In this episode, Joshua Maltz, Senior Vice President, Revenue Operations & Strategy at UserTesting, discusses the importance of building deep relationships with leadership teams, avoiding tech stack pitfalls, and that a better customer experience begins with a better employee experience.
This episode features an interview with Joshua Maltz, Senior Vice President, Revenue Operations & Strategy at UserTesting. UserTesting enables organizations to understand what it’s like to be their customer with a video-first experience testing platform with a global opt-in network of contributors. Joshua is an accomplished leader with extensive experience in revenue operations, strategic planning, financial analysis, profit/productivity improvement, sales acceleration, and operating efficiency in companies ranging from private start-ups to Fortune 500 global corporations.
In this episode, Joshua discusses the importance of building deep relationships with leadership teams, avoiding tech stack pitfalls, and that a better customer experience begins with a better employee experience.
Guest Bio:
Accomplished leader with extensive experience in revenue operations, strategic planning, financial analysis, profit/productivity improvement, sales acceleration, and operating efficiency. Experienced as Head of Worldwide Sales/Revenue Operations, Go-to-Market Strategy, Financial Planning & Analysis for companies in the following industries: Application Software, Telecommunications, Networking & Communications, Professional Services, IT Outsourcing and Talent Management. Companies ranged from private start-ups to Fortune 500 global corporations. Expertise in planning and managing accelerated growth, leading companies out of financial challenges, quality process adoption, portfolio innovation (concept to market), and driving overall profitability. Living and working on different continents, developed skillsets that serve diverse cultures, corporate practices and customer priorities.
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Guest Quote
“I think a big misconception I see that's really emerged over the last few years is that automation and AI can solve all your problems. Taking the time to establish workflows that fit your business's needs, and being thoughtful in the way you feed your analytics tools with the right data sets and ask the right questions to understand risks and opportunities is critical. I worry sometimes with the breadth and the strength of the tech stock that's emerged, you know, it can make people lazy in some respect in taking a step back and asking the right questions for the business health.” - Joshua Maltz
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Time Stamps:
**(01:43) - Joshua's unconventional journey into revops
**(05:03) - The revops team at Usertesting
**(15:53) - RevObstacles
**(18:38) - Biggest RevOops moment
**(21:04) - The Toolshed
**(35:59) - Quick Hits
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Sponsor:
Rise of RevOps is brought to you by Qualified. Qualified’s Pipeline Cloud is the future of pipeline generation for revenue teams that use Salesforce. Learn more about the Pipeline Cloud on Qualified.com.
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Links
Narrator: Hello, and welcome to Rise of Rev Ops. This episode features an interview with Joshua Maltz, Senior Vice President, Revenue Operations and Strategy at UserTesting. UserTesting enables organizations to understand what it's like to be their customer with a video first experience testing platform with a global opt-in network of contributors.
Joshua is an accomplished leader with an extensive experience in revenue, operations, strategic planning, financial analysis, profit productivity improvement, sales acceleration, and operating efficiency in companies ranging from private startups to Fortune 500 global corporations. In this episode, Joshua discusses the importance of building deep relationships with leadership teams, avoiding tech stack pitfalls, and that a better customer experience begins with a better employee experience.
But first, a brief word from our sponsor.
Ian: Rise of Rev Ops is brought to you by Qualified. Qualified pipeline cloud is the future of pipeline generation for revenue teams that use Salesforce. Learn more about the pipeline cloud on qualified.com.
Narrator: And now please enjoy this interview with Joshua Maltz, senior Vice President, revenue Operations and Strategy at UserTesting and your host, Ian Faison.
Ian: Welcome to Rise of Rev, op, I'm Ian Faison, CEO of Caspian Studios, and today we are joined by a special guest. Josh, how are you?
Joshua: I'm fantastic. It's a pleasure to be here, Ian. Yeah, pleasure
Ian: to have you on the show. Excited to chat about UserTesting, all the cool rev op stuff that you're doing there. As always, our show is presented by qualified.
