Everyone is talking about RevOps right now, even though few people seem sure what it is. How is it different from Sales Ops? And how can it benefit you?

In the traditional ops structure, departments aren’t always on the same page about goals, revenue, and processes. This can lead to awkward disagreements in the boardroom, as department leaders end up painting very different pictures for the CEO.

It’s inevitable, this confusion. When silos exist between departments, everyone ends up pulling in different directions.

Revenue operations, or "RevOps", offers a whole new approach, in which marketing, sales, IT, and customer success are all in alignment. System integration, process documentation, and frictionless communication are the keys to this dynamic approach.

With RevOps, your organization will tear down the existing silos between departments, which will allow everyone to focus on the most important metric of all: revenue.

In this video presentation, you’ll hear from two of the foremost authorities on this new approach to ops. Brad Smith, co-founder of Sonar, and Ben Fuller, manager of SaasOptics, talk about the problems inherent in traditional ops structures and how the RevOps model can lead to better reporting, tighter alignment, and more accurate revenue forecasting.

You’ll also discover the role technology has to play in RevOps. Find out how to develop your current tech stack to support the RevOps approach, and drive slick, revenue-focused co-operation between departments.

If you're a leader in sales, marketing or human resources, you need to learn more about RevOps right now. If you're an IT leader, you'll need to understand these concepts so you can help build a RevOps culture. Whatever your background, let Brad and Bill explain everything you need to know.

What You Will Learn:

  • Agenda and overview of the presentation [00:03:14]
  • The RevOps Framework [00:03:51]
  • Communication tools [00:10:10]
  • Deploying changes safely [00:14:23]
  • Managing your tech stack [00:19:35]
  • Q&A, including contact details so you can ask Brad and Ben your own questions. 00:25:46]

Full Transcription

[00:00:00] Hello, welcome to another X-Force data summit presentation. Today we have Ben Fuller and Brad Smith, two Salesforce guys from Atlanta. They're going to explain their relationship. It's too complicated for me to say it. But they've agreed to give us a talk on RevOps. And I think we're all – it's a very interesting topic.

[00:00:42] And these two guys have, given this presentation before and they've lived it, to my understanding. So, without further ado, Ben and Brad. Certainly. Really appreciate it and we're excited to be able to present with you guys. Like I said, I have an interesting background and interesting relationship.

[00:01:00] We've kind of run the gamut all the way from being just local Atlanta Salesforce nerds together, to working on projects together. Most recently, especially with SaasOptics, working as a customer of Sonar's, as well as partnering together in a couple other capacities. So, we've known each other for a while.

[00:01:23] Like you said, we've presented on this topic a handful of times and are super passionate about it. So, without further ado, we'll go ahead and get things kicked off. Again, my name's up Brad Smith. Prior to starting Sonar, a lot of my background has been in the revenue operations space.

[00:01:37] So, you know, as a brief aside, we know there's this big wave of revenue operations coming into the world right now, and it's a lot of transformation from previous sales ops and marketing ops and customer success ops, and now it's really getting everybody in the same room and making decisions together.

[00:01:53] So, you know, again, like I said, prior to starting Sonar, which is a revenue operations application that supports the RevOps framework, a lot of my day to day responsibilities was running ReOps for local startup companies here in Atlanta. So, I'll let Ben give a quick introduction for himself as well.

[00:02:13] Yeah. As you might notice here, Brad's and my title screen here, neither of us actually have the titles of revenue operations manager. And I think a lot of that has to do with how new and kind of scary the idea of revenue operations is.

[00:02:28] So, we build what we do underneath it, with SaasOptics. I manage strategic systems, which really encompasses all of the sales enablement and sales platform. So, Salesforce, G Suite, Cora, SalesLoft, anything like that falls under my purview.

[00:02:40] And then outside of that, I am a managing partner with a company called CloudTrails, which is a Salesforce consultancy with a specialization in revenue operations. And then I like to talk about getting the junior Salesforce community involved in more work, more projects in an effort to bring them up to speed and fill a definite talent gap in the Salesforce ecosystem.

