Mason McMullin: Broken RevOps Playbook? Here's How to Fix It

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 Amy Cook, and I'm so excited to introduce Mason McMullen, revenue operations leader for EMEA sales at Alteryx. Mason, how are you doing?

Hey, Amy, I'm doing extremely well. Very excited to be here talking to you, actually.

So I am so excited to talk with you. We just had a quick— for all of our listeners, we had a quick chat beforehand, and Mason knows several of the people on our team. And Mason, you have made fast friends with everyone. So it's really fun to be able to get to know you a little bit better.

You all make it so easy to be, to be friends with. So kudos to your team there at Fullcast for putting an amazing group of individuals together. Very— thank you.

It's really a lot of fun, you know, and RevOps, we have a lot of fun, right, Mason?

We do. Yeah. Nothing but fun. Absolutely.

That's right. So, you know, actually one thing that is very interesting to me is as I have done these podcasts, I have seen so many times when I ask people's backgrounds, they start off in something else and eventually find themselves in their true passion in RevOps. So did you always know that you wanted to be in RevOps, or was that a progression for you as well?

Yeah, I would say absolutely not. I never started my career thinking that I would end up in revenue operations. In fact, you know, so one of my leaders said, you know, I don't think anybody ends up in RevOps or thinks they're going to end up in RevOps when they start their career. It's kind of just a play, a destination more than it is kind of an origin for most, for most folks, which is the same for me. Yeah, I, I definitely had no idea I'd be a RevOps person or, or be so passionate about it even.

Interesting. How did you start out? What's your background?

Yeah, so I, I went to school here in, in the valley. I went to Utah Valley University and I did a very non-technical major. I, I'd say business management with an international emphasis, like I think a lot of, a lot of folks coming back from LDS missions probably do. And, uh, and then Kind of from there pivoted directly into a technical role coming out of school, which was actually kind of a really lucky situation that I found myself in. I was able to get a job doing data warehouse architecture and business intelligence. And I had some really incredible mentors right there kind of out of the gate that helped me kind of develop as a technical person and as a leader. And I had some amazing mentors. So very, very kind of quick out of the gate start into a technical role, which was unexpected for me.

Hmm, that's interesting. So as you're, you're in this technical role, you're really enjoying it. It sounds like you've got great learning experiences. So how did you transition from that technical role into RevOps?

It, it was kind of a natural progression for me. I, I started out in business intelligence and then I went directly into technical consulting, uh, and that was my first foray into this, the SaaS industry, and was my first exposure to kind of a fully fully fleshed out SaaS organization where you have post-sales consulting and you have customer success and you have a large sales organization that is bringing things to you to do as a technical implementation consultant. So really was able to get exposure to a lot of different brands, logos, and different departments that I was very unfamiliar with in my original kind of role, you know, starting in consumer packaged goods and retail and going into SaaS, dramatically different.

Totally.

Things to work in for sure. So for me, getting that kind of SaaS experience and consulting experience as well with, with some large logos and some incredible companies really kind of set the stage to be able to pivot into a go-to-market role with, with kind of very little ramp and onboarding. I would say it was kind of a natural progression from the technical side into the consulting side and then into operations for sure.

And one of the things I love about the RevOps role is that it's technical and strategic at the same time, and I find that those people who really excel in a RevOps role have kind of that dual brain where you've got the, you know, the ability to be flexible, solve problems and be strategic. And then also like on the execution side and the technical capabilities to get it done. And that's one of the reasons I think I'm so enamored with this industry and the people who are in it, because really you guys are trailblazers forging this path and developing this industry more solidly, whereas it's still kind of fuzzy.

