What is RevOps and How it Impacts you

Hello. Welcome to another X Force Data Summit presentation.

Today we have Ben Fuller and Brad Smith, two Salesforce guys from Atlanta. They're gonna explain their relationship. It's too complicated for me to say it, but they've agreed to give us a talk on RevOps. And I think we're all It's a very interesting topic and these two guys have given this presentation before and they've lived it too, my understanding. So without further ado, Ben and Brad.

Certainly. Leonard, appreciate it. We're excited to be able to present with you guys.

Like I said, I have an interesting background and interesting relationship. We've kind of run the gamut all the way from being just local Atlanta Salesforce nerds together to working on projects together.

Most recently, especially with SAS optics, working as a customer of sonars as well as partnering together in a couple other capacities.

Been and I've known each other for a while. Like you said, we've presented on this topic a handful of times and are super passionate about it.

So, without further ado, we'll go ahead and get things kicked off. Again, my name's Brad Smith. Prior to starting Sonar, a lot of my background has been in the revenue operations space.

As brief aside, we know there's this big wave of revenue operations coming into the world right now. And it's a lot of a transformation from previous sales ops and marketing ops and customer success ops and now really getting everybody in the same room making decisions together.

So, know, again like I said prior to starting Sonar which is a revenue operations application that supports the rev ops framework. That was a lot of my day to day responsibilities was running rev ops for local startup companies here in Atlanta. So I'll let Ben give a quick introduction for himself as well.

Yeah. As you might notice here, Brad and I's title screen here, neither of us actually have the titles of revenue operations manager.

And I think a lot of that has to do with how new and kind of scary the idea of revenue operations is. So we we build what we do underneath it. With SaaSOptics, I manage strategic systems which really encompasses all of the sales enablement and sales platform. So Salesforce, G Suite, Corus, SalesLoft, anything like that falls under my purview. And then outside of that, I, managing partner with a company called CloudTrails, which is a Salesforce consultancy with a specialization in revenue operations. And then I like to talk about getting the junior Salesforce community involved in in in more more work, more projects in an effort to bring them up to speed and fill definite talent gap in the Salesforce ecosystem.

Absolutely.

And we'll dive into a lot of those components as we go through the presentation. But first and most importantly, we'll run through a quick agenda of what we plan on covering. There's really only three main components to what, our session's gonna have today. First, we're gonna break down the revenue operations framework.

What is it and why does it make sense? The second part to that was to understand what this foundation looks like. We're gonna dive into how we communicate that framework to our customers and to our internal teams. How do we all operate and work together?

Which obviously rolls into the final part of it is operationalizing revenue operations. Not only within the strategy and the framework, but also one of the tools and systems, that we're gonna be using to manage that.

So, we get into the framework, the one thing that we just wanna make aware of before we understand how this works is what is it? Why are we seeing such a rise for this in our community, in our ecosystem? And why is the time why is the right time right now to institute a RevOps framework?

So to start, revenue operations or RevOps is a new department that manages the full funnel operations for your go to market teams which consists of marketing, sales and customer success.

It does bring all these operational areas together And essentially breaking down the silos so that we can again all be in one place at one time making decisions that impact our entire go to market team.

So when we talk about breaking down the silos, this is always a good before and after clip going from this screen to the very next one. Traditionally speaking, you have seen operations groups work in these silos. And you hear marketing, sales and customer success.

When we think about why that framework exists to begin with, it's mainly because we've worked in these capacities of these groups having defined operations resources. When we really think about how our data flow, especially our customer lifecycle goes, we should be aware that our customers don't necessarily have to look at it in the same light. They wanna talk about, you know, what's the best flow of my data and my time. As we're working ourselves through the funnel, why do we have to speak and work with different operations groups along the way? Why can't everybody be, kind of in one centralized framework? Or more so importantly, one centralized group to manage a lot of that customer lifecycle or the data points behind that.

So when we start to think about what that looks like as we morph into a RevOps framework, I know Ben has a lot of, experience and insight on this side of it. We really start to see how revenue operations sits at the base layer of this team.