[00:03:04] Absolutely. I won't dive into a lot of those components as we go through the presentation. But first, the most support that we'll run through a quick agenda of what we plan on covering. There are only three main components to what our session is going to have today. First, we're going to break down the revenue operations framework.

[00:03:20] What is it and why does it make sense? The second part of that was to understand what this foundation looks like. We're going to dive into how we communicate that framework to our customers and to our internal teams. How do we all operate and work together? Which obviously rolls into the final part of it, operationalizing revenue operations,

[00:03:40] not only within the strategy and the framework, but also what are the tools and systems that we're going to be using to manage that.

[00:03:51] So as we get into the framework, the one thing that we just want to make aware even before we understand how this works, is: what is it? Why are we seeing such a rise for this in our community and our ecosystem? And why is the time, why is the right time right now to institute a RevOps framework?

[00:04:08] So to start, revenue operations or RevOps, is a new department that manages the full funnel operations for your go-to-market teams, which consists of marketing, sales, and customer success.

[00:04:20] It does bring all these operational areas together and essentially breaking down the silos so that we can again, all be in one place, at one time making decisions that impact our target market team.

[00:04:33] So when we talk about breaking down the silos, this is always a good before-and-after clip going from this screen to the very next one. Traditionally speaking, you have seen operations groups work in these silos, and you hear, you know, marketing, sales and customer success.

[00:04:52] When we think about why that framework exists to begin with, it's mainly because we've worked in these capacities of these groups having defined operations resources. When we really think about how our data flows and especially our customer life cycle goes, we should be aware that our customers don't necessarily have to look at it in the same light.

[00:05:13] They want to talk about, you know, what's the best flow of my data and my time as we're working ourselves through the funnel? Why do we have to speak and work with different operations groups along the way? Why can't everybody be kind of in one centralized framework or more so importantly, one centralized group to manage a lot of that customer life cycle of the data points behind that.

[00:05:35] So when we start to think about what that looks like as we morph into a RevOps framework, I know Ben has a lot of experience and insight on this side of it. We really start to see how revenue operations sits at the base layer of this team. It is supporting both sales and customer success.

[00:05:53] So, if you kind of think about drawing a line down the middle of before you become a customer and after you become a customer, really where that handoff between sales and customer success goes. But more importantly, there's a marketing layer that's right in the middle of that. We don't necessarily think, in the past, we've always associated marketing with so much top of the funnel activity and bringing in leads and driving, all this net new revenue.

[00:06:16] But, there's an entire customer marketing component to that, which is also being supported by the RevOps framework. And I know, like I said, it's got some interesting insights from that, especially with his time that SassOptics. Yeah. I think what you get to see now – and Brad's got a really great boardroom story, as he calls it – is there's always a miscommunication between teams, right?

[00:06:39] What is sales considered? MQL? What is marketing to hear in SQL? Where does success get brought into the situation? And the conversation, and building on this RevOps framework, it's the same team responsible for the reporting across the board. So, everybody knows exactly what each definition means, and that kind of takes it back to data governance, right?

[00:07:01] Who owns this data, who's responsible for it, and who's managing it. And that RevOps framework is what builds that from the ground up for you. So, you're not fighting other people to make definitions. That's a great point. And then mention the boardroom story, and this'll sort of segue into our communication piece on the RevOps framework.

[00:07:21] But, I think we've all been in one of those scenarios before where we're taking a look back at the previous quarter or the previous year, and, you know, a lot of our executives are sitting around a table, especially like a board room type meeting, and you start working your way down the funnel. Marketing starts and says, "Hey, we had a great quarter last quarter."

[00:07:38] VP of marketing stands up, and she says, "Hey, we generated $10 million worth of new business. It was a great quarter for us. Really enjoyed it. Really successful quarter." She passes down the table to the CRO, or the VP of Sales. And then he says, "Well, that's interesting. We didn't see 10 million come all the way to us."