Yeah, that's, that's a very, very good point. It really is kind of a new, a new area of investment for a lot of companies when it comes to operations. You know, we've often thought of in the SaaS industry of sales operations and marketing operations and to an extent, you know, CS and sales engineering potentially have operations teams. So it's been very kind of disparate. So bringing those teams together really gives the opportunity to combine some of those skill sets. And for me, I feel really lucky having started as a technical person because so much of what we do in RevOps is kind of borderline technical where you're doing some system architecture, you might be doing some data analytics, you might be doing some data architecture potentially and maybe even some data warehouse work. So being able to leverage that initial skill set was very helpful. But I think that's one of the basic things about RevOps is there's so many skill sets that can be applicable to everything that we do day to day. You know, there's not one singular skill set that is going to be better than any others, I think, honestly.

That's super interesting to hear that. So, you know, obviously, like you mentioned just now, you know, there was marketing ops and there was sales ops and CS ops, and, and now we're pulling, trying to pull all of this together in one team and, and say we're RevOps now. So, so clearly not, there's like, I mean, it seems like there are some people who are better than others at different things, right? You've got your people who are specialized in one area, different skill sets, right? So how do you develop a really high-functioning team when you have such a disparate set of skills?

Yeah, that's a great question. And, and I've kind of been through this process a couple times in my career as an operations person, even though operations is still fresh within the last 5 years for me. I've been through a couple RevOps consolidations, and I, I think it's really important for revenue operations leaders to be really conscious about bringing these teams together and, and, and kind of staying away from the assumption that everything's just going to kind of function correctly without too much, too much touch, you know, like everyone's competent, everyone's skilled. We bring these teams together, they're going to function together just fine. But I think that's, that's an assumption that can be dangerous because you really want to develop, you know, core synergies with the teams that you bring together. And bringing teams together without some really cohesive strategy around how they're going to work together just leaves the same silos in place that maybe existed before you brought the teams together. So I think it's really, really important to bridge the gap and have a really cohesive strategy to bring the team together and have everyone work together well.

Okay, so you're totally preaching to the choir. I find that same thing, right? Like, even within teams, people want to kind of stick with what they're familiar with, right? On my marketing team, I have the same problem in a different way, right? Where I've got my content people and my web people, and they all have very different skill sets. And it's a challenge to be able to get everyone to work together. Seamlessly. So what kind of strategies do you use in order to try to get people to do that?

I mean, I think it's really kind of understanding the personas that you want in each role, uh, and understanding the, the strengths of the people that you have on your team. And that's really kind of what it goes back to when we're talking about skill sets, where you, you have to have people that, that can do many different things. And I think one of the things that RevOps leaders kind of over-rotate on when they're combining a team together and they're doing this RevOps consolidation is over-rotating on the strategy piece and leaving aside maybe some of the more tactical and execution-focused areas of the business. I mean, really, when you're thinking about RevOps, you're thinking about, I mean, top of mind for me as a kind of a RevOps person that's directly embedded within this sales organization is how can I make the lives of my sales leaders easier? And all the decisions that a RevOps leader has to make should be focused around that, around that, you know, how do I make the lives of my sellers easier? Because I want them to spend I mean, this might seem obvious, but we want our sellers to spend the most time selling. We don't want them to spend time doing things that are clerical or maybe taking them away from selling. So I would say obviously staying focused on the big picture, the strategy of let's make our sellers' lives easier, let's make go-to-market easier, let's sell better, and then getting the right people in those roles to fulfill that. And that means you know, having strategy, having tactical execution, having support personas, and, and then like understanding exactly how maybe some of the people that are in those roles now could function better in a, and potentially in a different role or on a different team even, and understanding what people actually want to do in their careers because RevOps has so many opportunities to grow and learn new things. So leveraging just the, the, the people more than anything to make, to make things move forward.

I really love what you said there. I think the last, the last statistic that I saw said that 4 or 5 hours a day are being spent doing admin tasks by salespeople. Is that true?

That wouldn't, that wouldn't surprise me.

Not at your company, obviously, because you've got—

not us. We have all of our ducks in a row. All our sellers have everything they need all the time, and we're, we're perfect.

