Let's get strategic. Today we'll hear from Charles Lu, VP of Operations at LexCheck. Charles explains how he uses RevOps as a strategic tool for not only tracking revenue, but assessing performance and identifying areas for improvement. He also describes the biggest challenge in modern sales leadership: balancing creativity and process to empower teams while providing insights on performance.
This episode features Charles Lu, VP of Operations at LexCheck. LexCheck accelerates contract review and streamlines negotiations by delivering redlines and issues lists in minutes while ensuring consistency across contracts. There, Charles is responsible for executing the C Suite's strategies to grow its product offerings and customer base.
Charles explains how he uses RevOps as a strategic tool for not only tracking revenue, but assessing performance and identifying areas for improvement. He also describes the biggest challenge in modern sales leadership: balancing creativity and process to empower teams while providing insights on performance.
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Guest Bio
Charles Lu is the VP of Operations at LexCheck where he is responsible for executing the C Suite's strategies to grow its product offerings and customer base. With a background in law, Charles has served as an M&A Associate at leading law firms such as Latham & Watkins and Goodwin. He holds a J.D. from the University of Michigan Law School and a BASc in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Waterloo. In his current position, Charles leverages his legal expertise and engineering knowledge to drive operational excellence at LexCheck. With a Juris Doctor degree, he possesses a comprehensive understanding of the legal intricacies. Additionally, his Bachelor of Applied Science in Mechanical Engineering equips him with a versatile skill set. Charles' multifaceted background makes him a valuable asset in executing growth strategies at LexCheck. His commitment to operational excellence and deep understanding of the legal industry contribute to advancing the company's impact on the legal tech industry.
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Guest Quote
“One of the mantras that I live by is that time kills all deals, right? Inactivity kills all deals. Open decision points will kill a deal, right? And so the challenge that we solved was taking those exit criteria and boiling them down to can you write a proposal for this client. Not a proposal that they need necessarily to sign. But can you write a proposal that will basically set out something that we can provide them that will provide them value.”
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Time Stamps
00:24 - How Charles got started
01:54 - Defining Revenue Operations
06:46 - RevObstacles
15:14 - Scaling legal review
26:26 - RevOops
29:20 - The Tool Shed
35:56 - 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
[00:00:00] Ian Faison: Welcome to Rise of RevOps, I'm Ian Faison, CEO of Caspian Studios, and today we're joined by a special guest. Charles, how are you?
[00:00:06] Charles Lu: Uh, I am doing great, Ian. Thanks for having me.
[00:00:08] Ian Faison: Excited to have you on the show. We're gonna be talking rev ops. And all the cool operational stuff you're doing at Lex Check. So, uh, first let's get into it. Um, I know you're not technically a, died in the wool rev ops person, and yet here you are. How did you, uh, how did you come to be someone who is, uh, leading operations?
[00:00:29] Charles Lu: Yeah, yeah. Uh, definitely don't fit, at least what I know of as the typical kind of persona for, for operations. Um, You know, originally I was trained as a mechanical engineer, and then I practiced, uh, corporate, um, corporate law, actually at a, at a large firm in New York City after I went to law school. So I actually came to Lex Check, um, originally as, you know, kind of a, a refugee from, from big law and then, uh, into a product and a, and a business analyst role actually. And so my path to now leading operations at the company actually went through product and, and sort of, um, business development, if you will. Initially kind of building out features of the tool, like very technical stuff. And then from there into more dealing with our, our clients, figuring how to get, how to maximize value for them. Um, and from there, you know, really kind of taking charge of a lot of the operational aspects of the business. And at this point, that mandate includes sales, right? And, and revenue. So, um, my title now really kind of reflects that not only is, is the, you know, the operations of the company in terms of delivering and just kind of day to day, um, making sure employees are taken care of, um, but also, you know, our sellers and, and how they're gonna go out and kinda help people solve their problems. Um, get Lex check and, you know, for us at least close those sales and, and get them going. Um, so yeah, that's a, that's a little bit of the history.
[00:01:50] Ian Faison: And what's your definition of, of revenue operations?
[00:01:53] Charles Lu: It's a structure that my sales team needs to fit themselves into so I can help them be better at what they do. That in a nutshell is, is the way that I look at it. Um, it's a tool, right? It's a tool for me to, uh, one, get information about how the revenue acquisition aspect of the business is working, right? Evaluate whether it's, you know, doing well, whether it, you know, needs to be improved in certain areas, but also it's a tool to help me experiment, right? With different tactics, different um, ideas, uh, to be able to kind of implement those things in an efficient way and get learnings out of them that I can implement and deploy and, and kinda get value out of.
[00:02:31] Ian Faison: Obviously coming into a role where you didn't have like a, a operational background, uh, or operations background and now leading rev ops and seeing the business holistically. Obviously, you know, you are, uh, you have a background in loss, so you know the product intimately from that perspective. Do you think that that sort of gives you an advantage in, in like the rev ops lane because you understand the products so well?
