This episode features an interview with Kiva Kolstein, President and Chief Revenue Officer at AlphaSense, Inc. AlphaSense is a market intelligence and search platform used by the world’s leading companies and financial institutions. There, Kiva oversees revenue operations, renewals, and referrals. Kiva will describe the importance of breaking down marketing silos while building a strong RevOps team. He’ll dive into using data to tell an important company story to your investors, board, and the sales organization.
This episode features an interview with Kiva Kolstein, President and Chief Revenue Officer at AlphaSense, Inc. AlphaSense is a market intelligence and search platform used by the world’s leading companies and financial institutions. There, Kiva oversees revenue operations, renewals, and referrals.
Kiva will describe the importance of breaking down marketing silos while building a strong RevOps team. He’ll dive into using data to tell an important company story to your investors, board, and the sales organization.
Guest Bio
Kiva is an experienced senior executive with over 25 years of experience building and leading high performance, cost-effective revenue organizations. He’s a seasoned and disciplined executive, and an influential process improvement leader. Kiva’s a creative problem solver with the ability to deliver innovative customer-focused strategies that grow revenue, and generate long-term customer loyalty. He’s been both presenter and facilitator, conference panelist and moderator.
Guest Quote
“The other thing that rev ops does for me is help me use the data that I might find in Salesforce or Tableau or Gong or and tell a story with that data. I'm telling a story to an investor, to a candidate, to the board, to the broader sales organization. And so what they become are storytellers helping me tell stories with the data that they pull out. Really, really important.”
Time Stamps
**(00:27) - Defining RevOps
**(10:40) - Building a RevOps Team
**(15:49) - RevObstacles
**(25:39) - The Toolshed
**(37:01) - Quick Hits
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.
Links
[00:00:00] Ian Faison: Welcome to Rise of Rev Ops. I'm Ian Faison, C E O of Caspian Studios, and today I'm joined by a special guest. Kiva, how are you?
[00:00:06] Kiva Kolstein: I am good. Thank you for having me. I'm happy to be here.
[00:00:09] Ian Faison: Yeah. Super excited to chat about AlphaSense, uh, a lot of the cool stuff that y'all are doing from a revenue perspective. Of course, we're gonna talk about revenue operations and everything in between. So starting off, what is your definition of Rev ops?
[00:00:26] Kiva Kolstein: My definition of Rev Ops, um, I think Rev Ops is, is about bringing teams together. It's about breaking down silos. It's about aligning everyone toward a common goal, uh, revenue growth. And, and what Rev Ops is responsible for to some extent, is orchestrating the seamless collaboration between sales and marketing and customer success.
[00:00:54] And all of that is fueled by, by data. And so providing all of those teams, all of those leaders, the data that we need to inform all of the decisions that we make.
[00:01:04] Ian Faison: I love it. That's great. We might have to put that on, uh, at the, as the opening of the show. Uh, I think you, I think you think you solved it. Taking a step back, what does, what does AlphaSense do?
[00:01:13] Kiva Kolstein: The easiest way to understand AlphaSense is we're a Google for business. But, but what we really do is we're an AI powered search engine. Uh, That sits on top of tens of thousands of sources of content that was previously found in lots of different places. Uh, in this one platform, content like sell side research from every bank and SS E C and global filings, earnings call transcripts, transcribed expert calls, press releases, news. All of this content sits in this platform layered upon which is an AI powered search engine. That enables you to find the very specific thing that you're looking for more quickly than you would if you were using any other tool.
[00:01:56] Ian Faison: And one of the things as we were prepping for this interview, which was super exciting for me, 'cause I I knew of AlphaSense for a little while, is that y'all have a have a cool free trial. Uh, so our listeners can just go try a free trial to, to learn what we're talking about. Uh, and uh, and I didn't know that before.
[00:02:13] Uh, we're, we're doing our research for the pod.
[00:02:15] Kiva Kolstein: Have you tried it?
[00:02:16] Ian Faison: No, I'm gonna do it. I'm gonna do it.
[00:02:18] Kiva Kolstein: Get on there. We'd love to, we'd love to have you try the platform and, and, uh, engage with, with a seller.
[00:02:24] Ian Faison: I know, I'm super excited. It speaks to the importance of data. It speaks to, you know, how much, uh, content is out there, um, how many different sources are out there, and how important getting insights is, and that's like, that is. Like you said, that's what Rev ops really does, is finding the truth from the chaos.