[00:07:59] "That's okay. Cause we saw 8 million come to us and we actually ended up closing 4 million. That's great. We had a successful quarter because we ended up closing 4 million worth of new revenue. You know, really growing." And that person gets done. And they bounce pass down to the Customer Success head, and she stands up:

[00:08:14] "That's funny. We didn't see $4 million come through the pipeline or come through close. With opportunities, we saw $3 million but that's okay because we still had an 80% gross retention. We're successful. Everything was great." And all of a sudden you just look out at the very end of the table, and you have the CFO or the CEO kind of sitting there just with a blank stare because

[00:08:33] none of the leaders have their numbers in order, and everybody has a different number, and everybody has a different perspective. The RevOps framework truly does help support a different perspective of that. When you start to centralize where you're reporting comes from, where your numbers and metrics are in place, you really find that

[00:08:50] it removes that layer of inconsistency and a little bit of the bias involved with some of those numbers as well, which we'll get into. So, segue into the communication side. I know, Ben's used this quote a couple of times, so I'll let him speak to it, but it's a great kind of rationalization for where we are with everything operationally.

[00:09:10] Yeah. This goes back to MQL, SQL, where do those definitions – how do you define them between teams. And who's tracking them. Right? Sam Lee here. This is a really great quote. I think that really rings true for a lot of companies and a lot of RevOps, professional sales ops, marketing ops, success ops work, wherever your title is, strategic systems, you know.

[00:09:32] Whatever you see the title on, this is something we've all run into. Sales needs to understand where the leads are coming from. Marketing has to understand what happens to convert them into MQL is right.

[00:09:42] Which targets are the ones that are identified as most ready to buy, who has the best ICP for us? And without having a cohesive system in place, your map platform, your marketing automation platform flowing into your CRM. 

[00:09:55] So most cases with Salesforce these days, if there are no guard rails around data integrity, there will be somebody dropping something and you'll have a leak in your funnel. And RevOps is kind of designed to prevent that. Absolutely.

[00:10:09] And so when we start to think about how do we effectively communicate that within our organizations, you can see here on the side, this actually doesn't do a good service to the number of communication tools that are out there that we're all leveraging and using.

[00:10:23] But it does start to help you understand how we actually communicate through the funnel and through our own internal customer-facing mechanisms, but also our internal layers of communication. I think we're all big adopters of, systems like Slack or Google Hangouts or Microsoft Teams, so that we get to help communicate effectively.

[00:10:44] When you think of what the RevOps role in the person that knows those roles are, what they're really trying to do is, they have to communicate a lot of these process changes and how to implement change throughout your organization. So they get to start using fun systems. Obviously, our documentation systems like Google Drive, Quip.

[00:11:02] Anything within the office suite, as well as, you know, systems like Sonar, for instance. We're able to help you understand what your tech stack is doing, how you're supposed to be leveraging everything from an integration standpoint. Even all the way down to other sales prospecting tools, ZoomInfo, leadIQ, everything else you see on the screen.

[00:11:23] But the reality here is that we have plenty of systems that help us leverage that communication. It's still on the revenue operations leader within your org to help facilitate that communication. Because so many times we implement a new process or a change, something in one place, and we don't effectively communicate that down to other groups.

[00:11:44] They won't be able to operationalize that or adopt it and pick that up as they go. So, go ahead Ben – And I'm sure Brian will agree with me here. I'm not a huge fan of flybys personally. So, whether you know this new normal of working from home, you get people drop it in Slack all the time. Hey, I need this, this, and that.

[00:12:02] Right? So, a big part of communication is a way to track your incoming requests. So, myself personally, I'm a big fan of cases within Salesforce. It's a native object. You get standard on sales cloud, right? You don't have to worry about buying service cloud or you know, health cloud, anything like that. You just have access to it.

[00:12:19] So I'm a big fan of standing that up as a way to collect all your requests, aggregate them, and then report off of them. So you're able to identify trends and who's having issues where retraining needs to happen, where weak points in your process are, and you're able to report on that and give a clean update on where things stand with open requests for the organization.

