Cody Guymon: RevOps on the Rise: Shaping the Future from the Executive Team

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 Cook, and I am so excited to introduce my guest today, Cody Gaiman, COO of Go-to-Market Operations at Workato. Cody, thank you so much for coming on the show. I really appreciate it.

Thanks for having me, Amy.

Yeah, it's so fun to be able to talk with you, and I've had a chance to get to know you a little bit and learn about, like, a little more about your background. But for our audience, can you tell me a little bit about your journey and how you got started?

Yeah, sounds great. I fumbled my way into tech. I started in healthcare consulting early on in my career and did that for a few years.

Very cool.

Landed at a tech company called Vivint here in Utah, and then made my way to Qualtrics where I was there for 6 years through a couple different exits and acquisition by SAP and going public. And then more recently been at Workato for 2 years here.

Oh wow, that's— what an amazing career. Where did you— what did you start off doing in healthcare consulting?

I thought I wanted to be a CEO of a hospital. Hospital administration. Yeah, I like helping people but didn't quite like going to school for 13 years to be a doctor, so I figured maybe in between there would be good. Got into it, but, uh, healthcare is a little slow moving and I like fast-paced. I like a lot of change and chaos. So tech seemed like a good spot to go to. It also seemed like it was the most fun. I remember at the time Vivint was giving away free lunches in the cafeteria that I thought was great. And it's just a lot of fun activities, some good swag. So I thought that was a great spot to be. That was my mindset when I was, you know, 25, 27.

Oh yeah. I mean, that's totally appealing. I agree with that. I ask because I started off in healthcare as well and worked at a bunch of healthcare companies in marketing. Had the opportunity to work with Ryan Westwood over at Simplest and then kind of never looked back in tech. So I love the industry, but I think maybe healthcare might be ready for your fast-paced disruption. Maybe now. Well, Cody, thanks again for having this chat with me. What I have one question in particular that really has been kind of on my mind a lot because as we are going to market with Fulcast, our go-to-market cloud, we think a lot about, you know, how do we elevate our primary user, which is Hugh, which is our head of RevOps. And we think, how can we be strategic? How can we help everything run better? And I have a very strong opinion that elevating the The RevOps leader to have a strategic seat at the table is a very, very important thing for businesses to do. So I'd like to get your thoughts on that if you agree with that, and also talk about who should RevOps report to as kind of part of that discussion.

Yeah, great question. I love this one. I think that the RevOps leader needs to be on the executive team. I would say that, you know, I have a fun title of COO of Go-to-Market Operations, but it could be head of RevOps, SVP of RevOps, whatever it is, I think they need to have a seat at the table on the executive team. I prefer that I, I report directly to the CEO, and I think that it's important, um, for a lot of strategic reason— reasons. And I enjoy it. I think it's a, a fantastic place to, to sit. I'm in the board meetings. I enjoy that. There's a lot of strategy decisions that get made. And you wanna make sure that, uh, your head of RevOps is at the table to bring data into the conversation a lot of the times, or or have a perspective that might be outside of the sales leader perspective and create some of that healthy tension that usually exists with sales and ops and things of that nature so you can come out to the right conclusion. So personally, I enjoy reporting to the CEO. I think that'd be ideal. At Qualtrics, I reported for most of my tenure at Qualtrics to the president, Chris Beckstead. So I think, you know, a president also works, but just making sure you have a seat at the table You know, reporting lines and structures are different at all different sizes and scales of companies. But as long as there's a seat at the table, that they are considered a part of the executive team, have a voice in board meetings, I think that's really the core principles there.

I love that. So I think it's interesting and important that you have always reported to someone who is in charge of the revenue. Right? Yeah, ultimately, it only makes sense. But what do you— what would a counterpart of yours that is reporting to either COO or CFO miss out on if they don't— if they're not holding a revenue number themselves?

Yeah, I think, you know, you miss out on the holistic view of the business. You know, I think you tend to get siloed if you're in certain departments, and, and maybe that makes sense early on in a, in a company's life cycle. And sometimes it, it makes sense really later stage, right? We, Qualtrics got bought by SAP, so we were part of SAP and, and, and that's a, you know, a different reporting structure there. But I think the, the, the fear there is that you could, you could miss out and be siloed. And, you know, maybe if you're in finance, just have a finance, financial lens on everything, right? Maybe you over index on costs. Whereas if you, you know, sit and report maybe to a head of sales, you could over-index just on the short-term, hitting the quota today or tomorrow and not be thinking as long-term. Those things can happen. You could report into a CRO. Just know that that might be some of that healthy tension that you need to work through is thinking long-term. Be the counterpart to the CRO to make sure you're thinking you know, multiple quarters out, if not multiple years out, so that you can balance the short-term, hit the quota today mentality that can sometimes happen in sales. So I think it all depends. You can report in other areas as long as you understand what silo or what mindset might exist in that functional unit, and you can bring kind of a counterbalance to that unit. But preferably, I think being a part of the exec team and reporting to the CEO is the spot that I prefer to be.

