EP 32 | RevOps & GTM Excellence in Private Equity

In this episode, David and Adam from RevSearch sit down with Matt Gallagher, a portfolio CRO with extensive experience working with private equity firms to drive growth and operational efficiency in portfolio companies. Matt shares his insights on why Revenue Operations (RevOps) is crucial in today’s business landscape and breaks down the key benefits RevOps brings to forecasting, performance management, and sales/marketing alignment.

Topics covered include:

• The importance of RevOps in providing visibility and predictability in sales and revenue
• How to effectively manage forecasting, from bottoms-up to top-down approaches
• The role of RevOps in supporting sales and marketing alignment for stronger results
• Challenges in building and maintaining a strong RevOps function, including data integrity and tech  stack management
  
  

Plus, Matt gives practical examples of how RevOps can streamline operations and improve team performance. This episode is packed with valuable takeaways for revenue leaders aiming to build or optimize their RevOps function.

Free Resource: Ready to assess your own RevOps readiness? Visit our website at revsearch.io/readiness for a free 20-question assessment to evaluate your current state of RevOps.

Connect with Matt on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mattgallagher2/

RevSearch - https://revsearch.io/
LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/company/revsearch-revops-recruiting/

Transcript

Well, Adam, here we are again. How are you back for another podcast? Doing well. Yeah. Excited to be here. We got an exciting guest to talk to today, but before we jump into that, we just want to welcome everybody to the RevOps Recruiter podcast. That's right. Welcome everyone. And David and Adam from RevSearch.

And before you intro our guests there, just want to invite folks. If you are looking for a tool to. Help kind of evaluate your rev ops readiness. We put together a document that we'd love for you to have for free. You can get it from our website by going to rev search. io slash readiness, 20 questions that you can answer to kind of evaluate how your rev ops is functioning currently today.

So that's right. David intro who we've got here with us today. Yeah, excited to intro, uh, Matt Gallagher. We've got him on the podcast today, a friend by now and, uh, someone we've partnered with before on, uh, placing rev ops roles, and we know he values this function, he understands, uh, the why and the need for it in, in, uh, go to market.

And so Matt, super excited to have you on. Um, welcome first of all. Yeah, Matt. Welcome. Thanks for being here. Thank you. And, uh, so really quickly, um, Matt's got a rich background consulting, uh, go to market bottom line. He's helping companies grow. He's worked for three PE firms to support portfolio growth there.

Uh, he, he really focuses on increasing value, uh, of companies. And so we're excited to have him on Matt. Why don't you give us a little bit more of your background? Yeah, thank you. So, um, I've been close to sales and marketing since, uh, 2010 when I got out of business school, um, and I was a consultant first in the space that I was selling consulting services.

Uh, then I took that, uh, skill set to, uh, private equity company. I was at Vista for a few years, picked up a lot of their playbook, was able to help evolve some of their playbook. Um, I've done a couple of stints as a CRO. Um, and then I've had a similar. Uh, operations role at Riverside, another, uh, with their micro cap fund.

And then now I have another, uh, private equity operations role at HG capital is, uh, the largest, uh, investor, uh, software investor in Europe and one of the largest private equity companies in the world. Well, yeah, well, let's jump in. So one of the, uh, you know, we kind of explored a few different ideas of what we would want to talk about with, with you, Matt today.

And I think one of the things is that we want to dive in is just, you know, Why does RevOps matter today? Right. What, what's, what's so important about it? So the first question I'd ask of you is what do you see as some of the primary reasons why companies need to invest in revenue operations today?

What's the benefit? What do we get out of it? Yeah, so it's just increased visibility, and it's in a couple directions. So one is just that linearity into the future. Or, you know, some people might call it telemetry. So when you don't have good revenue ops, and that could be because you don't have good data, you don't know how to read it.

You're not tracking the right things. At the end of every quarter. It's a surprise. How did things turn out at the end every year? It's a surprise. It makes it really hard to plan to get the right number of salespeople, etcetera. Two. There's a performance management side of this. I mean, it's a surprise. Um, with sales, sure at the end of the year, you know how much everybody sold or how much everybody booked, but do you know how efficient they were?

Do you know if your territories were balanced? You know, because sales is like a lot of games in that it's a mix of luck and skill and you're never going to get all of the luck out of it. But it's sure I've seen many times in the past where the top performer at the company maybe was more lucky than good.