Go to qualified.com to learn more. Josh, let's get into it. How the heck did you get
Joshua: into Rev ops? Yeah, I'll give a a bit of an atypical answer here. I'll go back before my professional days, I was, uh, editor-in-chief of my high school newspaper and. I can think back to those days and just being fascinated in kinda the interplay of content and the business aspect.
I went to a public school. We absolutely had to be selling ads to fund our paper for the breadth of the publication. We needed to provide a quality product to, uh, drive up our readership to get those advertisers interested to place. And I, I can just remember from those early years, Being kind of enamored with all of the interrelations there.
E even taking me through to, to college at Berkeley. Shout out to all the Cal alums there. I kind of followed up that again, working at the newspaper at the Daily Californian and, and focusing on sales. I was pounding the pavement, walking the streets, selling to local restaurants and shops, and very much thinking about territory planning and analyzing what was giving me.
Better win rates highlighting to competitors, how they were being upstage by one another. I remember serving pizza clients like Fat Slice and, and Bies on on Telegraph Ave and comparing and contrasting which, which ads they were running and what was effective with the student population. And you know, building on that, my professional career.
Actually started in finance, which I, I don't think is unusual for, for rev ops professionals, but core financial planning as well as controllership responsibilities. So I, I started my career with Sybase, had the opportunity to, to really manage the global forecasting and planning processes and really get an appreciation for the inner workings of finance with the frontline sales teams and, It was Sybase that I had an opportunity, which should have been just a six week assignment, went out to Hong Kong and filled in for the fp and a leader in Asia Pacific.
Really, for me, it was the act of getting outside of company headquarters, being on the ground with. The local country representatives in Asia Pacific at the time, you know, so much growth and diversity between China, India, Southeast Asia, had the opportunity to be offered a full-time rollout there, and it turned into an 11 year run, really pivoted into leadership positions in strategy planning, and operations for the regional outfits of larger tech companies such as Cisco Systems.
BT Global Services and when coming back to the States 2015, what was most important to me was really building and leveraging those experiences of what good looks like at scale. And I, I was very much targeted on, um, seeing how best I could leverage my skillset to smaller companies that were on a growth journey the past five years, having the pleasure of leading.
The revenue operations team at user testing through a successful I P O a recent acquisition and merger by Tom Bravo has just been a. Fantastic experience.
Ian: Yeah. And so tell me more about, uh, the Rev ops team at, at UserTesting.
Joshua: So it, it's gone through quite a few iterations from the time I, I joined five years ago.
I mean, we were pretty lean and scrappy when I joined a team of about four, uh, that were focused on what I'd consider more core sales operations and, and commercial management deal desk type of functions as we scaled on our journey, 200 million plus. On the way to an I p O, we really structured ourselves to, to cover the entire life cycle of the customer.
So starting top of final marketing ops, the core sales operations function, also customer success and getting a deep understanding and appreciation for what drives retention and, uh, user testing. We couple those building blocks with a very critical focus on enablement to, to make sure that we're.
Bringing the customer facing critical team members along on the journey and equipping them to be successful. Uh, we also carry the outbound, the, uh, the business development reps to, to drive pipeline creation and still the, the commercial aspect of the business. So pricing strategy. Coupled with the, the deal desk reporting to rev ops user testing.
Ian: So, so sorry. It actually reports into, uh, to rev op, or were you saying that you manage like the, the outbound piece of that? I
Joshua: directly manage the outbound piece. That it's, it's a part of this consolidated rev op team. Yes. Oh, that's,
Ian: that's super fascinating. I didn't realize that. Why the, why the switch to, to consolidate those things.
Joshua: Great question. Um, for us it was a matter of understanding what was working, what wasn't working throughout the go to market, and how we could best pair like-minded teams to drive results for user testing. We've been blessed with a really healthy. Inbound lead flow and generation that contributed healthily to our growth.
And as we focus more on the enterprise business, we, we recognize we really needed to separate out an inbound focus S D R responsibility from an outbound focus, what we call business development reps. Yeah, today. Um, so having those BDRs, you know, report into revenue operations, be coupled with the enablement team, have a tightness in the relationship with sales leadership, as well as the closeness with marketing campaigns and the messaging.
