Enhancing Operations with RevOps and AI at RevOnyx with Jeremy Steinbring

Welcome to the B2B Growth Blueprint podcast, where we talk with entrepreneurs, founders, and leaders at B2B services, tech, and SaaS companies to learn the systems and processes they've used to create success for their business. We'll also learn from marketing and sales experts to provide insights to help you grow your business. I'm your host, Mark Osborne, and the podcast is brought to you by Modern Revenue Strategies and their 10x ROI B2B Growth Guarantee. Schedule a free diagnostic call to learn the fastest path to double your B2B revenues in just 90 days. Hello and welcome to another episode of the B2B Growth Blueprint Podcast. I'm your host, Mark Osborne, and today I'm very excited to welcome my guest, Jeremy Steinbring. Jeremy is the CEO and founder of RevOnyx, and I'm gonna read this to make sure I get it all right. He has over 10 years in technology and SaaS companies across sales and marketing roles. He's certified in Salesforce, HubSpot, Lead Data, just about everything you can think of across CRM and tech stack tools. RevOps or RevOnyx is a RevOps as a service agency. They work with scaling businesses, and we're gonna talk about what that means and, and how they do that. They really believe that we should do everything aimed at saving our most valuable resource, which is time. They save time for startups by partnering with executives to leverage the power of RevOps. And they do this all using CRM and AI technologies to streamline processes and improve revenue potential. He's been a guest on hundreds of podcasts, and he's an active mentor in many RevOps communities, helping to guide RevOps leaders tackling challenging problems. So Jeremy, I'm so excited to have you on the show today.

Yeah, Mark, thanks for the introduction. Great to be here. Excited for this chat.

So tell us a little bit about your journey of, you know, through these marketing sales roles, learning all these technologies to sort of founding this company.

Yeah. So again, my name is Jeremy Steinbring. I have a very unique journey. You know, you don't wait, you don't grow up saying, hey, I want to be a RevOps agency owner. That's just not something that people do. So actually, my love is music. And so I actually went to school for audio engineering. I spent some time in LA doing the whole music thing. It was not the life that I wanted for myself or my future family.

True.

So I actually went to work at Apple in the retail store. I learned a lot from working there. Fantastic company. And very quickly, I was referred into my first tech role. And ever since, I've been in tech. So for the past, like, 10, 12 years, I've worked for tech and SaaS startups in all capacities from sales and marketing, product, onboarding, implementation, CS. And so it kind of gave me a good overall understanding of how all of these departments work and the friction points of them, you know, when they're, when they're working with each other, right? So we've all heard about, you know, the complaints and tension between marketing and sales and sales and customer success. So I got to see that firsthand. And so that, that lent to having a great background and understanding everyone's issues, which then ties into the technology. I actually became a Salesforce administrator, business systems manager. I did some consulting for another Salesforce firm for a while, and it just made sense for me to share my experience and help companies kind of go through that heavy growth early on, you know, that they go through. So, you know, a lot of startups, they get a big round of funding. They add 50 people overnight and they wonder why things aren't working well. And I lived through a lot of those things. And so it just made sense for me to share it to the masses rather than having, you know, one company get all of me.

That's super interesting. And we share some of that music background and that we've connected on in the past as well. And we were chatting a little bit before about this interesting sort of thing that we've witnessed in our careers is this evolution of marketing where, you know, for their marketers that their whole career has been sort of chasing the next thing. And, you know, like if you were the first person to optimize your website for search engines in your category, like you blew up overnight and that growth hack really was the key to success. And if you were the first person to, you know, start buying paid ads for your keywords, that was really the key to success. And it's funny, you know, the the MarTech conference, you know, Scott Brinker and those folks, I'm sure you've probably been before. You know, when they first started publishing their landscape of all the marketing technology and RevOps and ad tech tools, there were like 150 on that page that they printed. And I think that was like, you know, 2011, 2014, something like that. This past year, there were over 10,000 different tools. There's a tool for every problem out there. And so Companies keep buying tools thinking that that's going to be the solution, but that's not really what happens. And it's interesting that you talk about being an expert in so many tools, and I oftentimes think of RevOps as sort of the synthesis of all of these. How do you go about, you know, sort of making sure that it's not just a collection of tools in a box, instead it's a focus on solutions?