[00:02:54] Charles Lu: I think it definitely does, and I think it does in two ways, right? So first, coming from more of a product operations and just general kind of operations pathway through their company to rev ops, I think I'm a little bit more in tune with the kinds of problems that we're actually trying to solve for our clients, first and foremost. Um, some of them I actually solve with our internal tools, right? It's great to be able to eat our own dog food, be able to kind of take these tools that we spend so much time developing and get some real value out of them. Um, and in that process that gives me even more insight right into the kinds of things that go into an implementation cycle or even a buying cycle and things from those, from essentially those, um, being able to take things from the active implementing or, um, setting up the tool and actually using it in practice that are going to translate or need to be reflected and measured at different parts of our sales cycle. So, I think it definitely adds a layer of a perspective that wouldn't otherwise be there, and I'm, I'm really glad to have it.
[00:04:02] Ian Faison: You know, so often on the show there's sort of the, the, uh, more strategic level, you know, revenue lifecycle decisions that get made. And then you have the like, underlying technical sort of ability, and the team that can sort of build that stuff out, and bring information back to sales and marketing and, and customer success.
[00:04:25] Charles Lu: Yeah, I think particularly for us, because now revenue operations and our product are very intimately linked, not only through myself, but also some of our other sellers, right. Who we brought in over, actually from our implementation side, since, since I kind of took over. Um, we're closing that gap even more, right? We really want that gap to be as small as possible, what the client experiences, um, and how to maximize that should be, should be front and center in, in the minds of all of our sellers.
[00:04:59] Ian Faison: Yeah, zooming out. So tell us a little bit more about Lex Check and, and, uh, who are your customers?
[00:05:04] Charles Lu: Yeah, sure. So Lex Check is an automated, um, AI powered contract review solution, right? So in a nutshell, we can actually make edits to foreign documents. So documents that are coming across the desk of your sales team or your procurement team, contracts that your business is entering into Lex Check can actually read those, even if it's not your document, even if it's coming from somebody else and can actually go in and make automated changes to the language. So it's actually taken a first cut at marking up that document. Something that typically you would have to wait for legal to be able to get to. I mean, we all know legal departments are, are scrapped everywhere, right? And I've never heard of a legal department that isn't sort of short on bandwidth. Um, but to be able to do that first pass and be able to take some of that lift off of, off of legal's plate, um, what we're really doing is helping legal kind of serve our business teams a little better.
[00:05:55] Ian Faison: And then obviously you're not just, Head of Operations here, VP of Ops, you're also the council. In-house council. How involved are you like in the actual deals, like you're seeing, you're seeing things from the, the one inch view and from the 30,000 foot view.
[00:06:09] Charles Lu: Yep. No, that's exactly right. I do serve the role of in-house counsel when it comes to any agreement that we're signing. So, um, I'm essentially a team of one, uh, and we're serving, you know, all of our, all of our customers. I. All of the entire sales team, our procurement team, right? Um, our product team, when they're looking at new tools, all that kind of has to run through me. So, um, let's just say I'm, I'm really, really grateful that I have a great tool internally that I can use, uh, to help me do that and help me make sure that nobody's waiting too long for, for help from legal.
[00:06:44] Ian Faison: Okay, let's get to our first segment, rev Obstacles, where we talk about the tough parts of Rev Ops. What have been some of the hardest problems, uh, that you faced, uh, leading a team that that includes, uh, Rev Ops.
[00:06:59] Charles Lu: Yeah, I think when I came in, kind of took over the mandate. Um, one thing that I noticed immediately was our sellers had some friction with the infrastructure that we had put around them, right? So exit criteria for stages in our pipeline, um, requirements for escalating issues, all of those kinds of things. You know, do we have a product sheet, right? What am I selling? How do I, and how do I sell different things? Do we have the right collateral? Um, we had a very comprehensive infrastructure set up, but it actually became a bit of an obstacle because it prevented folks from getting creative. Right. We've been around for a while and we've been fairly successful in a lot of ways, but I think that we are still, as far as I'm concerned, always experimenting to be able to do things better, right in the space where we're at, especially as one of the first movers in the AI, AI space.
[00:07:58] In order to stay ahead, right, stay ahead of the competition, not only do we need to be creative from a product perspective and a delivery perspective, but also from a sales perspective. And so the biggest obstacle that I've had to face in this role so far has been creating an infrastructure of process points around our sellers that is flexible enough to let them be creative and let them do what they do well, which is help our customers identify pain points and get them on a tool that's gonna provide them value. But at the same time, I still need to be able to get that insight around how they're doing their jobs and how well they're doing their jobs. So being able to take that really complicated infrastructure and turning it into something powerful but manageable was probably the biggest overall challenge. I.
[00:08:44] Ian Faison: I love this stuff. 'Cause it's like totally where the rubber meets the road. And it's like, you know, obviously in the smaller work it's like you can see it all if you're running rev ops for a 20,000 person company, it's completely different. I wanna talk about the stages. It's like, what was it about exiting, exiting the stages that was, that was creating the challenge.
