On this episode, Daniel Bornstein, Vice President, Head of Growth, Technology Vertical at Genpact, discusses the importance of fostering organic lead flow, the secret sauce of service lines, and why RevOps is an invention of the SaaS model.
This episode features an interview with Daniel Bornstein, Vice President, Head of Growth, Technology Vertical at Genpact. Genpact is a global professional services firm that makes business transformation real. Daniel is a veteran of the consumer internet space and has a specialization in B2B2C. At Genpact, he oversees growth for the technology verticals. Daniel managed the new business development team for Google in the UK and has worked within the M&A landscape, playing a central role in a data marketplace IPO.
In this episode, Daniel discusses the importance of fostering organic lead flow, the secret sauce of service lines, and why RevOps is an invention of the SaaS model.
Guest Bio:
Daniel is a veteran of the consumer internet space and has a specialization in B2B2C. At Genpact he oversees growth for the technology verticals. Before joining Genpact, he held senior positions within high-growth startups and publicly traded companies. Daniel managed the new business development team for Google in the UK and has also worked within the M&A landscape, playing a central role in a data marketplace IPO. Daniel's domain expertise has been centered in business development within digital advertising, online marketplaces, and data companies. Daniel holds a bachelor's degree in international relations and a master's degree in economics from the London School of Economics.
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Guest Quote
“How can we have those conversations? How can we illuminate that dark funnel before you get to that point? I know that's very important to our marketing group. It's very important to me.” - Daniel Bornstein
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Time Stamps:
*(03:39) - Daniel’s controversial view on RevOps
*(11:35) - Genpact’s secret sauce
*(14:40) - Quality vs quantity
*(19:15) - RevObstacles
*(23:34) - The Toolshed
*(35:26) - Prioritizing the funnel
*(38:23) - 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 Daniel Bornstein, Vice President and Head of Growth Technology Vertical at Genpact. Genpact Is a global professional services firm that makes business transformation. Daniel is a veteran of the consumer internet space and has a specialization in B2B2C.
At Genpact, he oversees growth for the technology verticals. Daniel managed the new business development team for Google in the UK and has also worked within the M&A landscape, playing a central role in a data marketplace IPO. On this episode, Daniel discusses the importance of fostering organic lead flow, the secret sauce of service lines, and why rev ops is an invention of the SaaS model.
But first, a brief word from our sponsor.
Ian: Rise of RevOps 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 Daniel Bornstein, Vice President and head of Growth Technology Vertical at Genpact and your host, Ian Faison.
Ian: Welcome to Rise of RevOps. I'm Ian Faison, CEO of Caspian Studios, and today I am joined by special guest. Daniel, how
Daniel: are you? Good, how are you Ian? Thanks
Ian: for having me. Yeah. Excited to have you on the show. Excited to chat about all things Genpact and how you think about RevOps and, uh, and as a vp it is, it is top of mind.
So, uh, let's get into it. How did you get started in
Daniel: revenue operations?
Well, it's, it's interesting because, um, I would argue that revenue operations is a fairly modern construct. Which was really an invention of SaaS companies, which I think is, is kind of interesting as well. But, um, for me, I was in graduate school in London and most of my classmates were going into consulting companies and investment banks.
And I had, I had started out working in Web 1.0 startups, so following graduate school and in graduate school I really wanted to work in tech. Uh, so I worked in Google for, for five years in the European office and then in New York and then back in Europe and back then, I don't think revenue operations, I say back then about 15 years ago.
Was defined in the same way. So for me, I started out in sales, uh, and very quickly, um, I moved into management. So, you know, I've been in management in, in different facets my entire career. And management in sales constitute strategy on some levels. So to me, I think that's part of the revenue operations piece.
And as the industry evolved, um, that's kind of how I got into it. From that side of it.
Ian: What's your definition of revenue operations?
Daniel: My definition and the actual definition are probably not too far off. I would call it the revenue Ops is the Holy Trinity of sales, marketing, and customer success. And I think that's right in the sense that common wisdom is those three departments of an organization working together in the most seamless manner, all of them accountable to revenue.