And other folks that maybe weren't set up for success. So having the right revenue ops really helps you figure that out. Um, and then it can also serve as a tool to drive better behavior. You can get people to use the right kind of processes and procedures, et cetera. Um, you can de risk a lot of sales, which You know, sometimes can be a little bit of a dark art if companies don't know what what good looks like.

Um, and also, you know, when done well, it should increase efficiency. Sure, you are asking sellers to, uh, to put data in the CRM And do CRM Salesforce hygiene. And you'll hear sellers come complain about that a lot. But if it's done well, if the fields are set up right, it should actually help drive good behavior and should be a good tool for if not just the sellers, but also you.

When their manager comes into coach on deals or coach on pipeline, et cetera, it provides that fact base toe make those conversations higher value. And then finally, you know, sales and marketing alignment is, um, is an issue for a lot of companies. Good revenue ops function. Make sure that that And you do want some, you want a healthy debate between those two functions.

They can be the arbiter, uh, of that, make sure that, you know, your discussions again, are grounded in facts and figures. Yeah. That's great. I love each of those points there. I wonder if we could double click on a few of those. So when we think about like essential for forecasting, you mentioned that as kind of the part of the reasons why RevOps is there, uh, Could you, do you have some examples or do you have some ideas around like, what does, what does, what does forecasting look like when you don't have this function?

Right. And maybe it's more guesswork, maybe it's more gut feel. And then what should it look like if you've got a revenue operations function that's really clicking the way that it should. Right. What are your thoughts around that? Yeah, I'd say there's, there's a lot of ways to do it wrong. Um, one way that I've seen it done wrong is people just forecast to the goal and then the forecast processes, they're just building this bridge from where they are today to what the goal is and slotting in deals and, uh, you know, relying on an ever shakier number to get there of, of, of deals to there's, um, There's, you know, the components of a good forecast would be a bottoms up approach and then maybe a top down approach.

There's a couple ways to do each of those. Bottoms up is working on a deal by deal basis, and you might have a team that's deciding. Is this a commit deal? Is this an upside deal? Sometimes they'll call it best case, et cetera. This is just pipeline. You, um You might sometimes they just use a binary, like especially late in the quarter, which deals are we banking on?

Which ones are we not to get to a number or if you've got just got a small number of deals? That's that's sometimes the best way to do that But I always recommend in addition to that a top down approach, especially further out from the end Which is either gonna be stage driven Which is you know each successive stage of your sales process You're gonna wait that deal higher and higher stuff that's in stage one You maybe give a 10 percent of the value You know, then maybe 20, 30, 40, and maybe, you know, a stage five deal, you're, you're counting at 90 percent of the value, but that only, that is a good tool, but that only works one.

If you've got your stages set up properly and two, your sellers are adhering to that. And that usually requires like exit criteria and, uh, and a sales process built on the buying process. So I'll pull up there. I think the long story short there is I strongly recommend multiple approaches. As you get closer to the end of the quarter, rely more on the bottoms up when you're further out or more rely more on the top down approach.

And that's, that's great. I wonder, you know, another thing that I was thinking about there was just the performance management side. You, you'd mentioned it a few minutes ago that when you think about that, um, there's probably, there's probably a lot of gut feel that goes into that as well. But, and then people just being, being in the right circumstances rather than Them really having the skill or the tools or the taking the actions that really drove the, whatever the wind was.

Right. And so being able to use the analytics, the data points, the information that we have to still coach folks and lead folks and, and try to, I've even heard the thing, the term like move the middle, right? Bring those that are maybe falling a little bit behind, bring those up. In what ways, or do you have any thoughts around how we, how RevOp supports that and really helping the team get better through supplying the right data during QBRs or annual reviews and, and, and how that, how that helps those leaders lead those people.

Yeah. If you're doing a, let's say it's like performance evaluation or a seller evaluation, you always want a mix of objective and subjective, uh, inputs. It's always good to look at in the past, have they closed business, right? Have they hit their goals, et cetera. But you do want to contextualize that in terms of, Hey, did they have a good patch?

Like, was there, did they have enough viable opportunities in their territory and revenue ops, you know, there's, you can, there's lots of levels of sophistication you can apply to figure out how rich a territory was. Yeah. You might also look at where did they get their pipeline from? It's a lot easier to win business when one, it's either, let's say, existing customers.

