RevOps in HubSpot

Ashley, it's very nice to have you here. This is Ashley Quintana from Bridge Rev. She's going to be sharing all kinds of amazing and rev ops in HubSpot. Ashley, go ahead and take it away.

Thank you. Let me get my screen share. Talking about hitting the right buttons. I'm really appreciative that you guys have me on. I'm happy to be here with you all today. As Deanna said, my name is Ashley Quintana and I am the CEO at Bridge Rev. I'm a firm believer that context is everything. Like you got to know where something is coming from in order to apply it. So today's talk comes not only from my 13 years in my role at Bridge Rev, but I'm also a wife, a mom to three kids and two dogs and most recently a hamster that I do not want to touch. I don't think I've touched it. Someone gave it to my kid for their birthday and I'm stuck with it. I'm also a first generation Mexican American, first gen college grad, a minister and a speaker. True story. I hosted my first radio show when I was 6 years old. Kids would call in and complain to me about their parents and I would give them advice about what to do with their parents. It was a fun weekend thing that my community did and I have had a passion for media and communications and speaking all of those kinds of things ever since. So today we've got quite a bit to cover, but first I want to do a quick poll. Caitlin is going to do me the favor of sticking it in the chat a link to like a Google form. It's just going to ask you what your role is. I told you, context is everything and I'd like to know who all we've got in the room today. So it will help me if you take a quick poll and that way you know, we can adjust as we go. There's two marketing buckets by the way. One if like you just do a lot of content or one if you do more marketing ops. So it'd be helpful to know. But while you answer that, here's what we're covering today. So we're going to be talking about what revops is and why it matters. And we're going to be talking about a framework that could be useful to you as a shared language for how you tackle RevOps as a team and how to go about building this framework into your HubSpot instance. We'll have some time for questions, but feel free to add them as we go, I'm that person that if I don't type it out, if I don't get it out of my system right in that moment, I will forget. So don't feel like you have to hold on to it till the end. If you've got a question, feel free to stick it in. If I see it and we can jump to it, then we will. Or we'll just hold them to the end. We'll see as we go. Deanna said that we were pretty informal, so I'm counting on that as we go. So. All right, let me see. We got some people typing it in the chat. Sales operations analyst. All right. And Caitlin tells me that it's mostly Rev Ops professionals and HubSpot admins. All right, so thank you. I appreciate that. So. All right. Have you ever felt like this? Does this look like you? I think this may be the most popular meme in most companies, no matter what you do. In our own company, Slack, I think one of our devs actually saved the little dog as a custom emoji that we can use, and we use it as a reaction to whatever Slack message we've got that day. So it's not just the giphy, it's at this point an emoji reaction. I know many of you said you're Rev Ops professionals, you're HubSpot admins, so I suspect that you landed in the role that you are in today because over time, you. You became your company's HubSpot expert. You're literally the backbone of your company's revenue potential. And it is a big role with a lot of weight and a lot of responsibility. But a lot of times, instead of focusing on the high impact strategies, the ideas that you have that we all have, you're often bogged down by the fires, maybe some manual tasks, because you've got those people in your organization who will not import anything into HubSpot because they're afraid to break it. But let's face it, you probably don't want them importing anything anyway. I once was working with a client who did an import, somehow turning records into binary. I don't know how it happened. Had to contact HubSpot support and they had to roll back the database to the previous day. So let's face it, there are people that you don't really want touching the buttons. Deanna, sometimes we don't want people touching the buttons. I'm saying it because you told me I can touch all the buttons. But if you felt like that, then you probably recognize these Needs. Right. You've probably had to deal with unreliable data and misaligned teams and you know what needs to be done. But you're missing the tools, the alignment and the structure that can make growth scalable and predictable. So I'm sure all of us in this digital room have experienced a number of these on the screen at some point. But I gotta tell you, and I know that this sounds like common sense, but I feel like we often forget that just because we can see it, it doesn't mean that everybody else can. And you know that it doesn't have to be this way. You know that the state of your revop strategy and the state of your HubSpot portal doesn't have to be this way. But just because you see it, it doesn't mean that everybody else can. I know that we all can imagine the future where our processes are more scalable and every piece of data is reliable, 90%, 95, maybe 99% reliable. And every team is aligned toward the same revenue goal. But seeing the path, it's not enough. If you want other people to follow, you can't just point and say, we need to go that way. You have to show them with a map or with a guide. And I know that that's straightforward, but I've witnessed a number of teams get wires crossed because they could all agree on what it needed to look like, but they couldn't agree on how to get there. And I see that a lot. You know, we can all agree on. On the what. And I think most of us today here do agree on the what. Since inbound 2018, we seem to all have come into agreement with what it should look like. Enter Brian Halligan. I couldn't find the version where he's got, like the price. Price's right