On this episode, Adam Tuttle discusses the importance of defining RevOps within an organization, the challenge of making good decisions with bad data, and why it’s imperative to create a unified language across operational teams within a company.
This episode features an interview with Adam Tuttle, Director of Revenue Operations at ActiveCampaign. ActiveCampaign's category-defining Customer Experience Automation Platform (CXA) helps over 180,000+ businesses in 170 countries meaningfully engage with their customers. Adam joined ActiveCampaign 10 years ago as the ninth employee at the company. Starting as the first Account Manager, Adam worked his way up to Sales Director opening the first international office in Sydney before returning to the US to transition into RevOps.
On this episode, Adam discusses the importance of defining RevOps within an organization, the challenge of making good decisions with bad data, and why it’s imperative to create a unified language across operational teams within a company.
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Guest Quote
“Where is the data? How does it live and what is painting the story that you need to make a good decision? I think that what happens sometimes is we think we're making a good decision, but it's predicated on bad information and that ends up being just a bad decision at the end of the day.” - Adam Tuttle
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Time Stamps:
*(02:04) - Adam’s unexpected transition to RevOps
*(07:15) - Bringing other departments into the RevOps fold
*(11:30) - Spend more time planning
*(14:34) - What is your source of truth?
*(19:35) - The Tool Shed
*(24:33) - Metrics that matter
*(33:51) - RevOps blindspots
*(36:47) - Rapid Fire
*(40:39) - Parting 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: [00:00:00] Hello, and welcome to Rise of RevOps. This episode features an interview with Adam Tuttle, Director of Revenue Operations at ActiveCampaign. ActiveCampaign's category-defining customer experience automation platform helps more than 180,000 businesses in 170 countries meaningfully engage with their customers. Adam joined ActiveCampaign 10 years ago as the ninth employee at the company, starting as the first account manager, Adam worked his way up to sales director opening the first international office in Sydney, before returning to the US to transition into RevOps.
On this episode, Adam discusses the importance of defining RevOps within an organization, the challenge of making good decisions with bad [00:01:00] data, and why it's imperative to create a unified language across operational teams within a company. But first a brief word from our sponsor
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.
And now please enjoy this interview with Adam Tuttle, Director of Revenue Operations at ActiveCampaign and your host, Ian Faison.
Ian: Welcome to Rise of RevOps. I'm Ian Faison, CEO of Caspian studios.
And today we are joined by special guest Adam, how are you? I'm doing great.
Adam: Thank you so much excited to have
Ian: you on the show, excited to chat about active campaign. We're a customer here at Caspian, so, uh, it's, it's fun to hear the inner workings of how you all go to market. And, uh, we have a bunch of podcasts that we do that, that have newsletters and, and use and active campaign stuff.
So it's, it's fun digging in. Obviously, of course, we're [00:02:00] gonna talk about all of, uh, your rev op, so let's get into it. Tell me about your background. How did you first get into rev op.
Adam: I was dragged in to be honest with you. So it was, it was, it was fun. I I've been with active campaign for about 10 years. I started in a support role, did that very early days when we were like sub 10 employees.
So we did a lot of everything and then started a sales team in 2015, opened an international office overseas in Sydney, Australia. And when I was coming back from that. I realized I didn't want to be a director of sales anymore. So I had this kind of existential crisis where I was looking at my long term goals.
Like where do I wanna be in 10 years? And I realized there was a big gap in my skillset, and that was the operation side of the house I had been doing ops kind of like under the radar for a while, but I didn't really know anything about it. And so when I came back, I, I just asked, I said, I really don't wanna lead a sales team anymore.
I wanna get into operations. And so [00:03:00] I did that and then I was doing a lot of side work for. Former vice president of rev op at active campaign. And she basically just secured my time. She said 40% of your time's mine, no matter what. And then eventually I went full time with her. And so, and that was at the start of this last year, actually.
So it's been a, a really fun journey though. It's an awesome field to be in right now. It's it's growing and I think there's just a tremendous amount of opportunity.
Ian: Truly. It is on the rise. Hence the, uh, hence the podcast name. So what's your definition of rev?
Adam: Yeah. I think that rev ops is, is going to change depending on the org.
Right. And that's something that I've been learning a lot over the last few months is I realized once I got into rev op officially that I didn't know what it actually did. And so I was like, oh no, I need to figure this out. And then I realized that everyone does it a little bit differently, but at the, the end of it, I think that there's really like a core piece of that.
