'Mastering RevOps for Business Growth' with Jeremey Donovan

Welcome to the Scale with Strive podcast, the place where you come to listen to some of the world’s most influential leaders of the SaaS industry. 🚀

I am your host, Adam Richardson, and on today’s episode I am excited to welcome you to Season 2!

We kick off this Season with a man who will need no introduction – if I say the words “Hey Salespeople!”, you’ll know, of course, that I am referring to the industry Thought Leader, Jeremey Donovan.

Jeremey is Executive Vice President Revenue Operations and Strategy at Insight Partners.

He is also an Author, Thought Leader, the man behind the SellingSherpa and has over 25 years industry experience, having worked for the likes of Gartner, SalesLoft and CB Insights.

Some of my key takeaways from the conversation today were:

💡 Breaking down RevOps – What is it? How does it help your business? Why is it important?

💡 How to know if you are ready to make your first RevOps hire.

💡 What skillsets to look for when making that hire.

 Let’s Dive In!

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Watch the episode on YouTube 🎥 – https://youtu.be/G3uzVd0ns4E

Connect with Jeremey here - https://www.linkedin.com/in/jeremeydonovan/

Connect with Adam here - https://www.linkedin.com/in/saasheadhunter/

Learn more about Strive here - https://scalewithstrive.com/solutions/

Transcript

Adam: 0:14

Welcome to the Scale with Stride podcast, the place where you come to listen to some of the world's most influential leaders of the SaaS industry. I'm your host, adam Richardson, and on today's episode, I'm excited to welcome you to season two. We kick off the season with a man who needs no introduction. If I say the words hey, salespeople, you'll know, of course I'm referring to industry thought leader Jeremy Donovan. Jeremy is executive vice president of revenue operations and strategy at Insight Parmars. He's also an author thought leader, the man behind selling Sherpa, and has over 25 years of industry experience, having worked for the likes of Gartner, salesloft and CB Insights.

Adam: 1:04

Some of my key takeaways from today's conversation breaking down rebops. What is it, how does it help your business and why is it so important, how to know when you're ready to make your first rebops higher and what skill sets you should look for when making that higher. Let's dive in. So, jeremy, thank you very much for joining us on the Scale with Stride podcast. I really appreciate you giving up your time today and, yeah, really excited to the conversation that we're going to have today. So, yeah, thanks for joining us. Awesome to chat, adam. Good stuff, good stuff. So for a man that doesn't really need an introduction. You've got a huge following on LinkedIn, very well respected within the industry. I just want to start off with the executive vice president for revenue operations and strategy at Insight Parmars. So just to start things off, tell us what does that role entail?

Jeremey: 2:04

Yeah, so super high level. Insight is a VC firm. We have about $80 billion of assets under management, over 500 portfolio companies, and we divide our world into two pieces the investment side and the advisory side. So I am on the advisory side, having operated in revenue functions but also actually marketing I was a CMO once and engineering and products. I've done a bunch of different things in my career, but the job at this point is to help our portfolio companies grow more efficiently. I think we used to say grow. Now we say grow efficiently. So that's the job, and that just means talking to them about revenue, operations and strategy pillars, and strategy for me is about people processing technology, in that order. So, yeah, I'm sure we'll get into a bunch of that today, but that is it in the nutshell.

Adam: 2:55

Good stuff and I suppose, for someone like yourself who's had such a strong career as an operator with lots of success to shout about, how have you found the transition from, I suppose, like executing daily, being in the weeds and being the operator, to then move in more to like an advisory role as opposed to coaching from the sidelines kind of thing? How have you found that transition?

Jeremey: 3:23

It's a bit funny because in a way, my career has come full circle. I worked very briefly as a semiconductor engineer but then I became a semiconductor industry analyst and I really think that this job is like being an analyst. It's almost a hybrid of an analyst and a CSI CSM. It's a very service oriented job and, because we're typically minority investors, big difference between VC and PE, as I've discovered in the job, is on the VC side. You're reactive, so you're not really going and being directive about what people should do. You're giving them options about what they can do when they come to ask you. So, yeah, it's a little bit of coming home to my roots, because I was an analyst for eight years earlier on in my career At your time at Gartner.

Adam: 4:13

Yeah, at my time at.

Jeremey: 4:14

Gartner. I mean, I found the transition to be, I guess, delightful in a way, because I love to learn and I love to teach. If I weren't doing this, I would be, I think, a high school math and computer science teacher. So this is my version of it.

Adam: 4:28

I was going to ask the question because, given your background, particularly from the idea electrical engineering and statistics academia, what you would have been if you weren't doing what you were doing now. But you took the words right out of the mouth, so yeah well.

Jeremey: 4:44

I was going to say I actually thought about it. I thought about, you know, called active retirement. I guess, as a teacher, and because I think it's a very admirable profession, I'm also interested, obviously, in the subject matter. Ultimately, the reason I'm not doing it right now is, I think, the degree of flexibility. I think as a teacher you have a little less flexibility and you know, I've talked to a lot of teachers and they said it's about the teaching, but it's also about managing the expectations of the parents, which is a little bit of a pain. So I'm avoiding dealing with that.

Adam: 5:22

Yeah, that's it. That's it. And as opposed to you know, it definitely would lean into the fact that you know you're an avid reader. You know you're a scholar, you've written books, you've seen, you know you've got the sales shirker seems like reading and studying. This is definitely a passion of yours.

