Asking Tough Questions for Successful Outcomes
On this episode, go-to-market leader Jason Rushforth says that, of many jobs, his most important role is fueling revenue success. This episode features an interview with Jason Rushforth, Senior Vice President and General Manager for the Americas at SugarCRM.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
Go-to-market leaders have to fill a lot of rules.
Today's guest says that of many jobs, his most important one
is fueling revenue success.
This episode features an interview with Jason Rushforth,
senior vice president and general manager
for the Americas at Sugar CRM.
Jason emphasizes the importance of doing your research
and asking questions to set yourself up for success.
He and Ian will talk building pipeline,
critical tools, and aligning cross operational teams.
Welcome to Rise of RevOps.
I'm Ian Faison, CEO of Cast Me in Studios.
And today we are joined by a special guest, Jason.
How are you?
I'm awesome.
How are you doing?
Thank you for having me today.
Yes, so excited to have you on the show.
Talking sugar, talking rev ops.
So let's get into it.
How did you first get started in rev ops?
It's a great question with a very long answer
that I'll try and synthesize for you,
because I don't think a lot of people end their university
career and go straight into a rev ops type function.
I was actually a network engineer
building Cisco wide area networks.
Later, I was invited to go work for a software company
as a technical presales person back in the late 1990s.
And through that journey and experience,
now I've worked my way up.
And now we go to market teams driving revenue for SaaS companies.
And so, yeah, flash forward to today.
Tell us what it means to be SVP and GM of America as a sugar.
I have the best job in the company, in my opinion.
It's a very difficult job, but it's the best job.
My remit in my current role is to drive all things revenue
for North America and Latin America at Sugar CRM.
So when I think about that, I think about retention,
renewals, upsell, cross-sell, driving new logo,
revenue and services revenue associated with the SaaS deals
that we're signing and all of that falls within my remit.
So teams of people working together in tandem
to drive great outcomes for the business.
And how do you think about rev ops?
What's your definition?
It's a funny thing, because when I first
was invited to the show, I was like, revenue operations.
Well, isn't that a function inside of the SaaS organization
for booking and revenue recognition?
And then I started really peeling it back, thinking about it.
And there's a lot of cogs in the wheel to drive revenue.
And those cogs in the wheel are from everything,
from marketing to sales to service to product
to delivery to customer experience.
So to me, it's about the alignment of the objectives and goals
and driving the operational function that
is cross-functional to achieve growth and successful outcomes
for from a revenue perspective.
Yeah, I like you having an analogy about rev ops,
like the layers of the cake.
Can you tell us more about that?
You know, I posted that article.
I posted an A article on LinkedIn.
And it was a funny thing, because I'm not that active
in posting my ideas on LinkedIn.
But I was talking to a buddy who was new in a go-to-market
leadership role.
And I was having a coffee with him.
And I said, it's like the layers of a cake.
Can I start describing the functional requirements
to build a successful go-to-market organization?
And each layer of the cake, as a baker,
you need science to actually bake the cake,
to get consistency, to get the color, the flavor,
and everything you want out of it.
And the actual topping on the cake
is your creative and artistic freedom
to put the cherries of fondant and decorated as you will.
But I think that my analogy of the layers of the cake
are each aspect that requires detailed analysis
and follow through as a go-to-market leader.
And I start with the base layer.
The base layer is people.
You need to have the foundation of people
in your organization that are driving to a common goal,
that want to participate in the revenue game.
And then you start working your way up the cake,
and you get things like enablement.
How are we training our people?
Are they educated to deliver the best results
for the business through to KPIs,
driving the KPI dashboard should drive the cadence
and everything around the business?
It's your levers that you're going to be pulling
throughout time that help you adjust to get
to the best outcome possible.
And so I go through each of the layers,
but they're all equally important to the overall cake.
And as a go-to-market leader, you
have to investigate and analyze every element of the cake.
So I believe that the fondant and the cherry on top
is the fun and the excitement and the recognition
that you put around the cake to create the culture
of your selling organization.
But you have no culture if you can't win,
and you lose significantly more than you win,
and you don't have the foundational elements
to build the cake.
Yeah, some of the things that I think
have been really interesting in this series
and talking to sea level execs about RevOps
is first off just how sales ops and marketing ops,
historically pretty siloed things, customer success ops,
like if it even exists on a thing,
or maybe in there into more of a unified function
for certain organizations.
