Balaji Krish: How to Align Strategy, Operations, and Tactics for GTM Success

Business. Business. Business.

Business. Welcome to Go-To-Market, a podcast for RevOps, sales, and marketing leaders to dive deep into industry insights and best practices. Go-To-Market is sponsored by Fulcast, the go-to-market cloud. My name is Dr. Amy Osman Cook, and I am so excited today to introduce you to Balaji Krish. He is an incredible leader who has led RevOps at Google, Twitter, Walmart, and Atlassian. And he's here to talk to us in the studio about demystifying RevOps. Balaji, how are you?

I'm very well. Thanks so much for having me, Dr. Amy. It's such a pleasure to be on this podcast and I am very passionate about RevOps, so really looking forward to this conversation with you.

Likewise, I have ever since the first moment that you agreed to come on the podcast, I have been such a super fan and it's amazing the career that you have had. Can you give us a little background about how did you get into this?

Do you want the long version or do you want the short version?

I want the long version for everyone to know like how they can have a career like yours.

Okay, so for that, to really give you an idea, I, for the longest time in my career, and I did not have a really good idea of what I wanted to do, but I found my way. And I think that's probably my superpower is not my skills or not my positions or whatever. I think my superpower is to not settle for what I'm not passionate about, really go after what I'm passionate about. So growing up, I grew up in India, you know, before India became modern. So everybody in India, if you're a male, you either became a doctor or an engineer. If you're not really great in academics, you could become a CPA. That was the bar back then. So I'm like, I became an engineer and I came to the US for my master's. I was doing my master's in some crazy thermodynamics and fluid mechanics types of thing. And I, you know, I was working with a project on NASA. I was like, oh, this is cool. But then when I was graduating for master's, you don't really recruit. Your professor tells you who to talk to to get a job. So he said someone from JPL will give you a call about a job. And he did. I had a good conversation with that scientist for about an hour. And he said, that's great. You know, my admin will take over, you know, come and do this work for me. Admin called and said, well, fax me over your passport, which I did. She said, well, no, no, I want your other passport, the US passport. I said, no, I don't have one. And I found that, you know, any job that I could take after the grad study, graduate study that I did, required US citizenship. My choice was to either get a PhD and get an accelerated citizenship or to go back to India or to get a different field of education altogether. And by which time I was pretty sure engineering was not the right choice for me. PhD was not something that I wanted to do. So I ended up getting another master's in information systems. It was back in the day when dot-com hadn't quite happened. So that's how I first made it to the Bay Area after getting my master's in information science. Started my career in a tech-ish type of a job, but pretty fairly sure I wanted to get into, you know, more business-oriented roles. So I finished my career at Hewlett-Packard as a product manager when I— after I started in the tech world. Decided to hang up my shoes, went to business school full time, wanted to get a proper education in business concepts. I went to Wharton, the best 2 years of my life. I was humbled so much, like, you know, surrounded by such brilliant people, but gave me the confidence that I could survive. A guy from a small town in India moved to the US and worked a very tech job, but then I could hang out with the consultants and the bankers and the hedge fund guys of the world. Gave me a lot of confidence that I can survive in this world. I wasn't sure what I wanted to do out of business school. I mean, in fact, a lot of people are not when they come there. That's why they're there. So I tried my hand at management consulting, didn't quite enjoy the non-execution side of consulting. I said, okay, no, I need to find something else. Went and did banking at Barclays in London. I quite enjoyed that, but the finance culture was so vastly different from the tech culture. So those are the experiences that led me to my ops career. So I hung up my shoes at Barclays, moved back to the Bay Area. That's when I started at Google. So my grounding, and I, by the time I was fairly sure I wanted to be in operations, I love problem solving, I love execution, having spent time in consulting, banking, and I was like, okay, this is what I want to do.

