Nick Soldano: A Recruiter's Journey Into Revenue Operations

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 am so excited to introduce Nick Soldano, Head of Recruiting at Integrated Management. Nick, how are you doing?

I am good. How are you?

Doing well. It's great to connect with you again. This time virtually. How is it in Arizona? Is it sunny today?

It is. It is. We, we had a little bit of rain yesterday, which was needed. It's been a pretty rainy week, which has been nice, but my lawn is happy. My lawn is happy.

That's good. I love that. I know it's raining today here in Southern California and we need it really bad too. So good news.

Yeah, exactly. Yeah, it's Mother Nature's been volatile these days. I don't, I don't get it.

Everything's been volatile these days. In 2020.

You are not kidding.

So Nick, tell me a little bit about your background. One of the reasons that I was so excited to have you on this podcast is because you are doing recruiting specifically for revenue and sales operations, correct?

Yes, I am. Yes, I am. The story is actually pretty interesting on how it kind of just rolled into it. Any real recruiter that you talk to, they're gonna just probably tell you all the same thing. The reason why they're recruiters is 'cause they didn't want to have a real job. And I started off on the sports side with coaching and mentorship and wanted to be a professional baseball player, all that, and yada, yada, yada. But I ended up being a collegiate baseball coach and part of my duties was recruiting and recruiting coordination and trying to find out which people fit the best teams. And, you know, I really gravitated towards that. And when I was really looking back and really analyzing what I really wanted to do outside of just being a baseball coach and working 120 hours a week and not getting paid very well, I really started to reflect that I just like talking to people and trying to help people in any best way that I can. And so ended up going full-time in recruiting, quit, quit coaching. And started off kind of doing everything, accounting and finance, supply chain management. And then my boss, Chad Dean, ended up finding me as I was making the move to Arizona. And he goes, hey, this is the deal. This is the great stuff that we're going to start doing. We're in this space. We're going to start building other verticals around it. And what do you say? And I'm like, absolutely. I'm on board. And with Chad and I, it was just simpatico right away, probably just You know how you guys were with Fulcast and building out the executive leadership team. And it's just, once you feel that connection, you're willing to jump headfirst off of a cliff into the water and hopefully you land safely. And it's been extremely rewarding since then over the last 3, 3 and a half years. We've really been penetrating the PEVC-backed SaaS market, specifically everything revenue generating, still have a little bit of a finance function as most revenue operations teams need to. Uh, but yeah, really focusing on really the entire umbrella that is sales operations and revenue operations. It's been really, really fun. But like you said earlier, it's so exciting.

Well, and it's been so fun to watch the industry grow. Like, even in, even in the early days when we were doing some kind of revenue operations as Salesforce partners, you know, 10 years ago, just even to see how everything has grown and developed and matured even since then, I think that's— it's a really exciting— it's an exciting time to be in revenue operations, and It's got to be very rewarding when you can help match up companies and people who can help them in this space. So, 100%. Yeah. One of the things I love about you is how easy you are to talk to, number one. And then also, I really can feel that you genuinely want to help people, and that's probably one of the reasons that you're so good at your job, because it's very easy to you know, tell when you have that simpatico relationship like you, like you have with your partner, you can move mountains and you can get through the downturns and you can go through the volatility and really help. Has there been anything frustrating about revenue operations as a career path with it growing so quickly? You know, there have been a lot of questions about what does this industry comprise? What does revenue operations mean? I'm kind of more on that side where we are developing that. Do you ever encounter any confusion about what revenue operations is versus sales operations? Like, how do you navigate that with companies?

Yeah, it's so funny. And, you know, kudos to you for kind of calling it out about a month ago on one of your webinars, the stats really blew me away. And I really started to, to dig a little bit deeper after you started throwing out percentages out there. So just to kind of clout chase for you here a little bit, you mentioned 35% of companies are building a RevOps team and 48% don't have RevOps at all. So that in a nutshell is the frustration, but to go a little layer deeper than that is a lot of these organizations that do or have or are building out the revenue operations teams, what does that look like? Is it defined as modern revenue operations or what, like you said before, is it just, are you just talking about admins? Are we building out admin rollouts versus are we building out legitimate strategies? Are we building business intelligence pipelines? Are we building the right dashboards? What are we doing that's customizable to our industry, but also our product delivering that's going to allow us to scale? And a lot of those things are, are the bigger frustrations. Because the organizations that we deal with, very similar to you guys, is high scale, very strategic. You have to bring in the right people to do the right things. And sometimes, depending on the organization, leadership doesn't really have that truly defined yet because this, like you said, RevOps has kind of taken on a, a leg of their own at this point over the last 5 years. It's adapted and, and evolved into this metropolis of high impact. And so there's an educational piece to it to make sure that organizations are doing it the right way. And if they aren't doing it the right way, what can we do for them to provide value to make sure that they're going to be steered in the right direction with the amount of talent and the level of talent that they're going to need?

