In this episode, we talk to Art Harding, Chief Operating Officer at People.ai, about crafting your rev ops roadmap, the importance of leadership alignment, and Art breaks down his rev ops swim lanes for us.
This episode features an interview with Art Harding, Chief Operating Officer at People.ai. People.ai delivers the industry's leading revenue operations and intelligence platform.
Art is a versatile business leader with global experience leading sales, services, and operations teams through the challenges of scale and strategic change. He has an energetic, hands-on leadership style with a proven track record of establishing and altering organizational momentum for the purpose of building results-orientated high-performing sales, services, and operations teams.
In this episode, we talk to Art about crafting your rev ops roadmap, the importance of leadership alignment, and Art breaks down his rev ops swim lanes for us.
Guest Bio:
Art is a versatile business leader with global experience leading sales, services, and operations teams through the challenges of scale and strategic change. He has an energetic, hands-on leadership style with a proven track record of establishing and altering organizational momentum for the purpose of building results-orientated high-performing sales, services, and operations teams. Responsibilities and experience include P&L, responsibility for global teams, and international operations. Art is a regular speaker and evangelist at customer and corporate public speaking events. He has experience with organizational re-design and KPI-based performance improvements with a focus on sales and customer success services and leadership team experience with businesses from $50 million to $1 billion in annual revenues.
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Guest Quote
“I think the rev ops function is a derivative of those two large rocks, right? Like what product or service are we bringing to market? What is the go-to-market motion that best fits our buyers’ buyer journey in the sales cycle, your operating function, really, ironically enough, the most common piece of advice I give rev ops leaders is they should think of themselves as product managers for go-to-market capabilities.” - Art Harding
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Time Stamps:
**(01:49) - Art’s intro to rev ops
**(09:00) - Tech spend
**(15:16) - Building your rev ops team
**(21:49) - RevObstacles
**(32:07) - The Tool Shed
**(44:51) - 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 Art Harding, Chief Operating Officer at People.ai People.ai delivers the industry's leading revenue, operations and intelligence platform. Art is a versatile business leader with global experience leading sales services and operations teams through the challenges of
scale and strategic change. He has an energetic hands-on leadership style with a proven track record of establishing and altering organizational momentum for the purpose of building results-oriented, high-performing sales services and operations teams. In this episode, we talk to art about crafting your rev ops roadmap, the importance of leadership alignment, and art breaks down hives, rev op swim lanes for us.
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 Art Harding, chief Operating Officer at People.ai and your host, Ian Faison.
Ian: Welcome to Rise of Rev Ops. I'm Ian Faison, CEO of Caspian Studios, and today we are joined by a special.
Art: Art, how are you doing? Well, Ian, thanks for having me on the show.
Ian: Yeah, excited to have you. Excited to chat rev ops with someone who's been there, done that, and uh, and everything in between. So let's get into it.
How did you get started in
Art: Rev ops? So, what's interesting is my journey at Rev Ops started well before the word really started being thrown around the industry. The first 20 years of my career, which primarily fueled roles, uh, either in sales, in professional services, customer facing, no desk at the office type type job.
I was fortunate enough to be part of a, a great company called Riverbed Technologies that grew to a billion dollars quite quickly. It wasn't on-prem hardware company, you know, SaaS was just starting to take off, you know, 2010 era post 2010, and we stopped growing along with, you know, some market challenges, et cetera.
It went through private equity. Takeout and during that process some of the senior leadership liked how I was running the post sales business for Riverbed and they were very impressed with the, the rigor and the process and the results and I think also predictability. Um, and so they asked if I'd be interested in running global operations in this post private.
Entity. So my first role in Rev ops was actually an a billion dollar company for, uh, a global sales operations team and post sales team and enablement team. So the first set of functions I had were everything from order management to enablement. The forecast sales operations, and it was at a global scale.
We had teams in Amsterdam, Singapore, um, and here in San Francisco, marketing operations was still reporting directly into marketing. So that was my first experience, partnering with another operating team, um, where we had sales and services and enablement, um, all reporting into the organization that I was running at the time.
Ian: And we'll get into people, AI here in a little bit, but Zoom now for a second. What's your definition of Rev? Well,
Art: it leads us to our second chapter after a few years, um, of working in private equity and learning a ton about driving EBITDA and profitability, et cetera. Um, you know, it was hard to ignore , the SaaS explosion.
Um, I had a background in observability performance management and was fortunate enough to get engaged around an opportunity to a company called New Relic when they were just north of 200 million SMB commercial PLG company That was, looking at penetrate the enterprise. And there was some interest in having me run a sales operations team, and this was the first time I think I was consciously talking about what we now call rev ops.
And during the interview process, I actually pitched. To the senior leadership team, this idea that I called go to market strategy and operations as someone who understands RevRec, et cetera. I always thought revenue was more of a finance thing and we were the bookings department, um, over in go to market.
But, uh, that's more of a debate for a cfo, in the coo. So to new relics credit, they were a very data-driven, very modernized organization with a lot of SaaS infrastructure. Although the infrastructure is about 10 years. And I actually was fortunate enough to get the support of the cmo, the c o, and CCO, to integrate all of their operating functions.
