Dan Martell - Get RevOps Working for Your SaaS (3VC Model) with Jason @ GoNimbly.com - Escape Velocity Show #15

00:00:00.000 All of our research says that, you know, it used to be the saying where, hey, your customer

00:00:04.380 knows more about your product than your, you know, your BDR or whatever.

00:00:07.300 They've done all this research and yeah, that's true.

00:00:10.340 But we're now in a place where a customer is coming and they already want to buy from

00:00:13.800 you, especially when you're in the SaaS space.

00:00:15.800 They've already evaluated Zendesk versus some other tool and they want to buy Zendesk.

00:00:19.400 And they come to you and they, what they're deciding is, how much am I going to put my

00:00:23.180 neck out there for you?

00:00:24.140 Am I going to go across my entire organization?

00:00:26.220 How am I going to commit for three years at a time?

00:00:28.260 What am I going to do?

00:00:29.140 And so what you do is you erode that trust by having all these gaps in your customer experience.

00:00:35.280 Admission sequence start.

00:00:37.120 Three, two, one.

00:00:48.460 I'm here with Jason Reichel.

00:00:49.680 What's up, Jason?

00:00:50.240 Hey.

00:00:50.540 It's good to have you, man.

00:00:51.080 Oh, that table's large.

00:00:52.000 Okay, there we go.

00:00:52.800 We got it.

00:00:53.300 Thank you.

00:00:53.760 My arms are short.

00:00:54.580 There we go.

00:00:54.740 It's all good, man.

00:00:55.340 And so you run GoNimbly, consultancy,

00:00:59.340 focus on RevOps, revenue optimization.

00:01:03.160 I believe last number I saw, I've got to assume

00:01:05.220 it's a little higher, $200 million in MRR,

00:01:07.700 probably a little higher than that now.

00:01:10.100 Yeah, yeah.

00:01:11.960 We're supporting about $3 billion a year of revenue.

00:01:14.780 OK, there we go.

00:01:15.860 So big number.

00:01:17.160 Focus, Twilio, Zendesk, all previous customers

00:01:20.000 or current customers.

00:01:21.980 But for those in the SaaS space that have not really dived

00:01:25.880 into rev optimization, how do you describe it?

00:01:30.300 So revenue operations, the best way to describe it

00:01:33.440 is it's just taking your sales ops, marketing ops, customer

00:01:36.300 success ops, if you're lucky enough to have that,

00:01:38.000 most people don't, and unify them into one team that

00:01:41.120 supports a revenue number.

00:01:42.940 So it's converting a traditional and support

00:01:45.500 model of you optimize for the sales team

00:01:48.600 or you optimize for the customer success team.

00:01:50.260 Instead, say, we actually are working on behalf

00:01:52.300 of the customer experience.

00:01:53.440 We're finding the gaps in that process.

00:01:55.180 We're making a scalable process.

00:01:56.960 And what we can accomplish is actually

00:01:59.660 change the revenue number.

00:02:00.580 So give us a revenue number, and we'll hit that.

00:02:03.300 And we'll show you that scalable solutions

00:02:05.680 and building things the right way for your inflection point

00:02:08.080 can really have a huge impact on your revenue.

00:02:09.720 So you're saying, give us a revenue number,

00:02:11.720 and you'll hit it.

00:02:13.480 When you start working with, and I mean,

00:02:15.640 these are predominantly Series C and upward type companies.

00:02:18.440 Enterprise.

00:02:19.140 Your background's product.

00:02:20.880 What do you look at?

00:02:22.920 What's the initial assessment to know where

00:02:25.200 the opportunity lies?

00:02:26.100 Sure, usually, I mean, most people

00:02:28.140 come to any kind of consulting because they have a problem

00:02:30.380 they don't have the skill to solve.

00:02:32.460 We are a generalist firm.

00:02:33.660 So we actually do a lot to make sure

00:02:35.100 that our people are very cross-functional across sales,

00:02:37.740 marketing, and customer success strategy tools,

00:02:40.760 how to enable insights they should be pulling.

00:02:43.040 But the secret is that we actually

00:02:45.820 use one common thing, which most people don't think

00:02:47.900 is they don't use it operationally,

00:02:50.520 which is we pull the sales pipeline into a tool.

00:02:54.380 And because we have so many customers,

00:02:56.160 we actually look at your sales pipeline and go,

00:02:59.080 okay, what's the volume, velocity, value, and conversion?

00:03:02.420 And that's 3VC metrics, yeah.

00:03:04.340 That we use.

00:03:05.620 And let's find the benchmarks where you're underperforming.

00:03:08.240 So we can do that across the industry

00:03:09.800 because, you know, SaaS loves to talk about SaaS.

00:03:12.000 So there's tons of benchmarks

00:03:13.020 about where you should be in each place

00:03:15.020 and also in our customer base.

00:03:16.620 So we can see, oh, the average SaaS company,

00:03:19.200 here's what the benchmark's here.

00:03:20.640 Here's a GoNimbly benchmark.

00:03:22.300 And then where are you underperforming?

00:03:23.880 And then we'll come up with tactics and strategies

00:03:25.980 that we think we can help you implement

00:03:27.660 or that you can implement on your own in order

00:03:29.680 to achieve revenue.

00:03:31.140 So let's break down those four because I think

00:03:32.800 they're important.

00:03:33.300 So first one's value.

00:03:35.400 You pull in their pipeline.

00:03:37.560 And I mean, it's interesting because you have to look

00:03:39.800 across customer success, including.

00:03:42.000 So is it just the sales pipeline you're looking at?

00:03:44.640 It's just the sales pipeline.

00:03:45.540 I mean, we believe in the bow tie funnel, as far as trying to get people to advocate on the other side of that.

00:03:52.860 But ultimately, what we're doing is we're pulling in the funnel, and then we're understanding that if you have a problem, let's say, in value from stage one to stage two, you probably have a marketing ops problem.

00:04:05.160 Okay, and when you say value, it means the value of opportunities, the actual dollar amounts.

00:04:10.160 Okay, so when we look at a sales velocity, the opportunity, like total opportunity value.

00:04:14.800 In each stage, right?

00:04:15.640 In each stage, yeah.

00:04:16.240 And so what it might mean is that you're not targeting.

00:04:18.500 So if usually stage one, stage two issues are marketing out.

00:04:21.300 I mean, just for people watching,

00:04:23.740 this is cool because you're breaking it down

00:04:26.380 into a very scientific approach with benchmarks, which

00:04:29.040 is we're in a fairly newish industry.

00:04:31.440 I mean, how old is RevOps?

00:04:34.580 Maybe six months.

00:04:35.660 No, it's been a couple years.

00:04:37.000 A couple years.

00:04:37.560 A couple years where we've been talking

00:04:38.740 about the unified nature of this.

00:04:40.860 Probably the last year where we've seen VC-backed companies

00:04:43.800 coming to market with products that say revenue operations.

00:04:46.920 Yeah.

00:04:47.580 So when you look at the value per stage,

00:04:52.100 is there a unified stage structure

00:04:54.540 that you feel everybody can map to?

00:04:57.040 Because I mean, all these metrics

00:04:58.320 have to be mapped to some kind of common language.

00:05:01.660 So when you say stages, what are the stages for you?

00:05:04.900 Well, typically, most organizations fall into,

00:05:07.720 and most of our customers have both of these,

00:05:09.640 a velocity model and an enterprise sales model.

00:05:12.560 And we've kind of boiled down the stages that

00:05:15.080 are necessary in each of those.

00:05:16.880 People can add more stages, but in reality, you know, it's

00:05:19.500 You might compress them into, like, that's really this.

00:05:21.500 Behind the scenes, we compress them into categories, right?

00:05:24.020 Just the same way as you might say, oh, this is in pipeline.

00:05:26.000 This is not in pipeline.

00:05:26.780 This is in forecast.

00:05:27.440 This is not in forecast.

00:05:28.660 And so we can actually break those down

00:05:30.260 into those categories.

00:05:31.760 And at a high level, what would those be for you?

00:05:33.560 You know, qualification.

00:05:35.600 We're kind of seeing more and more stage zero opportunities

00:05:39.380 as you're moving BDRs to saying, OK,

00:05:42.260 It's about getting the meeting on the book, qualifying it,

00:05:44.740 and then having the handoff to an AE.

00:05:46.440 So a zero-stage opportunity into qualification, into demo,

00:05:51.380 into negotiation, if you have a really easy sales cycle,

00:05:56.280 out into a closed one as the most simple.

00:05:58.740 Yeah, so like five stages.

00:05:59.960 Most people have four or five.

00:06:00.600 Four or five stages.

00:06:01.620 So then you'll map their pipeline against those four or five stages

00:06:04.640 and let them know kind of are they moving across those stages efficiently or not.

00:06:10.480 Yes.

00:06:10.700 And the chances are that the operational team

00:06:13.340 will come to go nimbly with ideas of what they want to accomplish,

00:06:16.600 and they won't map to where they're not performing.

00:06:19.940 What would be an example of?

00:06:21.800 Someone might say, we really need to do sales territory

00:06:24.260 alignment, or we need to do sales territory lead routing

00:06:27.700 or something.

00:06:28.440 And then what you'll actually find out

00:06:30.260 is it's not a problem with the amount of volume

00:06:34.740 in each of those stages.

00:06:36.640 It's a velocity or conversion issue.

00:06:39.080 And so they're taking a tactic, because

00:06:40.660 Maybe their gut is right that there's something wrong,

00:06:42.740 but they're not using their own attack.

00:06:43.580 And they're thinking it's a routing issue.

00:06:44.280 Correct.

00:06:44.540 That's not the issue.

00:06:45.140 And what we find about most operators, because they haven't,

00:06:48.600 I think 10 years ago, this was safe to say about marketing,

00:06:51.340 which is, hey, marketing just does what they want.

00:06:55.100 They don't have a lot of accountability in the process

00:06:57.700 and the spend.

00:06:58.860 And over time, what we've seen is now marketers have to,

00:07:02.380 every dollar, they have to show where that's going.

00:07:04.340 And because of that value they're providing,

00:07:06.440 they get more and more money.

00:07:07.980 CMOs have huge budgets now to buy software and be sold stuff.

00:07:11.700 So that's great.

00:07:12.760 I think that it's time for operations

00:07:14.400 to sort of stand up and say, hey, look,

00:07:18.120 we're actually pushing this.

00:07:19.180 I mean, I think a lot of operating teams are really great.

00:07:21.700 And they are pushing it.

00:07:22.520 But all the credit goes to your go-to-market teams, right?

00:07:24.800 And so for us to have this model where you can look at 3VC

00:07:28.420 and say, hey, look, we didn't increase reps.

00:07:31.040 We didn't increase marketers.

00:07:32.400 But we actually fixed this tactic.

00:07:34.060 And we saw an increase in our revenue.

00:07:35.720 That's huge for the organization, the CEO, the COO,

00:07:39.200 the CRO, to invest in operations versus investing

00:07:42.140 in other areas that they're investing in.

00:07:43.400 And when you say operations, is it, I'm assuming,

00:07:46.120 is it just tools?

00:07:47.160 Is it process?

00:07:48.740 Is it training?

00:07:49.640 What's involved in that?

00:07:51.300 So I view, I'm writing a book right now about revenue

00:07:54.960 operations, and it's called Transform.

00:07:56.380 Yeah, so I'm pretty excited about that.

00:07:57.560 When's that coming out?

00:07:59.200 Soon.

