lot of money on media, we spend a lot of money on brand activations,
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we go to events like Money 2020
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and it's really hard to go in front of finance teams and justify those
18:16
investments when you don't have the data to back it up.
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It's been a holy grail for a long period of time not only for revenue
18:22
operations but in general for the marketing tech staff teams
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so we are excited to see where we can go with it.
18:28
We have been investing in market measure.
18:30
I was going to ask, I'm curious as a rev-ops leader especially from a strategic
18:35
standpoint
18:35
when you're looking at multi-year time horizons and things like that, we're
18:39
like okay six to nine months or more
18:41
and that marketing leader who's saying there are things that we are going to do
18:45
and initiative that we are going to do
18:47
that you cannot track as a one off thing a billboard for example.
18:51
We're just talking to someone who ran a billboard ad that everyone thought it
18:56
was stupid
18:57
and then they did a self-reported attribution and they had like, I forget how
19:03
many customers, it was a crazy number of people
19:05
that signed that were just like I see your billboard ads all the time and they
19:09
're freaking hilarious.
19:10
And you're like everyone thought it was this stupid thing, they spend all this
19:14
money on these billboard ads
19:15
but it showcased that brand and who they are and their personality in a way
19:21
that aided to the brand.
19:22
It's not an awareness play, it's an affinity play. Those are those sort of
19:28
things like when you're trying to justify the spend
19:29
before you spend the money, no CFO on the planet is going to be like this is a
19:34
great idea because you can't track it.
19:35
I totally agree. We try to measure individual attribution as you rightly said
19:40
but we also try to measure
19:41
brand health and awareness and there are some metrics which we use to figure
19:46
out what are these things doing.
19:47
I'll give you an example, we spend a lot of money in the payments world, money
19:51
2020 is a very big event.
19:52
You could easily spend at the low end a couple of million dollars all the way
19:57
to 25-30 million dollars in a single event.
19:59
And that's a big amount of money like Marketa is not a huge company, maybe a
20:02
thousand people.
20:03
So for us to spend that amount of money we need to justify that investment and
20:08
you might need a prospect in money 2020,
20:10
in the month of October when it happens and the prospect won't come back to you
20:15
till like January or February,
20:17
but you had had that conversation with him. Now how do you track it, how do you
20:21
measure it?
20:21
He might have gone to the website three times, in between that he might have
20:25
downloaded a few pages, he might have seen some ads,
20:27
some emails. It's so hard to kind of lend all of that together and say like
20:32
okay the first touch attribution here actually resulted
20:35
in the second touch, the third touch, the fourth touch and ultimately in the
20:40
month of April we started negotiating a deal with them.
20:43
And it's always been a challenge and so we are really excited to figure out, I
20:48
think there's a bit of leap of faith you will have to have in some of these
20:52
things that they work
20:52
and you have to measure them not on a monthly or a quarterly basis but more
20:58
what a period of time.
20:59
And I think there are other metrics which you have to use other than direct
21:03
attribution method to measure the effectiveness of some of these campaigns.
21:06
As I said like Billboard is a great example of that, like people spend millions
21:11
of dollars on Super Bowl ads and there's always a question mark,
21:14
do they generate an ROI or not?
21:16
Yeah and I think that like one off campaigns is just not how marketing is done
21:20
really anymore.
21:20
And that's like at the end of the day like it's so many touches, one of my
21:25
favorite marketers of all time,
21:26
Chan are the former Sammo Mercado, he says paint the skies, right?
21:31
And like that's like everywhere you look or everywhere your prospects look you
21:35
want them to see your brand and I love that idea.
21:37
It's like their sky is what is in front of them, right?
21:42
It's not paint the entire world with that.
21:45
It's like where are they looking?
21:47
What can they see in doing that?
21:49
And companies that do that really well, they win.
21:52
If you have a good product and you're constantly being reminded how good of a
21:56
product it is, like you're going to win.
21:57
And that's not a single campaign initiative.
22:00
A lot of marketers, and I think that this is where like this ties into the Rev
22:05
Ops play, which is RevOps can own more of the conversation around finding those
22:14
areas of multi-touch attribution that you can't track and being creative.
22:18
That is something that like a great RevOps team can do and help your marketer
22:22
to figure that out.
22:24
Because your marketers like I have a hunch that this will work and I need to
22:29
prove it, can you help me prove it?
22:30
And that's super exciting.
22:31
I think you're absolutely right.