Yeah, that's a great question, and this is actually our entire business model. So we We do three things really well, and you need all of these three things in order to have a successful you know RevOps strategy. You need CRM expertise. Where is your customer data living? You know typically HubSpot and Salesforce are the gold standards for CRM in today's world. I know there's a lot of new up-and-coming CRMs that people are interested in, but having a place where all of your customer data lives is super important, and you need someone who understands CRM. So we're certified in both HubSpot and Salesforce. I've worked as a product manager to help. Design a CRM to compete with those. So I've done a lot of, you know, research and my team definitely understands those systems first. I think in addition to that, you just talked about all of the tools. And if you're listening to this, you probably can't list out all of the systems that your company uses because you probably have 40 and 50 that you'd need to look at on a spreadsheet. And so it's not just about the CRM any longer. It's about how the, all of these other tools interconnect with one another. And what ties all of that together is your customer journey and the strategy, right? If you're just, if you have a problem and you go to Google, you're gonna find 3 tools that say they solve that problem.

That's right.

It's just how it is. And so rather than taking the time to think deeply about the issue and the root cause of the problem, we have what I like to call shiny object syndrome. And before you know it, before you know it, You end up with 40 and 50 tools. Data is everywhere. And frankly, most teams, when we start with them, would be better off going back to Google Sheets. That's how bad it gets. And I'm sure, again, for folks listening here, you know, your trust in your CRM is probably broken. And that is because of this problem. Shiny object syndrome. We add too many tech stack tools. The adoption from your team of all of this technology, especially because they can all be configured differently. I mean, I have not seen a single CRM instance in any tool being configured the same way on a, you know, or there's similarities, but a lot of companies are all different. And so this all adds up to confusion, a lack of trust, a lack of adoption, and frankly, an absolute ton of dollars wasted. And so when we work with our customers, the first thing that we want to do is kind of understand the business and try to document just the different milestones throughout the customer journey. Let's not look at it from just a marketing perspective. just a sales perspective, just a CS perspective. What is the customer's journey through the customer's eyes?

Yeah.

And if you, if you change that thinking and you think about what they go through through their entire lifecycle, not through a specific department, you start uncovering big gaps in, you know, their experience or, you know, the value that they're getting from the product. And you use that first as a rubric to help you design the tech around supporting your customer and supporting your internal team. And so that's typically where we start. And a lot of it is eye-opening. Most of the customers we work with do not have like a unified vision of what their customers go through on a per-customer or industry or segment basis that just doesn't exist.

Yeah. Yeah. One of the exercises that we do with clients that's so valuable is just sort of describing that entire lifecycle from an anonymous target that exists out there to our best customer that's been with us for years. What does that process look like? What are the different inflection points where they're making choices? How are they informing those choices? How are you impacting those choices? And just having that clear view is really a system that allows you to then layer in data, layer in technology, layer in people that allow you to do a better job at each of those stages. But so often companies are like, Well, marketing, you know, goes out and gets leads and sales closes those leads and customer success, you know, you know, make— takes care of our clients, but they don't have that unified view. And one of the ways that we help create that unified view is like bringing everyone together on like a shared revenue scorecard so that like there are different metrics for, you know, different stages and, you know, maybe different weighting of your focus, but you all share it together, which then allows you to consolidate different technology tools. So you find one tool that helps both marketing and customer success instead of marketing having their collection of tools and customer success having their other collection of tools. So it's so interesting to use that principle of, you know, thinking about the context of the company and then the customer journey for finding that utilization.

Yeah, and I will say, every company that I've supported and/or worked in over the last, you know, 10, 12, 13 years has this problem. Every single one, it— they look different. The teams are different, the industries are different, but they all have this problem. And it actually stems usually from teams working independently, rather than them thinking and having this kind of RevOps customer journey philosophy and view. And so they end up building their own little fortresses within the company separately. And that works for a while.

Yeah.

Right? Like when you're, when you're smaller and you're nimble and you can make breakneck speed decisions, it works. It's okay. But it so often gets to this point where you've built up and now you've hit this wall or this ceiling where you can't get through it. And it's real, like, it also will cost you a fortune if you don't figure this out, which is why I'm, I'm noticing a trend where RevOps is now this household name and companies are starting to adopt this RevOps model sooner because they realize that having a couple really solid systems and process people can use the technology that's up and coming with AI and, you know, some of the great tools that have already existed for years and the improvements that they've made. They can deploy all of those things together in a scalable way to where you don't need to hire 100 people. You might be able to get to $10 million, $100 million in ARR with 25 people instead of 50.

Right.

