In this episode, we talk to Chief Revenue Officer at Tomorrow.io, Adam Clay, about optimizing your go-to-market strategy, aligning on the meaning of opportunity, and harnessing your technical drive.
This episode features an interview with Adam Clay, Chief Revenue Officer at Tomorrow.io. Tomorrow.io is the world’s leading Weather and Climate Security Platform, equipping humanity with the weather intelligence needed to thrive and adapt in an era of climate crisis.
Adam brings experience leading and scaling revenue teams for growth-oriented SaaS organizations. Prior to joining the company, he was CRO at Beyond Identity and Logz.io. Before that, he served as Vice President of Worldwide Sales at Black Duck Software. He has held VP of Worldwide Sales positions at Mendix and Shunra. Adam holds a Bachelor’s degree from Skidmore College and a Master’s degree from Brown University.
In this episode, we talk to Adam about optimizing your go-to-market strategy, aligning on the meaning of opportunity, and harnessing your technical drive.
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Guest Quote
“I think to not be technically driven in the decisions that you're gonna make and therefore the strategy you're gonna execute, particularly for a SaaS company, just does a disservice to shareholders. All the data is there. You just have to have the discipline to look at it, the discipline to gather it, and the discipline to pull the right people together to make a thoughtful decision.” - Adam Clay
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Time Stamps:
**(04:57) - Adam’s definition of rev ops
**(11:27) - Changes to being a CRO
**(14:00) - RevObstacles
**(30:21) - Tool Shed
**(37:40) - Adam’s advice
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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 RevOps. This episode features an interview with Adam Clay, Chief Revenue Officer at Tomorrow.io. Tomorrow.io is the world's leading weather and climate security platform, equipping humanity with the weather intelligence needed to thrive and adapt in an era of climate crisis.
Adam brings experience leading and scaling revenue teams for growth-oriented SaaS organizations. Prior to joining the company, he was CRO at Beyond Identity and Logz.io. Before that, he served as Vice President of Worldwide Sales at Black Duck Software. He has held VP of Worldwide sales positions at Mendix and Shunra.
Adam holds a bachelor's degree from Skidmore College and a master's degree from Brown University. In this episode, we talk to Adam about optimizing your go-to-market strategy. Aligning on the meaning of opportunity and harnessing your technical drive. 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 Adam Clay, Chief Revenue Officer at Tomorrow.io And your host Ian Faison.
Ian: Welcome to Rise of Rev Ops. I'm Ian Faison, CEO of Caspian Studios, and today I'm joined by a special guest. Adam, how are you?
Adam: I'm very well, Ian. Thank you for having me. Yeah. Excited
Ian: to have you on the show. You're a multi-time c r o. You've led revenue at a bunch of different organizations, worked with a bunch of different rev ops leaders, and who better to talk about rev ops than you.
Thank you. All right, so let's get into it. What was your first foray? Into revenue operations. When did you first get
Adam: introduced to it? Yeah, great question. I remember it clearly. The company was black and the year was two 14, and I was hired as part of a team that ultimately turned around the company that was flatlining.
We had a very nice exit sold. The company pleased everybody, all shareholders, and the CEO who hired. Said that he had also hired a vice president of Revenue Operations. And I thought, well, for sure that person's gonna report to me. He's like, no, it's gonna report to me directly. And when I first heard that I was conflicted, but then I came to understand that, you know, revenue operations first and foremost is the guardian of the single version of the truth about the organization's go-to-market performance.
And I thought, By the end, it was a brilliant decision on the CEO's part to set that up as a separate function that ultimately grew to a very sizable one that would partner with sales and marketing and post sales to do all the things that revenue ops is supposed to, is supposed to do. But that was my first true intro, introduction and a a very good one.
Ian: You know, we always talk about in startup plans that you. Hire for the company that you're going to be. And I think that the folks who make investments in rev ops, we've seen, we have brought 'em on this show. We've talked to a lot of people. It's such a different thing when you get to different gates of the company as you grow, because there's so much less of that just.
Non-transparency. There's like, Hey, we have this. Even if you don't have all the answers, which of course we never have all the answers, but even if you're just saying, Hey, we've been tracking this. Cuz the funny thing is about startup world, who you're selling to, what you're selling, the number of products you have, all that stuff at Series A and series D are two completely different companies.