[00:02:43] Kiva Kolstein: Well, I'll tell you, I mean, it really is an interesting time to be working for a company like AlphaSense. If you think about it, a hundred years ago we were living in the industrial age with a, an economy built around manufacturing. Today, we're living in the information age with. With an economy built around information, uh, and so a tool like AlphaSense that organizes all of this information that is available to all of us all the time is a really cool and exciting place to be.
[00:03:11] Ian Faison: and it's a cool and exciting rev ops problem. Uh, I'm, I'm curious to hear how, how you're taking it on. How have you organized your rev ops team and what, and what is your approach?
[00:03:20] Kiva Kolstein: So the Rev ops team is, is now 17 strong. Uh, and we split them between pre-sales, sales and post-sales. So pre-sales, everything from top, top, top of the funnel. All the way through to the initial inquiry. Then we've got a team that's responsible for measuring every facet of our pipeline, uh, and then a team that's responsible for all of our, our existing clients.
[00:03:45] So, so once you become a client, we're a land and expand business. So we want to understand how quickly we, we grow within our client firms, and of course, renewal and uh, and referral. And so, Um, that's how the team is organized. They specialize in one of those three sections.
[00:04:01] Ian Faison: And how do you think about building this team as a CRO? Because, you know, we've, we've talked to certain CROs that, that definitely don't have a 17 person rev ops team. Clearly it's something that is, uh, that, you know, I think you're more on the cutting edge of.
[00:04:15] Kiva Kolstein: They're crucial to our, our success. They inform, um, everything that we do. But I'd also say they're a secret weapon. Um, I think there, there are sort of two secret weapons in scaling a, a global sales organization. The two are sales enablement and rev ops. And, and of course here we're, we're talking about rev ops, but to me, uh, there isn't a decision that we make, that I make, without being informed with data from the Rev ops team. And so like I mentioned, like they measure every facet of the business. They're feeding me not just the information every single day, but every sales manager, every individual contributor, so that each of us has a really developed understanding of the business that we're running and can press the gas pedal down and pull it or pull it up based on what we're seeing. What we're seeing by geography, what we're seeing by, um, Vertical sub-vertical persona. The vis velocity of opportunity as it moves through a funnel. Macro economic impact on, uh, one portion of our business, uh, anyway, informs sort of everything that we do. Our hiring plan, entering new markets, bolting on new products, The team has grown alongside the revenue organization. We're now 500 strong, and so we weren't always a 17 person rev ops team. Um, but that is the team that I believe is required, for the size of the team, to support our business in the way that we need it.
[00:05:39] Ian Faison: Yeah, it, it's really cool and it's really interesting. I should also add that, you know, your 500, uh, person team is, is also, uh, growing and you're, and you're hiring right now. So, uh, for our listeners who are, who, who are looking for their next role in revenue, uh, uh, Kiva's hiring. Um, but uh, but yeah, it's really interesting to me because I think, you have this shift from just the folks that the, you know, a handful of rev ops folks that were just doing things, knocking stuff out day-to-day. The, the, the sort of more ticket taking type mentality. And now you have this sort of like elevated go-to market strategy and operations blending with rev ops. Like, where does one start where does one uh, end, what do you, what do you kind of feel like is Rev ops getting a more strategic role in addition to the, the tactical role?
[00:06:31] Kiva Kolstein: I think it should. Uh, in AlphaSense it absolutely is a more strategic role. Of course, we handle the day-to-day, those tickets that you mentioned, uh, people having trouble with, you know, Salesforce instance or, or, you know, there, there are things that, that are happening all day every day across the revenue organization that the Rev ops team is responsible for helping them solve.
[00:06:51] But, but the, but the, the team at AlphaSense is absolutely strategic. They're thinking about territory creation and our Sam serviceable addressable or tam, total addressable market relative to, um, the target, uh, by vertical, by sub-vertical, by personas that we're selling into in AlphaSense Land, we sell to financial services, corporate, big corporations and consultancies, which adds a bit of complexity.
[00:07:16] Um, I'll give you an example. Every Sunday night, I get an eyes and ears email from my two leaders of rev ops who are sharing with me what they're seeing and hearing on the ground, not just in the data. That's a really important part of it. What they're seeing in TA in Tableau or in Salesforce about pipeline, about forecast, about velocity of opportunity, but also what they're seeing by rep, by S D R in terms of how much pipeline was created last week. By vertical, by geography where we're perhaps getting hard hit. Where we should press the gas pedal down a little bit harder, and hire, perhaps, more AEs into that vertical or that region. And so every Sunday night I get this eyes and ears email that gives me a sense for what they're seeing and hearing on the ground that might, I might not be paying attention to or may have missed, uh, and informs a lot of what I do the upcoming week.
