Winning Together: Tyler Morrow’s Secrets to Motivating Your RevOps Team

Business. Business.

Business.

Business. 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 sponsored by Fulcast, the Go-To-Market Cloud. And my name is Dr. Amy Cook. I am the co-founder and CMO of Fulcast. Today I am so excited to introduce Tyler Morrow, a sales leader at Qualtrics. Tyler, how are you doing?

I'm good. How are you?

Good. I'm so excited that you're here with us today. It is. It's been so fun to get to know you a little bit. I also want to find out a lot of the dirt on my other co-founders, Isaac and Ryan Westwood, who you know very well. So we'll have to save a section of that podcast just for the dirt.

That's its own podcast. So yeah, that's great.

Well, Tyler, tell me just a little bit about your background. Now, one thing I'm so excited about for this podcast is we're doing a lot with RevOps, but I'm also so excited to pull in your sales perspective as a sales leader as it relates to RevOps and pull on some of the threads of what may or may not be working. So, um, I'm really excited about that.

Yeah, so I actually got my start in software through Isaac and Ryan. So I had been working in a B2B manufacturing job for about 7 years, and just knew I wanted to be in software because software is where at, at a young age, you can actually make a really good income. And so I got introduced to Qualtrics through Isaac and Ryan, and then just slowly went from an SDR back in 2013. 11 years later now running one of the teams at Qualtrics. So it's been fun. It's been a lot of changes in 11 years at Qualtrics with like 3 different exits, but I'm still at the same company. So.

That is so interesting.

It's been a unique ride.

Oh, absolutely. And you're one of the success stories where, you know, that's every SDR's dream is to be able to go become an AE from an SDR and then continue to advance your career that way. And, you know, I think just as a co-founder and a business owner, I think that that is the absolute best path for an AE because you know how to prospect yourself, you can build your own pipeline and you know how to work with other departments really well.

Well, and you, you, it's one of the one industries where I'd say, um, you have to have some experience at a very, very junior role like an SDR to to make your way up the ladder. Originally, I had Isaac introduced me to someone at Adobe, and his first response was, you got to start somewhere before you come to Adobe. So I said, all right, we'll go somewhere smaller. And then I decided never to leave. So I just haven't left. I love it.

What did you want to say to that person at Adobe? Neeneneenee? Kind of.

Kind of. But, you know, Adobe is a good company. There's lots of people that I worked with at Qualtrics have gone, and lots of people we've hired from Adobe. So it's not bad. But it's one of those ones where it's like the moment I saw it, and saw the grass at Qualtrics, I was like, I don't think it's much greener really anywhere else.

Anywhere else. Oh, I think that's really amazing, and it speaks to your success. It's not often that you see a salesperson become a sales leader and stay at the same company for 11 years. So Qualtrics must be doing something really special to allow you to be able to stay there for that amount of time.

Yeah, it does. I mean, it's one of the one The one of my main advice or anything I'd give anybody that I go out to lunch with or hang out with is if you can go to a company and the product sells itself, you can learn to put up with everything else at the company, right? And Qualtrics for the longest time has been the leader in what it does and it still is. So it's like no matter what I have opportunity in front of me, it comes down to is the product on par or is the product or are you the underdog and you're now having to really, really work at it. So no, Qualtrics hasn't really changed and I wish everybody well that I know that's moved on, but I know a lot of people that are on their second or third or fourth job since leaving Qualtrics, which— that's not me.

Yeah. Well, how cool to be able to be there from the beginning and watch it grow and expand and grow with it. And in so doing, I'm sure that you've had a whole heck of a lot of planning cycles that you've had to be part of, right?

A few, yeah.

So you are no stranger to that. And one of the things that we were going to talk about today was kind of best practices for that. I think that you at Qualtrics, as a sales leader, have you built something that is kind of like a blueprint or some best practices for that?