It is supporting both sales and customer success. So, if you kind of think about drawing a line down the middle of before you become a customer and after you become a customer is really where that handoff between sales and customer success goes.

But more importantly, there's a marketing layer that's right in the middle of that. We don't necessarily I think in the past, we've always associated marketing with so much top of the funnel activity and bringing in leads and driving in all this net new revenue. But there's an entire customer marketing component to that which is also being supported by the RevOps framework. I know, like I said, Ben's got some interesting insights from that especially with this time at at SaaS Optics.

Yeah. I think what you what you get to see now and Brad's got a really great boardroom story as he calls it is there's always a miscommunication between teams. Right? What what is sales considered an MQL?

What is marketing considered an SQL? Where does success get brought into the situation in the conversation? And building on this RevOps framework, it's the same team responsible for the reporting across the board. So everybody knows exactly what each definition means and they kind of become that.

It takes it back to data governance, Who owns this data? Who's responsible for it? And who's managing it? And that RevOps framework is what builds that from the ground up for you. So you're not fighting other people to make definitions.

Yeah. It's a great point. And Ben mentioned the boardroom story and this will sort of segue into our communication piece of the RevOps framework. But I think we've all been in one of those scenarios before where we're taking a look back at the previous quarter or the previous year.

You know, a lot of our executives are sitting around a table, especially at the boardroom type meeting, and you start working your way down the funnel. You know, marketing starts and says, hey, we had a great quarter last quarter. So the VP of marketing stands up and she says, and we we generated ten million dollars worth of new business. Was a great quarter for us.

Really enjoyed it. Really, you know, successful, quarter. She bounces down the table to the, you know, CRO or the VP of sales and he jumps in and he says, well, that's interesting. I we didn't see ten million come all the way to us.

That's okay because we saw eight million come to us and and we actually ended up closing four million. That's great. And we had a successful quarter because, you know, we ended up closing four million worth of new revenue and, you know, really growing and that person gets done and they bounce pass down to the customer success head and you know, she stands up. She's like, that's funny.

We didn't see four million dollars come through the pipeline or come through close one opportunities. We only saw three, but that's okay because we still had a eighty percent gross retention. We're successful. Everything was great.

And all of sudden, you just looked out at the very end of the table and you know, the CFO or the CEO is kind of sitting there just with a blank stare because none of their, their leaders have their numbers in order. And everybody has a different number and everybody has a different perspective.

The RevOps framework truly does help support a different perspective of that when you start to centralize where your reporting comes from and where your numbers and metrics are in place. You really find that it removes that layer of inconsistency and a little bit of the bias involved in some of those numbers as well which we'll get into.

Segueing into the communication side. I know Ben's used this quote a couple of times. I'll let him speak to it. But it's it's a great, you know, just kind of rationalization for where we are with with everything operationally.

Yeah. This goes back to MQL, SQL. Where where are those definitions? How do you define them between teams and who's tracking them? Right?

Sam Lee here.

This is a really great quote I think that really rings true for a lot of companies and a lot of rev ops professionals, sales ops, marketing ops, success ops, whatever your title is, strategic systems. You know, what whatever you see the title on, this is something we've all run into. Sales needs to understand where the leads are coming from. Marketing needs to understand what happens to convert them into MQLs.

Right? Which targets are the ones that are identified as most ready to buy, who has the best ICP for us. And without having a cohesive system in place, your your your map platform, your marketing automation platform flowing into your CRM. So in our in most cases Salesforce these days, if there's no there's no guardrails around data integrity there, somebody's dropping something and you have a leak in your funnel.

And RevOps is kind of designed to prevent that.

Absolutely. So when we start to think about how do we effectively communicate that within our organizations, you can see here on this slide.

This actually doesn't do a good service to the number of communication tools that are out there that we're all leveraging and using. But it does start to help you understand how we actually communicate. One, through the funnel and through our own internal customer facing mechanisms but also our our internal layers of communication. I think we're all big adopters of systems like Slack or Google Hangouts or Microsoft Teams so that we get to help communicate effectively.