hand, like, scrolling, go that way. But I did find the picture online, so that's what I included. You know, we can all agree since inbound 2018 that we had to put the customer at the center, focusing on growth that's scalable. And the flywheel approach gave us that. You know, transforming how teams work together, turning fragmented processes into a continuous cycle of engagement. We're where every department supports the next to drive the growth that everyone's desiring. But agreeing on the destination doesn't mean that you share the map to get there. And when we talk about RevOps, we stress the importance, I think all of us do, breaking down silos and building up the automation. I think those are the first two things. And I actually did this kind of informally this week I asked a few people on LinkedIn, just sent private messages and I said, when you think of revops, what are you actually thinking of? And the most, the most. Two common responses that I got were breaking down silos, improving automation or taking processes, automating them, those two things and they're very important. But I want to be sure that we agree on the destination for just a moment. When we talk about the core principles of rev Ops, it's these four. While I got a lot of breaking down silos and building up automation, really it's rallying around a single source of truth, right? By bringing together the previously siloed systems, you can create a unified company wide view of the customer. You have the centralized data and it gives you the actionable insights to align on goals, serve your customers effectively. And that alignment comes from a cross functional collaboration that improves your overall efficiency. Right. You optimize your processes, you reduce friction, you, you implement that automation shared KPIs across the department so that your teams can stay focused on the high impact work like creating a consistent customer experience. And then the data gained from every customer experience then leads to that data driven revenue growth that we all desire. You iterate, you continuously improve and that leads to better, faster decision making. Better, more informed decisions, right? So by aligning all the teams around those shared revenue metrics, RevOps equips companies to forecast with a lot more confidence. You can address strategies kind of on fly, on the go, maximize those revenue opportunities. And it sounds great in theory, it does. But it can be really challenging as you know, to put into practice, especially when you don't have all of the authority to make the calls and you're waiting on someone else to give their consent to bless it to, to say, okay, you can do that. I was actually speaking with one of our own clients and this was always the challenge. We would be in a meeting, we'd be ready to make the change and everyone on the call could agree, oh, this is great. That is what we need to implement. We need to swap this KPI for this one, or we need to focus on this part of the funnel for the next three months. We could all agree, but the person who could make the call and sign off on it wasn't in the meeting. And so then that would lead to delays. Sometimes we would eventually get their blessing, but you had delays. So then it made it really hard to show value for our work. And I'm sure you've experienced that too because the change making was slow and in some cases we couldn't get a decision because the person with the supposed authority didn't feel comfortable making the call. Like, you know, we could all agree, oh, well, that lands on so and so. But even when that person was in the room, there was this sense of deferred responsibility. Does that sound familiar? So this is what we learned in the process. When authority is shared, let the process lead. Sounds a little bit counterintuitive, but here's someone that explained it a little bit better. There's this quote by W. Edwards Deming. He was an American economist and composer. I think he died in like 93, so not too far away from our present reality. And he's best known for his theories of management. And he has a quote that has just stuck with me over the years. And he said, in God we trust, all others must bring data. And it makes me laugh. But what he meant is that in the absence of a single authority, or when you don't have that authority in the room, a reliable system like data, data driven processes take precedence and they drive the decision making. And it was this need for a shared process that led us as a company to create one that could ground our clients, ground us, give us a process to lead the way. So we built this framework around four pillars. People, priorities, process, and platform, in that order. The order is important, but each of those aligns your revenue teams around common goals to give you that process when you lack all the authority to make the call. And this order really matters. So while you're moving multiple initiatives at once, I know everyone's juggling a lot of pushes at once. You should iterate through these four Ps every time you've hit a roadblock. And I'm telling you that mainly because it worked for us. But I'll let you try it as we go through it. And, you know, you. You get to take it home and do something with it to let me know if it worked for you, because I personally witnessed clients who try to start with platform, and it doesn't work. I believe it was. I saw a post on LinkedIn this week, and I think it was Tony Dowling. He's a HubSpot partner, and I think he said HubSpot itself is not a strategy. Please stop saying that it is. And it was just kind of, you know, one of those kind of like rant posts that. But he's right. HubSpot itself is not a strategy. So let's dive into these a little bit, one at a time. People come first. Your plans and your strategy mean absolutely nothing. If you cannot connect with your team. And if your team does not care to work together, do you need a sweet, sweet sponsor? No, it's a nice to have. And I know that that might sound really controversial coming out of my mouth right now, but I've seen plenty of teams tackle Rev Ops without a C