Has proved to be su super valuable.
Ian: Yeah, I've never heard of that. I mean, I hear on our marketing podcast that we do, we talk all the time about how have an outbound be, be a marketing function, but I've never heard of it as a rev ops function. It's super fascinating.
Joshua: Yeah. And in my mind it's the, um, the reporting line isn't always the critical piece.
It's the Sure. The management, the common KPIs that we look at. We actually made a recent switch to have our sales development group. Report directly into marketing, which I think is gonna be a fantastic move to get that even greater closeness with the demand gen team. I, I think the outbound piece has been very valuable to be a part of the Rev Ops family and really promoting for that whole unit a growth, a career growth trajectory in into sales as well.
Ian: How unique is this about your organization? Cuz this is super unique and I'm so fascinated by it. It seems like with that setup you would have. A really good understanding of how the pipeline looks, uh, and the different triggers. If it's, you know, reporting into you, and like you said, I guess, you know, it doesn't really matter who it reports to, but for all it is this way, one of the common problems that a lot of people have is sort of that rev ops falling, you know, primarily under sales or, or primarily under marketing or sort of not being able to look at it holistically, it seems like.
You're looking at it extremely holistically in terms of these functions of inbound and outbound not being even under sales functions. Like do you feel like it adds a level of increased, like transparency and
Joshua: visibility? In my mind, you know, rev Ops very much needs to be perceived as this neutral agency within the company.
Having probably grown up with a finance background and having at different companies reported, You know, into a, a function led by the C F o, by the c o o or the c r o, my motto has always been, regardless of reporting line, I'm gonna reach out and build deep relationships with the leadership teams throughout the company of, of those supporting functions.
And in this case, with the BDRs. It's absolutely about ensuring you've got that closeness in relationship, closeness in agreement, and understanding on the go-to-market priorities with the C M O, uh, and the c r o. And, you know, to to your specific question, Ian, you know, it's an ongoing study on what's happening in the pipeline and we're, we're constantly looking at the life cycle and where does.
The deal velocity slowed down. There's been periods during the last five years where it, it could be early stage where we've seen for specific campaigns, perhaps the messaging wasn't resonating and we needed to find a, a different way to connect with certain buyers and personas and, and we wanted to utilize a, you know, a different type of approach for opening the door at other times, especially over the last.
Few years, be it when Covid first hit or the financial downturn of the last year. There's other levers, there's other specific points within the sales cycle that can trigger slowness and can trigger concerns with the buyer. And it's very important to look at. Your sales life cycle on a trended basis and understanding what's changing quarter to quarter, year to year.
Because if you think the buyer seller relationship is just static, you're gonna be surprised unpleasantly, um, very frequently. Yeah.
Ian: Any other things that are, uh, unique about your rev ops team?
Joshua: I would highlight our, our enablement function. I think we have, we have a world class enablement team, and again, on the growth journey when, when I joined 12 sellers, heavily focused SMB and mid-market, and we've built, you know, a hundred plus that are very focused on enterprise and global.
The enablement team has really done a fantastic job at allowing us to, Go through periods of hyper growth, getting new hires up to speed, understanding our product positioning, but also treating it on an iterative basis, providing coaching feedback. And very important to me, it's a two direction measure. I, I always take the approach as a rev ops leader, you absolutely do not know everything.
You, you need to be listening. You're, um, customer facing. Employees are the ones that can give you the latest and most important critical information. And our enablement team, having that close relationship with our sellers is able to really constantly, Feedback, what's resonating, what's not, where do we need to consider tweaks?
So I, I would definitely put a focus and stress on the enablement aspect of the team. Yeah.
Ian: Interesting. Having enablement be part of it again, you know, like why, why that decision and where else where else would it go, do you think?
Joshua: Yeah, I mean, I, I can share with you when, when I first joined that user testing, our, our enablement leader reported directly to the chief.
Revenue officer and that that did work very well. I think that elevated the platform of enablement. But again, for me in org design, it is looking about where can you couple leadership that just kind of one plus one equals three and get these fantastic synergies that pay off. And with our enablement leader and many of the operational leaders, we're able to have this constant.