Yeah, I think that makes a lot of sense. And it also is really important leaning into the strategy, given that AI is able to automate a lot of the manual tasks that RevOps, specifically SalesOps before it turned into RevOps, has been responsible for, right?

Yeah, absolutely. I think, you know, it's going to be increasingly more and more important for RevOps leaders, for COOs to be more strategic, right? The mundane creating territories and capacity planning and things that Fulcast solving for right now, those, those used to be so hard to do manually that you just have your sales ops leader in the back office corner just cranking away in Excel and trying to create territories. But now with the blocking and tackling, you know, the mundane that can get automated or simplified, right? Something that took months is, you know, can take a few days now. It's increasingly important for a RevOps leader, a COO, to be strategic, to really have a vision for sales strategy, for where the puck's going and to skate there rather than where it is today. You know, the dynamic market changes, it's changing every year. So, you know, we've talked about a bull run in the past that was there. Now it's a little bit more on efficiency. And so got to make sure you can be adaptable. And that's a lot of strategy.

That's very interesting. You mentioned something that I think is really important is that you have to know where the puck's going, right? And I think that is strategy in its very basic form is a theory, right? We're making big money bets on theories and that is strategy, right? Yeah. How do you prepare yourself when you're working with the CEO, the president, or for other people who report to the CRO or the CFO or the COO? What are some things that you need to do to work well with each individual person? And I know that you haven't worked, you haven't reported to the CFO, but knowing what you know, like, What do you have to watch out for and how do you maybe counteract over-indexing on cost or over-indexing on sales?

Yeah, I think it starts with having the long-term vision of the company so that, you know, you're not going to optimize for short-term decisions. The second thing I would say is whoever you're working with, bring data to the table. Right. I think that's going to be the key. In RevOps, we have this special purview, you know, in, in my org, it's, it's not just SalesOps, but it's, you know, CSOps and MarketingOps and PartnerOps and Data and Analytics and Enablement. There's a wide purview that you get to see at a global scale.

Yeah.

And so I think bringing data that's multiple quarters out is going to be helpful, right? In strategy decisions, usually for me, that's next year's decision. It's really hard to get into like 3 and 5 year strategy combos with tech because of how much changes.

So true.

But you can always be a year out in revops, right? You can look at pipeline that's existing, you know, sitting out there 3 and 4 quarters. You can see up funnel what's coming in that might be different. I remember at Qualtrics we saw a lot of healthcare that was coming in. We were getting a lot of inbounds from healthcare, and then a couple reps had gravitated towards healthcare. And I love to partner super closely with sales and listen to sales reps. And you're just seeing like, wow, these reps that are working the healthcare deals are super successful. Maybe we start a vertical here, right? And then we, we formed a strategy and there's a leader there that took that from zero to, you know, hundreds of millions of dollars of revenue. And, uh, you know, but I think it all starts with data, right? It starts with data. It starts with listening to sales, seeing what's happening top of funnel in marketing. But ultimately, it's really about bringing that data in a clearly presented way to other stakeholders to try and do best to convince them that that's where the puck's going. And if not, you know, have some healthy debate and land on a strategy that will work.

I love what you're saying. And I've always thought of the RevOps leader as really like the center of the center of excellence, right? The middle of that. And being able to pull in all those stakeholders, maybe it's the hub of the wheel analogy, you know, but Either way, like, being able to understand all those different data points is something that only a very strategic leader is able to do. And I think it's so important for companies to understand that about their leaders. And it's just been my experience that the RevOps leader is usually the smartest person in the room, but they're not always given the voice.

I don't know about that. I don't know about that. I've talked to a lot of smart, smart RevOps leaders, though, that are out there and Yeah, I think it's important to be intelligent. And I think what's nice about— you talked about the wheel analogy and the hub and spoke. You know, a really good RevOps leader is unbiased because, you know, there's no dog in the fight here. If marketing is doing great, we need to invest more there. Awesome. And you know, if, if sales outbound is doing great, we wanna double down there, or SDRs or wherever the investment decisions are coming, RevOps leaders get to be this central, unbiased, very data-driven leader that can come in with a clear perspective that, that doesn't have any self-interest in there to manipulate data or make it look good. You can always take data and make it look however you want, right? But so if you can have standardized data dictionaries and reporting and really unbiased ways of tracking, a great attribution model, good healthy rules of engagement, like if you can be that central hub like you talked about, then generally you can be a trusted advisor to the CEO or president because there's not an angle that you're coming at it with.

I really like—

You've got a long-term vision of the company.

Yeah, that trusted advisor role I think is essential when it's like you're the chief of revenue almost, like not the chief revenue officer, but you're just like the, you're almost the chief of staff to the CEO when it comes to anything.