That's easier than hunting for new business to if, let's say you're hunting or existing business. If it's inbound, if you're getting nice qualified leads from from marketing or from partner, that's easier than somebody who's going out prospecting by themselves. Um, and then three, you know, different, Segments of the business might have different difficulty in terms of the product, or if they're selling into different verticals, et cetera.

So you do want to look at the bookings. You do want to look at the territory that they have. You want to look at the kind of help they got from pipeline. Um, but then you also want to look forward. Are they building good quality pipeline now? Do they have good sales hygiene? Can they forecast? They know which deals are coming in and which ones aren't.

Um, you can, you know, you can evaluate frontline sellers on that. Um, and then finally, it's always good to, you know, You ideally want to have managers who know what good sounds like. How do they sound on calls? Um, now keep in mind, there's almost always a big enough sales team. There's somebody there who's successful and you can't figure out why.

Um, I would never, if somebody is continually hitting their number, like as long as they're not. Putting the business at risk or driving everybody nuts, like you're going to want to keep them around. That should, your performance should be your highest weighty category. But, um, there are, I recommend multiple inputs there.

That makes sense. Yeah, for sure. Another thing we, uh, we often come up against, uh, when talking to leaders is The tech stack, the tools in a tech stack. Right. Um, and I'm sure you're, you see this when you come into a new company, maybe there's no tools or maybe there's, there are too many tools. Um, how have you leveraged RevOps in getting the right tools in place and then achieving adoption ultimately?

Yeah. You see, you do see a scary amount of companies buying the new shiny thing, the big brand that's out there. Um, And I've seen really good tools get bought in places where they would have made a ton of sense and they just aren't operationalized properly. Um, so you need an internal champion rev ops. A lot of times it makes sense to be that person.

Sometimes it makes sense to have enablement. Sometimes you need a sales manager to be that champion, but somebody has to make sure that you're using it right. Um, You know, for example, something like six cents, six cents is a, it's a hot brand. Now it's a, it's a great product, but it's not a silver bullet.

It's not going to work all by itself. You need, people need to have it set up properly. You need to operationalize it. The, the, and ideally is revenue ops. That's getting the signals from six cents and getting them in front of the sellers in a way that they can act upon that and jump on those accounts. Um, yeah, you, you bring up an interesting point.

You know, a lot of times. You look to the tool to solve all your problems, right? But there's this other piece, uh, where, where you need to tailor it. You don't just have a one stop solution. Most of the time you, you have to have someone who takes that data, you know, who takes that and then moves it forward, trains others, enables others, right?

Gets the right message across to, to those sellers that you're talking about, to the go to market team. Um, let's talk about, yeah, go ahead. I'm sorry. Just one more example there. I would say it's lead scoring, right? So lead scoring is popular tool, but I've been, you know, worked with a number of companies where I go and say, okay, great.

You have lead scoring. Who does the prospecting? They might say the age of the BDRs. And I say, can they see the lead score now? It just sits in HubSpot. I'm like, wouldn't it be helpful if somebody is out cold calling, if they knew who's already interacting with our content, they'll say, Oh yeah, that would be helpful.

Do you literally see the light bulb come on? Yeah. Yeah. Because they're not thinking through like all the, you know, it, it's at companies, the BDR role, you know, it's one of the most important. Roles at the company. It's incredibly impactful to your pipeline, to your success. And what do we do? We usually give it to like the least experienced person and give them the least amount of training and sometimes the least tools.

Um, so it's, uh, you know, very, very much a frontline soldier job. So you always want to like put yourself in their seat. It's, it's always good to ride along with them, see how they're doing the job. What are they saying? And it's amazing sometimes what. Maybe you have, and they just didn't know about, weren't trained on, or they're not blind to, they don't have the permissions, et cetera.

Yeah. I mean, that gives it a whole other part that you haven't even talked about the whole enablement and the onboarding and training side of things, but it's so, so huge and so valuable. So, but one thing before we kind of jump to the next part, Topic here is you mentioned your last point there was just that arbiter between sales and marketing alignment.

I hear people say marketing and sales alignment all the time. What does that really mean to you? When you're, when you look at an organization that's doing it well, what does that look like? Yeah. Well, I mean, one I've seen and been at companies before where sales and marketing need to go to couples therapy.

Uh, it's so you need that, that arbiter. Um, so the, uh, one sales and marketing should have a shared objective view of what a good lead looks like. Now, it's one thing that, Hey, we. We build an ICP. There's a slide. It sits somewhere. But like when each lead comes in, would they both agree? My recommendation is that the lead process is also something where you need to have agreement on the different stages.