[00:08:06] Ian Faison: Interesting to hear you take such a, uh, take, take the long approach to both and I think that one of the thing,
[00:08:12] Kiva Kolstein: I also just, just quickly, I think to some extent it's about how Datadriven, how process oriented you are as, as a, as a leader or your business is in terms of using data to inform decisions. And so in our case, we are a hyper data-driven revenue organization Using that data that we, that we, um, you know, pull out of whatever, whatever tool to inform every single thing that we do. The other thing that Rev Ops does for me is helps me use the data that I might find in Salesforce or Tableau or Gong or and, and tell a story with that data. I'm telling a story to an investor, to a candidate, to the board, to the broader sales organization. And so what they're, what they become a bid are, are storytellers helping me tell stories with, with the data that they, that they pull out. Really, really important.
[00:09:04] Ian Faison: And especially when you're looking at the entire customer lifecycle. From marketing to, uh, to sales to css. Like what's, what, what's more strategic than that?
[00:09:15] Kiva Kolstein: Right?
[00:09:16] Ian Faison: Okay. Any other thoughts on, on sort of like team, organization or, uh, or rev ops strategy, uh, or anything like that?
[00:09:24] Kiva Kolstein: I think one thing I might add is it's important to understand how best to use, uh, not just as a CRO. The relationship that begins to exist between Rev ops and S D R and s d R management and AE and am and marketing, right?
[00:09:41] Those are relationships that don't form overnight. And so, you know, each of them have to figure out how best to, um, collaborate with each other and, and, and use the data that's being provided by Rev Ops to inform the strategy in that specific function. And so we spend some time on that. Thinking about, okay, this is what Rev ops is sharing with the S D R leadership team. What do I do with that information? How do we get higher quality meetings? How do we get, how do we decrease the time between meeting and opportunity? Um, how do we identify the right targets? What tools are we using to do that, you know, are things that the Rev ops team, uh, assists the s d R team with, with doing, and of course we can say the same kinds of things for a E A M, et cetera.
[00:10:26] Ian Faison: Considering this is your not your first rodeo as a, as a CRO, uh, do you think kind of coming into this role you had a little bit more of a refined look at how you would sort of build a rev ops team?
[00:10:40] Kiva Kolstein: Yeah, I think, I think just generally, you, you recognize what works and, and you're trying to, to build the playbook that delivers on the promise. So for me, over the course of, of my career, um, through failures and successes, it's identifying, you know, where the blind spots have been or the things that have been missing.
[00:11:03] You know, the missing ingredients in terms of the, the team that I was building to deliver on the goal. And so joining AlphaSense that I joined six years ago, I mentioned sales enablement, rev ops, those were the two. First functions, support functions, if you will, that I hired to help me scale, scale the business.
[00:11:21] Ian Faison: Oh funny. that's like sort of the old school way of sort of building a business was like, Hey, I'm gonna go hire a bunch of salespeople and we'll get at, and now it's like you hire one, you know, like one marketer, one salesperson, one customer success person. Uh, and then, you know, you hire a rev ops person to make sure that all of that stuff is, is, uh, you know, built on a tech stack the right way from the very beginning, getting the right data.
[00:11:47] It's just like so different than, you know, it was a decade ago where it's like, yeah, let's go hire four sales reps and just have them beat down the doors and, and close as much.
[00:11:55] Kiva Kolstein: I, I'd say even more so in a business as complex as ours is whereyou're communicating value to so many different client types between every sector of the economy and all these personas within these companies, financial services and corporates and consulting and all these geographies.
[00:12:16] It's, it would be nearly impossible for a seller to come in and not only take your product to market, but begin to evaluate the market and determine where, where we win, where we lose, how fast we win, how predictable the business is over here versus over there. And so to me that's, that's what Rev ops is delivering on a daily basis, is the information that we need to figure out where to, you know, go faster, you know, where to continue to invest. I think still companies fail to recognize the importance of, of that function in an organization that is trying to scale.
[00:12:52] Ian Faison: Well, and I think that what's so tough for the sales manager, the sales leader in those si situations is like the data lies to you all the time. Right. You talked about the story. Um, there's a great story that we did on, on a different podcast where, um, they, it was a marketing leader where they ran a trial where they'd give you a hundred dollars gift card to, to demo it. And it was like the worst performing campaign And they're like, oh, I guess that doesn't work. And then six months later their, their bookings like, like shot up like crazy. And they're like, what did we just do? And it turns out all the people who did those demos weren't ready to buy at that exact moment in time, but they were in the like exploratory phase. And then when they were ready to buy, they all came back and he was like, it was the best marketing campaign we ever did. And so like, It took a very sophisticated like, understanding of, of data and like being able to go back and look at like what was the common thread of all those accounts. Oh, there's this thing. a sales leader would've never been able to pick that data point out if there wasn't like a holistic look at data for that organization. That's what you need is someone looking at everything holistically.