And so that was a really neat role for, you know, a few years as we went from 200 million to 600 and shifted the revenue mix from SMB commercial into enterprise. That was an organization where, My responsibilities ranged everything from, um, deal strategy and monetization, marketing operations, sales operations, post-sale ops, and what I like to say from inquiry to renewal and from the board deck to the weekly forecast call.
And we had responsibility for all the systems, the data, as well as the buyer and customer journey, as well as executing strategies to, to impact new relics business. Um, that was probably the, the, my first exposure to a real integrated rev ops function at. Yeah. And
Ian: how does that look at people? Ai?
Art: So, you know, we've, as we're talking here, Riverbed billion dollar on-prem hardware company, right?
Order management was actually putting kit on trucks to recognize revenue New Relic. You know, uh, enterprise, mid-market observability, SaaS company, people, ai, pre i p o, you know, Andreessen iconic yc, light speed company. Really AI driven, um, born, you know, the last five to seven years. Much different scale.
So you know, we're not in the hundreds of millions of dollars as a pre I P L company, much smaller. What makes people interesting is because we sell to. Revenue operations leaders and go-to-market leaders. We have historically really taken rev ops very seriously, so it's been fun to both recruit, attract, and build rev ops talent, and also really have permission from our leadership team to be.
Cutting edge in terms of using a lot of automation. You know, for example, I saw one of your questions today was, what's your favorite spreadsheet? I can actually look you in the eye and say, after three years that people that we, we don't use spreadsheets, right? We're a very modernized, automated, um, go-to-market operating structure.
So people, AI is kind of the newest, coolest toys on the bleeding edge of what enterprise go-to-market selling looks like today. And, um,
Ian: as you. Not only operate at People.ai, but you also advise a bunch of people, uh, um, in, in kind of a variety of different formats. So you're not only thinking about Rev Ops in terms of yourself, but also in terms of other size organizations.
Today on our call, We're gonna be talking more about the enterprise. We're gonna be talking about more the, uh, you know, larger type companies, but you also advise startups and different folks who are just starting out in figuring out what the heck they're gonna do with, with rev ops in
Art: general, right?
Yeah, I think the healthiest way to view rev ops is one, it is still a relatively new concept, so anyone who's very rigid in their definition or structure of rev ops, I, I would already cautious start cautioning them to slow down a bit because just like an organization is gonna be going through transition, as you introduce new products, as you penetrate new markets, it's gonna put new stressors on the business as you scale internationally.
As you just scale in terms of sheer size, the difference between someone who's sub 10 million maybe early on in their life cycle versus someone who's expanding internationally. Those rev ops organizations, while they may have some consistencies, are gonna look very different. So, um, I like to think of, of rev ops, just like the rest of the business.
Um, it has to evolve in terms of not just what it's doing within the rev op org, but how it's connecting to the business that it's actually empowering and enable.
Ian: Yeah, I'm curious though, because as someone who's a, uh, a smaller organization, but I find it's just so difficult to, you know, they always say like, uh, you know, kind of think like a bigger company, so you know, as you grow.
And I think that that's one of the things that's really struggled for me personally is the constant evolution of like our go-to-market operations and technology. It just seems like, you know, I, I, I, I forget, forget the exact number. I, my CFO just told me of how much we spent on technology last year and, uh, you know, it's pretty staggering.
But, but the thing that's so interesting to me is like, I don't really, there's no life without it. And I wonder like how many founders and, and executive teams do you talk to that. Our product people that don't really have a background in, in, uh, in sales marketing definitely don't have a background in Rev op who don't really understand like necessarily the, the power that this has or someone else has just always done it for them, and they, and they don't have that background.
So I'm just curious, like, you know, how do you, how do you think big when you, when you are small, and make sure that you are
Art: investing the right way? There's a bunch there. It's interesting. We can, if we get to it, we can talk about, you know, how product and engineering teams operate versus go to market. But to, to answer your first question, I don't think this just applies to rev ops.
I would actually back up and start, we're all clear on the idea that when we build a product company, or even a service company, you're looking for a product market fit of what, whatever it is you're, you're bringing to market The very next question. You that needs to ride alongside that is what is your go-to-market fit.
We're not even at rev ops yet, which is are you a PLG company? Are you an inside inbound, you know, high velocity sales machine? Are you a top down named enterprise account selling team? So as you look at who your buyer is and you look what problems you're solving for that buyer, and you look at how they buy, that starts to define what your marketing, sales, and services organization looks like.
I think the rev ops function is a derivative of those two large rocks, right? Like what product or service are we bringing to market? What is the go-to-market motion that best fits our buyer's buyer journey in the sales cycle? Your operating function, really, ironically enough, the most common piece of advice I give at a Rev op leaders is they should think of themselves as product manager.
For go-to-market capabilities, this means you have a roadmap. This means you are bringing capabilities, not tools to the business. So I always encourage the stakeholders of rev op capabilities, please communicate to us. in terms of the capabilities you need. I need improved lead routing. I need improved visibility into my pipeline.