suite sponsor and still get amazing results. And the proof is in the fact that they work together and they get a little bit of traction. And that little bit of traction eventually gets them leadership to buy in. What do you need? Here are the things that I think you they're not the nice to haves there. You have to have. You have to have someone from sales on your team. You have to have someone from marketing, you have to have someone from customer service. And sometimes functions will overlap in one person and that's okay. But the main thing is it cannot just be you and one other person. You legitimately need multiple people. The best teams. The best Rev Ops teams that I've seen are even numbers. If that's one of the takeaways you can take with you today, even numbers are better. And I know that that might sound odd, but it's better because you have to talk things out. There isn't one person to vote on something and give you the majority. And it's like, okay, well that's what we're going to do. Having an even number of people means that if you disagree on something, someone is eventually going to have to switch sides. And those conversations are absolutely worth having. When there isn't a majority, you're forced to have those conversations. You should establish a regular cadence to meet and in that step of the process, you're looking to ensure cross functional alignment. So how do you do that? How do you ensure cross functional alignment? Stop saying the answers and focus on asking really good questions. Like really, really good questions. I think a lot of times we, you know, because people come to us knowing we're the resident HubSpot expert, that we have to have all those things figured out. And while you can be a great resource for the team, when you're in the role of leading the RevOps initiative in your organization, the questions you ask are a lot more important than the answers you have. By asking the right question every week, you're bringing those thoughts to your team's mind. And so what that means is that as they go throughout the week, let's say you had your regular meeting cadence on Monday and you said, I want you to be thinking about this. What do we know about X customer? How did we fulfill on that, what did we learn from this interaction? Whatever the question is that you're asking, it means that your team is going to be paying attention throughout the week. They will leave that meeting, and if something happens, something pops up, they're on the lookout for the answers to the question that you asked. So keep in mind, if it's the right question, it doesn't feel repetitive to your team. It feels intentional, it feels mindful, like you've got a North Star. All right, next up, priorities. When we work with a client, we make them choose one priority that is more important than all the others we make them choose between. And this is one that we've used actually for a while, one of these options. Increasing the team's efficiency, improving data integrity, team alignment, or automating the customer journey. And we make them pick one of the four. Why those options? Because sometimes you're going to need a tiebreaker, especially when we're pushing multiple initiatives at once and you're doing one thing with customer service and you're doing something else with the marketing team, at some point you're going to need a tiebreaker because what they each want might be in opposition to the other. And if you can agree on what the priority is at the start, that this takes over it, you know it is the winner over everything else that becomes your North Star. And if you can all agree on that, then it makes it really easy when you need a tiebreaker. So those priorities that you set should be informed by a journey map that includes both your customer experience and your team's experience. Because your team, they're people too. Their. Their input matters. The way that they feel. Going through the journey with the customer has a lot of impact on what you choose to automate, what parts of their job are most efficient or effective. So any goals that leadership has shared with you, you want to have that, and any KPIs that you're tracking as a company. And I'll say, I'll say this. While you want customer input, we all want customer input. I've seen a lot of companies get stuck on, but we don't have nps. We need to do that first. We don't know how our customers feel, so we need to do that first. Those things are really important, but they aren't the most important thing here. It's a nice to have. You don't need a CSAT or an NPS to get a pulse on a customer experience. You, you can go and look at your reviews, you can look at tickets if you have those, or you can look at your support inbox to get a feel for it, or you can send someone a message and ask the question. I think a lot of times we'll get stuck on going with platform first, like, oh, well, we need to set that up before we can really make any decisions about this. But you do have data. Just because it's not in the CRM yet doesn't mean that you don't have some data to work from. And then next up you got process. So this P is a great way to get others involved with a low commitment. So if you've got someone who's like, oh, what you're doing seems kind of cool, but I don't have time for that right now because, you know, I've got these other responsibilities. This is a good way to get them involved with the low commitment, you know, that kind of will help you rally the troops. Sometimes you can put yourself in the learning seat and shadow some of your team members while they work so you can understand what a day in the life is like. To be successful in collaborating with others and scaling process, you have to ask when really, really, really good questions. You need to understand how something is currently done, how it is actually working, and why you can't iterate to a better state until you understand your current state. Which leads me to platform. I know that saying platform can last is going to bug people, but if AWS is down and this has happened before, you know, digital snow days. Has anyone had