That's right. That's right. But that does resonate very much with me because, you know, I understand having been a seller myself in the past, it can get very overwhelming if you don't have that enablement in place and you don't have the operations to be able to do it. And kind of nothing's more frustrating than being told to use a system that you can't get to work very well for you. So, yeah, I totally, totally feel that. So I want to lean a little bit more in on the people. So it sounds to me like you find it very important to get to know kind of the hopes and dreams and desires and personalities of your people themselves. Is that right?

Yeah. Yeah, most definitely. And I think it's important from a kind of a career progression perspective and also just getting a highly functioning team that's performing. What I've found kind of going through the RevOps consolidation process a couple of times is that there are, there are people that are maybe, maybe underutilizing some of their skills. You know, we have technical people embedded in non-technical roles, or we have really strategic thinking individuals who are stuck in a support role or doing the day-to-day when they should be kind of directing more of a GTM strategy. So I really think it's important for leaders to stay engaged with their teams. And as teams get bigger, it's a lot more difficult to do that. But I think it's really paramount that, that RevOps leaders take the time to spend with everyone, including the people that are doing the tactical, the support personas, the data analysts, the business operations analysts and process analysts, people that are really close to the business that can have really valuable insight into how you can make things, make things better. I think it's really important to leverage everyone's input. Now, you can't make every decision by committee. I mean, we all know that. Eventually a decision has to be made. But kind of understanding those people that are closest to the business, I think, is really important.

I really love that. So as you're consolidating your RevOps functions, understanding, you know, the right people for the right job and not over-indexing on strategy, I heard you say, but getting to know the operations and tactical people as well to get the full picture.

Yeah. I think that's, that's completely accurate. I would say there's a lot of valuable skill sets that exist in revenue operations. And I might be a little biased because I came from a technical background and, and, and had a business foundation with a technical background and a consulting background. So I kind of feel lucky that I was able to play all those different parts at times in my career. But I know that not everyone has had a chance to play all those parts and some people might have skill sets need to be developed, but are totally willing to and, and, and want to be be those people that are maybe a little more visible. And maybe there's some people that are more visible that love to sit in and do the data analytics work. So it's really just kind of an ongoing exercise to make sure that your team is functioning properly. And like I mentioned before, it's about engagement. An engaged leader will always trump a non-engaged leader because being visible, being kind of a servant leader and understanding your team is really important. I think in RevOps especially.

I agree. Could not agree more. How do you— if you think about the consolidation process, when it comes to strategy, I always think of the three stools, like people, process, technology, right? So we've kind of talked, talked about people. Let's lean into technology. How do you know when to let go of some systems and when to introduce some systems? Do you have like a Do you have a blueprint that you typically try to use all the time, or are you more of a, like, let's look at what we have in front of us and put the parts together?

Yeah, that's a great question. I think the blueprint oftentimes comes from the FP&A folks where they're telling us how much we can spend and then we could try to fit it. But if we're talking, we're talking about kind of all technology, I wouldn't say that I have a perfect blueprint for it. But I think, you know, speaking from kind of the, maybe the economic situation that we're in right now, a lot of companies are thinking about profitability and spend and where they might be able to cut back. So I would say that consolidation is paramount. And I would say from, you know, from my personal experience that point solutions can be really useful because at times you might be able to pay less for something that's a more robust solution that's very specific to a, specific function. So I would say, you know, it's important to have, you know, base CRM and master data management strategy because you want a clean CRM and you want people to be able to understand what's coming in and what's flowing out. Really, I think RevOps is honestly just really important funnel management processes, you know, like you're really just trying to optimize your funnel when it, that's kind of the primary function of revenue operations. And so kind of having your CRM clean, And then also just thinking about like how we're engaging with our customers, how we're engaging with our prospects. Like, do we need to invest in up-funnel prospecting tools? Do we really need to dig into kind of conversational intelligence because we're finding that deals are falling out kind of lower in the funnel? It's really kind of just examining how you're looking at your pipeline and then better understanding what technologies may support some of the deficiencies in your pipeline. So I would say look at your weaknesses and how you can find tools to fill those weak spots. And then of course make it consolidated in a way that we're not going to, we're not going to send our AEs or our sales leaders into 5 or 6 different systems or looking at 10 or 15 different dashboards. Consolidate, keep it simple, find the tool to fit the need.