When you think of what the rev ops role and the person in those roles or what they're really trying to do is they have to communicate a lot of these process changes and how to implement change throughout your organization. So they can start using fund systems.

Obviously, documentation systems like Google Drive, Quip, anything within the Office Suite. As well as systems like Sonar for instance. We're able to help you understand what your tech stack is doing. How you're supposed to be leveraging everything from an integration standpoint.

Even all the way down to other sales prospecting tools with ZoomInfo, LeadIQ, everything else you see on the screen. But the real reality here is that we have plenty of systems that help us leverage that communication. It's still on the revenue operations leader within your org to help facilitate that communication. Because so many times we implement a new process or change something in one place and we don't effectively communicate that down to other groups, they won't be able to operationalize that or adopt it and pick that up as they go.

So from Go ahead, Minh.

And I'm I'm sure Brad will agree with me here. I'm not a huge fan of flybys personally. So whether, you know, this new normal of working from home, you get people dropping in Slack all the time. Hey.

Need this, this, and that. Right? So a big part of communication is a way to track your incoming requests. So myself personally, I'm a big fan of cases within Salesforce.

It's a native object. You get it standard on sales cloud. Right? You don't have to worry about buying service cloud or you know, health cloud or anything like that.

You just have access to So I'm a big fan of standing that up as a way to just collect all your requests, aggregate them and then report off them. So you're able to identify trends and who's having issues, where retraining needs to happen, where weak points in your process are And you're able to report on that and give just a clean update on where things stand with open requests for the organization.

Absolutely. And I jumped into the next slide just because Ben so eloquently started to segue there to begin with. But when we start to think about how we deploy these changes within our organizations, there's a lot of different ways we do it. But I think the thing to really focus on here is not necessarily the system or the tech side that we will get into here in our next piece of this, but more so the strategy behind it.

Again, you really start to think of revenue operations not as one department supporting one group but one centralized location responsible for supporting many groups, you have to have a very clear channel or clear strategy for deploying those changes. If you're making a change on the marketing side, how is it that the customer success team, you know, three, four steps down the road is supposed to know about that change? And these are, these don't have to necessarily be, monumental or big shifts in the company. It can be as simple as we're adding one new pick list value on a field. We need to make sure that we're able to tell the other teams who have access and visibility that field what it means. No one likes surprises. We talk about that internally all the time.

Be prepared to speak to your changes. Be prepared to be able to articulate how these changes are gonna impact your entire organization. If you do that and you have the right level of deployment strategy, you'll be in great shape to make sure that your customers, which in this case are your internal customers, are gonna be able to adopt that.

So we really start to think about how that actually works. And we start to think of there's current solutions for ops teams right now. However, not all of them are totally optimized. We wanna get to a place where they're in a lot more of a fluid manner.

So many times as we've seen over the years, a lot of this information is stuck in one person's head. Sometimes we get some really cool, maybe conventions behind it, but it's still not the best when you think of how to scale a company. And a lot of times, some of our documentation is built just even into regular old spreadsheets.

Yeah. I think so. Tribal knowledge is kind of terrifying if you ask me. I mean you come into any kind of process and you see one person who doesn't have anything to any documentation.

There's no spreadsheets. There's no word docs. They're not using Quip or anything. It's like, oh yeah, I built this six years ago.

This is how it's supposed to work. And then you go and look at the process or the the field itself and there's no description. There's no help text. There's nothing there's nothing on it.

And that's, you know, that's not a unique use case for any one company. That is almost standard across most orgs where at one point or another, somebody built something without talking to somebody else and then didn't document it. And the idea behind RevOps, so what Brad and I like to, you know, stand on a soapbox really that Sonar is kind of built on this soapbox that he and I have both stood on many times is without documentation, without knowing where things are. I mean, you're you're kind of screwed, but you're you're gonna break something.

You're gonna impact something else. This field is gonna touch that field and then you're kind of SOL. And that's what we run into a lot these days.