Right. And so people are thinking about that and they're starting to catch on. And those that adopt it sooner are in a better place to not overspend and make sure that they do have process, you know, all documented. And it's really important. And I think that's a trend that will continue.

It's funny too. It's almost like a curse of success sometimes that companies that grow really fast, they actually wind up being some of the biggest offenders on, you know, marketing will say we need, you know, we need a tool to help us, you know, manage the leads or whatever it is. Okay, go get the one that you need. And then sales says, well, we need a tool to help us manage our pipeline. Okay, well, go get the one you need. And You know, customer success, we need a tool to keep track of all of our conversations. Go get the one you need because you're growing so fast, you know, and then you find out that you've got, you know, 3 different tools that all do the exact same thing and would all work so much better if they talk to each other. And so then you get another tool that helps them talk to each other instead of just going back and saying, well, actually, let's just go find the right tool that does all of these things. And, and so How do you help companies identify? So first off, almost every company has this problem, but, you know, some problems are, you know, sucking chest wounds that have to be, you know, solved immediately. Others are stubbed toes that you can limp along with for a while. How do you help companies identify when it's like now, like now is the time that you should prioritize solving this problem?

Yeah. Well, you know, people are in different parts of their journey, their RevOps journey, you know, so like we, we talked to some people who know that this is a problem, they are actively trying to fix it, and they just need an extra hand. And we have some folks that have no idea that this is the solution. And we're kind of walking them through, like how we think about creating a RevOps team and then deploying technology and creating that system for them. So I really do think it depends, which is why you don't Google how to deploy RevOps for my company, and it gives you all of like the answers on which tools to get rid of and not. It's why it's complicated. But that's why, I mean, that's the whole reason why we exist as a company to help customers with that. I think that it starts with a deep understanding of what is revenue generating, what is adding value to the customer, what is making it easier for your team to do work and being more efficient. Everything else goes in this other bucket. And it's nice to have, need to have. It really is that simple. Like one of the exercises I like doing is I like working with, you know, our customer's team or CFO, right? And say, okay, show me all of the systems that you use that you pay for, for the go-to-market team. Show me all of the license counts, show me the renewal date, and show me the cost. And then if you can estimate utilization, 25%, 50%, 70%, 100%, and just, just write that down because you a lot of times can estimate anything that's 100% utilization or 75% utilization. We keep and save for another day. These are like Salesforce, HubSpot, core tools that you know that you need, that you use every single day. But as you go down the list and sort by that 50, 25, maybe even 0, you can easily pick out there might be one specific team where 2 people use this specific tool for this specific thing. Say it's like email activity tracking. Right? Like maybe, maybe someone has a tool like Outreach and Salesloft. They, they don't do the outbound messaging that they used to where they just blindly download, you know, 2,000 Zoom info contacts and put them into an outreach campaign. Maybe it's more targeted, but they're just using it so that their emails track to Salesforce automatically. That is a big opportunity to remove a giant contract and a giant integration, the tech debt of that. Yeah.

Yeah.

And maybe subsidize with a, with a lighter tool that just focuses on email activity capture and making sure that you can report on activity within Salesforce. And so just through going through that exercise and actually stopping and like, where are we right now? There's always cost savings and you could do that today. You don't need someone like me or my team. And again, it's poor marketing. You always need me, right? But you could do, you could do this today and you could probably pick out your low-hanging fruit. And come up with another solution. If you feel like there's not another solution for it, I would ask, is it revenue generating? Is it adding value to your customer? How much is it helping you be better at your job? Most of it is noise.

Yeah.

And that's why we end up in the position we're in. How big is the problem? Does the problem tie back to any of those things I just mentioned? And I would venture to guess that a good handful of them were decisions made to put out a fire that was maybe for a very specific use case or a very specific team at the time. And there's so much of that that we can just remove right off the bat.

Or there was one campaign where we're gonna do this. Well, in order to do this, we need this software. Well, do we need a year? No, let's just do a month, but it'll renew every— and then you forget that it's gonna renew every month and now it's just out there renewing. Every month and someone's still using it on occasion, as you say, but they're not really using it to the full extent. And you could probably accomplish those same things, which is again, the way that we like to instill this sort of systems thinking is this critical flow of revenue. And then there's these inflection points. Well, what technology or data is helping you influence this KPI that you care about? And if you can't point to a KPI that a piece of technology or data is helping you influence, then maybe you don't need that. Maybe you don't need that particular technology.

