Steve Settle: Grand Slam RevOps Begins With Team Alignment

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 Steve Settle, Senior Director of Revenue Operations at Customer.io, the all-in-one customer engagement platform. Steve, how are you?

Doing well. How are you doing?

I'm doing well. Thank you so much for joining us today. It is so much fun to be able to connect with you, and we've had some really fun conversations prior to this that I'm so excited to talk about.

I agree. I agree. I'm looking forward to this.

Yes, me too. I also have to tell you, you look so good against your background with all the blues and grays. I just think— Well, thank you. Thank you. Whoever's doing your decorating is doing a fabulous job.

I cannot take credit for it, but thank you very much.

I love it. Well, so Steve, can you tell us just a little bit about your background first, just to position the conversation?

Yeah, of course. So my background's pretty simple. I've been in about 20 years of in the industry experience. I started really kind of with a lot of finance background, around 10 years in finance. So think different facets of finance through engineering, supporting sales, supporting— actually got my CPA as well. Then dove into operations, which I've been spending about 10 years in operations, kind of working my way down from— I started at Adobe, worked my way to SurveyMonkey, and now I'm sitting with CustomerIO. So you can think about the different stages of a company's journey. I've been going from the larger companies, obviously down to CustomerIO, which is a, a much smaller company sitting really square into the growth phase right now.

That is so awesome that you have a, a very cool view of sales and marketing from a finance background and an operations background. I come from a very strong marketing background, do not have a finance background, but I ran an agency for 15 years and so I had to really think from a finance perspective because because gotta keep the business running and have the financials be sound, right? So as we're having this conversation today about aligning sales and marketing, I'm so excited to hear it from your perspective. I don't think I've ever done this before.

Yeah, it's something I'm really passionate about, and I think as my career has gone on, I've really recognized how important that you can be running as a business okay with not being fully aligned, but when you got it fully aligned, the teams are working together really well. It is a significant improvement, not just working within the company, but for the customer experience. And so that's why to me, I'm so passionate about it and feel that when it's going well, it makes a really big difference for your prospects and customers.

Hmm. Very interesting. What is the first sign that something's awry? How do you know when something's misaligned?

I think from my experience of working with both organizations is when you're talking to, like, account executives, for example, and they're not aware of campaigns that are being run, they're not aware of initiatives that are happening, or even just, why did I receive this lead? What type of event did my prospect go to? And therefore they don't know how to actually pull the thread through for the customer experience. And so the customer is talking to an account executive who does not really understand what brought them there, and therefore it starts to create this rigid experience, right? And so as well from there, if we're not also connected through to the post-sales experience, then you have a disconnect between pre-sales handing off to post-sales and not providing that context through to them. So obviously you can see the value of, yes, marketing and sales, and then continuing to pull the thread through the post-sales. But you got to start top of funnel first.

Hmm. That makes so much sense. And just from a marketing perspective too, I love what you were saying about the rigidity. At Fullcast, it's really a priority for us to have our go-to-market aligned, and we talk very easily and well. But I've been at companies that are so siloed, and maybe it's because of the size of the organization, maybe it's because of the people who have the roles in the organization, or it could be the processes or the technology, but for some reason I'm not even allowed to know what the target companies are in sales. Yeah. How am I supposed to do campaigns when I don't even know who we're trying to reach out to from a sales perspective? And so, you know, things can get so difficult. And then on the customer experience side, if they don't know what the salesperson has sold them, how are they supposed to deliver and how are they supposed to be good customers for Amy Cook?

Exactly. And I feel like what I've learned over time is not every company is set up, or at least the expectations upon where the company is at in the journey at that point, it doesn't necessarily mean like what good looks like can change. Because to say from an early-stage company, good looks a little bit different than when you get into a more of a growth phase company versus a mature phase company. So I would say going to different size companies that I have, I've really noticed that what good looks like is different. And sometimes that's okay based on the evolution of where the company's at at that point.

Hmm. Interesting. So you talk a lot about evolution and we've mentioned size of the company. Mm-hmm. Does alignment look different to you at different stages? How do you think about it in terms of stage?