It really starts to go down to how traditionally operations have sat in many different groups. And so this is a really good way of thinking in silos about that. But to the same point that Ben was just making, if you think of how one change can impact other teams, it's almost like putting a blindfold on and trying to understand what a domino effect looks like. Because you hit one button and without being able to see the other three or four or five or ten or one hundred dominoes in front of you, you really don't know the true impact you're gonna have to an organization when you're implementing change.

So I'll Ben walk through this. He has a great job of understanding how traditionally operations have sat in different groups.

And that's because I've been in each of these groups.

Right? I understand. I've seen this. I think for the most part, a lot of us have.

You know, sitting in IT is hard for somebody in a rev ops role or in a Salesforce administration role, HubSpot admin. Whatever whatever whatever your CRM of choice is, whatever your flavor is, it's hard sitting in IT because they have different priorities than the rest of the than than the CRM in the cloud space. Right? They are managing hardware.

They're managing desktop support. There's there's all sorts of things that they have going on that really don't align with keeping data safe in in in the cloud. Cloud.

There's usually and I hate to say this and this will bite me in ass, but there's usually a lack of understanding in leadership on the IT side where they just don't they they haven't bought into into the CRM world. They haven't bought into the cloud stuff yet. They're they're used to having, like I said, like a hardware or software to support itself.

Opposite in marketing, there's a bit of frenetic energy there. They're not entirely sure what's going on with sales or IT. And they they just are focusing on what they're trying to do and running at million miles a minute because there's always a change something's changing in the market and they have to keep up.

And they have a chance it's challenging to balance sales and marketing priorities.

Sitting in sales, I I'm a big proponent of not putting Salesforce underneath sales leadership. They are always looking to augment themselves and it doesn't help support teams outside of sales. Right? There's always also a low budget because they wanna buy all these other cool tools that they found. You know they're signing up for free free trials online all the time. Know, I'm not saying I've had to do this in the past but you know, I'm always removing access to things people have signed up for without talking to anybody. You know, always wanna try the next new thing.

Yep. Absolutely. I think the one thing to always keep in mind here too. When you have these different operations groups in these you know quote different silos or even in this picture you can kinda see them on their own different islands.

What ends up happening is you develop a certain bias towards the metrics you're tracking inside of this.

It's that's what earlier he was saying, you know, operations you know, a marketing perspective is really gonna focus on, the top of the funnel activity. What kind of MQLs, SALs are we seeing? Where the metrics in sales are a little different. They are bottom line results, how many deals are we closing, how much new revenue we're bringing in the door.

And when you have these different biases towards the metrics for each one of these different groups and those metrics are kind of on their own, quote island like you see in the picture, it does start to have disjointed effects to the company where you don't understand are we all marching to the same beat or the same drum? Are we all moving towards the same goals in the right direction? And so when you start to think back to that very first slide where we had revenue operation sitting as the base layer of that, when you have an organization that truly owns and manages the data and the goals and the metrics that support all those from the bottom up, you have no choice but to have full alignment and everybody using the same metrics as they move forward.

As we look into the next, to the third layer of this, on the execution side, and to Ben's point earlier, there's a ton of technology out there. And I think it's growing every day.

What was really cool, we always like to show, you know, some of the metrics that we found in some of our research. There's a really cool company out there called Blissfully that actually puts out a report every year on this. And it's really just the annual sort of state of SaaS when it comes to the systems we're using. But even now, you can start to see just the average spend per company as it's growing year over year. It's just exponentially growing even down to the SaaS spend per employee continues to grow. So essentially saying as your company gets bigger, you're providing more systems and more tools for your go to market teams to use.

And even just from a sheer numbers perspective, you know, the number of apps that each company uses even based off the company size and even within their own departments just continues to grow.

Going back to one of Ben's points earlier, when you think of the IT department, previously, know, call it five, maybe ten years ago, the IT department was in charge of buying all this software and implementing it, making sure the systems are used properly for their teams. It's not the case anymore. IT is still very much involved from a security and network perspective. But a lot of your end users now who are deploying some of these new pieces of low code, no code software are in fact the revenue operations leaders or the sales operations leaders or marketing operations leaders. So you're getting a lot more folks in the room to make those decisions.