Where that thing rolls up to does a roll up to CFO?
Does it roll up to CRO?
Like under the COO or somewhere else,
curious where do you think RevOps should live?
Should it be more of a consolidated thing?
Should it be more of something that
lives in more functional areas?
What do you think about it?
So I think if you have a cross-functional role
in a corporation, you should sit in a department that
has cross-functional responsibilities.
I've seen it roll up to the chief of staff, which
is a really good place for a revenue operations, marketing
operations, sales operations, function to live.
I've seen it roll up to sales.
I've seen it roll up to the CFO.
And I think it depends on the nature of your business,
how you operate the size and scale of your business
will determine where that those functions roll up to.
But I will say something, as a go-to-market leader,
I don't need to build fee-stims to build success.
And I have to work with my sales operations team,
my marketing ops team.
If you're BDR organization or if your SDR organization
lives in marketing or sales, it shouldn't matter
if you're driving the revenue engine where they report to,
but rather aligning them to the goals and objectives
of what the business is trying to accomplish
is probably paramount to the place that they report to.
And what does that look like for you?
What does that look like for sure?
So we have a revenue operations function
that lives in finance.
And that's a traditional-- this is how we book revenue.
This is the AR attribution of a deal.
We have a sales operations function that also
reports into finance.
Our marketing operations function reports into marketing.
And I actually had to pause for a second.
I think, where do they actually roll up to?
Because I'm on calls with these people every day.
And I don't give them a direct mandate
on what they need to do, but I encourage them
to help support our organization the best they can.
How do you think about the many mouths to feed
in terms of sales, marketing, customer success,
and where do they get the most attention?
In terms of my attention, all parts are equal.
And it's important.
We have a narrative of a trigger-write.
Customer success is non-negotiable as an employee
of our company.
So we have to make sure our customers love us.
They're happy with us.
And that we build a working relationship with those customers.
But inside of that, my attention does pivot from point
to point within a given week, month, quarter,
year based on the KPIs that I'm looking at
to facilitate success within the business.
So if I have a deficient pipeline,
I'm going to be spending a lot of time
with the marketing team and the BDR organization.
I'm going to be rallying the sales team around,
how do we build pipeline that sustains itself?
Because pipeline is the fuel for the revenue engine
in the business, and that can never be forgotten.
But there are times where we have to put an emphasis
when I first joined Sugar.
Our renewal rates were good.
Now I think they're great.
And there was a point in time where there was a huge emphasis
on how are the mechanisms of customer success
driving better renewal rates for our customers
and how we interact with our customers.
So I look at my job as basically the pivot point
for where we need to focus and what we need to do
to course correct on KPIs that I see
that are driving the business.
- Tell me about some of the projects
that you have going on at Sugar right now.
- There's never a shortage of projects, right?
We've rolled a bunch of new sales functional capabilities
out that I think we're going to talk about
in a little bit here, but we are learning and growing
with the use of intent data,
with the use of first party website data
and how we co-illate that information to be smarter
about how we approach prospects and customers.
I always tell the story to my team, right?
We have this bucket of tools that we use.
The data doesn't lie, it's how you interpret the data
and it's what you do with the data
and your level of curiosity with the information
you're looking at will direct the outcomes that you have.
We're putting a lot of emphasis right now
at verticalization strategy here at Sugar.
So recognizing that we're a CRM platform,
we have great success in specific industries
and we're looking to really double down
and going after those industries.
And that's from a messaging perspective,
that's from a product perspective,
that's from a pipeline and lead slow perspective.
Everything we're looking at right now
is a pivot point to verticalization for the business
as I think it's a natural part of any horizontal SaaS
application like CRM.
And then how are y'all doing using sugar to run revenue growth?
- You know, it's funny, I have a presentation
that I will give to customers.
If a prospect would ever ask me,
I would deliver it to them
and it's how I use sugar to run sugar.
- Oh, that's awesome.
- It's a really fun presentation because, you know,
I've worked at other CRM providers,
you can see that on my LinkedIn profile
and I can attest that in those environments
and those companies,
I never use the CRM tool that we were selling.
We're not very often.
All of my reports were given to me in PDF or Excel format.