00:08:00.620 No, when it can.

00:08:03.820 Right now, we're field testing all the ideas and making sure that they really work because it's supposed to be a field manual for someone in operations who wants to make the transition, not someone who has the autonomy right now to do it.

00:08:16.280 So we're seeing if all of our philosophies work when you're not the one that's leading it.

00:08:20.920 accountable um but one thing that we keep seeing is that organizations are you know bringing in

00:08:28.160 people and they have no idea how to prioritize their work and they have no idea how to basically

00:08:34.760 accomplish uh the goal of really understanding inflection point and what it's going to take to

00:08:41.600 get there and so what we've tried to get operators to do is to understand that there's four skills of

00:08:47.220 operations. There is strategy, which you can find great sales operations people that know things

00:08:52.340 like comp structures and things which are strategic in nature. Uh, there's tools, um, and then there's

00:08:57.760 enablement and insights. And those are the four skills of a revenue strategy, tools, enablement,

00:09:02.800 and insights. Correct. And on the tool side, we're talking, you know, your CRM. Yeah. Yeah.

00:09:07.180 Yeah. So CRM, you know, your, your lean data, your, your engage O ABM platform, all of that

00:09:13.780 stuff and you know if you were a one person shop we would say that you want that one person to have

00:09:18.260 a 25 25 25 25 split that generalist is going to be better and be more equipped to handle anything

00:09:22.960 that's coming across across you know yeah across the business yeah that doesn't happen you know

00:09:28.960 we work with companies who have you know 40 people and they are highly technical they have

00:09:33.780 weak muscles and strategy they have weak muscles and enablement and insights right and so that

00:09:38.760 functionality is where we kind of come in and help augment

00:09:43.100 and teach those people how to do those other skills

00:09:45.600 and help kind of round out their mostly technical stuff.

00:09:49.420 We're finding that at SaaS companies,

00:09:50.800 you usually hire a Salesforce admin.

00:09:52.280 You usually hire a bunch of tools experts.

00:09:54.160 And then hoping to increase the data entry, efficiency.

00:09:59.420 Yeah.

00:09:59.920 Yeah, yeah.

00:10:00.420 And you can only go so far.

00:10:01.320 The time to moving stages.

00:10:03.320 But at a certain point, like just enablement,

00:10:05.000 I'm assuming that can really unlock a big opportunity

00:10:08.200 Yeah.

00:10:08.700 And enabling people, because we look at it as a circle.

00:10:10.960 If you enable, you get the context, right?

00:10:12.700 The insights should drive the strategy.

00:10:14.000 And so it's a reciprocal process.

00:10:15.960 When you say context, you mean 360 view on a deal.

00:10:19.200 360 view of how the go-to-market team functions,

00:10:22.440 how the sales rep interacts with the customer.

00:10:24.400 So we're big proponents of thinking of revenue operations

00:10:26.800 as there's one revenue team.

00:10:28.300 So there's no marketing, there's no sales,

00:10:29.960 there's no customer success.

00:10:31.440 There's the front line go-to-market team

00:10:33.480 who interact with the customer.

00:10:35.100 And then there is the behind-the-scenes directors

00:10:36.880 who are your operators.

00:10:38.100 And that yin and yang power struggle needs to be there.

00:10:40.600 And they need to be independent of one another,

00:10:42.060 but they need to make one revenue team.

00:10:44.060 Everyone is working on behalf of the customer.

00:10:45.900 So the go-to-market team is working

00:10:47.100 on behalf of the individual customers.

00:10:49.000 And the operations team is working

00:10:50.280 on the overall customer experience.

00:10:52.420 And we find that when you build your teams that way,

00:10:55.920 they can sell any product.

00:10:57.860 And you can build world-class operations teams,

00:11:00.460 world-class revenue teams.

00:11:02.320 And so we see that a lot of organizations

00:11:04.200 are weak in one of those muscles.

00:11:05.660 And especially on the operations side,

00:11:07.080 Their skills are a little weak.

00:11:08.380 Well, it's usually, I'm assuming a lot of these folks

00:11:10.620 don't have experience kind of building that kind of capacity.

00:11:15.060 No.

00:11:15.600 And it's such a new thing.

00:11:16.720 I mean, unless somebody comes in like you guys

00:11:18.560 to show them how to do that, then it's just a lot of testing

00:11:20.940 and figuring it out.

00:11:22.440 But when you talk about the customer experience,

00:11:24.540 I just had one of my coaching clients recently

00:11:26.560 post in the group.

00:11:27.540 He's testing out some new outbound sales automation tools.

00:11:30.060 And he actually said, I've set up demos

00:11:32.200 with these four companies.

00:11:33.500 This guy did this.

00:11:34.360 This company did this.

00:11:35.320 This company did this.

00:11:36.060 this company to pretty much tear in it.

00:11:38.520 And it's funny, because they're in the sales process.

00:11:41.160 And they're all confused.

00:11:42.420 It's like you're talking to an SDR,

00:11:43.680 but you got scheduled for a demo.

00:11:44.800 But then they qualified you, and then they

00:11:46.440 said you're not ready for it.

00:11:47.400 I mean, these buying experiences or journeys

00:11:49.540 are getting pretty, from a customer point of view,

00:11:52.700 annoying.

00:11:53.880 And this is what you're talking about,

00:11:55.080 is saying somebody needs to own that, both front line

00:11:59.060 and back office, to make sure that we're

00:12:01.260 creating the right experience.

00:12:02.880 Yeah, all of our research says that it

00:12:05.360 used to be the saying where, hey, your customer knows more about your product than your BDR or

00:12:10.160 whatever. They've done all this research. And yeah, that's true. But we're now in a place where

00:12:14.700 a customer is coming and they already want to buy from you, especially when you're in the SaaS

00:12:17.920 space. They've already evaluated Zendesk versus some other tool and they want to buy Zendesk.

00:12:22.480 And they come to you and what they're deciding is, how much am I going to put my neck out there

00:12:26.680 for you? Am I going to go across my entire organization? Am I going to commit for three

00:12:30.480 years at a time, what am I going to do?

00:12:32.240 And so what you do is you erode that trust

00:12:35.640 by having all these gaps in your customer experience.

00:12:37.980 So it's not, are they make, this is really fascinating,

00:12:40.560 because we just evaluated a vendor.

00:12:43.080 And you're right.

00:12:43.720 It wasn't, are we using something else?

00:12:45.400 It's, what's the small, where are we

00:12:47.580 going to allow them to play in our customer experience

00:12:50.400 to see if they can deliver on that,

00:12:52.920 and then we're going to deploy it.

00:12:54.580 And had they even asked us about that,

00:12:57.260 they might have been able to help us

00:12:58.980 think through that deployment or rollout strategy

00:13:01.740 to win more of our business upfront.

00:13:03.360 Correct.

00:13:04.220 That's fascinating.

00:13:05.100 Yeah.

00:13:05.600 I find that it's not about everyone

00:13:09.060 is in service of the customer experience.

00:13:11.100 I don't think that I'm not.

00:13:12.900 I love sales.

00:13:13.740 I love marketing.

00:13:14.400 I think they're incredibly valuable.

00:13:16.440 But oftentimes, they're done in the name of the organization

00:13:20.460 and not in the name of your customer, right?

00:13:22.720 A great sales rep is creating value, which everyone talks

00:13:25.560 about, for their customer.

00:13:28.160 marketer is marketing the right product for the customer if you're working in a

00:13:31.580 business where you're selling stuff to people who don't need it you're in a bad

00:13:34.920 business right and I believe in the tools that we support and that we're

00:13:39.020 part of the operations team and or we won't do it we're not going to accept

00:13:42.660 every customer right and so for us it's really important to say does this tool

00:13:46.640 work does it make people's lives better is there value here and can we actually

00:13:49.880 optimize that so that more people can experience that value and I think that

00:13:53.920 integrity really shines through, both in our product,

00:13:57.540 but in our customers' customers' product, right?

00:14:00.560 Zendesk, we're in their office right now.

00:14:02.240 Great product.

00:14:03.060 Works really well.

00:14:04.060 Can really help a lot of businesses.

00:14:06.140 I'm happy that we're optimizing them, right?

00:14:08.120 And when you say, are they selling it to people

00:14:10.900 that really need it, you're saying

00:14:12.780 that the value out on the front end

00:14:16.920 is essentially, I'm going to help this person solve a problem.

00:14:19.780 It may not be our product, and we need to figure that out

00:14:22.120 and figure out how our, because it may not.

00:14:24.520 I mean, at the end of the day, it's a consultative sale.

00:14:27.300 It's the diagnosis frame.

00:14:30.900 Walk me through, if you could kind of,

00:14:32.800 and I'm assuming this is what you do for your customers,

00:14:34.600 but what would a beautiful buying journey

00:14:37.360 look like from the customer experience?

00:14:39.660 And what do you think?

00:14:40.360 And then what happens on the back end

00:14:42.060 to enable this at scale for a Series C B2B SaaS company?

00:14:45.360 Yeah.

00:14:46.100 So I'm a big believer in the conversational marketing

00:14:49.540 movement that's happening with companies like Drift

00:14:51.000 and other things like that.

00:14:52.100 I'm also a big believer in ABM and personalization.

00:14:54.540 So B2B thinks, always says to me,

00:14:57.380 like when I start talking about this,

00:14:58.460 they go, yeah, you can personalize

00:15:00.480 for your top 100 accounts or 10 accounts or whatever.

00:15:03.140 But that's not true

00:15:03.880 because if you look at B2C customer companies,

00:15:05.960 they personalize all of the time to very specific buyers

00:15:09.660 because they know that they need to get them to buy into this.

00:15:12.520 And hopefully they've established a lifestyle brand

00:15:14.340 where they can sell them X stuff

00:15:15.500 in the spoken will model of a B2C company.

00:15:17.860 B2B doesn't think that way, right?

00:15:19.620 But everybody wants to be treated like an individual.

00:15:21.820 Everybody wants that experience to be tailored to them.

00:15:24.400 And so it's more about not what is beautiful.

00:15:28.160 It's more about all of the handoff processes.

00:15:30.920 So for instance, if you're going to go and cold email people, which some companies have

00:15:35.060 to do, right?

00:15:36.660 It's just their product and they just need to make people aware and that might be the

00:15:39.860 most effective way to make them aware.

00:15:41.640 When after you do get their engagement, are you just going to, how does your example being,

00:15:46.700 how does your outreach campaigns end?

00:15:49.820 Is it possible for them to get into another one

00:15:51.460 and get another email from you

00:15:52.440 that's from someone else in the organization

00:15:53.800 or even from you

00:15:54.520 because you didn't actually take the time

00:15:55.820 to end their journey properly, right?

00:15:58.580 And this is usually because both technologists,

00:16:00.680 sales and marketing are both working in an outreach,

00:16:02.840 creating messaging and stuff.

00:16:03.940 And they're not really talking about

00:16:04.980 what that diagram looks.

00:16:05.840 No one's actually drawn it out on a board

00:16:07.160 and said, okay, how's this going?

00:16:08.680 What's the different plays

00:16:09.500 that we're doing for these customers?

00:16:10.560 And they just put people in things blindly.

00:16:12.900 And it feels disrespectful.

00:16:15.120 It is disrespectful, right?

00:16:16.960 And so it's something as simple as that.

00:16:18.700 Or if I do get engaged with you and I click through onto your website, is your website

00:16:22.200 going to have anything that's there for me?