22:33
I would just add to that is that where RevOps can help is identify the right
22:38
target audience for that marketing campaign or that market and can say like
22:43
this is what I've been seeing, this is the analysis, this is the result.
22:47
This is how these guys interact.
22:49
This is the deal size, the deal velocity.
22:52
This is the type of audience we want to go after and these are the results we
22:56
've seen historically.
22:57
And that can feed into that campaign or that event and then ultimately you
23:02
start tracking it and seeing it at much more holistic level than at the atomic
23:07
level.
23:07
Sometimes you're very hard and you say like okay, I went after this audience
23:12
like we go a lot after the developer audience and we'll see that results.
23:15
Someone else would go a lot after a consumer audience, someone might go out to
23:19
the mid market, someone might go out to the large market and I think that's
23:22
where RevOps can really come in and say like this is what works and this is
23:25
doesn't. And then that helps the marketing team to figure out the right messaging, the
23:30
right value proposition and the right attribution overall.
23:33
Yeah, I mean you just nailed it how complex this is.
23:36
So the marketing team is marketing to SMB, mid market and enterprise who need
23:41
three different types of messaging.
23:43
There's let's just say seven personas within that that they're selling to.
23:48
So that's 21 different campaigns that they have to be running like types of
23:53
campaigns.
23:54
And then all of those people want individual industry vertical stuff too, right
24:00
So let's say there's another seven, you know, there.
24:03
You're already talking about like plus different types of things and that's
24:07
where like the RevOps leader partnering with marketing, looking forward from a
24:11
strategic standpoint.
24:12
And so that's where the revenue is so valuable, right?
24:15
Like I love the phrase that the chief marketing officer is the chief market
24:18
officer, they need to understand the market and the way that you're talking
24:22
about RevOps being that strategic leader that like those two things tied
24:26
together is really exciting to me for the future
24:28
of like RevOps is the marketer and the RevOps leader like tying together on the
24:32
market and the strategy piece to figure out how to get the message and market
24:36
as best as possible and sales closing the frickin deals that come in.
24:40
You did the maths three or four different segments.
24:42
You have within those segments seven or eight use cases multiply four by seven.
24:47
That's 28 within those use cases you might have three or four different kind of
24:52
personas who you want to reach out in three or four different dimensions.
24:55
And how do you create that grid where RevOps can identify and say like, this is
25:00
what I want to go after and this is where you get the highest returns.
25:02
And you also want to create a grid where say like, I don't want to go after
25:06
these ones because and if you can give both those grids to the marketing team
25:10
and then they can craft a value proposition, a story for each of those personas
25:15
, each of those cells in the grid,
25:17
then they can start targeting and doing a drip campaigns, which then attracts
25:22
those audiences to engage with you.
25:24
And then you need to figure out the right handoff from marketing to the sales
25:28
team to say like, okay, I've won the lead enough for you.
25:31
Now it's your time and then the sales team state that lead and then ultimately
25:35
get the leads to convert to the right deals and then you hand it off to the
25:39
customer success team, which then basically start up selling and cross selling
25:43
and ramping the customer to ultimately generate revenue for the company.
25:46
Any other wine spots, they wish you could measure better. I think a tradition
25:52
is big. The second blind spot, I would say, is what we are finding is placed
25:57
from our lens is that once you have signed the contract, we also measure what
26:02
we call deal to dollar metrics,
26:03
which is the time to launch and the time to ramp. And that in the past, we have
26:08
not been very good both in terms of measuring it and also figuring out the
26:13
optimization path.
26:14
We are getting much more hyper focused on figuring out, okay, once you have
26:18
signed the deal, it means nothing to the company.
26:21
You have actually invested a lot of dollars both in marketing and sales team to
26:26
get the deal signed.
26:27
The company actually starts making money when the deal, which you have signed,
26:31
starts generating dollars for you.
26:33
And how do you optimize that deal to dollar process? Because if you can reduce
26:39
on an average, if I'm taking six months to eight months, if I can reduce that
26:44
by a month, that's a 15% extra return on me, just from a time perspective.
26:48
If I have 10 clients I've signed and five of them are launching in five or not,
26:52
I've lost like 50% of the investment I've already made.
26:55
So how do I make sure that everyone launches and everyone ramps sometime? And I
27:00
think that's under focus area where we are working very closely with our
27:04
delivery and on boarding team to make sure that happens.
27:07
We also work actually on the top of the funnel, we work very closely with our
27:12
solution engineering team to make sure that the solutions which we are selling
27:17
can be actually delivered on time when the deal closes.
