Rob Stanger: RevOps Reality Check: ICP, Deal Health & the Metrics That Matter

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 Rob Stanger. Rob, thank you so much for joining us today. Appreciate it.

It's my pleasure. Thanks for having me.

Oh yeah, this is really exciting, and it's months in the making, right? We started talking about this a few months ago.

Actually, years in the making since I've been following Fulcast for probably past 6 years or so.

Oh really? Oh, I didn't even know that. That's awesome. Before my time. So we are 6 years in the making for this. I love it. Well, this is really great. Great. And thank you so much for, you know, being willing to share your insights about some of the kind of burning questions that RevOps people have today. So, well, let's just start by talking a little bit about your background. How did you get started?

In RevOps?

Yeah.

It's interesting. So I'm actually a recovering consultant and one of my first jobs at, well, one of my last gigs as a consultant was with a big company called McKesson. And they, uh, brought me on later on as a sales efficiency or sales, uh, effectiveness, uh, director, which was a fancy way of saying, uh, sales operations. And I had no idea what I was doing. Uh, we were getting a lot into sales process and, and different projects, and it felt a lot like project management. But at the same time, that was my first real, uh, exposure to the sales cycle funnel management deals and, you know, establishing your total addressable market and making sure that you have all of the operational aspects, including technology, people and processes, all that kind of stuff just to help salespeople hit their number. And I was surprised at how much effort goes into creating an ecosystem and a support structure around hitting a quota. Uh, it's, it's the lifeblood of business and of companies particularly. And I've had the fortune of being spending most of my time in technology and SaaS companies, but it, it's just amazing. If you don't hit your number, life is a lot harder for everybody in the company. And so it's something where, you know, there are a lot of people everywhere that come together to support hitting a sales number and hitting a sales target. And RevOps is kind of the, at the crux of all of that, of Do we have the right— our eyes on the right KPIs? Are our funnels healthy? Are our deals progressing in the right way? Are we talking to the right people and dealing with the right ideal customer profile? It touches everything. So I've been fortunate enough to spend probably the past, going on past 10, 15 years now in a sales operations, revenue operations capacity.

That is awesome. My first comment is recovering consultant. I laugh because that is me too. I spent 20 years doing consulting. Consulting work, and I can't believe I survived that long. And, and it's, uh, it is such a grind. So congratulations to you.

Thanks, I appreciate it. It's fun while it lasted, uh, but it's definitely a young man's game.

So, oh, I agree with that. So it's really interesting to see how RevOps has evolved as an industry, right? You were doing a lot of that work beforehand, but the industry itself as revenue operations is starting to kind of coagulate together and start to take on some shape and be more defined, right?

Yeah, especially in the past few years, RevOps has kind of become a cool new and very fast-growing career path and something that people didn't talk about before. Even sales operations, it was just kind of behind the scenes, but it started off as really being mostly driven by, hey, what are our KPIs and CRM management? But then very quickly it evolved into what's our market, how do we work with marketing, how do we work kind of along the whole customer lifecycle of prospect to evaluator to implementation to lifelong customer and renewals. So it spans the entire customer lifecycle.

I think that there have been some really interesting changes recently that have enabled that. And I think I love the way that you framed that. I think of it in terms of, you know, the sales funnel versus the flywheel. And I think especially in SaaS where it's so important with that onboarding stage and customer success to the renewal cycle. Article that people started saying, you know, oh, we really need to look at this as one go-to-market. And I love that you are talking about, um, you know, what the KPIs are, everything built around people making quota, like you said, and it being the lifeblood of the, of the organization. So as we're talking about deals, for example, how do you know, or what are some indicators that a deal is healthy? And will convert?

Yeah, that's a great question. I mean, I think it starts off, the very first thing is understanding who your ideal customers are, what that ICP is, ideal customer profile, right? And making sure that you not only understand who they are, but what are the attributes that showcase that this is an ideal customer profile. In other words, we can say, hey, we're targeting, you know, healthcare systems over a certain size, That's great, but that's really not an indicator of whether or not that's going to be a qualified or a good fit. And it's also not a good indicator of how you're going to find these deals. You have to then understand what are the attributes that these companies are showing and then how do we go and track those attributes down. I'll give you a perfect example. I worked at a company that sold sales engagement platforms into SaaS companies, and it was super easy to say our target customer is Anyone who has, uh, who sells software. Well, okay, that's, that's way too broad. Really what it came down to was we were looking for people who had a high velocity sales process and who then could then, um, and, you know, turn around pretty quickly. And then how to find those companies, it, it's more than just do you have a sales team, it's what was the ratio of your SDRs to your closers, right? Because a company with a lot of SDRs, they're doing high velocity, you know, pinging and sales engagement outbound prospecting. That's who we were looking for. So it took a lot of iterations to go and figure out what are the attributes of these ideal customers and then how do we go and find them. That's your first step in qualifying is just to make sure they fit that ICP. And then the second step is to make sure you go through, you know, a normal deal qualification process of is it the right time? Do we understand who the stakeholders are? Is there a compelling event? Right. And because a lot of reasons that deals are lost, if you, if you go back and look at closed lost reasons, you're going to find that your biggest reasons are wrong time, no budget, wrong stakeholder. Right.