There's a certain part up, up at the high level. If marketing is deciding what they want to qualify, that is a bit of their call, right? Because what we're going to send along, but I strongly recommend that at that sales accepted lead stage, it should be sales that is accepting the lead. It's amazing how often I've.

Gone to companies. And I see that rate, you know, that SAL conversion rate really high and the SQL rate low. And then what I find out is the BDR accepts it and the BDR reports into marketing. Like, well, you know, that means marketing's grading their own work. Um, and the, you know, I know what I do when I grade my own work.

A plus, top notch, great job. So, so whatever it is, somewhere in your process, there's got to be where marketing thinks it looks good. And then we ask sales and it can be as simple as like, The lead pops up and the seller clicks. Yes, I'll take a meeting with this person. And that number should be that conversion rate should be above 90%.

If it's not, you objectively know you don't have a shared vision. You got to get back in the room. Second, you need, um, you need a service level agreement that both people know can quote and enforce with their teams. Um, you know, sales is not helping marketing out if they're passing over leads and sales is enacting on it quickly, right leads.

They don't They don't age like wine. They, you know, they age like sushi. So, you know, you've got to jump on that right away. Right. And, and, and, and finally sales also owes marketing feedback. If the leads aren't good, they have to explain why, right? Cause otherwise how is marketing supposed to know, supposed to adjust.

And they've got to provide things like win loss analysis or, you know, a specific request or which have to be filtered. Here's what we need in the sales process. You definitely don't want. Marketing to end up being like a hotline number or marketing or where sales just ask for anything under the sun, they'll get buried in requests.

You know, you've got to somehow distill that out to the most common ones, but that's, that's what a good, to me, the, the, the harmony that you're looking for is an agreed vision of what good looks like an SLA that both sides had their fingerprints on and have shaken their hands and agreed to. And then the conversions should look Accordingly should look good, and they can look a lot of different ways.

You might have a volume approach that you're, you're sifting through a lot. As long as both sides say that's the best thing to do, you can do that. Or it can be much more of a martini glass, you know, before it gets passed off to sales. That's okay. Like mutually agree to what that, that answer is. And then, you know, and there should be some healthy tension.

I've also seen, you know, where, you know, sales markets say, well, we never argue. I've, I've even seen where between that marketing funnel and the sales Funnel there's like a demilitarized zone and just leads go there and marketing can, can claim success. It's been qualified and sales doesn't count towards their, their forecast of the pipeline.

So it's not their problem. And then just a bunch of junk piles, right? Just stuff sitting in the middle. Yeah. No, that makes sense, man. That's, that's a great, great analogy or not even analogy, just great description of what that alignment between sales and marketing looks like. I really appreciate that. So let's go into the next piece here in our conversation.

So from your experience, uh, what makes getting revenue operations under control? Difficult. Yeah. Um, so one, you're always going to need the participation from sales. So sales has to understand the, the with them, the what's in it for me. Um, At worst sales operations, let's say Salesforce hygiene feels like a chore for sales.

Right. And look, and it's, and sometimes it is part of it is a chore. You know, I've definitely used shaming mechanisms before, you know, signage up on the, on the office floor where you're calling people out that have the oldest deal. Right. Um, you know, I've used that approach before, but what, what you want to do is you do want to carrot as well.

And what the carrot should be. Is high quality coaching from your manager that's made possible by what's in the CRM. So, for example, if, you know, we talk about a rhythm of business here at HG, like a sales manager should be doing, uh, territory reviews. Account reviews. If it warrants it, if you're selling a lot of products or a lot of different buying centers, opportunity reviews, and you've got a forecast, you get this four things.

Um, so if I'm a manager that I'm doing a territory plan review with a seller, I should be able to pop into their territory and clearly see who they've hit, who they haven't and strategize. If that date is in there, we're jumping right to action. If we're not, we've got to burn a lot of time with the sellers explaining to me what they've done.

Okay. Similarly, like an account plan, what do you see most of the time at companies account plans are like term papers. Seller spends tons and tons of time on it, publishes it, puts it on a shelf, never touches it again. And it doesn't really do anybody any good and it gets out of date. What it should be is this living document that Multiple people are popping in, you know, customer success, leadership, et cetera, is going into, there should be requests going in and out.