Jeremey: 5:40

Well, I'd love to learn and I do definitely believe what separates great people in the workplace, you know it is outwork, absolutely, and out-learn right, and learning is can be, I guess, passive, I guess in a way from reading books and consuming content, and I think also it needs to be active is that I've had the good fortune in my career not at all times, but certainly in the last 10 to 15 years of having incredible bosses who, you know, know more. They either know more than me or, even if they don't know more than me, they know how to call my BS right and and and and refocus me and I'm, I'm none of us are flawless, right, like I'm plenty flawed in the workplace. So so you know, to course correct me is is really useful.

Adam: 6:36

Well, I love that outwork and out-learn. I think my business partner, alex, he's got a real man crush on you. He's he's the avid reader. You know he'll read a book, he'll reread it, he'll write his notes. That's his way, how he consumes and remembers things. So I think if we're to put you two in a room together, you'd be sat there all day going on, leader about the different books that you've read, and I think you'd go on pretty well for a. But no love loves to hear that. So, and I think in terms of, like you know, wanting to dive straight into the bulk of today's conversation, which is naturally all geared around Rebops, I think you know to to to kick the conversation off like what is Rebops and and why is it so important in today's, in today's world?

Jeremey: 7:20

Yeah. So I think actually one of the best ways to explain this is one of the CROs I used to work for, sean Murray, who's now the CRO of Greenhouse, once said to me hey, jeremy, you work on the business and I'll work in the business, and I don't know that it's always that clean of a separation, but I appreciated it. So in the business met like what's going on quarter to quarter, right, yes, he was also making big strategic decisions, but you know, with the execution of, I think, being a thought partner on strategy and then the execution of turning that strategy into like actual implementation, that that was the job. And what does that mean? Right? I think there are five, six core responsibilities within within Rebops and, mind you, rebops is a bit of a rebranding of what everyone called sales operations before.

Adam: 8:12

Yeah.

Jeremey: 8:15

With an asterisk, I'll get to the address in a second. So the core responsibilities strategy and planning work, which could be divided, you know, between a normal Rebops team and a FPNA team, analytics and forecasting again those things could be divided. What a lot of people think of in Rebops is the systems and data side. So that's part three. Part four is working on comp and quota, part five is territory and part six, again, which could be in other places, is deal desk. So those to me are the core responsibilities and then, if you will, those are almost, I don't know, we'll call them horizontal responsibilities in a way, and then the vertical responsibilities would be whether that applies to sales, whether that applies to customer success, whether it applies to marketing. So it's almost that you know that intersection, those intersection points of those responsibilities with those particular functions.

Adam: 9:08

And if you were to explain it, to say like a let's say you're explained to a five year old, and it's no simplistic terms like what was the purpose of?

Jeremey: 9:16

it If super well, I don't know that a five year old would necessarily get this one, but the most simple way to explain it is is it's it's a way to increase sales productivity. How do I help sellers sell more? Yeah, when I was, I think when I was five years old, I was selling mangoes because we had a mango tree and I would set up a little table in front and I would sell mangoes for probably a quarter of a piece. I don't know, maybe it was a dime, I don't know. Way back in the day right. So like if I was explained to my five year old self, you know, revenue operations would be helping me figure out how to sell more mangoes per hour. So I could go. So I could go buy more whatever kites and baseball cards and whatever trinkets at the what used to be called a five and dime store. Again, I'm dating myself there.

Adam: 10:04

Well, I was listening to a podcast the other day and the host said and imagine you're explaining this to a Labrador. And I thought I don't know how he's going to get around this one. So I went with the five year old. Yeah, I take it quite literally.

Jeremey: 10:15

I guess there was a dog in that movie up that could talk. No, if the dog could talk, you'd be all right.

Adam: 10:24

There we go and as a recruiter, we saw such a significant spike post COVID in that 2021 boom. There was a huge spike in demand for RevOps across all seniorities within the business unit. Why do you think that was, particularly given the timing, and what are your thoughts on that?

Jeremey: 10:47

Yeah, I definitely have seen it in our portfolio. But then also getting recruiter messages on LinkedIn. I think it was a realization that, right, we needed to find a way to become more productive because the growth at all costs was just like throw lots of bodies at the problem. And then here you were sitting in a situation where your sales and marketing as a percentage of revenue had exploded, which means your CAC payback, which that's an input into, had exploded. Cac is customer acquisition cost, which is your sales and marketing costs relative to what you bring in.

Jeremey: 11:21

So the long CAC payback times, really high sales and marketing expenses. You got to figure out how to get more efficient and someone's got to solve the problem right. And if the CRO and the sales team is working in the business deal, you know fighting to win deals which things just became. They were just gradually and suddenly, I guess, becoming more and more competitive. Right, there's 10 or 20 companies doing every category of everything. You got to find a way to get more productive. So I think that's where the demand for RevOps came in was leverage in the business.

Adam: 12:04

Yeah, and so I know you talked about it just previously. So if I'm sat, you know, around a board table and we're talking about bringing someone in to focus on the business, as you put it like, what are the? What are the points that I should be getting across in terms of how RevOps can help your organization increase revenue and become more profitable? So how does it do that?

Jeremey: 12:30

I think there's well I'm going to come back to those core responsibilities and I think there's maybe like a RevOps maturity cycle of the way that leadership, ceo, cro, vue and even CFO, I guess to some extent Vue, revops the version one of it is like RevOps is just my systems people, right, they run Salesforce and that's it. And you know, if you couldn't do anything else, you do have to keep the lights on. So that is keeping the lights on. That's not necessarily going to improve your sales productivity dramatically, but I think it's really. By way of example, with use cases, so in the last operating job that I had, I was at a company called Salesloft that does sales engagement software and every customer yeah, every quarter I would do us, we would do a sprint on the team, and that sprint was one thing that we thought would have the single biggest impact on our ability to continue growing. That was really that was the thing was you didn't want to be the person or the team that's, that was responsible for slowing the revenue growth of the company. So so one of the sprints, for example, was that we reps had tons and tons of accounts and it's unproductive for them to research every one of those accounts, prioritize them, figure out which ones to go after. They just don't have the time and the ability to do that.