Yeah, no, I definitely have best practices that I share with everybody as it relates to annual planning, as it relates to territory planning. I mean, people call it a little bit of everything. But depending on who this is going to reach, you know, everybody is going to say my case is different, my case is unique, I'm in a different type of software, I'm in a different type of sales model. And so the caveat I would say is every single answer that I would give or anybody else would give starts with it depends, which is kind of a— it's a way of saying like everybody has probably found their own way to do it. And if you can be successful with your own plan and your own type of capability, then more power to you. But there are plenty of people who all they want to do is learn and meet from the best AEs and the best leaders and copy what they're doing, right? I didn't get anywhere on my own, right? I've got everywhere from learning from the people in front of me that were better than me, that were much more mature than me, and then taking the things I liked and the things I could emulate and copy them, right? So everything related to how do you go after a territory? How do you do account planning? When you start, you don't know anything, right? When you're a brand new AE, you might have some ideas, but the concepts are pretty generic and then it's always a matter of just executing correctly. So yeah, I've learned a bit in a few cycles.

I love that. And I do the same thing in marketing. Marketing people are notorious for stealing each other's stuff and just reskinning it, which is You know, another way to say like we're all learning from each other, right?

Yeah. And the one thing I would say is I am very, very grateful that I work at Qualtrics where it's not a competitive internal team, right? I'm not competing for my colleague's role or the next role in leadership. That's not how it works, right? If I have something that's working really, really well, people around me are going to ask me, what are you doing? And I'm going to do the same thing, right? If you have an organization where sharing best practices is not frowned upon, then you want to be at that kind of org. And if you're at an org where you have to compete with the people sitting next to you to, to a sense where you are keeping your best ideas away from other people, not a very good culture, not a culture that's going to build a lot of people that stay for a while. It's going to be a culture where people get burned out. And leave pretty quickly.

That's so interesting. You know, I was really impressed with one of our sales directors today who called me and said, hey, I was noticing that two of our— two of my colleagues need some more pipeline. This is working for me really well. Can I show them how to do it? And can I use the same resources? I was so impressed with that. And I thought, dude, this guy is great culture fit for what we're doing. So to totally speaking to your point, I thought that was so awesome. So even though there's like a lot of variability in the, you know, in everything, in annual planning, it depends. What are a few best practices that we could take with us that are pretty consistent across industries? Do you have any advice?

Yeah. So especially for software, right? Because the way you promote, the way you make money is just by getting quota attainment. And it doesn't typically matter where it comes from at the end of the year. And at the end of the day, if you are green and you hit your number, you feel good. Doesn't matter, right? So the first thing I usually do, or the way I instruct people, is to work backwards from their annual number to their day-to-day, right? So take how much do you need annually? All the way down to how much pipeline do I need to generate on a day-by-day basis? And typically that starts with your best clients. So if, like, I can take the example for Qualtrics, I can prioritize kind of in a way of doing tiers. Here's Tier A, here's Tier B, here's Tier C. So for the instance, for most of the account executives that report up to me, they have 10 to 15 accounts that if they were successful in growing them, they could hit their annual number just by working their 10 to 15 best customers. And that's their annual number. That's not a quarterly number.

Wow.

Beyond that, you have your best prospects where same thing, if you have a good year with 10 to 15 of these accounts, you can also hit your annual number, right? There's just the way you build your sales motion so that you can focus on what's most important, right? A lot of people will get advice on you need to make calls, you need to make meetings, you need to be on LinkedIn, you need to send a bunch of messages. But the reality is, is if you have the data to show, here's your average deal size, here's your average win rate, here's your average sales cycle, you can do the backwards math to figure out how much pipeline do I need, how many deals do I have to close, and by when to set yourself up for your annual attainment.

That's fascinating.

Once you have that in place, it's not so much It's not so much that you wrote down this beautiful annual plan. The issue is, is most people never look at it again until the end of the quarter or the end of the month, or when their manager says, hey, what's going on with this account? And they're like, oh, I have a plan for that. Let me look it up. Right. That truly is the difference between A players and B players.

