Roee Hartuv: Forget the Tools—Talk Strategy, Instead

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 and Silicon Slopes. My name is Amy Cook, and I am so excited to introduce Roey Hartov, Senior Pricing Advisor and Head of Go-to-Market Expertise at Willingness to Pay. Roey, how are you?

I'm doing well. Thank you for having me.

Great. I'm so happy that you are here. Where are you hailing in from?

Berlin, Germany.

Oh, wow. That's wonderful. Is it— what time is it there? This is kind of a midnight podcast for you, isn't it?

7 PM.

Not— okay. All right. Not too bad. That's great. So are you from Berlin originally?

No, I'm from Israel originally. Moved to Germany. Yeah.

And yeah, that's great. Love it. That's wonderful. So tell me a little bit about your background and your journey in go-to-market.

Yeah, actually have a BA in computer science, but I never coded for money in my life. So I just coded in university. And then when I graduated, I actually got into sales engineering or pre-sale engineering role.

Mm-hmm.

Uh, which was a good combination of my engineering background and what I wanted to do is, is talk to customers or prospects.

Yeah.

But very, I did that for a year or two and then I, why do I need the salesperson? I could just do the entire sales process myself and I got the, the opportunity to do that and jumped into a full sales role and then climbed my way up, regular team lead and then heading sales at a few startups. And then 20— that was around 6 years ago. The last company I worked for, we ran out of money. It was the beginning of COVID and then I decided, all right, let's just do advisory and try to help companies based on my experience. And that's what I've been doing ever since.

That's wonderful. I love that. So tell me, based on your experience, I mean, you and I, even just since COVID have been in a whirlwind of change in GoDaddy, right? I mean, COVID, like digital transformation, just like hit us like a wrecking ball with COVID right? And then AI hit us with another wrecking ball. And so we are just like, you know, like all of the playbooks that we've had even in the past 5 years are in large part defunct.

Yeah.

We are trying to innovate and figure it out. So tell me, Roei, what have you figured out that the rest of us need to know?

I'm still trying to figure that out. I don't know if I found the magic secret, but you're absolutely right. The market is changing so fast. In the beginning, COVID hit and then it was all about, yeah, trying to work remotely. And that was the biggest change in go-to-market. And then soon after, we thought the market are slowing down, but instead they were actually on steroids and everybody was selling remotely. Everybody was selling SaaS, was selling to SaaS, and all of a sudden the market was exploding. But then the pandemic ended and growth started to stall for a lot of companies. And then we had to let go of a lot of people. And then it was all about cost cutting. And then at some point it went back, okay, that was fine for a year or two. Now the investors are, our board members wanted us to continue to grow. But right now you, you are back to growth mode, but not with the same kind of expenses that we had. And that was for a while. And then in the past year, AI, everything is changing so rapidly. So we're back to that. Stellar growth, and we all heard of those successful companies that are growing like crazy, and that's becoming, yeah, I wouldn't say the norm, but this is where companies want to be, right? Going from 0 to 100 million ARR in 18 months, 12 months with 4 people in the go-to-market team or with no go-to-market team. That's, that's so crazy. Yeah.

It is crazy to me. And the other thing that is so interesting, I love the way that you put that. I was the CMO of an AWS partner partially during COVID and I watched Amazon and all these other companies like hire 70% more people because of all of the changes in the remote work. And I found that fascinating, right? But it has to come down at some point. So, right? So then they started cutting everybody and everyone was like, layoff, layoff, layoff. But really they were still above pre-pandemic levels. That's what was crazy to me is that they were, whoop, boop. And I'm like, how are the smartest people in the world not understanding basic go-to-market dynamics, right? Where you're gonna have to come back down. And then just like you said, the remote work was such a big part of it, and then AI was such a big part of it. And so with the efficient growth mandate coming, the next thing that boggles my mind is how are we growing AI companies so fast when there is not a really strong play yet for a lot of AI effectiveness? Do you agree with me on this?