Right. That's right. So it's like, that's right. If you're not tracking the historical trends and those historical trends might not be super relevant, but you gotta know where you've been. And without rev ops like, like you said, what is your single source of truth? Is it the C R O that's changed twice? Is it the CMO who's changed twice?
Or is it this dysfunction that has kept a record of that? And I think that. Your first intro to it is, is I think probably not very common. Yeah, it
Adam: certainly was uncommon at the time, and again, the decision wasn't mine. It was the CEOs of Black Duck and he's a brilliant guy, but that VP of Rev ops was a full-time member of the senior executive.
Team and was in, you know, every meeting that senior executives participated in from, from start to finish, from entry to exit.
Ian: And so, you know, flash forward to now, what's your definition of Rev Ops ?
Adam: So I, I think so, so much of what I carry with me as a definition was formed from my experience at Black Duck.
I was very fortunate. Worked with great rev ops teams at the subsequent companies as well, but I think first and foremost, I've always adhered to a definition that starts with maintaining a single version of the truth regarding performance, whether it's historical performance, current performance, or forecasted performance across the go to market team, which is typical.
Defined as marketing, sales, and post sales, either services, customer success or account management. So maintaining, uh, a single version of the truth and implementing, you know, the correct measure of people, processes, systems and tools to get there, which in this day and age, you know, as well as anybody. And it's a, it's a very complex thing to do.
So I think first and foremost, that. Ultimately, ultimately, rev Ops is there to optimize, you know, all facets of the go to market. And my definition would be that that optimization comes through truly objective, detailed analysis that drives really high quality decision making about where the problems and the opportunities are in the.
And internally and that decision making for a great rev op leader, like the one I worked with at, uh, at Black is not only for the rev op team, but it's in partnership with sales and marketing and uh, and post sales. So I think as a, as a benchmark definition, that's, that's what I would, would want as a CRO and a rev ops org.
Ian: That's perfect. And so as CRO of Tomorrow io, tell me how you think about rev ops for
Adam: your. Yeah. So, uh, I think similarly to that, to that definition, so, uh, we're a very ambitious venture backed growth stage company, uh, growing very quickly. So our rev ops practice is, is rapidly evolving. We have a small.
Rev ops team here. So we take one thing at a time, but I think we've done a very good job here of maintaining a single version of, of the truth. Cause it's very hard to, to move forward with any of the things that I talked about, optimizing processes to make the GTM go faster, or enabling really crisp, incisive decision making across the GTM org.
If you don't have. . And so from that perspective, I'm, I'm quite blessed here at tomorrow IO to have a team of people who are driving
Ian: that. And then in terms of your overall revenue strategies, obviously the CRO charge of revenue, how does technology play into your decision making? How do you think about, you know, your strategy and the tactics that y'all are y'all are using and how you use, uh, technology and data and all of those things to uh, to.
Adam: Great question. So, you know, I'll, I'll hold tomorrow IO in mind, but I'll also think a little bit about my other experiences in order to answer that question. So, you know, the fundamental question when it comes to marketing and sales and post sales is always how do we create more opportunity? How do we convert that opportunity at the highest possible rate and the lowest possible cost?
Mm-hmm. . Keep our C down and how do we, you know, absolutely delight our customers so that we not only retain them, but grow them. And I would think that every self-respecting go to market executive or C wakes up in the morning thinking about how they improve those things in this day and age, because most SAS companies are fairly complex in the information that you would need to.
Pull together in order to make intelligent decisions to improve those things. And reliance on technology, at least for me, is integral. It's implicit in every decision that we make. So we look routinely, you know, the health of the top of funnel. That is a tech enabled decision that comes through. HubSpot, comes through Salesforce, comes through Google Analytics.
We look routinely at conversion data, and that comes through. Salesforce comes through Gong. Uh, we look routinely at the strength and health of our forecast. You know, are we doing what we projected we would do? And that comes through Salesforce. We recently started using Gong to do that, to assist us in that regard.
And I would say the majority, if not all of the decision making is resting upon data that we're pulling from one of those systems and a few more that we, that we need, I think to, to not be technically driven into decisions that you're gonna make, therefore strategy you're gonna execute, particularly for a SaaS company, just does a disservice to, to shareholders.
