Emme Thacher: Rethink Everything You Thought You Knew About RevOps

Welcome to Go to Market, a podcast for revenue operations, sales, and marketing leaders to dive deep into industry insights and best practices. Go to Market is sponsored by Fulcast and Silicon Slopes. My name is Amy Cook, and I am so excited to introduce Emmy Thatcher, Vice President of Revenue Operations at BEAM Benefits. How are you, Emmy?

I'm doing great. Very happy to be here, Amy.

So glad that you're here today. Thank you so much for joining us. We've been in the same circles for quite a while now, and it's been such a pleasure to get to know you a little bit, and I appreciate you coming on the show today.

Yes, you as well. Thanks.

Thank you. Well, so just to start off, to get people to know you a little bit, can you tell us your background and how you got involved in revenue operations?

Sure. I have been fortunate enough to be in RevOps for nearly my whole career. Got started with it at a large bank, was there for a couple years. Heavy need for optimization organization, but you're regulated, you're Moving very slowly through all that red tape and hierarchy and have gradually gotten my career into smaller companies, all the way down to seed funding, up to high levels of Series D to F. I've also dabbled in a lot of industries from finance to manufacturing, SaaS, healthcare and insurance, and B2B, B2C, B2B2C. So lots of different ways that RevOps can look. Currently I'm at a company called Beam Benefits. We do ancillary insurance for small businesses and have been there for about 6, 7 months. So standing up what revenue operations is and building up an awesome team around it, which is also what I've had the opportunity to do in several of my last roles.

Oh, that's amazing. I mean, clearly you have such broad— well, both broad and deep. Deep in the revenue operations and broad in the types of industries and sizes of companies. So my question for you is how similar is RevOps in different industries? Is it easily transferable or are there certain things that you have to figure out between industries?

I'd say it's a bit of both, especially earlier in my career. I thought there would be a lot more in common than there was, and then you start to see what you're looking out for. RevOps looks tremendously different in how they support sales in a transactional sale versus a strategic sale. Transactional, you get much heavier in data enrichment and cadencing tools, and you're working at scale. You need things to be happening for your reps. You need to be getting quick insights. Meanwhile, with more strategic conversations, those could be happening over several months. You're looking more at conversational intelligence. How are your reps positioning you? Do we have enough stakeholders involved? All things that would not even be components in a more short sale. Both are very core parts of RevOps, but behave a lot differently. So different tooling, different metrics, different sales personas that you are enabling. So I'd say there's many common threads and you're still looking at all the areas, but the answers do start to look a lot different.

That's very interesting. So let's take, for example, Beam Benefits now versus another company, maybe the one you started with. What bank did you start with?

Goldman Sachs. Goldman Sachs.

Okay. So what are some differences between the way that RevOps works at Goldman Sachs versus Beam Benefits?

Different worlds. Oh gosh.

Everything's different.

Everything? I guess each used a spreadsheet at some point is near the only commonality. But I mean, you look at Goldman Sachs. They, first of all, are highly regulated, so they build a lot of their own tooling. So, there's not this tech stack approach where you are using a CRM, then you have all these integrated tools. Pretty much everything there is built in-house, which means a couple things. It means it fits a very rigid use case. It means you can't make changes to that without dedicating a significant amount of your energy and career. And everything runs on a very, very tight ship. Just so for some sort of RevOps folks, I'd consider myself one of them, drove me absolutely nuts that you'd see an inefficiency and know that there was nothing you could really do about it. As you get into smaller companies, you're able to really make that impact where, you know, you could spend an afternoon revisiting, let's say, a handoff process from sales to CS, and just by you dedicating that day, You'll find 10 different things of, oh, well, we could have just had that email sent for you and that could be a template. And we already have that information in Salesforce. Let's just port that over to Zendesk. You can see all these things pop up all over the place and make immediate impact that still can scale and things like that. But just with levels of their maturity and really what's at risk, you can move at a different pace. It's still safe. We're still in a highly regulated industry today. Insurance is very, very regulated, so we have to be very careful but also fast, which is a cool dynamic to play in.

Well, I think that's really exciting, and I'm assuming that your title is also different now than when you were at Goldman Sachs in your first position, right? So I'm sure that you have more ownership and the ability to make change than you used to, regardless of the size of the company, most likely, right?

Very good point. When I started, I was definitely hired for my hours and a lot of them. And today I'm more hired for the expertise that I'm able to bring and how to spend them.

What advice would you give to people who start out at a Goldman Sachs and want to get— follow your career path and get to a place where you have ownership, you have decision-making power, and you can really affect an entire company. How did you get there and what skills did you have to be able to get you there? Sure.

I would say attention to details feels like a cliché, but to not get lost in the detail when you're working at such a kind of analyst role, sometimes you can get really stuck into the just what you were asked to do and stop questioning, well, why was I asked to do that? What are they going to do with it once I've done it? So being really curious for those questions, I think, will put you in the right conversations and the right rooms. Still doing all that work that frankly is just how you're going to get in the door, but realize kind of the opportunity that the, I guess you could maybe call it even grunt work of a RevOps analyst is a great amount of exposure. There's very few parts of a company that RevOps doesn't get to kind of look under the hood of and ask questions. And that's. Really cool. Not a lot of other folks can say that. So really seizing that opportunity and having that curiosity. We even talked at the last session that Fulcast put on, there was a lot of talk about AI, and one of the components was AI can replace a lot of things, and some of them aren't creativity and critical thinking. So being able to demonstrate those really early on will make you someone whose expertise becomes more valuable than their hours soon enough.