There was a sales operations team
that basically delivered the goods to me.
But when I wake up in the morning,
I live, sleep, eat and breathe sugar CRM.
And so, you know, when I think about one of the key initiatives
around pipeline generation,
and this was a big thing, right?
I joined the company four years ago.
We had a deficient pipeline
and I could see that statistically inside of the report
so that I would look at, you know,
we created a huge rally cry around pipeline development.
You know, we call the pipeline saves lives
and it's kind of tongue in cheek.
It's kind of fun, but, you know,
pipeline is not just the responsibility of a marketer.
Pipeline is a responsibility of everybody
that runs a go-to-market function.
So Rapture required, our partner to require,
our marketing department, our VDRs and SDRs
are required to build pipeline.
We build that pipeline inside of our sugar application.
And, you know, we focus heavily on intent signals now.
We focus heavily on site visits.
And, you know, I always tell my team this,
you don't roll out of bed
and start researching sugar CRM
because you felt like it.
You know, companies that are showing intent signals,
companies that are researching our products and services
that we offer likely have a budding initiative
and how do we engage and how do we interact with them.
But we embedded all of those key metrics inside of sugar.
So we took an ABM platform with Triblio
and Triblio gives us basically a score
for accounts that are showing in market.
And we can see exactly what intent topics they're researching.
We can see exactly what web pages, when they hit.
I know when we've served them and add on LinkedIn.
I know when they hit a certain score
because it orchestrates and it sends an email to the rap.
It sends information into a dashboard inside of sugar.
So we're trying to get as sophisticated as possible
around the lead generation engine,
but not doing it in a plethora of places,
therefore having reps going into six different applications,
going to sugar, you know, all the information you need is there
and you can make a decision on how you engage
with that prospect or customer.
- Like you said, nobody just is sitting there eating their,
you know, breakfast like, hmm, I think today's the day
that we're gonna switch over to sugar CRM.
When you got into dug into those accounts
and started looking at those intent signals,
and looking at those accounts that had, you know,
a potential to buy,
what were some of the things that sort of like surprised you
or surprised you in the way
that you weren't going after them previously?
- You know, I'm gonna date myself here,
but when I was at a company called CDC Software,
we would go out, we'd spend 10,000 bucks,
15,000 bucks by a list of names and phone numbers,
and we would walk around the office,
it was literally here, it would distributing all these names
and phone numbers, start dialing for dollars.
It's super demotivating, you have to find a needle in the aid.
It's horrible, right, it's horrible experience.
It's awful to think back, that's how we did it, right?
And-
- And those were called leads.
- Those were called leads.
- You're like, that's not a lead.
Someone's email address is not a lead.
- That is.
- And when we fast forward to 2023, right,
we have these intent signals,
and the question is how do you capitalize on the intent?
What do we learn, what do we glean from,
and there's actually some really interesting byproducts.
We found out about what we can do with intent data,
but if somebody's circling the wagon,
circling sugarciarum.com,
we can see them on LinkedIn doing research,
because if you have LinkedIn sales navigator,
you can see that information.
You can see them inside of,
we have neon intent data,
we have G2 crowd intent data,
we have Bombora intent data,
and when you can see an organization
that's surrounding itself with key topics,
there's a couple of scenarios.
One is I can see them circling around sugar.
Those are the easiest ones,
because we know exactly who they are,
we know what location they are from,
and we can start to build our engagement model,
we use sales loft for outbound cadence,
and start to pull them in to having a conversation with us,
because we know that the buyer's research takes
65 to 75% of the journey
before they actually engage with the vendor,
and so we wanna be sensitive to that,
but what's really fascinating about the intent data,
and I'm gonna tell you a quick story
that I thought was really interesting.
If I have a customer that uses sugar,
there is a, there's an anatomy of how they operate
if they're thinking about leaving sugar,
and I don't think this is specific to sugar,
I say it's across the board,
you have a notification period for termination clause
in any contract, right?
So 30 days prior to renewal, I have to give notice.
Very rarely does your customer tell you
until that 30 day point,
and then you get a infamous, we're canceling,
we're canceling, we're not renewing the subscription.
So I call it my early detection warning system,
this is something that came from us prospecting is,
every CSM inside of our organization gets a weekly report.