And that is to sup you know, give [00:04:00] a sales org, success, marketing, whatever it might be, whatever orgs that you support a mechanism. To build a foundation upon and, and have success. Right? And that's like, the piece is like, what you are doing is you are laying a foundation for the organization or the organizations that you support to be successful in their day to day jobs.
And, and that's it.
Ian: And tell us a little bit about active campaign for our listeners who don't
Adam: know. Yeah. So active campaign has been around for almost 20 years, which is pretty wild. And one of the things that we've grown from is we started as just an email marketing platform, but in the last few years, we've really.
Pivoted to what we call a customer experience platform. And so what we are is a really simple to use platform that embodies email marketing, automations, CRM, and kind of takes all of those things that makes them work together to help you as a small business or large business, whatever it is to give your customer a great experience for the [00:05:00] entire funnel or journey that they're on with you.
Ian: And. Tell me about how your rev op team is organized and what approach do you kind of take looking at rev op and how it fits in? Yeah,
Adam: so, you know, rev op is only a couple years old within active campaign, as it is within many companies, right? It's, it's a kind of, uh, rising star in the operations community.
And what we've decided is that we're gonna build our org, our rev op org, especially on kind of four. Tenants or for pillars. And those are really simple. It's people, policies, processes, and systems. And so what we try to do is look at everything that we do. To drive success within the teams that we support.
We want to focus on exactly those things, the people, the policies, the processes, and the systems. And if we can do that, or if we start to deviate outside of that, we know that we need to pull it back in. And so it acts as a kind of a, a foundation for us to always make sure that [00:06:00] we're, we're pointing in the right direction as.
Ian: How do you think you all differ from like other rev op teams or, or what's maybe unique about your org or
Adam: active campaign? So historically active campaign has had rev op really under the sales org and, and some under success. A lot of rev op orgs are a little bit broader than that. So they might do sales success market.
Even support at times in sales. And so what we have focused on historically was we kind of were birthed out of the concept of a sales ops org. And then we started expanding that a little bit. And I think what we're seeing now is the opportunity to say, okay, hold on. How do we centralize ops a little bit better within active campaign?
Is there opportunity for us to say that rev op is maybe a bigger part of the. As we try to solve that. I think what makes us unique is, you know, again, we were a pretty small team to start with and trying to really make sure that we had our, our processes nailed down and, and things like that. [00:07:00] Again, a lot of businesses are, are in this, this journey of solving for what is rev op to them.
But that's definitely been like the, the piece for us that we focused on is building that out and, and making it successful within our, our business.
Ian: Yeah, it's funny how it usually grows from one area, whether it's marketing or sales or, you know, probably least, least common being CS. And then it sort of starts merging into that, you know, kind of combo thing.
I'm curious, you know, when it has that initial DNA and you were in sales and it has like a sales ops DNA bringing those marketing and success kind of pieces. How did you go about doing that? Did you kind of like, you know, fold in some marketing folks into the conversation? Or how did you do.
Adam: Yeah. I think what has been really outstanding is in the last year, the marketing teams and the rev op teams have been very, very intentional about saying, Hey, there's a gap between our relationships [00:08:00] and we, we can't operate and continue to be successful together if we don't fully support each other.
And so. There has just been iteration after iteration, after iteration of really taking the time to make sure that all the stakeholders are brought into the conversations that we're having, that we're not planning any changes to how we function or work without at least notifying like someone in marketing ops at a minimum, but more likely actually bringing them into our process.
And so it's all about that intentionality to say, Hey, yes, we, we have to do what we have to do. We have our mission, you have your mission, right? We all have different projects that we work on, but realizing how much those projects actually probably overlap. If we allow them to. And then just, again, like I said, being really intentional is to say, Hey, uh, you know, marketing ops director, you are a stakeholder in my project on rev op, I'm bringing you into every conversation on it.
I'm gonna allow you to have a voice. I will be [00:09:00] cognizant of what you need to be successful from your side to ensure that we work together and create a really unified approach and has been really awesome to see. Take place in that relationship build to a point where I'm like, uh, I feel that our ops teams are more aligned than they've ever been before.
And that really we're just getting started, which has been really exciting. Let's get into some
Ian: of, uh, of what are those things are in our next segment. Rev obstacles,
Adam: obstacle, obstacle, an obstacle to what? There's your obstacle.