00:16:24.060 So as simple as using something like Drift, that when I land on my website, I'm actually

00:16:28.620 engaged with the person that owns my account and I can ask them questions directly.

00:16:31.700 Not some other person that has no clue who you are.

00:16:33.080 Not some other person.

00:16:33.740 And also, maybe they've tailored it to me if it's one of the accounts that may be named

00:16:37.600 accounts that you care about, right?

00:16:39.040 And just that little bit of thought and that very front end of the process, just the outreach

00:16:44.500 process right can I think increase your your ability to try and sign a bigger

00:16:49.420 LTV with that customer by five to seven percent right it's because that's when

00:16:53.720 they felt the pain and you responded to the pain quickly and accurately and with

00:16:57.940 respect right nobody wants to go to the doctor and have the doctor say what I

00:17:02.500 don't like what you're feeling is not real yeah right and we don't reach out

00:17:06.520 to companies unless we like my theory and I said this earlier but I'll say it

00:17:09.820 again we don't reach out to companies unless we want to buy right and you know

00:17:15.400 if you believe in sort of the golden circle inside of us is we need logical

00:17:18.880 facts but we've already sort of made a gut decision that at least this is one

00:17:22.900 of the three finalists right SAS companies particularly that we work with

00:17:26.580 they don't have these kind of bureaucratic buying experiences where

00:17:31.540 they have to get 30 people involved to make a decision on product now some of

00:17:34.960 our customers do have those customers and for that I think you know ABM and

00:17:38.100 swarming is even more important and having a strategy for those accounts and so that's just

00:17:42.080 a very front end of the process but then you go through it and you go okay when do you bring your

00:17:45.320 customer success in so that it feels like it's they've been there the whole time right how do

00:17:49.700 you build a experience that is it's we're adding people we're not switching you transition yeah no

00:17:55.900 transition no we are uh against handoffs right so our revenue team works as one revenue team

00:18:01.440 uh and we're really big on that now large organizations will say well this is how we

00:18:06.700 have to do it and I'll go Oscar Myers doesn't make me watch how the hot dog is

00:18:12.080 made to enjoy one right and they make it at scale for thousands of millions and

00:18:15.640 millions of people and I think we have a little bit of growing up to do as an

00:18:19.660 industry to go oh they don't have to experience this for it to be true

00:18:23.940 internally and maybe your teams are organized badly right maybe your

00:18:28.460 leaders don't know how to manage to there's no process proper right yeah and

00:18:32.380 so instead of what it is is you know a lot of alignment talk which is I'm on a

00:18:36.400 on a lot of panels talking about how alignment

00:18:38.560 is kind of a joke.

00:18:39.340 If you align to the customer, everyone's

00:18:41.080 working for the customer.

00:18:41.900 There is no such thing, right?

00:18:43.580 You need a new boss.

00:18:44.360 I think I've seen you talk about collaboration on alignment.

00:18:46.720 Like, how do you?

00:18:47.740 And I mean, when you guys work with companies,

00:18:50.500 is there a template for the handoff?

00:18:53.520 Like, here's the information should be captured.

00:18:55.660 And is it all in as some kind of CRM, or is it?

00:18:58.780 Yeah, I mean, so we try two things.

00:19:02.680 One was we try to give metrics, like the 3BC, the operations

00:19:05.560 to justify their existence, but to also ask for more money

00:19:08.320 and more funding, which obviously benefits GoNimbly

00:19:10.320 as a consulting company, but also benefits them

00:19:12.400 because the company's investing money more smartly.

00:19:17.440 I don't know if that's right.

00:19:18.440 Anyway, so they're investing properly.

00:19:20.520 And then what we do on the other side of it

00:19:22.540 is we actually try to separate what we call vanity metrics

00:19:25.360 from momentum metrics.

00:19:26.840 And vanity metrics are things that are not

00:19:28.760 going to lead to revenue.

00:19:29.800 Activities.

00:19:30.500 Activities, even volume of MQLs.

00:19:33.560 Doesn't matter.

00:19:34.480 Because who defined what qualified is?

00:19:36.160 It's the marketing team.

00:19:37.400 Who decided what SQL is?

00:19:40.540 The sales team, right?

00:19:41.440 So it doesn't really matter.

00:19:44.340 But things like MQL definition for qualification,

00:19:48.480 that's probably a momentum metric.

00:19:49.740 And we probably need to figure that out and use that.

00:19:51.700 Because ultimately, we're going to see revenue increase

00:19:53.920 by the more qualified.

00:19:54.900 So I'm going to apologize, everybody

00:19:55.960 listening or watching, because I'm

00:19:57.280 jumping all over the place.

00:19:57.980 Because every time you share something,

00:19:59.600 I want to double click on it.

00:20:01.440 So what are your thoughts on revenue

00:20:02.900 quota for marketing versus, you know.

00:20:05.400 Oh, I think everyone should have a quota.

00:20:06.560 I think everyone should have a number, even operations.

00:20:08.060 Talk about that, because I mean, that's a new, again,

00:20:10.100 this is a newish concept that's showing up.

00:20:12.600 Yeah, so about operations specifically,

00:20:15.080 because I can talk more about operations.

00:20:17.240 The average operations team, what we call legacy at GoNimbly,

00:20:19.820 which is your sales ops, marketing ops,

00:20:21.620 rolling it up to probably your CMO or someone, COO,

00:20:25.020 or someone like that.

00:20:25.780 But it's still very siloed under sales, marketing,

00:20:28.280 customer success.

00:20:29.220 They'll have about a 10% revenue impact.

00:20:31.180 So just having an operations team will,

00:20:33.900 and people don't add this into their numbers.

00:20:35.160 So if you have a $10 million business,

00:20:36.720 add 10% to it and say,

00:20:37.900 our operations team is going to give us that, right?

00:20:40.260 That's legacy operations.

00:20:41.580 If you move to revenue operations, unifying that team,

00:20:44.460 having them work in some of the philosophies that we have,

00:20:46.960 you can see up to 36% revenue increase, right?

00:20:50.200 And so I say, okay, if we have net new

00:20:52.820 and we need to go get $10 million of net new next year,

00:20:55.580 give me 36% of that and add that to that.

00:20:59.020 And then we'll see how close we can get.

00:21:01.180 Right. And again, we're so early days that it's not a science yet.

00:21:05.440 It's not as disciplined as forecasting your pipeline.

00:21:09.260 But you do see by giving them that number, the team prioritizing operational work streams that have true revenue impact and not things that are vanity people's projects and other things like that.

00:21:21.300 And I think that we have sort of a blind eye in most of our organizations that if our operations teams are releasing things and are busy, then it's good.

00:21:30.620 Right?

00:21:31.120 Yeah.

00:21:31.740 And that is not good.

00:21:33.500 Right?

00:21:33.800 And so we are big proponents of building an operational roadmap,

00:21:36.620 something I learned in product that I really believe in, which

00:21:39.200 is, hey, what are we going to do three months, six months,

00:21:41.420 nine months from now that are going to get us to the inflection

00:21:43.160 point that we're trying to get to?

00:21:44.560 So you'll actually deconstruct the strategies over a time

00:21:49.640 period and sequence them properly so that you can look at it

00:21:54.840 objectively and say, yes, if we do x, y, and z in this sequence,

00:21:57.740 we're going to get to this outcome,

00:21:59.340 and let's properly invest in it.

00:22:01.520 And then in regards to marketing owning some kind of revenue

00:22:05.760 quota for pipeline generation, how

00:22:09.840 do you see marketing teams quantify that dollar amount?

00:22:16.120 I think it was Mark Roberge from HubSpot, previously HubSpot,

00:22:18.740 he talked about it in Sales Acceleration Model, where

00:22:21.020 he talks about quota.

00:22:22.220 And every week, marketing should generate

00:22:24.260 x amount of quota around these types of leads

00:22:28.060 perform better versus just an MQL.

00:22:30.960 Is that something you guys deploy?

00:22:32.640 It's something that we enable.

00:22:34.220 It's not something from a strategic perspective

00:22:36.100 that we're deploying right now.

00:22:37.240 OK, so it's not a must yet.

00:22:38.960 Yeah, it's not a must.

00:22:39.820 But internally at GoNimbly, we do that.

00:22:42.280 And having one team, what we actually look at

00:22:45.800 is engagement minutes.

00:22:47.140 So we've sort of shifted the conversation

00:22:49.340 just to engagement minutes.

00:22:50.720 On site?

00:22:51.800 Or just whatever it is.

00:22:53.200 So you get the most engagement minutes.

00:22:55.120 We're an ABM shop.

00:22:56.320 You get the most engagement minutes for in-person meetings

00:22:58.660 and showing up to meet-ups and taking over drinks.

00:23:01.560 So less about activity, more about engagement.

00:23:03.460 Yeah, engagement.

00:23:04.120 And it's not about us doing it.

00:23:05.860 It's about what they do afterwards that we try to measure.

00:23:08.740 And we haven't perfected this.

00:23:09.820 And most organizations I'm talking to right now

00:23:11.500 haven't perfected this, but it's

00:23:13.360 we did this tactic, and they responded in this way.

00:23:16.120 And that's how we're measuring it.

00:23:17.540 And that's what we are hoping turns into pipeline.

00:23:21.520 So we're not to the point where we can give a specific number

00:23:24.200 to the marketing team.

00:23:26.220 Because we're not sure what things are,

00:23:28.660 like most teams try to do this through attribution

00:23:30.560 and other things like that, which is just paid acquisition.

00:23:32.740 We've grown by 100% year over year

00:23:35.580 with no, very little paid anything, right?

00:23:38.520 All named accounts.

00:23:39.620 Yeah, all named accounts, all working on referral networks

00:23:42.320 and things like that.

00:23:42.860 And now we're just starting to get into the area for us

00:23:45.240 personally, where we're like, OK, let's go and get a company

00:23:48.500 in Austin, who's not in the Valley,

00:23:50.600 and get them to buy our services and see what that takes,

00:23:52.820 right? And let's see what the CAC is on that. Because right now we have a very relatively low

00:23:56.180 CAC. It's very easy for us to rely on our book of business, who we've worked with,

00:24:02.080 the quality of the work, and the space that we're in, right? And so if you're interested in those

00:24:07.360 things, we're kind of the only shop that can do that. So that is an unfair advantage we have right

00:24:13.620 now. What I'm trying to see is how does this scale? How do we become a $50 million company

00:24:17.760 or a $100 million company? And what technologies do we need and what processes do we need? And

00:24:21.900 And one of the key things I'm thinking about is marketing is incredibly important when

00:24:25.900 we're trying to create a new category, which is subscription consulting, in revenue ops.

00:24:30.500 Those are two different categories.

00:24:31.500 Totally.

00:24:32.500 And both fairly new.

00:24:33.500 Correct.

00:24:34.500 And so we're trying to invest and figure out how to properly quantify that activity.

00:24:39.500 Yeah.

00:24:40.500 But that's something that I feel like a lot of SaaS companies need to start thinking about

00:24:43.100 as well, so that they don't have these moments where marketing goes out, does an event, and

00:24:47.100 says, hey, sales, here's a bunch of MQLs, and just dumps it.

00:24:50.340 And then the sales team can't respond properly.

00:24:52.340 It's like the nice thing about that model for us

00:24:54.260 is we would pick that up almost immediately

00:24:55.980 because you would have high volume in your pipeline,

00:25:00.140 but you would have low conversion.