Jeremey: 13:55

So you know, we did a sprint for a quarter where we went deeply analytical. This is where you know the statistics, math comes in and any end programming. We went deeply analytical and built a quite sophisticated account scoring model that prioritized those accounts for the sales reps and now they could just kind of go in and sort by priority of company or the account priority score and go in so like that has the ability to help them be way more productive. Another one is territory. So you can take those account scores, you can build equal potential territories. Compensation, right, if you have the right motivation for people, right, they're much more likely to be to be productive. So these are all. They're all like levers. It's extremely difficult to measure the the impact of one thing like how do you measure the impact of better account prioritization? Again, like the measure was, the measure was more are we able to hit, meet or exceed our growth targets?

Adam: 14:57

Yeah, and from your experience you know, as an operator in this space, in an organization like sales law, that's had such success from, from some of the key initiatives that you ran and in in Rebops like what would you say was some of the most impactful, like what really helped move the needle in terms of, like sales productivity, shall we say.

Jeremey: 15:17

Yeah, I would count scoring and territory assignment. I would say we're we're really big needle movers. I was a maybe I'll cite two more, since I already said those two. Another one I had a very close partner in crime there who I he was that had a sales enablement and the two of us worked together on, you know, making sure that some of these kind of other other education got to got to the Rep. So the where I'm getting at here is deal reviews. I think deal reviews are are are probably one of the most effective things you can do to improve performance, especially on the enterprise mid market and enterprise sales side. And are you talking both one and last?

Adam: 16:01

or just deals one.

Jeremey: 16:03

More well deal reviews, not while the deals are open, while the opportunities are open. So you know going in and applying some kind of rigorous framework for evaluating deal health on a regular basis. So it's both the methodology that you're using as well as the cadence that you're applying, whether that's medic or whatever you're using. So that that, I think, was a big, a big needle mover for for productivity. The other one I would say is we did a customer success sprint as well, and the CS sprint was. It was actually there's a bit of a story behind this one the. We had a dip in CSAT at one point and that dip in CSAT happened. Remember, there was a period, right after the COVID restrictions were lifted for the first time this was before Amicron and there was this thing called the great resignation, so. So when that great resignation happened, we lost a whole bunch of customers, success and support people. They just, you know, moved and we then so CSAT, dropped on on some of the support tickets and we thought, okay, we're going to hire people, we need to ramp them, and that takes time. We also need some, you know, technology in place to help. So, again, it's not just the tech, it's people, process and technology. But we did two things on the customer success and support side. On the support side, we put in this is pre Gen AI we put in an AI tool that allowed customers to self serve. So it read all of our historical support tickets and gave them the ability to basically have a chat, an AI based chat bot that would answer their questions, and it could do that via chat or email response and if they then wanted if it didn't answer the question, they want to talk to a person, they could. But that made us a ton more efficient on the support side and the CSAT scores went, went back up.

Jeremey: 17:59

The other piece was on customer success. So you know our cms, just as a lot of places do. They got dumped a whole bunch of accounts and then they just need to figure out what to do and a lot of that is reactive. So, just like we did an account score for potential accounts, we did a customer health score for existing accounts. That had 20, 25 different factors inside of that and then we would we knew that there were certain plays we could run that if there was an issue with the health on a particular dimension, we would queue the CSM up to say like hey, there's an engagement issue in this account. Or hey, they only have one third party integration and we know if they have a second third party integration or more than they're much more likely to renew, so we would queue up these. Next best actions for the CSM is based on customer health. So if that was another needle moving thing, oh, nice, interesting.

Adam: 18:59

And and then you know, revops is a term that's, you know, increasingly become more and more used. It's more in demand from a skill set perspective is more and more individuals within software companies, even at an earlier stage now, where people are sort of building with the future in mind rather than getting to a certain scale, then bringing in and trying to get the house and all that. How, like? How do you know when you're ready for revops, like, are there any leading indicators to say like now will be a good time, or is that? Is it around? Like infrastructure, you talk about people processing technology, like what? What is it that would be a determinant, that's to say, you're ready and able to have an individual come in and make a positive impact in that kind of role?

Jeremey: 19:44

Yeah, well, we do benchmark in our portfolio when like think about ratios of revops to, let's say, like AES, csm, sdr is right people who are sales and sales support types of roles. So you know, I think the first revops hire is very often a systems person because, again, you have to keep the lights on, so that person is usually managing the CRM, that. That person's probably coming in when there's I don't know, tennis sellers before that and I don't know, there's not an exact cutoff, but before that you probably got somebody doing multiple hats. You might even have a salesperson who is doing some of the CRM stuff, or you've outsourced which is quite common right To an agency, which I think is probably even better idea. But yeah, the typical ratio is like, for very early stage, 11, 10 or 11 to one. So once you have, as I said, 10, 11 people on the sales team, it's time to hire a rebus person and that ratio then creeps up over time to like 15 to one as companies go 10 million, 100 million. So I think you just kind of go by the staffing ratios and then you just add things sequentially.

