Peter Ikladious: Companies That Scale Fast Have One Thing in Common: RevOps

Business.

Business. Business.

Business. Ah, that sounds all right. 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 my guest, Peter Ecladius, founder of Unlocking Growth. Peter, how are you?

Good, thanks, Amy. How are yourself?

Good, doing well. Thank you so much for joining us today. This is so much fun.

Wonderful. Thanks very much for having me on.

Well, I love, I love that we have formed this fun friendship from across the pond. You're in Australia, I'm in California, Only an ocean separates us and it's, we're talking about the same things and we're having the same business challenges on, in two continents.

Absolutely. It's, it's, it's very small. Like just a kind of a little sidebar. When I was doing a road trip through California and I like to listen to local radio to see like what's, what's playing. And what I found is if you drive in rural Australia and you drive in rural California, the music is the same, same era. There's a rock theme. Like it's fascinating how similar we can actually be.

Oh my gosh, that is fascinating. Accommodating. All right, let me ask you then, on a road trip, what do you like to listen to?

Oh, I'm, I'm, I'm a big fan of '80s and '90s rock.

So am I. AC/DC, Thunderstruck.

Absolutely.

Those are some of my go-to.

Now, now we're talking.

I love it. That's great. Well, thanks again for taking time out of your busy schedule. As, as an owner of an agency, I know how hard this must be for you to, you know, take some time apart and share with us all of the things that you're doing for clients in your business. It's really great to be able to, to pick your brain. So thank you.

Well, thank you, thank you. And I think it's a great opportunity also, like, I love the kind of the podcast and the sequence that, that you've made, Amy, because like in, in understanding where we're going, part of, part of the role that we've got as agency owners is not just delivering service to our clients, but educating the general space. And I kind of, I'm really looking forward to this conversation and just seeing, you know, how can we, you know, provide the seeds for building, ultimately building the models for RevOps and really fundamentally efficient growth. Like what does efficient growth look like across all the different departments? So at the end of the day, this is, I think, core of what we've got to do. And yeah, looking forward to this conversation ahead.

Yeah, likewise. I really love— and this is a great place to start— I love what you said about efficient growth and RevOps being so aligned with it. So to me, efficient growth is something that's always been important to business, but it's now being talked about so much more, especially in SaaS, where in the past, as you know, it's been kind of growth at all costs. Now we're seeing VCs lean a lot more into efficient growth. And how do you do that well? And that is, if I might say, the primary purpose of RevOps is to enable that efficient growth. So you can see why there's such a renewed interest in this role of revenue operations as a strategic leader. So that, you know, just from my own selfish viewpoint of wanting to enable the RevOps leader, that's— I love what you said just now. But tell me a little bit more about your background and how you got into Unlocking Growth first.

So my journey probably started about, I'm gonna say about 10 years, 10, 11 years ago. And up till that point, I had worn many hats. So I had been a project manager, I had developed it, like I had software engineering roots. And then I went into media, I was doing things such as Big Brother here in Australia. And then in the process, I worked, ended up working at IBM and wore multiple hats there. I was a consultant, I led a sales team, I ran some industry motions. But one of the things, one of the general managers at the time said to me, can you come and transform one of my products? Can you transform my, digitally transform one of my products? And that for me started my journey for today, for what is growth and where I'm at the agency. And in that, It was very nascent stages, early stages, what we today call product-led growth. And then we thought self-serve is the version. But in my learning and my understanding, working one with IBM, very large, you know, classic traditional B2B type of company, and then building the models around what is product-led growth, what is sales, how does that intersect and interlock, that refined my understanding my perspectives. And then since then, I returned back to Australia. I was in New York for about 13-odd years, came back to Australia. I was CMO at a company called SafetyCulture, which was a scale-up. And then in the— during COVID I decided to start an agency and just say, how do we get these models of scale? Because it's now a reproducible formula. Like, there's no rocket science here. There's no magic book hidden, hidden, hidden anywhere. And so that's really what got me onto this journey. And since then, since run the, since the agency, um, started with my co-founder Audrey, um, we've probably done a good 40 solid engagements. So, and in terms of really transforming the way a company, the CEO, the leadership team, and then also the individual contributors, how do they treat growth, um, and how do they transform their thinking from very siloed thinking, uh, into this coordinated approach, which I think today we'd collectively say is the role of RevOps. But really starting on that journey.