Ian: We talk about the tough parts of rev. What's the hardest rev op problem you've
Adam: faced in the last six.
I've been chewing on this one, uh, trying to figure out, uh, what actually is the hardest problem. One of the things that is maybe been a unique challenge for us, right, is that active campaign has a [00:10:00] CRM. And so we use that for our inbound teams and we have used that for our inbound teams for years. But for a small point in history of about two to three years, our outbound teams use Salesforce.
And the reason for that was because our CRM needed to have some more capability added, some more functionality added to really allow us to do outbounding. In a, a cohesive way. And so, as the platform's been growing and changing, it came time to move back and moving off of a CRM to another CRM is often a challenging, uh, point of view, but also moving off of a CRM into your own CRM.
When you have direct access to the engineering teams and things like that, and you have to now manage, how are we going to actually take this move and make it successful? That's been a humongous thing that we've been working on over the last six to eight months where kind of on the [00:11:00] tail end of it now, but there was definitely some big challenges that came along with that.
And, uh, you can imagine that it was, uh, quite a lengthy process.
Ian: Yeah. Any, like after going through all that, any takeaways of, you know, I mean, obviously that's kind of a unique scenario with you all because you're, you know, working into your product, but, but we all know what it's like to change technologies and kind of bring in those stakeholders and trying to get kind of that unified data, uh, approach.
So any, any takeaways there?
Adam: Yeah. I, I think the, the biggest takeaway for me personally, as kind of the person that was like leading this, this project, If I could go back in time and like give myself the, you know, advice. I would've said, just spend more time on the planning upfront, like really like, sure, you've got a seven month timeline to get this done.
Spend four of those months planning and spent three months implementing. And I think that, that we spent a lot of time planning, but because there was a [00:12:00] restricted timeline, our planning was often. We laid the foundation. And then we were building upon that as we were going. And I think that that quickly exposed some gaps that we didn't realize, like in our own product or.
Pieces that we hadn't thought about just, you know, pain points, right. That are gonna be a part of this, no matter what tool you're switching from. So I think this is applicable to anyone in rev. Op if you're switching from tool a to tool B, it's just ask more questions and really get the stakeholders involved of, you know, how do you use this function?
Is there anything that we're not doing? Cuz I think for me coming out of a sales background and having working on the system side, you can make assumptions unintentionally that, oh, I know how Dialpad works or I know how X software works. And so I know how we use it. We, we dial the numbers that we make calls, but it's like, well, yeah, but how do you segment those and how do you bucket these and how do [00:13:00] you record, you know, the, the messages and where do those.
Where's that data stored and you have to ask those types of questions. And I think that that was one of the big learning lessons. Uh, as we're going into more projects, it's really getting the stakeholders involved that are like the users very, very early and, and taking like. Deep dive upon deep dive to really understand the ins and outs of what makes someone successful in their day to day with the current tool.
And then how is that going to translate? Because there's gonna be times where you have to say, this is not important to us in the future, and we're willing to sacrifice that functionality for something else, but you need to make those decisions intentionally, as opposed to saying like, oh shoot, We didn't think about that.
And it's too late now. Right. And then you're like kind of stuck in a rock rock in a hard place.
Ian: I love that. That's really cool. And it's such great advice. Do you have, uh, [00:14:00] do you have any other sort of rev op problems that the, the little fires that you've been putting out that you wanna talk about at all?
Adam: Or, yeah, I, I, I think like one that I, I would suspect is a very common theme amongst. Rev op leaders. And I've been on a few, you know, rev op training classes and different things like that. And you kind of start to hear these common themes. And the big one is always like the data, right? Where is the data?
How does it live and what, what is painting the story that you need to make a good decision. Right. And I think that what happens sometimes is we think we're making a good decision, but is predicated on bad information. and that ends up being just a bad decision at the end of the day. And so one of those things that you're always, or we're always trying to figure out, and again, I don't think that this is like uncommon.
Um, although it's maybe not talked about is. You know, what is your source of truth? [00:15:00] What is your source of truth? Not only that you align to as rev op, but maybe marketing ops, maybe your finance teams. You have to have this, this piece where everyone's looking at datas, but if you're, you're looking at data and it's just sliced a little bit differently or it's.