Jeremey: 21:08

So you're gonna start off with the CRM person. I think the second hire is gonna be probably someone who is gonna be much more focused on deeper analytics and forecasting. There's no perfect order here. It's based on your need. The next person I think should be that person who has the strategy and planning job. So they're gonna be a little bit more senior. You might even have the CRM person and the analytics person report into that strategy and analytics person. At that phase, comp and quota and deal desk are probably being done by finance, but over time, right, you can absorb those functions into Rebops and free the FPNA people up a bit, and then territory tends to be a little bit more sophisticated. So that's probably your next hire. That's the order I would roughly go in as I was building it out.

Adam: 22:04

So, like you said, to build it out in stages, but the sort of hiring triggers for Rebops will be based on the size of your sales organization.

Jeremey: 22:14

Yeah, I think that's really important. By the way, like I don't know whether it's CFOs listening or sales professionals, rebops people but one thing I've always done when I've gone into a Rebops role is I don't wanna have a negotiation with this CFO every X number of weeks, months. So what I do is I go in and I just negotiate and I say look, here's the benchmark for the ratio of Rebops people to sales people defined as, again, aes, csms, sdrs, what have you? However, you define that and let's build out the financial plan so that we're gonna hire to have enough Rebop support given those ratios over time, and that, to me, has always worked out very well, that I don't have to negotiate, then there's no questions. It's like I went four years at sales law without having to renegotiate that agreement and with the CFO, so we were just able to continue staffing.

Adam: 23:14

Yeah, okay, so you've given like a really clear indication as to when an organization is ready to start thinking about Rebops and bringing people in, a bit of an idea in terms of the different stages of when to bring in what type of person or what type of skill set within that domain, like one of the things I became to talk about is like how to successfully implement a Rebop strategy into your business. Now, let's assume that this is a bit of a latest age organization with a bit more of a developed sales organization and they're sort of ready for that full suite of Rebop skills. How, what kind of advice would you be giving people in terms of how to implement?

Jeremey: 24:02

Yeah, well, I think the biggest implementation question these days is about where should Rebops live, which is, I think, is an implementation question and whether that's centralized or distributed. So, to me, if you have a true CRO and there aren't many of these, in fact, I've noticed the 2024 trend that people are who are like what I would call a true CRO, where they have sales, cs and marketing, they're calling themselves president of go-to-market now. So the title elevation has continued, as you've probably seen as well. So if you have one of those right, then you can have a true Rebops, centralized Rebop function where they're looking across sales, marketing, customer success. In most instances, you have decentralized Rebops because you have, at the very least, a separate person who runs sales and CS from the CMO, and in that case I would not fight to pull marketing ops into the Rebops function. Rebops in that case probably reports to the CRO and then let marketing ops report into the CMO. Just that alignment, I think, is so important. There's no reason to necessarily pull that out. So, yeah, I think it. Yeah.

Adam: 25:25

So, as you put it, a true CRO that's responsible for sales, marketing and customer success. Why, what's your thought process around, like marketing ops continue to report into marketing and not bringing that into like a central function to help with that kind of alignment?

Jeremey: 25:41

Yeah, I mean it's always a trade-off, right Is, let's say, you have a great Rebops leader who has great strategy chops, great analytics chops, great planning chops, like the whole deal. Like you could argue, it would be better to put your marketing ops person under in that structure and because they're gonna benefit from the leadership. But the other trade-off, though, is kind of speed and trust that I think that trumps those other things that, if I'm a C, I also put myself in the shoes of. I was a CMO once, and if I'm a CMO, I want my analytical right hand you know analytics and strategy right hand like all the time reporting to me and not being with no threat of that person getting pulled onto other projects and so forth. So I put myself in the shoes of the CMO. I just think that agility that you gain from having that person directly report into the functional leader is really important.

Adam: 26:46

So that's Do you think that's influenced by your own bias, coming from a marketing perspective as well? Like, if we were to get a CRO on the line now, would they necessarily agree with that? Or like what's the contrary arguing to that?

Jeremey: 27:01

Well, I feel like I have a little bit of the luxury of having been in both marketing and sales. If someone hadn't been in marketing, I think they would try to fight for the consolidation of resources. But I think that's a human thing, right Is, humans try to grab, you know, power, resources, money, like whatever they can. But I think the more evolved way to do it is again put yourself in the shoes of the other person and ask yourself what's the most effective thing, and not just for the person individually, I think it's for the success of the organization. I think organizations you know, if you were to it's hard to do this test right. But like if you could A-B test and have you know an organization where you had these separate CRO and CMO and in one you had RebOps centralized and the other one you allowed marketing ops to be within marketing, I actually think that the one where marketing ops was in marketing would perform better. It's impossible to measure.

Adam: 28:05

It's like the age old question of where should be the asset on the sales or marketing?

Jeremey: 28:09

I have a strong opinion about that one actually.

Jeremey: 28:13

I need to ask why did they sit? I've run sales development in a number of different places. My philosophy is that first of all you must separate inbound and outbound SDRs. If you don't have scale then you can't do that, but once you have scale you must separate them. I strongly believe outbound SDRs should report into sales and inbound into marketing. The reason for that is because the career path for outbound SDRs is into sales. They're learning the prospecting muscle. They're tied to the AEs. They're learning the qualification muscle. It's the correct profile In my experience. Inbound SDRs sure, there are exceptions, but inbound SDRs are building a very different muscle. They're reactive, yes, they're qualifying, but often there's not as much persuasion and influence. They're not cold calling Because they don't build that muscle. They often struggle to move into quota carrying, especially hunting oriented sales roles. I've generally seen those inbound SDRs move into customer success, support marketing, stay in marketing and other exciting roles. That's my thought. Then the other piece is also alignment.