We need to launch account planning. Don't come to me and say, I wanna buy tool X because I used it at my last company. I really think the tooling decision is something that should be made between rev ops. and IT professionals, and we should be looking at materiality and priority of these solutions within our tech stack.
I think Ian, you're in good company. Lots of people have made massive investments over the past 10 years in go-to-market tooling, and I think there's. You know, a couple reasons for that. Um, the first, we've experienced digital transformation and the benefit of using technology in so many areas of our lives.
We're always hungry to apply it to more, but more importantly, sas really allowed line of business owners to start moving much more quickly and much more independently, which has cut both ways. It allows us to do things faster, quicker. . It also has resulted in the fact that a number of us are sitting on some Lego sets we've been building for 10 years, and we bought everything from the Death Star to the Millennium Falcon to to the, the Raiders of the Lost Star set.
And we put 'em all together and they were all independently really good decisions. But I do feel this, I do feel this collective, you know, tool fatigue in a lot of our customers prospects and myself and my peers, where we're looking around at everything. And I think you said it. It's a non-starter that we can do without these.
But I think if you just scratch below that question and you start focusing on what's most material for your business right now, in which tool is moving that lever, um, it will help us make some of those prioritization decisions if we're looking to rationalize. Yeah, I think
Ian: part of it is just, you know, the, the reliance on, on data and having such a strong data.
And sort of like architecture for me from the very beginning. And that's like what I wanted to build when I started this company because I was like, I know that I'm gonna wake up three, three years from now and be like, Hey, let's look at whatever, something three years ago and like, if you weren't capturing all that information, you know, things change, whether it's actionable or not, all those things, but it's like if at least if you have that stuff and you can go back and look at it, but if you don't do those things, Then you really can't.
Yeah, I don't know.
Art: Yeah, so I think, I think in two areas. One, I really, if I was drawing a visual on a whiteboard of a go-to-market org, I would draw three columns, marketing services in sales, and there'd be three swim lanes across those three departments. The top swim lane is your business process. The second swim lane are the automation, software and tools that en empower or bring that business process.
To, to life. And then the third swim lane is your data layer. I believe your data layer is the one that you can make the biggest bets on being the most persistent over the lifecycle of your company. So if you, from day one, if you think of data as a persistent and permanent asset of your of your business, you're gonna wanna capture as discreet information as you can for as long as you can about everything you can right now.
That doesn't mean you're using. Immediately or all the time. I think just because we capture data doesn't mean we have to use it today or that we need to try and operationalize it. I think as you start moving up the stack into your business process in your. Software automation layers, you should expect to have to retool those every few years because your business is going to be evolving and changing.
And I think this is really where sometimes we may even over-engineer things where we try and build things for 10 years. Um, you know, in terms of your MarTech stack or sales tech stack and. I don't know many people that can run a business today the same way they were running it 10 years ago, particularly in technology.
So I try to encourage people like, think of your data layer as really the foundation of your house. A lot of infrastructure. You want it very discreet. You want a lot of trending data points. You want the ability to move it, snap it, curate it, and present it. Um, but the business process and the workflow layer, that's something that should be.
As you're part of your annual planning process, I think a healthier, more productive way to look at it is those three columns, the marketing, sales and services column, are actually supporting one business process, which is your buyer and customer journey from the moment of prospect. So when you're not sure what's to prioritize or whether it's a tool you wanna invest more in or somewhere you're gonna cut, I think the best North Star is your buyer and customer experience.
Yeah. So continuing
Ian: the thread on enterprise, any kind of unique setups that you've seen. In terms of creating a, a high performing or higher impact rev op
Art: team, I think sometimes people start talking about setting up a rev op function or some sort of centralized go-to-market operating fabric. There's this initial fear of like, oh my gosh, how many people are rehiring?
What's the headcount investment? Where if you actually step back, most organizations have this operating fabric. The only question is have you organized it? Have you named it? Have you structured it? To perform as one team or is it distributed around the business? And so, you know, a lot of us that run centralized orgs will call that shadow ops, like the old shadow IT days, where a lot of program managers out there and project managers and departments that are actually performing, you know, routine and regular operational functions, if they're reporting into the business, they support the business, gets that great intimacy of having that close right hand, the person they know to go.
But the downside is that operator's on an island, right, and they're, they're very segmented. So something that's maybe nuanced but not unique is standing up a rev op org by not just incremental hiring, but just actually taking an honest intellectual. An authentically intellectual perspective of who around here is actually operating, and will we benefit by putting them all on one team so that we can centralize resources prior to some decision making?
So that's the first thing, is that a lot of us probably can construct a rev op organization with the headcount that's already in the company by simply realigning them differently. Where things get really unique comes down to that concept of go-to-market fit. I talked about. If you look at PLG companies or high velocity selling companies, I've even seen where the faster and more digital the business is.
The rev ops or marketing ops function actually starts performing what, maybe 10 years ago we would've called marketing, right? And the mark and the marketers. I think the line between operations and marketing is the one that is the most. Transformed over the last 10 years in terms of the way we marketed 10 years ago in the role of marketing ops versus now marketing ops is hand in glove, like genetically integrated with marketing.
