Jared Barol Mantra: "Move fast and don't break things."

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. I'm your host, Dr. Amy Cook, and I am so excited to introduce today Jared Barul, revenue operations leader with companies such as Salesforce and Reputation and others. Jared, how are you?

Doing great. Great to be here. Thank you for having me.

Thank you so much for joining us. I absolutely loved our discussion previously as we were preparing for this podcast. I love the way that you operate and It's encompassed in the phrase move fast and don't break things. I thought that was just like the best way to describe just a kick-butt operations leader. And I just wanted to learn more about how did you, how did you get your start?

You know, it's funny, I got my start by breaking things. You know, I started as an entrepreneur, started a couple different businesses in different spaces and trying to find ways to optimize existing expensive processes, everything from import to consulting, go-to-market, which then grew into a much larger business. But all along, you know, I found myself making mistakes and breaking things that shouldn't be broken. A couple of years ago, the idea of, you know, move fast but don't break things hit me. And sort of working with my colleagues, employees, mentors, and started developing actually, you know, a set of capabilities and practices around this. That's something I've been deploying in the last 6 years.

That's amazing. So with this mantra, move fast, don't break things, what, what does that encompass?

A, a company is an organism by definition. It's, it's not the product itself. It's not the people who work there. It's not the brand. It's not what's on the balance sheet. It's, it's all of that and a lot more. And when you look at business transformation, You should be looking at it from a perspective of what does the end state of the business need to look like? And that is what you protect. You protect that core part of the business. Things that are not part of that, you know, you can move through and shave away and carve and build the way you need it to be. But as long as you protect the core. Hmm.

I love that. I have never heard of an organization discussed that way before, and it's beautiful. You got to protect that core of the organism, and everything beyond that you can pivot, you can, you can, you know, shave off, you can transform, but that core has to be there in order for it to maintain its integrity.

Yeah, exactly. And you know, there's a, there's a writer, I have a few of his books up here on the right, a guy named Itzhak Adizes from the Adizes Institute, talks a lot about this. At different stages of corporate life cycles, there are different goals that your organization, your company needs to achieve. You know, what works for a company the size of Salesforce might not work for a hot AI startup like Writer or for Fulcast. Different maturity model that applies to these different companies at different stages.

I love that. So as you're talking through, you know, don't— like, move fast, don't break things. How does that look in an enterprise compared with a startup?

You know, it's a really good question. So let me break it actually, if it's okay, into 3 different buckets.

Yes, love it.

We have nascent organizations, you know, maybe it's a 0 to 1, 0 to 10, 1 to 10 range, probably more realistically. Then we have that, that midsize business. You've hit your go-to-market fit, you're applying the afterburners, you're starting to take off. Let's call it 50 to 150. Just, just for sake of argument, it could be 250 to 500 for some businesses. You get the idea, that middle range. And then we have your more mature, stable scale organizations who, let's call it a billion plus in revenue. And what move fast means for these 3 different companies is wildly different because I want you to think about a $10 million business and you close that, you close your first or probably second by that point multimillion dollar deal. That is a double digit percent change on your business and it necessitates care and feeding for that business, for your customers specifically. It means that you're going to change how you approach infrastructure, how you do product strategy, how you do go-to-market, marketing, Or you can take a very conscious decision to not make those changes. Someone I really have a lot of respect for, Jonathan Spear, wrote the other day about how it is so hard to avoid chasing those big customers, those unicorn customers when you're at that size. They can really significantly change your business and you can break things by doing it also. And so instead, what I encourage companies to think about is the difference between your enterprise, your enterprise pursuits, and then your commercial business. They're different animals and need different approaches as you think about them, especially at these early stages. Enterprise, you know, is frequently driven by 3 founder-led sales. Maybe you've brought on your first sales VP and a couple of AEs, and maybe you have a pre-sales engineering team. You want them focused on what the core of your ICP is and driving that core. You do not want them to spend all of their cycles chasing that next big elephant out there.

That makes so much sense because especially as a small business, when you're resource-strapped, you can't afford to wait 15 months while an enterprise cycle happens.