Now what ends up happening and know, Ben could speak firsthand to a lot of this is when you start to get into these different systems and we all start to own these different places or all these different pieces of the tech stack, it really inserts chaos. Because how is a person in marketing supposed to know if they make one or two changes to one or two fields the impact that has on a customer success team two or three steps down the road?

Like I said, Ben has felt this firsthand and some of the tech stack that he's manages not only at SaaSOptics but he also sees on the consulting side with file trails.

Yeah. And it's not you know, with SaaSOptics, I've been really fortunate and the idea that the less admin is better. You know, that's that's kind of a motto a lot of people live by. I don't need nine people having admin access to a single product.

That's scary. That's that that leads to confusion and broken and broken processes. But I've I've worked in organizations and assisted organizations in the past where, you know, we log into an org and they have fifteen admins and there's only, you know, fourteen people in the company. Right?

Like everybody has admin access. Anybody can make changes as they see fit. That's when processes break. That's when integrations fail.

That's when downstream issues arise because upstream changes were made. Right?

You know, integration failing is is a big one. We implemented a new product at one point where it was blowing up API calls. Right? It's the point where our entire org stopped moving because we could not get anything in and out because we we capped out.

And that's a silent fail that that Brian likes to talk about. Like, no one would have noticed that until people started getting error messages. And then I'm getting, you know, SDRs and BDRs Googling saying, hey, like this is the problem. Like, alright, cool.

Let me go figure out what's actually going on. Right? Because, you know, armchair admins are scary.

That's absolutely it. And so as we start to sort of wrap up a little bit on the mentality of this, It brings up a great point and it's really how do we start to make sure that we are all communicating effectively. How do we make sure that we don't have armchair admins in a bunch of different parts of the organization because at the end of the day, this is one big, I call it like technology sandbox. Or the tech stack that we're operating in is not dependent on one or two people. The entire company is leveraging it.

And really when you start to think about how Sonar gets to be inserted into these frameworks and how SaaS optics gets to be inserted into these frameworks, it really helps, one, support the rev ops framework and make sure that as your company's growing and as your company's scaling, you are putting the right pieces of technology in place as well as providing the right level of visibility for everyone.

A big piece to to our platform is centralizing that location for your tech stack to make sure that, hey, I know these one or two or three or one hundred fields are being used across all seventeen different pieces of my tech stack. And if I hit one button here, I do know the exact domino effect. Why is that important? Well, to Ben's point, if you don't know that and you happen to push that one button or change that one field or create that one new process, there's a really good chance that you bring the whole house of cards down. And so for Sonar, as we look to support additional rev ops leaders and continue to grow this space, it does allow us to have one central repository for everyone to work in together, to collaborate and to issue change in a confident and safe way. And it instills more clarity and certainty in their day to day jobs.

I'll let Ben talk a little bit about SaaSOptics as well.

Yeah. SaaSOptics itself is a subscription billing platform. So it's designed to take a lot of the confusion and and work out of SaaS billing. You know, our our process is designed to streamline order to cash, generate metrics and analytics and reporting that you're just not gonna get other places based on the data that you have available to you.

You know, integrations with HubSpot and Xero and Salesforce. We're we're able to pull all that data and push data in and in so that your team is always aware of what's going on. And then, you know, we have a cool podcast called Get Funded Stay Funded that Derek Thomas hosts. You haven't, you know, this is my shout out there.

Give give it a follow-up. Check it out.

Absolutely.

And so as yeah. As we wrap up, obviously being a digital platform here, you know, if you do have any questions for Ben or myself, there's contact information here on the screen. We'd we'd love to chat with you about it. Especially to hear how your company is either employing a RevOps framework or thinking about installing a RevOps framework into your organization.

We'd be more than happy to discuss that and kind of hear just your ideas and how your company is growing within this. But with that said, we'll pass it over to to Ben. Go ahead.