And the clarity of data is also becoming incredibly important, right? Because as we move to like an AI, like machines and AI are doing the heavy lifting for us. And this is, and again, I'm gonna get off on a little bit of a tangent about AI. I know we, I promised you I would not do this before we, you know, I was about to tee this up. So I have a bone to pick with AI. I think AI is great. It's here to stay. It's the future. Like, we're in the '90s where like the www, you know, the World Wide Web started, right? Like, we're— but, you know, we're still on Microsoft DOS. Like, we're still in the very early stages. And I think people are so— again, we talked about shiny object syndrome. Businesses are just slapping AI on their domain to sell more business. Like, if that tells you anything about like the state of marketing and like where that's at, like people People are just doing it because it's a name grab. Like, oh, they're using AI, I want it. AI is only good as good as the data that you feed it and the model that you feed it. So most of our customers that ask us about AI tools, you know, as systems people, like, I nerd out. This sounds really fun. Like, I would love to have an AI replace, you know, 5 different people doing something manually. They can work on better, more important things. That's great. But if your data is a mess and you have all of these systems and data is not accurate, you're only gonna get out of it what you put in.

Yeah.

And so it's really important to have this solid RevOps strategy and system strategy before you adopt any of these AI tools. Like, and, and I would much rather somebody you know, remove 20% of their tech stack systems, get their process super tight, adoption is high, it's working so you can trust your data. So then you can put, you know, analytics and insight tools on top of your tech stack to help you get more out of it. But so many people are trying— it's like the— it's kind of like the, like the diet pill, right? Like no one wants to eat good for 6 months and work out every day.

That's right.

Everyone wants to just Take a pill or have an injection and lose weight. And it's like, in some cases, yeah, like you get some, some short-term results, but it always— the Jenga tower always falls over and you always go back to needing to go back to basics. And it, it bugs me the amount of blatant, oh, like it's an AI tool, it can do it for me. I don't know that most companies are ready. To adopt, at least in the startup world, the folks that we, you know, that we, that we help, they're just not ready for it.

I mean, that's such a great analogy that, you know, eat better, work out more often. Like, there are tools that help you eat better. And those are good tools to bring into the process. There are tools that help you, you know, work out better. And those are good tools to bring in the process. But If you're just like, well, all I gotta do is download this app and I'm gonna lose weight. That's not the key. And the same thing is true when it's, you know, all I gotta do is install this piece of technology, this, you know, one tool and I'm gonna have more money. That's not the way it works in business either. Instead, it's defining, well, what is it you're really trying to do at what stage of the system and of the process? And it's by sort of building it that way that you get the right tools that actually make an impact.

If you're on a demo and you hear the phrase seamlessly integrates, run in the other direction.

Yeah, because nothing seamlessly integrates.

Or, or just know that that's just conjecture and, you know, it's gonna take more work. Sure, you can authenticate a new app and integrate it. Yeah, it takes 3 seconds, but is it actually adding value? Is it causing more issues than, you know, it's actually helping you.

Yeah.

And I think just— I think a lot of it also goes to the decision-making around when you invest in a tool versus when you use the tech stack that you have versus when you don't do anything about the problem at all. So, I think a lot of times a lot of everything we just talked about can actually be avoided by having like a mental checklist of all the things that would need to be approved or would meet certain criteria before you go down the path of Googling, oh, I'm gonna need a new tool, right? So, like, I would think about how often is this problem going to occur? What is the impact if we don't solve this problem for customers? Like, the business questions to ask yourself first, because 50% of the times are probably already saying, yeah, you know what? This is a corner case. It's happening right now, but based on where our business and products and services are going, I don't see this as being a long-term issue. Maybe it's not the best time to, you know, to integrate or buy a new tool. And then I would also ask questions around, do we have the team or process to support the purchase and integration of this new tool? Is it end of quarter? Is it end of year? Do you have a new product maybe being released in 2025? And like, this would be the worst time to upend a big major process. So like, so all the timing stuff, the purpose conversations, the questions you have to ask yourself, most of the time it's an emotional decision to go buy something else, an emotional response to a problem, to a fire that you just don't have the time to handle. And that's what we do for our customers. We are that, hey, I have this problem. I need someone to think unbiasedly about what the best solution is. And that's why you have to know how to advise with RevOps strategy and be able to implement tech. You know, a lot of the agencies and competitors to Revonix, they just focus on one thing. They're HubSpot experts, right? Or they're Salesforce experts, or they're RevOps advisors, but you can't get all the help that you need with a single point of contact. And like just having everything being organized by one business entity has been incredibly helpful for our customers.

