Louis Poulin: Fixing the Revenue Flow By Transforming Silos into Streams

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 Cook, and I am so excited to introduce you to Louis Poland. Louis, how are you doing?

I'm doing great, Amy. Thanks so much for having me. Looking forward to the conversation today.

Oh, likewise. I have been so excited ever since I met you and we started talking. I mean, I have to admit, I've stalked you a little bit on LinkedIn. I find your background is so interesting, and you have really had some— a journey to where you are now. Can you just tell me, start off a little bit about your background?

Absolutely happy to. I think like lots of people in this space in revenue operations, I wish I could go back 20 years and tell you that I had a really well-crafted and plan in mind about what I was going to do and how it was going to lead me into the revenue operations space. That would be a complete lie and complete fabrication. I really got into it like a lot of people did. I have a background that that spans IT, that spans sales, and spans sales operations, for lack of a better word. I was very fortunate to have worked for a lot of large enterprise companies. Your efforts on LinkedIn probably uncovered that a little bit.

That's right.

Cisco for 13 years, both here in the United States and also in Asia Pacific based in Australia. I left Cisco. My last role there was as lead of the APAC sales operation strategy enablement organization, which was fantastic. Previous to that, here in the US, I had done IT work leading some development teams as we looked to build service solutions for internal users. And then also had a stint in APAC as well as a channel business development partner working with some of the key partners for Cisco in the region, which was fantastic. I had probably the best sales territory I've ever had in my life, which was Australia, New Zealand, Vietnam, and Thailand. So it was, it was extraordinary to work with all those vendors. After that, I came back to the United States. I joined a small startup at the time called Amazon Amazon Web Services. I was hired in as their first Director of Worldwide Sales Operations and Enablement, which was a fantastic ride, an amazing time to be there with AWS as cloud was just going through this crazy growth period. I think we had 70% year-over-year growth for a few of those years when I first joined. So just trying to keep pace with the business and actually trying not to get in the way of the business and let growth happen organically, which was, which was fantastic to see. After that, I moved over to Google, was in the Google Cloud division. I was a Director of Revenue Operations for and managed two global processes that were focused on lead management and opportunity management. So those connection points between sales and marketing and just looking to drive efficiencies through our tooling, our processes, and our, and our data. After that, joined PayPal. I was there for a couple of years as senior director of revenue operations, helping PayPal continue to grow and innovate and establish a very solid revenue operations function for their organization. And then about a year and a half ago, I joined Buildertrend. As VP of Revenue Operations. Very different organization, but, but also an organization that is hungry for growth, looking for efficiency and looking how to drive future revenue and scale as they continue to grow as well. So great company and a great opportunity. And that brought me here today into our discussion.

What an incredible, incredible ride. So there's a little bit of crossover. I loved hearing more about the AWS ride because I've been the CMO of an AWS partner and, um, have worked very closely with AWS for many years in how they're working with partners, how they are, um, hyperscaling organizations, and, and working with many, many RevOps people to, uh, understand AI, how it works with, um, you know, all of the fundamental infrastructure. So that's super interesting to me. Also, as a Google partner, I, in marketing, I have some, I have some, uh, need some advice from you as well. So thank you for that background, and what an amazing career you've had so far. So tell me a little bit, just out of curiosity, what got you so excited about Buildertrend?