I completely agree with you. And this comes back to the entire conversation that is happening every day now, is this a bubble?

Yeah.

And yeah, I tend to think that, yeah, it's— there's something, there's something right there. So much money poured into that space. And you're right, I don't think we saw big use cases that They last, I don't know. A lot of them make an initial impact. Do they actually do a longer, a long, like a sustainable impact? I'm not sure.

Yeah, I agree. And I obviously there's so much there with AI that some things are going to rise to the top and some are not going to be. So my personal opinion is that this is going to be a lot like the tech, like the tech bubble, the dot-com bubble, where some companies are going to just insanely go to the top and willingness to pay will be one of them, right? And so, but going back to some of the go-to-market stuff in general, how are you seeing the people dynamics? We've talked a lot about the people and how teams are structured. Should they continue to be structured the way they were before, or is this AI and digital transformation piece upending that as well?

So first of all, I don't know because we haven't seen a solution that I believe is sustainable that can completely change how we go to market. However, there's a fundamental problem with go-to-market that still from the SaaS times, the way companies are built, we're built on different departments, right? We've got the marketing team, they're responsible for lead generation, create awareness, and then we've got the sales team. The sales teams take those leads and convert them into paying customers. And then we might have an onboarding team and then a customer success team. Each different department has a different role and different responsibilities, but that, that handover creates friction. They create friction both for the customer, because when you think of it, the customer, we know that the customer journey is not linear, but it starts from one point and then ends up at a different point. And throughout that journey, from a customer perspective, and we all experience that as buyers, you are being handed over between one team to the other, and that creates friction for you as a buyer. Also internally, we're built based on departments and there's always this friction. How many times have we heard that beef between marketing and sales? Marketing, you're not following up on our leads fast enough. That's what marketing says to sales and sales says to Marketing, well, your leads that you're generating are, are, are not good crap, right? That's one thing. And sales and customer success. How many times have we heard, you know, the, the, the contracts that you're closing are not in line with your overpromising and are not in line what we can actually deliver. And then says, hey, I handed over a paying customer and you guys lost them. So is that constant beef that, that happens and it is because how we're structured as organizations. And I think this is one of the biggest challenges, or if we can unsolve that, we will get to unpack a lot of potential, a lot of inefficiencies that happen because of this structure and create one coherent go-to-market approach between the different departments.

Mm. I love that. So what would you suggest doing to structure differently?

Yeah, I believe that we should adapt principles from system thinking. System thinking has been in manufacturing for a long time, developed in the '70s from the academia, and then it was brought into manufacturing. It was the first industry. But basically system thinking says that every complex organization, not organization, but process can be broken down into systems and subsystems.

Mm-hmm.

And those subsystems are basically the customer journey that we're experiencing, the awareness, the education, the selection, et cetera. And if each system has a defined input and an output, this allows us to eliminate some of the friction that I just explained. Interesting. Got it.

Yeah. Can you give me an example of that?

So we all know them, right? Like when you think of it, let's say sales takes leads from marketing and the output is paying customers. Right. And when we look at it from a systematic point of view and create clear criteria as what is an input. And what is a high-quality output that we expect and create that for every system and subsystem within the go-to-market strategy, this is how we start to eliminate those inefficiencies that we see. So it's a lot about coordinating between the different systems, departments in this example. But yeah, there's a lot.

Interesting. Do you think that there should be, here's one question based on your systems thinking. Some people want to have the CMO and the Chief Sales Officer or CRO report to the CEO. Other people want to have the CRO report to the CEO and then marketing, sales, and sometimes customer success report to the CRO. What's your opinion?

My opinion is that right now we don't have one person that is responsible for the entire system, the entire customer journey. And I don't care if that person is a CMO, is a CRO, chief customer officer, like Hotspot has it, as long as somebody oversees the entire customer journey. Because let's, let's face it, a CRO is usually an ex-VP of sales that was promoted into C-level.

Yeah.