[00:12:42] Absolutely. And I jumped into the next slide just because Ben so eloquently started to segue there to begin with. But when we always start to think about how we deploy these changes within our organizations, there's a lot of different ways we do it, but I think the thing to really focus on here is not necessarily the system or the tech side that we will get into here in our next piece of this.

[00:13:04] But more so the strategy behind it. Okay. When you really start to think of revenue operations not as one department supporting one group, but one centralized location responsible for supporting bitty groups, you have to have a very clear channel or clear strategy for deploying those changes. If you're making a change on the marketing side

[00:13:25] how is it that the customer success team, you know, three, four steps down the road, is supposed to know about that change. And these don't have to necessarily be monumental or big shifts in the company.

[00:13:37] It can be as simple as we're adding one new picklist value on a field. We need to make sure that we're able to tell the other teams who have access and visibility of that field, what it needs.

[00:13:48] No one likes surprises. We talk about that internally all the time. Be prepared to speak to your changes. Be prepared to, be able to articulate how these changes are gonna impact your entire organization.

[00:013:59] If you do that and you have the right level of deployment strategy, you'll be in great shape to make sure that your customers, which in this case are your internal customers, are going to be able to adopt that.

[00:14:10] So what we're really starting to think about, how that actually works. And we start to think of how there are current solutions for ops teams right now. However, you know, not all of them are totally optimized.

[00:14:21] We want to get to a place where they're in a lot more of a fluid manner. So many times, as we've seen over the years, a lot of this information is stuck in one person's head.

[00:14:32] You know, sometimes we get some really cool naming conventions behind it, but it's still not the best, when you think of how to scale a company. And a lot of times, some of our documentation is still just even in regular old spreadsheets. That it would be tribal knowledge is kind of terrifying if you ask me.

[00:14:50] I mean, you come into any kind of process and you see one person who doesn't have any documentation. There's no spreadsheets, there's no Word docs. They're not using Quip or anything. It's like, "Oh yeah, I built this six years ago. This is how it's supposed to work." And then you go and look at the process or the field itself, and there's no description.

[00:15:09] There's no help text. There's nothing. There's nothing on it, and that's not a unique use case for any one company. That is almost standard across most orgs where at one point or another, somebody built something without talking to somebody else and then didn't document it. And the idea behind RevOps

[00:15:25] and Brad and I like to, you know, stand on a soapbox – Sonar is kind of built on this soapbox that he and I have both stood on many times – is without documentation, without knowing where things are, you're kind of screwed. You're gonna break something. You're going to impact something else.

[00:15:42] This field's going to touch that field, and then you're kind of SOL. And that's what we run into a lot these days. It really starts to go down to how traditionally, operations have sat in many different groups.

[00:15:58] And so, this is a really good way of thinking about silos and that. But to the same point that Ben was just making, If you think of how one change can impact other teams, it's almost like putting a blindfold on and tried to understand what a domino effect looks like, because you hit one button and without being able to see the other three or four or five or ten or a hundred dominoes in front of you, you really don't know.

[00:16:22] You know, the true impact you're going to have to an organization when you're implementing change. Ben walked through this, he did a great job of understanding how traditionally operations have sat in different groups. And that's because I've been in each of these groups. Right. I understand.

[00:16:36] I've seen this. I think for the most part, a lot of us have, you know – it is hard for somebody in a RevOps role or in a Salesforce administration role, HubSpot admin, whenever, whenever, whatever your CRM of choice is, whatever your flavor is, it's hard sitting in IT because they have different priorities than the rest of

[00:16:52] than the CRM in the cloud space, right? They are managing hardware, they're managing desktop support. There's, there's all sorts of things that they have going on that really don't align with keeping data safe in the cloud. There's usually, and I hate to say this, and this'll bite me in the ass, but there's usually a lack of understanding in leadership

[00:17:11] on the IT side where they just don't, they haven't bought into the CRM world. They haven't bought into the cloud stuff yet. They're, they're used to having, like I said, like a hardware or software to support.