[00:09:06] Charles Lu: So I'll give you, I'll give you a real easy example, right? So our, our pipeline, you know, our pipeline for sales opportunities that are Qualified starts with discovery, right? Um, but the exit criteria from discovery into the later stage in the pipeline. At that point it was evaluation or proposal, right?
[00:09:24] Something like that. Um, the exit there, there were something like 12 or 14. Different exit criteria that needed to be filled in, around
[00:09:32] Ian Faison: Oh wow.
[00:09:33] Charles Lu: what the customer was doing, what kinds of documents were they looking at? What kind of throughput or in the workflow were those clients seeing, right? Um, estimated time savings, all of that kind of stuff.
[00:09:43] And don't get me wrong, those things are super, super important for us to know, right? To be able to get maximum value for our clients. And I, so, so I understand why, you know, they would've been there to begin with. That being said, though, I mean, like one of the mantras that I live by, um, and this actually comes from our c e o, is the time kills all deals, right? Inactivity, kills all deals. Open decision points will kill a deal, right? And so what the challenge that we solved coming in was taking those exit criteria and boiling them down to can you write a proposal for this client? Right? Not a proposal that they need necessarily to sign. But can you write a proposal that will line basically, um, set out something that we can provide them that will provide them value, right?
[00:10:30] At a price point that makes sense to solve a problem that exists. And if you have that information, you can move it into proposal, right? So that's super, super concrete example of, of kind of one thing that we did. Um, Another example actually is taking that proposal document and moving it way further up in the process. Right? And this is a little bit counterintuitive, I think, for our sellers when we first did it. Maybe not for your listeners, right, who have kind of thought about this problem a little bit more broadly. Um, but for our sellers, I think they in, you know, bless their hearts, they really want to get it right.
[00:11:02] So they want to know the information. They wanna be able to serve our clients in the best possible way. They wanna get all this information, get it down. Basically down the line, know everything that they possibly can before they put, you know, a very detailed proposal in front of the client. And one thing we changed was we took that proposal and actually moved it right after discovery. Right. And what that helped us do was, one, create a tangible, achievable goal for our sellers as to what their discover needed to accomplish. And two, give us a measurement point very early on about is this a deal that makes sense for us to continue spending time on? Right. Our clients at this point know because we've, um, we've kind of optimized the way that we communicate this stuff, that this proposal document isn't a final. It's not meant to be signed right now, right? Nobody's saying that you need to take this proposal, take it to, you know, your investment committee or your procurement committee, um, and have 'em sign off on it. Right now, it's just meant to be a vehicle to make sure that we're on the same page. Right. Is this a need for you? Is this a product that you're interested in? Is the price point in the right ballpark? And getting that out very early in the process gives us some certainty in terms of, you know, this is worth making additional investment. Right. Working with the client to kind of get this across the finish line. Um, but also it's really, really beneficial to the client.
[00:12:22] 'cause then they have a piece of paper that they can use to have internal discussions. They have a piece of paper that they can ever refer back to or show people and it helps 'em solidify in their minds that this is a sale process. It's not just, you know, we're up in the air talking about interesting problems, um, to be solved by novel technology. It's a really tangible, okay, we can, if we sign this up next week, we can get started within, you know, two weeks and my problem is gonna go away. Right? That's the kind of do that, that's essentially what we're trying to achieve.
[00:12:48] Ian Faison: That was a great answer.
[00:12:50] So obviously, you know, you're a growing company. How do you balance managing sales, which we've talked about a bunch, marketing and, and customer success.
[00:13:01] Charles Lu: I mean, the, the short answer is there's not much balancing, right? It's just three different fire hoses, right? If we're honest, um, and ideally they're all kind of you, you can point them all in the general direction of success of the company, right? Which is really for us, success of our clients. So whether it's, you know, marketing and sales, um, it's really about finding a way for our clients to understand that they have pain points that can be solved with our software, right? They can be better off using our tool than otherwise. And then on customer success, it's really about the practical nitty gritty of helping them get there, making sure that once things are implemented, they're, they can find that value.
[00:13:41] I guess where the balancing comes in, right, is the better job we're doing from a marketing and a sales perspective, the easier a job our customer success department has. Right? So being able to kind of create some process around, you know, marketing and sales, right? What kinds of, what kinds of points we're pushing, um, in terms of highlighting value and pain points to, um, how those things can be solved when we really get into the sales process? What are the, what are the must haves when you're doing the demo, right? In terms of being able to communicate that with the client and being able to show them what the value looks like. If you can map those things on to how customer success is also doing their jobs and bring it all back, right? You get past that. The, the, the biggest problem, which is always that, that loss in translation piece, right? We're experts in our tool. The client is not, the more we can hit consistent, the same consistent points over and over again from top of funnel, right? In marketing to, you know, the real heart of the funnel with our sales team, and then kind of post, uh, post-sale activity, the more we can be consistent and be hitting the same things um, the more success we have.
[00:14:47] Ian Faison: Obviously legal review is, uh, incredibly hard to scale.