Well, I love that it gives you the opportunity to pull from all of your different experiences and with your strategic mind and use that to solve problems. So I can totally see how that led you into—

Yeah, and you know, a bunch of these personality tests I used to take in business school at work told me, you know, you should go into sales. And I think I would have loved and enjoyed sales. But I realized, you know, I think what I enjoy more is operations. And so, you know, I decided not to be a sales professional or a marketing professional or a product professional. I decided I want to be operations, sort of be a jack of all trades, king of none. So my first role at Google was my— was a RevOps role. And that was the grounding in operations. And that's how it started. I did DevOps in Google, moved to Twitter, did DevOps there for a long time. Then I grew out of DevOps to do more overall company operations type roles. I got the opportunity to be a country leader for Twitter India, which was an all-encompassing sales plus operations plus working with the government on social media policy type role. And then I moved to Walmart from there. It was more of a division operations where DevOps was one part of it, but business operations, analytics were the other ones. So I sort of slowly expanded my portfolio. But RevOps is what gave me the grounding in operations. And I think, you know, I look back at those days in Google and Twitter very fondly. And that's helped me shape my operations career. So yeah, that's a long story.

No, that was fascinating. And it's also super relevant for anyone who's listening who wants to really have that kind of level of success that you have had and showing how you can kind of come at it from a whole bunch of different ways and really follow your passion into that nexus point between the strategy and the execution.

Yeah, it's not an easy route. It takes courage. I mean, I think a lot of people, you know, they get a good role, they stick with it and they move up the ladder. Some enjoy it, some don't, but they still stick with it. I think if I'd stuck with the consulting role or the banking role, any of those, I probably would've done okay. But I don't know if I'd have been super happy. And I think that's the lesson for me.

Yeah, I love that. That's such an important lesson. So let me ask you, when you were at Google, what years were you there?

I was there 2008 till 2013.

So that was before the term RevOps was even coined.

You're absolutely right. I, I think that's why I really appreciate Google for, and maybe Yahoo a little bit before Google, but Google is where in the tech world strategy and operations as a function really took shape in my opinion. Prior to that, these roles existed, but they existed in silos. They would be in a chief of staff type of role or someone in a program management type of a function. Wasn't really defined. And, and even people who were doing those roles where, where people who were in the organization sort of grew into those roles. But I think Google made a concerted effort to build strategy and operations as a function and recruited for that, for that function, either from business schools or consulting firms or other operators who have done this kind of work in the past. So really, I saw it take shape in Google and I learned a lot during those, during those years.

So interesting. So I have to ask you, because you were around before the term of RevOps was coined, what is RevOps? How do we demystify what this huge circling cloud around us of the areas be between strategy and execution, right? Everybody's got a little bit different definition, right? What is RevOps?

Um, in a humble way, I'm going to give you my perspective on what RevOps is. I'm sure if you talk to other great RevOps leaders and other ops leaders, they would probably have their own opinion and, oh, the point of view. My point of view on what RevOps is, RevOps is the internal partner to go-to-market sales function and marketing function. I shouldn't just say sales, go-to-market sales and marketing function is an internal partner is what I would call it. And then I'm carefully choosing the word partner because RevOps can is not just a tactical function to do the stuff that, you know, CRMs and whatnot. That's part of it. The reason I call it a partner is if used really well, and I have some great leaders, go-to-market leaders at Google and Twitter use DevOps really well. If used really well, you can act as an amazing internal partner for the go-to-market function. So you can help them think strategically about their businesses. About their clients, about products, the product market fit. At the same time, internally remove a lot of the, you know, block and tackle, remove a lot of the obstacles for go-to-market teams to spend more time in front of clients. And that could mean a lot of operational work internally, some tactical work internally. So it's an all-encompassing partnership to go-to-market, external go-to-market team. And so I think of it in a broad, broad way. 3 buckets for revenue operations.

Okay.

Strategic, operational, tactical.

I love it.

My perspective, and I preached this to my team so much, they probably are sick and tired of hearing it. The ideal mix, in my opinion, again, it could differ from people to people, from company to company, and from stage to stage, phase to phase of a company. The ideal mix in my opinion is 40-40-20, 40% strategic, 40% operational, 20% tactical. And what that does is, A, it gives a very rich RevOps career to people who do that work. They're able to zoom in and zoom out. You have to zoom out for strategy, you have to zoom in for tactical.