Yeah, Buildertrend was just an interesting opportunity. As I was thinking about what I wanted to do next, there were some obvious large enterprise companies. I won't name them here, but companies that I was interested in and that would probably makes sense as a next step following those different companies. I decided I want to do something completely different. Buildertrend approached me with their desire to want to set up a centralized revenue operations function. At the time they were realizing, like lots of companies, there were silos of, of operations resources and just different agendas and priorities that spanned the marketing organization, the sales organization, and the customer success organization, in addition to data and in addition to the operations teams. There really wasn't a centralized view, a single go-to-market motion. There were lots of inefficiencies and lots of disconnects that was preventing efficiency, preventing automation, right? Getting a cohesive view of our customer and even internally, just a lack of agreement on where we had problems, where we had opportunities, and what collectively we could be doing across those different organizations to help to enable and fuel revenue growth in the future. So a lot of my role is really basically taking this function, building it up, bringing these teams together that weren't previously under a single, a single leader, and really defining a vision that would provide value to each of the stakeholder groups that were now a part of this centralized revenue operations function, and then grow and define a vision that made sense that would add value to the organization while not missing the strategic priorities that sales, marketing, and customer success had individually, along with defining our own goals as an operations team to be able to help contribute to the growth of the organization. So that really attracted me. I never had that opportunity to do that previously. I typically inherited teams that had already existed and either leaders were moving on or just taking on different roles and there was a gap. So I stepped in and took sales operations or different operations functions. So this is the first time I built it from scratch. So that was really exciting to me. The second piece of it that was really exciting to me was the investment that Bain Capital put in to build a trend as well. So we're one of the 24— don't quote me on the number— technology companies that in their portfolio. So it's been really interesting to also have access and exposure to the Bain folks and their thinking about how they look at valuation, how they look at opportunities to drive efficiency, to look differently at how you're thinking about your processes, your data, your tech stack, and what things make sense as you start to collaborate across their entire technology of, or their whole portco of companies. It's also been very interesting to collaborate with other operations, revenue operations, or business operations leaders at the other organizations to learn best practices, share best practices, and really talk about our journeys as we collectively look to grow each of these individual organizations. So that was really cool to me as well.

Oh, what an amazing opportunity to be able to really in many ways do this from scratch, from the ground up, right? Pull them together in ways they've never been pulled together before. I just find that just fascinating and such an incredible opportunity. And then knowing that you're doing it right from the ground up. When you are building this up, how do you include a lot of the things like forecasting and AI and revenue intelligence? What is your mindset around the future as you build this?

Yeah, I think the future right now, it's really interesting, the whole evolution of revenue operations as a function. I mean, let's be honest, the function itself really only existed for the last 10, 12 years. Even then in the early days, I mean, I remember being a revenue operations professional about 10 years ago. I had no idea what the hell I was doing, right? It was, I think the first time it was described to me by one of my former managers is like, well, your job is basically, and your team's job is basically be the plumbers of the revenue process and flows. You look for leaks, you plug them, and you do that through technology, process, and data. I'm like, okay, that's a good easy way to—

I've never heard that before.

Yeah, I've heard different variations at that, but that was the one that really stuck with me. And that, that was kind of my mantra, I guess, for a few years. Then after that, you start to realize, look, I am stuck in a very reactive role. Like, I don't, I don't want this to be this reactive function. And I think like lots of revenue leaders, once you're put in the middle of the entire go-to-market motion and you have that span of control and that purview across marketing, sales, and customer success, you see a lot of the inefficiencies even in the handoffs between those teams. Let alone just the entire end-to-end motion. So I think a lot of what, of what I did as this function continued to mature was how do I define value out of what's there? Having that purview and having that perspective and being able to be objective around what's working and not working without sabotaging a particular team and taking them off of their strategic goals and objectives. It's really partnering with them efficiently to get what they want to get done but then also bring your own priorities to bear. So as I think about the future and where we're going, there's so many opportunities. We've gone about 10 minutes without talking about AI, and it's 2024, so I think that's actually not allowed in any podcast or public function. We're talking about technology, but, but clearly, no, no joking there. AI obviously is very transformational for where we are today. I don't know if no one needs to hear that from me. But as I think about applying that into the revenue, the revenue operations space, I think about things like automated, automated process enablement. So rather than having people and humans manage processes that need to be automated, either having software step in and workflow step in to actually automate that either with human intervention or even proactively identifying areas for opportunity and even building and putting forward processes and building links between disconnected processes to have it be one continuous flow. That is a huge piece that flat out just didn't exist even 3 years ago. And I'm seeing more of that, more and more of that functionality being built into so many of these core platforms that run revenue operations.