27:21
So that's another area we are very excited about.
27:24
Anything particularly cool that you're doing with data or that you've done with
27:28
data?
27:28
We slice and dice data right from the top of the funnel all the way to the
27:32
bottom of the funnel. On top of the funnel, we regularly look at our MQL, we
27:37
look at cost per lead, we look at our conversion rates or win rates.
27:41
As we get on the bottom of the funnel, we look at our time to launch, our time
27:46
to ramp, and we can bring all of that together for our marketing team, for our
27:49
sales team and the customer success team.
27:51
And we are constantly looking at trends and patterns to figure out what happens
27:56
once our customer gets into our funnel, how long it takes to kind of move from
28:00
one stage to the other.
28:01
And I think it's really exciting to see like how certain customers of certain
28:05
size and certain audiences behave versus the other.
28:08
And I think that helps us inform where do we optimize our touch points with the
28:13
customer.
28:14
I just love the idea of onboarding as a great rev ops thing, because gosh, is
28:20
that not one of the most forgotten children of this whole endeavor of that
28:26
sales marketing CS thing that speed to value.
28:29
Speed to value is like the best marketing thing you have. It's the best sales
28:36
tool you have.
28:37
And we don't invest into speed to market, right? That's like part of the thing.
28:42
If you can do it actually the speed that all of your sales people are promising
28:46
, that is a force multiplier that like people will find out about that they'll
28:50
talk about it. They'll tell their friends about it.
28:51
You know, there's a great story that the Empire State Building was built on
28:55
time or is delivered early and it was under budget.
28:58
You're like, what was the last time that that's ever happened? And it's like
29:02
one of those things, right? If you're building the Empire State Building for
29:05
them, that's great.
29:06
We're gonna have the tallest building in the world. That's awesome.
29:09
Oh, but if you could do it those other two things, then it's like the best
29:12
story in the world. And like we under emphasize that.
29:15
And it's such an important part of our brand, a part of our go to market from
29:19
word of mouth. And like we don't invest in it.
29:21
So like, why is nobody tracking this? And it's great to hear that you think
29:24
about it from a rev ops perspective.
29:25
Because I think that's a great person to own it to say, hey, listen, this needs
29:29
to get better.
29:30
Because if this number gets better, you can see it down the line for a turn
29:33
more revenue.
29:34
Totally agree. And I think there are several components where you can actually
29:39
make that happen much better.
29:40
One is how do you make sure that your delivery team is engaged in that solution
29:46
itself when you're selling it, especially it's more important than the B2B
29:49
environment.
29:49
So we try to bring our delivery team much closer in the solutioning phase
29:54
itself. And sometimes they will set in the sales motion trying to figure it out
29:57
with the customer.
29:58
So that alignment, not treating delivery as a stepchild and like, hey, the
30:03
disclose, now it's your job, figure it out.
30:05
So they have that knowledge of the customer. The customer has the knowledge of
30:09
our delivery team.
30:09
And they've already built that symbiotic relationship very early in the process
30:13
The second element is like, how do you make them feel a part of the GTA
30:17
organization in many places they sit either in product world or in a separate
30:21
world themselves?
30:22
I think what we have done is done a good job of kind of bringing them together.
30:26
And the third thing is we invest in that. Like we invest in their training.
30:30
We invest in their tools and their processes. And we have incentive structures
30:34
which we are looking to put in place to bring that up in alignment with.
30:38
Because they are, as you rightly said, among the biggest value creators for the
30:43
company. Not only for the current deals, but also for the future deals.
30:46
When you hear like, hey, their delivery team is the best in the world. You'd be
30:50
willing to pay more price. You would be willing to give more.
30:53
And they can make it happen in six months for me. And they can prove it that
30:56
they can do it.
30:57
So I think it's a great force multiplier for any rev-ups organization and the
31:02
GoToMarket organization, I would say.
31:04
Yeah, I love that. That's such a great point. They actually would pay more.
31:08
That's a great point.
31:09
Alright, let's get to our final segment. Quick hits. These are quick questions
31:13
and quick answers. Quick hits. My hash, are you ready?
31:15
Yep, go ahead. If you could make any animal any size, what animal would it be
31:20
and what size?
31:21
It's a very interesting question. I think one of the animals which I kind of
31:26
admire from a distance is ants.
31:27
And the reason I admire them is ants can carry 50 times more weight. Their own
31:34
body weight.