Yeah, I mean, I'm gonna simplify it in early stage, growth phase, and then also mature phase, cuz really that's been a lot of my experience. As I look at early stage, if you think about what the business needs at that point, it's really establishing product market fit. It's establishing building awareness of the product. So that's how you look at both from the marketing and sales side. From, you know, the marketing side, they're going to provide the insights into what are our target customers that we're going to go after? What is the messaging that we're going to use? And so they're going to start to build that out, right? But also why sales complements that, because they also can provide the feedback of what's actually resonating with the people that they're talking to. But if they're misaligned, then you're not going to get that feedback loop. And so that's why the cohesion between the teams is really important. And usually these are smaller companies. And so if you don't have that, it's actually a really big miss. So I think about it there in the sense of when you talk about early stage and then RevOps obviously plays a role in that as well too. But when you transition into it, when you start talking about then the growth phase, Well, now you start talking about demand generation and starting to build out that muscle. And so the way that I start to think about it is you've kind of defined then the ICP that you're going to be working within. And so continuous feedback as well too. Once again, you're also starting to solve for scalability at that point too. So these are just different aspects that, yes, we go define the ICP maybe a little bit earlier on, but now you're starting to say, okay, how can we actually start to scale our efforts? In reaching out to this ICP and starting to create more predictable, consistent revenue streams.

That's so interesting. So as an operations person, how do you build for scale with processes without making it so rigid that people feel like cogs in a wheel or feel like they don't communicate well?

Yeah, I think continuously where we're at right now, the company that I'm at, we continue to talk about We're a customer-led company. And so I think when you start to make sure that everything you're doing, you're trying to take the lens of how is the customer going to actually view this process, how the customer is going to interact with this process, that at least solves for the experience part of it. But then we start to think about scale. That's why then working cross-departmentally, I can create something that works for maybe a a sales operations process, but then when you start to think about the marketing operations process, that's where you have to work cross-functionally because there is so much interconnectedness as you think about the entire customer journey that if you just solve for one part in the journey, it starts to really, it could create that rigidity that you just don't anticipate until maybe a little bit later on.

Interesting.

And so scalability, it has to be You also driven with connectedness across your org.

That makes a lot of sense. When you implement a process, let's say, that's like across the go-to-market, how do you typically communicate it out? Do you have a meeting with sales and marketing and ops and customer success? Do you have standard SOPs that you have people follow? How do you typically do that in a way that's— people will stay connected as you're trying to scale?

Yeah. No, that's a great question. Typical, if you think about across both of those teams, a lot of us, we do start with the executive level just to ensure here is what our objectives are and just in general. But then when you start to break it down and get into an actual project, I think the important thing for us is yes, we do kind of create more of those broader kind of communication channels just to make sure that everyone's informed of what we're working on. But then you start to create, yes, the smaller working groups that are actually driving the initiative forward, right? And so from that, then you got to keep everyone else still informed. And a lot of times of what I've experienced is that even just through just that awareness of I need to keep these other groups informed, even though they're not actually involved in building and driving these processes, if you just keep them informed, there's a lot of stuff that usually comes up from that, that it's like, wow, okay, I wouldn't have thought of that if I had not kept you in the loop.

I love the way that you're structuring this operationally. So as you scale, everything stays transparent where everyone can communicate. What happens when you get more to enterprise where, you know, things are more stable?

Yeah, and, and that's where I think it's interesting because you do really start to find more of the silos in the enterprise side. And what I mean by that is the groups are getting bigger. You got essentially people who get into more of those defined lanes, right? So it is actually a lot more challenging to continue to orchestrate the threads across it because the teams get very good at what they do. But then they also, a lot of times you create these blind spots because they get very good. But then the challenge is cross-departmental communication. There's a lot more people involved, right? And it gets more complex because you're now starting to bring in talent from other companies as well too. So they start to build up their muscle and discipline, and that's great. That's great. But then the challenge becomes is how do you stay connected?

Because I think that's such a huge problem, like just from working at a couple of large enterprises that I won't name, it is so, so difficult to know what someone else is doing in that enterprise. So anyway, keep going. This is so interesting.

Yeah. So that's why you do pull together a lot of like project management functions, right? Because they understand these models. They understand the RACI, DACI models that allow to essentially create these channels to communicate back to other groups. That's why sometimes you have more chief of staffs in these type of companies because they are responsible for trying to keep the communication going back and forth. So while that's a great thing, at the same time, I would say unless a project manager has gotten into the details of all the projects and is really a resident expert, there does pose a risk that you're not getting to the level of depth that you might need to across departments. And so that's why it's like the evolution as you see between, as we were talking about with essentially kind of like a startup phase to a growth phase to a mature phase, there are different challenges because in the initial phases you're really working alongside the one person sitting within the sales operations team. You got one person in the marketing operations team. It's just a much smaller environment. And so you're kind of by nature wearing the same hats.