If you're wall to wall sugar,
and your intent signals are showing our competitors,
and buying signals for other solutions,
we probably need to get back into that account,
and that's usually happening 12 to nine months
before the actual notification,
and that 12 to nine months,
we don't know what's happening inside that account.
It gives us an early detection warning system that says,
hey, this account might be thinking about leaving us,
and we need to engage with that customer.
But a true story, when we first turned on the Triblio ABM,
now it's designed for marketers,
and when Claire Dorian, my CMO,
was out in the market looking for ABM platforms,
I said, oh, wow, Claire, if we could take that data
and put it into the hands of sellers,
if it is as accurate as I hope it to be,
I think we have a game changing offer on our hands
that we can leverage to build pipeline.
First time I ever get my intent report,
it was it's a guitar center,
Bombora Intenscore 100,
on the topic of sugar CRM,
I'm like, hallelujah, I'm reaching out to the CIO
of guitar center, I don't know who else to reach out.
So I send him a private note, and I said, hey,
I'm not trying to sell you something,
I'm trying to understand something,
which means he's probably gonna respond quicker
than if I gave him a pitch.
I said, this is what I'm seeing in my data,
I'm trying to reconcile it,
he comes back and says, hey, Jason,
that's fascinating, but at guitar center,
we use another solution that we're in the middle of rolling out,
so I'm not sure I can help you.
So I put my head down, walked away, and I said,
jeez, what's wrong with this?
What did I do wrong?
Five days later, no word of a lie,
my CEO gets a LinkedIn message
from a wholly owned subsidiary of guitar center.
And both from that division, so I didn't go deep enough,
I figured the CIO would know a project and they're like,
hey, we used to use sugar,
we're not going on the corporate mandate,
we were just acquired by guitar center,
and we wanna spin up an instance really quickly here.
And the moral of the story is the data doesn't lie,
it's what you do with that information,
it's how you interpret the data,
it's how deep you go into the account,
as an individual seller, as a CSM,
you'll find your answers every time,
it's like clockwork.
- That's super cool, what a great story.
Any other thoughts on sort of like RevOps or strategy here,
or those type of ways that you're using, sugar to run sugar?
- Sugar has a innate capability,
and I'll share with you not a shameless plug,
but just the reality of what we do.
And I like to equate it to,
if you were a product of the 1990s,
when you had your two televisions,
you watched Friends, Jerry, Jerry,
Seinfeld, or you watched something on TV,
think about how you would do that, right?
You would be okay, Seinfeld's on at nine o'clock
on a Wednesday night,
you had to be ready to go at nine o'clock,
the only time you could get up and walk away
from the television was to go to the restroom or whatever,
but that was on a commercial break,
it's on and people would get come scrambling back,
trip over a footstool or something,
just to get back in the room, so you didn't miss a second.
Sugar has a time-aware CDP,
and our time-aware CDP is, in my opinion,
the secret sauce of why we can run the business using sugar.
And basically, it's like Netflix.
I can start a show anywhere I want, I can rewind,
I can fast forward.
Most CRM products on planet Earth are point in time.
If it rep updates the deal value from $10 to $10,000,
and I come in after the update, I see $10,000,
and that's the only data point that I understand
about a particular opportunity,
our time-aware CDP takes snippets of time and information
that allows me to triage backwards and forward.
So a great example of this is, at this point in the quarter,
I have 13 days left and the quarter, 14 days left in my Q3.
My boss will say, "JR, you're woefully behind
on your number."
We have, inside of our system,
the ability to look at where we were today,
today, last quarter, the quarter before that,
the quarter before that,
and you can track your progress against historical information,
but we also see conversion rates,
we get alert and notifications around all of the KPIs
that we need to operate and run the business by,
but it's time-aware.
So things are changing inside of the system.
I'm aware of those changes that are happening
and understanding the material impact on the business
and how I can pull a lever to make an improvement
on performance.
It's very sophisticated, but it's very powerful.
- Yeah, that's awesome.
That's really cool.
Yeah, it's very powerful.
- Okay, let's get to our next segment, Rev Obstacles,
where we talk about the tough parts of RevOps.
Do you have a hardest RevOps problem
that you faced lately?
- The ongoing challenge that we have
is consistently building pipeline.
We're in a market of 800-pound gorillas.
It's a constant evolution.