Maybe the same data, but with just a little bit of a twist, that's slightly different. It's, it's actually different. Right. And that can cause problems. And so those are the things where we've been actually really going through and being intentional of aligning across all of the teams and saying, what are the pieces that are feeding.
Our data sets across every single team that's gonna be using it. And then also making sure that as we look at that, that we're evaluating what is like, what is our source of truth? Because other thing too is. With any company that's growing quickly, somebody built something two years ago, the data has since changed or the method in getting that data has since changed and that person's [00:16:00] left.
So they didn't update the dashboard. Nobody did. Right. So it's just making sure, like, you know, Hey, if this person leaves, here's all the things that they've built, and this is what we need to do to make sure that these things are accurate at all times. So that way we're not making bad decisions, UN unin intent.
Ian: It was one of the things we thought about for the show of like making a section, uh, or a segment called like data lies. I was like, where's, where's, where's a piece of, you know, information that you found that actually didn't tell the truth and you had to dig in further or something. But yeah, it's a, it's funny.
I mean, we're, we're so data driven now. We're so, and that's not a bad thing. We're so data driven, but like you said, sometimes you draw the wrong conclusions because of how you set up the, you know, the inputs.
Adam: Yep. And it, it doesn't take much, right. It can literally just be like one filter out of 10. That's different.
And that just changes everything just enough to, to make a [00:17:00] huge difference for you. Any
Ian: rev, hoops, uh, moments or mistakes, uh, that you want to wanna share.
Adam: I I'll go back to what I said, like what was one of the biggest problems, right. Again, kind of going back to this idea of this project, of moving, changing systems.
I think just again, looking back at it, Had I been able to better deep dive and really understand the ins and outs. It would've made not only the, the process smoother for me, but it would've made it smoother for our sales teams. And I think like that's the piece that is like the rev. Oops. Is sometimes you forget that in rev ops.
It's not just you or your team that gets affected. It's like the end sales rep. That's like three steps down from you. That is like having a really tough time because something wasn't communicated to them properly or well, and. I think these things are always going to happen. It's just part of like being in a business, that's [00:18:00] moving at an incredible pace, but you have to be honest with yourself and be willing at least to step back and say, okay, this person's coming to me.
And what I used to find is I would get like, kind of offended by it or like put off right where I'd be like, man, why are you asking me this? Like, I can't control everything, but then I have to also be willing to step back and say, you know, You're right. I can't control everything, but what could I have done differently that would've helped this person not have a, a crap day?
And so I think like it's, it's just being aware that sometimes our actions in rev op have. Ripple effects that can go down pretty deep and just being willing to like, even when you have those, be willing to go like talk to someone and say, Hey, I made this thing. It hurt your team. Let me get on a call with your team, explain why we did what we did try to like smooth it over and just be willing to like, have those relationships and those conversations with people.
And I found that when I made those mistakes or when I've had situations that [00:19:00] just were like awkward or maybe not handled. Awesome on the first try being willing to go have a conversation with a team, an individual, et cetera. And just be honest, Hey, I totally didn't think about this. Or, you know, we did this for this reason, but that reason wasn't communicated to you properly.
So that was the miss. It's not that the decision was bad or the implementation was bad. It was just. We missed this final step and I wanted to own that. And I find that people tend to be really receptive to that and, you know, very forgiving. Okay,
Ian: let's get to our next segment. The tool shed. Hey,
Adam: 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: 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 [00:20:00] them. Adam what's in your tool
Adam: shed?
Well, like I mentioned, we are. One of our biggest users in the world, which is pretty cool. So from the size of our sales team, to the amount of automations that we use, like at any given point, we'll have somewhere between 20 503,000 automations pumping through our account that are live. So we, we use our tool on a very high, high level for our own purposes.
So active campaign is the number one tool that we use day in and day. And I know
Ian: that obviously, of course, like you all use it a ton, but you're also the best at it. So I'm cur like when you say that number of automat, I mean, that's like, that's a huge number. ,
Adam: that's a huge amount. That's a huge amount.
Ian: And I know that you have like, you know, a hundred thousand way over a hundred thousand plus customers and all that sort of stuff, but like what is in all those automations,
Adam: you gotta [00:21:00] start breaking into bite size chunks.