Right. Really?

B players are just winging it. They don't know how to figure it out. They'll get lucky. They'll have the roller coaster of attainment where some quarters they crush it, some quarters they miss horribly. And it's kind of a, a cycle they always go through. But A players, people that you can rely on, people that you build a team around, literally look at their territory plan weekly or daily because that's how they prioritize their day. Right. I have a, I have a little block on my calendar every Monday at 8:30 that basically says for 30 minutes, it basically says, what are the priorities for this week? And then I've got the top accounts for my team. I've got the top things I'm doing as a leader to reach out, to connect at a higher level with the prospects or with the clients. Because I know that again, if I have 10 to 15 accounts for each one of my AEs where they could hit their annual number. Then I'm trying to attach myself at the leader level to all of those accounts as well.

Hmm.

And it's not, again, it's not complicated, right? There's no strange math or strange algorithm to figure out like, well, if I just play the number, the probability game and I make 200 calls a day, I'll hit quota. It's not, it's like you could learn, you could learn to hit quota just by reaching out to your clients and growing Again, here's the caveat. It depends. If you can grow all those clients into a second product or a third product, right? And you're calling someone you know, you're calling someone you have a relationship with. That's not a cold call. That's how you build a territory plan. That's how you get AEs to be motivated about looking at something daily or weekly is they can actually see the probability of themselves hitting their annual number. By working with their best clients, right?

That's so interesting and so awesome to hear. Like, I have never, um, had this conversation before in the same exact way that you're saying this, and this is really important stuff, getting into the mind of an A-player and how you structurally think about what your job consists of and how you organize it in your mind and on paper and analyze it. It's a lot more mathematical than I, than I ever expected on the individual AE level.

Well, it just depends on the AE, right? Because if you were to go to an AE, right? If I was to get ahold of an AE under Isaac and Ryan, there's probably an AE where if I said, hey, what's your average win rate? They would know it. Or if I said, what's your average deal size? They would know it. Or who are your top 10 best clients? Who are your top 10 best prospects? A lot of them will have that information, but then if Isaac or Ryan or whoever's over them in sales says, what are you doing this week for that account? Most of them won't have something on their calendar for that account.

Interesting. Right.

The way I, one of my favorite movies, and I'll use the quote Baby Steps. If everyone, if, and if no one knows what that movie is, I'll just let you find that out. But Baby Steps. I love What About Bob is the movie and I'll just give it away. But for let's say you have an account as part of your territory plan and it's like, oh, it's like a Moby Dick. It's a white whale. You don't have to get an IQM with that account. You don't have to get an initial call with that account this week to have a win, right? To have a baby step.

Right.

Your baby step might be let's find one person from these three departments that I could have my boss reach out to, or I could have Tyler reach out to, right? You go down to a lower level where it's a user level, and you might say, I can find 5 people within each of those accounts that I could reach out to. Then when I come to them and we, we do a territory review, they have 15 people that week that they're trying to get a hold of. That's a win, right? That's a baby step. Then the next week it's like, okay, what's the next baby step, right? We need to show AEs that just because you don't get a meeting, just because you don't create a new opportunity, doesn't mean you're failing.

Mm-hmm.

You're just taking the next step into working on the account. And eventually they could get to the point where they get burned out. And after 2 or 3 months of prospecting into that account, we're having no success. Cool. Move it from an A account to a B account.

Mm-hmm.