Whereas sales and sales operations have been running in parallel with each other for decades, and they're only just now starting to integrate with some of the integrated cadence tools and, and things that we're seeing, I believe post. Has evolved similar to marketing in that a lot of post sales orgs were professional service, time and materials, fixed price, and now you've got customer success with embedded offerings just in time, realtime learning.
So, uh, CS and uh, marketing, their operating partners are starting to become a part. Of what they do day in, day out in terms of how they touch their customers. If you turn the channel to a non PLG company, heavy field marketing, heavy thought leadership, top-down executive base selling, you'll start to see the role of those operating teams change.
You'll see enablement and the importance of enablement start to really play a big role. So what I find unique is as I go around, if I lined up 10 or 20 of people, AI's customers, The difference in their sales organizations. You know, you're either selling to SMB commercial with a short sales cycle or enterprise is, is relatively, it's the standard.
Deviation is not that big one. Sales org looks very much like another sales organization. They weekly forecast calls, say their a p and sales cycle length may be different, their hiring profile might be different. But the way you run a sales organization, you have a sales methodology, you have an annual.
Kickoff or training event you do your qbr. It's pretty consistent. The marketing and post sales motions take a consumption-based company that's driving a product with a consumption-based licensing model. The Rev ops team supporting post sales are supporting cs. Is gonna have a heavy data, heavy analytics, you know, working with product teams in terms of driving that consumption.
So I think the uniqueness really comes out of which market you're in and what product you're bringing to market. And then that manifests itself in the role that Rev op plays for that, for that team.
Ian: Well, yeah. I mean, so this is, this is something that we, we talk a lot about on, uh, on a different podcast on dementia visionaries with CMOs is about the, like, if you are a Plg c M.
It's like you literally own a number, right? Like, that's like you , right? Like the, the, the no salesperson, uh, gets their fingerprints on a percentage of the deals that your, that your organization is driving. And so how does that change, especially if you had so siloed mops and sales ops, uh, back in the day, uh, or now, how does that change things?
And what does that look like from the Cro O's perspective to say, well, MOPS team, which is exactly what you're talking about, is like literally driving revenue. They're responsible 100% for it. There's no one else doing it other than them. So should this be two different functions or, or should it be one?
Art: Well, and I, again, I'll throw out that caution that anyone who's sure they know the answer, I already have alarm bells and red flags going off because Yeah, sure. It should be your. For your stage of the company. And that answer's gonna need to change in a few years as that company evolves because, you know, as you bring up a plg, um, the how PLG impacts marketing and mops, let's go to a consumption company and how does that impact cs?
So now you have a sales team forecasting the potential revenue of land, but the revenue actually doesn't come in until the customer starts consuming. , you know your technology and now you've got a sales team and a CS team and who's driving the revenue. Versus in a consumption model, the sales team may be landing the potential for revenue.
The actual driving of the revenue comes from your product team and your CS team, right? The product team through viral features and your CS team through the engagement, adoption of evangelism that they'll do for your customers, right? And so it's, we, we work with a lot of people that are asking those types of questions.
How do you forecast consumption-based? , uh, revenue models, right? Who's responsible for forecasting it? Um, and I think, uh, I think the rev ops team's responsibility, um, is to drive clarity and drive clear boundaries and force. Tradeoffs, um, in the business within whatever your operating budget is or your capacity to deliver.
Ian: Speaking of tradeoffs, let's get to our next segment. Rev. Obstacles.
Art: Obstacle, obstacle. An Obstacle
Ian: to what?
Art: There's your obstacle
Ian: where we talk about the tough parts of rev ops. What is one of the hardest rev ops problems you faced in the last six? And how'd you solve
Art: it? Oh, geez. Um, there's no question. Um, this was not just the hardest problem I faced. I think it's the hardest problem a lot of folks have faced, which has just been the big shift in the macro, and it happened in the middle of most people's operating year.
I'm sure some people were different, but most of us about midway through the year. Couldn't ignore the fact that something had changed. Um, and you started hearing phrases very similar that we heard when Covid kicked off. The only budget is the CFO's budget. I don't know if my champion or buyer actually still has access to the dollars they have.
So in terms of rev ops, the question we were asking ourselves and helping our customers answer is, is our pipeline still the same pipeline? It was three months ago. If you, if you had a long sales cycle and you were working in an. You could have been working with a very sincere buyer in a very sincere pain, and then suddenly their organization's responsibilities changed.
So I know, um, we and many folks experienced late stage changes to very well Qualified opportunities. So what we did is we were a med tech shop, so we're big on talking about champions and EBS and decision making process, et cetera. What we did is we. Dropped all of our qualification scores for the decision making process and the EB for our opportunities, and we asked our sales teams to actually explicitly go out and re-qualify all of those opportunities with very specific questions.
Do you still have the budget that you thought you had when you started this year off? When was the last time your organization spent money of this size and caliber, and is the process for spending money of this size and caliber the same as it was six months? And we got a lot of, we got a lot of new answers, right?