So it's not just rev op it's our education team and our marketing team. And our, I mean, we send things to internal. People, right. It's all of those, those pieces put together. The thing that I find really fascinating about marketing automation tools as a whole, right? So like lets be agnostic to active campaign for just a second.
Is that a lot of users when they hear marketing automation, they think, oh, that email, if you were to break down, let's just say 2000 automations and you were to break those down probably only. A couple dozen to a couple hundred of them, right? If you, so we'll say a higher dozen, so one to 200 send emails, maybe 10%.
The rest are actually doing a lot of work behind the scenes to manage our data, to build funnels for our sales teams. To correct things when mistakes happen, like [00:22:00] there's a lot going on behind the scenes. And that is where that number really grows. Cause you might have a lot of like micro automations, which is an Adam total original coin term uh, but micro automations that really are there just to do like one very simple task, like, oh, this happened, add a tag, you know?
And so there's a lot of those. And when you stack them up, then you get thousands. So, yeah,
Ian: what, what's an example of that, that, that, that, like something happened at a tag.
Adam: Yeah. So I I'll actually give one. This is like one that I, I set up in all my personal accounts and I always have told customers since back in my sales days to set up right away for themselves.
So for anyone listening, again, doesn't matter, the system that you're using, you should be doing this. One of the big things as you talked about is metrics, right? Data's really important inactive campaign. For instance, what I will do is I set up an automation that says anytime that someone opens an email.
Update a last open date [00:23:00] field to today's date. And I do the same thing for link clicks, and I usually do the same thing for site visits. So that's a one step automation. It's literally like someone clicks the link. Update that link click field to today's date. What that allows me to do though is say, oh, Hey, I've been sending emails and this person, I know that on average, I send, will say six emails a month.
It's been two months. This person hasn't opened a single one by sending to the same people over and over and over again, that don't open. That's gonna hurt my deliverability over time. So I'm gonna actually push them off of the list. Or maybe even send them an email that says, Hey, it doesn't seem like you're interested anymore.
I'm gonna remove you from my list. But if you want to come back, here's a form of how to resubscribe and I can do the same thing for link clicks. Like if you're a business that's really trying to drive revenue off of link clicks that can eCommerce store something like that. If you have someone that has opened a hundred emails, a hundred out of a [00:24:00] hundred, but they've never clicked on a single link.
That's maybe not a high value customer. Maybe you need to target them through something like Instagram or something else. Like you need to find another medium because the email piece isn't working for you. And so I think sometimes it's just those really simple things. It's a trigger and a one action step.
It takes about five minutes to build. Less if you know what you're doing, and that can be a pivotal, uh, data point for your business. So it's looking for those things that can really add value off of very simple steps. That's
Ian: awesome. Thanks. Yeah. So what, where, where are the rest of your, your sales marketing and your, and your CS people living and what metrics matter to you?
What metrics matter to.
Adam: Yeah. So we use Looker and like snowflake to U you know, manage our data and then Looker helps aggregate that and, and make it pretty. That's probably where a lot of those teams tend to live is it's taking data out of our tools, whether it be, you know, we [00:25:00] have some homegrown systems that do a lot of our processing for billing and different things.
Like. And connecting that data to data inside of the CRM. So if I think about it from like a rev op perspective, it's looking at things like, okay, how many trials came in and how many deals did we create out of those trials for our SDR team to try to qualify if we see a huge gap, cuz we know that we only strip out a very few.
You know, small amount of, of potential opportunities. Like, you know, we don't let anything that has an active campaign, email address go through as like a, uh, an opportunity for rep to work. Right. That, that doesn't make any sense. So we, we take those out, but we should have like a very small margin of.
Should be basically the same. And so we're always looking at things like that, you know, looking at how many, uh, especially on the sales side, looking at how many people are progressing through the pipeline, like, what are our qualification rates? What are the things that we are doing? And I would say that that actually is [00:26:00] similar to what marketing is doing as well.
Right. Again, we talk about, or we talked. This relationship with marketing ops rev op at least in the, the context of active campaign marketing is the one driving those trials. But if none of their trials are converting to leads, then that's a problem for them as well. It's not just something that man, you know, matters to sales where we probably get in the weeds a little bit more is looking at like the processes that we've built around for our sales teams to do such as.
Hey, we want you to have X amount of touchpoints before you close, lost a deal, something like that. Right? Marketing doesn't so much care about how many touchpoints we have, because they've trusted us to take care of our processes and, and manage the sales team. So I think that it's very relational. It it's usually like.