Talking to each other. Yeah, exactly. Right now. Fullcast is small. I'm in charge of inside sales, marketing, and partners. So I can say, Amy, should we do this as a partner marketing? Yes, we should. And, and as we grow, those are going to be different people who are going to be responsible for each of those functions. And so I see that. Is there any kind of analogy that you can think of that really articulates what we're talking about with those stages?

Yeah, I think about from a stage perspective, right? Maybe the collaboration might not work so well with this one, but I've been a Little League baseball coach for the last 10 years. So I've seen it all. I've seen it.

I'm sure you have. Like, first of all, bless you because that is a hard job.

Yeah, I know there's probably some stigmas around baseball and people standing in the outfield. Anyway, put that aside. I deal with 4-year-olds all the way up to 12, sometimes 13-year-olds. Um, and so I've seen it all, sometimes even seen diapers on the T-ball field. It has happened before.

Oh my gosh.

Okay. But what I would say is I like to think about the early stages of a company when you start to really lean into the early stage of T-ball. T-ball is you simplify everything, right? You have a tee that you actually put on top of home plate that you put out there and really You stabilize, the ball is not moving anymore.

Uh-huh.

You essentially have a coach walking up to them.

A lot of handholding.

Handholding them, putting right next to the base and say, swing. And so they start to do circles and eventually they hit the ball. And then once they hit the ball, then everyone's pointing, okay, run to that base. And, and sometimes they run to the opposite base until the coach cuts 'em off and brings 'em over. So I, I think sometimes a lot of that is, it's very simple as like you start to think of an early stage company, like, yes, you have to really, I, I totally see that we have an early stage company and there's a lot of handholding going on right now.

And oh yeah, it is. It's so, it's so interesting. I just remember when my son was in Little League and we had— this is totally off topic, but he would run to the wrong base sometimes, just like you're talking about.

Yes.

One time he just was not very good at baseball. Hopefully he's not listening to this. He's good at other things, but he was like 6 years old and the coach didn't know what to do with him. And so he was like, okay, just stand on center plate and then if the ball comes past you, just throw to first. Do that. And he's like, okay, okay, I got this. So anyway, the ball rolled right past him, but it was like 3 feet away. And I was like, Jacob, how come you didn't just go throw the ball to first? How could the coach told you to go pick it up? He's like, the coach told me to stay on the plate. And so he took it very, very literally. And I only mentioned that because I feel like, I feel like that way sometimes where, and I'm in an early stage and I'm like trying to do my job, trying to do exactly what's right. And sometimes I just should have gone 3 steps away and picked up the ball and thrown it to first.

So, yeah. A lot of people that are in those environments love those environments. There's some people like myself that came from more established environments. And so you're kind of coming into this with sometimes being like, that's the direction that we need to go. Let's define the ICP. Let's define our focus. And so our experience, which I I've loved, um, where I'm at is that it was a very much marketing-led, here's our ICP, here's the set of accounts we're gonna put into Salesforce to drive your focus for the sales organization. It was beautiful because then it creates this like, all right, that almost like you have to kind of create that tunnel vision in a way to keep everyone aligned.

Okay. Let's go back to this analogy cuz it's so much fun. Sure. What, what's a growth stage like?

Yeah, so I would say growth stage is kind of like when you start to introduce kid pitch. So kid pitch is probably, you know, T-ball, and you've got about 2, 3 more years after that. And I like to say it's one of those phases in Little League that can be one of the most painful phases to experience because you've got kids being brave, getting up there on the mound, picking up the ball, they throw it, and you don't know if it's going to hit the kid. You don't know if it's going to hit the backstop. You don't know if it's going to reach halfway to the plate. And if it hits the catcher's glove, you're excited, but you don't even know if that's a strike. So there's a little bit more refinement to that when we think about the growth phase. But the idea there is, is, yeah, you're starting to really try new things. You've defined your ICP. Now you're trying to create that demand generation engine to say, okay, what's going to work? What campaigns can we run? What can we do? That's going to really accelerate our growth. And that's what I loved about it, cuz I just came out of first time Coach Pitch again, second time for this last year. And I love seeing these kids from the beginning of the year to the end of the year, the amount of growth that you see that year. It's like a treat to be able to witness.

That's so cool. I love that. How fun. And so taking the analogy a step further, as a marketer, I can totally see if I'm the kid throwing the pitch. Aka releasing a campaign, I can have one that's all the way out, you know, completely in the stands. I might have missed my ICP. I may have said something that just didn't resonate or whatever. And every once in a while I'll get it in the catcher's glove and it'll be beautiful.