We have to stay nimble
around the development of pipeline
to sustain the revenue growth
that we're having and the expectations of growth.
So it's a challenge in the sense
that we're always focused on it
and it's something that we're always looking to evolve.
I'll give you an example.
So we do something called Shark Week.
Shark Week is a dedicated week
of prospecting efforts by our partners,
our reps, our CSMs, our BDRs.
They get into teams.
They rally around building pipeline.
Building pipeline is an everyday activity.
That's probably what you're gonna say,
but we actually make it a very focused effort
that we put spiffs and incentives around these teams
driving pipeline.
But what's more important than the activity
is the takeaways and the learnings that we get
from driving pipeline.
What objections are we getting?
What is something that's working?
What isn't working?
Because we seek to optimize
the development of pipeline for the business.
- I love that.
I think, I've heard of things like that before,
but I love the way that you looked at it there.
And like, I've seen that stuff happen
where you do an engagement like that
and you're like, "Hey, let's look at, you know,
everyone in the company and see like,
what are our connections into these ways?
Is how we can get these conversations?
How can we prospect business?
How can we do it in a creative way?"
You're like, "Wait a second.
Jerry and Jane both know the, you know,
CMO of this company?
Like, wait, how come we never talk to them?"
Then you send a LinkedIn message and you get a meeting.
And like, that's the sort of stuff
that I think I love the idea of sort of, you know,
taking it in the army called a tactical pause.
Taking a tactical pause and saying like,
"Hey, we're all doing all these, you know,
things every single day,
spin our wheels about all this stuff.
Let's just take a second and focus
and figure out how we could more strategically
look at certain things and get all the effort
and all the energy sort of going at one, one time.
I love it."
And that's kind of like what events do.
Like, that's like part of the reason why people like events
is you chuck your sales force out of thing
and then all this, you know, you stir up all the dust
and then once it settles and you're like, "Wait a second."
You know, and that's it's, but yeah, Shark Week, I love it.
That's great.
True story, just real quick.
You know, there is a power of connecting the dots.
And I think the future of RevOps
sits within that capability.
LinkedIn's working on the Team Link and other things,
which is a portion of it.
True story, this week,
I was looking at some inbound leads that came in
and I'm like, "Oh, yeah, I've bought 12 automobiles
"off of this dealership network and know the founder
"and I know the general manager over there."
But I only bumped into it
'cause I was looking at one record inside of sugar
and once you connect those dots,
I'm like, "They let me at Corvette for a weekend just because."
And I'm like, "Oh, awesome car, I'll take it for a drive."
But I'm a good customer there.
It's a bit into their gallows events
and now that power of the relationship just explodes, right?
Now it's not just this vendor coming in to present,
there's personal relationships,
there's a history of transacting there.
And I only put the dots together,
because I saw something on a report,
whereas if you could automate that,
you would know that I've emailed that group
of car dealerships 300 times
from my corporate account as I was buying cars
and what have you.
So connecting the dots, I think,
is a huge component of the future of RevOps
for any go-to-market leader.
- There's so much that's dark
that's just like sitting in your email inboxes
of stuff that you've communicated with people
in those accounts and if it's not all
flowing the right direction.
And it also, yeah, LinkedIn is like one part
of the puzzle there.
But back to the Shark Week piece,
any tips for like if someone wanted to do that,
wanted to like run that same play
and set something like that up.
- So a couple things.
One is we like to let the BDRs be the team leads
as we build the teams, make it fun and exciting.
So we give our teams names,
we have money allocated to it.
Not that money is really required,
but it's that extra push.
We measure it, we talk through it.
But if you don't take away the learnings
from a company-wide prospecting activity
and really synthesize those
so that in the day-to-day efforts for prospecting,
you're probably missing something.
You have to come away, you have to understand
we build X millions of dollars of pipeline,
but here's what was working
and here's what wasn't working.
There's probably an enablement session
that can come from that,
that can help every seller, every BDR, every marketer
and everybody in revenue operations hit success
because we can learn as a collective.
- Okay, any other rev obstacles or revoopses
or anything like that?
- Look, there's always revoopses,
there's always rev obstacles.
You know, it's as a conductor of the orchestra,
you know, you can pull a lever
or you can think you're gonna adjust something
and you know, something different as an outcome happens.