Tweaking and constant mindset of improving our sales process and life cycle to provide a, a better experience ultimately for our customers, but absolutely for all of our internal customer facing employees to be more effective in their jobs.
It
Ian: seems like you have sort of crowd resources. Around the actual salespeople in a way with like surrounding them in a nice warm blanket of marketing and rev ops.
And it feels kinda like a lot of times the best rev op teams do that is they're really just allowing the sellers to just sell and pulling those, extracting those insights and ideas and best practices and all that sort of stuff, pulling. You know, different levers to see how you could get deals done faster or accelerate sticky points and all that stuff.
Curious how you think about sales?
Joshua: I think you're spot on in the way you described it, where, you know, I'm at a company where we're selling a platform to get our customers closer to their end users. I'm kind of bridging that empathy gap. Yeah. And the way that. I look at our job as rev ops professionals to set up customer facing employees for ultimate success and the sales team for success.
It is about creating that, that fluid best in class experience, uh, for the employee and. Ultimately that's what we're trying to, to drive. We're wanting to delight our customers, but at the same time, for our internal employees to do the, the job of their lives. For our sellers to be high performing, we need to be thinking through their lens.
We need to understand what's driving inefficiency, what's creating roadblocks for them, identifying opportunity. And, and you're right, I, I think the rev ops construct that, that we've built at UserTesting, it's very much. With the goal of making the, the sales experience optimize and creating a kind of a, a single intake, if that makes sense for the, uh, for the sales team, rather than needing to bounce around to, to finance, to legal, to many different stakeholders, we want, we wanna shepherd them in, in a streamlined fashion to get the answers, the guidance, and the knowledge they need to be successful in their jobs.
Ian: All right. That's it. We're done with the Rev opening. Let's get to our next segment. Rev. Obstacles.
Joshua: Obstacle. Obstacle. An
Ian: Obstacle to what?
Joshua: There's your obstacle
Ian: where we talk about the tough parts of rev ops. What's the hardest rev ops problem you faced in the last six months or so?
Joshua: In terms of the, the biggest obstacle in the last six months where, you know, we've recently been acquired user testing and user Zoom has merged over the past really weeks, and as you can imagine, it's going through a merger of similarly sized companies.
It's very exciting. It's a great experience for the new combined company, but it can be a daunting task in terms of all of the dynamics of designing the blended org, figuring out. Territories that are best set up to allow our, our company to thrive and to set our sellers, our customer success representatives up for a, a great trajectory ahead, as well as again, delighting our customers.
And the challenge here was really wrapping your arms around a. Two different tool sets, two different data sets and, and forging a path forward. We always talk about
Ian: rev ops as the zipper, but when you're merging, uh, it really is the zipper. Yeah. Merging those sort of go to markets, your sort of rev ops teams, all that stuff.
Joshua: It's very much kind of the go slow to go fast framework where we wanted to take a step back, ensure we had a clear understanding about the existing ideal customer profile that both companies were operating under. Getting a deeper view around existing install base territory establishments, and then it's really about ensuring that the partnership with the go-to-market leadership, with your sales leaders, marketing leaders, customer success leaders, to be on the same page as to what are we truly building for the future company.
You know, with all of those inputs go through the exercise of ensuring that you're carving appropriately, you're setting up territories for success. Very important to me when you go through these types of transitions for m and a activity, in the past I've seen cases where unnecessarily you, you rip away account executives that had fantastic relationships with their existing customers.
So again, putting weight. On the, the health of that continuity and coverage as well. It's not a straightforward formula. You need to really take the time to understand those variables. Use your tech stack to draw out the right insights, and then land on a design where all the supporting go-to-market functions together are on the same page and can sign off together.
Is it
Ian: helpful when both companies have the first, first, first
Joshua: name? That is, that is true. That's a, that's a unique one here.
Ian: Yeah, it's pretty unique. What's your biggest rev, whoops,
Joshua: moment? Biggest rev, whoops, moment, um, is related to, to rolling out our Vote to cash solution with, with C P Q. There we, you know, we did not follow the go slow to go fast mantra, and in many ways, again, with, with.