That's right. I believe those are the top 3 among all industries and people. Right.

And that just means that you either found that out early in deal qualifying or you found that out late after wasting a whole bunch of sales cycles on these, on these accounts.

That is really, really interesting. So what, what kind of safeguards or guardrails do you have in place to help identify some of those things early?

Yeah, I think the biggest thing is just, and it's not even safeguards, it's, it's a proper training around a deal qualification framework. And there are a ton of them out there, whether it's MEDDIC or MEDPIC, whether it's BANTT, there's 100 different ways to qualify a deal. I think the idea is basically to figure out which one fits your company. I'm a little partial to MedPic because I've used it a lot. But basically, if you go through that and then make sure that you're checking off all those questions of, you know, do we understand who our buyer, who our economic buyer is? What's the compelling event? You know, what's the purchasing process? Things like that. You go through that and that helps you qualify the deal initially. But then, Amy, I think it's super important you don't just do that one time. Deal qualification and deal health is throughout the sales process and sometimes even after that as well, right, as they go and become a customer. But if you go through and you identify your stakeholders one time, odds are you're going to have some stakeholder that you missed. You're going to have somebody who can come in and torpedo your deal at the last minute because you didn't understand, you know, that the decision criteria had changed or some compelling event had changed within the company. Or the competitive landscape had changed. So it's, it's an iterative process. You go through a number of times of, you know, asking the same questions, even, even though it's super annoying, you ask those same questions and you make sure that you understand who's participating in the deal, why are they doing it, and ultimately what the outcome, what you expect the outcomes to be.

So interesting. And for anyone that's listening, the components of MedPic are metrics, The economic buyer, decision criteria, decision process, paper process, identifying the pain champion, like finding that, that internal champion, and competition, right? So, and, and that's everywhere across the, the internet for anyone that's listening that wants to go dive deep into that. But, um, so Rob, here I have a question that is a little bit more like, let's double tap on this ICP. And what do you do if a seller disagrees with the company-established ICP? What if a seller continually says, hey, you guys don't know what the ICP is yet, you're, you're basing this on assumptions that are not correct? What would you do in that situation?

Uh, after I got done rolling my eyes. No, I mean, it's an interesting question. Look, salespeople are in the trenches. They're our frontline. And so they see a lot of things that we don't see. And so I think it is important to listen, but I would say, especially if you're an established company, you've done, you have product marketing teams, you have people whose job it is to go through and identify What's the market and how does our product fit into that market? And there should be a specific problem and solution and a value proposition that fits to that ICP. And ICP is not necessarily a person, necessarily. It is a company in, in a given state. It's a prospect, right? So I mean, I would listen and I would say, look, at the end of the day, these sellers, they're quota carriers. They have to hit their number and the proof is going to be in the pudding. They want to go waste their time or use their time chasing a different prospect, then I would— you can do that, that's fine. I highly doubt that it will be a successful experiment.

So you would kind of let them say, like, prove me wrong. Oh, you'd listen and then coach?

I would coach and I would listen. And I would— if, if it was just something completely bogus that, that was way out in left field, then obviously that's a different story. If it's close, feel free to give it a shot. But here's my— here's what I would caution them is I would say, look, just because you can sell to a person and if they accept a deal doesn't mean that they're going to be a lifelong happy customer. And that's ultimately the goal, right?

And I think that that makes it— I think that discussion of churn and, you know, lifetime value, I think that's a super important discussion when you're talking about ICP too, because then you're like, hey, you don't— you want to sell— don't you want to just sell it once and have a happy customer for life and continue to get recurring commission on this? You know, I think that's one discussion that's interesting. I, I think about it though because we've, um, just been going through some of those things with our clients as well and trying to help them identify that ICP. And there is a very interesting case sometimes for people who go outside of that because it's easier for them to sell to a particular demographic.

So, or they have relationships there, they've come from that industry. And like I said, I'll always listen That's what a good RevOps person should do is listen to their sales teams, right? At the end of the day, the hard part is, is by the time you figure out that the customer that you sold to is unhappy, the implementation was terrible, they don't want to renew, and they're telling people that it's a bad fit, you've done a lot of damage, right? So, you know, I would caution them just to say, look, let's, instead of going down that path, Let's try what we know. Let's go down this path. And if they're, if they're doing that because they aren't successful selling what we want them to sell in the way we want them to sell it, there's probably a bigger problem.