Jeremey: 29:47

Marketing is generating MQLs. There's always this frustration and tension between marketing and sales on actioning those MQLs. Look, let's just have marketing drink their own champagne, eat their own dog food, whatever you want to say. A really good example of this is when I was a CMO, I thought about two different types of leads. One was priority one leads a demo request or talk to sales. Then priority two, or everything else, was things that a lot of people would think of as MQLs, where someone maybe had a certain persona and or engagement with content. They would score points and then we would elevate them right to a marketing qualified lead.

Jeremey: 30:38

After downloading a certain number of white papers or attending webinars or whatever, the wake up I had when I moved into sales was the only valid leads are demo requests, all that other stuff, content downloads and whatever. These days I'll use a more modern term. I think that's intent. It's very passive, very passive intent. My point here, though, is, if you put the inbound SDRs in marketing, they're going to learn. They're going to learn what's a quality lead. They're going to learn to tune their MQL thresholds. My conclusion after all, that was the goal of all marketing again, hyperbolic statement, there's always exceptions is to push people towards demo requests. Once they request a demo, then you get the salesperson right on them. That's long-winded explanation of where I think inbound and outbound SDRs should live, based on a lot of experience and observation.

Adam: 31:54

Yeah, it's great to hear you're taking. I've hosted maybe more eight or nine round table events in the likes of San Fran, new York, berlin, london, soon to be in Boston. That question comes up at every single dinner.

Jeremey: 32:11

Yeah. There's a new question, which is should SDRs exist? That's the 2024 question, replacing with AI.

Jeremey: 32:21

AI or just like I mean. A lot of people will say I mean, it's fun for pundits to go around saying XYZ is dead, the 2024 thing is, outbound prospecting is dead, which is not true. The outbound SDRing as a verb makes sense, but the threshold for ASP and or win rate has gone way up. It might have been efficient to have outbound SDRs selling a $10,000 to $20,000, a CV product a couple of years ago. Not anymore, unless you have some exceptional win rate, which, on outbound prospecting, is very unlikely. Now. That threshold is more like probably 40k plus a CV product. If you're below about 40k outbound SDRing, it's probably not working.

Jeremey: 33:23

I don't even know that AI is going to work. I find it irritating and annoying when people prospect me that way. I think I'm not alone. I think the better use of money is to focus on partners. This is what we're seeing our portfolio companies do. They're either redirecting that money to develop partner channels or they're redirecting that money to drive what I refer to as true inbound, to drive more demo requests. I think that's a better use of money when you have a sub $40,000 a CV product.

Adam: 33:58

Interesting. I could probably sit down and talk about that all day with you, Jeremy.

Adam: 34:02

Let's pull it back to RevOps. Then we were talking about the implementation of a successful RevOps strategy. I think one of the things that I'd like to touch on is around the implementation of technology. Different organizations will regularly have different technology stacks and ensuring that the alignment between sales, marketing, customers, et cetera, from a technology standpoint and having the right tools is going to be fundamental to enable RevOps to be successful. What does a great technology stack look like for yourself in relation to RevOps?

Jeremey: 34:42

Yeah, well, there's tools for sellers and there's also RevOps tools as well. The tools for sellers what's core? You got a CRM core. You got data service or services you probably need to attend to recommend to data providers. You have probably some sort of sales engagement platform like where I came from. What's core stuff for the sellers? Your CSMs are probably going to hopefully have some kind of a customer success system that helps them with health scoring and workflow. Next, best action you got a marketing automation platform right on the marketing side. Then, core RevOps tools you kind of think back to those categories. You likely have some sort of revenue intelligence and forecasting type of solution for reporting and dashboards and so forth. You probably got a common quota compensation execution tool. Then, interestingly, some of the other stuff.

Jeremey: 36:01

A lot of companies get by without tools like territory planning and management. There are tools out there but a lot of people get by without them. Real tasks larger companies are going to have CPQ. That's another core RevOps tool. Then, on strategy and planning a lot of times those tools are going to sit inside of finance. The finance team might have a financial planning tool that helps them build out models. I think a lot of the strategy and planning work, frankly, is in Excel or Google Sheets. Even until you're a 100 million plus, probably approaching $200 million company, there are some things out there that are useful for sales capacity planning. It's a bit of an emerging category, then. I guess. You can go on and on and on, but I think another very useful tool A whole debate about nice to have or need to have is conversation intelligence tools. For going back to the rep side, I'm a big fan of conversation.

Jeremey: 37:16

You notice I can't mention company names, but yes, that would be an example, part of my regulatory restriction. I can't mention company names, but yes, companies in that category, gun can send me the referral fee. Right yeah, exactly.

Adam: 37:33

Well, it's good to hear like a high level overview from a technology standpoint and I think implementing Rebops and that, like alignment of different departments and different people, is going to be a big part of implementation. Like how you know, if you were given me advice now around implementing this, aligning sales, marketing, customer success and those sort of you know individual figureheads for each department like what are the best, what's the best advice that you'd give to someone around improving and encouraging alignment between the three sort of core areas?