All of the intent of having a end-to-end, fantastic automated solution to unlock efficiency. We just hadn't taken the time to think about all of the corner cases, ensure that we got key stakeholder feedback and it was a painful deployment. There's no, no other way to say it. I mean, we, we have world class systems team deal desks with all of the right intent, but we.
Pushed ourselves on a timeline that just didn't allow that initial successful moment. And it was a big, a big learning process where we did have the opportunity to go back, get it right, make iterations, put in place building blocks, but it just really reminds you when you have these big structural releases that are, are gonna be so foundational to your company, you wanna make time.
For testing. You wanna make time to get that key stakeholder feedback. And if you take shortcuts, you know it, it is going to, to burn you. So I think it was a big, big learning experience for many of our team members. Yeah. Any
Ian: other, um, rev obstacles or rev oopses or anything there?
Joshua: I guess another thread on the, the rev, oops, is jumping to assumptions.
I, we live in a world where there can be. Anecdotes that people wanna seize onto. And I think on the analytical side, when you think about the key KPIs that, um, you know, user testing or many other SaaS companies dive into, it's so important to be a. Multi-threaded and really understand what's changing throughout the entire lifecycle, and certainly run into issues where we thought we had a big aha moment in terms of something dramatically changing with a key K P I, but then taking a step back and looking in the larger context.
That would be one where I just, I'm a big believer in ensuring that you're looking at multiple lenses when conducting analysis.
Ian: Yeah, that's great. All right, let's get to our next segment, the tool shed. Hey, hey,
Joshua: Brandon, Michael, wanna do me and mom a favor? Get off that shed. This is my favorite
Narrator: place,
Joshua: the tool shed get off the
Ian: shed.
We're talking tools, spreadsheets, and metrics. Just like everyone's favorite tool qualified. No B2B tool shed is complete without qualified. Go to qualified.com right now to check them out. The best tool in every rev ops leaders toolkit, that's for sure. Josh, what's
Joshua: in your toolkit? There's, there's a lot.
It would, it would take me a long time to go through that entire shed, but I'll, I'll talk through some highlights. Salesforce is our crm. Pretty much every company I've been at over the last couple decades that's been. Table stakes to build out your integrated tool set. Marketo, from an automation standpoint, how we're driving top of the funnel activity and insights.
We use Tableau for data visualization drift. We recently m moved to for, for managing our live chat HighSpot for, you know, storing our enablement assets and ensuring that it's a clean, streamlined view for our customer facing folks to engage. Use outreach for sequencing. And then in terms of contacts, company intelligence, ZoomInfo is where we've really landed in in recent years as a best landing spot.
Yeah,
Ian: that's great. I, I think a lot of those things, like you said are, are table stakes now. Um, what are the things that you're pushing into that are a little bit more at the cutting edge and things that you're trying to push the limits of or, or just stuff that you're testing and checking out
Joshua: Sixth sense and kind of gaining deeper insights on intent data.
Mm-hmm. I think is, is one that. You know, across marketing and sales, we have a huge amount of excitement around the potential there. We do follow what I consider to be a pretty classic sales cycle model, where we start at the top of the funnel with inquiries and MQs. For those of you out there that are not yet using intent data, but getting, getting that data and insight as to who's engaging with your brand, your, your website, as a means to really revolutionize the way that we.
Engage with our ideal customer profile and being able to over time layer that to understand their buyer journey, layer that with a knowledge of which verticals we typically win at and which particular departments do we need to engage. We're still early stages in terms of leveraging all the insights that intent data can provide, but this is one where I'm.
Super excited in terms of how, you know, how this can change the game and open up new means of us getting closer with our customers.
Ian: Yeah, it's really amazing. I mean the, the tools that can give you more information about what's happening on your website and intent and all the ABM platforms are really exciting.
Obviously. Tools like qualified are amazing sponsor of figuring out who the heck is coming to your website, how to talk to 'em faster. I like that you said revolutionary cause that's what it feels like. It feels like a shift. And I think there is some, you know, scuttlebutt about sort of like using. ABM as a term and the vendor's creating it all that sort of stuff.