[00:14:54] This is something that like every single company deals with, like no matter who you are, you deal with legal problems, you deal with legal review. It's incredibly expensive and time consuming. but you also have to deal with this too. And so, yeah, just curious how, how do you, uh, how do you make the legal stuff easy for customers, and then how do you deal with it sort of internally?
[00:15:15] Charles Lu: It's interesting, right, because you know, Lex Check is really on the cutting edge of using AI to solve a lot of these problems. But the, the fundamental principle of what we do is actually very simple. And it's not, you know, we're not a company that's rooted in L L M, even though we use it. We're not a company that's rooted in np, uh, N L P, even though we use it. We're a company that's rooted in just simplifying and scaling legal, and that starts with a word that everybody has heard. Not a lot of people actually do this, but it starts with playbooking. The way that you actually conduct a legal review. And that's easier said than done, right? If it was easy, everybody would already do, like they'd already have it done.
[00:15:52] Everyone would have a super easy to understand, super easy to follow, you know, call it a bible, right, for how you review legal documents. Um, but because it's such a difficult thing for a lot of people to wrap their heads around, the alternative is let's rely on lawyers to just exercise their own judgment.
[00:16:10] Let's basically bring in expensive resources to be able to do this job for us. And that's where we get into the problem that you were describing, right? Which is, it's really difficult to scale because all you're doing then is you're stacking body on body on body. Each of those bodies are super expensive and the only return that you're getting on them is linear.
[00:16:26] Right? So you're not really, you're not really setting yourself up for, for good growth. Right. Especially if you know your revenue takes off, um, by playbooking things. It gives you two advantages. First, it actually makes the on the ground task a lot simpler, right? You take out a lot of the discretion. You make it so you know somebody with less experience, right?
[00:16:46] Somebody with, um, you know, somebody with less, less of a proven track record on judgment. You're more comfortable having them take the wheel, right? Because they have guardrails from that playbook. Um, the second thing you can do is actually take a look at the playbook holistically and think, does this actually, does this playbook make sense for our organization?
[00:17:04] Right. Are the things that we're doing, do they actually make sense for a company our size? Now, those are things that you can do without Lex Check, right? If you, if you're really disciplined and you take an eye on all these things and you kind of see it all holistically, you can do that kind of stuff without Lex Check.
[00:17:20] Um, but with Lex Check, we are able to actually, you know, I, with lch, I'm able to support all the departments in the company by myself. I don't have any help. I can do it all by myself. And that's because instead of delegating to another person that I need to train up, instead of, you know, delegating the analysis of the playbook to somebody that I need to train up, what I can do is actually delegate this to our own software. So I have a playbook. I know how I like to mark up NDAs, right? I know the, you know, three or four things in NDAs that I really care about that make, that are important to the company, to Lex check. And now I have a piece of software that whenever one of our sellers has an nda, a they need to enter into, instead of coming to me with it, they can run it through the software. And if the software says, you know, I don't see any big issues here. I'm not making any big changes, they can sign the thing. Right? They don't have to come to me anymore, which is great. Um, for stuff that's a little bit more complicated, right? For stuff like when we're entering into sales agreements with our clients. And they want us to use their form, obviously. Right? Especially when you're dealing with Fortune 500 clients. Like, you know, we are, um, they're often saying, no, we we're not using your paper. You gotta use ours. Right? Like, we're, we're x y, z fortune one company. Right? Like, you're, we're not using your paper. Come on. Um, they're sending it to us. And at that point, What I can do is I can look at, you know, running it through our tool. I can see, okay, here are the points that I, I actually need to push back on and it helps me out a little bit. Right? 'cause it, it makes it so that review process is actually quicker on me and I can get it back around to my sales rep more quickly.
[00:18:47] But in addition to that, when you start running more and more of these documents, or more and more of our clients through the tool, what I can see is essentially a heat map, right? Of what are the things that are sticking points. Right. Having the software be a layer on top of the playbook, having it actually apply the playbook gives me a ton of information about what are the sticking points in legal review?
[00:19:08] What are the things that are holding back our performance from a rev ops perspective? Right? And then, you know, because these two functions are consolidated here, I can make a judgment call. I can say, okay, well, you know, and if I had a colleague who was representing legal, you know, apart from me, I would, I would go to that person I would say, These things are on average taking us, you know, they're, they're adding a week or two weeks to our sales cycle, right?
[00:19:32] We think that that's pro projecting out to killing X percent of our revenue, right? If we get rid of this, we see, we think we can see the benefit. Do you want to keep that right? Is that something that you really want to keep? And we can have that conversation because we have the data, 'cause we're measuring it. Specifically on the legal documents. 'cause anybody I think who. Who sells, you know, especially enterprise stuff, right? It's gotten to that point where, where legal is, is doing their best, but ultimately, you know, frustrating a lot of the other stakeholders because they have a job that's so hard to understand.
[00:20:05] Right? And being able to take that job, codify it, simplify it, and be able to optimize on it, one, increases transparency so everybody's on the same page, right? This is not because legal wants to slow anything up, it's because legal has a mandate. But then we can have a conversation about that mandate, an informed conversation, you know, that is based on actual facts and actual documents, and we can have a conversation about smoothing things out and making things easier for everybody.