All the data is there. You just have to have the discipline to look at it, the discipline to gather. And the discipline to pull the right people together to make a thoughtful decision.
Ian: Yeah, and I think there's so much of that that is about asking the right questions, and I think for a long time, yeah, we were asking maybe there are the right questions, but fundamentally we weren't like aligned on why we were asking them or what we were asking them for.
And having that base level, like Rev ops, one of the things that it allows you to do is to. Ask questions of the data to understand why the things are happening. Okay? We know things are happening now. Like back in the day we didn't know things were happening. Like we sort of knew that things were happening, but we didn't really know, you know, you didn't really know what was happening to.
You know, in reps calls, you didn't really know what SDRs were saying in their, in their, you know, emails. You didn't really know how many people are converting on the website and like heat mapping and all these other things. You didn't really know that stuff. And now you can ask the question why, like, why is this happening?
What's the secondary effect of this? What's the third order effect of this? Like, if we, if this, then that. And like that's the part. I would imagine being a C R O has changed so much is that you have all this stuff at your fingertips. Like you get to ask all these things and point to different things, whereas, you know, back in the day it was kind of like a little bit more straightforward.
Adam: Right. That's a very good point. When I first started my career, just the, the possibility of understanding, you know, what an sdr, to take one function with an entire go to market to understand who an SDR was. What they were saying when they got them on the phone, what the outcome was of that call, what follow up looked like, let alone what was sent after the, the conversation or what might have been sent in advance to, to create the conversation.
Were on a system that relied exclusively on trust. There was no data. . Yeah. Yeah. Right. Only what you told me you did. And you know, I imagine, you know, that, that some managers might, might, you know, pull up the sent items or, you know, go into some obscure system and pull the call logs. That was about as close as, as we could get.
But now, you know, from having a, a conversation with, with our t r team, and I think this really started to change five or six years ago. Of course we still trust. Of course we still trust. But I can also say, Hey, show me. Let's look at the prospecting emails. Let's look at the performance of those emails.
How many did you send? How many were were open? How many were read? How many were click through? Okay, how many calls did you make at what time of day? To which people? And, uh, let's listen to what you. In that call, it's all available with the click of a button. And so the, the coaching opportunities that arise as a consequence of having all of that data at, at the fingertips to compliment, you know, trust between a manager and an sdr.
In this example, it drives progress forward dramatically. And to your earlier point, it enables strategy. Cause we can very quickly. You know, over the course of a thousand emails or a thousand phone calls, what worked and what didn't work. We don't need to guess. We just need to be disciplined enough and sort of set our gut and sort of set our instinct aside to look at the data and make a, make an informed decision.
That's very exciting.
Ian: Let's get to our first segment, rev Obstacles.
Adam: Obstacle, obstacle.
Ian: An Obstacle to What? There's
Adam: Your Obstacle
Ian: where we talk about the tough parts of rev ops. What's one of the hardest rev ops problems that you've faced in your career?
Adam: The single biggest challenge, rather, the biggest obstacle that I've faced in my career. I haven't faced it here. But I faced it at other companies that I've, I've worked on because as a, cause often as a c o, you know, you're brought in not, and I'm sure Ian, you know this, not because people are like thrilled with the way things are going.
Sure thing. Yeah. Right, right. Like, so rule number one, you're expected to, to make change and manage that change and keep everybody motivated. Through that period of change, assuming that the changes you're gonna make independently or with the rest of the executive team advance the business's interests.
Right? Everything we do is in the interest of the business, but you know, not everybody when you come into a company has the same ideas. Not everybody in marketing, for example, or post sales, has the same ideas about, and this gets the answer to the question that you asked about challenges, about what an opportunity.
So think about it. You know the op, the opportunity is at the crux of the way that we evaluate the effectiveness of pipeline, the effectiveness of the early stages of a sale. How much opportunity are we gonna create and how good are we converting leads into opportunities, agreement on what an opportunity actually.