You know, when we did that session, that was the piece that really was a moment for me as well, was what used to be considered soft skills or less important now with AI are becoming the most important skills that you can develop. I mean, you all also have to have the analytic, you know, chops, but I think that's a really great point, Emmy, and I also love your focus on being willing to do the grunt work, but also seeing the vision of how it works for the good of the company and the overall company goals. Because when I was young and in my first job, I would like pride myself on being very efficient and doing a lot of grunt work quickly, but I didn't have the strategic ability at the time to be able to connect it to why am I doing this? What is, what is the benefit of doing it this way and being able to connect it to those goals? So once I figured out how to do that, that's when my job started progressing more because I could connect it to what higher-level managers and directors and VPs really wanted. So I love what you said there. Is there anything else that you would recommend people do wanting to follow your career path?

I, gosh, I think great career paths can look like a lot of different things. I just have my one area of exposure. I've had the privilege of working for really, really excellent leaders that made me feel very supported and very confident in what I'm doing. I've also had the other end of the spectrum where I've had leaders that I was stepping up and frankly doing a lot of things that maybe in my role I was not equipped to do or definitely not experienced to do. And I think it forced me into some of these metrics and decisions that at the time felt incredibly unfair. And in hindsight, I kind of look back and go, wow, I had the opportunity to do that with that kind of a title. That's wild. So, I mean, taking those opportunities and, and rolling with it, remembering that every leader has something to teach you, especially in RevOps, and finding It's less common now, but more common, especially at the start of my career, that the person you're reporting to has never heard of RevOps. They've never had a you. And so you do need to take ownership on what is your job? What are you great at? Are you just sales support? That is a very valid role, but is that you? Could you be something different? I've seen areas of my career where I've gotten the advice of just say yes to everything. And you'll see what things turn into. And I've seen a lot of positive come from that, but I think sometimes in RevOps, it's maybe not the role to follow that advice because it can turn into that sales support where, sure, maybe helping fill out that email list every week helps everybody run faster, but maybe then that's all you're going to be doing because there's enough email lists for that to be half your job.

That's so true. And maybe that's not the highest and best use of your time either. And maybe sales reps should do it themselves.

Or maybe you enable them. I mean, there's a lot of different answers and sometimes you just, you do the list. One area I've found in, and also in my career that I don't want to let go of, and a reason why I've stayed at companies that aren't small but aren't gigantic, is I have the ability to still be very on the ground. Many days a week I'm doing data loads, building a flow, making reports. All things that I could very easily hand off to somebody on my team, but they're busy too, and I want to be. And it helps me be so much more valuable in the conversations I'm in, where I can be meeting with an executive like you and we can talk about an entire problem, and I can come with a solution that I know can technically happen, rather than me talking in hypotheticals and let me get back to you on that timeline, or committing to something that my team's going to be saying, Why would you have signed us up for that? I have a really good understanding of what is and isn't possible with the tools we have, what kind of turnaround time is challenging but possible, what types of things are just odd limitations, but I feel confident telling folks that they are to protect my team's time. My advice would be to be in, if that interests you, to keep in roles where you have the ability to dabble in both because it'll make you better at I both sides too.

I really love that. I find the same thing. It makes me a better leader if I never remove myself from some detailed work because it helps me understand how much, how long things take. It helps me technical expertise is needed and it helps me communicate the value of what each one of our team members is doing with our leadership. So I couldn't agree more. I mean, clearly you are at the top of your game and it is so exciting to talk with you about that. What do you do to stay there?

Yeah, well, hopefully we're just getting started still. RevOps is a growing industry. So the thing I guess I'm doing to stay on top of my game is to continue networking. Fulcast, other organizations, RevOps Alliance, we've really taken hold as having these great networks where people are sharing what they've learned, they're sharing their experiences with vendors. They're sharing the teammates that they've had work for them that they would recommend. It's really challenging me to see how other people are progressing and using their positions. There's some parts of RevOps that are very defined, but especially with AI, that scope is getting bigger, and I love seeing where people are able to flex and be successful. More than many other roles, I think, is also encouraged to push the boundaries of what you can do with one person. A RevOps team of one, a lean mean machine, all these lovely ways that we like to coin it, they are pretty common, which really pushes the high producers into even more creative roles of how can I deliver my C-suite, my board, my sales team these types of robust results as just me. And people are so open with sharing it. So absorbing that on a frequent basis has been huge for me.

I love that. And I do agree that RevOps, more than any other position that I know of, is holistic.

Mm-hmm.

Your job is to pull together silos. Your job is to change the way that business is done. And I find that very fascinating and so impactful. And I think companies are experiencing the benefits of people like you and me and other RevOps leaders who are making that holistic change happen. So, um, Emmy, thank you so much for joining me today. It is so fun to be able to learn more about your experience and appreciate all of the advice that you're giving to people who are wanting to follow your trajectory.

Well, thank you. I'm happy to share it, and if anybody would ever like to connect, I'd love to talk. Wonderful.

Thank you so much.

Thanks, Amy.

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