[00:17:20] Ops and marketing, there's a bit of a frenetic energy there. They're not entirely sure what's going on with sales or IT, and they just are focusing on what they're trying to do and running a million miles a minute because there's always a change.

[00:17:33] Something's changing in the market and they have to keep up, and they have a chance. It's challenging to balance sales and marketing priorities. Sitting in sales, I'm a big proponent of not putting Salesforce underneath the sales leadership. They are always looking to augment themselves and it doesn't help support teams outside of sales, right?

[00:17:55] There's always also a low budget, cause they want to buy all these other cool tools that they found. They're always signing up for free trials online all the time. You know, I'm not saying I've had to do this in the past, but you know, I'm always removing access to things people have signed up for without talking to anybody.

[00:18:10] You know? They always want to try the next new thing. Yeah, absolutely. I think the one thing to always keep in mind here too, when you had these different operations groups in these different silos, or even in this picture, you can kind of see them on their own different islands.

[00:18:26] What ends up happening is you develop a certain bias towards the metrics you're tracking inside of this.That's what earlier he was saying, you know, operations from a marketing perspective is really going to focus on the top-of-the-funnel activity.

[00:18:38] What kind of MQL sales are we seeing where the metrics in sales are a little different? They are bottom-line results. How many deals are we closing? How much of your revenue are you bringing in the door? And when you had these different biases towards the metrics for each one of these different groups, and those metrics are kind of on their own Island like you see in the picture

[00:18:59] it does start to have disjointed effects to the company where you don't understand, are we all marching to the same beat of the same drum? Are we all moving towards the same goals in the right direction?

[00:19:09] And so when you start to think back to that very first slide where we had revenue operations sitting as the base layer of that, when you have an organization that truly owns and manages the data and the goals and the metrics of support, all of those from the bottom up, you have no choice but to have full alignment and everybody using the same metrics as they move forward.

[00:19:31] As we look into the next, or to the third layer of this, on the execution side, it's like Ben's point earlier: there's a ton of technology out there, and I think it's growing every day. What was really cool, and we always like to show, you know, some of the metrics, that we found that some of our research.

[00:19:48] There's a really cool company out there called Blissfully that actually puts out a report every year on this. And it's really just the annual sort of state of SaaS. It comes to the systems we're using. But even now, you can start to see the average spend per company, as it's growing year over year, it's just exponentially growing.

[00:20:08] Even down to the SaaS spend per employee, it continues to grow. So, essentially saying, as your company gets bigger or you're providing more systems and more tools for your go-to-market teams to use, and even just from a sheer numbers perspective the number of assets each company uses, even based off the company size and even within their departments, just continues to grow.

[00:20:32] Going back to one of Ben's points earlier, when you think of the IT department. Previously, call it five, maybe ten years ago, the IT department was in charge of buying all this software and implementing it.

[00:20:43] Making sure the systems are used properly for their teams. It's not the case anymore. IT is still very much involved from a security and network perspective, but a lot of your end users now who are deploying some of these new pieces of low-code/no-code software are, in fact, the

[00:20:59] revenue operations leaders or the sales operations leaders or marketing operations leader. So, you're getting a lot more folks in the room to make those decisions. Now what ends up happening, and you know, Ben could speak firsthand to a lot of this, is when you start to get into these different systems, and we all start to own these different places, or like different pieces of the tech stack,

[00:21:22] it really inserts chaos because how is a person in marketing supposed to know if, they make one or two changes to one or two fields, the impact that has on a customer success team, two or three steps down the road. Like I said, Ben has felt this firsthand, and it's some of the tech stack that he manages, not only a SaaSOptics

[00:21:41] He also sees the consulting side with Valtrex. Yeah, and it's not – SaasOptics has been really fortunate and the idea that the less admins better, you know, that's, that's kind of a motto a lot of people would buy. I don't need nine people having admin access to a single product. That's scary.