You know, just the next step in the chain, right? They're they're looking at like, okay, we've generated this many leads. You've got this many conversion rates. If we're seeing a dip [00:27:00] in those conversion rates, they probably will come to sales and be like, Hey, what's going on? Why are you seeing this step? But they also are looking at, from the context of, are these leads still relevant?
Are we making sure that we're not just sending through garbage? Right. Like they wanna make sure that they're not giving us things that are poor leads. And so it's that relational communication back and forth of, you know, those are the things that really matter in how we, we address 'em.
Ian: Gosh, I love it. I mean that, that's one of those things that you could, you could endlessly kind of tinker and fiddle with because you know, you have, Hey, this sales rep, you know, has sent five straight emails, no response.
And marketing is like, I don't know. They read every one of my market emails and they click around a bunch, you know? And so you're like, that person is a very different person from, Hey, the salesperson. Send 'em five trade emails and they haven't been, you know, reading or clicking on any emails or they haven't engaged with the website or they haven't done whatever.
And like, that's the sort of stuff where it's it's, uh, it, it's so interesting to say like, Hey, they still are [00:28:00] consuming what we're doing, but clearly they just ain't ready to buy it.
Adam: Yeah. I, I think like when, again, you know, when we look at like the tool shed analogy, right? You, you kind. Often use a lot of the same tools.
Obviously marketing has some that are very special to them. Like what they use to drive their SEO or different things like that. Uh, I don't really know anything about that nor do I get involved in that. That's not my, my, my field of expertise. Oh, interesting. Yeah. I, I don't do anything with the SEO side.
Oh yeah.
Ian: That's it J just, just an interesting thing to note that, that like, kind of where you, where you set sort of like, are you the tool master of, of all of these sort of things, uh, uh, of anything revenue related versus, you know, your specifics and that stuff. So that's, that's interesting.
Adam: Yeah. I, I think that that stems from like, what I mentioned earlier is how active campaign's rev op team was kind of created out of a sales ops probably foundation or, or that's where it [00:29:00] came from.
And so we do manage the tools for sales. So things like LinkedIn navigator licenses, or, you know, Dialpad, different things like that. And then we work collaboratively with tools, like, look. Snowflake, et cetera, to get all the data, but we don't manage the tools that are outside of really outside of the sales work at this point.
I think again, we're now looking at, okay, we've kind of gotten to this place where things are going well, but if we were to make a more centralized ops team or begin to centralize our processes a bit more of, can we enhance what we're doing? Can we, you know, and we have to ask those questions, like you.
Can't just be complacent with where you're at because the market changes so fast. The, the market's always evolving and we've seen, especially in the last two and a half years, that things can shift literally overnight and change almost instantly depending on your region or globally. Right. And so what we have [00:30:00] to do is be always continually evaluating ourselves on is what we're doing today.
The very best thing for us to be doing. And that's how you grow. Are you a spreadsheet person? I like to look at spreadsheets. I'm not great at building spreadsheets. And I would say like, uh, for me, what I try to do is we have several analysts on our team that are excellent. And I work with them to define what we need.
What reports I'm looking to get, right? How those need to look and feel. And then I work with them to build out what we need so that we can be up to date and current on things at all times, and make sure that we do, I have a few things that I look at, you know, quite a bit, especially like with, again, related to trials and conversion rates and different things like that.
That's something that we were constantly paying attention to, but I, I allow. The analysts that are really skilled in the, the spreadsheets to build what they need to build. And then I, I am lucky enough to be able to digest that [00:31:00] data and, and try to make decisions off of it. Is there, have,
Ian: have you noticed something in the pipeline that wasn't working and that you had to kind of go about kind of digging in doing the research and, and, uh, and fixing.
Adam: Yeah. Uh, there, there definitely have been at different times. One from a few years ago, this was our early day. So I was still a director of. Sales, but at that team, our ops org was like two people. Right. So when there was a problem for my side of the house, on the directors of sales side, like I was involved in it and having been at AC for so long, I tend to just like, get my hands into the weeds.
And basically what was happening is I had a two week span where there were no deals coming to my team. For whatever reason. And at first I was thinking that in Australia, where I was living at the moment, the Christmas holiday, like the country effectively shuts down. So I think that it's, I was like, [00:32:00] oh, maybe it's just because everyone's going on holiday.