Pull another one in, start the process over, right? It's a very iterative process where no matter what happens, no matter what the week is, I can, I can look at someone on my team's calendar and identify here's the priorities for them this week, right? Depending on how they do their KPIs or their OKRs or whatever term someone's calling it these days. It's like I can literally look at their calendar and know what their focus is this week. And then we figure out a way to help them. We figure out a way to either I'm reaching out, they're reaching out, we're having our one of our C-level reach out to their C-level. There's so many different things you can do to have a win. And as long as you're having wins, week after week after week after week, you'll build the pipeline and you'll build the pipeline with the accounts that help you hit your annual number. Too many times where you call an account, you can say, again, I can use Qualtrics, I can say, what's the most we're getting out of this account this year? And AEs can figure it out. It can be like, well, I might be able to get $100,000 out of them this year. I'd be like, okay, that's not even 10% of your annual number. So let's put that as a B account. Right. But you've got, you've got accounts that could hit a fourth of your, a quarter of your number or half of your number. Let's prioritize those for what we're working on week after week.

Wow. I feel like I am getting a masterclass in sales strategy right now. Like, this is so interesting and you're breaking it down for me in a way that's very easy to understand. And you can see how you're blending the art and the science of sales. And you're letting, you're letting the data and you're letting the science drive the actions and the strategy, I guess. Yeah. That's really cool.

Yeah. Well, you're also managing the emotions of your team, right? I have AEs on my team that the harder they work, the luckier they get, right? It may not be from the work they put on. This account, but something happens on a completely different account. But from an emotional perspective, when you have someone sitting next to that person in chair and they're putting in all the work and they're not having the luck, then you need to help them focus on how do we just make sure you're having wins, right? How do we maintain a positive outlook? How do we maintain momentum? You can't just be comparing yourself to any other AE. Right. I can, I can share a 10-second story of one of the largest companies in software. I worked for 9 months to close a $25,000 deal because of legal issues, right? We went back and forth forever on legal issues. The moment I closed that deal, I had built the pricing, the packaging, put it all together. I lost the account.

Hmm.

The next day he got it and within 9 months had built over $1 million of software with them. Oh, and I lost and I didn't get any of it, right? But I had put everything together. I could have sat there and complained because he just got all this revenue for the pricing and packaging I built.

Yeah.

Or I can focus on what I actually am capable of controlling. And build more because now I've seen what I'm capable of doing. So now I can just run with it, right? If you can manage emotions of AEs, that's just as important as managing their messaging or managing their territory plan or their account plan, making sure that they, they know that even by finding 2 or 3 people at an account that are the right people to talk to, that's still a win. That's still—

that's so interesting. So how much do you think, how much do the emotions of the AE contribute to their success, would you say?

Tons.

Tons, huh?

Like, I wouldn't put a number on it, but I've read enough Harvard Business Reviews that if you have a bad attitude, you should just go home for the day.

Yeah.

Right. There's, there's, especially at a leader level, at a leader level, if you recognize someone's having an off day, because everyone does, right? No one's perfect. And funny part is usually going to work is the easy part of your day. Going home is the hard part of your day, right? So if someone comes to work with a bunch of personal matters that are bringing them down, it's almost better to send them home and let them have a refresh or work from home, right? Get what you can get done today at home. I get it. But that comes down to having a relationship with the people you support as a leader. If you have people that don't think they can let you know how they're doing, that's a completely different podcast. That's a completely different, completely different set of problems. But I agree with you, like the emotions of an AE are huge, right? If I, if I came into work every day as a leader and I was negative, that's going to filter down. And everybody on my team is going to be negative. And then internally, I mean, we're talking about RevOps here, but internally you then build a brand where if I need help, if I need to reach out to RevOps and get some help with my accounts, they're not going to help me if I'm just a negative person. You have to build credibility everywhere around the company and especially in sales because sales, you're just a quarterback, right?

Absolutely.

You're not an engineer, you're not a lawyer, you're not— you can't do the whole sales process on your own. You need all the people around you to support you. So if you're negative all the time, if you have a bad day and that shows, you're going to find it really, really hard to be successful selling software.

It's so interesting. Well, so you've mentioned this a little bit and let's dive into it a little more. You mentioned the salesperson working with RevOps and what does that relationship generally look like? Is it generally collaborative? Is it generally a little competitive. What's the average, like, you know, what does it generally look like? How do you work with RevOps?