[00:20:30] Ian Faison: Gosh, I cannot even tell you how many deals I feel like I've lost in my life because the legal review is so slow.
[00:20:38] And so it's like those sort of things that every single sales leader, you know, loathe the wait time of that legal review, forget the deal getting killed, but just like the actual time, time kills all deals.
[00:20:52] And like obviously you must see that all day, every day. Like would you have any like data about that? About like how much time things go into legal review, how much time is wasted there?
[00:21:03] Charles Lu: Yeah, for sure. So, and I'm, I'm gonna speak for us at this point just on, just on kind of data that we have internally. Right. I think before we started using our product internally to help us review our sales agreements they were taking, and this is, this is my time. This is just actually my time. Um, they were taking me on average between six and 10 hours. Right. And typically that would be spaced out, um, over a couple of days. And these are fairly robust agreements. Um, I like to think I was already taking a pretty commercial approach, right?
[00:21:35] pretty middle of the road, not trying to hold up the sales team at that point, you know, I was working with the sales leader and a sales team. I really need them to succeed. I'm an early employee of the company, right? Ultimately my goal here is growth. Right. Um, but since we've implemented that software, that time has shrunk down to less than half. And, you know, it's actually shrunk down probably more, but I'm gonna say half. 'cause I don't wanna, I don't wanna create just like a, you know, it's just like an unbelievable situation, right?
[00:22:00] I think a lot of people, they might not necessarily understand exactly how much time you can save when you have something that can go in, make some changes for you and actually streamline your review process. Um, the real benefit though, Is that instead of having to sit down like two or three times with that doc, right? Like open it up, you know, after I have my coffee in the morning, if I don't have other meetings, right? Like what kind of day is that? Um, being able to come back to it, you know, having to come back to it the next day because my afternoon got totally destroyed by a bunch of fire drills, right? That, you know, that right there, that's another 24 hours in the cycle. If I can do this thing in half the time, or a quarter of the time, I can do it in, you know, maybe a third or a fourth as many days. So that review time actually gets magnified when it comes to how much you can save in a sales cycle. Saving four hours of review time can equate to way more than four hours in a sales cycle because of all the handoffs.
[00:22:56] Oh, it's like a week, right? Because the thing is the, I mean, you know this way better than I do, but I, from a sales perspective, the problem is that they have a review time too. So it's like you have two rounds back and forth of red lines. And plus there might be another call in there where the lawyers have to get on the phone and hash some stuff out, and that's a negotiation in of itself. So it's like, yes, let's say it's uh, like, you know, 10 hours, but it's also that 10 hours ends up getting broken up again by each of those different iterations. Like those are much shorter, but still like you have to work all those in and it's always a week. at
[00:23:38] Ian Faison: it's
[00:23:38] Charles Lu: at least, right? Yeah, at least a week. I think. Let me, so ideally, where we want to get is where we currently are with NDAs. Right. The M S A problem is always gonna be bigger. It's always gonna be more complicated. It's always gonna be a little bit more specific to each of our clients, which is why our focus right now, especially for our commercial clients, is down to the N D A, right? The big problem with the N D A is not necessarily that the review itself takes an inordinate amount of time. The docs are short. People kind of get them right. But really to your point, the problem is all the handoffs. It comes in from the business, it's gotta go to legal legal's. Gotta pick it up. It's at the bottom of a stack.
[00:24:21] You're not getting it. Even if it's the easiest thing in the world, even if it only takes 20 minutes to do, to your point, it's not coming back in less than a week. Right. Um,
[00:24:31] Ian Faison: They got, got a 20 page A, they.
[00:24:34] Charles Lu: Yeah. Or they're reviewing, you know, chat G B T or open ais, like fair use policies or whatever, right? Like they're, they're looking at other things. They're, they're helping everybody else out in the company. And so that, who knows how long it's gonna take to even get to that N D A, right? So for us, right, being able to have our sellers and our technical sales guys be able to just use the software, run it through, get an answer back, and if there's nothing in there that, you know, jumps out at them as, or if there's nothing in there that the software has flagged as needing escalation, they can just go ahead. That right there, that's, that's the real value, right? Being able to get into these simpler documents and getting rid of that, getting rid of that handoff altogether.
[00:25:10] Ian Faison: you know, when we look at sort of like operational challenges, like what are the ones that was identified? Um, For a lot of organizations is like, does the rep actually have approval authority to do X, Y, Z? Right? Do they have approval authority to give a discount? Do they have approval authority, like what is the back and forth between that stuff? Like all that, right? Like we've identified that's a huge sticking point for many reasons, and we try to optimize that. And then on the legal side, like we never did that, right?
[00:25:38] It's like, even though it's just as time consuming, just as painful, like giving the power to the rep is like generally speaking, as long as they have guidance like. Saves us way more time and money.
[00:25:48] Charles Lu: Yeah. And I think the added benefit of having some, like having the software. As a check on that, um, is that we have an audit trail.