I think that's. However, I do think that there's nuances, right? So I mentioned a few moments ago, sa so it's pretty interesting because my take and other people may disagree is that this construct of revenue, operations and customer success and marketing and sales and go to market more generally has been an invention.
SaaS companies, but what about other companies that are not SaaS, that maybe are services companies that are B2B or companies that are B2B to see, like Google or me, right? Those companies also sell to to businesses, but their go to market motion may not be the same. As sas. So what are those differences and how do those articulate themselves?
And I remember about 10 years ago, I had a friend who's been in hardcore SAS tech sales this whole career. And he said to me, You know, we would never hire somebody that comes from digital advertising because they don't know what they're doing. They wouldn't understand how to sell technology. It's too complicated for them.
They're the wrong profile. And I actually think that's, And I do think that there's, there's some synergies, for example, between sas, B2B and B2B digital advertising in the sense that they may both be focusing on small and medium sized businesses. So what is the go to market there and how does it parallel, right?
Or how does it not parallel? Where does a an sdr BDR make sense and where doesn't it make sense? So I think that's pretty interesting and it's, it's kind of a long way of saying that the industry seems to be shaped. By the point of view of SaaS, and I think it would be helpful to get other points of view when you think about revenue operations as a discipline
Ian: and zoom out, what does Genpact do and, and how have you organized your rev op team?
Daniel: Many people may not know Genpact, so I'll give you sort of a, a brief one on one. Uh, we are defined as a multinational consulting and professional services. Which is to say, uh, part of our business is management consulting, and you may be familiar with some of the big names in that industry. In fact, we were recently named as, uh, one of the top management consulting firms in the world.
The second part of our business is professional services, which means we take areas where we have deep domain and we do work on behalf of, of our clients to optimize their operations or to do digital transformation, moving them to the cloud or to. Create a target operating model for a financial transformation.
So that's kind of what we do as a company. We were started in 1997 and in fact we were part of General Electric, which is in very, uh, in a lot of ways an iconic American company. And a lot of the success of GE actually was a product of what's called Lean Six Sigma. So you've probably heard that term before, and I'm assuming some of your listeners know what it is.
But maybe don't know it intimately, but to really kind of simplify it, it's a way of optimizing and improving process efficiency, which makes any company more efficient. And that's something that Genpact practiced on behalf of ge. Uh, and then in 1997, We were created in 2005. We spun out of G in 2007. We listed publicly on the New York Stock Exchange, and we're a multibillion dollar company with over a hundred thousand employees all over the world, and we do this work now for.
Approximately 800 companies in a very large percentage of the Fortune 500. So it could be a lot of things. It could be helping them create a target operating model to create cost efficiency. It could be helping a large social media platform, moderate content. It could be helping a manufacturing company with their supply chain.
And the list goes on and on. And in fact, in the SAS space, we actually help companies become more efficient when it comes to sales. Generating leads, end to end, inside sales, ssdr work, that sort of thing. And then for us, I think the second part of your question is how do we think about revenue operations?
Well, we're a large company, right? You wanna say large company mean companies that have our size of employee base a hundred thousand plus. And so we, we do have customer success, right? We certainly have sales. And we certainly have marketing and those, those, uh, three divisions, a hundred percent work together.
I think what's interesting, and I'll just give you one data point that I find fascinating about Jump Back specifically, is that for us, the definition of customer success is everything, right? And what I mean by that is that. We have a set amount of accounts that are very strategic to us. And for those accounts we put very, very senior people on them, right?
So if you think about like a traditional SaaS company, they may have, let's say, I don't know, a hundred million run rate SAS company. Maybe they've got five SDRs, 12 AEs, two VPs, and five, uh, customer success managers, right? I'm making this up, but let's just say it's. Directionally, those customer success managers, they're probably gonna be people between, you know, let's say from an experience perspective, four to 15 years experience, something like that, right?