If I'm a seller and I've got one of the big key accounts and I wouldn't, and you shouldn't have an account plan for all your accounts, not worth it. But the big ones where you can sell a lot of things, or you can sell into a lot of places or a lot of things into a lot of places, it makes sense. And there should be There should be contacts that you're trying to get to, like a wish list.

That's the, you know, marketing should be looking at that for things like account based marketing or leadership should be looking at that for introductions. You should have alerts set up for that account so that there's data flowing in, whether that's Google alerts or LinkedIn alerts, et cetera. Um, there should be like customer success should be able to pop in there and see why did they buy this stuff in the first place?

What problem were they trying to solve, et cetera, et cetera. Um, so it should be this, this. this hub of information that a lot of people, a lot of people access, use, um, leverage, and then a seller for doing all that work should get value out of it at the very least where they're having a meeting with their manager strategizing and doing something that's going to be a high value, high efficiency to help them build pipeline.

So that's, that's an account plan, an opportunity, right? It's hard to get people to put the data in and have some stage properly. Again, if that. it serves the purpose of making sure that when you're doing a deal review, your manager is able to give you more targeted, more useful coaching more quickly.

That's going to motivate you to have your house in order there. If it's not, if opportunity reviews are just where you're kind of reading the news. So then you're not going to care. You may, you may, it may be in Salesforce. It may not. You're just on the witness stand for 30 minutes. Um, curious, go back to the account plan there for a moment.

Who, who owns that initially? I, it sounds like the seller initially building it, but then do you see robots participating in making sure it stays that living document that stays updated since it's so cross functional or who will own that? Yeah. Great question. So the, the person who owns updating it. And keeping it current is the seller, the person who owns that account that might be a key account manager, but Revenue Ops likely has a big hand in designing what should this look like?

And then also ensuring that the right people have the right access to it, and they may be involved in ensuring that it's updated. So, you know, if I'm, um, you know, depending on the business, let's say if I'm a business where Um, my top 50 accounts are gonna have a disproportionate impact on my year. I'm gonna want to be reporting on a regular basis, either a board meeting or otherwise.

What's the update on all these? And one stat I'm gonna want to look at is how many opportunities do we have here? How many new opportunities do we have? What have we booked here in the last one year, two year, etcetera. When is the last time this thing was updated? I think you'd also, you'd mentioned something around the agreements on just terminology stages, forecasting everybody, everybody kind of on board with that.

And I'm assuming that's also cross functionally, uh, but what do you mean by that, unpack it a little bit for us? Yeah. There, I mean, so often you see in, not just in sales, but in business, that people use the same term different ways. And, um, and that can lead to miscommunication that can lead to outright people arguing over stuff for no good reason.

So let's just maybe just use sales stages. The most objective way to set your sales stages best practice is to align it with, um, objective and ideally binary customer signals. This either happened or it didn't. Like if I'm moving from stage, I'll move from stage four to stage five when their legal department gets me red lines back.

You can't fake that, right? Either happened or it did. Um, maybe from stage three to stage four is like the my champion gave me a verbal that this is moving forward. We're a finalist, right? So it's very easy. Then the ideally you're trying to take the stress for the seller out of what stage this goes in.

You know, and, and the second, you don't want to over engineer this. I've seen, uh, you know, work done where there's 10 X of criteria per stage. Like that's just, if you have that many sellers are going to start checking the box, they're, they're not going to pay attention, you know, you're talking to three signals per stage.

Again, objective, simple binary. And then if you get that and you can adhere to it, then revenue ops can take that data. Reverse engineer, look back at past deals and tell you, okay, when we get to stage three, how often do we win? Cool. That tells us how to wait these deals. Um, now that, you know, that takes some work.

You got to drive the behavior, the adherence, etcetera. But once you do that, that data is incredibly valuable. Similarly, like forecast, you want to have very clear and simple guidance. What is a commit deal? And, you know, it's now the simple way, but maybe not the most informative way to do it is where people say, you know, they'll just say to a seller.

Is this a 90 percent deal or a 50 percent deal? Well, that seller doesn't know how to gauge deals like they have no idea. Um, and a lot of sellers don't know which deals are coming into which ones aren't. So it's better to, like, give them clear criteria You know this we've gotten a verbal we've got a we've got a closed plan and it's on track.