I would say in a general relationship, you don't have much interaction with RevOps. They're kind of like marketing. They live in their own world, they do their own thing, and then they take credit at the end of the day. No, I'm just kidding. You live in a world though where you only interact with them if you need something.

Right.

Which then puts you at a disadvantage because if you're only ever asking for help, eventually that well runs dry and they're not going to help you.

That's interesting. But what it sounds like to me is that you have not had a great experience with a super collaborative marketing team because that's not what should happen, right? Like what we're hoping that we can help develop is sales and marketing and RevOps and customer success where we all are interdependent and lean on each other, right?

That's the world.

Yeah, that's, that's the, that's the utopia. But I, I think it's a really very poignant and relevant point that it, it doesn't seem like, even though we give a lot of lip service to getting rid of silos and building a unified go-to-market strategy, the practical application of that You know, expectations versus reality are very different. Is that fair to say?

Yeah, especially as your company grows or as your company shrinks, right? I started it, I started at Qualtrics when there were 300 people. Last October, Qualtrics had a, a, a layoff, which was about 1,200 people. The RevOps team at Qualtrics You know, I watched it go from we didn't have one to we had one of close to 40 people supporting the global org. And then after layoffs, that's been reduced drastically. So now, now in order to get stuff done, if you don't have a relationship with them, you don't, you don't get the support you need. Right?

Yeah, that's, yeah, that makes sense.

There's a big difference between me reaching out to someone I've worked with for 5, 6, 7 years. Or someone who's a brand new manager at Qualtrics, doesn't have any credibility, doesn't have any— haven't really made deposits throughout the org where now they can go ask for it, right? They'll end up leaning on their manager or their manager's manager who's been here a while to help them get stuff across the board, right? RevOps is usually an overworked team.

Yes.

Right. They have too many things they have to do, too many people they're supporting. And so they have to prioritize the asks that they get from all the other departments. If you've got that ace in the hole of somebody you've worked with for a long time and you've built the credibility, like you can sometimes go around the normal process just to get stuff done.

Yeah, that makes sense. So what are some, you know, from a sales leadership perspective, and I think this is really important for everyone on the go-to-market team to understand, but especially for your RevOps counterparts. What are some things that the RevOps team can do to better engage with sales and vice versa?

Well, I would say starting with RevOps, when they make decisions that affect people's territories or people's books, that's effectively messing with their W-2 at the end of the day. So the one piece of advice, which is, which is you would think is common sense, is just being transparent on what you're doing and when you're doing it. Right. So something as simple as we hire a new AE, that AE needs a new territory, that territory is being pulled from a bunch of AEs. Well, when you take their accounts, let them know what's happening.

Yeah.

And let them know when it's finished. Mm-hmm.

It's as simple as that.

Yeah, it's as simple as that because as an AE, if you are managing a territory and there's no process for alerting you that you lost an account, or alerting you that you're going to inherit an account, you have a hard time keeping up with a territory plan. You kind of have a hard time. I mean, I can't, I don't think all organizations are this way. I think a lot of organizations are pretty locked down where you get a notification in Salesforce, you get a notification in your CRM, but sometimes you don't have that.

Yeah.

Sometimes you're a new company and it's just, you manage, there's no real process. It's the wild, wild west. You need some transparency from RevOps as to when things are happening. And also, the one thing most organizations have is almost a rules of engagement. Here's how we operate as a business. Yes, you have the accounts, but you realize that those accounts are given to you, you don't own them. So if you need to take them, it's happening, right? I can tell you a half dozen stories of AEs that left Qualtrics for promised really good territories. Only by the time they're hired, that territory has already been cut in half because they hired more people than they planned to.

I think that's so interesting that one thing that you said a minute ago really stuck out to me, and that is realize that when you are messing with their territories, you're messing with their W-2s.

Yep.