That's so interesting. So what you're telling me, if I heard you correctly, is that there truly is a repeatable formula and a playbook, a magic cookbook for scaling. Is this true?

100%. 100%.

That's amazing, right? Because so many companies first of all, don't get to product market fit, but more companies lose their way once they have product market fit and they're trying to scale. And there are so many pitfalls as a company tries to scale. So, you know, with your permission, let's dive deep into this because I want to know what this, uh, what this formula is. What is the secret?

If—

let's start here. What is one secret that you know about scaling that most people don't do? Why are there so many companies that fail during this process?

I'll bring in some examples, but the way that we think about it is we say we have a framework called Customer Journey Optimization. And what it is, whether a customer is already a customer or still in the prospect stage, they have a journey. Very simple concepts that everyone probably understands. And in the process, they go on a multi-step journey. Think of it like snakes and ladders. And every time there's a roll of a dice, you go up Snakes and Ladders, the, the game Snakes and Ladders, you go a few stops. Okay.

In America, we call it Chutes and Ladders. So that's good.

Oh, okay. Chutes and Ladders.

Okay.

It looks like Chutes and Ladders.

Maybe it was in the '80s when I was playing it, it was Chutes and Ladders, and maybe it's Snakes and Ladders now. I don't know, but I know it is Chutes and Ladders. But yes, keep going.

Let's call it generic something and ladders. But yeah, it's like whether it's chutes or snakes. Um, the, the whole idea is if, if you think about the first square is the, the time that you want someone to start on your journey and the last square is when they're an active customer, you can so and say, well, actually they're active and then there is churn and other things. But for simplicity's sake, if we think of it as a Chutes and Ladders or Snakes and Ladders game, then along the path they have chutes which actually drop them off the journey. They either fall back lower down in the journey or they completely disappear. Okay, but then we as practitioners and helping them is we've got to put the ladders in place. And what are those ladders in place? That's improving things such as how do we identify the right people? How do we make sure that the steps are easier on the journey? How do we make sure that the right AE or the SDR is speaking to the right person? How do we make sure that they've got the right information? So all of those are ladders so that you can bypass or jump over those snakes or those chutes. Um, and it's again, like we talk about best practice in B2B SaaS from someone who's a free user or a trial user, assuming that there's an online signup through to a paid customer. We say a benchmark is north of 40 to 60%. So if that's the benchmark, how much lower are the rest? And so if you think about, if you're at the benchmark, you're losing roughly half anyway. So those snakes and those chutes are really aggressive. They're gonna steal at least half of the people coming in. So how do you get them? And so the, the magic is that there is no magic. The magic is if you think of it as a snakes and ladders or chutes and ladders game, and you think, where am I going to put the ladders, then it changes the way you think. It changes the way you think about the technology, because now it's about cohesion and collaboration. It changes the way you think about what your teams do. I no longer have a lifecycle marketing manager who cares about one sequence. I now have a person who's accountable for the first branch of the journey. And that means they've gotta work with marketing and sales and RevOps and sales ops and marketing ops to make sure that's actually built. The technology is a solved problem. So anyone who says, oh, we've got data problems in my site, that's a solved problem. It has been for over a decade.

Okay?

And over time that actually requires the commitment and the thinking of how do you solve that? I worked with a large fintech who like in the 8, 9-figure revenue range, so pretty significant. And they had had this success because they had a good product, no question about it, but they couldn't get marketing and sales aligned. So I had to spend time just saying, okay, let's talk about this path through it. Let's look about where the snakes or the chutes are. Let's talk about what ladders we can do it. And let's even agree because they didn't even have this fundamental. Let's even agree on what the right metric is. They would start every meeting and they couldn't even agree on what an MQL— what, like, I had 300 for MQL and you had 274, which number do we agree on? So technology and data solved problem, changed the way you think so that people now are owning things. But you're also implementing automation. Those ladders aren't someone calling up all the time, it's actually automating facets. You got high volume at the beginning of your journey, so you want to automate as much as possible. And at the later parts of the journey, you may have more of a white white glove treatment. You know, you have a big, you know, a big Fortune 10 customer, Fortune 100 customer coming in. Maybe you don't want to give them the self-serve experience. Maybe you want to give them white glove treatment, but work out that they are a Fortune 100. There's technology to enable that, and there's automation to make sure that the SDR isn't getting the Fortune 100 customer confused with, you know, Joe's hairdresser down the, down the road.