I was gonna say we promise there won't be any sales pitches from us either. We're here to help and learn as much as possible.

Thanks guys. I do have a few questions. I don't know if they have the questions that the audience would ask but the first thing that struck me about the presentation was when you got to that communication slide and there's like twenty different modes of communication and then putting that together with your boardroom story of how revenue just sort of declined as it went through as each mouth opened, it's a single source of truth issue, isn't it? I mean, isn't that at the bottom of all this? And to me, that plethora of communication tools is kind of the enemy of a single source of truth, or if not an enemy, it's friction that you have to overcome.

Are you finding that, as Ben did with cases, are you finding ways to get more stuff into Salesforce to keep it as your single source of truth? Or what's your strategy for that generally?

Absolutely. It's interesting because while him and I both will agree on this, we've always looked at Salesforce being our single source of truth from a data our hope is that all of our customers kind of embrace that. But what gets really tough sometimes in that is while it's still there, while your single source of truth is there and your reporting is all centralized there, people can still jump into a report, slice and dice it a bunch of different ways. And that's really where you start to get some of the ambiguity between well, I ran report number one and it gave me number one. Well, I ran report number two and it gave me number two.

So really if you think about how to centralize that, what we've both done is create dashboards and reports that are essentially read only. And and even take a step back before we get to that point, if you can think to understand what metrics marketing sales and customer success need. And if we all get the thumbs up on all of those, let's have one place and one set of reports that are quote read only. At least as a starting point to make sure that everybody's looking at the same numbers on a daily basis. They know what their goals are. And from there, sure, if we need to slice and dice them, we can. But at least having the centralized starting point for it removes a ton of friction.

And then to your point on the communication side, how do we effectively get that out? What's great about some of the technology that we have now, there's a million mediums for it. I don't think there's one perfect, thing. I know a lot of companies love Slack.

I know a lot of folks don't use it other than just making sure they can send fun GIFs and pictures to each other. Yeah. So you know, kinda whatever your cup of tea is on how you communicate it. I think it really starts down to knowing it it boils down to knowing what the centralized place for the data lives.

Who owns those numbers, and how do they display those.

Yeah. I think it it comes back to data governance. It's a big thing. In the last couple years Salesforce has rolled out governance fields.

Governance governance tracking on fields in Salesforce so you can determine who owns the data, you know, what kind of data it is HIPAA compliant, something like that. But even more so, I think it's really important to understand that when you're slicing and dicing data and you're building your own reports that you're matching filters correctly and you're actually matching report types. So Salesforce gives you the option to create multiple different report types and those can be accounts with contacts. Those could just be accounts, opportunities with contact roles.

And depending on the report type you select, it really does impact the data it's showing you. And if you're using a different report type with different filters, then all bets are off. Right? You're gonna have to find a way to it's hard to reconcile that data.

And then you're gonna run into challenges where people are exporting the data at Salesforce and just messing with it and changing it around in Excel and then wondering why it's not matching what's coming out of Salesforce. So there there is a lot of, you know, smushiness, I guess, is the term I'm gonna use now and this is gonna bite me in the ass. But a lot of smushiness around reporting and that governance if you're not super careful and definitions aren't wholly defined company wide holistically, you're gonna get bit in the ass.

Yeah.

I'm on team Ben when it comes to interruptions from Slack. I mean, I've seen it used as a pretty decent communication tool. The other thing the other issue I have with Slack is that the conversations are memorialized well. Right? You can search Slack, but, you know, a lot there's just a lot of garbage in there. Are you and it doesn't seem like Chatter has really gotten the adoption that Salesforce wants to have it, wants it to have clearly, but is there any other way that you've facilitated memorializing important conversations about a customer within Salesforce other than Chatter or, you know, is there some kind of integration that you like Slack integration or some other chat tool integration?

So me personally, I'm a huge proponent of the Chatter. I think taking advantage of that newsfeed and that Chatter feed is really big. But then, you know, make sure you have activity tracking. If you're sending emails in at a Salesforce, if you're if you're working out Outlook or Gmail, make sure that you're loading that to Salesforce as well.