[00:25:59] Ian Faison: Right.
[00:25:59] Charles Lu: We have an audit trail about what's acceptable and what's not. The software's already made a call, and so it's, it's way more conducive to building trust because we know that there's gonna be an audit trail. We know that the, the, we know that the, the rep is seeing the issue, right? And then we can trust that they actually saw it, considered it, and made a call. So being able to have that has been, has been really, really helpful.
[00:26:22] Ian Faison: Any, uh, rev, oops, moments that you've made, uh, since you took the role?
[00:26:27] Charles Lu: Ah, rev oops moments. I mean, I'm, I'm sure there are plenty, right? I think we run a lot of experiments and some of them don't pan out. Um, I think early on for us was, again, this is maybe a, maybe vestigial of kind of where we started before I took over, but I think, you know, we were a little bit too specific with some of the experiments that we were running early on. And that was, that was sort of a miscalculation on my part, I think. I think, uh, you know, obviously you come in and you wanna make impact, right? You wanna make some changes, you wanna be able to kinda show improvement. And so you have, you know, really specific ideas about things you wanna do. Um, and so we tried a couple of these things and luckily, you know, it didn't, it didn't burn too much time for us, but the results were just not what we wanted. Um, like for example, like we wanted to go after a certain sector in terms of target customer, right? And so one thing that we did was, you know, we tried to research, okay. You know, what are these people, how are these people gonna use the tool? What are all the various touch points we want to have to be able to get them interested?
[00:27:22] And we, we could, we create like, let's call it like a 12 to a 15 touch campaign, right? In between marketing and between outreach from our sellers. Um, and this is great, right? This is, you know, very well considered a lot of times spent in there. Um, and, and really, really able to get like a read from the customer as to whether or not, you know, it makes sense for them and what part of the process, um, For me, what I just realized after having that in the field for a little while is I'm just not getting the signal that I need quick enough to move in a meaningful way. Right. And so having those things is good. We're still running those things in the background because I think long-term campaigns like that just to kinda build brand awareness and get people sort of thinking about how we can fit into their, their work is really, really important. But now we're gonna supplement that with like, you know, we're with one-liners, right?
[00:28:08] Things that really are targeting a very specific pain point. And we're gonna run way more experiments to see what people are really interested in. Right? What really matters to them. Um, and being able to take that information in a much easier way. 'cause then you can really identify what resonates, right? It's not like a 12 touch campaign where you're not sure if it was email one or call four that really move the needle. Having these like, you know, one touch experiments gives me the ability then to be, to tell Mar the marketing folks, Hey, this really worked. Do you agree that this is, you know, kind of why they, they picked up or they replied, right.
[00:28:39] Get their sign off and then I can go straight to the sales and customer success and be like, this is what people care about. This is what we should be emphasizing, right? And being able to kind of pull out those decision points a lot easier, um, and pull out like the, the data around, you know, the wins, you know, a lot more easily.
[00:28:53] Ian Faison: Any other thoughts on, um, sort of coming into the role, uh, new to Revs, um, any other things that, that, that sort of lessons or takeaways there?
[00:29:05] Charles Lu: I mean I think I knew generally kind of what the mandate was gonna be, but I don't think I really appreciated coming in, just kinda how broad I. How, how complicated and how many moving parts there were. Um, one thing I've definitely learned is, you know, I'm not here necessarily to reinvent the macro wheel, right? There's, there, there are a lot of great thinkers out there. There's a lot of great literature people have, you know, published a lot of really great stuff about how to kind of think about this stuff from like a high level where the rubber meets the road is being able to actually execute on those things.
[00:29:40] And so that's where I focus most of my time now and I can really leverage that, my background as a lawyer and an engineer, right, to kind of break things apart. I think in a lot of ways lawyers and engineers are have a lot more in common than, than you might think. 'cause both of them are just taking something that's more complicated, breaking it up into its constituent parts and fixing it to be able to achieve a goal, right? And that's now what I'm doing here. So the takeaway is be able to leverage some of the really good thinking that other people have done and be creative in applying it to kind of, Actually getting it to our sales reps, to our marketing guys, right? To our customer success team. Be able to kind of compartmentalize a little, like compartmentalize things so that they can run their experiments.
[00:30:20] And then so as they're running their experiments, you get real time feedback, right? With our sellers, it's okay, you're trying some very specific outreach into, you know, five specific organizations, right? You need to, like every two weeks you're gonna have to report back what are the things you tried that have worked? What are the things you tried that haven't worked? We're gonna dig into those things. It's gonna influence how we do our marketing. It's gonna influence how we do our customer success stuff, right? That kind of thing.
[00:30:43] Ian Faison: Let's get into our next segment. The Tool Shed. We're talking tools, spreadsheets, metrics. Just like everyone's favorite tool, Qualified can go to Qualified dot com to learn how no B2B tool shed is complete without Qualified. Do right now and check them out. They're best friends in the whole world and they've been since the very beginning of Rise Revs. Check out qualified.com. Charles, what's in your tool shed?