That's right. That makes sense. So when you say solved problem, do you mean that there is technology out there that currently exists today that solves the problem of data hygiene and data, you know, understanding what the data actually is and that it's just our inability to properly utilize the technology whereby there are issues? Or what do you mean exactly by solved problem?

Yeah, so we have a big belief that we use off-the-shelf technology. And so to your question, it's exactly that. There is technology today that you can get that addresses the bridging problems and addresses the automation and addresses the stitching. All right, so all of those questions, all of the challenges and the key capabilities you need on the technology and data side are commercial software. Now, what's the inhibitor is, is not everyone knows about them.

Mm-hmm.

Startups today know about it. Like, we talk about the Canvas of the world and the Buildkites and, you know, and those companies they've built from the ground up using that stuff because they've known, because they've been around for 10 years and they've said, oh, well, I've seen these other startups do it. And when they got to scale, they were doing this. They're using that stuff already. Problem is when you've got a bit of a legacy, you know, you've been around for 20, 30, 40, 50 years, you've built your own processes, your own technology to do it, and it doesn't think in the same way. Like I'm building a CRM. Like, we're working with a life insurance company. You think about life insurance, it's a very old industry, and this is a company, a very old company in a very old industry. And that, that's it. They've got systems that have been built in place over the years, and they're trying to transform this concept of customer engagement. And so how do you transform their existing technologies and systems to use these new things? There's compliance, there's also a fear. Some people have a fear. It's like, if I, if I'm not developing this custom proprietary piece of software within an organization, you know, I've got job security issues. Okay, so you've got to kind of factor that in mind. But at the core, if you had started from a blank sheet, the technology now you would use, which is actually highly accessible and highly cost-effective from very small to very large companies, you can get that started and build that in there into the plumbing so that you don't have to have that conversation about, well, my spreadsheet says this and your spreadsheet says that, which is the one?

I see. That makes sense. So you're— you've unified— one thing that I'm taking from this discussion is that you've unified the different roles around centralized data. So you've got one number, and sales, marketing, operations, and, and customer success are all looking at that same number. It's stored in one place. It's your single source of truth. Nobody has a disagreement about that data, right?

Exactly, exactly. And once you agree on that data, then you can build on the automations. And then here's the really cool part, you can start doing some forecasting and predictive parts. So we built RevOps models for a SaaS company that was scaling into, like, growing into the US and scaling there. And what we did is we modeled it out, and you, and when you have, when you've solved that data problem, then modeling growth actually becomes essentially an Excel, like a very simple Excel activity. It says, okay, you want to get to this much. We make certain assumptions, we assume certain conversion rates. Every facet of the journey becomes a funnel, a type of funnel, and everything becomes metricized and everything becomes a percentage. And so therefore you can say, well, that's currently at 12%. I'm going to put a team to focus on stage 2 of the journey and I want them to get from 12% to 14%. RevOps has that high-level view that says, okay, they optimize that by 14%. This changes, this changes, this changes, the end of the day, I know what my 12-month forecast is going to look like. I have a forecast of what that's going to do with reasonable confidence, and I can track how I'm tracking against it. My— I'm not looking at the lagging indicator, which is revenue, which is after everything's like, how many people got to the end of the journey? I'm actually looking at these leading indicators. How many people? What are the journeys? What are those micro funnels looking like along the journey? So that's that whole concept, customer journey optimization, of giving those teams and, and RevOps being this, this orchestration function to say, okay, we need a ladder at step 4, at step 7, at step 12.

Oh, I love this. Okay, I, this is so interesting. So, you know, you've got your, you've got your, I'm going to call it snakes and ladders now. I'm like, come into the new century here. I'm going to call it snakes and ladders. And so you've got your, you've got your, you know, you've got your ladders that your RevOps team is building. What are the snakes? What are the pitfalls that make you drop down in that customer journey?