I've really never thought of it that way before. But of course, that's how it is. Of course, from your perspective as a sales leader, you have to have that trust that the RevOps team has given you something that's equal to other people, that they're not trying to, you know, attack you or give you bad territories, that it's supposed to be equitable and fair. And that's a lot of trust to put in a team that you don't interact with very often.

Correct. Yeah. And especially, especially when AEs kind of know to expect that once a year. Right? You typically expect a RIF once a year on an annual turn, usually, maybe more than that, depending on how quickly your organization is growing. But when it happens mid-year or it happens mid-quarter and there's no communication, you just have, you just have tickets and alerts and people texting their manager saying, hey, what happened? And then as a manager, you're running around the building trying to figure out like, what are we doing and why are we doing it? So I think maintaining open and honest communication with RevOps is critical. You have to have it. And depending, again, most of the time, I would assume in the organizations it's happening. But the amount of people I've interviewed where it doesn't happen is kind of shocking.

Yeah, I do think that there's the tendency, especially because one thing I've learned as a leader over time is that you have to allocate, like, you have to give grace to different personalities who gravitate toward different functions, right? So, um, I was part of a consulting project a little while ago where, um, the company brought me in essentially to evaluate and potentially let go of a, of a woman who was not playing ball, so they said. And, and so I took the opportunity to listen to her and to try to understand. And what was happening was she had a fairly domineering personality, but that's because she was frontline saves. After everyone had canceled, they brought her in to try to go in and save the account. Takes a very special person to be able to do something like that, right? And then the RevOps person was had just been, you know, she felt kind of bullied because this person was like, hey, there's real problems here, right? And then, you know, being able to do that therapy between sales and RevOps for me was so instructive and so insightful because once I was able to say to them, you know, you are a very kind RevOps person. You value process and you value certainty. Do you want to be the one on the front lines doing the saves? And then on the other hand, you know, the salesperson was, you know, do you want to be the one that's messing with everybody's data all day long? And it was really an aha moment for me and for them where they were like, I see why we've had friction and I can value the other person in their perspective. And I have not seen that happen a ton, but it was really special for me to be able to be part of that and see when that did happen. So really speaks to what you're saying is like, openly communicate, try to develop that good relationship with that other person. And, um, you know, recognizing the different personality traits are, are going to gravitate to different areas of the business.

Yeah. Well, and one of the topics that we kind of went back and forth on before this podcast was, you know, what's an unpopular opinion you have about RevOps?

Yeah.

And so before I, before I share that unpopular opinion, I, I will share that when I started at Qualtrics with 300 people, we had a really, really small support team, right? It was awesome. They were really, really good. But in the building, we had a rule that if we had a bunch of red lights everywhere, like it almost looked like an alarm. It was kind of funny. They didn't go off, but if someone called into Qualtrics and it rang for 3 times and no one from our support team picked it up 'cause they're on calls, those red lights would flash. So everybody in the building immediately picked up the phone. Wow. So I could tell you how many times I picked up a phone and said, hey, this is Tyler with Qualtrics, how can I help you? And if anything, all I did was log a support ticket, right? But that's part of that training, if someone said I have a support issue and I understood it, I'd walk them through it, right? I'd take that support call. And you're speaking to kind of my unpopular opinion about RevOps, which is, I think sales, if you are in sales, you should sit for a day or two with the people in RevOps that are doing the grunt work. They're doing the work where it's a ticket, it's an AE calling and saying something 5 or 6 times like, you need to be able to process that data like they do. So you actually understand how they feel. The opposite side, I think RevOps needs to sit down with an AE when they do their territory planning and see how they value and critique the accounts. Right? Every RevOps has some form of scoring metrics that they use to say, hey, like Tyler's been given 30 A-tier accounts, he's fine, he doesn't need anything more. Well, then to sit down with an AE who's done it for years, review those 30 accounts, they can tell you why they're not good.

Mm-hmm.

Tell you why you're—

And to trust them and to not just say, oh, well, they're just moaning about it because they want more money. Right. I'm sure that— and that's— I'm sure that's happened. And I'm sure that that is super frustrating for the sales team.