Tactics.

So you're able to zoom in and zoom out. That's one, it's a great rich career. And on the other side, for the good external go-to-market functions, you get a solid, well-rounded RevOps partner, not just someone who does one thing versus the other, someone who can help you really sit down and think through about your org structure, about what's the best way to segment your business, what's the best way to go to market. At the same time, how do we set up our internal go-to-market CRM systems? How do we create processes for our sales team to be efficient? And at the same time also do tactical stuff like put together spreadsheets and, you know, pipeline reports and whatnot, right? So I think to me, that's how I define DevOps as an internal partner to the external go-to-market teams. And if that's the way teams use it, I think you get the most out of that.

Oh, I love the way that you're segmenting that. This is so exciting. So you've got your 40% of strategy, You're 40% of operations and you're 20% of tactics. So one of my questions is, how would you differentiate, what are some examples of activities that are operational versus tactical? How do you differentiate those two?

Yeah, why don't I give examples of all three? I think one of the—

I would love that. I would love that.

I think one of the most meaningful work my team and I have done over the years when it comes to strategy side is how you segment your business. And I think that's a really important part of go-to-market. It's actually a go-to-market strategy. You know, what is your large account? What is your medium account? What's your small account? And how do you define that and how do you create a template for that and not let it move around and be fluid, right? I think that's an awesome strategy and I think it requires a lot of work with data, understanding your company culture, understanding your clients, understanding your product. So you have to work with cross-section of teams in the company, sales, marketing, product, finance. So I think that's a very cool example for strategy. Education. One of the first things I remember, you know, when I joined Twitter back in 2013, it was very young, you know, pre-IPO, and it was sort of segmented in a regional form, West Coast, East Coast, Southeast and all that. But a lot of Twitter's clients were, you know, national clients or sometimes global clients. So one of the very first things that my team and I ended up doing was segmenting the business based on industry. And I think it was very meaningful work that helped the company grow and then turn public. So that's a strategy example. I think operational, to be honest, operational is a lot about being efficient. And I think one of them, there are several examples of operational. The one cool example I would give is measuring your team's efficiency and success in the form of input metrics as opposed to just output metrics. And let me explain to you what I mean by that. Typically, you measure your efficiency by your revenue, your revenue growth, and, you know, those kinds of external metrics that you have influence over, but you don't have control over them. What you do have control over is the input metrics, which is all the work that you do internally. Have you really defined your customers? Do you have an account plan? Do you have all the contacts and do you have them segmented by C-level decision makers and executors? And do you have a meeting strategy? Do you record your meetings so that you can follow up on them? Do you have a pipeline? Do you forecast your business? And if you do all of these really well and you can measure these things, it's not easy to measure, but you can measure. If you do all of these things well, then you influence your output metrics really well. A lot of the times, if you lose sight of the input metrics, then you're only focused on, you know, the output metrics like revenue and growth. Then you're at the mercy of what they give you. Sometimes it could be great, sometimes it could not be great, and you don't know why it's great, you don't know why it's not great. So defining the input metrics, really putting through processes to measure those metrics, to implement those metrics, that's a great operational work.

That's interesting.

Yeah.

So, so you would define the strategic, you know, basically you're putting together like strategy at its very most basic level, right? Is a theory, right? Yeah. Anything, anything strategic would be like your segmentation would be like, I believe that if we segment by industry, we will achieve outsized growth at Twitter. That would be a great strategic motion, right?

Absolutely.

And then operationally, the output of operations would be efficiency. Would it be like, how would you measure, how do you measure a good operations outcome?

Yeah. So if let's take this example, the input versus output metrics. If a good operations team should be able to work with go-to-market external teams and other teams, finance teams to really define measurable input metrics that's acceptable to all constituents and be able to easily measure it and show the return on investment to your external teams. That's a good operational thing.

So that is really great.

Yeah. So I'll give you a good example. So one of the companies that I work for, when sales professionals used to go to meetings, we would ask them to record the meeting, which is not video record or audio record, just record the fact that you went to a meeting and who you met.