At the high end, what we actually do is we look at our strategic accounts and we put our most senior people on those accounts. So for example, somebody with 20, 25 years experience who has either been in consulting, professional services, or maybe client side, and we tend to deal with a lot of C-suite. So when we're dealing with a C-suite, we bring somebody with a pedigree and the acumen to match, and we invest in those accounts to grow them and to be a trusted partner.
So I think that's where we differentiate, I would argue, for the better, is that investment in growing those accounts, but more so providing solutions to problem statements in helping companies grow more efficiently as time goes.
Ian: Yeah. That's super fascinating and so cool to hear from a big company perspective and, and all of that piece within Rev op.
Obviously, you know, customer success being such an important part of your rev op motion here. How do y'all think about, you know, the customer success as it relates to Rev
Daniel: op. Well, it's kind of, I think, as I described, which is just, uh, an over investment into the account or to the partnership. I think what's really interesting about Genpact, and, and I'll give you kind of a.
An anonymized obfuscated example, right? As I said, our clients are Fortune 500, so it could be everything from one of the largest social media companies in the world to a large bank, to a large retail company. And we work obviously across industries, but we, um, will answer RFPs in our industry. That's fairly commonplace and we were, uh, in the final throws of an RFP process.
And the prospective client asked us, Well, can you please give us three examples of clients that churn? And what was the reason they termed And we have a, a channel that taps in, so kind of like a Slack type Microsoft teams type channel that taps into senior leadership across all of our accounts. And we posted on it and we said, Hey, we're looking for three examples.
You know, where this was the case. And the response we got was, I don't know that we have three companies that we can highlight in this particular regard. Because our clients, our partners, tend to be multi-year contracts that we do. Am I saying that we never lose a customer? No, Absolutely. Things change.
The business world is dynamic, but that's our special sauce, is that investment in that customer. Because we have so many different, what we call service lines or areas of domain like finance and accounting, where we're ranked one of the top in the world, or supply chain or sales and commercial or enterprise risk and consulting or trust and safety, there's multiple different ways that we can help a business, right?
So if we come in and we help a company with financial transformation, For example, say we help 500 to a billion SaaS company. They're maturing. They need more mature financial processes and target operating models and efficiency models. We can come in, we can create that strategy, do the work for them, maybe a year down the road.
They're looking at expanding their Salesforce internationally. And so when you expand a Salesforce International, I've been on this side of the table and you're in North America, easier said than. Right. Genpact can come in in that particular example and say, Well, we're in these 12 countries that you wanna get into.
We've got our Lean Six Sigma lineage heritage, we've got people on the ground, we've got the analytics, we've got our SMB uh academy, and we can sort of create the go to market for you. So that would kind of be an example of we evolve with a client.
Ian: Any things you know, obviously. Emphasis on customer success being one of 'em.
But any other things that you feel like are unique or different about your Rev op team or the way that you think about Rev op? I
Daniel: think that's, I think that's probably the thing that in, in this particular question, that's what strikes me as being the most differentiated, this nexus between marketing, customer success and sales.
It's always an evolution, right? And over the last few months, I've seen that we've gotten even that much more tightly integrated, specifically in terms of sales and marketing. Right. And in fact, I can tell you one other thing that's different from us is that we have, depending on how you define sales, right?
We have a relatively small sales team in group for a company that has over a hundred thousand employees. One of the reasons I mentioned is because we work to. Grow partnerships and accounts based on needs and, and as they evolve in multiple years. But the other reason is because a lot of our pipeline is actually referrals.
Uh, so it doesn't require as much outbound sales. Obviously, that's still very important to us. And building inorganic pipeline, which is something that I'm tasked with, is incredibly important. It's a life flight of the company, but traditionally, the referrals have been a really good source for us, and that has everything to do with satisfied customers.
Ian: Yeah, you're not gonna have that traditional, you know, gigantic funnel where you have all sorts of, uh, all sorts of leads, you know, left, right, and center. That's just not, you know, not a lot of people just sitting there cranking out a lead form trying to figure this stuff out, I'd imagine.