00:25:02.000 And so we would come back and say, hey,

00:25:03.240 there's a marketing issue here.

00:25:04.740 There's a marketing operation issue here.

00:25:06.220 And by not having that team separated from marketing,

00:25:09.780 there's accountability now for what marketing is doing.

00:25:12.600 You don't have a marketing operator who's

00:25:14.340 enabling that process.

00:25:15.640 They do enable that process.

00:25:16.720 But if that process doesn't work,

00:25:18.100 they're going to come back to you and say, hey,

00:25:19.580 not helping us close deals.

00:25:22.140 And that yin and yang situation, that tension,

00:25:25.040 creates a very healthy environment

00:25:27.560 where people are aligned because they're

00:25:29.120 solving the right kind of problems.

00:25:30.620 And who do you see as a natural leader

00:25:33.020 to be promoted or brought into a RevOps kind of position?

00:25:39.320 Is it somebody in marketing, sales, customer success,

00:25:43.580 engineering?

00:25:44.300 Yeah, I'm hoping that GoNimbly is training all those people.

00:25:47.860 So we have a very robust training program where we bring in someone from sales operations, marketing operations, and we train them on the other aspects of operations.

00:25:56.960 So the way we do that is you come in with a background of, say, sales ops.

00:25:59.740 And this is something that every organization operationally could copy is we have them come in with their background and then we give them an hour to two hours a day to work on things that are not in their background because we really believe in the generalist model.

00:26:11.100 And then what we try to do is get them to do work that's not in their category by having them be able to be solution designers, but not actually work in the tools and processes that they really know when they came to us.

00:26:21.240 And over time, we create revenue operations consultants, specialists who understand operations for SaaS companies backwards and forwards.

00:26:29.080 Those people are who should be your CRO.

00:26:31.880 In my opinion, those people are who you should be promoting because they understand the mechanics to drive revenue.

00:26:36.620 until those people are all out there

00:26:39.800 and deployed to the field.

00:26:40.760 We typically see it coming up through sales.

00:26:43.600 But CROs deployed through sales

00:26:45.700 usually have such a huge focus on BDRs and outbound sales stuff

00:26:51.200 that they don't actually really care about.

00:26:52.660 They have a hammer and they know nails.

00:26:54.260 Yeah, yeah.

00:26:54.840 And that's a struggle.

00:26:57.020 You see some COOs really get interested in this,

00:27:00.460 but they have troubles creating the urgency

00:27:02.460 that's necessary to really focus on revenue.

00:27:04.700 So it's kind of a space where I go, find the person who

00:27:08.480 believes that operations and customer experience is king.

00:27:13.160 Not king, but at least has a seat at the table.

00:27:17.000 I say king because what you want to do

00:27:18.320 is you want your hunters to be focused on hunting

00:27:21.020 and finding new things.

00:27:21.980 And you want your operators focused on the farming hunting

00:27:24.680 model.

00:27:25.180 You want them to be farming and tilling the land 0.60

00:27:27.620 so that it's stable for everyone going forward.

00:27:29.840 And that's kind of the experience that I like.

00:27:31.640 I want the sales team to be disruptors.

00:27:34.160 I want them to go out there and disrupt stuff.

00:27:35.720 I want them to go find a vertical that we

00:27:37.160 didn't think we could sell to and sell to it.

00:27:39.140 I want them to go and say, why can't we sell to Amex?

00:27:42.480 Why can't we sell to, who's telling me I can't do that?

00:27:45.380 I can do that, right?

00:27:46.080 I want them to push the envelope there.

00:27:48.380 And I want the operators to try to level the playing field

00:27:51.980 and say, OK, yeah, you sold to Amex,

00:27:54.140 but we have no processes and functions to do this.

00:27:56.360 Yeah, on the customer success side.

00:27:57.680 Anywhere, right?

00:27:58.520 Anywhere.

00:27:58.940 And so if you ultimately want to go upmarket like that,

00:28:02.340 what are we going to do to get there, right?

00:28:03.980 And how can we actually build those processes and things?

00:28:06.220 Let's just not keep throwing people at it.

00:28:07.740 And this is where I feel like most people

00:28:09.760 are going to get hung up on the difference between ops

00:28:12.500 versus the creative aspect of marketing, creativity, sales,

00:28:16.580 coaching, customer success, account management,

00:28:19.460 versus the ops side of it.

00:28:22.540 My answer is, when you send an email to someone,

00:28:27.680 I consider that a face-to-face.

00:28:29.440 Let's just say that's a face-to-face.

00:28:31.040 That is a front-end person that part of your go-to-market team.

00:28:33.520 If the person is a sales coach, they are part of your operations team.

00:28:39.800 They are part of the enablement part of the operations team

00:28:42.120 because they are helping support and enable those frontline actors.

00:28:46.420 Frontline.

00:28:46.960 Yeah.

00:28:47.440 And that gets a little murky in the way that most organizations are broke down.

00:28:50.940 But most people can understand, oh, is my job there to support the actors?

00:28:54.620 Am I the director?

00:28:55.440 Am I the script writer?

00:28:56.820 I like to use those analogies.

00:28:57.540 I like that analogy.

00:28:58.300 That works, right?

00:28:59.120 Because then people understand what's happening.

00:29:00.120 Are you on stage or are you backstage?

00:29:01.840 Exactly.

00:29:02.200 Backstage is ops, onstage is the creative.

00:29:04.980 Yeah, correct.

00:29:06.040 And so if you're creating the content,

00:29:07.880 you're probably part of the operations team.

00:29:10.820 If you are actually configuring the tools,

00:29:13.440 you're probably part of the operations team.

00:29:14.940 If you're actually the CMO, you're not really

00:29:18.540 part of the operations team.

00:29:19.780 And it's OK for this to get murky.

00:29:21.520 The only reason we try to separate it now

00:29:23.140 is so that we can say, OK, who's actually

00:29:24.880 going to do the manpower, and who's

00:29:26.120 going to develop the skills that are necessary to actually

00:29:29.380 move our teams.

00:29:31.300 We would like to think that anybody that has an interest

00:29:34.420 in solving the problem at a holistic level,

00:29:37.720 like if you have a BDR who it's time to get them promoted

00:29:40.840 and they either can go AE or you're

00:29:42.460 thinking an operational role for them,

00:29:45.800 is it a person who's thinking scalable about the solution

00:29:48.120 across the board for all customers?

00:29:49.740 Or is it someone who really likes

00:29:50.980 to get deep with a customer face to face with them?

00:29:53.980 Put them on the sales.

00:29:54.860 Put them in the GTM functionality.

00:29:56.980 If the whole time they've been a BDR,

00:29:58.700 they're thinking about how can they optimize this

00:30:00.640 And how can they reduce the calls

00:30:02.980 but get the same results?

00:30:04.140 That's an operator, right?

00:30:05.520 And we don't recognize that.

00:30:07.120 And what we do is we put them on these tracks

00:30:08.860 and push them forward.

00:30:09.940 Yeah, and then let's talk about tools,

00:30:11.920 because I know that most SaaS companies

00:30:13.960 are dying from deaths of 1,000 SaaS products.

00:30:16.800 What is the stack that you feel needs

00:30:19.200 to be present at 10 million ARR plus?

00:30:22.840 What do they need to do this properly?

00:30:25.700 Yeah, enterprise companies, we really

00:30:27.880 would recommend something like, so we kind of have two.

00:30:31.500 Salesforce for enterprise-grade companies, CRM, a must, obviously.

00:30:35.760 For smaller organizations, Copper is really good,

00:30:40.060 and they're a customer of ours, so I'm going to shout out to them.

00:30:44.100 And then from the marketing automation side,

00:30:47.140 you need a Marketo, you need an Eloqua.

00:30:49.560 We use Autopilot ourselves.

00:30:52.020 We don't do a lot of nurture because we are an ABM,

00:30:55.460 so we're not putting a lot of people in things.

00:30:57.080 And then you need some specialty tools.

00:31:01.820 So you need data tools.

00:31:04.580 We're big fans of Clearbit and other tools like that.

00:31:07.060 But really, it doesn't matter what technology you choose,

00:31:10.140 as long as you're intentional about the choices you make.

00:31:14.140 There is this kind of.

00:31:16.100 Then what about on the customer success side?

00:31:17.720 Customer success side.

00:31:18.720 I'm seeing there's a bunch of tools now.

00:31:20.180 What are you seeing that you like?

00:31:22.960 What's the one?

00:31:23.740 I know the founder, because he's always tweeting and stuff.

00:31:26.640 Yeah, but there's essentially the ones

00:31:28.920 that give you the reports.

00:31:30.120 Yeah, yeah, like engagement platforms.

00:31:31.960 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

00:31:32.700 They're great.

00:31:33.260 They're great.

00:31:33.720 I think that customer success tools

00:31:35.860 are still really in the early days of analytics platforms.

00:31:39.420 And any analytics platform, and we've

00:31:41.660 worked with lots of marketing automation analytics companies.

00:31:45.180 They have a hard time proving value,

00:31:46.920 because analytics is only useful.

00:31:49.020 Is Pendo one of them?

00:31:49.820 Pendo?

00:31:50.200 Pendo is a great tool.

00:31:51.040 Yeah.

00:31:52.040 Yeah, so that's like product feedback and customer support

00:31:55.080 engagement.

00:31:56.800 So there's not a clear winner in that category yet.

00:31:59.640 And what we find is it's more vertical-based.

00:32:02.280 So it's, who are you selling to, and what

00:32:03.820 are you trying to accomplish?

00:32:05.340 Most of our customers have Zendesk and tools like that.

00:32:08.200 But ultimately, I don't think there's a clear tech stack.

00:32:10.680 What we are interested in doing is,

00:32:12.300 because right now we're only working with C and up,

00:32:14.280 we're interested in putting together a tech stack of tools

00:32:16.740 that we recommend to seed A, B, and C companies

00:32:19.740 and sort of build out a recommended tech stack for them.

00:32:22.580 But once you get to-

00:32:23.580 It's really a configuration aspect, not the stack.

00:32:25.960 Because what I feel is missing a lot for companies

00:32:29.220 is just that view of the customer experience, right?

00:32:31.680 Being able to say like, oh crap, we

00:32:33.180 did send a double campaign, outbound campaign. 0.95

00:32:36.140 They bought.

00:32:37.080 Oh, this person reached out.

00:32:38.580 You want to see all the touch points.

00:32:40.140 And when you've got all these siloed solutions,

00:32:42.640 they're not well integrated.

00:32:43.500 Yeah, integration is really, really key across that.

00:32:46.600 And one thing I was going to mention

00:32:49.000 that we have a habit of doing in Silicon Valley

00:32:51.260 is having this idea that tools are cool.

00:32:54.560 And I'm a product guy, I love product,

00:32:57.780 I try product out all the time.

00:32:59.840 But there's this kind of dirty thing

00:33:02.840 that's happening in the industry

00:33:03.840 where it's bring your pick what tool,

00:33:05.480 every tool you want to use

00:33:06.360 and as long as it works for you, that's great.

00:33:07.940 And what they don't realize

00:33:08.980 is they're creating all this operational debt

00:33:11.400 that when you want to get sold or go to IPO or whatever

00:33:15.000 and trust it, we work with companies

00:33:16.200 who had to spend millions and millions of dollars

00:33:17.820 cleaning up this process, it doesn't really work.

00:33:23.160 And no one's actually gaining the efficiency,

00:33:25.120 because no one on your team has time to learn those tools.