Absolutely not. Whereas if you go to that middle range of companies, you start thinking about what is necessary to grow from 50 to 75, 75 to 100. You do need to think about, well, in most SaaS businesses, you need to start thinking about enterprise. And maybe we're not talking about verticals and sub-verticals yet, but you are thinking about what do I need to do to attract big logos, whether it's to help with your next raise or simply to feel growth at this larger scale. Oh, you know, a $50,000 deal at $50 million, it still means something, still very impactful. but it does not have the same impact on your plans, on your, on your attainment if you're a sales leader as a $1 million or a $2 million deal. And so as you think about how do you position yourself to sort of make your ICP broader and open the aperture, you do want to think about what are ancillary use cases, what are other job performers that you can be serving, what are the jobs to be done that exist in these larger businesses and start thinking about if there's targeted development that you can do. And I use the word targeted very intentionally. At Salesforce, one of the functions that my team oversaw was our blueprints, industry blueprints. And what we looked at were capabilities, jobs to be done, job reports. And as we thought about how we were positioning our roadmap and how we thought about how we put together go-to-market strategy, that was the core. We talked about customer capabilities. So we were moving fast. Developing really targeted engineering and product and, well, engineering product advances and innovation, but they were targeted towards innovation in a very specific direction as opposed to really wide, which again could overstrain— now Salesforce obviously isn't, you know, a $50 million company, but it could strain the resources of engineering team, it could strain the resources of your sales, your marketing, your demand generation. At $50 million, demand generation dollars are so hard to come by. And they are limited resource. You see, you guys are nodding. So where do you target that? And if you think about an account-based marketing, account-based sales motion, that's more expensive per lead. There's no way, there's no way around it. Now, in the end, it's more valuable. Yes. But it's more expensive. And so if you are too broad at that point, you're going to spend a lot of money, have very little results, and you are going to break what, make it seem like your go-to-market motion is broken. And it may not be broken. It just might be being misused.

All right, well, so like you're saying, there's so much that depends on the size of the organization to be able to do that, um, to be able to like move fast and not break things in an enterprise versus a, you know, commercial strategy. And you've just articulated so well a lot of the different elements that go into a go-to-market strategy. What's an example of something that might be acceptable to move fast on in, let's say, an SMB, whereas in enterprise it, it would be like, it takes a lot more thought and planning.

The one thing that's coming to mind right off the top of my head, this might not be a great example, we'll see, is changing messaging, pivoting and messaging. You know, I'm thinking of a recent company that I spent some time with that realized in a very niche SMB space that their messaging was off. So within a vertical, industrialized vertical, that they thought their messaging was off and they wanted to change it. And they were able to do that in weeks, days, weeks. Product marketing got on the phone, marketing got on the phone, a lot of really smart people who know what they're doing and they were able to iterate. They talked to some customers really quickly and they were able to start iterating and get really good feedback from from sales teams, from the customer success managers, from the SEs, customers, and so on. Whereas if you were to take an action like that and start changing your image in an enterprise space, keep in mind that your sales cycles are, let's call it 9 to 18 months. Okay, if you're lucky, 6 months. Your customers are going to hear different things from you at different periods of time, and it causes confusion, especially if you're talking to different buyer personas as you go up the chain. One thing with enterprise is that you need to be better at multi-threading around an organization. So if I'm talking to your head of demand gen about a topic today and I position our business as solving their problems through one particular set of ways, and then I talk to you tomorrow and I have a different message I'm delivering to you that is fundamentally different, not spun, but fundamentally different, you're gonna go back to your head of demand gen and say, hey, like, I don't believe this, I don't buy it. And so as you get to larger and larger companies, there's more people you talk to and messaging has to be consistent. Targeted but consistent. Yeah, and that's a risk when doing this enterprise. It has to be a very intentional shift.