That is a commit deal. Okay, those are objective things. They either happened or they did. That makes life a little easier. Now your managers, should they be applying some subjective, uh, uh, adjustment to that? Yeah, right. That's why you have in there. They have that experience, but a lot of your salespeople don't.

So you try to take, in my opinion, you try to take as much of the guesswork out of the The metrics and the terminology as you can. That makes sense. Yeah. I had another comment to what you just said. It really makes me think of the sooner, the better on revenue operations, because you know, depending on how much time you go in the wrong direction on that with.

With folks, you know, put having access to whatever is there in the system, having access, right. You're building this cluster that you have to then undo, you know, one route at a time, you're having to get back to that simplicity. What has been your experience with data messes? Um, talk to us a little bit about that.

Yeah. I know old coach when I was younger, I said, bad habits are like a comfortable bed. They're easy to get into and they're hard to get out of and, and, and certainly You know, bad Salesforce hygiene is like that. Um, and a lot of times it's not that anyone's doing anything intentionally wrong. They just don't know any better, right?

They don't know what, what you're looking for, what their answer is. Also, you know, a lot of times that buildup can happen with acquisitions. Okay. We've sell this, we use this term. They use that term. Let's just keep both. We'll figure it out later. And you just kick the can down the road over and over again.

Next thing you know, I mean, I was at a company that was. Only 70 million in revenue. When I got in there, they were out of Salesforce fields. They could not add any more fields. And what it was was there was too many people that had access to just add whatever field they wanted. So you have these redundant fields going places.

And then next thing you know, the numbers aren't adding up. Um, and I've, you know, I've seen companies where you, you know, you'll do 15, especially in private equity, you'll do 10, 15 acquisitions in a couple of years. The longer you wait to integrate, make those hard decisions, the bigger, the mess you're, you're leaving for yourself later.

And then when you finally get to it, it is tough. Yeah. Wow. That's unbelievable. Um, one last thing I'm curious on there. You were kind of talking a little bit about just, just forecasting and data. Do you get, do you find that. In many of the companies, they're utilizing a strategy. That's both sales forecasting and pipeline forecasting.

So they're bringing in a little bit of the kind of near term sales gut feel of what the sellers feel about that, but then also requiring a very, um, a pipeline forecasting strategy. That's just based on simply like what you said, exactly what the stage is, the percentage that gets assigned to it and so forth.

Yeah. My recommendation is both right. The bottoms up being that subjective. Which is going to have some feel involved. Um, ideally you're giving them guidelines on how to get to that field. Like it should have these components before you call this, but there's going to be some gut, right. Um, uh, and then the top down and then, you know, for that bottoms up one, there's deals where, Hey, look, we I'm working with my champion.

We're a finalist. The decisions happening in this boardroom, when that happens, like we're all teed up and we're going to get legal and et cetera. And you know, I don't know, going in, you're going to have some of those. You just want to. Limit the number of deals in your pipeline that you're, you're calling that way.

Um, and then obviously the, you know, there's, there's businesses where, uh, it's, uh, it's a smaller number of large deals. Those are harder to forecast accurately than the machine, the high velocity where you've got this big volume of deals, where the random, that random noise has less of an impact. So you always want to keep that in mind when you're looking at forecast accuracy.

Yeah, that makes sense. Well, let's, let's go to the final section we want to dig into here. Um, So Matt, when it comes to having a thriving revenue operations function, what are some of the common issues you see there? Yeah. I mean, one is, you know, when you're starting a new business, it's a startup culture, right?

You can't, you can't afford all the fancy tools. You can't, you're not going to put all the systems in place. Um, you know, probably if you're the founder CEO, you're the first salesperson or you hire a salesperson and all the deals in your pipeline are basically tattooed on the inside of your eyes. It's like, you know, them, like, you know, them in your, Yeah, you know them during your sleep, so you don't need revenue ops then right.

And then at some point with any kind of startup that succeeds, you grow, grow, grow and then something breaks. And then that's when you start spending money on infrastructure and revenue ops would be that. So, um, that's one thing you see. And it's also What legacy of that startup culture is still there? Um, one thing that I have seen is, uh, what I call the junk drawer mentality to revenue ops.

And I've seen it a couple of companies recently where they don't really separate out territory accounts and opportunity management. They just like the one when when an opportunity goes dead. Or just ghost you. They just leave it around. Let's just kick it out the next year. I'll call him back. And so it looks like it's still this active opportunity, but really, it's it died in the past.