Jeremey: 38:06

Yeah, I mean I relate back to again my own experiences and a big part of it, I think, is just governance around what tools you have and what the budget is for those tools. So the CFO is probably going to be very involved in that, even more than right, like the CRO or CMO or Chief Customer Officer. So I think a big part of that coordination yes it comes from Rebops, but I actually think it comes from Finance and it's setting appropriate budgets for tools. But the other part of governance is making sure that you're not adding duplicative tools to your stack, and I think another 2023-2024 trend not I think for sure is consolidation of the tech stack. Right, it's got a point where you know you might have had three or four different vendors for three or four different point solutions, but now there's been a lot of convergence and they've all cross-created second products and now you can consolidate your tech stack right into a smaller set of vendors, which not only has purchasing and vendor management benefits, but you know, if you've integrated whatever I mean a lot of people are integrating sales, engagement, revenue, intelligence and conversation intelligence. Next, best action like there's probably five or 10 companies who have all of those four components, if not more, so like it's a good time to look and say, hey, maybe I can consolidate there. So that to me is, I think, is a big part of the governance.

Jeremey: 39:46

And I was just. I'm always remembering stories. So I mentioned earlier the AI chatbot and that was a very complex orchestration in order to get that in place, because our marketing team had another chatbot, like a non-AI team, a chatbot that was really good for marketing use cases, but really not good for customer support, post-sale use cases. So I mean, that took a lot of you know, talking about strategy, people, process, technology. It took a lot of people persuasion in order to get that approved. And it wasn't the money right, it was we're going to met on paper to the CMO and CFO and to others it looks like two chatbots. So why are we, you know, why are we adding a second chatbot and, but execution wise, very, very different, those two things. So like that's part of the governance debate is, we could very easily have said no to that second thing and just tried to make the other one work. Wouldn't work as well. But you know, you do what you do. What is an optimization exercise? Yeah, okay.

Adam: 41:06

And I think another key well, key part of RAVROPS is particularly around like metrics you know growing to really understand you know understand the business, look for opportunities to improve efficiencies and increase like profitability and a lot of the sort of you know key metrics that you hear thrown around. You mentioned before around like customer acquisition costs, lifetime value and like, from your perspective within RAVROPS, what are like the most fundamental metrics that any you know RAVROPS leader worth us, worth assault should be monitoring and sort of live and die by.

Jeremey: 41:44

Yeah Well, I mean I was talking a little bit about those things like customer acquisition cost is very much lagging indicators. I think the real value for RAVOS people yes, there's a whole bunch of lagging indicators but I think it's really around some of the leading indicators and I'm a big devotee of I call them the PTC, bladebogic, appdynamics, snowflakediaspora, it's all these people who kind of came from that heritage and if you ask them this question they would say it's. They would actually use an acronym PG. It's PG all day, every day, which is pipeline generation. So I think the more critical thing for RAVROPS to be looking at is pipeline metrics.

Jeremey: 42:26

So you could go all the way back to activities. If activities are strongly correlated with outcomes, I would do the math on that. There are certain activities that likely are so, for instance, like proof of concepts and like truly validated POCs that are being run. That might be a good activity, for instance, to track. But on the pipeline generation piece, it's looking on a per rep basis. What's their pipe gen over the course of whatever the appropriate period is? For a SMB rep it might be over the course of a week even, or two weeks or a month. For enterprise reps you're probably looking at quarterly pipe gen relative to target. So it's not just, it's relative to target for. And if you want to get super sophisticated, the way I've done it is not just is to actually set pipe gen targets on a per person basis by adjusting for their win rates. So if someone has lower win rates, then they're going to need to generate more pipe to hit their quota.

Adam: 43:30

So I'll call that person adjusted pipe gen versus target and then so what you're saying is have like a blueprint for success for the business as a whole but then tweak it for the individual based on their ability, win rate and them as an individual. So does that help from an engagement perspective and getting buy into those KPIs as well?

Jeremey: 43:53

For sure, yeah, yeah for sure. And I mean reps don't love it when they have a higher pipe gen target because their win rate is lower. But that just tells them, hey, like you want to lower pipe gen target, you got to get more effective. And get more effective is not helpful but it's hey, relative to your peers you're not as effective as they are. You know Jane has a. Jane's win rate is 35%, yours is 25%.

Jeremey: 44:25

Going back to the conversation intelligence thing, go listen to some of Jane's calls, go ride along with Jane. Like study what Jane is doing because she's doing something, something correct. You know that was more effective than what you're doing. Or it also focuses sales enablement. That says like, hey, if your win rate is 25% and the average is 35, then you can sort of dive in and figure out and this is the next piece of it is is kind of funnel advancement metrics, stage to stage advancement metrics, not just top of the funnel stuff, but like mid and late stage. Where is this person getting tripped up and how can enablement and their manager coach them up to get them more successful?

Adam: 45:07

Yeah. So just to sort of like recap on that, from a metrics perspective you've got leading versus lagging, but what you're saying is the most fundamental metrics that you should be monitoring right from the get go where you're leading indicators, starting off with pipeline activities, then moving into, like advancement metrics. So once you've got the pipeline, how is the individual then advancing that sales, that prospect through the sales process in that?

Jeremey: 45:36

order. Yeah, exactly, and it is an and it's leading and lagging. It's not one or the other. There's a ton of lagging stuff that we didn't talk about. Sales cycle, win rate, acv, nrr, huge right. So yeah, all those things are critical.

Adam: 45:57

And then what about, like you're going back to those, the lagging indicators from a rev ops perspective? You know you've talked about pipeline activities for an individual. You've talked about like advancement metrics for the individual as well, but like using like a custom acquisition cost as a whole and tying that back to like all the different channels of custom acquisition, like talk me through like experience of that and why that plays a fundamental part within the rev ops function.