And so leveraging what we thought our, the state of our pipeline was, along with our sales methodology to drive our field organization to requalify it so we can actually know what happened to our pipeline in a very measurable and mathematical way, leveraging our sales methodology. .
Ian: We talked a little bit about sort of balancing the different departments, uh, sales, marketing, cs.
Do you have trouble with, you know, feeding the different heads of the hydra when all of them are, are kind of asking for different things? I know it's a little probably different at People.ai than, than other places, but that's a, it's a common thing that people are, are struggling with who to, who to feed and when with limited
Art: resources.
So a couple of perspectives. One. While the, while the sales, marketing, and service functions report into my role at people, even at New Relic where I was in a integrated rev op function, one of my clear responsibilities was the facilitation of negotiations across the departments and budgets, cuz we did have a centralized go-to-market budget that get allocated to marketing, sales, and services.
So annual planning was the, You know, bringing the, the heads of state together and everyone's debating what they needed and why it was a priority. So one, I think needing to keep teams aligned and focused on shared wins and shared responsibilities is a perpetual state. Whether you're a hundred person company or 10,000, there's gonna be drift in terms of what people are focusing on, and you wanna get 'em back on the same page.
I actually really believe this is a huge leadership responsibility right up to the ceo. No, and and including myself, presidents and CFOs. Nothing will drive departments faster apart than taking what is, at the end of the day, probably a shared responsibility and a shared outcome and trying to assign one person to it.
For example, marketing. Where's the pipeline? I don't think that marketing is solely responsible for pipeline. I think a lot of people contribute. To marketing's leadership position in building this pipeline. But if you, if you believe marketing is building pipelines solely by themselves without the help of product managers, sales reps, or the case studies, your post sales team brings to market.
I believe pipeline's a team sport. Everyone contributes to pipeline. So where I think the alignment starts is first the leadership. Letting people in the company know that no matter how unique or special you think you or your department is, no one here at this business wins or loses alone. Everyone is a leading or lagging indicator to someone else's job.
So if I'm in sales and I need pipeline, I think sharing a deep understanding of leading indicators with your cross-functional leaders and having your sales leader and your marketing leader look at both sales and marketing leading indicators together versus if as leaders, you isolate one of these functions and I'm like, Ian, you own pipeline by yourself and you're a team.
I've already created this concept that, one, you have to go fight this battle alone. Um, you're gonna, you know, get really defensive about it. So I think having shared data sets and shared goals in addition to specific goals, right? Reps carry quotas, you know, every department needs their objectives just for that department.
And then you have, you know, whatever the appropriate cadence is for your organization for a shared review of these and retrospectives in terms of how they're tracking, where they're performing. I think key to alignment is leading indicators are so much more powerful for driving collaboration than, so as you look at your operating cadence as a leader, or you look at how you perceive you hold people accountable, if you're only doing it on results, and of course we, we need results, right?
So I'm not advocating we don't hold people responsible for, for results, but if you only hold people accountable for results, it's a little bit like my trainer. only holding me accountable to losing weight or not, or my financial advisor holding me accountable to being wealthy or not. Like, okay, we may agree on the outcomes, but where I can really start to change my behavior, where I can still be an optimist if I've got problems is if you're coming to me when my leading indicators look off.
Hey art, based on what you're eating, your leading indicators, I don't think you're gonna achieve your weight goal. Can we start exploring why these leading indicators look wrong? So I, I think just the practice of using cross-functional leading indicators is the beginning of getting better alignment. And then the last thing is how do you allocate budgets?
And I think this is where rev ops can really play an integral role. If the CMO gets a budget and the CRO gets a budget and is not running marketing, and this chief customer officer gets a. They're gonna deploy those funds into technology and headcount, basically like three separate departments, and they're gonna try and interlock at like the VP director level.
I believe that the integration and alignment actually starts to minute, you start allocating budget before anyone gets their budget. You know, you've got this go-to-market investment, you're looking to drive revenue. What is the buyer and customer? What's the holistic priority? We need to. and then having the trade off conversation with those different department heads before your organizations start going, because your organizations are all gonna try and prioritize their department's top needs, which is the right thing to do.
Those just may not be the organization's top needs. So I think the budget in leading indicators are two really good signals. I'm like, who's managing the budget, how it's distributed, and if you're giving it to three different groups and allowing those groups to set their priorities independently, and all you give them is a result.
they're all gonna come with three different, five different, nine different thesises as to how to drive that result.
Ian: Any, uh, rev, oops moments, uh, in the past couple years that you've made mistake that you, you don't recommend someone, uh, making and, and maybe you,
Art: they should learn from you? I've worked with a lot of people that are looking to rationalize tools, um, and or modernized their crm, and I, I personally went through a CRM re-implementation and I would say my rev, oops moment was.
Trying to address the tool and tech footprint around the CRM we were working on when really the CRM and the tool footprint is actually just a mirror of your procurement. Decision and budget process. So my rev up, rev, oops moment might have been first trying to tackle it as like a tool rationalization project, when really it's a business re-engineering project, which is, Hey, what do we want the buyer customer journey to be?