It can be, depending on the organization, kind of hard fought. And so I'll, you know, I've joined organizations in the past where opportunity equaled meeting. I don't, I don't, maybe there are some businesses where you're lucky that you convert a very high rate of meeting to close one pipeline, but most organizations I've worked for B2B companies that are, you know, Selling to enterprises or selling even to the SMB opportunity doesn't equal meeting.
But you'd be surprised at how many companies have have built their entire pipeline based upon that notion. So now we've gotta introduce, for example, rigorous systems of sales qualification to define what an opportunity is. But guess what? The number of opportunities the marketing team creates or the SDR team creates is gonna come.
As a function of the introduction of that rigor. And so, you know, helping everybody understand why that's good for the business and then aligning everybody's, aligning everybody's incentives that that can be, that can be challenging. And you know, I think, I think that same drama, you know, plays it out, plays itself out in software companies around the world, you often see the same challenge arise when you talk about leads.
You know, a new C new cmo, you know, get together, aligning on a single version of the truth. Like, Hey, what's the lead here? Is it somebody fill out a form on our website? Is it a name that we pumped into our database? Is it somebody that actually raise their, raised their hand and said, contact me. We have to talk about it.
And so suddenly, if you align to a more stringent definition of what a. Is you might be creating quite a bit of conflict for marketing teams that up until that point have been, have been measured, have been bonused, have been patted on the back for driving A standard unit that has a, has a lower definition or a lesser rather.
Definition. Most of the, the challenges that, that I've had as a c have come in and around those sort of definitions, and it's the steady unwinding of those definitions to something that really means something to the business, which is typically a qualified lead and a qualified opportunity that can take, that can take a little bit of.
Now that was a really long answer. I hope I answered your question. . I mean, you, we
Ian: could probably keep talking for, for the next, you know, three weeks just on this topic and, and we still probably wouldn't do it justice, so I totally agree. I used to have a, uh, a boss who would take a photo of someone with an ad somewhere in the wild and then send it to the team, and then it would be like a lead, like, Hey, here's a lead.
I'm. . Just because someone is buying an ad somewhere on earth does does not mean that, that it's like, well, they're spending money with somebody. And I'm like, I mean that's, I ca but that's, and I would be like, yeah, you know, the lowly rep and be like, yeah, I mean, I guess, but like, why are they buying that?
Who is the target for that? Is that in and around our solution? You know, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And so I, you know, that, that's another thing, like if. , is it someone who is driving, you know, showing intent to do X, y or Z? Is it, is it someone who's using a competitor? Is that a lead? You know, Hey, is that good enough to say we better be knocking down the door of this, of, of what that means?
Well, and so, and I, and I wanna ask you, so. In those organizations, what was sort of like, you know, as an example, just for, for one of those organizations that they used to be a part of, what would be an example of like, okay, this is, this is what we figured out. We decided that this is the way to do it, and you thought that that was a pretty good way to
Adam: do it?
Yeah, so it ties back to the beginnings of this conversation. Many, if not most of the organizations, not including the one I work for today, the one I work for today, we have this remark. Remarkable collaboration between sales, marketing, and post sales. And we have a ton of transparency and we're all just in it to win it.
So the decisions are, are, are pretty easy and they're collaborative and we've got a great little rev op team. But historically, historically, what did it, and again, this is the root of the conversation that we're having. Giving the reporting to an independent objective rev op team. And I, I've also been, Hey, granted Michael do mean model favor, get off that shed Rev op, this is my favorite sales report, I think is Interestd.
So it's reported directly to the CEO or it's reported to the cfo and some people might, you know, recoil. When I say that's a good thing and say, well, hold on a second, I wanna control that, but you know, it's better to have it as function. So where for
in, they have all the data, they can make a recommendation about what units actually convert into meaningful business value. And that's what we. Just gave it to an objective party and, uh, they helped us figure it out. And I'm
Ian: curious, you know, in your role as c r o, and not speaking from this company particularly, but as the, the royal C R O A C R O in the sky, that, that looks at all of us breaking those three functions into having a, a functional leader for sales, for marketing, uh, and sometimes marketing rolls up to cro, sometimes they don't.
You know, I get that. But having sales lead, marketing lead and uh, and, and post sales lead and being responsible. All of revenue, therefore puts those things a little different. I think partly the problem was if the C R O is actually the head of sales and they're the one who owns the rev op team and they're gonna serve that purpose, then you have marketing and, and customer success or, or whatever it is.