Daniel: Well, so that's right.
And I think the way that I would respond to that, for us, it's all about quality versus quantity. Right. It's not a commoditized, I don't mean commoditized in a negative connotation, but we're not a SAS product that's commoditized in. We have one, two, or three products, and those one or two or three products have a rate card.
A lot of what we do is very much bespoke. So when we think about how we go to market, let's say as a sales organization, it's more complicated. And in fact, we hire people typically with 20 years experience, VP level sales on the individual contributor level. With advanced degrees in some cases, et cetera, because they need to understand a potential client's business and through the help of their colleagues on what we call the service lines, the subject matter experts understand actually can we help them?
How can we help them? What are their problem statements? We're never gonna, let's say, approach a new prospective client. And say, Please buy option one, two, or three or product P and C, and we're never gonna waste their time. We'll always do our research and we'll always understand to some extent that we can, based on publicly available information, what's going on in the company, and have some sort of thesis on why it makes sense for them to have a conversation with us.
When
Ian: things are so relationship driven and there's so much research in these, you know, huge deal sizes, sort of like land and expand type stuff. Sometimes there's not as much data as, you know, you would get from a traditional, you know, SAS product or a PLG type product or something like that, where you get tons and tons and tons of data.
How do you think about data from a revenue ops perspective or just in general from a growth perspective?
Daniel: So if I'm thinking about, let's say an SMB advertising model where you have tens of thousands or hundreds of thousand customers, or even a SAS product where your price point for yearly license is 30 to 50,000 and you've got a large funnel, everything in that funnel is statistically significant because their scale, whereas in a funnel like ours, we don't have that steam statistical significance for pipeline efficiency.
Is that kind of what you're suggest? Yeah, exactly.
Ian: Exactly. So it's like those rev ops folks that are normally sitting there, you know, looking for trends in the data and saying like, Hey, this is something, this is an outlier, this is something, this is an opportunity. It's just, it's slightly different. You have to dig in probably a lot further.
Daniel: Yeah. It, it, it is different. That's, that's a, that's a great call out. And it's much more, let's call it manual. And I say manual with mixed emotions because we're a company that creates automation for our customers to improve their processes, like robotic process automation and many other example. Cause we're a data and analytics company in so many ways.
But when you think. Ourselves is Genpact and how we go to market. It's a much more thoughtful approach. And yes, we use data, but I'll give you a couple of examples how we use data. So first of all, the average VP of sales at our company. That's only exclusively trying to foster new partnerships with prospective customers.
Fortune 1000, fast growing tech companies, SaaS companies, whatever they have, they don't have a huge icp. Right. And when I say icp, I mean like ICP as a cascades down to the individual level. So for the sake of conversation, they may. 15 or 20 accounts that they would like to partner with. So what does that actually mean in the go to market?
It means that you become an expert. On that particular prospective client's business, you're doing a lot of research. We actually have a growth operations team, and they help us do very, very, very deep level of research on the company what's going on. Again, as I said earlier, we're never gonna talk to a company unless we think that they have a problem statement that we can help them with or they have, you know, a way that we can help them grow.
Or a way that we can help them with efficiency and we're gonna have a point of view. We have to be careful, right? Because we don't want to be too assumptive and say, Hey, we know what all your problems are. We can help you. We have to be a little bit more thoughtful about how we approach them, how we have that discovery call, how we learn.
So that's one thing that we do is we'll really do our research. I love
Ian: it. Let's get to our next segment, Rev Obstacles,
Daniel: Obstacle, obstacle pen. There's your,
Ian: we talk about the hard parts. Rev op. What's the hardest, uh, rev op problem that you faced in the last six months? Or,
Daniel: or, or, Interestingly enough, now I'm 20 years into my career roughly, and I have this experience from working what you call client side. And I have a, a fairly good depth and breadth of knowledge in, in certain verticals in the sectors that I oversee from a growth perspective.