How do we spend money here? Who and how do we make technology purchasing decisions so that you can, you know, build sustainable architectures. I really think the organization, um, has to think that way. Uh, other rev ops moments, rev, oops. Moments. I'd say in general, another good one that I see on a regular basis is trying to enable the field.
So I think, you know, obviously Rev op and enablement have a very tight partnership, or sometimes even part of the same organization. We all anecdotally will say things like, we need to enable the field on the new product. We need to enable the field on the, the new account planning process. We need to enable the field.
I think it's a, a good red flag for us. Anytime we say that we need to enable the field. I really believe that we're skipping a step. If you've got 500 sellers, yeah, you've probably got 40, 50, 60 managers or leaders, maybe even more in there. I really believe pound for pound, enabling your frontline leaders and enabling your second LE second line leaders.
We often just skip over the leaders and we just train the field, right? And we say, Hey, you know, why aren't they doing this? And then sometimes I'm like, well, we have millions of dollars at larger organizations in management structure. So I've seen a number of ops. Oops. And experienced them. Train the field to do something.
But if you don't train that frontline on their role of reinforcing and inspecting that training, that can turn into a RevUps rev ops movement where you spent a lot of time and money educating the field and you skipped over your part of your governance structure, which are your leaders. All right, let's
Ian: get to our next segment, the tool shed.
Hey,
Art: Hey Brandon. Michael, wanna do me and mom a favor? Get off that shed. This is my favorite place. , the tool shed get off the shed
Ian: where we're talking tools, spreadsheets, and metrics. Not that you would know what's spreadsheets look like anymore. And all these tools are just like everyone's favorite tool Qualified.
No B2B tool shed is complete without Qualified. Go to qualifi.com right now and check them. We love Qualified Qualified.com. Check 'em out. Art, what's
Art: in your tool shed? So we're a go-to-market technology company, right? So I'm gonna start with the obvious answer, which is the tool I personally use the most.
Now, this is also. Relative to my altitude in the organization. So I'm responsible for the pipeline and revenue number across marketing, sales, and services, as well as having the rev ops function. I am sure that some people are using some spreadsheets at people. Ai. I just have the benefit of, you know, having a great data team and, and a commitment to curating that data into dashboards, um, and repeatable use.
So outside of people, ai, which I do really believe we're in the era of this, we're no longer in the people own account. people rent accounts, right? The rent payment is pipeline and a r. Um, this is not a, trust me, I'm gonna bring the number back in three months. Um, this is a trust and verify environment. We now do have the tooling to look at pipeline and account engagement with telemetry that fundamentally didn't exist 10 years ago, right?
Unless someone was manually tracking it. So I, I really believe that if you think of the essence, if we really wanna simplify, go to market, it's the creation and disposition of opportu. Right to, for the purpose of creating revenue, creating a retaining revenue. Mm-hmm. , lots of things we can do around that.
So your crm, um, I've primarily worked as Salesforce, but we also do work with Oracle crm, and I'm familiar with HubSpot, but obviously you need a crm, um, for a centralized repository of a lot of your data, but also your workflows. Huge fan of Snowflake, um, or other large data warehousing technologies. Um, most of the tooling vendors have not cracked the code of how to be the backbone.
Of complex data and context when you wanna start looking at product usage along with financial data, along with your go-to-market data. I believe having a data warehouse, data lake, and solid ETL strategy, so like in terms of your three big rocks. One, I wanna be able to measure my customer facing teams engagement with my prospects and customers.
Number two, I need a centralized CRM platform. Number three, I need the data platform. And now as I move into market, In sales, I want intent signals, I want lead routing, I want marketing campaign automation. Um, you obviously want standard automation capabilities around, you know, email marketing, messaging, et cetera.
And then post sales, I really think has a very big responsibility to bring automation to market, not just for renewal opportunity management, but also for customer training, customer engagement and engagement with your product. I think the relationship between customer success and product is one of the big areas.
The industry can really make a, a, a lot of headway in terms of really tightening that up because the customer success team has such a huge opportunity. To scale the right or wrong way with an organization based on how effectively a, they use automation, and b, how they provide feedback to the product team to bring those in product experiences out there.
So, you know, in terms of like naming specific vendors, you know, maybe, uh, in the Rev, rev tool shed, maybe this is blasphemy. I've actually been a big fan at the end of the day of believing. Most of the tools are actually mostly good enough. I like that. That's a good answer. Yeah. Yeah. If you're in the top three vendor in any of these categories, the tool's probably good enough.
The real question is, do you as the customer or as the rev op leader, have a clear vision? Of how you're gonna put these things together. There's so many overlapping features and functions in the go to market space. Like it's on you as the customer. I hear a lot of times I'll talk to my peers like, ah, everybody in this space says they do the same thing.
Everyone just, I'm like, yeah, I know. It's cuz they're the vendors. I'm like, it's, it's on you as the customer to start saying, you know, they do this really well, so I'm gonna prioritize this feature from them and I can replace this other vendor with this tool that comes down to us as customers. Um, the vendors are gonna be trying to grab as much wallet share and market share as they.
Right.