Yeah, that's a great one. So the first one, the early on in the journey, you have the biggest snakes, okay? So you've got the ones, and this is what we'd say is how do you find your people? This is the, how do you find that intent, that audience? And those are what we traditionally call as your top of the funnel metrics. All right, so those snakes at the beginning are I haven't got to the right audience. I haven't been able to do messaging for the right audience. They've come to my webpage or they've come to my site and there's, there's too much noise on my website that doesn't give them key focus. So it's conversion rate optimization, SEO, classic paid media. So those are the tactics you can solve, the ladders you can build, so to speak, to get to those snakes because all of those snakes are there inhibiting what you get. If you get— we typically say if you get to a website and you get a 5% conversion rate, you're doing okay. All right, if you get 10%, you're like market leading. Like I saw, we're working with one client, we got to 12%. All right, and 12%, so 12% of everyone who came to the website was now progressing along the journey. That's huge. So it's really, really powerful to get that. So that's early on in the journey. Then they have to engage with whatever your product, service, or offering is, and that's the next one. We'd call it, say, initial value. You have the concept of initial value. How do they get to their initial value? What is it that makes sense? So they've gone and they've said, okay, if I'm in the B2B world, does this SaaS product solve my current pain point? So if I'm using something as simple as Asana, my pain point is tasks, task management. I want a task list and I need to coordinate across a team. How do I make sure that that's easy? Now, if you've got a 20-step process to onboard That's a giant snake. So we typically see onboarding and trial as being that. Or when you're using a complicated product, um, where— or sorry, rather than complicated, sophisticated product— where you've onboarded, but unless your systems, your data, your processes, and people are on board, um, we— then it's meaningless. So we're working with a, uh, a B2B SaaS company that does workforce management. So workforce management scheduling. And what that— what we found was, unless you've plugged in your entire employee base and payroll, it's absolutely like there's no value. Someone sees like, okay, that's all I'm seeing is some generic screens. So that next snake is, how do I— how do I get them to see value even if they haven't fully onboarded? Because it's a sophisticated product that requires a lot of activation. So that initial value is probably kind of the second set of snakes. Once you've got them, then you've now got to convince of the value prop. This is when we're talking about how do we get them to see, I see the value, now can I quantify that value in a way that I'm willing to pay? And sometimes that is through self-serve means, sometimes that's through SDRs and account executives. So now you're talking about what typically is the sales process, the lead progression process. So those are, are how do you make sure that pricing is right, how you scripts of the SDR right, because you got the wrong SDR or making the wrong call or the wrong content, then things are failing. So So all of those snakes there come along. And obviously, as you think through the sales process, everything that gets that win rate from 100% down to market leading, we typically say is 30 to 40%. If you can get a win rate that, that rate. So 70% of your snakes are still there and chewing through all of those leads and those opportunities.

So interesting. And I love this analogy so much. So you mentioned something about, you know, maybe it's a self-service. Business model, maybe it's a sales-led growth model. How do you know the difference? How can you tell for your business what's right?

It's a great question and it depends on a few different things. If you've got hardware in the business, so for example, we were working with, um, I'll give two different examples. One hardware business which is in the AgTech, which has water sensors for farmers, farmers and ranchers. So they would go and they would deploy these, you know, satellite-based sensors that would go out in the middle to find out water levels. Now there's a physical device. Customers can't get that value until they go and put down money for the hardware and then go and deploy it. We worked with a, um, a company that does a, a fitness device similar to Peloton but for weight training. Um, and same thing, you need a big physical device. In those cases, uh, those ideas and kind of the key is to get them to value. How do you want to let them understand that? Maybe it's through in the fitness example, it's promotions and videos and influencers. On the farming example, in the ranching example, then that one is about showing them what savings they get by not having to travel 100 miles to look at the level of a dam, to look at the level of a well, to look at the water level for their crops or their farms. On a SaaS business, we kind of want to highlight as much as possible if they can showcase or trial the value immediately with them trying it themselves. Asana, create your first task list within seconds. Great. Here's my to-do list, my holiday season gift list. I could do that in Asana. So very quickly I can see that value. So you really want to kind of bridge that. So in that case, we say it's like really quite product-led. The hardware stuff, I gave you the two examples. One of those was actually sales-led, the agriculture one. A farmer rancher wants to speak to someone. So they could see it, but it's a sales-led model. The model around the fitness device, that was like an e-commerce example, entirely product-led. Like they go to a Shopify type store experience, they click buy, and then the experience after that becomes more product-led, but it's highly self-serve in nature. So the whole idea is one is the nature of the product you've got. And then the second thing to be aware of, Asana being a great example, and it's what I learned at IBM and I did some research on, on the top, what we would say, PLG companies, 30 to 40% of staff are salespeople. So even though you have a self-serve model, you need a sales team.