I, you know, I think it's super important,
you know, when I look at the general KPIs of the business,
which by the way, they roll up
to the board of directors for Sugar,
these are serious metrics and KPIs that we operate within.
And if a KPI is trending in the negative direction,
it's never, it's not always just one little fix
to course correct that.
You can pull a lever,
course correct one component of it,
but still have other issues.
You know, one of the things that we implemented
was a pre-call planning task list, basically.
So, you know, if you have, you know,
deals that you take down the line
and you look back and say, "Hey, that company made no decision."
Where did that happen?
Did that happen when you're in stage four?
You know, 190 days into the deal,
200 days into the deal?
Or did that potentially manifest itself
from your qualifications?
So, we're putting an emphasis around doing your research
and qualification, asking the tough questions
because that sets the table for what a future
successful outcome looks like.
And there's so many data points around a customer
or prospect that with a high degree of curiosity,
with some structure around it, you know, you can be,
you can go into a meeting a lot more prepared
to ask the hard questions by just understanding
the general landscape of that company.
- I love it.
Okay, let's get to our next segment,
the tool shed where we're talking tool spreadsheets
and metrics, just like everyone's favorite who qualified.
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What is in your tool shed, Jason?
- I have a lot of tools in my tool shed
and each provide a very different lens
on what we're trying to accomplish.
So, you know, obviously my, the tip of the spear
is my sugar CRM instance and all of the vital information
that we capture about our customers and prospects.
I talked about it earlier, but you know, we have Triblio,
which is a foundry company, embedded into sugar.
And that gives us first party data.
So the website visits that people have,
it also gives us the marketing team,
the opportunity to run hyperspecific ABM programs
and campaigns to those accounts.
It gives us the ability to visit
and understand the intent, not visit,
but understand the intent that those customers
and prospects are exhibiting.
But we don't stop there, right?
That's a great lens.
It's a great view.
But if you want to go deeper, you know,
we have G2 crowd that comes to our desks every day.
So if you go on to G2 crowd, you research sugar CRM,
you have intent signals.
I know that that's happening.
And that's also manifested through the Triblio platform,
but we also get a separate G2 crowd report.
I play in Bumbora religiously.
I look to figure out what the optimal intent data structure
should be. I play with reports.
I look at them.
And then what I will very commonly do is take them
and I will upload those accounts in delete forensics
and lead forensics will spit out a list of companies
that are in market based on the intent topics
and the taxonomy that I choose.
And it will show me what percent of those companies
are actually visiting our website.
So, you know, we have lead forensics, we have Triblio,
we use Bumbora intent.
It's part of Triblio. We have neon intent.
We have G2 intent.
We use LinkedIn sales navigator.
It's the foundation for a lot of really valuable information
around your customers and prospects and using it properly.
You can use it to prospect.
I don't personally use it to prospect.
I use it to keep tabs on prospective customers,
what they're doing, what the news and the markets are saying,
to check out their intent on the LinkedIn platform.
But I also use it to look at any actions
or things that are happening inside.
So, if a customer mind files for chapter 11,
I'm usually sourcing that with LinkedIn sales navigator
and learning about, you know,
what's happening inside my customers with regards to it.
We also have access to several other tools.
You know, the beautiful thing about our industry is
there's something called tags on people's websites.
So, we use a product called built with.
And built with, I can pick a particular product,
take their tags, run a report,
extrapolate that report and say,
here is a list of paying customers
of this particular product.
And we can use that to target within the ABM programs.
Or we can use it for outbound calling exercises
because we want to do a rip and replace program or campaign.
I would say we're not a heavy Microsoft Excel shop
because, you know, most of the information
that we gather around exists within our sugar platform
and therefore, you know, diminishes the need to be
a spreadsheet jockeys.
- Yeah, which is music to many areas.
- First time in my career,
first time in my career where I wasn't living inside of Excel
or a spreadsheet, I'm living inside a sugar,
information's changing at real time.
I have all the access and the reports that I need
to run and operate the business.
- It's so funny.
Like, I mean, I expect nothing less,
but you have such a futuristic B2B,
you know, modern marketing stack.
And even still you're like,
yeah, this is still the first time in my business
that I haven't had to go like,
lop on over to Excel to work on stuff.
Like it's just crazy, it's so crazy.
- It's good.