31:35
They can work in a very collaborative manner along with their team members.
31:40
And I think I love that aspect. One, they can carry much more weight than
31:46
themselves. And then they can work in a very collaborative manner.
31:49
The second animal which I love is dog. Dog is so peace and calm in any
31:53
environment. And I wish if I could be a dog in many, many environments,
31:57
especially when you're trying to meet the CRO and trying to explain why the
32:02
booking goals were not achieved.
32:04
Yeah, that's right. You need as much. I never thought about that. Do you have a
32:10
rev-ups misconception?
32:11
I would hand it to, I think one of the things is as rev-ups has been evolving
32:16
and developing, and there's a misconception that rev-ups only for tech
32:20
companies, I think.
32:22
Obviously, startups and tech companies started using rev-ups more as a
32:26
prominent function and that engine of operational excellence.
32:30
But the utility and the value of rev-ups is relevant for any industry, whether
32:36
it's healthcare, pharma, retail.
32:38
Obviously, the tech world is a little bit more matured in advance on all the
32:43
tech stacks, processes and utilizing rev-ups.
32:46
And I think the value of rev-ups is amazing across any industry you put at.
32:51
Because at the end of the day, you are trying to create that interconnected
32:56
alignment across different organizations and be the one single point of truth
33:01
and efficiency for those teams.
33:03
The second one is, I think a lot of rev-up teams anchor on data and data is
33:09
central to rev-ups, but data is not the only piece of the story.
33:13
Rev-ups does a lot more and rev-ups should do a lot more and they are that
33:18
strategic alignment with the CEO, with the CRO, with the CFO, with your CMO.
33:23
And obviously, you use a lot of data, but you can do a lot more and I think rev
33:24
-ups is that function which can help you figure out your near-term and long-term
33:24
, who to market strategies as well.
33:37
Do you have a favorite book or podcast or TV show or something you've been
33:42
checking out recently?
33:43
My favorite book is a book I read many many years ago and I keep on going back
33:49
to it. It's the autobiography of a Yogi. It's about a Yogi who was born in
33:53
India, came to US, you're going to love.
33:56
And it's actually, it's biography, it's written very beautifully and you can
34:01
actually read it more like the story.
34:03
But the spiritual lessons it has is amazing and it's a light reading and I love
34:08
it from time to time.
34:09
So, I've been watching a bit of Netflix. I don't know if you follow the Israeli show FODA. It's something I've been trying to follow a flait.
34:17
I've watched a few episodes of it, done some binge-watching and I like it as
34:21
well.
34:21
And just a podcast, I kind of listened to a wide range of podcasts and no
34:26
strong favorites there, but I love podcasts. I think it's so useful.
34:30
You can get really good information and knowledge from a variety of speakers.
34:35
Alright, what's your piece of advice for someone who is newly leading a RevOps
34:39
team?
34:39
I have this mantra of three C's and I always tell it to my team or anyone who's
34:44
aspiring to be a RevOps leader.
34:46
The first mantra is communicate. The first C communicate very clearly what the
34:52
goals of RevOps teams are.
34:54
Communicate within your team and communicate with the stakeholders in this case
34:58
Your marketing team, your sales team, your personal success, finance, legal and
35:02
others.
35:02
The second is collaboration. I think RevOps sits in the middle and the
35:07
intersection of all these stakeholders.
35:09
Collaboration is key. If you can build a great collaboration engine and
35:14
partnership with marketing, with sales, with finance, you need them for pricing
35:19
, you need legal for contract management, you will be on your way to success.
35:23
The third thing I say is commitment. That's my C commit to the growth and the
35:28
vision of the company.
35:29
And commit to the team's growth. I think sometimes the RevOps team members are
35:33
left on the side and that should not be it.
35:36
Those three C's are my guiding principle and hopefully it would help some of
35:40
the others.
35:41
That's it. That's all we got for today. It has so awesome having you on the
35:46
show.
35:46
Thanks so much for listening. You can go to marketa.com to learn more and check
35:50
out all the stuff that they're doing. Any final thoughts? Anything to plug?
35:53
No, again, thanks for having me for the real pleasure chatting with you.
35:57
I think your questions kind of give me more insights into what we should be
36:01
doing.
36:01
So really thoughtful and insightful questions and more than happy to share
36:05
anything else. Thank you so much.
36:07
Thank you. Appreciate it. Talk soon. Thank you.
36:10
[Music]