So what I love about my job is working with companies where I know their business models very intimately and I can kind of use my knowledge to help show them that I understand their problem statements and in fact, sometimes even help with the solutioning. But to answer your question, I think qualification.
So probably there was some. Potential pursuits that we shouldn't have qualified. And sometimes it's okay to say, For this particular project or for this particular multi-year initiative, we maybe don't think we're the right fit for you. And that's very, that's very hard to do, right? If you think about it, let's say, let's again, again, use the SAS example.
If you have an ICP and you have a customer and they're willing to spend 50 or $60,000 a year licensing your software, You're probably not too many instances where people are saying, You know what? I've got a quota. I've got a VP of sales. We have growth goals. Why don't you go ahead and not license this software?
Because I don't think's a good fit. So that to me is kind of interesting.
Ian: Any other like obstacles or things? I mean, I think qualification is so core to exactly what you said, the enterprise experience, right? It's just so tough, you know, from that space, especially when. Not, not a super high volume thing. I mean, I guess it's hard both ways, but any other, uh, rev obstacles or maybe some rev hoops moments a mistake that you've made in the past?
Daniel: I think pricing is another thing because pricing is very dynamic in, in what we do, and we need to strike the balance between giving the appropriate price where the potential customer sees value and not putting a price that's gonna make it, um, detrimental to Genpact. So because it's not, you know, every engagement is bespoke, I think there's.
Some areas there potentially for improvement. But one thing that I would say isn't so much an obstacle necessarily, but it's kind of a unique differentiator to our business is because, again, going back to this notion of I have three products and three price points, right? And I know I'm oversimplifying it, um, we.
So many different service lines where we excel in. So one of the things that, um, we've been, I wouldn't say challenged with, but it's anybody that's coming into Genpact and I have a fairly newer team, is how can you be an expert in finance and accounting, supply chain sales and commercial trust and safety, enterprise risk and consulting?
Source to pay. I mean, the list goes on and on. You can see I'm struggling to even name all of our service lines. And so how do you, The challenge is how do you look at a particular customer, right? And how do you say like an on-demand customer and say, What are the four areas where we think we can help them?
Or what is the one area. So that part, again, that's, that's a little bit of a challenge. And the way that we overcome that is we have a learning platform called Geno, and it's one of the largest learning platforms in the industry. It's got hundreds of thousands of hours of interactive content. It's got sessions where somebody like me, I'm a.
A guru for high tech. So somebody's going through what we call their high tech wave, and they're going through all the areas to be proficient in it and the certifications. So we invest very heavily in that to help overcome those challenges of learning. It's not just learning about us, it's also learning about the industry or learning about cloud, or learning about how to be an effective public speaker.
So that, that's quite a, a big differentiator with Genpact, is that focus on learning at all levels of the.
Ian: All right, let's get to our next segment, the tool shed.
Daniel: Hey, 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
Ian: shed. That's where we're talking tools, metrics, spreadsheets, data, and all that stuff.
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. Daniel, what's in
Daniel: your tool? She. So I won't board you with everything that's in our tool. Shed instead, I'll, I'll answer the question a little. Differently in terms of how I think about what should be in a tool shed.
So we, we kind of use the, again, I won't mention all the, the tools that we use, but we use kind of the common tools that you would think a company like ours of our size, or even frankly, uh, a B2B SA company would use, for example, Salesforce or Marketo as part of Salesforce, right? Or, you know, tools like qualified.
Um, so I think we are very much trying to be on the cutting edge of what we need to license to make. Business, you know, a modern sales organization and so on and so forth. But I will tell you two things. One is my approach traditionally because I built, you know, a number of tech stacks when I was more in startups, is I always look at anything licensable or any suite of tools within a must have or nice to have bucket.
If you're nice to. Probably you're not gonna win a contract with us if you must have your must have and and I like Salesforce only. I know it's so obvious, but I'll give you like a very, very short anecdote. A year ago I was visiting my dad, and my dad is a retail investor. And he invests in numbers of, you know, number of companies.