Ian: I like it. Great answer. It's true though, right? Uh, of course, that there's, there's differences, like you said, you know, a million times caveating, what size you're at, what com, like what type of company you are, all those things. But I think it's a good point that, you know, I mean this is, uh, like marketing 1 0 1 is like nobody ever, uh uh, is like nobody ever got fired using.
I b m, right? It's like that same sort of idea, right? This is why the Gardner wave and the, uh, you know, all these things exist is to allow people to say, Hey, these are the three things on the slide. And if you're not one of the companies on the slide, Your life is to figure out how to get on the slide, right?
Um, and, uh,
Art: and, and totally. I mean, if you're, if you're, if you're a rev op leader or a line of business leader looking to make a technology investment, you have this amazing analyst community that's doing a lot of work for you, you make a handful of phone calls to peers and peer groups to find out their experience, and I would argue your bigger risk in getting value.
Is the effectiveness of your organization's ability to adopt that technology than it is you picking the wrong vendor? That that's where I think the bigger risk is. You know, I can, I can buy three or four different types of cars. They'll get me from point A to point B. Me knowing which type of car I need for my family and from my commute and how to drive it is a much bigger risk than the feature function difference between Hyundai, Honda, and you know, Toyota.
Right.
Ian: And I think there's a million, uh, rev ops lessons, uh, in there to be unpacked as well. Any things, any stories about, uh, something you noticed that wasn't working in your pipeline, uh, and how you sussed it out?
Art: Yeah, so, um, again, we have the benefit of not only building tools in this space, but asking lots of questions about our business and also learning from our customers and prospects.
We stay, we see them unpack things. One of the more interesting ones for. I was a customer of People.ai for two years before I, I've been here, so I, for the last five years, I've had data that tells me questions that I did not have as an operator six years ago. And that what I think is really compelling, and that is not only the health of our engagement and accounts in a territory.
Are we working all of them? Are we working? Some of them, like what's the optimal territory size for any given revenue, responsibility or segment in your business? Having real. that tells you how many accounts your top sellers can get to effectively to get a result is I think a really modernized, important piece of information versus debating.
Do enterprise reps get 20 accounts or 10 accounts or eight accounts? You can put some real telemetry on that, but more importantly, as you, and so when I look at Pipeline health, my very first question is, are we actually engaging with the accounts that we claim? There's pipeline. So at the end of the day, I always remind people pipeline still is coming from.
From this as people are typing in what the human thinks is going on in the real world. So I at least wanna know that they're engaging with these accounts. They claim they have pipeline. The second thing is the personas. What are the actual titles and roles of the people? If Ian and Art are both calling on eight accounts and you're hitting the key personas, and I have the same level of activity, but I'm not hitting the key personas, we're gonna get very different results in terms of the pipeline.
I love it,
Ian: man. Uh, you know, sing it again from the rooftops. And that's not just on sales, that's on marketing too. And like, this is the thing that drives me absolutely crazy is when I sit down with a marketing team and I'm like, what are your key personas? And they're like, we have a lot. I'm like, I mean, you should be able to rip 'em off here
Art: pretty quick.
Well, so, uh, and I'll give you a great answer in terms of like, ripping off the rooftop. Yeah. Specific, specific problem. I've had the benefit of every sales kickoff I've now been a part of for the last five years. It's a very data-driven sales kickoff. We show all the stats and data from the last year, and one of the big ahas for us in the go-to market space was we've had CROs drive investments in People.ai.
We've had CMOs drive investment people. We've had CCOs drive investment people. I, but what we found was the presence of a rev ops leader early ear, early in the sales cycle. With any one of those, shorten the sales cycle and dramatically increase the size of the deal right now. Maybe some of us knew that anecdotally, you and I as rev ops professionals kind of giggle, like, yeah, of course.
You know, lots of reasons why you're gonna get a really organized person running everything from the procurement process, et cetera. But we also know that the Rev ops leader is important for buy-in in terms of long-term sustainability of the go-to-market solution. So being able to show our sales team that when you have a rev op leader engaged at Stage X, With a minimum activity level of why your deal goes up dramatically and your sales cycle goes down.
Was was a big learning for us and something we've actually shared with a lot of our prospects and customers as well.
Ian: That's great. I mean, you know, we talk a lot about the champion. Um, that's something so common in sales parlance and core of the strategy. Who's your champion? Are they gonna do everything that needs to get done?
Are you enabling them? Right? Part of that process is like, do they have the collateral to pitch their teams? That's something we've been really focused on lately as a organization, is our. Because so much of, you know, so much of this process is now people just ripping stuff off your websites and putting together decks and doing all that stuff without you even knowing that that is even happening, right?
So it's like, how do we give them the tools to just so, hey, if you're gonna rip all this stuff off of our website anyways, like here's all the stuff that you really need to go pitch your boss. And, um, you know, without us in the room, which is we always want to push ourselves in the room, but like, They're not gonna invite us in there anyways, so, you know, in most cases.
And so, yeah, I love that. I love that.