I really love the way that you're saying that. One of the, the things I think is very interesting in enterprise messaging is that you do have to say such a simple message a greater number of times to the same group of people in order for it to stick. And the larger the company gets the more simple that message has to be. And, and I find that to be fascinating in terms of not only to the market but also internally to people. One of the people, one of the companies that I think is able to pivot very, very quickly compared with the size of the business is AWS. And do you remember how— so we work with AWS, we're partners with them. And do you remember how at the beginning of the year, Andy Jassy went all in on GenAI, right? Right at the beginning, their entire strategy shifted towards GenAI and everything that that meant.

Sure.

And I was absolutely astounded at how quickly that entire organization pivoted just toward that messaging. And I thought that was a really interesting case in point. That message had to be so incredibly simple and they left it to each department to kind of determine what that meant. And they're still like trying to work out the bugs right now. But it is really true what you were talking about in terms of that messaging. Now, when you're talking about like the messaging being often a smaller business, I had a conversation just yesterday with our CEO about changing some terms and going in a different direction and changing stuff on the website. We did it in 24 hours. So it's exactly what you're saying in terms of like the size of the business being so different in terms of, you know, how not to break things.

Also, absolutely. And actually, to your point, you know, you were able to do it in 24 hours because, you know, I imagine that your testing cycles on the new messaging on the language, you probably did a couple of, did a bit of it before talking to the CEO. But the total time spent on that testing cycle didn't need to be a lot because the people who were doing the writing were the ones doing the testing or the ones doing the implementation. Whereas at a larger organization, there are so many other levers that can be played. And also, you know, think about the value and the risk. Innovator's dilemma is real, especially when it comes to messaging and ground.

Yeah, I love that. I love that. So with RevOps being touching so many of these different parts of the organization, you're very much connected to all the different departments. You're the one that like is making sure things don't break, right? As different as you get different push and pull. What's the best way to structure the organization as you, you know, so eloquently stated, it's an organism, right? Where should RevOps report? How should that come down in the chain of command so you have the best success?

It's an interesting question and I have a somewhat controversial opinion about it. And I don't know if this is true for every company, and it absolutely depends on what the circulatory system of that company looks like. But I think that a, you know, the natural homes are going to be one of the following. It's going to be, you know, CRO, CMO, CFO, I think you see that as well, and COO. And I am of the opinion that if you think of RevOps as posing to be this independent arbiter of metricized truth, It's an interesting way to think about where should that be so that it's not biased or otherwise single levered on one set of, one set of the data stack, one set of the financial stack. You know, if you think of the idea of a RevOps team as building that, you know, the holy grail of Data 360 or the Deal 360, what does the company look like? What do we spend on? And I'm paraphrasing from the go-to-market partners folks over there. But the goal should be to be an independent on analytics and operational and strategic front, which makes a solid argument for being in the COO world as well. Excuse me. And I initially heard that idea from Ryan, actually. I had not thought about that. And initially when he said that, I had this violent reaction. No, of course not. Has to be, you know, the revenue stack has to be the revenue stack. The word rev is part of the title.

Right.

It's really interesting when you start thinking about what the company of the future looks like today. You know, 15 years ago we didn't have chief customer officers, right? You know, the CRO title in the '90s, it was pretty rare, I would say. And so as companies are evolving, what's happening, it looks to me at least from my vantage point, is that the C-suite is very much moving away from general process procedure and development towards a revenue focus.

Yes.

Which makes sense, especially in a time like today, which is a time of efficiency and performance.

That's right. I really love how you've conceptualized that. And it's true, we don't have the luxury like we used to, to say, now the product team is doing their R&D over here and we can let it sit for 3 years and we'll see how it comes out. We always have to be focusing and innovating and iterating more and more quickly to be able to turn on that revenue. The way that I look at RevOps, like, I agree with you. I always thought, you know, oh, they should report to the CRO because it's revenue. And as you look at the— as you look at revenue operations, I see the draw toward having RevOps report to operations because of what you said exactly. It's unbiased. It looks holistically at all of the different angles of revenue. And really, RevOps has the potential, I think, to become the center of excellence for all of the, the revenue-focused functions in the organization. And I think that allows us to become, as, as RevOps leaders, it really allows you to become more and more strategic.