00:33:27.320 So they think the tool is going to solve the problem

00:33:29.240 when it could be a processor.

00:33:30.240 They think the tool is going to solve the problem, 0.98

00:33:31.240 and they also think that enablement is a bitch, 0.97

00:33:34.800 and we're not going to do it. 0.98

00:33:36.580 And so if they can enable themselves

00:33:38.280 because they want to be enabled, which

00:33:40.380 is kind of the mindset of if you get

00:33:41.860 to pick what you want to do, if you get to pick your own lunch,

00:33:43.480 you're going to eat what you want, right?

00:33:46.060 But it kind of slows everyone else down in the process.

00:33:49.500 And so we find a lot of tools are not being mandated

00:33:51.820 and not being enabled properly.

00:33:52.900 I think we used to.

00:33:53.940 So it's interesting, ops debt.

00:33:55.180 Yeah, ops debt.

00:33:56.080 Yeah, exactly.

00:33:56.500 It's like code debt.

00:33:57.020 Yeah, yeah, code debt.

00:33:57.580 It's the same thing.

00:33:58.200 Yeah, exactly.

00:33:59.760 I like to do those kind of things.

00:34:02.020 But I really believe that 10 years ago,

00:34:05.260 because Salesforce ran this campaign against IT,

00:34:09.340 being the stopper of all innovation,

00:34:13.100 now operations and other teams are like, oh,

00:34:14.920 We don't want to be looked at that, because now business

00:34:16.720 owns all technology, and IT owns infrastructure, right?

00:34:19.680 And so the business has all this technology.

00:34:21.300 And they're like, OK, well, we'll just let it go,

00:34:22.400 because we don't want people to say, oh, we're not supporting

00:34:24.640 them.

00:34:25.220 And we're two people at a 100-person company,

00:34:28.780 and there's no way that we can keep up with all their demand.

00:34:31.200 So if we let them go and do what they want, they'll be happy.

00:34:33.100 You're going to wake up one day, and all of a sudden,

00:34:34.520 there's 15 tools to do one thing.

00:34:36.400 Yeah, and it happens.

00:34:37.720 And then companies are spending 3x what they should be on it.

00:34:40.660 Yeah.

00:34:41.160 And I think maybe it looks better on our books

00:34:44.780 to have software debt than people debt.

00:34:46.180 But it just doesn't really work at all.

00:34:49.560 And so I always talk about intentional buying,

00:34:52.120 which is I don't care if you sign a year, you do a POC.

00:34:55.820 I don't care about any of those kind of tactics.

00:34:57.540 I know I was listening to the Cassier big POC guy.

00:35:00.980 But I don't care about that.

00:35:02.760 If you want to go in and buy a piece of software

00:35:04.600 and make an enterprise and roll it out to everyone, do it.

00:35:07.020 But what you need to make a decision of

00:35:08.900 is why are we buying this piece of software, this tool?

00:35:12.340 What's it enabling to our inflection point, right?

00:35:15.840 And I think a lot-

00:35:16.280 And break down inflection point.

00:35:17.700 You've said that a couple times.

00:35:18.620 You mean like to the point where it's going.

00:35:21.820 Yeah, the reason we work with SaaS companies

00:35:23.560 is because it's actually,

00:35:26.200 there are like seven companies

00:35:27.820 in the five years that we work with them

00:35:29.760 before they get sold or IPO, right?

00:35:33.200 And at each of those points,

00:35:34.380 they have a very specific goal they're trying to do.

00:35:36.400 We're trying to scale up our marketing team.

00:35:37.760 We're trying to go global.

00:35:38.600 we're trying to go up enterprise those are inflection points yeah and you have to be

00:35:43.460 being intentional about that inflection point you cannot lose sight of that what problem are

00:35:47.460 we trying to solve at this stage right now right now because that's all you have funding for yeah

00:35:51.700 right and if you try to do both two three of those you're gonna run out of resources and people love

00:35:55.900 to jump to well we need to do it scalable or we need to do it and i'm like no what we need to do

00:36:00.320 is scale to this inflection point then we can redo it all because it's a joke in this world that

00:36:05.300 we call them work streams and not projects because we don't want, they're going to get

00:36:09.600 repeated over and over again. It's the work. It's the underlying guts of the system. We have to pull

00:36:13.820 it out and retool it every time. And the reason we do subscription base is because we'd be lying

00:36:17.620 to you. And every consulting partner who's a Salesforce consultant who comes in and sets up

00:36:20.980 is lying to you because you're going to have to keep doing that over and over and over again,

00:36:24.660 because it needs to be alive to your business. That's the bottom line. And so we do subscription

00:36:29.860 base because we want to be accountable to the work we're doing. And we want to be monitoring

00:36:33.260 and adjusting it to where it needs to be in the future.

00:36:36.020 And so all these organizations need

00:36:37.460 to work like that and be practiced in the idea that we're

00:36:42.080 trying to get to a point.

00:36:42.940 Let's get to that point.

00:36:43.760 And then we'll have a new milestone.

00:36:45.400 And then we can retool our roadmap to get to that next.

00:36:47.420 Do you have a high level kind of definition of what those?

00:36:50.060 It's different for most businesses.

00:36:51.360 But usually going from B to C is that we're

00:36:53.840 going to scale up our marketing team pretty heavily.

00:36:58.200 We've proven a sales model, a sales process.

00:37:01.340 And now we need to actually get the word out, right?

00:37:04.440 Then it goes to, we're going, as soon as you get to see around,

00:37:07.260 people are going, OK, that's great.

00:37:08.960 You know who your ICP is, but can you change your ICP?

00:37:11.160 Can you change it and go enterprise?

00:37:12.400 That's what typically happens, if they take more funding.

00:37:14.400 Yeah.

00:37:14.900 If they're going to stay-

00:37:15.400 Move from mid-market to an enterprise.

00:37:16.560 Right, if they're going to stay bootstrapped,

00:37:17.720 then it's, OK, how do we expand into international?

00:37:21.020 Or how do we just expand if they're geography locked?

00:37:25.900 And then usually around D or E, it's like, OK,

00:37:29.600 are we going to sell or are we going to go IPO?

00:37:30.940 And that process is the one that's most like big business, right?

00:37:35.560 It's like working at Coke, right?

00:37:37.100 Because we have to get SOX certified, and we have to do all these other things within

00:37:42.840 our process that every other organization does, and we have to become a real business.

00:37:46.600 And it's not about growth anymore.

00:37:48.160 It's about showing that we can be a real business to everyone.

00:37:51.160 And I find that to be the most applicable to, you know, now we're talking to companies

00:37:55.520 like, you know, Dell Computers and Coke.

00:37:57.640 They want to know about revenue operations, right?

00:37:59.840 they're interested in this stuff but because we have applied all these theories downstream at

00:38:04.800 these kind of what i would call high velocity point companies what's happening over here is

00:38:09.700 interesting right because we get to here and we have a different outcome like they don't have to

00:38:12.780 spend as long you know getting ready for ipo they don't have to spend as long getting ready to get

00:38:16.880 sold they can uh acquire organizations better like it's a big advantage when you're a series you know

00:38:22.520 company that all of your systems and operations are in place so that when you acquire a company

00:38:26.420 you can expand into them easily.

00:38:28.400 Easily.

00:38:28.940 Right?

00:38:29.440 Usually, it takes one to two years to do that properly.

00:38:32.060 And that's if both companies were run efficiently, right?

00:38:34.400 And so we're working right now trying

00:38:37.760 to integrate a huge organization into another huge organization.

00:38:41.180 And both of those companies valued operations.

00:38:43.100 And one's been a customer for five years.

00:38:46.020 And that process is much, much easier

00:38:48.540 than any other organization I've worked in.

00:38:51.100 And I think that's because they had the foresight to go,

00:38:53.900 OK, we're going the long run.

00:38:55.340 Our next inflection point is to acquire strategically.

00:38:58.400 Let's start building our system so that we can acquire that.

00:39:02.100 Then plug them in.

00:39:02.800 Exactly.

00:39:03.700 And that changed the game for them.

00:39:05.220 And those organizations are there.

00:39:06.400 So what is that activity?

00:39:07.780 Is that API enabling certain kind of interfaces?

00:39:11.820 Is it documentation, all of the above?

00:39:16.340 So I think at that stage, what it is is clear documentation.

00:39:21.220 And clear documentation doesn't look

00:39:22.460 like what people think it looks like.

00:39:23.940 And clear documentation looks like this business process

00:39:26.600 is tied to this tool.

00:39:28.140 So diagrams.

00:39:29.420 Diagrams.

00:39:30.180 But more even so, just saying, okay, here is how if we talk about SLA

00:39:36.000 or if we talk about lead management,

00:39:38.760 here's all the tools that touch lead management, know that.

00:39:42.100 You'd be surprised by how many organizations don't know that.

00:39:44.440 Oh, for sure.

00:39:45.060 Like they don't know, okay, we're using DiscoverOrg to enrich this data.

00:39:49.300 And I'm not talking about even you don't even need to know field detail.

00:39:52.200 Yeah, we're just saying, hey.

00:39:53.080 about huge organizations that have hundreds of people

00:39:54.880 working at them.

00:39:55.280 Just even know that they're involved in this part.

00:39:57.140 Correct.

00:39:57.620 Because people will break something,

00:39:58.620 and it has huge downstream effects.

00:40:00.280 And to find that, it's like a needle in a haystack at some

00:40:02.200 point.

00:40:02.700 So those organizations, that kind of documentation

00:40:04.520 is really critical.

00:40:06.140 And then not forgetting that enablement's important.

00:40:07.960 So I find even at large organizations,

00:40:10.600 doing rep rides, marketing rides, things like that

00:40:12.880 for your operations team to get the context of what the field

00:40:15.280 needs.

00:40:15.480 And when you say this, again, because a lot of people

00:40:16.900 have no clue, you mean essentially pair them.

00:40:20.140 What I love is a bunch of programming analogies.

00:40:22.060 Care Programming, Agile Scrum.

00:40:24.160 Yeah.

00:40:24.460 So I really think of, and why I think GoNimbly is going

00:40:27.180 to ultimately win as a consulting company.

00:40:29.000 Exactly.

00:40:31.220 I liken it to when people went from waterfall to Agile,

00:40:34.480 or from manufacturing to lean manufacturing.

00:40:36.360 Now we're going from legacy operations to revenue operations.

00:40:38.980 And the companies that can build the transition muscle

00:40:41.720 in organizations are the companies that win.

00:40:43.220 So Accenture, Deloitte, these big organizations in our space.

00:40:46.400 And I really feel like we might not win,

00:40:48.840 but we have a good shot of doing that, right?

00:40:52.000 And so when I'm looking at these organizations,

00:40:53.740 I'm going, yeah, here's things that

00:40:55.700 worked for those paired programming, paired rep rides,

00:40:58.620 all of these things that operations teams don't do

00:41:02.280 necessarily enough so that we can get the context,

00:41:04.760 so we can prioritize our roadmap.

00:41:05.880 It's running your operations team a little bit like a product.

00:41:08.380 For sure.

00:41:09.280 No, it's the agile approach to road mapping.

00:41:12.620 Absolutely.

00:41:14.260 And just being able to see it from the customer experience,

00:41:16.960 which is the force from the trees.

00:41:18.680 Because a lot of these, they're in it, they're doing it.

00:41:20.560 They don't actually see like, oh,

00:41:21.680 if you actually take a step back, this looks really, really bad.