That's, that makes a lot of sense. Okay. So here back, just to double tap on that, that churn and ICP and deal health. Here's an example. HubSpot early on was having a 30% churn problem. They were trying to sell specifically email marketing, and they were just getting like— they were basically just being called a widget, right? And a very expensive widget at that. So they looked at what they were doing and they said, what is it that users actually are purchasing us for rather than what we think they're purchasing us for? And so then they were able to see that what people really wanted was that dashboard and the ability to manage all of their channels together, um, along with a more of a CRM type of component, and their churn drastically dropped. So in that case, was it the ICP that was off? Was it the understanding of the problem that was off? How would you picture that in terms of like a deal, deal health and understanding that?

I would probably have started off with what are we, what's the value proposition that we're selling? So what are we selling? Right. And if our sales message is, hey, we are, you know, we're this all-in-one CRM that does all the stuff that we don't do, that's where you have the biggest problem with customer satisfaction and churn is when they buy, is when they don't get what they think they got, what they wanted to buy. Right. There's a disconnect between what we sold and what was delivered. Right? That happens more frequently than you'd think, where during implementation people are like, wait a minute, this is different than what I thought. Right? And so you start off on the wrong foot right there. So if there's, that's what I would look at first is, is there a gap between what we are selling message and our value proposition versus what actually is the value proposition? That's where, that's where I think I would start.

Yeah, I think that's a really great call. What are some other things that you would say to people who are wanting to improve the deal health of their their deals?

Yeah, first things first is I would, again, following those simple frameworks that are out there, I would basically make sure that people understood that there's an ecosystem that's ready to support them. It's not— selling is not a single person's sport. It's a team sport, right? You have sales engineers that are out there that do more than just demos, right? They're the ones that actually understand how the rubber hits the road from a product perspective and what the customer needs. And usually they're a little bit better at understanding the strength of the value proposition for a particular prospect and then getting into, you know, how to capitalize on that. So you've got sales engineers, use them. You've got SDRs that can set the hook, use them. You've got product marketing people who are actually really interested in the sales message and is it working or is it not? Because that's their job is to like look at the market and see what the market needs. So they're going to be really interested in why we win, why we lose, all that kind of stuff. I say this because we just barely came out of our sales kickoff like most companies do in January. And, you know, one of our big focuses was we're selling, we're One-Iodine, we're selling together as a team and we're going to have every resource that we can to help our sellers. It's not just sales and occasionally a sales engineer, right? So we had finance, we had legal in there, we had marketing and product marketing in there, we had customer success in there, implementation teams there. Everybody that touches that particular customer, that deal, is, was there with their, you know, hand over their heart saying, yep, we're gonna, we're gonna do this together, right? So, you know, the analogy that I like is if you're a Formula 1 driver, you can, you're not going to win the race because of your pit crew, but you can absolutely lose the race with your pit crew.

That's right. Absolutely. Yeah. And you can't really even finish without your pit crew.

Exactly.

Yeah, I love that. That's a great analogy. So what, how does AI influence how, you know, we would assess a deal and the health of the deal? Are there any tools that you're using right now that you think are really super effective?

Yeah, it's a great question. And I think, you know, the first thing I would say is we should be careful with how we term, what we term as AI, right? Because it's a very ubiquitous term right now. Everybody says they have it. Everybody uses it. A lot of time it's the difference between machine learning and, you know, natural languages and stuff like that versus true statistical-based data science AI, right? And so, um, it's all over the place. You gotta be kind of careful what you choose. But we have, um, look, you can have AI in your entire sales process from, from soup to nuts, including from, you know, marketing and, and outbound prospecting. We use AI to help us with generative, uh, AI content and And it's fun. It's super interesting. I'll give you a couple of examples. In my last company, I had a, I worked with a really great demand gen director and he had all of his SDRs had ChatGPT, like the subscription with ChatGPT-4, I think it was when it first came out. He had them go through and dump in 10-Ks and annual reports of companies, big public companies, and they would synthesize all this data and they would say, give me the top 3 pain points of this company that they mentioned in their 10-K, and it would spit it out like that. Boom. Then they would take that and they would go and put that into prospecting emails for that hyper-personalization. One of the people actually responded very quickly and said, it's like I wrote this myself. Turns out he had written the 10-K, right? And so, so that as far as data consumption and assimilation of information, AI can be super helpful for, for that perspective. I would encourage people to, especially if you're working with big public companies or companies that have, you know, documentation that's out there, you can, you can use that to, to kind of consume that data. But that's just one example of it. Look, we have, you can use AI in, in forecasting, right? A lot of different platforms out there that will say they're using AI to, to give you a deal score or health score opportunity, right? Reality of it is a lot of times that's really just more of a, of an activity score of does this opportunity have activity in Salesforce? And if it does, they assume that that's progressing, right? Kind of AI, kind of not AI. Get into that. But you can use, like I said, use it for forecasting. You can use it for top of funnel. You can use it for content management. We have, I'm looking at a tool right now that there's a lot of marketing and product marketing and internal documentation, sales pitches, a lot of stuff out there on, on shared drives in companies that sales reps have a hard time sifting through what's what, what's new, what's internal, what's external. And you can have platforms that integrate AI into that to serve up the right content at the right time and then again turn it into prospecting type of content or material. So all over the place.