Like for example, in this particular day, he said, What about Salesforce? So he knows Salesforce, he knows the financial metrics, right? He can see the growth of the stock, but he doesn't necessarily understand the business. He says, Should I buy Salesforce? Now I can give my dad any piece of advice I want on Salesforce because I'm not an employee of Salesforce.
There's no moral hazard there. And I said, So I explained to him this paradigm of companies licensing software and nice to have versus must have. And then I explained to him that Salesforce has this thing called a. And this is what ARR is, and they're so sticky because you have to customize and you have to build your own instance of Salesforce.
And they have all these other technologies like qualified, for example, that bolt onto Salesforce. So effectively their customer churn's gotta be one of the lowest in the industry. So like, yes, it's probably a pretty safe stock to buy, right? So that's, that's kind of my view on, um, on licensing and then, One of the things that I think is interesting, and, and I don't mean to be controversial, but this is a podcast about revenue operations.
Um, there's been some debate over the last few years on personalization versus automation, right? And what I mean by that is in your sales go to market. There are, we all know people are listening to this podcast, know who the players are, but there's a set of companies that create what I call sales esp.
They don't call themselves sales esp. I'm calling the sales ESPs because essentially what you're doing is you're, you're using a marketing approach to sales. Instead of doing one to one, you're doing one to many. Now, I'm not criticizing these companies because I think what these companies did is genius cuz they're doing well.
They found product market fit and they found customers who are looking at the promise of how do I make my Salesforce more efficiently? , but in the act of using automation, again, we're a company that embraces automation and we do it on behalf of our customers. But where does it make sense and where doesn't it make sense?
So if you're treating your sales prospects like you are treating your marketing prospects, I think it's a race to the bottom. I think people are trying to find what is that latest technology or what is that latest trick to get a higher conversion rate. They're sending these cadences and they're semi personalizing them.
And guess what? People are smart, right? Decision makers at companies are smart. And when they're getting an email, which feels impersonal, where somebody didn't talk about their business, their issues, something that feels authentic, they're not gonna respond. So it's, it's no wonder when people start talking about, I have a 3% conversion rate on sales emails like, wow, that's.
Right, because it's a little bit, if everybody's doing it, if everybody's automating this, it's really no different. You might as well just send emails from Marketo and those are gonna have lower conversion rates as well, depending on what it is. And you know, maybe it's promoting an event as higher conversion rates.
So I think about this personalization versus automation as being somebody that's worked in tech companies that wants to license the best technology as a company where we use technology to help digitize our. Our client's business to help them digitally transform. And where does it become too much?
Right? So for us, again, and this is my own personal opinion, when we're reaching out to potential prospects, everything is hyper personalized. Of course, easy for me to say, because as we discussed, we're not going after thousands of companies at scale. But if everybody's doing. How effective is it gonna be?
So I think, I'm not trying to pick on these cohort of companies, I'm not trying to pick on SaaS companies that use this kind of sales automation. And I think, by the way, it, it certainly works like if you're using it for inbound SMB advertising with tens of thousands of customers at scale, you need automation.
But there, there's a rate of diminishing returns there. And I don't, I don't feel like that's debated enough in the.
Ian: I couldn't agree more. I think it's really tough to see some of those automations go out and you're like, Yep, this is just an automation. Automation. You know, like you said, it's different when it's coming from marketing, but when it's coming from sales, it's a little tough to be like, you know, email number four in the , in the automation, and it's like, Don't think I haven't forgot about you.
You know, like, have you seen our latest like webinar or whatever and you're like, No I didn't and no, I didn't wanna see it. Um, uh, do you have, uh, any examples of, of the personalization and stuff that you're doing that, that has worked well?
Daniel: It's a great question and I can give you one example from the, the recent past.
there's a company in our icp and my team had been reaching out to that company for some time without success, and we know for a fact that there's two particular things that we do where we're ranked number one or number two in the world. And I, and I'm not saying that they have to work with us, but what I am suggesting is that given that these are things that are important to.