00:41:24.980 Yeah, we do this thing where we come in,

00:41:26.340 and we do two things where we do a skill gap analysis

00:41:29.120 of the team, so we can tell your team where you're weak.

00:41:32.180 But then we also try to do secret shopping

00:41:34.800 or talk to your customers and see how

00:41:36.980 And then give them back that as a report.

00:41:39.020 See where the perception is different.

00:41:41.600 You're saying this in your marketing.

00:41:43.400 Here's what I got from the rep.

00:41:45.080 Here's what the sales guy said to me.

00:41:47.100 If we said to an operator, because again,

00:41:49.640 we're talking at the operational level,

00:41:51.140 is a different thing to talk about because I know everyone wants to talk

00:41:53.300 about sales and marketing but when you talk to an operator you go hey what do

00:41:55.820 you think your biggest problem is and they'll say something and it's usually

00:41:58.280 been parroted by a salesperson oh our this is a bad example but it's something

00:42:03.200 we hear oh our page layouts are confusing hard to use in Salesforce it 0.86

00:42:06.380 can be as dumb as that and then I go well actually your customer thinks this

00:42:10.040 is the weakest part of your process what are you guys doing around that and they'll 1.00

00:42:12.920 go well that's not our job and I go well the sales team doesn't think that's

00:42:15.560 their job either so whose job is it and just pointing out that there's these

00:42:19.340 these holes where nobody takes accountability in the process.

00:42:22.700 But the customer realizes it.

00:42:24.800 They know it.

00:42:26.480 And we've all had that experience, right?

00:42:28.880 Especially when you're on this side of the fence.

00:42:30.280 If you fill out a form and you know, OK, where's that going?

00:42:32.900 OK, it's being routed in Marketo.

00:42:34.100 It's going to Salesforce.

00:42:35.900 My company is doing X millions of dollars.

00:42:37.940 That probably means I'm being routed

00:42:39.020 a small, medium-sized business.

00:42:40.820 They probably have an SLA of what?

00:42:42.620 Why has it been four days?

00:42:44.580 Right?

00:42:44.940 What's happening inside this organization?

00:42:47.100 And I don't think that everyone understands the guts that way,

00:42:50.160 but everyone can feel that no matter who you are

00:42:52.860 in any organization.

00:42:53.960 Yeah.

00:42:54.960 And when it comes to companies focusing

00:42:59.880 on retention, expansion, when you say that there's

00:43:02.540 different inflection points, is that something

00:43:05.420 that comes before they pour more in marketing,

00:43:07.680 or is that once they perfect the mid-market?

00:43:10.620 It should.

00:43:11.420 I know where it should, but yeah.

00:43:13.460 It doesn't happen.

00:43:15.580 We only, I hate saying this, we're

00:43:18.160 only seeing organizations prioritize customer success

00:43:20.580 when they have bad churn.

00:43:21.880 It's too bad.

00:43:22.540 Right?

00:43:22.960 Because I mean, that whole growth ceiling,

00:43:24.260 or I call the churn flatline, I mean,

00:43:26.340 if you don't know it's coming, it's

00:43:27.580 going to be a world of pain because trying to fix it

00:43:29.700 when it shows up.

00:43:30.700 Yeah, and more smart people are starting to look at churn

00:43:35.320 and say, OK, how do we prevent this?

00:43:36.600 And what can we do in the front end of the process?

00:43:38.420 And I think that area is maturing.

00:43:42.240 I think that they're leaving out the core actors, though.

00:43:45.460 They're not integrating the success team into that process.

00:43:49.120 They're usually trying to use marketing

00:43:51.880 to reduce churn through education,

00:43:54.200 or sales reducing churn through touchpoints, or QBRs,

00:43:57.780 or something like that.

00:43:58.940 And it's like, hey, the people who have the context,

00:44:01.120 you're not utilizing them.

00:44:02.540 You're not bringing them in and doing 0.85

00:44:04.060 an introduction that says, this is your partner.

00:44:07.120 And you know what scale these companies are going to be at.

00:44:09.440 And if you have a product that can't be supported,

00:44:11.660 you probably don't have market fit,

00:44:12.940 even though you're pretending that you do.

00:44:14.260 Yeah, and that means they moved up market too quick.

00:44:16.600 Absolutely.

00:44:17.500 And they didn't build out any of the functionality that's

00:44:19.140 necessary in their core product.

00:44:20.520 And that means that you probably need to go raise around and say,

00:44:22.900 we need a ton of support people so we can build this product.

00:44:26.200 Because if you just can sell this vision, sell the product,

00:44:29.240 and then you just churn everyone, everyone knows that's,

00:44:31.460 everyone's now starting to realize that's worse than selling.

00:44:34.360 Yeah.

00:44:34.860 You should not have sold to them.

00:44:36.020 Save the resources.

00:44:37.020 Yeah, because those people are never

00:44:38.020 going to buy from you again. 0.97

00:44:38.880 And they're out there talking crap about it. 0.98

00:44:40.520 Yeah, 100%. 0.94

00:44:41.700 So I think that including those people

00:44:43.700 the front end of the process.

00:44:44.660 So I like to get customer success.

00:44:46.560 I say, OK, you have like, let's say

00:44:48.860 you have five strategic customer success implementation

00:44:50.700 people, if you want to call them.

00:44:51.640 I don't know.

00:44:52.100 In different organizations, they have different titles now,

00:44:53.880 depending on how progressive the organization is.

00:44:56.120 But let's take those five people, and at negotiation,

00:44:58.820 let's bring them in. 0.98

00:45:00.260 One thing that we do.

00:45:01.520 Is that for a proper handoff?

00:45:03.520 It's so that the customer actually

00:45:05.020 feels like we're adding to this warrant.

00:45:06.940 Adding.

00:45:07.640 Right?

00:45:07.940 And you are adding.

00:45:09.520 It's not for a handoff.

00:45:10.580 That person is now involved in that process.

00:45:12.980 And that person, you should be using a tool like Front

00:45:15.540 or something where all the emails from that team

00:45:18.000 are now being shared.

00:45:18.780 They're being added to it.

00:45:19.920 You're creating this environment.

00:45:20.980 And get the contacts.

00:45:22.000 Yeah, we love doing Uber flips, personalized Uber flips,

00:45:24.820 for each of our customers in the prospect stage.

00:45:27.080 And what I'm working on now is introducing Lorena,

00:45:29.140 our vice president of marketing, to come in at some point

00:45:32.700 and talk to them about their marketing programs

00:45:35.200 and talk to them about partnerships.

00:45:37.700 We're lucky that a lot of the companies we sell to,

00:45:39.360 we could sell their software externally to our other companies

00:45:43.440 and integrate them into our tech stacks, right?

00:45:45.240 So we're seeing how can we add value,

00:45:48.240 how can a customer success person add value

00:45:50.480 in the very middle of the process, right?

00:45:52.560 In the middle of the sales process.

00:45:53.560 Not at the very end or as a reactive.

00:45:55.760 Because as soon as they're fighting fires,

00:45:58.600 even if your customer trusts them,

00:46:02.080 they trust that they're the good person at your company,

00:46:04.640 the person that cares about them at the company.

00:46:06.160 But it doesn't reflect on the company.

00:46:08.440 And I think a lot of people rely on that personal relationship

00:46:11.660 when, really, you don't want your customer

00:46:13.660 to have a personal relationship with Rick in customer success.

00:46:16.200 You want them to have the relationship with your company.

00:46:19.640 The brand.

00:46:20.140 Yeah, the brand.

00:46:20.740 And you need to say, no, this is how we go to market.

00:46:23.100 This is how we do it at our company.

00:46:24.760 It doesn't matter who is doing it.

00:46:26.420 Rick can move on.

00:46:27.240 And then you celebrate Rick moving on.

00:46:28.780 Yeah, and then you transition a new person in.

00:46:31.280 And that's one thing that we've done as a product consulting

00:46:35.940 company is, our customers stay with us

00:46:37.980 for an average of three years, which

00:46:39.240 is unheard of in consulting, continuous.

00:46:42.860 And we do that because someone can leave the team

00:46:45.200 or move to a new team, and the customer misses that person.

00:46:47.820 Doesn't have to do anything.

00:46:49.240 Yeah, they miss that person.

00:46:50.360 They're like, oh, I love so-and-so.

00:46:52.100 But they trust the company knows how to bring these people

00:46:55.000 in and do these transitions.

00:46:56.000 Train them, transition.

00:46:57.180 And they're sometimes excited.

00:46:58.480 Oh, we get all new blood, or we get someone that's

00:47:00.100 looking at our business processes with fresh eyes.

00:47:02.660 And so that's part of the process where I think

00:47:05.900 where you reduce churn, which is don't let the customer

00:47:09.420 think that they have a one-to-one relationship

00:47:11.680 with someone on your team.

00:47:13.160 Don't let someone be a scapegoat on your team.

00:47:15.040 So many customer success teams are scapegoats.

00:47:17.320 Or they blame the product, which is worse.

00:47:18.900 So when I worked in product as a product manager,

00:47:21.340 I'd open up tickets and go, oh, our success team

00:47:25.020 hates our product.

00:47:27.680 They're not cheering for it anymore.

00:47:29.520 And we're doing all of these other things

00:47:31.260 in order to build stuff so that we can go upmarket.

00:47:34.100 But our own people hate our product.

00:47:36.940 That should be the first sign that something's not healthy,

00:47:39.480 even if they can protect our churn. 1.00

00:47:41.040 Because at some point, they're just going to fuck it. 1.00

00:47:43.380 And they walk away. 0.99

00:47:44.580 And then your churn numbers go crazy.

00:47:45.940 And then you're investing lots and lots of your funding

00:47:48.380 into fixing that problem.

00:47:49.800 Who do you think?

00:47:50.500 Like, do you believe customer success

00:47:52.840 should be accountable for upsells, cross-sells?

00:47:54.600 Or should that be bringing the sales rep

00:47:56.460 back into the conversation?

00:47:59.520 Where do you think, as a holistic approach

00:48:02.340 to the customer, what feels best?

00:48:03.280 I think that if we really want to take customer success

00:48:05.940 seriously, we need to have them be responsible for upsells. 0.97

00:48:08.640 You need to have a upsell sales team that

00:48:12.300 lives with customer success the same way that so many BDRs are 0.98

00:48:14.900 now owned by marketing.

00:48:17.140 And I think that would really give them

00:48:18.680 a seat at the table on revenue.

00:48:19.680 Because I'm always about, if our company cares about revenue

00:48:22.320 and generating revenue, how can we

00:48:24.300 get more actors at that table who also

00:48:26.520 are contributing to that North Star?

00:48:28.980 Churn is a prevention mechanism.

00:48:31.200 So if we can say, yeah, part of your day-to-day

00:48:34.060 is preventing churn.

00:48:35.360 But really, what we want to do is,

00:48:37.280 some people are going to churn no matter what we do.

00:48:39.780 We didn't have the product they needed.

00:48:41.400 We didn't do a good job qualifying.

00:48:43.260 They grew out of our solution.

00:48:44.760 But instead, how can we upsell?

00:48:46.420 And get them to the table and talking about upsell

00:48:48.600 and getting that core team functional.

00:48:49.740 Because they've got visibility into the customer account.

00:48:51.780 Context is everything.

00:48:52.360 Yeah.

00:48:53.160 So they understand how to.