Yeah, absolutely. And some of the things that we don't even think about in terms of it being AI-based, like Google Ads for example, we think, oh, here's my Google ad, but it— that is absolutely infused with machine learning and generative content. And at this point now, ads are most effective when you basically say, take a look at my website. I just started one today, for example. Take a look at my website, pull out the relevant terms, and do a dynamic search ad for me, and let's compare what's working the best.

Interesting.

That's, that's a very, very common use case right now for Google Ads, and we don't even really think of Google Ads as AI like they are. So anyway, it's very interesting. So I love what you were saying about it. Absolutely. And just like being able to take kind of like an, a lens on how do I improve the productivity of my team through AI? How do I, how do I get 90% of the way there and then allow them to finish. And one of my personal perspectives is when it comes to SDRs, because I run the SDR team as well at Fullcast, if it feels like they're sending spam messages and it's not a real person, people will shut down right away. Don't you agree?

Oh, 100%. And you can see it coming a mile away.

You can. You can. And you can see the content coming from a mile away. That's GenAI. But if you can get them, like the use case you just barely delivered, which is brilliant, where you do all— AI does all the research for them. They're their extra octopus arms or whatever, and then they take it all the way to the goal line with, with the personalized touch. I think that that is where we're going to see AI be most effective.

You know, I agree. And, you know, the thought just occurred to me, Amy, is that AI is actually not just on the seller side, but think about how people are buying nowadays. And I don't know if you're familiar with Challenger Sale and the big blue arrow of how people are educating themselves before they ever contact sales.

Well, that was—

how long ago was that? That was what, 10 years ago that that came out? Kind of pre-ChatGPTs. Now, and, and even like you said, Google, the, the amazing thing is when I Google something, I get an AI attempted response from Google first before I ever see ads and links and stuff like that. And I read it, it's, it's surprisingly good, but that's going to influence the information that people consume and how they're educating themselves. And so things like how, you know, how our marketing teams are putting blog posts that have differentiators outlined that that AI can then consume and spit back to a buyer to say, oh, if you're looking for whatever, if you're looking for healthcare software like, like Iodine does, here's what I'm looking for and here's, you know, 3 things to consider. So people are going to get educated differently because of AI and our sellers are going to have to understand that. And be able to respond to that. I love that because AI can— it's not always accurate. It can deliver some bad information to you.

It can. And in training the GPT, training OpenAI is also a whole other thing that we don't have time to talk about today, but it's also a very interesting use case. So, all right. Well, Rob, thank you so much for your time. I've taken a lot of it. It's so exciting to talk with you about all of the cool things that are happening within such an amazing burgeoning group of people that is really defining an industry. My last question for you is, you're clearly at the top of your game. What do you do to stay there? What are you doing to stay at the top of your game, whether it's your favorite beverage or taking walks or educating yourself on certain aspects?

All right, uh, yeah, that's a great question. You know what, honestly, to stay at the top of my game, I surround myself with smart people who have done this kind of stuff before, and we have a lot of engaging debates about the right way to do things. And, you know, part of that is the way we've always done things and should we continue to do things that way. So there's a lot of, there's a lot of tendency for people just to say, this is how we've always done it, right? And it's changing and you can't do that anymore, right? So there, but as far as RevOps goes, there's a lot of great sources out there that are, you know, and a lot of communities that are springing up out there of RevOps professionals. Again, it's kind of a new discipline. So RevOps professionals who are willing to share ideas. I love, I love the RevOps Co-op. I love Selling Brew. So just things like that. And then, you know, you find people all over the place who are, who reach out to me on LinkedIn and they're like, hey, I want to get into RevOps. What do I do? And, you know, just find your groups and, and get out there. It's fun stuff.

Awesome. Well, thank you again, Rob. Really appreciate your time and hope you have a wonderful day.

Thanks a lot for the invitation. My pleasure.

Business is that business. Business is that business.