a digital snow day? If AWS was down and you didn't have slack, or HubSpot was down and you couldn't access HubSpot, what would be your source of truth for the day? Does everyone just say, oh, packing our bags, call it a day, we're going to sit and hang out in the break room. Or, you know, if you're remote, what do you do? How would you prioritize your day? You can access your email. If you couldn't access any of the things for the day people, it's why Connie would come into your office and say she's got to get the proposal out to Big Lytics because she knows what her top priority for the day is. Even if the system is down, it's why one of the best questions that you could ask your team this week is, if our systems were down, what would you focus on today? Why is that what you would focus on today? So still, that doesn't mean. I'm not saying that platform isn't important. You do need a single source of truth and I recommend consolidating your tech stack as much as possible. I know you all are on HubSpot, we're all on HubSpot and I think it's one of the reasons that we love it because it allows you to get rid of so many other pieces of the tech stack. You know, it helps on compliance and security issues, things like that. Very little need for outside anything else. You need one source of truth that you can pull reliable reports from to track progress. I've also had a lot of clients tell me but, but our integrations aren't real time so I can't rely on my reporting. Like it's not, it's, it's not, you know, I can't rely on that. If you rely on an integration with an overnight sync to report reports, so be it. Real time reporting does not have to be your top priority, but reliable reporting does have to be. C.S. lewis wrote this and I love it. He says you can't go back and change the beginning, but you can start, start where you are and change the ending. So how do you start? You have to have a solid understanding of where you are. So we have used this 4Ps RevOps framework in mind like we've been using it for, with our clients for I want to say four or five years at this point and here in the last year what we did was develop an assessment tool that evaluates the current state. So, so we took the learnings from those last four years and we built a tool that diagnoses where you currently are. So what it does is it guides you through a series of multiple choice questions. Looks like this did a short video to give you a feel for has questions on sales. It's got questions on marketing ops, customer experience, data integrity, processes. It takes, I want to say the last time I went through it took me eight to 10 minutes. So I'm not saying by any stretch it's extremely short. It's also not extremely long. But don't worry if you get stuck there is a save button. You can always come back and finish it later if there's a question that you're unsure about the way we've set it up. It also lets you take snapshots so you can see, you know, evaluate at the beginning of the year where you were, take it again at the end of the year and it can show you how you've progressed over time. But once completed, these results give you a maturity score. Looks kind of like this. Let me flip over. It's similar to Maslow's hierarchy of needs by design because we feel that that's the way Revops really works. You, you go in layers, right? And then you kind of iterate and you come all the way back around. And as I mentioned previously, it's actually designed. I'm going to flip over, over a different screen. Give me a second because I've got this one in real time. Can you all see that? Deanna, can you? Yeah.

Yeah.

Thank you. Appreciate it. So it'll give you a, you know, score what level you're at for this demo. It gave me the score of progressive and kind of like we were talking earlier. Forgive me, I'm looking this way, but my, my assessments over here. It will let you choose a strategy. Do you want to focus on your strengths or do you want to tackle weaknesses by toggling between? It will let you know where you had your highest score, where you had your lowest score. And it will give you that one top priority that we talked about, your North Star, what you would rally the troops around no matter what. And it'll explain the results for you. If you're a visual person like me, I absolutely need a chart. It helps me to see where I'm at, but it'll plot based on the different areas that it is measuring exactly where you land. Then to understand, you know, courting on this side has lots of helpful tips to read through. And then this is, this is my favorite part of this. It actually gives you actionable, almost shopping cart like steps of where to start. Because I feel like that's where a lot of us often get stuck and I'm overwhelmed. I've got too long of a list of things that I need to do. And it will tell you where to start. You can filter them by the area where you scored, which department of your revops you need to focus on. And as you scroll down, it'll give you some best practices down here as well for each of the different areas. And I'll add. The team added something really cool that I saw this morning. When you do complete it, it will actually do your PDF and send you your results so that you've got something that you can share with the rest of your team on how you scored and give you a document that you can all rally around and have a conversation on. It just takes the information that's already on the website page and puts it into a nice document for you to see and understand kind of where you are and where you're going. Our team has had a really, a really good time putting this together. We've used it on our clients already to understand where they're at. And I'm excited to get to share this with you all today. Our hope really is that this tool helps you build that bridge between where you are and where you want to be. And that's the link for the tool if it's something that you would like to take a look at. I know the key question is, okay, all that sounds good. It's a lot of things that, you know, I already have in practice or some of the things that I'm already