I love that answer. That is— that's really interesting. What do you look for when you are sourcing like a really great candidate? Let's say that I reach out to you and I say, hey, I just need someone that is the best fit for revenue operations and leading it. What do you look for?

Yeah, well, first thing, a little bit of an outlier here. I'm going to ask you first what you need from a cultural perspective. I think that it's one of the most unlooked at features of candidate development and candidate buildouts for teams is I can find you someone that can do the job. That's kind of the easy part. It's the finding the people that can do the job and can mend with the team that you currently have in place? Can they have the executive leadership conversations? Can they speak with stakeholders, especially in revenue operations? Can they speak with sales? Can they speak with data analytics? Can they speak with product? Can they speak with engineering? Right? So all of these emotions that people have to balance on a day-to-day, and I would first pry there and figure out what's your culture like? Are you guys grinders? Do you like being in the office all the time? Are you 5 days on site? Are you remote? Right? All of these things come into play. And so I would say that is first most important. So I do what is called a vibe check. That is for the first 5—

That's the official term.

Yeah. Yeah, exactly. And that is just to really engage what type of personality am I dealing with? It's, it's not good or bad. It's just, are you going to be able to fit and have longevity within the organization that I'm currently representing? Or do we have to go out and find something that's going to fit what you're looking for? So yeah, that's definitely the first couple of things. This first 5 to 10 minutes, we're talking about the weather, kind of similar to what you and I did, talked about the weather for a little bit. Talked about our kids and really get to know each other on a personal level before we even justify whether or not this would be worth a conversation of if I had something for you.

Interesting. So one of the things I love about what you're saying about culture is that culture in some forms of communication is kind of a euphemism for doing a good job in your organization at inclusion and whatever. But culture, the way you're describing it and the way that I see it as well, is amoral. It's neither good nor bad. It's just a matter of what is the best fit for each. So I like some of the things that you mentioned, like in the office 5 days a week, Grindr versus more of a priority on balance. What are some of— what are some of the other things you would include?

Especially with the clientele that we deal with, everyone's looking for startup experience, right? Everyone.

It's interesting.

And you can see it firsthand that the people that have been in the startup phases and startup environments of going from 0 to 10s, 10s to 25s, 25s to 50s, 50s to 100s, there's a certain level of aptitude needed for that type of environment, right? Not saying that enterprise-level organizations are bad in any way. It is just a different animal, right? And so you have to find people that are accustomed to that type because there's an adaptability change to it, right? You have to be able to adapt to, especially with some of the clients that we're working with who are in really uncharted territories of trying to build out a marketplace or market competition within a vertical, within a vertical, some of these niche spaces. And so finding those people that are able to tackle challenges that they may not have seen before, but don't have a fear-based mindset of being able to tackle those challenges in a positive direction. And Examples of that obviously would be, would be huge if people have built out pipelines, process, and infrastructure within go-to-market strategies or revenue operations is huge. But it really is dependent on what your client is looking for. I mean, that is, that's just the biggest crucial need.

Now, I love that. That's, that's a really great answer. What do you see in terms of what's out there for people who are looking to get into the field of revenue operations? Is it blue ocean? Is there a constriction of job roles? What does it look like?

Yeah, it's so weird, right? I mean, the market is so dang volatile right now that, you know, people are defining things in completely different avenues. I would describe getting into revenue operations specifically within high-growth SaaS to be like taking a wooden ship to the North Atlantic Sea. You're going to have a lot of waves. It's going to be extremely choppy, but at the end of the day, you're going to get to your destination. You're going to be able to talk about the ride that you just went on. And that's what I love about it. People just, you got to be in the trenches. You got to be on the front lines, making sure that number one, customer's happy, but also making sure stakeholders and leadership is happy and making sure the product is running seamlessly. And there's just so much that goes into it that, yeah, there could be days where, you know, it's bright and sunny and, and the ocean is clear and glassy, but for the most part, as you know, probably with Fulcast and scaling Fulcast, you're getting in uncharted waters and you're riding some waves, but it's fun. It's really, really fun.

It's really fun. And it's interesting because some of the skills that our team developed in the early days of a previous company where we worked at, Simplus, a lot of us worked at the same place.

Yeah.

Sometimes you forget, you got to dust off the cobwebs and be like, this is what this size of the business looks like, right? And then as you get into different phases of the business, different skill sets need to come out, which is why I think you would probably agree that the phase of the business of who they're hiring for is, you know, that's a huge factor in who you want to hire, right? It's probably hard to have somebody go from zero to $5 billion. Don't you need like a few different types of personalities in each one of those stages?