Given that they would work with either us or our competitors, and given how highly we are ranked by third parties, it certainly makes sense for them to understand how we differentiate and to have a relationship with us, even if that's just to have a call to understand a little bit more. And for one reason or another, and this is a vertical where we have a lot of success, and frankly, we have.
A lot of customers, and when I say we have a lot of customers, it's a finite grouping of companies and we have a high percentage of those companies as customers. So we felt very passionately that this is a, a relationship we should have at least just to understand what they're up to and them to understand what we're able to, to provide as a, as a partner.
But they just weren't getting back in touch with us. So, at a certain point, and frankly, I actually used. Sales automation because we do license a platform that where I was able to see a decision maker in that company, a C-suite decision maker was opening certain emails and interacting with us. Uh, and so I emailed her, and this is me personally emailing her, and I said, Essentially, we've been trying to reach out to you for some time.
We haven't been able to connect. We're very well positioned in the industry. We really think it would make sense for you to talk to us, and so on and so forth. So it's just a very sincere email coming from Daniel, being very honest. Uh, and she responded in 15 minutes and said, Let's set up a conversation.
So I think for me and for how we coach our teams that go out there and sell is have that sincerity of voice. Uh, and I'll give you another, um, example as well, which is a little bit past the, the discovery phase, which I really loved. So there's a, there's a gentleman on my team. He's the go to market lead for on demand customers.
So on demand exactly as you're thinking of it, like the Ubers of the world, et cetera. So that's a vertical within one of the sectors. And we were invited to an RFP process. In the RFP process, we submitted the rfp, it was comprehensive, and we like to write welcome letters and, and show the personalization, right, and show that sincerity of intent.
And the first two or three lines of the welcome letter, he wrote something very hokey in corny. That had to do with being a customer of their business to being a consumer of their business because they're, they're essentially a consumer company, right? And so he asked me, Do you think I should write this letter in this way?
And I said, I wouldn't do it because it's not who I am, but I know you very well. I'm not saying he's hokey by any means. , it fit with his personality. So this is like sincerely who you are. So go ahead and, and write it. And funnily enough, we are on a call with the decision maker about three weeks after that and she was asking about sort of dry things, pricing or solution or what are you offering here?
Then at the end of the call, her tone changes and she says, By the way, I just wanted you to. That when I read your RFP and I saw that you wrote this little blurb, I thought it was so witty, so funny. It entertained me, it made me laugh. And by the way, when you're reading RFPs, b2b, it's very dry stuff and it's not super interesting all of the time.
And this actually made me chuckle and made me happy and we thought, and you don't usually get that kind of feedback from customer. Especially in formalized RFP process processes. But we thought that was great, right? And so again, you know, not to belabor the point, but having these sincere, genuine moments with clients, whether it be a cold email to try and generate a discovery of call or when you're in the sales cycle.
It's important. Even if you are a large B2B company like us, we're all people. People buy from people. You wanna show who you are. You want to build that connection. That's super important. Any other,
Ian: uh, final thoughts on, on, uh, on tool shed tools, uh, metrics, uh, metric that, that you particularly care about or, or any blind spots that you're trying to measure, uh, in a different or, or better or unique
Daniel: way?
Yeah, so from a metric perspective, if I look at a funnel, for me personally, the number one thing that I care about for my teams, Is, uh, discovery calls because as I mentioned to you ear earlier, we're not beneficiaries of being in the industry for a while and having a really good reputation for being a partner that exceeds expectations.
So we do have a very healthy, uh, inbound, organic lead flow. But of course, every company wants to grow. So for me, what keeps me up at night is how do I build that inor? Pipeline and I very much gauge my success and I gauge very much my team's success based on how good are you at building inorganic pipeline?