Yeah, a lot of it is testing. You're sometimes testing outside your ICP to see will we play differently in this different market? And that's good because you're trying to unlock. In a lot of these cases. You found something that's working, you defined this is our ICP, but then you're also trying to continue to push the envelope.

Right.

Yeah.

Oh, I love that. Oh, okay. So then what is, uh, like a, a large stable company like?

Uh, the major leagues? No, um, just kidding. I've only been in Little League, so it is what we call our major league for 12-year-olds. But for us, it is now you're starting to see what baseball looks like. You get a kid that's up on the mound and now he's actually delivering pitches that you expect to go over home plate and not hit the backstop and not hit the kid. So you've really started to narrow in and now it's about the tweaking. It's about the, all right, I've now want to talk to you about the different side of home plate that I want you to focus on. I want you to focus over here and. When I start thinking about more mature companies, you are starting to think about, okay, well, what's these upsell opportunities? We've gotten a good base of customers we're working off of. So how do we continue to get more out of the relationship? It's about refinement. And so that's kind of how I would kind of categorize it. And I think about it even from, even from the baseball analogy.

Oh, I love that. Very interesting. So I'm just picturing this in my mind and it's a really, really good analogy. And I think of myself as one of the kids trying to learn how to do it. And I think of you as the RevOps leader, as the coach. And I think there's a really good analogy in that way too, because you see things across the board, right? And you're kind of trying to put the team together. And so my last question for you related to this is what do you do as an operations lead besides the communication that we've talked at length about? To put the right people in the right places?

It comes back always to the customer. It is making sure that I, as an operations lead, leading the teams of people who are embedded within these functions, that we are continuously going back to the customer. But it's also in the mindset as well as like, how are we driving as independents as well too? Because I think if you continue to just focus on— if you're just focusing only on communication, that's part of it, right? But we have to build the processes, we have to build the infrastructures. I think about it from like a business systems architecture. I think about it from a process architecture, building programs. And when you think about, as you get to more mature stage companies, how do I build programs that support a journey that we are all excited about to bring our customers along on? And so it is making sure that we're building those programs that do support a journey that we want our customers to go on. But it also is done, like I said, with an independence type mindset as well too. We partner very closely with all these orgs, and at the same time, we need to make sure that we're also driving our independence mindset, making sure that we are doing it for customers.

Mm-hmm. Oh, I love that. So. Let's think of the customers as maybe the people in the stands.

Yeah.

We're playing the game for them, right? Or back to Little League, maybe they're the parents, right?

Oh, don't go there about the parents. Just kidding. I love the parents for everyone listening to this.

Of course. Of course.

Yeah.

But I really, really enjoy this analogy. And baseball is a perfect sport for this too, because there's a level of independence. Within each position where you have to perform well yourself. And there's a huge level of interdependence where you have to work together.

It is one of the most individualized team sports I know of out there because only one person gets in the batter's box. Only one person stands on the pitcher's mound.

Yeah.

But it also is important to recognize, yes, the team in that as well too, because that one person sitting on the mound needs to know that everybody's behind them. That they can do their job confidently, that, hey, I put the ball over that plate like my coach has been telling me, and I have a defense that can support me. And so, yes, across an organization has to be the same is, yes, I am focused on my discipline, but it's not so much, even more so about the discipline I have right here. But everyone uses this analogy, it's a flywheel. Like, we have to really consider, as I work on this, how does it affect this? How does it provide feedback back to me, continuous improvement.

I love that. Well, clearly you're at the top of your game in both Little League coaching as well as revenue operations.

Thank you.

So thank you so much for being willing to join me. I found this such an insightful conversation for me personally as a marketer as well. Okay, so this is really truly my last question. How do you stay on the top of your game?

Yeah, for me, it's trying to understand, number one, the industry that we're in. That's really important just to really know of the teams that I partner with, what are the things that are really top of mind for them? Additionally, I try to join community groups. One is Modern Sales Pros. That's one that's a really RevOps-focused podcast. So there's some podcasts out there that I'll, I'll tap into around like the go-to-market side. Just hearing people's stories about the unique challenges that they're facing. LinkedIn's always a good source as well too, that I like to dig through quite a bit. I would say for me, trying to continuously understand where my organization is facing its challenges, that's where I like to make sure that I'm learning from them as well as trying to understand what's going on in the industry too.

I love that. And that's such a perfect way to end with our discussion about community. And thank you so much, Steve. It is just such a pleasure to have you and I really appreciate your time.

Of course.