We have a very good stack and, you know, it's an evolution.
It's, you know, we're constantly learning,
trying new things, making mistakes, you know,
interpreting of information.
And, you know, I'm always asking my friends
to see if they're doing anything like it.
Most of them are not for what it's worth.
You know, they might have bits and pieces,
but then, you know, they minimize the need
for these tool sets.
But I think a few futuristic rev-ops
functions around data as the foundational layer
to build pipeline, which is the fuel for the revenue engine.
And it starts with data.
You have to use the data.
It will help you grow and scale at cost
than just throwing millions and millions of dollars
at building pipeline.
- I couldn't agree more.
I'm curious, you know, you have so much intent information there
using so many different sources, which is freaking rad.
I'm curious about sort of those like the 95% of buyers
who are people who are not like in a buying cycle.
How are you looking at shaping those accounts?
Like pre that 67% of, of, of.
- Did you, did you listen to a conversation
I had this morning internally?
So, inside the Triblio platform,
there's a very powerful, powerful, powerful tool
called Smart Pages.
And, you know, what I want to do and what I aspire to do
with these Smart Pages, and we're at the tail end
of a project that we're about to implement.
And the Smart Pages, basically this,
it's taking the constructs of ABM, right?
Which is an account-based marketing solution.
Think of it as a micro-site, but they're specific
to the company that's viewing them.
And when you take that information,
you put it into a Smart Page, what I told my team is this.
I think a lot of people using Sales Loft
use the opened category as a success metric
of they read that email, right?
There's a red, unread, deleted, whatever,
in terms of Sales Loft.
And I said, the ultimate, the ultimate place we want to be at
is somebody's not on our website triage
in trying to find information.
We'll co-illate the information that we think is most relevant.
We will share that with them.
And forget about looking at opens in Sales Loft
or red as a category.
Watch because we have the tools,
the consumption of that data in those Smart Pages.
You'll know if they're interested in what you've had to say.
Sending out 10, 15 people inside of an organization,
a specific note catered to them with a branded landing page,
microsite, off of sugarCRM.com,
that only they go to to consume content.
That means I can go hands off.
I know that I've controlled the narrative
around the content that they can consume.
Some of that content, by the way,
isn't even available on sugarCRM.com
because it is a one-to-one AVM type program.
We're developing it for the customers and the prospects.
We're delivering it to them and we can sit back.
And instead of saying they opened an email,
but they never responded,
the best response you can get
is watching them consume the content on your web property.
- 100%. - And knowing exactly
what they've looked at.
So I think that's a different way to control
the buyer's journey and to have them
have really rich content that hopefully hits
and solves some of their business problems.
- Yeah, I mean, you're preaching the choir
as someone who has a company that has
no video podcasts as a service.
So the richness and the depth of the content,
I think is like incredibly underrated.
Like people are just like,
"Hey, we made a bunch of stuff."
We threw it out there.
And you're like, "Yeah, but that wasn't really
for this specific type of person at this specific time."
Like that's the thing.
It's like the depth and the richness there
is really what matters.
And so much stuff is just scraping at the surface.
And we always say there's no traffic on the extra mile.
Like if you go the extra mile with your content,
people will actually watch and listen and pay attention
and be taken notes.
Like I've been taking notes since you've been talking today.
That's like, you gotta make it good enough
that it stands out.
- Yep, for sure.
- Okay, any other thoughts on it?
I know we talked a lot about data there and tools.
Any blind spots, anything that you're investing in.
- Always looking to improve on the tools and the data.
I think we have the right set of tools.
Although I wanna check out Connect the Dots
'cause I think that sounds interesting.
I think that we have a great set of tools.
We now have to take those tools
and make them perfect in terms of how we operate
with the data 'cause we have the data.
And that was a big gap four years ago when I joined.
The data was all disjointed and disconnected.
We sit here today and I could look at XYZ Corp,
some random company, I can tell you,
"Hey, they're looking at SAP.
They've been on this webpage.
They have a score of 89, which is exceptionally high.
They're showing in market.
Now I have to figure out what is the appropriate
engagement model.
And I think that that's a continuous learning exercise
for us as a business.
- I love it.
Final segment, quick hits.
Do you have a favorite thing that you're watching,
reading, listening, anything like that?
It's funny because I love to read,
but I decided to do something like your favorite movies.