I really love that. Leaning in on find the tool to fit the need. I'm currently having a problem right now in this moment. I'm going to expose my own systems. Where we are having one tool that has previously worked really well for us in the past in email marketing not work very well right now because of all of the new requirements with Gmail and Microsoft and the spam stuff and blah, blah, blah, right? And so we have— there is another tool that we've been using just kind of as a, a proof of concept for the past couple of months. We really like it, it's getting good results, and I'm— I am considering replacing what I've used forever with this new one because it's working better. How do you make those decisions? Like, when do you make a change? When do you listen to the sales reps where they're like, these tools are terrible? When do you listen to the marketing people saying, I don't have what I need? And when do you say this is not a systems problem. This is either a process problem or like a, maybe a user error problem or, or whatever. How do you make those decisions?

Yeah, I, I think there's maybe a couple of parts to this. One would be kind of what you mentioned last, which is kind of the enablement piece. Like, are, are, are, are existing tools the problem, or is it maybe more of an enablement issue where, where folks maybe need some more training, they might need some more materials, maybe documentation, just some walkthroughs or ongoing maintenance. So I would say, you know, start there, you know, is it really the tool that's the problem or is it the enablement around the tool?

Yeah.

And then, you know, if you do find that the tool maybe is deficient, then it's, it's, it's maybe time to understand a little bit more about how it's being used and the individuals using it and maybe they're crafting some user stories around what they would like to see in a tool, you know, like what's, what's your perfect scenario? What are you doing with it? How do you, how do you do it and, and what would make it better? And then, that you can then kind of couple that, that feedback. And I, and I say field feedback because if you're thinking about, again, going back to our earlier point, if you're making these easier for the field, you want them to be the ones to use it. And maybe a little bit different in the marketing space because you, you have your marketing folks, maybe marketing operations that are, that are using it. So that would be your, your feedback folks, maybe not sales folks that are using those tools. But again, like coupling up the, this would be the best thing to have, does the tool fit the need, and then deciding from there. Because you decided the tool isn't working. So, you know, does it make sense with what we need it for? And then make the decision then. So a little due diligence probably first, and then—

Yeah, that makes sense. Due diligence. But if you can, but if you really like honestly investigate and you see someone's pulled together something better, then you can replace it at that time. That's good.

Absolutely. Yep. And again, eye for consolidation. Like, is there a tool out there that can maybe replace the tool that is deficient and another one of the tools that, that we might not be using.

Same time.

Yep.

That, that makes sense, especially right now.

Absolutely.

So, okay, so let's talk about that third leg of the stool process. In your consolidation, um, process, what do you look at in terms of like, um, not over-engineering things, simplifying the process? Like, what's your, you know, What is your playbook when you think about process consolidation?

Yeah, the number one thing that I, I think about when it comes to kind of this RevOps consolidation process is going to be where are there overlaps in our processes now that we've brought all these teams together? Because we know that on operations teams, there are going to be similar functions. There's going to be similar processes. There's going to be similar tools, maybe similar outputs and similar people. So I think it's really important to, to kind of think about where there are overlaps in the, in the process and, and kind of suss out those, those overlaps. And that might be consult— consolidating materials. It might be kind of redefining rules of engagement or documenting processes. But, but I think it's really important to get everything kind of down in a, in a consumable way for, for folks to digest. So looking at where there's overlaps, re-documenting the processes, maybe redefining some of the rules of engagement. And then combining that with kind of the people that are going to carry out these processes. If it's not on paper and it doesn't exist in your, your storage, in the storage software of choice, then, then no one's going to be looking at it. No one's going to know and no one's going to understand. So I think it's really important to, to look for the overlaps, kind of re-document everything, make sure it's visible, because if it's not, then no one's going to follow any kind of these processes if they're not there on paper.