But it's like, it's true. I mean, it, it feels really different. Uh, and it feels like when you're not investing in those things, you kind of don't know
Joshua: what you're missing. Absolutely. I think doing, again, kind of doing the homework, understanding how other companies are leveraging some of these newer technologies, but you're absolutely right.
If you're not leveraging intent data, you're missing an entire. See of of data and insights that can be shaping your sales cycles in an entirely different way.
Ian: What about some metrics that matter
Joshua: to you? I mean, with metrics it's, I mean, this is an area I'm very passionate about where, you know, philosophically, it's really about establishing that balanced view between leading and lagging indicators for demand gen all the way through to sales where.
Again, if you're only focused on one piece of the puzzle, you can pretty much fall off a cliff in terms of the business health quickly. So today, in terms of that life cycle, you know, break it into different quadrants where we're looking at the demand gen and like we talked about earlier, understanding marketing qualified leads.
Earlier in the conversation we talked about are BDRs and their pairing with account execs to generate. You know, sales qualified leads, sales generated leads, and understanding what are the win rates there, which specific campaigns and efforts are paying off, and where are we seeing the roi? But then following that, it, you know, it turns into activity.
And with our SDRs and, and BDRs, what is the activity? Be it number of emails, calls, buyer interactions that are taking place that. Allow for that sweet spot where we know not every single buyer is the same. I mean, I've got colleagues that will pick up the phone for every unknown spam potential call day they get.
Did you. They're crazy. I, I don't, I can't, I don't, I couldn't pick up with it.
Ian: No way. Are you kidding me? There's no, I mean, I, I get 50 emails, maybe not a day, but I get at least 15
Joshua: just emails. Ab Absolutely. And then it's about fi finding the balance. I mean, knowing that yes, there's those outliers that will pick up their phone on all those occasions, but others that need prompts via email or LinkedIn, and making sure that we find the sweet spot for that multi-touch reactivity.
And then measuring there, where, where are we finding our sweet spot? It really gets into understanding the pipeline. We can go super deep and at, at our company it's, it's very much, but we bring together leadership to study the pipeline deeply in terms of knowing what's changed in the average sales cycle, getting forward, looking in terms of that pipeline to quote a coverage ratio, understanding win rates and where.
Where are they spiking or, and where are they challenged on an ongoing basis? And kind of connecting the, the metrics on the pipeline side, it is about turning your lens to, to performance and obviously on the journey when we were VC backed, fairly high growth on the the road to be i p o. And definitely once a public company that forecast accuracy becomes so paramount and important.
And again, knowing when to. Add fuel to the fire and when to add reps and, and get that total target attainment. Balance becomes critical. And for sas it's all about retention as well. So getting those customer insights as to where, you know, where's adoption successful, where's healthy usage, or where are there gaps?
You know, we're very deep in analyzing gross retention, so ensuring that we have a, a healthy. Amount of our existing customers renewing and, and coming back in focus, as well as net retention. So understanding what's the growth on top of that existing contract, so to ensure that we're driving some healthy expansion and, and showing more value to our customers.
Ian: Specifically with outbound, because you run it. I'm curious, any metrics on stuff that you're talking about? Number of calls, number of emails, any things that you see, uh, out there?
Joshua: Yeah, I'd call it a delicate balance. I've been at companies where there's such a focus on ensuring there's volume that again, it can get into kind of what many term that spray and prey approach where we are very much focused on inspecting the quality, making sure that.
The BDRs are taking the time to research the companies, understand the person that they're speaking out to, and re relate to topics that are going to be relevant for them. Sure. We, we don't wanna see an, A number of outbound touches fall to an unhealthy level, but it's more so important to ensure that the quality of the interaction, the partnership, and the planning with the account exec understand.
What are those high priority companies and verticals and personas that you wanna be engaging with? That becomes, you know, such a critical aspect of, of the job and the coaching and the inspection that we wanna provide for their success. Any
Ian: blind spot that you have that you're like, oh my gosh, I wish I could measure
Joshua: this better.