I see.

Right back in the day, maybe now they have better tools to do all that. But I'm talking about 10 years ago. And that was— this was not an easy process because a lot of the times they're busy, they're in an Uber and, you know, they go to a meeting, they're getting ready for it. At the end of the meeting, they're probably going for dinner, whatever it may be. Right. So giving them a simple way, a tool or technology to be able to record that, say, okay, I was here, I met this person, here's a quick follow-up. So like maybe a 5-minute thing. Giving them a quick way to do it and then, and then putting that to Salesforce so you can measure it and then report it back and then actually connect that to the insight, which is if you do this many number of meetings with, you know, decision makers and we see outsized growth in this company. And I think that it's really tied to the thread to show the ROI. That's a good operational work.

That totally makes sense. Here's another example, um, of, of someone— if I, if I'm understanding you correctly, you could take those meetings and you could say, all right, we see that across the company when you're meeting with the VP, you have a 60% chance of getting in, of creating that meeting into an opportunity. When you're meeting on the director level, it's only a 45% chance. Stuff like that, right?

Stuff like that. Yeah, you can, you can create insights based on those those recordings of, you know, who they're meeting with. And for that, you have to do a lot of prep work. You have to really define your account. Who are the C-level in your account? Who are the VPs in your account? Who are the decision makers? And you leave the title alone, you know, the executives, decision makers, operational folks, you know, agency guys, whoever it may be. I think if you define it and then record it and then follow through, and that's where the internal partner should help the external sales professionals and marketing professionals because they, you don't want them to be bothered with stuff like this. You just want them to go to those meetings and have a killer meeting.

Yeah.

Right. And you want to enable them to have those types of outputs.

That's very interesting. Okay. I love that. Now, can you tell me like the difference between operational, tactical?

Yeah. Tactical is work that nobody likes to do, but it's important to do. Right. And I think when I said earlier on 40/40/20, I know a lot of people say that's idealistic. One of the perennial issues with the RevOps teams is they are, the work-life balance is an issue. They're overworked because if you have to straddle all these three, there's a lot of tactical work that happens. And like I said, if you have true intentions of giving more time to your external go-to-market teams to be in front of clients, somebody has to do that internal sort of dirty work in within quotes. So I think that's what I call them. You spend a lot of time in spreadsheets, you know, pulling reports, you know, inputting stuff, you know, creating lead lists and whatnot. And you're also spending a lot of time in emails. Let's say you are one of your sales teams that you work with, they need some product enablement done with the product team. You're working, you're emailing the product guys and say, hey, you know, this is what is required. So you again giving more time back to sales, you doing a lot of that blocking and tackling internally. You're working with finance teams for forecasting and, you know, pipeline and do all that stuff. Very important work. And but I think we can get to that ideal state if we, if a company has great internal tools. And I think that's where a company like Fullcast comes in. If you give, if you make really good DevOps tools and give it in the hands of DevOps leaders, DevOps teams, as well as the sales teams, I think you can really keep the tactical work to 20%. But it's important 20%. You can, and one should never want to get away from that 20% because it's important work. That's where the zooming in and zooming out comes in.

I love that.

That's what I call tactical work. Today, I would say realistically, you know, I think RevOps teams probably spend 40% on tactical.

So, well, it is interesting because one of the reasons is that the data hygiene is always a challenge, right? And so if you're getting like lead lists from places or if you're getting, you know, for example, let's say that your marketing team wants to have as few fields in the form as possible to get people more likely to sign up for something, then you have to go in and fill in all the rest of it, right? Which is extra work for you. Sorry about that. I'm apologizing as a marketing person for doing that to you. But that makes so much sense. And another thing I really love about RevOps in general of the mentality that you have about rev-ups in general and just about leaders in general is the willingness to zoom in and zoom out. And that is one of the— that's the difference that I personally see between an A-player leader and a C-player leader, where the A-player, there's nothing— there's no task that is beneath them. They will cold call. They will go into the data. They will look at the data. They will do the inputs themselves. And then they'll have the ability to zoom out and be able to strategize, use that data, which is going to be even more meaningful to them because they have understood it from the granular level and be able to understand. How do you feel about that?