That's interesting. That's very interesting. So that self-serve model would just get you like just far enough along where you're starting to try things yourself. And is that when the sales team comes in?

Correct. Or, and I think there's two dimensions. How much value they've got out of the product. Okay, so, uh, when I was at Safety Culture, we had 2 departments, 3 departments of a large hotel chain were using the product. Okay, we've now identified they're part of this large hotel chain. Let's call up the head of the hotel chain or the procurement in hotel chain, say, let's talk through how we can take your individual little pockets of work and create a large enterprise agreement. So that's one example. Another example being if someone from, uh, like a large blue chip customer signs up to the product, maybe it's worth immediately reaching out to them, even if it's only one person, because that could be the precursor to a much larger deal. So in that case, you want to engage sales. So sales can come in from either angle, even if you've got self-serve.

This is so fascinating, um, and I wish we had about 5 more hours on this podcast to, to learn more. But some of the things that I found really compelling are, you know, that, that's a snakes and ladders analogy. The fact that RevOps is, is helping to advance things more quickly toward efficient growth. I loved connecting the concept of revenue operations to the concept of efficient growth and, and why that is becoming so much more relevant. I loved the, I loved when you started talking about how, uh, you know, the different types of growth. And that scaling is a formula. All of those things are absolutely amazing. And I know that, um, with your agency, you would be happy to talk further about that with customers, I'm sure, right? So how can, how can someone get to, uh, get to know you and reach out to you directly?

Yeah. So, so feel free to reach out to myself on LinkedIn, come to our website, unlockinggrowth.co. Um, and, and yeah, we're, we're available to have that chat. And I think, I think the part to underscore is growth at any size is possible with this. This is not— you don't need to be a certain size. So whether you're 10 employees, 100 employees, 1,000 employees, 10,000, 100,000, it's relevant. So we've worked— I've worked with the smallest of the small, 5 people in a basement kind of thing, through to you know, 100,000 people plus organizations, and it's still relevant. And we apply different facets of that, that building the perfect, you know, snakes and ladders game for your organization is entirely possible. You don't try and, you know, you don't try and eat the elephant in one go, but you take pieces of the game and you focus on where are the biggest pain points, and you progressively do it. Technology is solved, then you kind of build some processes that bring the teams together, and then you finally, um, you know, and then it's about finding the— make sure the out people with the growth mindset to do it. You know, I love, you know, using the technology we talk about, even Amy, you know, Fullcast, love what it's doing, how it's solving the whole sales process, the RevOps process around commissioning and building forecasts and models. It's a really hard problem. Like I remember spending months and months every year at IBM trying to do it for our departments and divisions. It's a challenging problem. And so that software now solves that. You don't need large budgets. A team of 10 or 100 people could use it through to mega thousands.

I love that. Thank you so much. Well, clearly you are at the top of your game here in go-to-market. How do you stay there? That is my final question for you today. How do you stay at the top of your game? Do you go surfing? Do you go to the Sydney Opera House? What do you do? You read a lot? Do you do community events? What keeps you at the top?

What keeps me at the top? I think from a professional setting, I'm constantly speaking to to not only founders and CEOs and our clients, but also speaking to other thought leaders like yourself included. Like we met at the SASTA conference. It was great to connect and hear what's going on. I love to think that I'm at the top of my game, but I'd much rather be the dumbest person in a room of giants and learning from them and understanding. And here there's, there's, and we're getting into a whole new era of generative AI and how it's gonna transform parts of So I'm constantly keenly just have to say, okay, where does that change? Is generative AI a ladder or is it a snake? You know, and what, and then, and how can it help us in RevOps in growth to circumvent all of that? So I'm actively reading, actively looking at that. I was at the Sydney Opera House earlier this week because my daughters were performing. So I've got a girl. So, so yeah, so they keep me busy as well.

Well, that is amazing and I love I think that needs to be the topic of our next podcast. Is GenAI a snake or a ladder? Like, that is, that is something that is quite debatable these days. So anyway, well, Peter, thank you so much. It's such a pleasure to have you on the podcast, and I really appreciate your time. Wonderful.

Thanks so much, Amy. It's been a delight. Thank you. Is that business? Business? Is that business?