Yeah, there's nothing perfect, right? You can't say like, hey, give me Apple, Google, Nvidia, Microsoft. Like, you're not going to get every perfect account. It's just not possible.

Right.

Need to be able to go through and with some form of elegance explain why they're not the way they're supposed to be. And if it's, if it's affecting you as an AE or you as a sales leader, you kind of need an additional lens of someone who's been doing it for a long time to help RevOps. That's why I'm saying it has to be collaborative because RevOps will build it. And if no AE reviews it before it goes out or before they change the model that they use, they're going to be spending multiple cycles fixing it. Instead of, instead of doing it prior, right? Every time—

it's going to be much worse, cost much more and take much longer than it would have ever in the first place.

It'll be a lot more painful for everybody. Because now you've got people that are instead of collaborative and building something together, to bring each other down from both sides. And then it becomes the world of justification and reasoning. And now, and now you're not doing what you want to be doing, which is time in chair selling, now spending your time arguing with someone like me as to why I need to go argue with them to fix it. Right? So it's, it's a, you, you made a great point of being able to understand that You don't want to be the person in the chair saving the client, but you also don't want to be the person on the other side of the chair whose job it is to fix everything. You kind of have to understand both perspectives. And I think the big unpopular opinion I have between RevOps and sales is there's just not enough collaboration between the two. It's— there's a lot of time spent fixing things between the two, but there's not a lot— there's not a lot of time building things. I won't, I won't say sales leaders at Qualtrics who have been around for a long time, but there are sales leaders at Qualtrics who have been around way longer than I have. And they have a hard time identifying what is a good account.

Hmm.

And they might use their opinion when in reality they should have some very, very, very frontline AEs be giving the opinion and qualifying how they do accounts.

Hmm.

A sales leader. Oh, a sales leader might look at an account by name and be like, that's perfect. And then you talk to an AE. It's not perfect.

Interesting. And I love, love, love that perspective. And I love the differentiation that you made just now between spending time fixing things and spending time collaborating. One of them is proactive and trust-building. The other one is frustrating and not trust-building. And I think that is a humongous difference.

Yeah, it is. And you don't really understand it until you've gone through it. Once you've gone through it once, you're like, okay, I don't want that to happen again. How do I— and that's where as a leader, you know, my job is to then get in front of that. So some of the— I realize more than anyone on my team that they're not successful because of just themselves. They're successful because of the team they've built around them. So I'm able to build that relationship with all the supporting functions, then I'm at least doing my job to support my team. Especially with RevOps, right? They are, they are behind the scenes all the time. They are the operations side of sales that never gets any credit for anything. They get credit when it works, but sales takes the credit, but they get all the blame when it doesn't work.

Yeah.

Right.

It's like nobody, nobody wants to, like, I, the way that it seems to me is that when everything's working well, they're invisible. And then until the house is on fire. Right. And then, and then they're like, they're fixing everything. So yeah, I, I think that is such a great, those are such great, great points. And thank you so much for that. I can't imagine that being an unpopular opinion. The way that you've articulated it seems to be very much—

I've changed in my mind how I say the unpopular opinion.

How's that?

If I was to lead with RevOps doesn't know what they're doing, that's a little bit—

That might be more unpopular. I really love how you said that.

That's sales thinking they know everything. So you have to understand.

Well, we— and then you add marketing in there that just messes everything up.

Yep. Yep. For everything. So yeah, that's right.

Oh, that's great. Well, okay. So as we end, thank you so much. This has been such an, such an interesting and valuable discussion and I really appreciate it. Um, clearly you're at the top of your game. How do you stay there? What's one piece of advice you have or one thing that you do to stay at the top of your game? Favorite drink, favorite hobby?