I completely agree. I think if you're an operations professional, you've got to be able to zoom in and zoom out. You cannot sit in the ivory tower and create strategies and be out of touch with what's, what's happening on the ground. I think there are other professions who can be very strategic and don't have to get very tactical and zoom in. But operations, finance and operations, the two functions, and coincidentally, I feel like those are the two functions which are truly objective in a company. And what I mean by that is, everybody works towards company success, but then as a marketing leader, your goal is like your marketing goals. As a product leader, your goal is to ship products. As a sales leader, your goal is to bring in revenue. I think for operations and finance, your goal is to make the company efficient. And, you know, for a finance professional, it's a truly fiduciary function, so that they're making the company efficient from a financial standpoint. For an operations professional, it's about making the company efficient regardless of, you know, whether you're working with one function or the other. And the way to do that is to be able to have a conversation with someone which is very zoomed out at the same time having a conversation with someone who's very zoomed in. And another one about that, you know, I think this is a really cool thing that I like as an operations leader and a RevOps leader, you gain a lot of respect from your team if you have the ability to zoom in and zoom out.

I totally see that too. Like when I work, it's the same in marketing. When I work with my marketing team and I can get into the details and I can say, all right, I see that we have you know, 5 different people in our ICP that we need to reach out to here that have some buyer intent. They're like, okay, she knows what I'm talking about. Yeah, I, you know, I find it that I get so much more respect that way too. I totally, totally—

no, enough to be dangerous.

Uh, but then still sell, and then you can celebrate the success of the specialist too because you know how hard it is, right? You know, you know that how valuable it is. So is there anything that is like a pet peeve of yours with all of this knowledge? Zooming out, you have so much experience. What's something that just kind of drives you crazy?

Yeah, so I think I mentioned it about the tactical work, right? I think RevOps is highly underinvested in companies in the form of technology.

Interesting.

I think that's something that is, um, that can be corrected. Uh, and I think it's a, it's a, it's a trade-off that companies go through all the time. Um, because to develop internal tools, you, you have to make a trade-off between developing external products and internal products. I mean, there's only so many, so much amount of finite resources. A lot of times companies index more on creating products and to ship. But I think if, if companies really invest in internal RevOps tools and when I say RevOps tools, I don't mean just for RevOps professionals. A lot of RevOps tools are used by, can be used by sales teams to make them very efficient. For example, when I talked about that meeting, You know, that tool is, could be for the salesperson to quickly open an app and say, yeah, I was here, I met this person, so-and-so, quick notes. That's a sales tool, but it'll be used by RevOps to actually create insights. I think tools are internal tools, technology, that's underinvested. I think I remember back in the day in Google, Google has a great internal CRM system. You know, maybe some of the Googlers who listen to it are like, what the hell is he talking about? But I felt it was really good. Back in the day, not anymore. I mean, early days of Google, if you were an engineer, you came in, you had to do sort of the quote penance in an internal tools team before you went on to work on external products like Gmail and whatnot. Right. So I think you spent, I think you're coming out of college, you have to spend a year in the internal tools team. So they had a lot of really good internal tools, you know, dashboards, insights. I think that's very essential. It's underinvested. And I remember in my days at Twitter, we had a really genius RevOps guy in Dublin, Ireland, who wanted to solve some of his DevOps operations processes using tools that he built on his own because he could code. And so we're like, okay, why don't you move to SF and create a small team and build tools for us? And then he moved to SF. We started building a small team. They created such amazing internal tools. Next thing you know, product team is like, wait, what are you guys doing creating a tech team within, within, you know, revenue? They're like, well, you can have these guys as long as you can ring-fence them and have them do stuff for revenue teams. So I think those are things I've seen. But that said, I think fast forward, you know, I'm not that clued in, but I do know that there are lots of SaaS tools that have come up in the last 5+ years that are, that do incredible things for RevOps and sales teams. But I still believe having, you know, talking to people, talking to people in the industry, I still believe they're all disjointed. You know, one of them does one thing, another thing does another thing. They probably don't necessarily talk to each other. So I think it'll happen as we move forward. Fullcast is taking that challenge on. That's where, that's my pet peeve. And I think it's getting better. And I don't think it's anybody's fault. I think it's a, anything to do with tactical, they're like, let's throw more humans at it. But as AI has come in with full force, I do think it'll get better. But that's my pet peeve, to get technology and tooling to get better for DevOps.