A little frozen out there. And I think that that there's some issues there. It's like, you know, if this person is responsible for my career, then. At the end of the day, they're, the tie goes to them, right? Every time. Yeah.
Adam: So just speaking from my own experience, ive personally never owned all three.
Although, you know, I've, I've met CROs and I read about CROs who have owned all three sales, marketing, and post sales. So I've had sales and I've had post sales, but in recent history, I'd have to go way back to my career Very. You know, but before the era of rev ops where I had marketing too, but you know, there's still a case to be made.
There's still a case to be made to have rev ops being an independent function that rolls up to, to the C E O or even to the cfo. I'll give you an example of that. I think one of the, I think one of the highest orders of revenue operations, and it's really. To get there is when the rev ops leader or the designated party inside of Rev Ops, and I've had this at a few companies that I've worked for, when they carry the forecast for the business.
And so that's, that's, that's, that's not just running a report in Salesforce, right? Because generally there are other factors that go into what comes. Of your, your CRM that allow you to form a forecast. There's some judgment, for example, that has to be imposed on it. Or there might be a tool that you're using, like Clarity or Inside Square that will help you put together an accurate forecast on the first day of the quarter that you're gonna hit 90 days later when the quarter ends.
And certainly it's easier to forecast as the quarter, as the quarter ages, but I think having an independent party. Provide a forecast does some remarkable things for, for, uh, a go-to-market organization. Like for instance, for instance, it, it gets me outta the business of having to forecast. I was just gonna say, that sounds great, , but we, so we can just rely on the data that comes out of the systems we put in place to produce an actual inaccurate forecast.
And then it's incumbent upon. And these are the things that I would wanna be doing. This is where I could add the most value. As a C it's incumbent upon me to make sure, you know, that our sales reps are working within like a really clear sales process with really defined stages, entry, and exit criteria, right?
It, it's incumbent upon me to make sure that the sales managers. Just proficient in our sales process and they're coaching to those stages and they're helping reps get over obstacles so we can predictably push opportunity or move rather opportunity through the process. That is, that's time. That's time well spent as far as, as far as I'm concerned, and then doing the other things.
You know, personally, or through my management team listening to sales calls, looking at Gong data and providing the coaching to make sure that the buyer seller conversation is happening. Now, I promise you, you do all that well and you instrument your systems to produce a forecast. Somebody else who is totally objective and emotionally detached from the outcome, which is a CRO, is like virtually impossible.
Can do that. It also requires that person. I learned this all the way back at, at Black. We had the wonderful, had a Rev Rev op. His name was Ed Loftus. He was incredible. He was a former finance guy. He also knew how to relate to salespeople, so he would sit in the deal reviews. He would, he would talk to sales reps.
He would get to know what they were working on. So he was ultra high context so he could pull a report. And I've had some great rev op leaders who could do the same thing because they work at generating context. They could pull a forecast out of a system, run the analytics, and they can look at. And they can say, well, hey, I'm gonna put some judgment on this because I know where we are and the opportunity.
And then when it comes time to present the forecast to the executive team or present the forecast to the board, you know, early on in a quarter, I and the head of rev ops do that together. He provides the numbers, I provide the context. Everybody's good. That is, that is the highest order I think of operations for, uh, for rev ops.
Ian: Yeah. I mean, and I think it's really interesting too that, that someone with a little bit of a finance background and, and I think that to add to that, someone who's just a deep either lever or understand of technology and how technology levers the business, like technology is a massive lever for sales and marketing.
Like you, like every, at this point in time, every single. Marketing sales leader and customer success leader, they have to be technologists like you have to because you're using technology all day, every day. And so if you are a little weak and you're in one of those functions, having a rev ops person who is really good at technology and maybe your CTO is or your CIO is as well, which is great.
They also have other fish to fry as
Adam: well. Yeah, completely. I think that's very well said. I think to add. To the conversation if I can. There's, there's a lot of talk in recent years about deal desk. I'm sure you've heard that. Here, you know, so having a, having a central point specifically within Rev op where, you know, pricing is owned, the quoting process is owned, approvals are owned, determinations around booking and revenue recognition are made.