Now, would you use the word center of excellence or shared service? How do you think about those two topics?

Ooh, that's a very good question. No one's ever asked me a question on a podcast before. Tell me what you mean more about shared service versus center of excellence.

You know, and this is a, this is one where I'm making up this stuff as I go and trying to think of the language here. Cause I think it's a, it's different companies have different definitions. I ran a COE at Salesforce for a little bit and the way that we viewed ourselves was as it was a way to enable other teams to do the function, whatever the function was at that time.

Right.

Whereas shared services, you're doing the function for the other people. But if I think about RevOps, you know, modern-day RevOps has a number of different capabilities that fit into it. Everything from sales ops, it could be marketing ops, it could be the Salesforce development or go-to-market or tech stack for the whole go-to-market side of the business, could be, you know, a strategy arm as well. And the idea of centralizing that fully, it almost feels inefficient as such. And so the, you know, the phrase center of excellence is very interesting because then, you know, we can create the systems, process, tools for the different arms of the business to function and, you know, leverage a data set. It's the same data set. Imagine having the same data set for sales planning, for financial bookings, and for demand planning. That would be so exciting. You know, but having that same data set coming out of that COE makes sense. Whereas if it's a shared service, you start having a lot of resource conflict. And in a fast-moving business, business going through a transformation, through rapid growth, that resource conflict is a bottleneck by definition.

Yes.

That's the one thing you want to avoid. I think that would be the risk with RevOps being under, you know, under a third party that's not necessarily a quota-carrying or let's call it, you know, CMO carries a difference in the numbers depending on the business or CFO does. But having it separate from those numbers could change unless it is that, you know, COE as opposed to shared service. It could change the outcome.

That is so insightful. And that is kind of the tension between what we're talking about, right? If you look at RevOps as having a strategic arm, an operational arm, and a tactical arm, which I think we all do, right? It's a matter like the COE would lean in more heavily on strategy, right? If it sits under the COO, it's more heavily on the operations side. And so I think it depends for the organization where the needs are. And it may, back to your original point, depend on the size of the business.

And I have this really cool maturity model that I use when I'm working with clients. I stole something very politely and with permission from a guy named AJ Gandhi, who's an operating partner at Marlin Equity, the OPS framework, OPS, operations. The P is for productivity and the S is for strategy. And there's a maturity model that you can take and build out for the— I was talking about there's 3 different size businesses. What does O mean? What does P mean? What does S mean for each of these? And you go from the S being reporting the news to doing market analysis and strategic development and growth. The operations side goes from what is the data that we should care about to let's be a little bit forward-looking. And so there are these different models that you can start building. I love frameworks. I absolutely do.

I'm into it.

Yeah. I mean, you put an acronym on something, I'm going to— I'll buy it. Yeah. Well, there we go. That's how you know I'm from the East Coast. So, so we're— I lost track. What were we talking about? I love it.

No, I'm totally into frameworks too. And so I got my PhD in organizational communication. So everything that you are saying to me, like, I'm just absolutely eating up because you're like, oh, I've read this book over here and here's the framework. And I'm just like, I am talking to my people right now. This is really exciting. And so I didn't know about that framework that I would love to I would love to look at it, your maturity model that you use for clients. That's, that's, uh, so valuable, especially when you're talking even with people internally in your own organization. Like, where do you think we are? And it becomes a really great communication tool.

Yeah, there's nothing more insightful than asking a CEO, you know, where are you, where do you need to be, and what's blocking you? Yeah, ask those 3 questions, you figure out what their investors want, you figure out what the customers expect, you figure out what the cultural impact is inside of the company as well. And you have them, you know, I used to do scenario planning at Salesforce. So, you know, again, in that role, we sit down with a customer and go through drivers and uncertainties to their business. And one of my customers was a very large oil company, I'm not gonna name, but one of the larger ones. In business. And so running these types of activities with them around their business and asking questions similar to that, you get so much insight. And I actually would encourage my reps in my RevOps function to ask those same questions to their customers because it's really the question doesn't change businesses. I have another, okay, this is another non-traditional opinion, I think. I think businesses for the most part are not that different from one another. There are differences. Absolutely. And industry matters, especially going from regulated to non-regulated.