I totally agree with that. There's nothing that is more frustrating to me than being asked to do something without the ability to do it. I want to do everything that my boss asked me to do. I just— if you can't do it because you don't have the tools, then it's a very, very frustrating experience. So I love that. Well, okay, so apology. I feel like I have taken so much of your time and I'm so grateful for it. What a fascinating journey you've had. What an interesting perspective you have on RevOps. Completely agree with you on the tooling. So my final question for you is, you are clearly at the top of your RevOps game. How do you stay there? What's a tip or a trick that you have that keeps you there at the top of your RevOps game?

Yeah, I'm going to, I'm going to repeat my earlier message, which is don't stay in the ivory tower as an ops leader. I would say one of the most fulfilling things you can do as an ops leader is to connect with the cross-section of your RevOps team. Not just with your direct reports and not just doing C-level interviews just to, just to figure out how their well-being and health is, but really from a work perspective, connect with the cross-section of people. What that does is it keeps you engaged with what's going on on the ground because like I said, only 40% of your ops should be strategy. Other 60% is operational and tactical. You'll never learn those operational and tactical things if you don't, if you're not in touch with what's going on. So connect with some of the youngest people in your team who are doing some of that, more of that operational tactical work than strategic work. Connect with them more often. Do skip levels. Sit down with them. Hey, tell me, how are you doing this? Tell me, how does this tool work? You know, you probably will never be on the tool yourself as a leader, but then learn, learn what's going on. You know, I think that's, that's what will keep you on top of what's going on, you know, with the, with the robots world. Other is also not just DevOps work. Sit down and do interviews with account managers in the sales teams. They actually use a lot of the tools. Account managers actually know a lot about their accounts. They know a lot about internal processes and systems. So a lot of the times the DevOps things, the operation processes are used by the account managers.

Yes.

So in fact, a lot of account managers move on to ops if that's— I've seen a lot of people choose that path. So I would say do a bunch of skip levels, you know, in a very informative way, you know, connect with cross-sections of your company. In fact, one of the things that I found very rewarding to do was I would, I would on a round-robin basis pick a sub-team in my org and I would meet with that team, you know, over an hour together. It'll be like a 4 or 5 member team. And it'll just be me and it's more of educating myself type of a meeting where I'll say, okay, let's pick this topic, you know, can you guys talk to me about it, how you do it? So it's a really cool way to learn. It's a cool way to learn every single team. And I think on the other side, you also get to identify amazing talent in your organization. You know, I think we've been able to push a lot of people you know, in a, you know, fast, fast-track people because we've been able to, my leaders and I have been able to identify people during those meetings. So I think that, that's probably my one advice to people, for DevOps leaders to stay on top of the game is to don't just only meet with your company executives, just definitely go across the board and not just wellbeing skip-level meetings, but truly information gathering, educating yourself, being humbled every single time you go to those types of meetings. Do those, do more of those.

I love it. I think that's so, so important. It reminds me of one of the mottos that we have at Fulcast, which is ideas win, not titles. And I think that that is so true. And you really exemplify that. The true great leaders are the ones who see value in every person, no matter where they're situated. And I just am so grateful to be able to have a leader of your caliber helping us with something as important and foundational as RevOps and helping us to demystify it. So thank you, Balaji, so much for coming on today.

You're very generous and kind with your words, Dr. Amy Cook. I appreciate that. I really enjoyed this conversation as well. Like I said, it takes me back to my early RevOps grounding days. Um, so I really appreciate it. It's super fun having this conversation with you.

Thank you so much.

Thanks a lot. It's that business, business.

It's that business.