Blind spot. I would lean towards sales plays where we have this fantastic solution. Uh, user testing can. Provide insights to any customer, any vertical, to get closer to their users and informing them to make better decisions about the way they run their business, the way they design their product solutions and experiences.
And for us, designing sales plays and thinking through the right messaging and making sure we're getting that feedback loop from our reps as to what's landing and what's not. That's the one I haven't fully cracked. We've created the fields. We've tried to capture the particular plays being run, but unless you take the time to really listen to calls or survey reps at large, which obviously you can't conduct on an ongoing basis, we need to find a way to better capture those insights as they're happening.
That's a sales play. Insight is one that. Definitely high on the list to solve for. Yeah,
Ian: that's great. Any thoughts on sort of marketing attribution, they're sort of warring thoughts on attribution and having it not work and this new sort of the self-identify thing working really well to find out more information there.
Just curious on, on attribution and also multi-touch and ABM and all this stuff's, like there's, you're not sourcing a lead in traditional ways a lot of times anymore Anyways.
Joshua: Absolutely. I'm a big believer in studying multi-touch attribution. I mean, I, I've been at companies where we go back and forth in terms of analyzing is the, the lead source kind of the holy grail, where did this individual originate from?
And I've always believed it's critical to understand what are the touch points on that sales journey that get you across the line. So we do, you know, we're blessed with. Fantastic marketing ops team that recently actually spun out from our rev ops team reports into a group that we call the Digital Demand Center and very The lead, I didn't know that.
Yep, exactly. And they're able to give us just. Really fantastic insights into different segments, different campaigns that are providing effectiveness on the sales journey. As you start to learn about that multi-touch attribution, you can think through for different segments and verticals of the market.
Where do we wanna place a campaign? If, if a sales cycle is stuck, where do we want to nurture leads that have gone cold? Where do we wanna provide supporting information or invite groups to important events as they're at later stages as well? So a absolutely getting that insight to not just understanding the lead sources, but the influence of multi-touch is, is critical.
Any
Ian: other, uh, cool stuff that you're doing with data? I don't know if you're pro spreadsheet or anti spreadsheet or any other spreadsheet thoughts?
Joshua: Lots of spreadsheet thoughts. I mean, I we're trying as much as possible to, to build automation and, and scale through tools like Tableau where we can build, can reports and set, set a broad array of users up to be more self-serve.
Because I certainly don't have the number of rev ops analysts that can be engaging with. Employees throughout the company on a regular basis. I think in ter, in terms of broad spreadsheet thoughts, you know, it's interesting. I think one is really about visual representation. I've definitely worked at companies and with colleagues that love to experiment with all sorts of.
Views beautiful pie charts and others. I, I'm very much of the mindset that a trended view is usually your best default position where you're wanting to understand how things change over time. I, I view rev ops as needing to be historians that kind of understand how we got to present day and helping to predict and, and guide our go-to-market leaders on.
Where to make the best decisions for the path forward. And you know, just a snapshot view of data at one point in time via pie chart. It just tells such a small slice of the, the overall story, so that that would be one. In terms of favorites, there's a few that I'd point to. I think one is, Is very much studying and understanding your close loss reasons and your, your turn and downsell reasons.
This, again, understanding over time what's changed. Has there been a new competitor that emerged? Has the economy changed so that budgets are drying up? That's one where you just need to stay on top. Another view, like I alluded to in the metrics discussion earlier, Very much I important to understand pipeline trends over time.
From a a few perspectives, we like to layer win rates as well as seeing deal slippage and what pushes the future quarters all in, in the same view. So you can understand over time, look, am I, are my number of losses piling up or am I having a sales cycle, slowness? What's truly happening here? And kind of getting those.
Multidimensional views into pipeline analysis is another, another big one. And then kind of a, a simple one that tells more of a story than you'd expect, really measuring out the count of new logo or expansion deals and the average sales price over time, so you're able to understand, are you relying on new logo acquisition versus not leaning into your install base enough.
As well as understanding is there a healthy baseline to preserve the average sale price, the, the healthy margin for the business over time. So those would be a few of my favorites. Are you building that
Ian: stuff in Tableau or where are you building that stuff?