Favorite drink is certainly Red Bull, but that's not a good— that's, um, so top of, top of the game is there's a, there's a, there's a couple things that I would always say to anybody, uh, it's you have to make sure you take care of yourself in the sense of I don't want to be that guy that says health and sleep and all that, but You need to know when you're on your A game and you need to know when you're on your B or even C game.

Mm-hmm.

I understand that there's a perception of Tyler seems happy, Tyler seems mad, Tyler's not in a good mood. Right? So if I can manage that and show up for my team the way they need me to show up, that's doing what I can to always stay on top of my game and always be successful. There are, there are days that are awful, right? There are days when my 12-year-old got up in the middle of the night, days when my 6-year-old comes in with 2 bloody noses in the middle of the night, and then the baby hears her and he's screaming. And then it's like the day's ruined before 3:00 AM and I haven't even started. There's days like that where I can literally level set and be like, I'm working from home. Then you can also do calls off camera. You can, you can take care of yourself so that you still show up. Right? So that's partly how I stay on top of my game. And then the other thing is just making sure you work with people you enjoy working with. If there is a bad egg on your team or a bad egg around you, find a way to not have them be around you or not rely on them, right? If it's on my team and it's a bad egg, I'd find a way to manage them out because I can't have someone bringing the team down. That's That's worst case scenario. But if it's someone not around me, not that I have direct control over, I figure out someone else who can do the same thing. Right? Again, as an AE or as a sales leader, you're just the quarterback. You're just, you're only one person on the team. Right? And you need, you need a relationship with all the supporting groups. One thing, like there are a few people at Qualtrics, if they see this, they'll know I'm talking about them. If they do me a favor that day, So Delicious Swig is showing up to their desk with a cookie. They just know it's coming.

Can I please be on your team? That sounds amazing.

Well, it's one of those things where it's like you have to figure out what makes people tick.

Yeah.

And if you're in finance and you help me above and beyond the call, I'll ask your neighbor what is their favorite drink, what's their favorite treat, and then it just shows up.

That's incredible.

Because if the only thing I can do is pay you with a $4 reward, right? I can't do much more beyond that, then that's $4. Like, just do it, right? You need, you need to be able to call those favors in and you need that kind of supporting group, right? So, so take care of yourself so that you can take care of the people you support and then show appreciation to everybody that that's their job is to support you in a software world. There's two sides. There's engineering and sales, and every other role in the company is supporting one of those two things. So if you're not taking care of those people around you, they'll stop taking care of you. And then, and then you're really in a, in a rough spot where you wonder why when you submit a deal to get it invoiced, your deal takes 3 days and this other team's done in like an hour and a half, right? You wonder why you're not getting that preferential treatment. And if you wonder, then you just need to start asking people around like, How do they do it? And someone like me gladly tell you, here's how you build rapport with all the other supporting groups. And I would say especially RevOps, right?

Yeah.

Probably why I'm on this podcast is because the software that Fullcast is creating, I'm very eager to use because it would be very helpful in my role.

Yes.

Right? A lot of the automations, a lot of the things that are just simple, I'm like just chomping at the bit for to get Qualtrics to evaluate it. So it's stuff like that where that's the other side I would say is, is you gotta be open to making changes to make things better. If you just are stuck in your ways with how your organization does things, that you're gonna get moved on. It's gonna be beyond you before it's gonna be too late to fix it. And now you're in a world of hurt.

Wow, Tyler, this has been such an incredible podcast for me. And what you've said has resonated so well because you've said that in a kind of a different way and you've illustrated why collaboration is important, why it's important to have your supporting team and be able to call in your favors, how to build that trust, and some of the different perspectives that, that are influencing the way that RevOps and sales interact. And I can't thank you enough for coming on the podcast and telling us about this. So thank you so much.

Yeah, it was fun. No, anything for, you know, this is one of those ones where I'm making a deposit with Isaac and Ryan, you know what I mean? Like putting the chips on the table.

That's right. Well, and you definitely have some favors to call in for me if you ever need some marketing help. So thank you so much. I appreciate it.

Thank you.

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