You're starting to see this role emerge in tech right now called president of go-to-market. That generally has a lot of folks coming in from the RevOps or COO route into that role that has a CRO report into the president of go-to-market, that has a CMO sometimes, it has enablement, it has ops, things like that that report into this role. It's starting to emerge that I've seen quite a bit lately, and I think it is because of that unbiased approach we talked about and that perspective of kind of seeing the whole business on the revenue side.

So would you say that the CRO is usually then the head of sales? Yeah, right. So this president of go-to-market is different because you would have the CRO reporting into the president. Interesting. Very cool. Um, so what do you have to do? My other, my other question for you is more of like a, uh, a character thing, which is what do you have to do to stay independent I have a tendency to be very empathetic with every single person I talk to, right? I'm like, oh yes, of course we want to boost your pipeline in this area. Yes, of course we want to cut costs. Yes, of course we want— how do you stay that?

I have that same issue or same— I don't know. It's a good thing in a lot of ways. I don't want to say a weakness, but I am very empathetic with a lot of people. I think what's key is that if, if this head of RevOps is part of an executive team, they're gonna have a decently large size of equity with the company. Equity is gonna be key. And if, if they have equity in the company, then it's company first all the time. And it's, it's, it's gonna be that way because you want to build a great company and you want this thing to be massive and maybe one day have a wonderful exit and do some great things and fun things for your family. But ultimately, I think that ownership mentality and maybe equity is just a fun word for ownership mentality of being an owner of the company. You're going to make the right decisions. You can be empathetic, you can listen to everybody for sure. You can, you can push back and test some of it and be empathetic. But ultimately, if you're an owner of a company, you're going to make the best decision for the company. And I think that that's going to be key. If you don't have a lot of ownership, if you don't have a seat at the table, it's going to be a little bit harder.

And I totally see that because then you're not thinking in terms of— well, I'm, I'm sure many people do still think in terms of what's best for the organization, but if you really truly do have that ownership mentality and, and some ownership, then you're going to be thinking in that direction. That makes a lot of sense. That makes— okay, one thing we have not yet talked about, which is reporting into the COO. We've talked about the CFO, the CRO, the CEO. What do you think about reporting into the COO?

I think that's a great fit as well. So yeah, I think that that can definitely happen. I think the key is really having that seat at the table. Right now I'm the COO of go-to-market operations at Workato. We don't have another COO. So I feel like I have a seat at the table still. It all just depends on the reporting structure. And like, like I said, every company is different. You can report to a CFO, a COO, a president, a CEO, founder, whatever. As a CRO, even as long as there's a healthy respect that there's a voice at the table, things like that, I think that's what matters most.

I love that. So the baseline across the board, what we have to have: number one, a seat at the table. Number two, um, an ownership mindset, whether it's real equity or It's just an unbiased opinion. And the third, I would say, no dog in the fight. Would you agree with that?

Yeah, I would agree with that.

Yeah. Okay. Anything else that you would recommend to people who are looking to level up their career to have that strategic seat at the table that maybe are tactical and operational but not yet as strategic as they want to be?

Yeah, don't be afraid to ask for a seat at the table. I think sometimes, you know, as ops leaders, we tend to be okay with just being in the closet, just working away on our laptops and cranking away on models. But I think it's okay to ask, you know, and I think a seat at the table, right, is, you know, I want to be specific there. It's sitting in board meetings if you're a private company, you know, and it's at a publicly traded company, it's being in the room where it happens, the Hamilton musical. But you've gotta be in there and it's okay to ask. I think that's okay. I think a lot of times RevOps leaders will prepare the deck for the board meeting and, and know more about every slide on that deck and every number, but then pass it off to somebody else to represent it in the board meeting.

Yeah, I've been in, I've been in too many board meetings where someone's presenting this slide and someone asks a question and they're like, oh yeah, we gotta get Brian. To let us be it. Like, Brian should just be there.

Yeah, Brian should just be there. Whoever RevOps leader is should just be there. So I think, yeah, asking for that. And I've seen that that works. But yeah, I think a lot of times we like to put glass ceilings on ourselves and limit, you know, where we want to sit or be in the room. And I think you just got to bust through that barrier mentally and then ask and be there. And if you feel like you're being silenced or you don't have a voice or a seat at the table, then it's probably not the right company to be at because you want to be at a company that's going to make informed data decisions and has a seat at the table for a RevOps leader, a COO, and it might be time to look elsewhere. So I think that it just, it's, it's about removing that maybe artificial ceiling that sometimes we put on ourselves and making sure that your voice is heard.

I love that. Thank you so much for this amazing advice for me, for all of the RevOps community, and, you know, for the executive teams to start looking for the how to move their very, very valuable unsung heroes into that strategic seat.

No problem, Amy. Thanks so much for having us.

Thanks, Cody.