I grew up back in the university, I was in my MBA, I was taught the CMO in traditional companies oversees the entire customer journey and actually sales is a division within the marketing team, right? That's classical structure. So it doesn't really matter as long as you have somebody that overlooks the entire customer journey. But until we fix that, by the way, your audience are— some of them are RevOps. And I think the only role within the current structures that sees the entire customer journeys is RevOps, right? And RevOps in the new way of looking at RevOps, not sales ops or not marketing ops, customer success, like RevOps that looks at the entire customer journey. And that's why I'm advocating for RevOps to, yeah, to exit their shell and to move from, hey, I'm just creating dashboards and reports to the CRO or whoever to take more of a strategic role because they are the only ones who look at that, that entire system, that entire customer journey.

Mm. I love that. So what do you think a RevOps person could do to better prepare for like that particular role of overseeing the customer journey?

Yeah, great question. So I would say what they should not do, or what should they stop doing? They should stop They should stop talking about tools.

Okay. I agree with that a million percent, but tell me why.

Why? Because when the, every time that you talk to your CRO and you talk about this CRM or this lead generation or Clay or whatever new tool is out there, this is where they shut off because they're, they want to hear strategy. They all don't want to hear about tools. They don't want to hear about what in their mind is costs. So if head of RevOps can elevate the conversation from those tools into that strategic mindset. Hey, if we implement that, and it doesn't matter the specific tool, but if we implement this process or we do this change, that will increase our revenue, our quality, our lead conversion, et cetera. This is the type of conversation that the CRO want to have with the RevOps. So from that technical tool level into that strategy, talk about impact, let's talk about business outcomes. That's the type of conversation they need to have.

That's excellent advice. Do you think that most CROs don't really care what tool it is, or do you think that most want to have the strategy conversation first and then also be involved in the tool discussion?

It depends. Like, everybody has their opinion of which CRM and which marketing tool and which— do we need a customer success? So I I think CROs want to have that conversation, but is it, is it really important? Yeah, from an operational point of view, but let the RevOps take care of that. Like, I don't think that's a conversation the CRO has to, should have, say that.

Okay, that makes sense. So when you're a CRO, when you are the head of RevOps and you're talking to the CRO, focus on the strategy, focus on the outcomes, be ready to talk about the tools if they want to dive deep, but don't necessarily lead with that. Is that— Yes.

And I would just add, maybe add numbers, dollars, revenue, win rate. That's the level. That's the type of conversation that you want to have.

I love that.

And remember, RevOps are the only people in the organization or the current structure that see that entire customer journey. So, giving that perspective on what happens in the different departments, on trying to connect results that happen in one department that you can trace back to another department, that's the added value that RevOps can bring to the table.

I love that. It's the connective tissue sinking in between. And pulling it through. That's awesome. Well, clearly you know exactly what you're talking about and are at the top of your game. And I was wondering, what do you do to stay there? Do you have some strategies? Do you cold plunge? Do you, you know, get up early? What is your strategy for that?

I do. I'm trying to take cold plunges, but not successfully. I have the privilege. I'm an advisor, right? So I work with a lot of companies. That's how I stay top of my game. I mean, I get a chance to see good companies, bad companies, small companies, companies in this space and companies in other space. And honestly, I think this is why I love my job so much because every project, every customer is different and I get to learn. And don't tell that to my customers. In a lot of cases, I learn more than I actually teach or advise. But yeah, that, that's how I stay. And, and from time to time, I get to work with such outstanding individuals that have, that really know their stuff.

Mm-hmm.

Fantastic.

I feel the same way. I spent many years, 15 years as an advisor and consultant as well. And it's amazing how much of what we talk about is fundamentals and how applicable it is between company sizes, between industries. There are some core principles that everybody needs. And then I learned so much and so much applies to other companies as well. Yeah, great advice. Well, thank you so much, Froey. This was an amazing discussion. I really appreciate all of your, you know, we did broad level macro and we went deep into tips, and I really appreciated the incredible value that you offered for our listeners. So thank you so much.

Fantastic.

Thank you for having me.