[00:14:00] Kiva Kolstein: Yeah, that's a great story. That's exactly right. There are countless examples that I can share where there's a, there are a false positive that we see and, and the knee jerk reaction is to pivot away from, from the opportunity as a result of, of something that we're seeing in the moment based on client reaction. But if you have this team, like you're describing who's really thinking about this in the long term and across all of the sellers, not just the one that you're sitting alongside. Generally speaking, you're gonna come out with a better answer. And so it's really about building a decision matrix. It's about the pros and cons.
[00:14:34] It's about really like thinking about how are we going to build our business in this market with this vertical against this persona? I. With the sellers that we have, how do we think about a territory that that gives each of our sellers an opportunity to achieve their target? And the Rev ops team is able to dive into every single customer prospect at AlphaSense and pick out the people that could perspec be potential buyers. And so one of the things that we're delivering on a regular basis to our sellers is not just the territory that includes X number of accounts, but the very specific people. Within each of those accounts, who should be buyers of AlphaSense? Thousands of them. And so you walk in the door and you really have a good sense for your serviceable addressable market.
[00:15:24] These are the folks that we've identified as as able to buy from you. And I'm sure there are more, right. You know, but, but we believe that just by selling to some portion of the folks that we've identified, you'll. Significantly exceed your target. That's a really important job that the Rev Ops team plays in building confidence across the sales team.
[00:15:45] Ian Faison: Right. Right. A hundred percent. All right. Let's get to our first segment, rev Obstacles, where we talk about some of those things, some of those tough parts of rev ops. What's, what's the hardest rev ops problem that you face? An example, uh, in the last year or so.
[00:16:00] Kiva Kolstein: Rev ops and just the revenue organization in general, we are, we're constantly thinking about how to be better today and tomorrow than we were yesterday. So it's increasing our conversion rate, it's increasing our, the, the number of trialers we have on at any given time. It's increasing penetration rate inside of our existing client firm. So I mentioned we're a land and expand business. We've got about 4,000 customers. We have a lot of room to grow inside of almost every one of those companies. And so how do we go deeper and wider inside these firms? How do we think about in AlphaSense land, the combination of content in our platform, product packaging, um, marketing and sort of the sales communication of value to make it appear as though AlphaSense was purpose built for you. Not just for the personas that are in our wheelhouse that we've been selling to for the last 10 years, but all these new and different people who exist inside these client firms who could potentially buy from us. And so I don't know that that's been a, you know, that that's not an acute challenge that I think about over the last six months or a year, but it is absolutely a rev ops challenge that we are constantly trying to solve.
[00:17:14] And so if there isn't a day that goes by that I'm not thinking about talking to our rev ops team about. You know, the entire sales cycle from top of the funnel. How do we get more people in? How do we increase our demand gen and, uh, you know, make it a true combo between outbound S d R and inbound marketing demand gen.
[00:17:34] How do we increase the size of the opportunity by inviting, inviting more people to that initial meeting? How do we engage more, more of the trialers? So you've got 10 or 20 people on trial. How do we engage them during the course of the trial, roll out the red carpet and make them see the, the, the value of the platform beyond what they're finding for themselves. So get to a higher trial, to, to close business conversion rate. Um, you know, these are the kinds of things that we're thinking about all the time. We just opened an office in Singapore. How do we, how do we. Get into that market and grow that market really quickly. Um, these are just some, some examples. Uh, we acquired two companies over the course of the last 18 months and we integrated those companies, you know, seamlessly really well.
[00:18:21] And we grew the, the first company stream, which is an expert transcript library business into our platform. So now you've got these four voices in our platform. So if you think about the analyst voice, you wanna hear from sell side research analysts. You've got the company themselves who are talking about themselves and earnings calls and, and filings.
[00:18:41] You've got the journalist voice through press releases and news. And now inside our platform you've got the, uh, the expert's voice through these expert transcribed interviews. Well, we bought that company, we integrated the content, and now we take that to market. That's a, a rev ops job to help us understand who are the likeliest buyers of that additional content set.
[00:19:04] How do we set the incentive structure appropriately based on this new content set that we have in, um, how do we build spiffs into our, you know, annual comp plan that account for this new content set, right? How do we, how do we just drive growth in this new company that we've bolted onto?