So I love that framework that you had of, you know, you know, how important is it? What's the cost of not, you know, getting it done? And that cost might be, you know, well, we're not quite as good as we could be with our customers, but is it a difference between, you know, 90 and 95? that's still an A, you know what I mean? And versus is it the difference between being 60 and 90? Like, well, then obviously there's a big opportunity there. And, you know, I was chatting with someone the other day about, you know, sort of digital transformation, which is a very old term, but that's still what's happening with AI and this, you know, idea of, you know, people, process, technology. And so oftentimes people are like, well, I want to buy the technology and that'll just solve everything. But instead, It starts with the people and experts like yourself that can then help define the process that you then find the technology to enable. And then all of that works together and really sort of creates the dynamic that you're looking for.

Totally. It certainly does.

So obviously we're both super passionate about this area and we could spend all day talking about it, but I got to be mindful of your time. However, I'm curious, like, what's something that's on the horizon for RevOnyx that you're excited about? Yeah.

So I mean, obviously, we're, we're a growing team. So over the last— we've been in business since January 2 years ago. So it'll be 2 years in this upcoming January. So big milestones for us, especially, you know, if you're in the startup world or in the agency world, you know, getting over that 1-year, 2-year milestones are big. You know, a lot of companies don't make it. And so I'm, I'm really proud of Not only myself knowing, you know, again, I am not a serial entrepreneur. This is my first go-round. And so there's a lot of— for the people that are, you know, that are unfortunately maybe looking for work or thinking about going fractional, I mean, I would recommend, you know, to definitely, to definitely give it a shot. But a lot don't make it. And so for us, we're really proud, you know, of what we've built. I'm really proud of my team. You know, the other thing is we have a fantastic team of experts. that have their specialties in all of the different realms of RevOps, both systems and process. And so working with such great people, I learn a lot every day from my team, and it's just, it creates like a lot of growth for me. As far as big milestones, things that are coming, we are building a more of a set solution using technology that you probably have heard of, like ClickUp, Slack. We use a new tool called Puzzle, which very few people know about. It's puzzleapp.io. It's a combination of Lucidchart and systems design. It is fantastic. But we're kind of building a productized solution for our customers. It's not just consulting.

Right?

We wanna be able to give you your systems and process on paper. And so we're utilizing these tools and building this almost like this out-of-the-box product that you can take with you when you're done working with us. Because again, the goal is to not be the agency that's with you for the next 10 years.

Right.

If we are, that's a problem. We're not doing our job.

You don't wanna keep them on the hook.

Our job is to give you the framework, help you build and teach you how to do this on your own so that you can hire your own people to do this internally. Like, that's the goal. It's the whole reason why we exist. But all in all, I'm just really grateful to be, you know, where we are right now in the times that, you know, we live in the post-COVID era where SaaS and tech startups especially have taken a massive hit financially and there have been a lot of layoffs and there's been a lot of, you know, tumultuous behavior going on in our world. And so I'm just really happy to be, to be where we are and really thankful.

Wow, that's awesome and an inspiring vision that you lay out for companies. So for our members of our audience that are hearing you talk and they're like, I kind of see myself in some of these challenges that Jeremy's describing, they want to get in touch with you. What's the best way to get in touch?

Yeah, so please reach out to me on LinkedIn. So you can find me again, I'm— my profile is open. DM me, let me know if you have questions. I'm, like I said, I'm super active in Slack communities like RevOps Co-op, Rev Genius, RevOps Alliance. So please feel free to message me if you have questions. If you're interested in working with us, you can go to revonix.io, learn a little bit more about our team, our service offerings, and request time to chat with me directly. And it would be, it would be great to meet you.

Awesome. Well, Jeremy, thank you so much for the time. I know our audience learned a lot, so I appreciate you dropping some knowledge on us.

Thanks, Hugh. Thank you, Mark. Take care.

Talk to you again soon. Thank you for joining this episode of the B2B Growth Blueprint podcast. We hope you've gained insights to grow your business. If you enjoyed this discussion, please rate, comment, like on your favorite platform and share to others who will find it useful. Do you know a CEO, founder, or leader at an early stage B2B services tech, or SaaS company who would like to be a guest and share their story, send us a note. Let's schedule a conversation.