You do. Yeah. And again, kind of broken record here. It really does depend on the organization of how they need these things to be structured. Typically what we see, especially in buildouts during high growth stages, is they'll bring in your analysts first. Usually we'll roll up to the COO if the COO is legitimate, which, you know, if you're COO at a SaaS startup, you're pretty legitimate at that point, but they really focus on you know, being able to manage your sales pipelines, being able to manage the data coming in. And so a lot of those phase 1 buildouts are what I like to call your trench diggers, right? The people that are in their front lines building everything out for you. You got your Salesforce people, you got your sales ops people, you got your revenue operations people, and then you take a step back and you say, what do we need at the leadership level? What kind of qualities are we looking for? What kind of experience are we looking for? And then once you bring in that leader, whether, whether it be senior director, VP, senior VP, or even bringing in a CRO, it really doesn't matter at that point. Levels are levels and titles are titles, but that is really what's going to create the dynamic of what type of culture you want to build. And one of the great things with the leaders that I'm working with, with a lot of the logos that I represent, is these leaders come in with a very high standard, which is fantastic. And they all have their own separate way of how to paint the picture. Whether it be phase 2 being, you know, let's build out the bridges a little bit to bridge the gap between communication within divisions, or, hey, we need someone to be able to manage more of the data analytics side within Salesforce. Let's make an understanding of that data. Or right now what we're dealing with, especially kind of all around the market, is territory operations. Very big thing as we continue to scale out sales organizations and align people with the proper strategies to do that. And another thing that's really starting to take legs right now is marketing operations is starting to take on a little bit of a, a new wave as well, where you have marketing meeting with data, meeting with product, meeting with sales. And it's just grown into this thing where, you know, it used to be one thing and now it's just an absolute powerhouse.

I love that. Coming from marketing, it's really exciting and gratifying to see more marketers like me having a seat at the table and understanding How we contribute to revenue. So the closer I received some really good advice when I was a few years ago. And this, this woman who is a mentor of mine said, the closer you can get to revenue, the, the more secure your job is going to be. And I thought that was really good advice. And so I've tried to really follow that even as, as a marketer, and it's been really helpful. So I love seeing that marketing operations is having a new life there. It is. What would you recommend for people looking to be hired into a revenue operations role or a marketing operations or sales operations? What's some advice you have for people?

Get to know the data is the biggest thing. I mean, data-driven strategy is priority number one in scalability, right? If you don't have good data, you're not going to grow. And so What I would encourage everyone to do, especially if you're just trying to get into revenue operations at the junior level, you know, post-grad and things like that, is to understand how businesses move and be able to articulate the data to get an understanding of how that business is going to move better. Whether that be in business intelligence or data analytics, everyone is data-driven these days. You have to understand data in order to push. And so if you can somehow get into, you know, just a sales operations analyst role with someone good or strong and you really have to look on, rely on leadership for that mentorship, which is great. But yeah, I would say definitely someone that can understand and interpret data from more of a business strategy versus anything else.

That makes sense. I have noticed that there does seem to be a gap between the business strategists and the data analysts and the technicians. And so that's one of the things I like about RevOps the most is that you've got your, when you find that really good RevOps leader, they're like 40% strategic, 40% operational, and 20% tactical, and they have it all, the skill sets within their team. I think that's a really valuable combination. Well, Nick, you're clearly at the top of your game, and it's really exciting to see how your business has grown with RevOps and SalesOps.

Yeah.

I personally think you're super rad, and it's been really fun to chat with you. And so my last question for you is, what do you do to stay at the top of your game? Do you go do yoga? Are you a biker? What, what do you do to, to stay recharged and on top?

Yeah, I just sit in a dark room in the corner and just don't say anything. No, I mean, it's, I've got good outlets, which is great. And I've got a lot of really great friends in the space that I can, you know, kind of just pause with and reflect with and have those types of conversations. And we all have those friends that we vent to on frustrations as well, right? But I can give you the cookie cutter typical answer of, I go work out and I do all of these things and I go golf. But at the end of the day, for me, as cheesy as it sounds, how I decompress is honestly just spending time with my family, especially on a rough day. It gives me the excuse to just unplug, not worry about anything and really be in the present with them, especially with a 14-month-old. You kind of have to be on your game when they get home, cuz you have no idea what she's going to be getting into. But yeah, I just really rely on my family to bring me back down to base and, and handle those things because. You know, if I were to tell you I go golfing on the weekends, that would just increase my frustration. So I'm just not going to say that.

I love that. And your little— I've seen a picture of your little 14-month-old and she is literally—

She's a monster.

She's the cutest thing I've ever seen. So I can see why it's a really great outlet. Well, Nick, thank you so much for joining us on the podcast.

Of course.

Really appreciate it. Thank you for everything you're doing for the industry and for the people who serve in the industry.

Thank you. Thank you for everything that you guys are doing as well. Product is awesome.

Go team.

Go team.

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