And then I was like, Hmm. This feels off. And so what we had to do is go look through what were the reasons for that? What was the routing? And then we went through our automations and I think like, this is the piece of rev op right. That can be applied to a lot of things is when you have a problem. You have to be able to quickly identify what tools could be causing that problem.
Right? So if data's not appearing properly, you can say, well, is my data not refreshing? Maybe the data's there, but it's just not refreshing. If you can rule that out then pretty quickly, you can recognize that you actually have a tool problem. That you need to address. And in our case, because I, like I said, we use a lot of automations.
We are constantly watching our automations to make sure that they're functioning properly, that they're putting people through them properly, that our routing is going where we want it to go. And that there's, you know, something didn't break. Like again, we use our own tool in pretty aggressively. And so we have to constantly be watching [00:33:00] the different things that we have in place within our own system, just to make sure that everything is going right or.
Someone didn't make a change and forget to take, like, you know, we had one similar thing just a while back where. Luckily, it was, it was kind of small potatoes. It didn't really impact things, but someone said, Hey man, like I'm not giving what I need. And we realized that when someone had was changing in automation, they had put a weight step in at the top.
We'll often do that just to prevent people from flowing through while we're like working on things and they forgot to remove the weight step. So everything went through everything corrected itself, but there was this like four hour gap where everyone's like, Hey, nothing's coming through to us. And so, you know, again, we were able to fix it, but we had to know where to look.
And that was really like the key, the key of that piece.
Ian: Any other, just like blind spots, uh, with, with data or something that you wish you could be measuring better, or maybe a tool that you, you know, are gonna start [00:34:00] messing with here, coming up, or just anything that, uh, that you sort of, uh, forward looking that you you'd like to, uh, like to improve.
Adam: Yeah, I, I think for us, and, and this goes back to when I talked about like building the relationship with operations, especially related to marketing is one of the things that we've realized as we've built this relationship. And especially over the last 12 months, is that. Sometimes marketing says one thing, rev op says the other thing, they kind of mean the same thing, but they use different terminology or, you know, they might use a different tag inside of an automation that's just slightly different or a different field to be updated.
Right. And again, you're kind of getting to the same result at the end of the day. . But I think one of the things that we're really trying to work on is creating this unified like language for operational teams within our company. And that can be like, from again, how the data is used, what tables are used.
It could be [00:35:00] your tagging mechanisms or, or naming conventions. It could be even things like, how do you. Build an automation and title it. So, you know, which team owns it and who is the last person to edit it. And those are the types of things that we're like, if I look at the next coming 12 months, that's one of those areas that, you know, there's been a tremendous amount of work done, but there's still a lot to go and it's worth it though.
Like the alignment is only continuing to gain momentum and that's really exciting. And so what we're doing is trying to look at ways. Okay. How. Again, this talks about like bringing in your stakeholders, right? Yes. I could go through and I could just say, okay, here's all my source fields. I'm gonna like put those in place.
Easy peasy. Marketing has their source fields. Well, if there's not alignment, then we're our, data's now skewed. Right. So then we have bad data. And so it's really making sure that, okay, Hey, we're gonna do an audit together. [00:36:00] We're gonna go through this and we're gonna agree that nothing changes in. Unless like we, again, mutually exclusively agree together as a team that we're gonna be willing to make that change.
And I think that that's really important. Or if I add something new, where do I record that? And what we would see is, again, marketing had their documents, their Google docs that they recorded their stuff in. We had ours and now we've had to, we've brought those. And then therefore we have a much more unified approach and we don't waste time just talking to each other and trying to figure out like where, where we went wrong.
All right. Let's get to our quick hits.
Ian: These are quick questions and quick answers, Adam, are you.
Adam: I'm beyond ready.
Ian: If you could make any animal any size, what
Adam: would it be? Mm, I would make a [00:37:00] blue whale able to fit in my fish tank.
Ian: Ooh, that's a good one. Do you have a biggest rev op misconception?
Adam: That rev op means one thing and that every company does it the same way.
Do
Ian: you have a favorite movie character of all?
Adam: Ooh, uh, John wick without a, without a doubt. if you could have
Ian: a superpower,
Adam: what would it be? Uh, I'm gonna go with the classic of flying. Uh, I think that would be just unbelievable.