[00:22:00] That leads to confusion and broken processes, but I've worked in organizations and assisted organizations of the past where we log into an org, they have 15 admins and there's only 14 people in the company. Right? Like, everybody has admin access. Anybody can make changes as they see fit.

[00:22:18] That's when processes break. That's when integrations fail. That's when downstream issues arise because upstream changes were made. Right. You know, integration failing is a big one. We implemented a new product at one point.

[00:22:32] Where it was blowing up API calls, right? It's the point where our entire org stops moving because we could not get anything in and out because we capped out, and that's a silent fail that that no one likes to talk about.

[00:22:44] Like, no one would have noticed that until people started getting error messages, and then I'm getting, you know, STR is googling, saying, "Hey, this is the problem." I'm like, alright, cool. Let me go figure out what's actually going on. Because, you know, armchair admins are scary.

[00:23:01] Absolutely. Yes. And so as we start to sort of wrap up a little bit on the mentality of this, Ben brings up a great point and it's really how do we start to make sure that we are all communicating effectively. How do we make sure that we don't have armchair admins and a bunch of different parts of the organization.

[00:23:20] Because at the end of the day, this is what big, I call it a technology sandbox or, the tech stack that we're operating in is not dependent on one or two people. The entire company is leveraging it. And so, you know, really when you start to think about how Sonar gets to be inserted into these frameworks and how SaasOptics gets to be inserted into these frameworks.

[00:23:40] it really helps to support the RevOps framework and make sure that your company's growing, and as your company's scaling, you are putting the right piece of technology in place, as well as providing the right level of visibility for everyone.

[00:23:55] A big piece to our platform is, you know, centralizing that location for your tech stack to make sure that, "Hey, I know these 1 or 2 or 3 or 100 fields are being used across all 17 different pieces of my tech stack."

[00:24:10] "And if I get one button here, I do know the exact domino effect." Why is that important? Well, that's the point. If you don't know that, and you happen to push that one button or change that one field or create that one new process, there's a really good chance that you bring the whole house of cards down.

[00:24:26] And so for Sonar, as we look to support additional RevOps leaders and continue to grow the space, it does allow us to have one central repository for everyone to work in together, to collaborate, and to issue change, in a confident and safe way, and it instills more clarity and certainty in their day-to-day jobs.

[00:24:47] I'll let you talk a little bit about SaasOptics as well. Yeah. SaasOptics itself is a subscription billing platform, so it's designed to take a lot of the confusion and work out of SaaS billing.

[00:24:58] You know, our process is designed to streamline order-to-cash, generate metrics and analytics or reporting that you're just not going to get other places based on the data that you have available to you.

[00:25:08] You have integrations with HubSpot and Zero in Salesforce. We're able to pull out that data and push data in and in so that your team is always aware of what's going on. And then, you know, we have a cool podcast called Get State Funded that Derek Thomas hosts. This is my shout out there.

[00:25:26] Give it a follow, check it out. Absolutely. And so as we wrap up, obviously being a digital platform here, you know, if you do have any questions for Ben or myself, there's contact information here on the screen, we'd love to chat with you about it, especially to hear how your company is either employing a RevOps framework or thinking about installing a RevOps framework into your organization.

[00:25:52] We'd be more than happy to discuss that and kind of hear just your ideas and how your companies grow within this. But with that said, we'll pass it over to Ben. We promise there won't be any sales pitches from us either. We're here to help, and you know, we're here to help and learn as much as possible.

[00:26:12] Cool. Thanks guys. I do have a few questions. I don't know if they are the questions that the audience would asked, but the first thing that struck me about the presentation was when you got to that communication slide, and there's like 20 different modes of communication. And all, and then putting that together with your boardroom story of, you know, how the revenue just sort of declined as it went through each mouth open.

[00:26:36] It's a single source of truth issue, isn't it? I mean, isn't that at the bottom of all this. And to me, that plethora of communication tools is kind of the enemy of a single source of truth, or if not an enemy, it's friction that you have to overcome. Are you finding that, as banded with cases?