[00:19:19] So Rev Ops gets involved in all of that kind of thing, and, and, uh, while these aren't, I'd say rev obstacles there, there are things that are standing in the way of our accelerated growth.
[00:19:30] And so we've got extraordinarily high ambitions. For our, that we've set for ourselves, and we set expectations really high. And so it's really about making sure that as good as we might be, as as, as successful as we feel like we are based on the growth trajectory that we're on, we can always do better.
[00:19:50] And so we're always pushing each other to do better than we did yesterday. How do we increase the conversion, increase the size of deal, decrease the sales cycle kind of thing?
[00:19:59] Ian Faison: A lot of the historical data and histor historical information from a sales team when you go into a new market can kind of fly right out the window, right? It's like average time to close, average, you know, number of people that you need in the deal, all that sort of stuff. Like, did you just say, Hey, we're gonna take all these benchmarks, we're gonna bring 'em in, and we're gonna say, Hey, we're gonna test this out. Like, how, what was your sort of approach there, uh, when you, when you entered the new market?
[00:20:24] Kiva Kolstein: It's a great question. I want to take a big step back and, and get right back to answering your question. Four years ago, we as an E L T, were becoming distracted by evaluating and incubating all sorts of new ideas, right? People were coming to us, so we'd come up with the idea on our own, and we'd test the idea, incubate the idea with a few sellers, with a few prospective customers. If the idea worked, we'd launch it more broadly, but it was really distracting while we were also running a high growth, high velocity scaling startup. And so four years ago we spun up a go-to market team, go-to market strategy team. I. A SWAT team of folks whose whole job is to incubate new ideas, whether m and a, new markets that we want to enter, new verticals that we want to sell to, new personas that could perhaps benefit from the AlphaSense platform.
[00:21:21] And they would test these ideas with small numbers of people, AEs, account managers, prospects, customers, through interviews, um, determining whether or not, uh, it made sense for us to. Press the gas pedal down a bit on, on on that specific idea. And so in the case of Singapore, we put the go-to market team on entering this new region and they did months worth of research to understand one, whether Singapore was the right place as a jumping off point for us to sell into that region.
[00:21:54] two, you know, just in terms of like, sourcing talent, where does talent come from? Uh, in that region we looked at our customer base and so some significant number of our global customers have major presence in the APAC region. And so, um, how close are they to Singapore? Do we need to be there in person?
[00:22:14] How much can we do over zoom? Anyway, all this research done by our go-to-market team, which allowed us to feel a lot more confident creating an entity there and beginning to hire there. And then we took one successful seller from AlphaSense US and moved him there. Um, he was someone who had formerly in a, in a previous career, sold in that region and so was somewhat familiar with it.
[00:22:42] He was our first sort of boots on the ground, did a fantastic job, continued to help us get the lay of the land, and over the course of the last six, 12 months, we've begun to hire a support system around him and additional AEs. So I think SDRs and sales management and Rev ops and go to market, you know, other folks on the team who could support, you know, a business that far away.
[00:23:09] Ian Faison: It's really cool to hear how the innovation that you set in like years ago, bears fruits. 'Cause that's like always one of those things. Like those, it's like, what, what's the ROI of building that sort of like innovation muscle? Eric Reese, who wrote Lean Startup, he always talks about sort of like, uh, I think it's him, uh, that like innovation is like a muscle. Like you have to like actually work on it, otherwise it sort of like atrophies. And I always think about that, how difficult it is to be in sort of like innovate mode and be in like, get the job done right now, most sim similar to like strategy and, you know, tactics there. Uh, but that's really cool to, to to hear about sort of like innovation bearing fruits that are, that are extremely outside the, I don't know, the box I guess.
[00:23:54] Kiva Kolstein: Well also, it's not just entering new markets and new verticals and new personas, but as you think about sort of the evolution of an organization like in AlphaSense, you move from what was historically exclusively organic growth into a mix of organic and inorganic growth. And so whether it's m and a or partnerships or channel sales or other kinds of things that might help us accelerate revenue, it's great to have this team who can evaluate, you know, the likelihood of that, of that thing working before we actually go go through with, whatever relationship, you know, we, we may be, you know, interested in exploring, right? Because every single day there are opportunities that get presented to me. You know, we should be selling to government. Of course we should, we should be selling to business.
[00:24:41] Ian Faison: Yeah.
[00:24:42] Kiva Kolstein: Course we should, we should be in the Middle East or Africa, right?