Art: So some, sometime your job, sometime your job may be prepping, you know, we like our champions to have professional wins, personal wins sell when we're not there, you know, et cetera. And so we're always encouraging our. Champions, especially when they claim to be a champion.
Like, Hey, can we do role reversal? Let me play CFO for you, . When you go, when you go sell this, these are the questions I'm gonna ask you. Do you have a deployment plan ready to go? When was the last time you deployed a tool like this? And so we try to teach our sales team that it's fun to, to help your champion prepare because you know you want, you don't want them making up their own answers when you're not in the room.
Yeah,
Ian: it's a great point. Great, great takeaway. Okay. Any other. Any other tool thoughts or, uh, or data thoughts? Uh,
Art: ta I, I happen to be a, yeah, I happen to be a big Tableau user. Um, I just have been part of that is, I, I don't think, you know, Tableau compared to other visualization tools is the important part of the story.
I think, um, I really do, you know, kind of view the go-to-market stack as either business process automation, workflow. Um, or data, and I think the least appreciated and the least understood is the data layer. , and I think there's a lot of frustration at the systems and tool layer from people that it's much easier to understand a workflow tool that is mimicking something you, you have domain expertise.
If you're not a data modeler, you don't understand ETLs, you don't understand the difference between data engineering, data visualization, data modeling. You just have a data problem. . And so I, you know, when you, when you talk about the tool shed and, and what's most important, I happen to believe the architecture of your data, the data model, how you do, you have data management, uh, sorry, data governance and master data management in place.
Like if there, you talked about as an early stage company, thinking about the future, very clear response roles of responsibility around what your systems of record are and who is responsible for not just providing you access to. In some visualization you want, they have a, a night job, and a weekend job of protecting that data, curating that data.
Um, and it's probably one of the areas I think is least invested in, um, in organizations that, that don't maybe think in a more modernized way. Lots of appetite for. Automation and blasting things out and seeing pretty, but that plumbing I think is crucially important and help drives your, your ability on top of it.
Well,
Ian: art, this is an absolutely wonderful conversation and it was so wonderful that we don't even have time for all of our quick hits. So I'm gonna give you one quick hit.
Art: Quick, quick.
Ian: What advice would you. To someone who is newly leading a rev ops team,
Art: the most common piece of advice I've given is nine times outta 10. The person leading the Rev ops team is leading it for a couple of reasons. Someone trusts them to be able to have really complex and maybe at times unsettling conversations and, um, to be an effective rev op leader.
you have to have a high degree of trust with the people that are depending upon this shared service you're providing back to the business called Revenue Operations. So the first thing is know that you really can't take a side, right? You, you can't love beating up on marketing or love beating up on sales or love rolling your eye at at post-sales.
You should have a deep. Understanding an empathetic connection with all the go-to-market functions, not just the one you happen to have. Cuz most rev op leaders will have come up through one of the operating channels and I, I really challenge them to be much more holistic in their view. That go-to-market is all about the buyer customer journey, not about marketing, sales, and services.
That's the first piece of advice. The second piece of advice is they're probably pretty intelligent. , probably a systems thinker, probably a degree in some sort of engineering, mathematics. You know, they've got a lot of intellectual horsepower. Unfortunately, as the rev op leader, especially if your team starts getting beyond, say, 5, 10, 20 people, your job's not to be the smartest woman or, or man in the room, your your job's to be a leader and you're going to spend more of your time.
Leading your organization to ensure that they are prioritizing the intentional and material things you wanted to tackle, not just what their latest ask was from the latest titled customer from one of the departments. Just because the VP of sales runs up, or the VP of marketing runs up is not enough for your team to suddenly break rank.
And I'll use the analogy with a new rev op leader. , if you do not understand your f, one of your full-time jobs is leading your organization is gonna look like six year olds playing soccer, and the ball is gonna be the biggest title and the loudest mouth from outside of the business. If you wanna run like a World Cup team or an MLS team, or a you know, premier League team, everyone on your team needs to know their position, the roles and responsibilities and your.
is to keep them in position and keep them performing as a team. And so for a lot of people not being hands-on in the numbers and not being the person who comes up with the aha moment or that analysis or installs, the software is uncomfortable for them cuz they've been doing it for so long. So I really encourage them to understand that they're a leader first and foremost, and let their team be the smartest people in the room and get those wins.
I.
Ian: Great advice. All right. Thanks so much for joining. We really appreciate it. Uh, final thoughts?
Art: No, it was a lot of fun and thanks for having us on the show. And, uh, I think the future is going to be more and more dependent on Rev op, and I think whether you're in the line of business or you're on a rev op team, there's a huge opportunity for us all to get smarter on this.
It's a, an emerging field, um, and I think it's gonna be more and more relevant, um, for digital businesses of the future as this amount of technology increases.
Ian: Agreed. And, uh, and if everybody wants to learn more about people, uh, ai, just go to people.ai and, uh, and learn more, um, and, uh, and follow art on, uh, on, on the socials, which we'll link up in the show notes.
Um, thanks again.
Art: Thank you for listening to Rise of Wrap Ops. If you enjoy today's episode, please leave us a review and subscribe wherever you're, listen. 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.