You don't just watch your favorite movie once.
You watch it multiple times.
Usually you watch it multiple times.
So I dust it off.
I went into my book collection
and I dust it off Jim Collins, "Good to Great"
and "The Switch" or "Switch" by Chip and Dan Heath.
And I started rereading them to reinvigorate some things
that I used to really believe in earlier in my career.
And so I'm kind of going back and being nostalgic
reading some older books that had influence on me.
- If you could make any animal any size,
what animal would it be and what size would it be?
(laughing)
- Jeez, that's a really interesting question.
I would probably make, I'm just thinking for a second,
I would make lions the size of cats.
- Love it.
And the final question, what is your best advice
for someone who is newly running a RevOps
or a go-to-market team?
- So I'm gonna tell you a very quick story.
- Sure.
- Very quick.
In 1984, Van Halen went on the road.
During that tour, it was an epic proportion,
pyrotechnics, highly complex stage setup.
And inside the rider, the rider's a contract
between the venue and the band,
they said that they did not want brown M&Ms.
And they got published like in Rolling Stone magazine
and Spin magazine as Van Halen was a bunch of prima donnas,
they didn't like brown M&Ms,
so they didn't actually put brown M&Ms
in the green room in the bowl of M&Ms.
Have you heard the story before, by the way?
- I've, I've know, I've heard of it, but yeah, keep going.
- So the reason Van Halen had no M&Ms in the rider
was that when they would show up to the show,
if the bowl of M&Ms had brown M&Ms in it
and meant somebody was missing detail
of what was in that rider,
if they forgot about the brown M&Ms,
what's not to say they didn't wire the pyrotechnics incorrectly
or if the electronics system that they had running
the stage was wrong.
So it was a cue point, right?
And the cue point was,
we're gonna put some tests and fails in place to see.
You're running a RevOps team,
understand the level of detail you need to have.
If you're new in a role, the first report
you're ever gonna run inside your CRM,
the very first report, I tell my team this,
so if they're watching, they know what I'm talking about.
Pass do opportunities.
Pass do opportunities is the telltale of the brown M&Ms.
Are people paying attention?
Are people not paying attention?
A lazy field that's not attuned to data and information
and not leveraging information
will likely have old laggard information inside CRM,
which means they're not keeping their business pristine.
So how can I go give them intent data
and expect they're gonna prospect
when they can't even keep their opportunities
inside their own CRM system up to date and accurate?
So I would say, get a cadence down.
Understand your cadence with the field.
Communicate and articulate the goals and objectives
of what you're trying to accomplish, right?
Make sure people understand, but roll up your sleeves,
get in the weeds, have fun with it,
put your culture, put your fun into it.
And the byproduct is it's a really hard job.
Like the outside looking in, people go,
oh, the sales team, they're the rich people
that have all the success, but the reality is
a great seller is told no 70% of the time.
And yes, 30% of that's a great seller.
If you're best in class and you're willing
30% of the time, that's successful.
It's a hard job.
There's a lot of nodes.
There's a lot of learning that has to come out of it.
Get your cadence down, get your team on the bus,
drive in a direction, let them know
what the expectations are, train those people,
make sure that they understand what's required
to be successful in the job.
Don't fear failure.
Fear not learning from failure.
- That's an epic story.
I love that.
And I love the past two opportunities
being the canary and the coal mine there,
being the brown imminence.
Same in my time in the military.
It's like, that's why you have short haircuts
and have to shave, right?
'Cause if you see someone walk into formation,
they have long hair and haven't shaved.
You know that if they're screwing that up,
then they're probably screwing everything else up.
- 100%.
- Jason, absolutely wonderful having you on the show today.
For our listeners, you can go to sugarcrm.com
to learn more, lots of cool stuff, lots of cool resources.
They got a podcast and a bunch of cool stuff
on the website, so go check that out.
Jason, any final thoughts, anything to plug?
- No, I just wanna thank you for your time today.
I've really enjoyed the conversation.
I think what you're doing for revenue operations
is an amazing thing because as a community,
there's always something we can do different,
something we can be better at.
Love your podcasts and they're super honored
and privileged to be a part of it.
- Oh, so honored to have you on the show.
It's been wonderful chatting and we'll talk against you.
- Great, thank you.
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