Jeremey: 46:29

Yeah, well, historically rev ops kind of stopped at. You know the stuff. I've already talked about NRR, when you know, on lagging indicators, nrr, win rate, sale cycle and so forth, and typically finance took the domain of like, looking at customer acquisition costs, looking at LTV lifetime value, looking at the ultimate metric rule of 40, which is the combination of ARR growth and free cash flow margin, so like that. So I think those metrics tend to still be more the domain of finance versus rev ops. But I think rev ops people are getting more into managing cost, because before it was all revenue, revenue, revenue, bookings, bookings, bookings, but now the pressure is on to manage costs. So I think they definitely are are looking much, much more at at customer acquisition cost on the on the sales side right, that's what you're spending on mostly people, right, quota bearing and non quota bearing people. So what I'm seeing a lot more rev ops people do on that side is to, like the questions I'm getting is they want ratios Like how many, how many SDR should I have?

Jeremey: 47:55

You know how many? How many per AE? How many sales engineers should I have per AE? What should be my span of control? Like, these are the types of things that people are looking for, I think, efficiency metric wise, but on the marketing side, it's yeah really to. Marketing was probably even more savvy on cost management than sales was because, right, marketing was managing people, is and was managing people and program expenditure and they're constantly optimizing, especially on the program side. Right A program would be your search engine marketing on LinkedIn or search search engine marketing on Google or, you know, social spend on LinkedIn. Whatever that they were, I think the marketing team in general and marketing operations was more savvy on cost than sales was until you know, starting about a year, a year and a half ago.

Adam: 48:44

But those kind of like knowing those metrics, particularly for like different routes to market of acquiring new customers, help you steer, like which avenues you lean into. So like early you were talking about and score scoring, particular accounts, so that reps could prioritize different accounts in terms of which ones they want to be going after.

Adam: 49:05

But then there's the other side of that is like, what's your route to market Like? If I look at my recruitment business, we've got, you know, indirect through the party relationships. You've got direct, like selling direct to vendors. You've got events, conferences, all these different routes to winning business, which all has a customer acquisition cost attached to that different channel. So how much did that play a part in terms of your account? It?

Jeremey: 49:27

does? It does. So. I mean, I think our most, the most sophisticated DevOps organizations are basically building a plan that says, with targets for the contribution by source, exactly as you outlined, and the sources are usually right. Like you can, let's separate new logos from expansion. So on the new logo side, right, is it partner generated? Is it AE, self sourced? Is it SDR sourced? Right, is it marketing source? So you're sort of thinking about all these like X sourced leads and X source pipeline, x sourced bookings and and, and, yeah, setting those targets and then holding the teams accountable to hitting, you know, their individual targets. So that's that's. The more sophisticated organizations are doing that and that's critical.

Adam: 50:19

Yeah, no, well, thanks for that. And I think, in terms of like final, final sort of topic around, and rebops, is has to come back to to people. You know this is, this is our domain. When it comes to, like going out to market and finding people for you know, organizations out there from your perspective, like what? What are the two traits that that, like a top performing rebops, individual and contribute or lead a possess? Like what are the skills that you believe are required to be successful in this kind of role?

Jeremey: 50:54

Yeah.

Jeremey: 50:55

Yeah, I'm going to give you sort of two answers to that. I'll give you the direct answer to your question and then I want to talk about moneyball, talent, moneyball after that. So, like the direct traits, I the direct traits I look for and you can kind of hear the subtext of it and I always worry about projecting my own background here. But project management, right, high analytical skill, attention to detail, process design and optimization, you know, being entrepreneurial. Great communications and cross functional collaboration skills. And then I may be two more.

Jeremey: 51:36

I've found in hiring rebops people that those with some degree of consulting training so strategic problem solving is is really critical and you learn that as a consultant. It's a very teachable thing, but if you got someone who comes in with that ability beforehand, great. And then if the person's the team leader, right is the usual stuff, whether no matter whether you're in rebops or other things hiring, coaching, performance management. So, like to me, those are the traits that you know that I try to assess when I'm hiring a rebops person. My other comment is about money. It will call this talent moneyball. I have not done this for rebops yet and I intend to do it for every role over time.

Jeremey: 52:16

Is. I love to do this thing, where I go and look at everyone, I'll say let's, let's say SDRs, okay, I did this for SDRs. A while back. I pulled the profiles of I think 1500 SDRs across the tech industry and I defined success in the role based on LinkedIn, because that's all I have, as they were promoted to an AE inside of the organization that they were hired into Like that's, I think, a great measure of success for an SDR.

Jeremey: 52:46

And then I paid contractors to pull all the biographical data on them. Where did they go to school? What did they study? Did they play sports? Were they in band? You know whatever? Did they work during college? Dot, dot, dot, dot, dot. And like, out of that I can then take those 1500 profiles and I can say, ah, okay, I can play some moneyball here. You're more likely to be success. It's correlation, not causation. But you're more likely to be success successful as an SDR if you have XYZ traits. So, like with that study, what we found was people who had two plus years in professional services, in particular as recruiters at agencies. Those people made like there was a big enough pool of those people and they made great SDRs. You know, there were other pools where there just aren't a lot of people, but they're good. So ex-military was good. Teachers who leave you know education and go.