And even in some of the more sophisticated deal desks that, you know, I've helped build or have been a part of, they can negotiate legal. . So, you know, having that provided to a sales organization sort of as a service through rev ops, I'd say that's pretty close also to sort of one of the highest order, you know, states of a rev ops.
Of a rev ops team. But it, it does, it does require, you know, the, the members of the Rev op team who are going to lead that function. And I'll just, I'll probably overuse a word I just used like three minutes ago to be super high context. Cause you can't really make decisions or partner with a sales rep.
From the perspective of rev ops or deal desk, if you don't understand the business, you don't understand the territory, the rep, where you're in the corridor, what you're trying to accomplish, what levers you can pull. And so some of the best rev op leaders that I've worked with have, you know, gotten out from behind the desk and they've put themselves in a position where they can learn about what it means to to be a quota carrying sales rep.
And they're better.
Ian: And it's so difficult to understand the internal intricacies and the external market forces like that is what it, that is really hard to do. Like that's why marketing is really, really hard, is because, uh, marketers need to understand the market, right? Sales need to understand those individual accounts, like to the teeth, right?
Like you need to know everything about how they buy, why they buy, the levers that they buy with all that sort of stuff. But then you also need to look at your organization and figure out how to optimize, like you said, all those other things that are, those are organizational, that's not, the market is telling you market doesn't care how you organize your sales team.
And I think a lot of the rev ops people that we talk to, when you talk about, you know, the three heads of the hydro, the sales, marketing, customer success that they have to. You know, give their time to all three of those and triage that stuff. That's the hard part for them is to say like, okay, well this running report on like, you know, whatever you're tam plus, you know, accounts that are of a certain size that we wanna, that have a higher propensity to buy, and we have this theory that these type of accounts, that accounts that raise SIR C are the, are the fastest buyers in our entire thing.
We want to test a marketing theory on this, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, is a very. Mental function than saying like, Hey, carve this territory up. Like that's totally different.
Adam: That's right. Yeah. Yeah. And, uh, I, you know, I think great, great rev ops teams, you know, participate in those decisions. Territory and quota, of course, have the compensation plans are gonna work.
And you're right, that's, I'll take that one with me. The market doesn't care about how you organize your sales team. I, I like that. I'm gonna steal.
Ian: Yeah. All right. Let's get to our next segment, the tool shed. Hey, hey
Adam: Brandon, Michael, wanna do me and mom a favor? Get off that shed. This is my favorite place.
the tool. Shed get off the
Ian: shed. We're talking tools, spreadsheets, metrics, just like everyone's favorite tool qualified. No B2B tool shed is complete without qualified. Go to qualified.com right now and check them out qualified. They're our best friends in the whole world and we love them dearly. Go to qualified.com.
You can talk to a sales rep right now, right? You could pause the podcast or keep listening and you can talk to a salesperson right now on qualified, uh, and uh, and fix your pipeline. Go to qualify.com. All right. Tool shed. You actually touched on a, a number of the tools in your tool shed like Salesforce and HubSpot, and you mentioned going a bunch beyond that, what are the metrics that matter to you and, and how do, uh, how do your tools and some additional things that tools that you spend your time in, how do they help you?
Adam: Yeah, sure. I'll start with the metrics we hear and I, you know, sort of over the course of my career, pretty passionate about routinely looking at just a handful of metrics. So, Number one is how much pipeline are we creating on a daily and weekly basis? And you know, to be fair, a lot of people probably do that and they're like, Adam, like that's not really particularly insightful, I would say not everybody puts that into the form of a trend.
Are we getting better or are we getting worse? Right? And then takes the time to look at the breakdown of the contribution to pipeline. By vertical, by territory, by sales rep. These things tend to be looked at in an aggregate, and so that's a wonderful place to partner with marketing colleagues. For example, just over day, week over week, are we creating more pipeline?
Are we creating less pipeline? And for whom are we creating it? And what are the sources by which we're creating it? Right? Inbound? Are we up or down that week for down? Outbound, are we up or down that week for down? Why sales reps? Because I typically work for organizations where sales reps are expected.