[00:24:45] All of these things are, are really good ideas and absolutely we will one day take advantage of, but how do you evaluate whether now is the right time without distracting yourself from continuing to to run a high growth business like we're doing.
[00:25:01] Ian Faison: It's so, yeah, it's such a great point. I mean, like everybody, well, you should sell to government, you should sell to this, you should sell to that. And you're like, yeah, but that's taking our playbook. And potentially throwing it completely out the window. 'cause like that subset of customers or whatever, it's, has different sales cycles and different velocity in the way that they can't be sold to like literally the way they can be sold to.
[00:25:25] You can't give them gifts. You can't do like, there's like so many different things that are probably embedded in, in your go to market. You can't just drag and drop it. And, um, yeah. That's super fascinating.
[00:25:38] All right, let's get to our next segment, the tool shed where we're talking tools, spreadsheets, and metrics. Just like everyone's favorite tool, Qualified, no B2B tool shed is complete without Qualified. Go to Qualified dot com right now and check them out. The perfect tool for someone in rev ops.
[00:25:54] Turn your website into a selling machine. Go to Qualified dot com. What's in your tool shed? What are some of the things that you're using? Where are you spending most of your time?
[00:26:01] Kiva Kolstein: Most of my time spent in Salesforce, Tableau, Slack, and Gong. I'd say those are, those are the four most important tools I use every day. More and more I'm finding myself in Slack. And Gong. we use Gong for everything from, um, listening to, to calls that have been recorded to helping us forecast.
[00:26:23] And of course Tableau, if you're not familiar, you know, just visualizing, I mentioned earlier, sort of telling a story with data, um, that, that data visualization for me is, is key. Putting them into sort of something that is easier to visualize, um, helps me tell the story.
[00:26:39] Ian Faison: Okay. What about relationship to spreadsheets?
[00:26:45] Kiva Kolstein: There aren't a lot of spreadsheets that I, I use every day. Um, most of the time I need to understand a forecast or a pipeline, How we're doing against our hiring plan. It exists in Dashboards, in, in one of the tools I mentioned.
[00:27:01] Ian Faison: What are some of the key metrics that, that you, that you zoom in on? Or maybe some, some of the common ones and then maybe some that might be unique to, to y'all? I.
[00:27:10] Kiva Kolstein: Sure. So, so the common ones, uh, are, are most important to us too. So it's top of the funnel, it's meetings and pipeline by source, pipeline by vertical pipeline, by sub-vertical. And what I mean by that is life sciences is the vertical pharmaceutical, biotech and device would be the sub-vertical.
[00:27:33] And of course you can take that across every sector of the economy. Energy and industrials, T M T C P G, financial services, hedge funds, banks, asset managers, private equity, big consultancies. Um, pipeline by rep, pipeline by rep. With tenure, pep line by rep, uh, who's on ramp. Um, so pipeline, but pipeline broken down in a, in a number of different ways.
[00:27:59] Um, trialers. So Trialers are a great indication of how we'll do next month, next quarter. So, trialer conversion, we pay very close attention to. Um, and then of course, close business and, and revenue. Uh, those are the, those are the most obvious for us and we track them very closely. Um, Maybe some of the, the less obvious is, is how is very specific content performing by vertical and sub-vertical.
[00:28:25] If you think about AlphaSense, we've got these sort of two moats, if you will, technology and content. The technology is kick ass, it's undisputed great search. You're not gonna find a better search engine anywhere else. The search engine means little, unless the content beneath that certain search engine matters. And so we spent the last 10 years building. Uh, an extraordinary platform of, of all the content that knowledge professionals need to do their jobs every day. We wanna make sure as we ingest new and different content, or we license newer different content, it matters to these new personas that we may be going after.
[00:29:00] And so thinking about by persona, by vertical, by geography, how well the content may be performing, or, or how, how much of it is being consumed by all of our trialers and users is a really important metric for us. Um, is the correlation between usage, the time you spend in our platform and the likelihood you are to buy, or to expand or renew, uh, is another thing that we pay very close attention to. Those are the biggies.
[00:29:29] Ian Faison: What about like a blind spot or, uh, or something that you wish you could, uh, you could measure better?
[00:29:35] Kiva Kolstein: I think as we expand into new personas. So if you think about like who gets the greatest benefit from the AlphaSense platform today. I. It's a knowledge professional working inside of any company you can with any degree of complexity. And so it's strategy and corporate development and competitive intelligence and business intelligence and investor relations on the corporate side. But as we expand into other places, r and d, early r and d, um, market research marketing, strategic marketing, enterprise sales,
[00:30:13] Ian Faison: Rev Ops, eh, eh.