[00:26:56] Are you finding ways to get more stuff into Salesforce and keep it as your single source of truth, or what? What's your strategy for that? Generally. Absolutely. It's interesting because while he and I both will agree on this, we've always looked at Salesforce being our single source of truth from a data perspective.

[00:27:12] And our hope is that all of our customers, kind of embraced that. But what gets really tough sometimes in that as well, it's still there, while your single source of truth is there, and your reporting is all centralized there, people can still jump into a report, slice and dice it a bunch of different ways.

[00:27:30] And that's really where you start to get some of the ambiguity between, "well, I ran report number one and it gave me number one." "Well, I ran report number two and it gave me number two." So, really, if you think about how to centralize that, what we've both done is create dashboards and reports that are essentially read-only, and even take a step back before we get to that point.

[00:27:52] If you can think to understand what metrics, marketing, sales, and customer success need. And if we all get the thumbs up on all of those, let's have one place in one set of reports that are "read-only", at least as a starting point to make sure that everybody's looking at the same numbers on a daily basis.

[00:28:11] They know what their goals are. And from there, sure. If we need to slice and dice them, we can. But at least having a centralized starting point for it. Removes a ton of friction. And then to your point on the communication side, how do we effectively get that out? What's great about: "so the technology that we have now, there's a million mediums for it."

[00:28:28] I don't think there's one perfect thing. I know a lot of companies love Slack. I know a lot of folks don't use it other than just making sure they can send the fun GIFs and pictures to each other.

[00:28:40] So, you know, kind of whatever your cup of tea is on how you communicate it, I think it really starts down to knowing it pulls out of knowing what's the centralized place for the data lives, who owns those numbers, and how did they display those?

[00:28:50] Yeah, I think it comes back to data governance is a big thing. In the last couple of years, Salesforce has rolled out governance fields, governance tracking on fields in Salesforce. So, you can determine who owns the data, you know, what kind of data it is, have compliance, something like that.

[00:29:06] But even more so, I think it's really important to understand that when you're slicing and dicing data and you're building your own reports, that you're matching filters correctly and you're actually matching report types. So, Salesforce gives you the option to create multiple different report types.

[00:29:20] And those can be accounts with contacts, like if it's just the accounts, opportunities with contact roles, and depending on the report type you select, it really does impact the data it's showing you. And if you're using a different report type with different filters, then all bets are off, right? You're going to have to find a way to – it's hard to reconcile that data.

[00:29:40] and then you're going to run into challenges where people are exporting the data to Salesforce and just messing with it and changing it around an Excel and then wondering why it's not matching what's coming out of Salesforce. So there is a lot of, you know, squishiness, I guess, is the term I'm going to use now.

[00:29:57] And this is going to bite me in the ass, but a lot of squishiness around reporting and governance, if you're not super careful, and definitions aren't wholly defined company-wide, holistically, you're gonna get bit in the ass. Yes. I'm on team Ben when it comes to the interruptions from Slack, I mean, I've seen it used as a pretty decent communication tool.

[00:30:17] The other thing, the other issue I have with Slack is that if the conversations aren't memorialized well, right? You can search Slack, but you know a lot, there's a lot of garbage in there.

[00:30:29] And it doesn't seem like Chatter has really gotten the adoption that Salesforce wants to have, but is there any other way that you've facilitated memorializing important conversations about a customer within Salesforce other than Chatter or, you know, is there some kind of integration that you liked?

[00:30:48] Slack integration or some other chat tool integration? So, me personally, I'm a huge proponent of Chatter. I think, taking advantage of that newsfeed and that chatter feed is really big. But then, you know, make sure you have activity tracking. If you're sending emails and out of Salesforce, if you're working out Outlook or Gmail, make sure that you're loading that to Salesforce as well.

[00:31:10] Salesforce, use the term, loft it, right? Like you can lock it into Salesforce, out of your Gmail, and then it's tracked as activities. It's on that record, and then you can report off that. It's really hard to make those kinds of hard requirements.