Joshua: Mostly Tableau. The goal is really to build everything we can in Tableau so we can get it out to the masses in a self-serve format and not allow our teams to scale for success.
Okay, let's go to our
Ian: final segment. Quick hits,
Joshua: quick, quick.
Ian: These are quick questions and quick answers. Josh quick
Joshua: hits. Are you ready? I'm ready. Yes.
Ian: Number one, if you could make any animal any size, what animal and what size
Joshua: would it be? I am tough one cuz I consider myself a, a naturalist. But if had had to choose one, I'd probably go with, uh, a miniature tiger.
Ian: Ooh. Well, I feel like tigers are something that deserves to be miniature. Just as long as it doesn't, you know, start eating all of our birds. That's, uh,
Joshua: it's gotta be indoor, indoor, indoor pet maybe.
Ian: Yeah. An indoor tiger. I like it. Do you have, is there a rev ops misconception out there that you have?
Joshua: I think a big misconception I see that's really emerged over the last few years is that automation and AI can, can solve all your problems.
Taking the time to establish workflows that fit your business' needs and being thoughtful in the way you feed your analytics tools with the right data sets and ask the right questions to understand risks and opportunities is, is critical. I, I worry sometimes with the breadth and the strength of the tech stack that's emerged, you know, it can make people lazy in some respect, and, and taking a step back and asking the right questions for the business health.
Do you
Ian: have a rev ops prediction for the next
Joshua: year? My rev ops prediction would be, there's a, a major consolidation of, of tools coming. On one hand, I think it's the customer's desire where I just, I talk to a lot of my, my friends and, and contacts in the industry, and I think managing the current tech stack with a lot of niche solutions has become unmanageable in some respects.
Sure. And I've also seen. Challenging economic environment we're in. It's pretty ripe for bringing some of these tools together. That consolidation of tools would be my, my prediction for the next year. It's
Ian: funny, you see, you really see it. Um, this sort of VC market landscape will really change that, but you really do see some of these unicorn tools where you're like two or three of these jammed together and you're like, this would be an extremely formidable thing.
It would be very fascinating if, uh, there's more interoperability with some of these things. But yeah, I like this part of you and I like this part of you, and you guys should just merge
Joshua: together. Absolutely. Yeah.
Ian: If you weren't in rev ops or business at all, or sitting. Hanging out with the, all the editors at the Californian, at the Great University of California, what do you think you'd be doing in your career?
Joshua: Yeah, it's a good question. There's a creative side that, you know, I feel like I get to use in the Rev ops job in terms of the way you explore business. I'd love to create content. I'd love to maybe take a step back. Try my, uh, my crack at writing a novel. So I think doing something more in the creative realms would be a, would be a treat for me.
What's
Ian: your best advice for a first time rev ops leader? Best
Joshua: advice would be do your homework. Don't take shortcuts in terms of understanding the business. Building a network is critical and inviting feedback in many cases, unless it's a truly unique business model. Rev Ops is about approaching opportunities and challenges that have often been solved before, and I think the key is being humble and inviting that feedback and seeking it out.
Many companies try to create their own bespoke alternative processes when there's absolutely no need for it. Ultimately, focus on building a network of. Reliable friends and resources that you can be engaging with to test ideas on. Love it.
Ian: Josh, thanks so much for joining. For our listeners, you can go check out usertest.com to learn more about the cool stuff that they're doing.
Josh, any final thoughts?
Joshua: Anything to plug? I'd plug UserTesting fantastic platform for delivering human insights to your business, to being able to design stronger solutions, better business processes. I wanted to thank you, Ian. Really enjoyed the conversation and, and the hour, so really appreciative of the opportunity.
Ian: Awesome. Thanks Josh. And uh, take care. Thank
Joshua: you. Thank you for listening to Rise of RevOps. If you enjoy today's episode, please leave us a review and subscribe wherever you're listening. This podcast was created by the team at qualified The pipeline Cloud is the modern way. B2B revenue teams generate pipeline.
Learn more at qualified.com.