00:48:54.260 And then it's interesting, then,

00:48:56.040 especially if you have a CRO or somebody managing,

00:48:58.740 they can kind of incentivize through whatever comp

00:49:02.360 strategy they want to to help deploy those new add-ons,

00:49:05.740 modules, et cetera.

00:49:07.480 And I think the personalization happens so much better there

00:49:10.620 because they have so many more touches.

00:49:12.060 They know so much more about the organization.

00:49:14.260 So for us, our upsell model lives with our actual account

00:49:17.060 teams that work with our customers, right?

00:49:19.520 We're integrated into our customer,

00:49:20.720 meaning that there is a team of four

00:49:23.060 who gets put at our customer, not at their site,

00:49:25.460 but works with them, Zoom, that stuff.

00:49:28.560 And they think of them as an extension of their team.

00:49:30.100 Like we did a customer survey, 99% of people think that this is someone who works at their company,

00:49:35.080 except there's four of them, and they have different skill sets,

00:49:37.640 and I can throw anything at them, and they're a SWAT team, and they can solve those problems, right?

00:49:41.720 And so that core idea sort of carves out how I think that customer success should be looked at too,

00:49:46.680 which is, hey, this upsell, churn, all of this stuff should be kind of looked at as one thing.

00:49:51.780 And maybe you build little SWAT teams of people, the people who are focused on this hundred customers,

00:49:57.400 and they're looking for the upsell opportunities.

00:49:59.140 These people are reducing churn and so on.

00:50:01.300 You can apply this sort of red team model to almost anything.

00:50:04.580 And that allows you to experiment with little cost

00:50:10.120 and then find what works in for your organization.

00:50:11.800 And then deploy it across the other.

00:50:12.720 And then deploy it across your organization.

00:50:13.660 And so a lot of people are talking about pods.

00:50:16.300 Do you believe in that model of having?

00:50:18.500 So who would be involved in a pod, and how do they communicate?

00:50:22.520 At GoNimbly?

00:50:23.340 Yeah.

00:50:23.840 So a pod for us is at least four people.

00:50:27.100 a sales ops background, marketing ops background,

00:50:29.500 a technical API background, so a developer,

00:50:32.080 and a SaaS strategist.

00:50:33.740 Those four people make up what we call a revenue operations

00:50:36.400 team.

00:50:37.700 And I mean, anybody listening that has a SaaS company,

00:50:39.460 they can borrow that.

00:50:40.600 Absolutely.

00:50:41.060 Yeah.

00:50:41.560 Absolutely.

00:50:42.100 This is how, in the book, we're

00:50:43.360 recommending that you build your net teams.

00:50:46.340 And what we do is, for us, they support a book of business.

00:50:50.220 So most of our customers are doing one FTE to three FTE

00:50:54.520 amount of time per month.

00:50:56.060 And those pods will support one or two customers.

00:50:59.680 And they will follow the same formula

00:51:03.100 that all the other pods follow, which

00:51:04.840 is action meetings and these kind of things

00:51:06.800 that we've coined that really help revenue operations

00:51:08.900 stay united.

00:51:09.920 And you'll be surprised by how if,

00:51:12.180 I'll throw out a customer, if we're working with Coursera

00:51:15.600 and they're doing a sales ops project,

00:51:18.300 and in their action meeting they're talking about that sales

00:51:20.540 ops project, the marketing ops person with the marketing

00:51:22.640 ops background will be like, oh, actually this stuff

00:51:25.100 is tied over here, right?

00:51:26.540 And this will be broken when we do that.

00:51:28.460 And we'll be able to solve it just

00:51:29.760 by having that unified communication platform.

00:51:31.600 That's it.

00:51:32.580 And they'll have that meeting before they ever

00:51:34.160 go talk to the customer, right?

00:51:35.620 And they're super self-sufficient.

00:51:37.860 And so the customer gets to make the decisions

00:51:39.720 on the business process.

00:51:40.820 Strategy.

00:51:42.420 Yeah, and agreeing with us that we're thinking things

00:51:44.820 through the right way.

00:51:46.200 And a company like Zendesk, we've worked with them

00:51:49.020 three years.

00:51:49.940 So we know parts of their process that they don't know,

00:51:52.720 and they know parts that we don't know.

00:51:54.280 And so it becomes a good partnership,

00:51:56.160 but it's really integrated.

00:51:57.220 But I think that every organization should do that.

00:51:59.140 And what we typically do is, let's say we have a customer,

00:52:01.720 our largest customer is like eight FTE, right?

00:52:05.380 We'll just expand that pod and have them focus 1.00

00:52:08.380 on that one customer.

00:52:09.200 And they're really integrated,

00:52:10.040 but we make sure that we keep bringing diverse backgrounds.

00:52:12.300 So companies that don't work well for us

00:52:14.620 are companies that come to us and say, hey,

00:52:15.760 we need a Salesforce admin.

00:52:17.120 Can you provide a Salesforce admin for us?

00:52:18.460 We're like, no, that's not what we do.

00:52:20.740 We know Salesforce.

00:52:21.680 We know it like the back of our hand.

00:52:22.800 And probably, I've worked in this space for 15 years,

00:52:26.120 like know it better than almost any other organization.

00:52:28.740 But that's not what we do.

00:52:30.560 And I think that a lot of consulting companies

00:52:32.420 try to build themselves on the back of tools.

00:52:33.960 And that's a bad place to be, in my opinion,

00:52:35.700 as a consulting company.

00:52:36.900 And I want to be able to talk holistically

00:52:40.320 about what the problem is and not always

00:52:41.920 be forced into this solution that doesn't make sense

00:52:44.080 for lots of organizations.

00:52:45.560 And so those companies don't do as well with us.

00:52:48.220 And we are very straightforward with that.

00:52:50.040 We learn that the hard way.

00:52:51.660 We were like, oh, we can land and expand.

00:52:55.080 And we do land and expand.

00:52:56.100 The way we land and expand is typically

00:52:57.960 we might be brought in because a sales ops team is having

00:53:00.200 a problem.

00:53:01.080 They buy into the methodology.

00:53:02.900 And then we might expand into the marketing team.

00:53:04.780 And then we might increase their overall program

00:53:06.600 and do start doing marketing work for them.

00:53:07.980 And then we might do customer success work.

00:53:09.840 We might even do some technical front end work for things

00:53:13.560 that touch their customer.

00:53:14.840 But ultimately, they have to buy into the idea, the methodology.

00:53:18.420 And now, because of revenue operations.

00:53:19.820 This is what you're going to cover in your upcoming book.

00:53:22.460 The book is going to be for organizations

00:53:24.800 who have an operator who's going, why can't I

00:53:27.140 get anything done?

00:53:28.200 Which is every operator I've ever met at every organization.

00:53:30.860 They actually care about their craft greatly.

00:53:33.180 And so I find that because most of them

00:53:35.300 are coming from a systems background,

00:53:37.640 they don't have the soft skills on building consensus

00:53:39.860 that are necessary to really change their role properly.

00:53:43.440 So I have a soft spot to teach those people on how

00:53:46.680 do you actually evolve your position

00:53:48.840 from a support class into a revenue class

00:53:50.940 where you have a seat at the table.

00:53:52.120 And when you say something, people are leaning in going,

00:53:54.100 OK, what's that team saying?

00:53:56.440 OK, that's important.

00:53:57.020 We should pay attention to it.

00:53:58.320 And not like, Dave is so nice.

00:53:59.680 Every time I send him a ticket, he gets to me in 20 minutes.

00:54:02.500 That's not the relationship that you should really strive for.

00:54:06.060 So that's what we're working on.

00:54:07.540 And hopefully, that will be something that people at,

00:54:11.140 you know, the ideal thing would be

00:54:12.820 that you get your office at a WeWork,

00:54:14.740 You read the book, and you start building operations.

00:54:16.900 Even if you're a CEO, you start building operations

00:54:18.620 the right way.

00:54:19.420 You invest in things at the right time.

00:54:21.760 And then when you get to an organization

00:54:23.640 where you're trying to actually scale,

00:54:25.260 it's much easier for you.

00:54:26.280 And you have the mindset to do it.

00:54:29.660 It's never going to be easy. 0.99

00:54:31.420 And you're going to fuck up a lot along the way. 0.92

00:54:33.540 And there is no silver bullets in anything. 0.98

00:54:37.000 But what I find is you can at least start

00:54:40.360 to tie a tactic to correlation.

00:54:44.620 Maybe we don't have causation yet in operations,

00:54:46.420 but that's closer.

00:54:47.560 And it's the same thing as what I see when marketing went

00:54:49.100 to attribution, right?

00:54:50.380 It's like, we don't know if this is working,

00:54:51.700 but we can attribute this.

00:54:52.740 And let's keep experimenting until we say, oh yeah,

00:54:55.120 this does work.

00:54:56.680 And I think that's where we're at right now.

00:54:58.360 And it's a very interesting time

00:55:00.040 to be solving these very old problems.

00:55:04.540 In a new, I guess, mechanism, which is SaaS and retention.

00:55:08.140 Yeah, I mean, they exist forever.

00:55:09.740 Yeah.

00:55:10.880 Who are people out there that you study

00:55:12.520 or you listen to around these different topics?

00:55:14.700 Yeah.

00:55:15.200 What are some of them?

00:55:15.840 So there's this guy named Phil who

00:55:17.220 worked at Goodyear Tires in the 80s.

00:55:18.520 And he actually came up with the term silo syndrome.

00:55:20.760 And that's your whole mantra, the no more silos.

00:55:23.320 No more silos, right?

00:55:24.440 And how do you break down silos?

00:55:25.820 And he actually came up with four core reasons

00:55:28.120 we silo as human beings.

00:55:30.160 His job was to actually unify all Goodyear tires, right?

00:55:33.340 And his job, he drove from everywhere.

00:55:34.840 And he drove through Iowa.

00:55:35.780 And nobody wanted to work the same way.

00:55:37.660 Nobody wanted it.

00:55:38.280 And they're all selling the same product.

00:55:40.280 And you could come in and say, well, these guys sell it this way, and they sell more

00:55:43.960 than you.

00:55:44.200 And they're like, we don't care.

00:55:44.960 That's not how we do it here.

00:55:45.700 That's not who our customer is.

00:55:47.100 And what he realized is that there was a lot of inefficiencies in the organization that

00:55:50.580 made people silos so that their job could be easier.

00:55:53.360 And he left Goodyear Tires, and he spent the rest of his career trying to figure that out.

00:55:56.800 And he died last year.

00:55:57.940 But he basically had all the fundamental roadblocks, but none of the technology supporting him

00:56:03.720 behind the scenes that makes this possible.

00:56:05.680 So we're just in the age where technology is so abundant

00:56:09.760 that it can be overwhelming.

00:56:11.660 Or technology can be so useful that we can actually

00:56:14.740 solve some of these core problems that we have as human beings.

00:56:16.920 It's natural to want to do our jobs.

00:56:19.000 It's natural to want to be efficient and feel successful.

00:56:20.860 Yeah, just let me know how to make the widgets.

00:56:22.280 I don't want to talk to other people.

00:56:23.440 It's going to slow down my widget making.

00:56:24.820 But if your goal is to increase revenue,

00:56:27.640 it might make sense to optimize.

00:56:29.500 And you're creating those opportunities

00:56:31.420 for people to collaborate.

00:56:32.220 And you're creating those opportunities for silos

00:56:33.560 to be broken.