[00:31:26] Cause if you're, if you're saying, "Hey, fill this field out any, you can put whatever they want to know," there's no real way to validate what the data is saying. So it takes a change of heart and a change of mind to get them to really buy into what we're looking to get out of it.

[00:31:42] Yeah. It is tough. There's so many mediums right now for communication that some can be more noisy than others. I agree. If I'm in two to three hours worth of back-to-back meetings and I don't even get a chance to look down at a couple of the Slacks that I have, I might be spending five or ten minutes reading through a thread trying to catch up.

[00:32:01] And so, you know, it works well for some companies and doesn't work well for others. My only suggestion would be is you kind of get on the same page as your entire organization. If we're going to live in a Slack based community, let's jump in there, fully embrace it. If it's going to just be an email, that's fine too.

[00:32:18] But yeah. It's more important to standardize that and get the thumbs up across your company. The other way that I look at it is, especially from a data perspective and metrics perspective, I don't think you can over-communicate any of that. That goes back to that first point. Nobody likes being caught off guard, and so if you have daily reports, this is standard functionality of Salesforce.

[00:32:40] Get that dashboard to pop into everybody's inbox first thing in the morning if they think that's too noisy or too, you know, too troublesome to get an extra email every time, set up an email filter and push it to a folder. But at the end of the day, if you're able to constantly put those numbers and metrics in front of people, it alleviates so much pain of this communication or of,

[00:33:03] "Well, I didn't know that number was trending in the wrong direction." Like, yes, you did. You get an email once a day about it. Things like that that can help. Yeah. So my last question is, I mean, it all sounds great. Do you have any advice for people who want to impose this on the organization?

[00:33:23] I'm guessing the only way this works is buy-in from the top. And I don't know what kind of pressure you can put on these siloed organizations. I mean, silo walls are generally very thick and very well-tended by a lot of people in an organization. What have you seen work?

[00:33:45] First day, the advice I gave everyone is start early with it. You know, even if you're in that startup growth mode of zero to a hundred employees, to start with the typical time to bring in an operations professional is around the 50 count mark, is typically the ratio that you start to see.

[00:34:02] it could be as early as, you know, in the first 30 employees, but typically between 30 and 50 is when you bring in someone to run operations. I suggest putting, you know, embracing that RevOps framework on day one. Don't hire someone just to do marketing ops on day one, just to do sales ops, or just to do success ops.

[00:34:19] Start with a RevOps framework in mind. Again, you're wanting to understand what these metrics are for your entire company. Now you can quickly go talk to any CEO or CFO or CRO and understand what those metrics are.

[00:34:31] And within a matter of 30 seconds, know that they stretch well beyond what group. So, if you start on day one, thinking about how that data should flow all the way through your funnel, and support your entire go-to-market team, it makes way more sense to start there.

[00:34:47] So, that's always my suggestion to start early, and that mentality, it is tough to break down those silos, but I think the minute that you start to understand there are shared metrics across these groups, and each metric really impacts the group upstream and downstream from it, it only makes sense to put everybody at what routes to us start making some of those decisions.

[00:35:09] Great. Anything else? You know, I think to Brad's point, it's best to start early. The challenge you're gonna have is if you're an established company and you're trying to make that pivot, that's when you need the buy-in, and you need to be, I don't wanna say forceful, but you need to be, you know, everybody needs to be on the same page.

[00:35:28] Like, hey, this is the change we're making, this is the pivot we are taking. And then just do it. You know, it's not worth the phase-in, phase-out, phasing RevOps in and sales ops out. If you have the framework and you have the team built and the process designed, just do it.

[00:35:48] You're going to have more headaches otherwise. Well, great. Well, we'll let those be the last words of your presentation. Thanks again, guys for, or giving this presentation and giving us some of your time and your insight. Your contact information is on the page, and I hope that some of our conference participants will get in touch.

[00:35:12] Again, thank you so much. We appreciate it. Thank you so much.

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