I expect them to prospect as a source of pipeline, generation of the up or down. And there's, you know, all sorts of precursors to pipeline generation that we look at in our regular reports, like the number of discovery calls, number of leads and so forth. But that's a big one. Um, it all starts with pipeline.
And the second is what's our convers. Of that pipeline at stage. So if we create a qualified lead and we've done that through, you know, a discovery call, maybe a demo, then how frequently do we convert that to the next stage and the stage after that? And the stage after that? And I don't think I'm unlike, you know, any.
You c or sales leader, like the things that you're looking for when you're converting opportunities, at least if you're selling in a, a B2B sale where you have sales reps who are out talking to customers. You know, aside velocity, aside, smb, sales aside, you know, are we creating sponsors who, who want a champion?
A solution to the problem. Are we aligning with, you know, we call it power, but economic buyers, decision makers, which is hard. Very few sales organizations are good at doing that. If we're being asked to do a proof of concept, for example, you know, are we properly aligned around the solution, around the investment, around the decision process and the multiple personas in the account?
And so, I bring that up, not to lengthen the answer, but because if those are delineated in the sales process, and I'm pretty passionate about that, just consistently looking at how well the company, verticals, territories, individual sellers are converting those opportunities and not necessarily week over week or month over month, but quarter over quarter, you wanna be improving, right?
You, you want the skill required to go from discovery call. Qualified opportunity to go from a conversation with a sponsor to a conversation with an economic buyer. You want those skills to be developing and you want the conversion rates to, so I would say addition pipeline generation, it's conversion of opportunity stage.
That would be the second one. And the third one's not unique, is our forecast, of course, and the opportunities that are gonna get us to where we need to be over the course of the quarter for.
Ian: Any other thoughts on tools or blind spots or anything like that that, uh, you wanna share with the audience? So,
Adam: um, I we're, we're making, we're making terrific use of, uh, conversational intelligence tools here and, you know, elsewhere over the last, last four or five years, I think they're very powerful.
I think they're somewhat under. So gong, for example, or chorus, not just for pulling out call analytics, I think those are useful, but actually listening and coaching to tape and then increasingly uh, um, tying what is said or what is not said in a call. To a forecast, not as the mechanism for forecasting, but these platforms are doing remarkable things now with conversational analytics to tell you whether or not, for example, the opportunity that you forecasted for close by the end of the quarter, which is just in a few short weeks.
Has supported a conversation around price or decision making process. Like guess what? Like I could know that I could pull opportunity right now that we're forecasting for the gong determine or has agreed to decision well we've, and a contract to them. So, uh, I, I find those tools to be remark. Remarkably powerful on the, on the extreme front end, we've started to use tools like ZoomInfo.
We're in a pilot right now with a, another, another tool that's helping us with intent data. So starting to shift our S D R. Prospecting efforts away from cold lists and toward high intent sources. So we have, we get inbound leads. We've, we've started to use tools to route those tos directly, which I think most companies are doing, and that leads our SDRs opportunities to prospect outbound and using signal from the marketplace around intent that some of these tools are able to gather.
And then focusing our prospecting efforts. Where there's a signal that they might be interested in solving a problem that we can, I think over the last couple of companies, those tools have been hugely impactful for me.
Ian: It's been, uh, awesome having you on the show. We're gonna be following along and checking out Tomorrow.ioio.
So many cool things, uh, going on there. I know you can't share everything. It's, uh, it's a, it's crazy times in this world and, uh, I'm super excited to follow along. Any final thoughts or, or any, uh, pieces of advice for, for rev ops, uh, leaders that are out there? Just
Adam: one thought. And at the risk of sounding a little bit redundant, and thank you for asking, by the way, I think that, uh, the go-to-market leaders, CROs, CMOs, are best served to bring Rev ops as close into the fold.
Of how the software is marketed and how the software is sold. Cause with that context, you know, rev op teams can become great and the quality of the decision making only improves. They've got all the data and if they're armed properly with the context around how the business actually works and how it operates, you're creating very powerful partners in the business to do all those things that we talked about, which is generally driving more business and improving the quality of decision making.
So I would just, uh, I would leave at one point around context. Awesome,
Ian: Adam, thanks again and uh, and we'll talk soon.
Adam: Thank you for listening to Rise of Rev Ops. 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.
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