And you know, the key thing is that 50 60 percent of your opportunities are going to be no decision losses. The customer doesn't do the courtesy of calling you up and saying, Hey, I know I kind of led you on here. I had you out. Thanks for buying me dinner. We're not gonna buy from you. They just the fact is they won't tell you.

So you need to make sure you've got a system where you're clearly closing those out. But if you know, I've seen again these companies using their opportunities as like their to do list. They're saying, Well, if I close that out, I'll forget to call them. That's because they're not separating out territory management, which is as every seller.

You've got a finite number of Accounts, that's your territory, you know, a certain number of days in the year and you get a number to hit and then territory management is how do I spend my time, which accounts, how often, how do I prioritize, then there's like account planning, which some companies don't know, don't do, and that to me is, you know, telling the story, the past, present and future of this account.

What have we sold? What have we tried to sell? What are they using today? Is it working? Do we have ROI? Um, who do I know today? And then future, which is what am I trying to sell? What should I sell that I hadn't, that I haven't gotten to yet? Like what's the long term ambition for this account? And that's different than just opportunities, right?

So separating those three out, For the companies that need all of them is, is very important. And the junk drawer mentality is that, so it's just all kind of in there in the soup together. I think we, you'd even talked about the idea of not sticking to that junk drawer mentality, but really saying, okay, if I do have a territory, if I've got these, let's say, let's call it a hundred accounts, how do I prioritize?

Which ones, hopefully I'm not just going alphabetically down that list. What are the, what are the ways that I prioritize even those hundred to say, there's probably, I don't know, 10, 20 percent of those that are the most important ones. What do I do to prioritize this? Yeah. And you know, this comes back to when you, you have to put yourself in the shoes of who do you have doing that outreach?

And a lot of times it's, you know, a 23 year old that was at a frat party or a sorority party 18 months ago. Hopefully not last night. Yeah. Hopefully not the last night. Yeah. Um, But, you know, it may have been an happy hour, but they don't have this experience in business where they, when they look at a company name or look at a website, like they, they can automatically say, ah, good fit, medium fit, bad fit.

They need some guidance there and revenue ops can play a big role there with targeting. So, you know, one is how likely is this customer to buy two. How likely are the churn and three? Like, how big is the prize? And then some combination of those items should help the business figure out where do we want to spend our time?

They just want to make that super simple for the, for the BDRs, right? These ones first, these ones after them, these only if you've exhausted everything else. And, um, and then there's also techniques like how, you know, uh, if, if you're in a territory, you might have. There's a great book on this called Fanatical Prospecting by, uh, by Jeb Blout.

I recommend that. But his idea of this prospecting pyramid, which is if I'm a seller, let's say I work with a BDR, there's probably a handful of accounts in the territory where I don't want to BDR calling and cold. Maybe like an old contact of mine is the leader there. Maybe we just lost a big opportunity there.

Maybe a big customer A big, uh, buyer from one of our accounts just moved to this new account. You don't want to BDR calling in there cold. So you want to divide and conquer. And that, you know, you might call those like anything inbound is probably your top of your pyramid. Below that is like anything where, hey, this is, Delicate, like let's not have the BDR bruise the fruit.

Uh, let's, let's own that. And then the bottom is where you, your BDR, you're, you're assigning to them and saying, do some homework on these, look for these signals and then hit these in this order. So that until they build that, you know, institutional market knowledge, they're spending their time on, because otherwise they could be just wasting a lot of good jet fuel.

Yeah. The, yeah, the, all I'm thinking about is. You know, get, get to the, get to the heart of the best opportunity possible. I mean, that's what I'm here and go after the, you know, the right target and that rev ops plays such a critical role in that and really narrowing that, not just filling up the pipe with a bunch of low value opportunities, you know, false positives, I guess, uh, but actually getting to, you know, the, The, the gold, uh, and, and converting those, right.

That maybe there are fewer numbers of opportunities, but converting those deals, um, is, is the key. Yeah. We, we had one, I'm sorry. We just, we had to that point, we had this one company, we went out and we looked at their, all the accounts and then we using some criteria, bucket them in, into like ABC and D accounts.

Like how likely are they to buy? And the D's were winning at like 6 percent and the A's were winning at like 30%. And then, you know, B and C were in the middle. And so after we did all that, I was like, okay, let's look at last year. How much time did we spend? On DS, those ones that went at six and it was almost 40 percent of the time.