[00:31:08] Charles Lu: Right. Tool shed. So we're a HubSpot shop's, what we're using from A C R M perspective, but beyond that, I'm actually trying to keep it as simple as possible.
[00:31:18] Ian Faison: Mm-hmm.
[00:31:19] Charles Lu: Right. And that gives me as much flexibility as possible. So we, I mean, like I'm sure like a lot of other people in this space and in this role, I, I just live in spreadsheets, love 'em, love pivot tables.
[00:31:28] If I can pivot it, it makes me happy. Right. Um, I would say that right now, like the most important stuff to me right now, um, are spreadsheets that help me track two things. So first is essentially a product sheet, right? Of what's going on in proposals and what's coming back. So we keep track now of every proposal that goes out there and the response that we get from it, right?
[00:31:51] So we've centralized all that information so we can kind of see in as close to real time as possible what the trends are in terms of what people are, what people think is, makes sense for our tool, right? Actual feedback from, from, from the space in terms of, um, our proposals going out. The second thing again, and this goes back to you know, time killing all deals, is being able to track how many of our deals are stale. Right. That's something that very early on, because we had a very complicated sales pipeline when I came, came in and took over the role, um, was really, really hard to figure out, right? Because you just have all these deals and they're all in the same stage, and some of them have been there for a long, long time.
[00:32:31] I mean, if they're not, if they're not actively engaged, there's a couple reasons why that couldn't be right. But all of them are bad for us. The customer doesn't have a pain point, we might not be able to help them, or customer just doesn't, you know, treat it as like a big priority. You know, either way something needs to happen. And so being able to kind of track that in real time, see how long things have been in which stages of the pipeline, right? And have that rolling on a day by day basis of when things are crossing a certain threshold, gives us a process point for folks to go in and say, okay, well this deal has actually kind of been stale for, you know, I've sent three emails out in, you know, three emails out in two weeks. I haven't gotten a single response. Right? Maybe I keep an eye on it. Keep going. You know, people are busy. They might not get to it once we cross that six, eight week boundary, right? Maybe it's time to try a different tack. Maybe it's time to try to, you know, shake something loose. Maybe, you know, it should be special.
[00:33:20] Find a, find a way to get special promotional pricing add to this particular client based on what they do, or, you know, what other things that they could bring to the table. Or maybe it's, you know, maybe it's giving them a bit more of a, you know, some, maybe something like a, like a light breakup email, right?
[00:33:34] Really kind of moving the needle a little bit. But having that process point is really, really important. 'cause it, it creates some accountability again for the sellers, right? So that they come back and, you know, they're forced to, 'cause a lot of sellers are optimistic as they should be, and so they always think it's gonna come back. They always think, Hey, my next hour to my next email is gonna be the thing. Right? It's gonna
[00:33:52] Ian Faison: It always is.
[00:33:53] Charles Lu: it always is. But being able to kind of track that, you know, in as close as real time as possible and having, you know, that, that trigger be there so that the seller can think, oh yeah, this is crossing that threshold where, after eight weeks, like our, our, our win rate drops precipitously. I gotta, I gotta figure out whether or not this is worth to keep, you know, in my pipeline. Right? And then, you know, they can take that and as a process point and go get some answers one way or another. 'cause either way, either they can help the client out or if there's really, you know, at this point it doesn't make sense for that client, then let's focus on someone where, where it does make sense, right? Someone who can get more value out of our tool.
[00:34:28] Ian Faison: What are your favorite spreadsheets?
[00:34:30] Charles Lu: Oh God. Um, I really do love, I really, I love our proposal spreadsheet, which basically just has like every line item that we've ever proposed.
[00:34:36] Being able to kind of see that in the pivot table, like what was the reason which ones progressed, been super, super, super helpful. Um, and then also just being able to kind of track activity at a really granular level. Right. Being able to see, okay, you know, These are three or four different initiatives that our sellers are running, right?
[00:34:55] In terms of out, like being able to kind of generate their own outbound meeting, feed themselves a little bit, right? They're looking at these targets. Here are how many people that they've been able to contact. These are the kind of strategies that they're running and what the results have been. And you know, if you have your sellers report and like a, like a relatively simple, but a consistent format, you can roll that stuff up and you can start seeing kind of trends across, you know, which verticals make sense, which titles make sense. Right. Um, that stuff has been really, really fun for us. So those would be the, those would be the two for me.
[00:35:24] Ian Faison: Any blind spots that, uh, you wish you'd measure better?
[00:35:27] Charles Lu: The biggest blind spot is probably, what are our customers actually sending upstairs. Right, when they're talking to their bosses for approval. And you can, you can try to include like tags and documents, right? You can try to include, you know, links and PDFs that will get you, you know, get the data that you need to see, like who's opening what. But oftentimes it's just someone's writing a summary of that information and it's going, so it's, it's a problem that we're trying to tackle first with the proposal. It's a problem that we think, like if the proposal is moving its way upstairs and it's being like, we wanna create a document that is a no-brainer to include when it goes upstairs.
[00:36:15] Ian Faison: Right.