00:56:34.460 And one of the core functionality of silo breaking

00:56:38.140 is that you have to give everyone a North Star metric.

00:56:40.640 So that's why we focus on revenue so much.

00:56:42.620 And then we have to give everyone the ability

00:56:45.380 to influence the conversation.

00:56:46.580 So it's why I focus so much on, hey, operator,

00:56:49.880 this is how you have a seat at the table.

00:56:51.840 Hey, customer success, this is how you have a seat at the table.

00:56:54.020 Because if we're all speaking the same language,

00:56:55.440 we can come at it with our different contexts.

00:56:58.620 But if we're not speaking the same language,

00:57:00.860 your context is not going to be heard.

00:57:03.080 That's a good point.

00:57:03.780 Even if it's real, right?

00:57:05.040 And so someone might go, yeah, I hear that.

00:57:07.680 But I only have $10.

00:57:08.900 And you didn't get any of them because I couldn't relate

00:57:12.780 why you needed that.

00:57:14.100 It's just something you asked for.

00:57:15.960 And that's really frustrating.

00:57:17.460 And a lot of good people kind of get burned out

00:57:20.700 in both of those areas right now in SAS.

00:57:23.520 And I really feel convicted that those people

00:57:27.900 should be respected and should learn and really

00:57:31.900 take ownership of how important they are to these organizations.

00:57:35.380 Because when I talk to a CEO and I say, OK,

00:57:38.020 what are your operators doing?

00:57:39.100 How are you measuring them?

00:57:40.000 I'm like, I don't know.

00:57:41.000 And you can see on their face when

00:57:42.760 I'm having a conversation with them

00:57:43.900 is they're not even thinking about these people

00:57:46.300 from a day-to-day perspective.

00:57:48.420 And that's a real problem because they're

00:57:50.020 running your business.

00:57:51.080 They're the ones that are actually making everything run.

00:57:53.200 Yeah, operations, people are behind the scenes making it

00:57:55.360 run.

00:57:55.780 Customer success people are preventing churn

00:57:58.400 and talking the most about your product.

00:58:01.120 And those two people are being ignored.

00:58:02.580 And I do think that there's more room for sales and marketing

00:58:05.560 teams to grow.

00:58:06.140 I think there's a lot of focus on them for good reason.

00:58:09.040 I think there's been a lot of progress

00:58:10.580 and the idea of alignment between them

00:58:12.100 and trying to get those two teams to work as one team.

00:58:15.600 So they're in a healthy direction, right?

00:58:18.360 But I don't see that so much with the other functions

00:58:20.280 of the good marketing, the revenue team.

00:58:22.000 So Jason, one question I'd love to ask as we wrap up

00:58:24.500 is you've built a successful company in the consultancy

00:58:27.740 space, 2013 to now, very rare.

00:58:30.860 Most companies fail.

00:58:32.060 Obviously, you know this.

00:58:33.580 And you're doing it in a very innovative approach.

00:58:36.440 As a founder, and I know you have co-founders

00:58:38.780 and a few partners, but who did you

00:58:40.800 need to become to be the leader that shows up today?

00:58:44.260 What's your journey been in regards

00:58:45.860 to just the personal growth?

00:58:48.760 Yeah.

00:58:50.580 So I think two factors that really influenced me, one

00:58:53.980 is I have a creative background.

00:58:55.800 So I, I've always loved like comedy.

00:58:59.040 So I do standup comedy, sketches, I have hosted game shows and things like that.

00:59:03.980 And I've always played music.

00:59:05.120 So I've been in bands and I grew up in sort of a punk rock DIY scene.

00:59:08.980 And when you see something that needs to be made, just go make it right.

00:59:14.560 And I am not a money motivated person, although I know in our world, that's how we reward

00:59:19.260 people.

00:59:20.300 But I'm a builder and I love to go out and build things.

00:59:23.360 And I love to go out and solve problems.

00:59:24.780 And so I think that's one thing, which is, Hey, I can be much more successful than my

00:59:30.000 skill says I should be by just going out and doing it by not waiting for someone to give

00:59:34.700 me a green light and just go and build something.

00:59:36.720 Even if you don't know how, even if you don't know how, and like, as long as you have a

00:59:39.860 growth mindset and you're going to be like, I'm going to learn for every single thing

00:59:42.540 that I do.

00:59:43.020 And go nimbly has this very aggressive betterment culture where we have retrospectives on the

00:59:48.860 weekly with the entire company where people are very vulnerable and that betterment culture

00:59:52.420 and that you can create this and you can become something that you don't know

00:59:55.520 is very seeped into everything that we are and who we hire.

01:00:00.160 And that's one of the most amazing things,

01:00:02.020 and I think why retention is so good at our organization.

01:00:04.560 The second thing is I was lucky enough very early on to work at Rackspace.

01:00:10.540 And when I worked at Rackspace, I worked on a special secret project,

01:00:14.080 which is called the Redundant Server Cluster, which turned out to be the cloud.

01:00:17.320 One of the customers was Salesforce.

01:00:18.840 and while I was working on that I worked with one of the co-founders of

01:00:22.500 Rackspace and Rackspace at the time was a huge organization probably one of the

01:00:28.380 fastest-growing tech companies yeah and I was like why are you working on this

01:00:33.720 why are you not the CEO of the founder and he said well my specialty is that I

01:00:38.820 can build things I can build these little 10 million dollar lines of

01:00:42.060 business and then someone takes them and blows up to 100 million dollars most

01:00:45.600 people don't have the flexibility and audacity to build these small things into successful things

01:00:50.300 some other people are very good at scaling this and I learned from that that you have to understand

01:00:55.020 what your abilities are and you have to understand where where you can grow and where you aren't

01:00:59.800 growing the way that you need to and that you always have to be evaluating yourself right and

01:01:04.420 so by the idea that I can try anything and then constant evaluation of where I'm at which I

01:01:11.200 learned through Rackspace, I've learned

01:01:13.320 that you can move forward things in a way

01:01:17.920 that most people are afraid to or that most organizations

01:01:22.440 are risk-averse to.

01:01:25.980 And I am a big believer that if you can bootstrap your company

01:01:30.220 to, and we're going to be doing no funding,

01:01:33.100 we're going to be closing over about $12 million this year,

01:01:36.100 $10 million to $12 million of revenue,

01:01:39.320 Now is the time when we have all the power to go and talk

01:01:43.580 to VCs about scaling our product arm of our organization

01:01:46.340 and other things like that because we were able to show

01:01:48.900 that we can build this thing in a scalable way.

01:01:51.080 And we looked at what was wrong with consulting,

01:01:53.620 and we said, OK, look, the revenue is not valued as high

01:01:56.500 because it's project by project.

01:01:57.620 Let's change that.

01:01:59.260 When people leave, you lose customers.

01:02:00.640 Let's change that.

01:02:01.640 Like, let's look at what the fundamental gaps

01:02:03.700 are in the experience of a consulting agency,

01:02:05.600 and let's figure out how to fix those

01:02:07.040 and experiment with those.

01:02:07.980 And let's do it in a test environment, which is with SaaS companies, where if we don't perform, they will leave us.

01:02:16.060 Yep.

01:02:16.600 Right?

01:02:16.900 Sure.

01:02:17.180 Because their pressure is immense, and that puts immense pressure on us.

01:02:20.560 And we had customers very early on coming and saying, we'll sign six-month contracts, give us discounts or a year.

01:02:24.720 And we said no, because we want the pressure that every month you have to renew with us.

01:02:28.120 Yep.

01:02:28.600 Keeps it honest.

01:02:29.220 Because we want the teams to get that much better.

01:02:30.780 And I think those were the right choices.

01:02:32.780 And so I think that just you can do it yourself and always be evaluating where you are and how to move forward are the two key things that I've kind of picked up on.

01:02:43.180 And then be creative.

01:02:44.760 Like I think that so many organizations devalue creativity within their organization.

01:02:49.560 They don't like promoting outside hobbies.

01:02:52.220 They don't like promoting things.

01:02:53.940 I always think of, like, I tell my team, if we are not integrating our personal life with our

01:03:00.860 work life, then we are failing because we have more time to practice at work than we have anywhere

01:03:05.080 else, right? And I'm a big believer in no work-life balance. I'm a workaholic. Just integrate it.

01:03:09.900 Right? Just integrate the two and work on stuff you care about. And if you don't care about your

01:03:14.120 job, get a new job. Go do something else. Most of the people I work with are immensely talented,

01:03:18.240 and they can go get a new job. And I know that's not something that we can say to everyone. I know

01:03:22.020 but there's like social economics behind that.

01:03:24.400 But most of the people I work with can get new jobs.

01:03:26.140 Yeah, they can go work anywhere.

01:03:27.420 Correct.

01:03:27.800 And so bring passion to your work,

01:03:30.240 bring creativity to your work.

01:03:31.920 Don't be afraid of changing things when it's not working.

01:03:35.740 I think those two things with experimentation

01:03:37.620 and then having something on the end where you're going,

01:03:40.780 now let's measure it, can help a lot.

01:03:43.620 Because I'm also a big believer in the creativity process,

01:03:46.300 that you need constraints.

01:03:47.340 Yeah, the rails.

01:03:48.140 You need the rails.

01:03:48.840 You need to understand.

01:03:49.980 So yeah, jump up here, but then measure that.

01:03:52.120 And if that jump didn't do anything,

01:03:53.980 come back down to reality.

01:03:56.120 If you just elevated everybody's game,

01:03:58.980 then let's elevate everyone else's game

01:04:01.000 and become a better organization.

01:04:03.240 And so not hoarding and just creating a community

01:04:06.960 is a big deal for me.

01:04:08.040 So those are things where, in my background,

01:04:09.460 I feel uniquely qualified.

01:04:11.340 I don't really fit the standard CEO type.

01:04:15.600 But I think that really wanting to build something

01:04:21.900 that's going to change organizations

01:04:25.880 is rewarded by success.

01:04:28.800 And when we were very early on, I

01:04:30.660 told my business partner and founder,

01:04:32.740 I said, if a year from now this feels like we're just

01:04:35.160 glorified consultants, I'm just going to go do something else.

01:04:37.780 And I still put those constraints in my mind.

01:04:39.780 If a year from now all we are is this,

01:04:42.880 then I'm going to walk away.

01:04:44.160 I'd rather risk the entire organization

01:04:46.460 and continue to build something that's amazing

01:04:48.160 than kind of settle for where we're at.

01:04:50.280 And I think that attracts world-class talent.

01:04:52.840 So that's kind of a question.

01:04:54.020 Jason, where do people find you online?

01:04:55.620 GoNimbly.com or BetterJason on Twitter.

01:04:57.460 And that's where the book will be announced when it comes out?

01:04:59.620 Yeah, or BetterJason on Twitter.

01:05:01.300 And I just share sort of betterment hacks and things like that.

01:05:04.020 That's awesome.

01:05:04.500 Really appreciate you, man.

01:05:05.280 Yeah, thank you very much.

01:05:06.080 Hey, man.

01:05:06.480 We'll talk soon.

01:05:07.020 Thanks.

01:05:07.320 Thanks for watching this episode of Escape Velocity.

01:05:10.420 Be sure to like and subscribe

01:05:12.040 and leave a comment with your biggest insight

01:05:14.500 from our conversation.

01:05:15.980 Be sure to check out the next episode.

Dan Martell - November 21, 2019

Get RevOps Working for Your SaaS (3VC Model) with Jason @ GoNimbly.com - Escape Velocity Show #15

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