So you can Salesforce use the term loft it right. Like you can loft it into Salesforce out of your Gmail and then it's tracked as activities in on that record. And then you can report off that. It's really hard to make those kinda hard requirements because if you're if you're saying, hey, fill this field out.

Anybody can put whatever they want in there. There's no real way to validate what the data they're saying. So that that takes a it it it it's a change of heart and a change of mind to get them to to really buy into what what we're looking to get out of it. Yeah.

It it is tough. There's so many mediums right now for communication that some can be more noisy than others. I agree if, you know, if I'm in two to three hours worth of back to back meetings and I don't get a chance to look down at a couple of the Slacks that I have, I might be spending five or ten minutes kinda reading through a thread trying to catch up. And so, you know, it works well for some companies.

It doesn't work well for others. My only suggestion would be is you kinda get on the same page as your entire organization. If we're gonna live in a Slack based community world, let's jump in there fully embrace it. If it's gonna be just via email, that's fine too.

But it's more important to standardize that and get the thumbs up across your company. The other way that I look at it is, especially from a data perspective and metrics perspective, I don't think you can over communicate any of that.

Kinda goes back to that first point. Nobody likes being caught off guard. And so if you have daily reports, this is standard functionality of Salesforce. Get that dashboard to pop into everybody's inbox first thing in the morning.

If they think that's too noisy or too troublesome to get an extra email every time, set up an email filter and push it to a, you know, push it to a folder. But at the end of the day, if you're able to constantly put those numbers and metrics in front of people, it alleviates so much pain of miscommunication or of, well I didn't know that number was trending in the wrong direction. Yes you did. You get an email once a day about it.

Things like that that help.

Yeah, so my last question is, I mean it all sounds great. Do you have any advice for people who wanna impose this on their organization? I'm guessing the only way this works is buy in from the top and somehow buy in from the top. And I don't know what kind of pressure you can put on these siloed organizations. I mean, silo walls are generally very thick and very well tended by a lot of people in the organization. What have you seen work?

My first bit of advice I give everyone is start early with it. You know even if you're in that startup growth mode of zero to one hundred employees to start, the typical time to bring in an operations professional is around the fifty headcount mark is typically the ratio that you start to see. It could be as early as you know in the first thirty employees. But typically between thirty and fifty is when you bring in someone to run operations.

I suggest putting, you know, embracing that rev ops framework on day one. Don't hire someone just to do marketing ops on day one or just to do sales ops or just to do success ops. Start with a rev ops framework in mind. Again, you're wanting to understand what these metrics are for your entire company. Now you can quickly go talk to any CEO or CFO or CRO and understand what those metrics are. And within a matter of thirty seconds, they stretch well beyond one group. So if you start on day one thinking about how that data should flow all the way through your funnel and support your entire go to market team, it makes way more sense to start there.

So that's always my suggestion to start early in that mentality. It's tough to break down those silos but I think the minute that you start to understand there are shared metrics across these groups and each metric really impacts the group upstream and downstream from it, it only makes sense to put everybody in what room to start making some of those decisions.

Great.

Ben, anything else you want to add or You know, think to Brad's point, it's best to start early.

The challenge you're gonna have is if you're an established company and you're trying to make that pivot, that's when you need the buy in and you need to be, I don't wanna say forceful but you need to be, you know, everybody needs to be on the same page like, this the change we're making. This is the pivot we are we are taking. And then just do it. You know, don't it's not worth the phase in phase out, phase in rev ops in and sales ops out. If you have the framework and you have the team built and the and the process designed, just do it. It's you're gonna have more headaches otherwise.

Well, great. Well, we'll let those be the last words of your presentation. Thanks again, guys, for giving this presentation and giving us some of your time and your insight. And your contact information is on the page. And I hope that some of our conference participants will get in touch.

Thank you so much.

We appreciate it. Thank you so much. Have a great day.

‍