[00:30:15] Kiva Kolstein: We have ops. Yep. I wish there were a better way to, evaluate not whether the content in our platform and our platform would be valuable. No doubt all of those additional personas would extract value from our platform. But in running a business that I can forecast, so a predictable business, how predictably they would buy. The goal is to build a a, a forecastable, a predictable business, and we have a very good sense for how the current users of our platform and the folks that are in our wheelhouse buy from us and how they use and extract value. How fast we expand, how, how quickly we close new logo business. But as we want to go deeper and wider inside of our client firms and sell to new prospective users, sort of outside of that wheelhouse, uh, there, there's always a challenge in understanding how predictably they'd buy.
[00:31:16] Ian Faison: Yeah, the go-to-market challenge for a
[00:31:17] company like AlphaSense is so, so cool to me because when you're selling to potentially any company and any persona, there's like endless ways literally that you can go to market to those folks. And, uh, and it's just, you know, it's, it's so complex. So it's interesting that you sort of mention that. It's like, I think about this all the time where, the tactics can be so different for what some, some people might like webinars, some people might like, uh, you know, to have in-person events. Some people might hate that.
[00:31:52] And it might be a, a persona or an industry that likes certain things because that's the way that's always been done. Or it might be an age thing of like, well, younger people like this, but older people like this. Like it, it's just, uh, anyways, endlessly fascinating.
[00:32:05] Kiva Kolstein: Yeah. No, look, I, I think that's, that's, well, that's well said. That's a good point. And I, and I think you're right. You know, but that is also, you know, the challenge in expanding to these new personas is making sure that you are supremely confident, you understand how they buy. I'll give you a good example.
[00:32:22] So we sell to consultancies and consultancies consume AlphaSense, like use the platform and pay for the platform different than other kinds of companies do, mostly because they're working on behalf of customers, on clients. But if you're a strategy consultancy, you've got a client engagement and you use AlphaSense to serve you well during that client engagement.
[00:32:45] And so we had to build an entire pricing model to support. That way of using our platform where it's not necessarily always on, you're using the platform when you're working on very specific engagements over the course of a year. Um, but I'd say the other thing, which we spend a great deal of time, this, this bleeds into sales enablement, but it, but it has a rev ops element to it, training our sellers on, and I'd say the evolution of our revenue organization over the course of this, the last six years since I've been here.
[00:33:19] This one concept is connecting the dots between what's going on in the world, what's going on in an industry, what's going on at a company, and what's going on at the contact level. Because what you're trying to extract from our platform is information that you'd likely not find anywhere else, or you'd have a hard time finding funding anywhere else, or it's getting you to the answer very quickly and you're using the information to, to make big investment decisions or big strategic decisions.
[00:33:50] What we're delivering to you is the ability to connect those dots,
[00:33:53] And just back to your point about back in the day, handing someone a computer and saying, you know, we'll see how you do. We're as far away from that at AlphaSense as you could possibly be. Because when we're now taking our PLA product, our platform to a new persona and talking to business development who's responsible for in-licensing inside of a pharmaceutical company, we've gotta be able to connect those dots for them and help them understand how they're going to extract vertical specific information from our platform that they're not getting from anyone else. And that takes a really sophisticated sales professional.
[00:34:31] Ian Faison: Yeah. It's, that's so cool. And I'm glad you mentioned sales enablement as part of this, because I think it's like, we've been able to start bringing data from sort of the chaos of where we used to be, of like understanding and being able to say like, Hey, our sales team in this vertical, they're not sophisticated enough, like full stop. They might be great sellers, but they are not sophisticated enough for this group of people.
[00:34:56] If you have the capability to take someone and make them 10, 20% better, like. You have to do that. You have to invest in that.
[00:35:05] Kiva Kolstein: I, I, I could not agree more. Um, sales enablement, just like rev ops is, is the, is the secret weapon. Um, you, you have to invest in a team who spends their time training your sellers to stand toe to toe with very sophisticated buyers.
[00:35:22] Ian Faison: Yeah.
[00:35:23] Kiva Kolstein: you've gotta be able to communicate the value of your platform, differentiate it from every other tool that that person is using to the most sophisticated buyers inside of the most sophisticated buying organizations in the world.
[00:35:38] So if you're relying on a sales manager to do that, or the salesperson to figure out how to do it on their own, you're, you're missing something to have a team that's, that's solely dedicated to spinning up the training, whether synchronous or asynchronous. Right? Both that is required to keep your sellers.