So you're just like, Oh, wow. And sellers, they don't, you know, they don't know. So, okay, quickly, let's get that in there. And if nothing else, just tell sellers, like, unless this customer is beaten down the door. Like, don't spend too much time here because it's just unlikely to buy based on signals we can see.

And I think some of the challenges that we have, when we don't have somebody digging and double clicking a little bit deeper in the data, like you guys did, is that you just, you equate activity. Or action with some level of success. And so you're some, a BDR might say, well, I made my X number of contacts today.

So therefore I was successful in my job today when the reality is they were just inaccurate shots that we were taking versus having a tool or having the process that helps them identify, do that same work, but in the right places and the, uh, in the accuracy goes up so much more. Yeah. And you know, that will build mistrust from sales, you know, there's all these leads of junk, like I'm, then they stop following up on them.

That marketing looks at the slow lead time that they mistrust sales on following up and you get, you know, it can be this vicious site that divide begins. Yeah. Yeah, that's the vibe he gets. Well, the last thing you had down here, you just talked about kind of the tech side of things and you had technology without champions and sponsors, kind of how, uh, how that is an issue you see sometimes, uh, and, uh, just, and then implementing tech, but not, not having a rollout strategy, a support strategy for it, what are your thoughts around that?

Yeah, there's lots of examples you could use here. I'll just throw a couple out there. So one, let's say like Gong. Gong, great technology, does a lot of good things. A lot of, a lot of good sales leaders I know swear by it, but it's, it's not a silver bullet. It's got to be accompanied by a strategy. I'll just give an example.

If I'm a manager, I'm coaching my sellers. I might, I can, one thing I can get quickly from Gong is I can get talk, listen ratios. So I can Take that data, run that for the team. Like if all those calls that I can't listen to, and I can quickly see it, I can go back if I'm saying to a couple of sellers on the team, like you're doing 80 percent of the talking on these calls.

Like this is, you're basically doing a webinar and it's hard to sell that way. Um, we need to get that ratio more like 50, 50. And also this is great Kong. Um, I thought leadership, like. We need longer answers. Like if it's just this like rapid fire binary, like those, those are things you can get very quickly.

Yeah. And so that allows you to listen at scale too. You can look at like compare top performers, everybody else that using different terms. Like when do they, when do they start? Introducing money finance, right? So but you want to have before you implement that you want to have clear things that you're looking to do with them as opposed to just throwing the technology because the managers don't always know.

Why do we buy this? I don't know. Why am I gonna roll this out? So I would have that driving it. Uh, something like 6 cents. There's businesses where, you know, you can call on at any time and maybe sell. There's also businesses where they're only going to buy in a finite window of opportunity, right? Like maybe when they're changing over their ERP system, if that's what you have, like 6 cents is fantastic for telling you, Hey, this, these customers are in this window of opportunity.

We're seeing the signal, but then. Knowing that's one thing, then you've got to make sure that the sales team sees that and is operationalizing and either the BDRs that the salespeople are calling in at that time. Um, you know, so, so, and then we talked about the lead scoring example too. So like, whatever it is, you've got to make sure that people want to understand why do we buy this?

What are we trying to do with this? What are we expecting you to do? And then you need somebody inspecting to make sure that it's happening. Matt, great. It's been fantastic. You've been So succinct and how you delivered each of the answers. I think it's a great, uh, just a great amount of information for anybody who's a revenue leader and saying, either we don't have revenue operations yet, and we need to begin moving towards that, or even we already have it, but maybe are we utilizing best way right now, give a lot of great points that I think our audience can go and process through and figure out, Hey, how do we apply this to our, to our business?

Yeah. And, and for the listeners, if you want to reach out to Matt, I'm sure he wouldn't mind. Um, he's a busy man, but, uh, we'll drop his LinkedIn profile in the description. So, uh, if you want, if you've got some questions or you want to reach out. So feel free to do that. Gentlemen. Thank you so much for, uh, uh, for having me here.

It's, it's, it's been a pleasure and you guys have helped me in the past. Uh, getting some great folks, uh, in seat. Cause you know, as, as you heard here, I, I value revenue ops, getting the right person in quickly. So it's, it's when you have a need, uh, usually you needed somebody yesterday. You want to get, you want to get them in as soon as possible.

So thank you for everything you've done for me in the past. And thanks for having me here today. Absolutely. We enjoyed it. Thanks, Matt. Take care. You're good. Bye.