Yeah, I think that's very interesting that you say that because, um, uh, our co-founder Bala Balabaskaran was working at Salesforce. He was in the middle of doing 1,500 spreadsheets with a team of 100, um, for 6 months in the sales planning cycle, and he was like, there has got to be a better way than this. So he built Fulcast, but he built it with AI baked in as well. And so that's pretty exciting for me that he was that forward thinking about it. But it's doing exactly what you articulated where it will do AI modeling on the top and then what will also do all of the automations based on Salesforce policies. And so when you go in and you set those policies, it will just automatically run in the background and do everything you want it to, which is super cool, right?

That's amazing. And again, we're talking about what was science fiction 2 years ago, now the reality of what we're dealing with. That is very exciting. Yeah.

But that's That's one example of what you're saying. Like, all over the place are these great new AI tools that are emerging.

Personalization is another thing that I'm really interested in as well. As we think about trying to crack through the noise of, of customers and potential customers getting bombarded with so many different companies with messaging. I mean, I know I do something. I'm sure you do. I'm sure most viewers do as well. Just actually being able to crack through with innovative content that's engaging to actually pay attention to what that offering is. I think AI and customized content or variation, that's gonna really drive an impact. It's not sending an email, it's not going, oops, it's not going out and, and trying to get creative and crafty to get that reaction from the customer to hook them, to actually have them be a live lead. So I think that's a really exciting area. The last area I'll comment as we think about AI as well is the idea of AI augmented decision making. So not necessarily autonomous AI decision-making when it comes to revenue and revenue decision-making, not yet. But I think having a Copilot-type solution or embedded AI functionality that helps me as a revenue operations leader look at my pipeline, look at my territories, look at my quota attainment, and ideally have that AI assistant proactively give me insights and analytics that I might be aware of, or ideally find those blind spots that I'm not paying attention to that represent opportunities for revenue growth with a particular customer base. That's what I'm really, really excited about as I think about the future and as I think about adoption and widespread adoption of a revenue intelligence platform.

Oh, I love that. All three of those things are so relevant and so timely that— and we need to stay on top of it and try to be forward-thinking and strategic in how we implement it. So thank you for bringing those up. Well, I know I have taken so much of your time already, but I still need to ask you, clearly you have an incredible pedigree. You're at the top of your game. What do you do to stay there? It could be anything from cold plunges to great drinks to something that you've been really learning a lot about lately.

Alcohol definitely plays a big role now.

No, I'm going to take a break.

Yeah, exactly. No, I think it's a combination of things. I think it's trying to stay up in the industry through conferences, through engagement with networking with other revenue operations and BizOps and CRO and COO level resources just to really keep a a good pulse on what's working and what's not working. The pace of innovation, it's staggering right now, and trying to keep ahead of it, it is, it's so much harder than it was 3, 4, 5 years ago. Just the volume of information, especially in this space. So I think it's a lot of reading, it's a lot of proactive engagements, going to conferences, watching and listening to podcasts, networking where you can, either regionally or nationally when there's various events that are going on. That's probably a way that I do it, and lots of, lots of reading too. I mean, I I try to read as much as I can. Sometimes it's very, very relevant to the revenue operations world. Other times it's kind of tangential, but still interesting. I just reread a book that I absolutely love, Creativity, Inc., about the whole Pixar story and how they drive innovation and creativity out of their organization. It's a fascinating read for any business professional, but certainly in the operations space, how do you create a functional, creative, highly performing team and how do you leverage some of the ideas that Pixar has has adopted internally to run their culture. And also, you get to learn some more background behind the scenes of how some of these key Pixar films came to be. So I think that's really interesting. And I think trying to stay on top of that by watching and listening and getting recommendations on good quality books that are out there to kind of keep you ahead of the game and ahead of what's happening in the industry, I think, is critical.

Oh, I love that. And I have wanted to read Creativity, Inc. in the past, and I have never done it. So now this is my cue that I I need to go buy that book. So, Louis, thank you so much for your time. It— I know it is precious, and I really appreciate you being willing to spend a few moments with us and, and give us a real, um, you know, a very insider's view on what you're currently dealing with right now and where you see the future going.

Thanks so much, Amy. I really appreciate the time.

Likewise. Thank you so much.

Well, thank you.

Business.

Yes, that's business.

Business. Yes, that's business.