[00:36:03] Sophisticated enough to have the conversations that they're having with these very senior people inside of these very complex organizations. Um, that's what leads to success, right? That that's what leads to persona based selling to vertical based selling, and we're moving into a more specialized world where generic sales just don't work.
[00:36:23] Ian Faison: Yeah, that's exactly right. And nobody wants to freaking time wasted. That's the other piece. Like, Hey, if you have an actual, I mean, this is why Qualified shout out, Qualified exists. If a C E O ready to buy comes to your website, you better roll out the fricking red carpet. You cannot like be like, Hey, do you want to talk to like our, you know, 22 year old S D R?
[00:36:44] Like, no way. Like, that person needs to talk to the person right now who can get them the best answers right away. And like, that is just, it ain't the old way. Is, is so far gone at this point. It. You have to embrace the new way.
[00:36:59] Kiva Kolstein: Yeah, ma'am.
[00:37:00] Ian Faison: okay, let's get to our final segment. Quick hits. These are quick questions and quick answers. Kiva, are you ready?
[00:37:05] Kiva Kolstein: I am ready.
[00:37:07] Ian Faison: If you could make any animal any size, what animal would it be and what size would it be? I.
[00:37:12] Kiva Kolstein: I would shrink an elephant, put 'em in my backyard because my children love elephants, and they would get to play with the elephant without fear of getting stomped.
[00:37:23] Ian Faison: Me too. Uh, I'm a huge fan of elephants. Do you have a favorite book or podcast or TV show that you've been checking out?
[00:37:33] Kiva Kolstein: So, favorite book that I read recently is called Unreasonable Hospitality. The Remarkable Power of Giving People More Than They Expect. It's about the hospitality industry. Um, but I think about it just in terms of customer success and account management and rolling out the red carpet and just delivering more than you promised. So really good read. I can't remember the name of the author, but I highly recommend.
[00:37:56] Ian Faison: Do you have a misconception or prediction as it relates to, uh, to revenue or rev ops or go to market in general.
[00:38:06] Kiva Kolstein: I think we've hit on it. I, I think, I think you said it. I think Rev ops is becoming more strategic. That is a prediction. Um, I think just in general, um, this idea that the more specialized, the more persona based, the more verticalized, uh, generally speaking, the more successful your sellers will be. But it requires a significant upfront investment. you have to be convinced that that sophisticated sales approach and the conversation with a sophisticated buyer requires that you, you can stand toe to toe with them. And, and it's partly sales enablement. We're talking about that, but it's really being given the data that you need to run your business.
[00:38:50] What I'm forecasting, and it's not just the AEs, it's the AMS on gross and net retention. It's the SDRs on meetings of pipeline. And we, the attendees of these meetings are meant to serve as their board. And so we're poking holes and we're testing assumptions, and we're asking questions, but we're not necessarily giving advice. This is their plan in very much the same way that, that we, I, the C E O, show up to a board meeting once a quarter and do the same kind of thing. So I, I, I, you know, this all goes back to this idea that Rev ops is really strategic, but it's, it's really strategic in part because they are, they are serving. All of our many CEOs in helping them run their many businesses.
[00:39:31] Ian Faison: I love that. That is so great. What a, what a fantastic insight and a great way to, uh, to finish here. Um, Kiva, it's been absolutely awesome having you on the show. final questions. Do you have a piece of advice for someone who is, a, a CRO who's, who's leading, uh, a, uh, a rev ops or a go-to market team?
[00:39:50] Kiva Kolstein: Pay attention. Um, pay attention. I, I, I think I mentioned earlier, the eyes and ears email I get on Sunday night. I think what you find is that your rev ops team works so closely with your revenue organization that they may see things that, that you don't see.
[00:40:08] Pay attention to what they say. Invite them to weigh in, you know, give them a seat at the table and, and have them participate in these, uh, strategic conversations about where we, where we should invest or where we should pull back.
[00:40:21] Ian Faison: Absolutely. Awesome having you on the show. For listeners, uh, check out AlphaSense. Like I said, you can do a, you can do a trial, uh, and, and check it out right there. Um, Kiva's hiring, uh, in the revenue org. Uh, Kiva. Any, any final thoughts, anything to plug? I.
[00:40:39] Kiva Kolstein: I appreciate you plugging the hiring. Uh, we are hiring across all functions and globally, so, um, if you're looking, we'd love to hear from you. Please reach out on LinkedIn or email. Um, no, look, you know, thank you so much for having me on. This was a fun conversation. I.
[00:40:55] Ian Faison: Awesome. Take care.