Okay, this is so helpful. Final question about the consolidation process. From my pers— you know, from my perspective, I think that the visibility is really hard, right? When you have so many different people doing so many different things and everybody's busy and everyone's being productive, how do you get that visibility so people know what to do next?

Yeah, that's a, that's a, that's a good question too. And I don't know that I've completely solved, solved that one to be, to be perfectly honest. I think it's really important to have interlocks with leadership amongst the RevOps team. And I think tops-down communication is really, really important. And that's kind of why I mentioned before, I think an engaged leader is the best leader because an engaged leader will have an eye for making sure that everyone is kept informed, that everyone is kept appraised of how the business is doing. And then especially like what the key priorities are. A revenue operations organization cannot exist really without without key priorities that are well-defined, that are tied to stakeholders that have ownership and that are tied to deliverables, to metrics and KPIs that you can measure against. So having that structure in place where you have, you know, OKRs that are disseminated throughout the org, everything's communicated downward as much as possible so that every single person, including those, again, like I mentioned, you can't forget the people that are at the bottom because those are the people that are doing the things that make the org run. And when you lose those people, some of them will take knowledge with them if you do lose them. So I think it's really important for a structured kind of OKR process in place. And then I think it's really important to be thinking about kind of the top-down communication and ensuring that as a, you know, a senior revenue operations leader, that your leaders that are reporting to you are making sure they're communicating with their teams and you have that kind of back and forth communication. I would say that there's there's never too much communication when it comes to revenue operations, honestly.

That totally makes sense to me. I feel it with our operations team and the way they communicate. It's very interesting, and I like how they are using multiple mediums. So some of them send videos, some people send documents, they have SOPs, they tell people multiple times. And so I think they're doing a very good job, and I as a marketing person need to do a better job of just over-communicating, saying it 7 times or whatever it is until people feel really comfortable hearing it. So that is very, um, that's very helpful. One of the things that I admire about you as a person, Mason, is that it's very clear in what you're saying that you have a very strong connection with the people who work well in an organization, and it doesn't matter to you in what capacity, whether it's strategy or whether it's tactical, and that you see the value in each one of your team members. So it does not surprise me at all that you run such an effective team, and I really appreciate you coming on to chat with us. So I have just one last question for you. Um, clearly you're at the top of your game. How do you stay there? Do you do it with meditation? Do you do it with lots of caffeine? Do you do it from learning? What's your secret?

Definitely a fair bit of caffeine for sure.

Absolutely.

But, but I think honestly the thing that's helped me the most in my career, and I would say this as a technical person, as a consultant, as an operations person, is be relentlessly curious. Like when I come into a role, whether it be an operations role or a technical role, I want to know everything there is to know about the organization. That means cross-functionally as well. You know, I want to understand our policies when it comes to to order operations and finance and how we book deals and how revenue operations engages with the field. I want to know everything. My goal when I come into a role is to have zero ramp time. That's always, always what I want to do. And it's easier said than done because every organization operates differently. But I would say if I was talking to, you know, myself 12 years ago, I would say be as curious as you possibly can because having that knowledge of the organization and how it, how it runs will be beneficial. It means job security. It means being able to answer the tough questions. It means being able to think strategically. Stay curious. Curiosity.

Oh, could not have expressed that better. And thank you so much, Mason, for your time and your expertise and for joining us on the podcast.

Yeah, I mean, it's been amazing and I really appreciate the opportunity. Thank you.

Thank you. Business. Yes, that's business. Business. Yes, that's business.