[00:36:16] Charles Lu: Right. And if we can do that, then we have some more confidence and we can try to optimize around, okay, how do we get, how do we get that, that satellite out there and the universe that is, you know, the, the client's atmosphere, right? Like their Jupiter, like Juno's going in and it's making a pass or the atmosphere and it's gonna send some signal back. Right? That's what we wanna, we wanna kind of create, but, I'm sure it's not unique to us, but like being able to know like what they're actually valuing and trying to get more of that. And we try to do it a little bit with like surveys and just, just asking folks, but it's still, it's still a big blind spot for us in terms of, you know, what ultimately is moving the needle upstairs.
[00:36:49] Ian Faison: I love that. So true. Like, are you using the tools that were making you, are you using the ROI calculator? Like are you, like, is that making the slide? Who's, who's on the slide with us?
[00:37:01] Charles Lu: Right, right. Which, which, yeah. And if you have like a deck, yeah, sure. The deck goes upstairs, but like, which slides like actually matter.
[00:37:08] Ian Faison: Yeah.
[00:37:08] Charles Lu: Slides are people actually looking at? Like all that kind of stuff. So for us, again, like we're gonna try to keep it simple.
[00:37:15] Definitely, you know, obviously we try to do it with case studies now, but like those things get, you know, pass around so much. It's, it's difficult sometimes to separate the noise. Right. Gotta figure out, okay. If a, if a, like an executive assistant's printing something out, like. Does that mean that it went to the executive? Does it not, you know, which executive did it go to? Who does that person work for? Um, yeah. A lot of interesting stuff that we, we, a lot of, a lot of really, really interesting wood that still, still has left a chop for us.
[00:37:40] Ian Faison: All right. Let's get to our final segment. Quick hits. These are quick questions and quick answers. Number one, what is your favorite to watch, read, or listen that you've been checking out recently?
[00:37:54] Charles Lu: In terms of industry publications, I'm still an above the law sucker, right? I like to see kind of, you know, what the trends are in terms of hiring, right? What the trends are in terms of like tech use, obviously. I think a lot of the macro sort of forces that are affecting, especially in-house counsel, a lot of them will start in private practice. And so it's like in a bit of an early warning signal, which has been really, really helpful. Um, outside of the office, you know, there's all sorts of stuff, but I've, I've really gotten into just like, you know, I've always loved Anthony Bourdain's stuff, but you know, his publications, his writing is just so great. I really just love it. Um, and it's a great way to kind of take a step back, do a little bit of, you know, meditation almost right when you can kind of take a look at that kind of material.
[00:38:43] Ian Faison: If you could make any animal any size, what animal would it be in what size?
[00:38:50] Charles Lu: See, I think what I'd want to do, is make a corgi the size of a horse so I could ride it.
[00:39:03] Ian Faison: Uh, who doesn't want a huge Corgi? Um, what advice do you have for someone who's newly leading a rev ops team?
[00:39:11] Charles Lu: Two things. So first I would say do your, do your research on the landscape of best practices. There's a lot of really good stuff out there. Don't feel like you need to reinvent the wheel, right? Especially on a high level. The second thing is try to be as specific as problem specific as possible. Try to be as specific as possible with the problems that you start with solving, right?
[00:39:37] So it shouldn't, don't, don't bite off more than you can chew all at once. Run your experiments in in tangible, practical pieces because otherwise you're not gonna be able to get any signal back, and at that point, your experiments are next to useless.
[00:39:50] Ian Faison: Charles, awesome having you on the show for our listeners. Uh, you can go check out lex check, uh, clearly, you know, there's, there's gaps in, uh, in the legal review process. Uh, so check that out from your rev ops perspective. Um, Charles, any, any final thoughts? Anything to plug?
[00:40:07] Charles Lu: No, I think, I think, you know, anybody who's having trouble with getting things back from legal, right, you could definitely hit us up. Um, we're probably gonna be able to help you. Um, the other, the last thing I probably will leave for folks and um, this is something that we hear from our clients all the time and are really successful, is that there isn't a problem that's too small to start with.
[00:40:26] I think a lot of people will generally feel like, okay, I have some, you know, I have some contract bottlenecks, but like, I don't know if they're a big enough problem to do like an I like a, like an it kind of procurement exercise for. The solutions in this space, and especially ours, are really, really lightweight from an implementation IT perspective.
[00:40:44] And they're not super, super expensive, right? Being able to start with some, being able to start with something small also gives you the ability to get a quick win. And that has instrumental, especially for our clients and building up, you know, the capital that they need internally to be able to affect even more change.
[00:41:01] So, um, don't be shy about reaching out if you have something that you think is. You know, this is something that Lexi could help out with. It probably can. And you know, our guys are always, always ready to spend some time just, just breaking it down, right? At the end of the day, our priority is helping our clients solve problems, right? So if you have something that we can help you solve, we're more than happy to help you break it down.
[00:41:22] Ian Faison: Charles, it's awesome. Thanks so much and uh, we'll talk soon.
[00:41:25] Charles Lu: Absolutely. Thanks so much for having me.