Ian: Do you have a best concert that you've ever been to?
Adam: Yes. Uh, Ironically, it was Josh groin back in college.
Um, but unbelievable musician and an unbelievable concert at the, uh, Xcel energy center in Minneapolis. If you
Ian: were sitting right here for our next interview, uh, with a, a, a fellow rev leader like [00:38:00] yourself, what would be something that you would ask him?
Adam: How do you get buy-in? From key executive stakeholders.
So I'm talking like your C suites and above quickly.
Ian: Hmm. How do you get
Adam: buy in? Uh, I usually slack our owner and complain to him.
Ian: that's advantage of being, uh, employee number nine. Uh, I suppose
Adam: there, no, I, I don't actually do that. That that's not the right way to do it. That was a bit facetious. Um, I think that it, it, it starts with trust.
You have to be when, when you go to an executive, they have to believe in your brand. Enough to hear what you're saying. And if you say that something's urgent because, and you, you need to be able to back it up, right? You can't just go off of guts. Like my gut says that things are about to explode. You have to be able to show like the why, but they, they have to believe in you enough to be able to, to sit [00:39:00] tickets seriously.
And I think that building trust is, is like, Pin critical, the most important thing that you can possibly do as a rev op leader with both directions, you ha you have to build trust.
Ian: What advice would you give to someone who's newly leading a rev op team?
Adam: I think it would be to stay humble. And get involved with groups.
There's a couple, I go through a group called sales assembly. I take some of their classes. They have monthly meetups for rev op leaders. I try to participate in those when I can and just listen. Right. I, I think that I've learned a lot on those calls, not because of the brilliant things that were being said by maybe a speaker, although some of 'em have been truly brilliant, but it's also listening to my peers.
And I, I would say that like, if someone's brand new, The more that you can get involved with other people in other businesses. One it's gonna foster ideas. You're gonna hear that one, like sentence or that one [00:40:00] phrase that you're like, oh, that totally makes sense. And that's why we've been having this problem.
Or it might say, Hmm. In a future state, we need to get to where we have like a really kick butt deals desk. And that's something I haven't thought about. So I think it's just building those, those peer groups, getting involved with groups on LinkedIn, et cetera. Um, and that'll, that'll take care of a lot of, a lot of your WOS.
Ian: Adam. It's been awesome having you on the show. Anything that, anything that I missed, anything that you think, uh, that, uh, that we missed here, obviously our listeners should check out active campaign and go to active campaign.com to learn more. But, uh, yeah. Any, anything, anything I missed anything to.
Adam: I don't think so.
I think just the last thing that I would state is, you know, again, really figuring out your tool set and sometimes realizing that the, the complicated answer isn't necessarily the best answer. Right. And I'll give you a really simple example of that. That's my, my parting words. But one of the things that [00:41:00] we've realized, right, is like we can utilize Zapier a lot of times to send data back and forth.
And so for instance, when we need to do big data sets and, and, and upload data into our CRM, it's often better for us to go through an API and we can do that via Zapier. Too much coding. I don't have to get a developer involved. I've got a guy on my team that knows APIs enough to like, make it work. We grab the data, we put it into a spreadsheet, it uploads.
We can catch all of our failures instantly. We can correct a men data, which is fantastic. And zappers are really simple tool to use. Right. And it's really powerful. And so for us, I could go the route of man, I need a tool that does this and I need a developer to build it to me. Well, one that takes away resources from the company from other projects and two for, you know, a couple hundred bucks a month or however much Zappier costs.
I'm sure we pay more than a couple hundred, but you get the point for a small [00:42:00] fee, certainly cheaper than a developer. I can have things built for me that I can implement same day, most of the time. And that to me is worth like speed is of the essence. So I try to find the simple solution, um, and make sure that I'm not over complicating things.
Cause I tend to get shiny object syndrome. So I, I, Ooh, that's a fancy new toy. And if I just did this, then it will all work perfectly. And sometimes like the answer's right under your nose and it's not shiny, but it's, it works. I love it.
Ian: Great. Great. Advice and final thoughts, Adam. You're awesome. Thanks so much for, uh, for giving your time and, uh, we'll
Adam: talk soon.
Thank you so much. Take care. Thank you for listening to rises 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 theme at qualified. The pipeline cloud is the modern way. B2B revenue teams generate pipeline. Learn more@qualified.com.[00:43:00]