Jeremey: 53:46

teachers is a big one, yeah, and if you talk to a lot of sales leaders, I'll tell you ex-teachers make great salespeople, b2b salespeople. So, like there were other, there were, there were things. There was other surprising things. So, for instance, everyone loves to hire for sports. Well, it turns out that if you look overall, for SDRs anyway sports doesn't matter, but if you double click on it, having played team sport didn't matter. So, whatever, baseball, basketball, soccer, football but individual sports, though, was correlated with success. So you know, and I would call semi, like gymnastics, has a team component, but that's individual right. So you know, you can't do gymnastics or golf or tennis or what have you right? So these things are, these things were correlated with success. So, anyway, we sort of did that money ball profile and said, okay, I can get a little bit of an edge by sourcing candidates who fit that profile, and so I intend to do that with Rebops too. I just haven't gotten around to that one yet.

Adam: 54:54

Nice. So we did something similar for recruiters. So we take a money ball approach to hire it. Just again to you play the numbers. You know. Obviously you hire based on the individual, but if you put the data in your favor you've got a bad chance of that individual being successful and that's it, with a combination of disc profiling, emotional intelligence assessments, general intelligence assessments plus like key characteristic traits that we hired for.

Adam: 55:22

So I'd love to see the report on the BDR stuff and there's a famous and the red slide for me is a recruits You've used on that, the success of recruits in the BDR role.

Jeremey: 55:35

Yeah yeah, the yeah, the one that you mentioned personality test, iq test. So there's a. There's a separate study, it's probably 50 years old but really, really good, and Google uses relies on this study pretty significantly. But there's basically, if you look at all the academic studies, three things matter If you can test for them. Iq, which you said already, is like the number one predictor of success in the job. Number two is conscientiousness, and those things can be assessed. Those two things can be assessed by tests, the pretty clear tests. The third one is is like a job skills test. Can they do the job you're going to ask them to do? Give them a project? That's what they're going to do. That's obvious. It's it's more effortful than the other two.

Jeremey: 56:21

I will say that I once I once had all of our company I was working for, I had all the reps take a like a personality test, basically, and calibrated that personality test right To build a profile based on our best reps versus our worst reps, and then we applied that going, you know, that test to new hires as we were bringing them in and in the end I found the juice wasn't worth the squeeze on that one Because it gave you. The personality tests sort of gave you a lot of information that seemed useful, but I think it was the illusion of usefulness and we didn't actually. The intent was to say like we would, yes, maybe no people based on the personality test, but we never really implemented. So there could have been a last mile execution problem on that. But I'm this, my net. Net is like I'm super skeptical about, about personality tests.

Adam: 57:18

I agree, it's just good. It's a good tool for the interview. Yeah.

Jeremey: 57:23

Yeah, we wouldn't get it real.

Adam: 57:25

We wouldn't yes or no than based on the results of the test, but that would be a massive driver of the interview and where the conversation ended up going. But I'm guessing based on what you said there around conscientiousness, you've read the Harvard Business Review of like the seven top traits of highly effective salespeople.

Jeremey: 57:43

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, it's true for any. It's really true for any. Any job is conscientiousness is is kind of critical. Like what job? Maybe it's an obvious statement, but it's it's. If you have 100 things to evaluate, which one or ones are important and it turns out that conscientiousness is one of them, and that's one. I think back channel reference checks is also super useful for the the the personality assessments can theoretically tease that out. You know I've taken a lot. I do consider myself an extremely conscientious person. Hopefully other people would say that about me as well. But I think I've taken maybe 10 of those personality tests in my life and nine out of 10 times they did say I was like highly conscientious. I took one not too many years ago that said like that flagged me for for you know, conscientiousness risk, which I had a good chuckle had a good chuckle over.

Adam: 58:44

I think the evidence is there, jeremy, with you.

Adam: 58:47

Just just even just like if you look at the selling surfer to go to that amount of trouble, the the greater good says a lot about you as an individual, but I think this is probably like a really nice place for us to to, to bring the conversation to a close here there's. There's one last question that I did want to ask. So, given you are such an avid reader and average student, particularly of all things, sales, I'd like to ask, like, what is your like favorite nonfiction book and why?

Jeremey: 59:22

I probably don't. Well sales related book, I probably don't just have one. I have a couple of recommendations that I think are are timely and good. Huge fan of John McMahon's qualified sales leader, it's a must read. I really liked the Jolt Effect, which is a newer, newer book by the Challenger Sales people. I'm not a big fan of the Challenger Sale book, by the way. I just don't think there's enough in there by the Jolt Effect. I think there was. So yeah, those are. Those are two good ones Cracking the sales management code. A little older, but good, yeah, and so many, so many, so many good ones and so many bad ones. But I think those are, those are. Those are a few.

Adam: 1:00:03

And when you're not reading sales books, what else are you reading?

Jeremey: 1:00:06

I read. My pattern is based I read a lot of fiction and nonfiction in different genres I love, and the nonfiction side, business, biographies and you know the usual popular stuff out there, I guess. But I read mostly, mostly fiction. I read a ton of sci-fi and then I read literary fiction and I read yeah, so right now I'm I'm I usually have three books going simultaneously and my my fiction book I'm reading right now is I'm rereading Anna Coretta, which is one of my favorite favorite books. So I love Russian literature.

Adam: 1:00:50

Browning.

Jeremey: 1:00:50

Yeah.

Adam: 1:00:52

Cool, well. Well, listen, jeremy, it's been. It's been an absolute privilege to sit here and pick the brains of someone that's, you know, studies the art and science of sales as avidly as you do. But, you know, the conversation's been been great, so I really appreciate you giving up your time. I'm sure everyone listening is going to take a lot from this, and so, yeah, so, thank you, yeah, thanks for having me. Thanks for listening. I hope you enjoyed today's episode. Don't forget to subscribe, and if you want more information about the podcast, head over to our website. Scale with strive.