Absolutely.

But a business functions based on something being produced, something being taken to market, someone or company buying that thing, currencies exchanged in some way. And then that thing is serviced, whether it's a, you know, it's an iPhone or it's a piece of software. And the same is true for both. And so I like thinking about these capabilities and the capability frameworks because you can totally abstract yourself from the minutia of minutia, you know, what the product is, that little thing. But get into that, how do we solve the problems that we're trying to solve? And And so when I'm thinking of this in terms of, okay, I work, you know, just do consulting and advisory work. I talk to my clients, CEOs and board members of companies. I ask the same questions as I would ask, well, some very, very similar questions I would ask if I were in that company selling that product of the potential customer.

That's wonderful. Yeah, I agree with you and that your non-traditional opinion is one that I hold as well, especially when you're talking about companies in the same industry. I came from the post-acute care industry in healthcare. And they are all so incredibly similar to one another, you can almost just replace the names and the processes are exactly the same. And so when it comes to that kind of framework, when it comes to developing a business model beyond industry, like there's, there's so many similarities to that. And just to bring it full circle back to the business as an organization, the core of your business functions are the same exactly the way that you're talking about it. And so what that to me is so exciting about is that that's why frameworks work. That's why we have RevOps people that can go from one industry to another without missing a beat, right? And so I love, like truly love everything that you're saying. And it's clear that you're at the top of your RevOps game. That the maturity models that you have are able to take companies from the very small to the very large. And it's, it's really, really fun to talk with you about this. I'd love to take you to lunch actually and talk about frameworks for several more hours.

Yeah. I, I, you know where to find me.

I can't wait.

This is one of my favorite topics. I, I teach it every now and then on frame, on business frameworks, not, not too far down the road. Just—

Oh my gosh. I need to be part of your class. Well, so for the last question, and thank you so much for your time, it's so valuable. As at the top of your RevOps game, how do you stay there? Besides frameworks, is there anything else that you do that really keeps you at the top?

All right. So with the caveat that I, I don't think that there is a significant difference across business types, especially within the same industry. And I like that caveat a lot. What I focus on is staying on top of market trends. I do not focus on which vendor is top today versus tomorrow. The next G2 will come out tomorrow and something will change. Next Forrest Allred will come out and something will change. Fine. What I focus more on are how are capabilities changing in the workplace? There's been some really interesting work being done recently by a couple really large tech companies around AI, for example, impacting the leveraging agents to change the roles that exist in certain functions. An example of this could be proposal management. Proposal management teams used to be quite large and heavily staffed. And I, you know, with a recent company was able to take a vendor that leveraged an LLM to functionally replace that role set almost entirety, in entirety. So that's what I'm more interested in is where is that, where are capabilities in business changing based on innovation that we're seeing from other companies. I think that's more, much more interesting than which is the, you know, the top revenue intelligence, second top revenue intelligence, third top revenue intelligence. It's more of what does revenue intelligence mean this year and next, and where will there be consolidation?

That would help you stay at the forefront of your game and ride that wave of innovation.

Thank you. Yeah. One other thing that I highly recommend is I do. So I really think that people need to always be taking courses. I love learning and not on RevOps necessarily. It may be a course on financial modeling. It might be a course on something else. I just, you get, you hear things everywhere you go. And if you're good at pattern matching, you can start taking these ideas mixed with the innovation that's coming out of the market and market trends and start thinking of ways to disrupt yourself. That's how you can actually drive change is by disrupting the patterns that you build over the course of your current, of your career.

Awesome. And that's a perfect way to end this segment today. And thank you so much, Jared, for all of your time and your expertise. And hopefully you'll be able to come back and we can talk about some more things because I feel like we just scratched the surface. So thank you so much.

Hey, thank you very much for having me. It was a blast.

Yes, that's business.

Business. Yes, that's business.