Because we're a company that's filled with very smart intellectual people, and when we have an opportunity to bid for some work, we're pretty good at converting. And I'm not saying that's an easy skill, but I'm saying that's something that as a company we're very, very good at. We're a very intellectual company on the employee.
However, building inorganic pipeline, it's an, it's an intellectual exercise. Uh, it's also a soft skill exercise. There's a lot of things that play into that. So every it, for me, it's all about building inorganic pipeline, and it's all about generating discovery calls. So again, going, going into this topic of quality versus quantity, we don't need to have 2010 discovery calls a week necessarily, but what we need to have our discovery calls were this sincere interest in having a thoughtful convers.
So that's it. So that's, that's what I would say to that is, is pretty simply, um, discovery calls. And then in terms of what would I like more visibility into, it would be the dark funnel. I think the dark funnel is, is very important and I know that, that, that speaks to what qualified does what, what other companies do as well.
But how can you engage with people before they fill out a lead form on your. Once they fill out a lead form on your site, it's depending on the business you're in, it might be too late. That just means you're gonna be in a competitive RFP process. You have no advantage, and that's probably fine for the company if they're reading Gartner or they're reading some other third party in terms of who are the highest ranked companies in the industry, and that happens in b2b, sas, and other industries as well.
But for me, how can we have those conversations? How can we illuminate that dark funnel before you get to that point? I know that's very important to our marketing group. It's very important to me. Yeah.
Ian: It, it is. I mean, it, it is, it's arguably one of the most important things that kind of we're all dealing with right now is just like the change in buyer behavior and dark funnel being sort of this, you can just do so much research on your own now without talking to a salesperson.
Correct. And then you, then you get so many of the calls, it's like, Yeah, yeah, yeah. Just gimme the price, gimme the price, gimme the price. And they, you know, they want to get on there. And then sales people are like frustrated.
Daniel: Yeah. A hundred percent. A hundred percent.
Ian: All right. Let's get to our final segment.
Quick hits.
Daniel: Quick, quick,
Ian: quick questions, quick answers. Daniel, are you ready? I'm
Daniel: ready. Number
Ian: one, if you could make any animal any size, What animal would it be
Daniel: and what size? An elephant the size of my dog, . My dog is 55 pounds. She's a Portuguese water dog. All right.
Ian: 55 pound elephant. What's the 55 pound elephant in the room? Um, do you have
Daniel: a, It's
Ian: a good one.
Do you have a, uh, a favorite podcast or, or show or, uh, or book that you've been
Daniel: checking out recently? Yes. Um, I'm reading this new, I, I'm sorry. I forget the, Uh, this new book on the Metaverse, it's still in hardback. It doesn't have like a super large distribution, but I think Genpact and me personally were very interested in how we can help customers in the Metaverse and, and we're actually starting to do that with a couple of Slack customers.
Any,
Ian: uh, Rev op misconceptions or, or, uh, or predictions?
Daniel: So, misconception is, I think that a lot of people think that it's a technocratic exercise, and I think it's less technocratic than people think. Um, I think it's, uh, a lot of it has to do with art and science predictions. We, we probably already touched on, I think that the pendulum is gonna swing more to personalization versus automation.
In fact, I think it shouldn't have been pretty vocal about.
Ian: What would be your best piece of advice for someone newly leading a red
a
Daniel: rev op team? That's a very good question. I know this is supposed to be short and fun sheet. I think it would be get into the weeds and don't just focus on the strategy in one sentence.
Ian: Daniel. That's it. That's all we got for today. Any, uh, any final thoughts here for the show?
Daniel: No, I, I don't have any final thoughts, but I very much appreciate the, the time and the opportunity to discuss revenue operations. I think it's a really interesting and evolving field.
Ian: Yeah, indeed. For our listeners, you can go to genpact.com, uh, to learn more about the company and, uh, and everything there.
Thanks so much, uh, Daniel, and we'll talk soon.
Daniel: 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 qualified. The pipeline cloud is the modern way. B2B revenue teams generate pipeline.
Learn more at Qualified.com.