doing. How do you go about building it in HubSpot? And I will tell you, it is. It depends. It totally depends. It depends on where you are starting from. And the answer is going to be different for every single one of you. Which is part of the biggest reason that we added that almost shopping cart like functionality for what your next steps should be depending on what results you get. But you know, here around our office we have a saying and we tell our clients we believe that your experience in HubSpot should be empowering and not overwhelming because it's really easy to get overwhelmed. And having a guide, having a rule book, something that you're following makes it a lot easier and gets rid of that question of oh man, what do I do next? So what we did do though is work together with the team and we put together this little table of what is the bare minimum. If I had to start from nothing, if I was starting a RevOps program in a company on HubSpot from scratch, where would I start? This is where I would start. So the way that we've plotted this out is with our 4Ps on the left and you've got your different departments on the top. This is what I would do. I want to call out a few things on here and we will share this deck afterwards. So don't feel like you got to go. Screenshot. The recording will be up. Deanna said at the beginning, I don't even need to say that, but a few things that I want to call out. I think providing a self serve support experience is one of the most important things on here that often we forget. And I'm not saying that you have to have an entire knowledge base or that you have to have a fully fleshed out ticketing system, but in our world today, our customers, all of our customers, expectations are so much higher than they used to be because you're not just competing with the people you think you're competing against in your same space. You're competing with every single Customer support experience that they've had with anywhere, Amazon, Netflix and how easy it is. So if there's a way for you to get an edge, it's by having a self serve option of something. Even if it's a single page that starts off as a form, you know, like have some sort of self serve experience, some sort of option. I think with automation a lot of us get overwhelmed and we think, oh, I have all of these processes and which process is the most important? Which process? Where do I start? Automate one thing, just pick one thing, one touch point per lifecycle stage. Don't get overwhelmed. Just make sure I've got something for when someone becomes a customer. I've got something, something for when, you know, someone leaves a review and they, you know, are tagged, they're an evangelist, they're a fan. Have one thing, just start. Yes to Deanna's point, like just start somewhere. And my hope is that if you go and take the assessment that it'll give you a list of where you can start, that doesn't feel as overwhelming. I think that's really important. And the other one I want to call out on here is when it comes to priorities, have a company wide scorecard. So this looks like is one dashboard that is shared with everyone and you can use some text fields, you can, you know, embed some reports from somewhere else if you need to, but it needs to have your North Star on it. Keep it front and center for all of your teams. It's your number one priority and you can say this priority will be evaluated on the quarter and we might change it at that point, but for the next 90 days, that is our number one priority. Don't get overwhelmed with, well, what are all the metrics that I should track? What are all the things that I need to be sure that I'm looking at? Just pick one, just one KPI per department, whatever it needs to be though. And using the goals tool for sure. I love the latest iteration of HubSpot's Goals tool. I was getting a little bit frustrated. I have that, you know that marketing report, Deanna, the one that's like sessions and then your contacts and then your customers. It's one of my favorite reports in HubSpot. But for a while, while we were going between the original goals tool and then, you know, what became the actual new goals tool, that I couldn't get the chart to reflect my goals, to save my life, it drove me a little bit crazy. But with the new one, with the new one, you know, it. I Think it just. It makes my life so much easier. I can actually, you know, set goals for each of the departments. So, like I said, we'll share this slide. And with that, I'm going to give everyone the chance to start putting in their questions if they have them. But I do want to say something, because I know one of the things that I stressed today was we need to be asking really good questions. I think it's important to stay curious, explore something before you settle. If anyone watched Suits. Deanna, did you watch Suits on Netflix?

I. I have, but I am still, like, 10 episodes behind, so. Okay, are you gonna do a spoiler?

Because I'm not gonna do a spoiler. I promise. I promise I'm not. I'm not gonna give any super important information. But there's this moment where Harvey Specter is evaluating what he wants to do. Like, does he want to leave? Does he want to do something else? Does he want to have his own practice? Like, what does he want to do? And I love this line. He says, I started thinking less about what I want to be doing in 10 years, and I started thinking more about who I want to be doing it with. And so. And I loved it. I sat there and I replayed it for a second. I was like, oh, my gosh, that is so good. It was so good. Like, it split. Spoke to me in the moment. I want to say, I don't think there's anything wrong with asking what questions. Like, when you start your question with what is? You know, and you kind of go from there. But I think we do have a problem in asking the questions where we've resorted to what questions over who questions, because it's not just about the questions that you ask. It's about the order of the questions. So there's a difference. You can show up to a meeting and you can say, what do we need to do to reach more customers? And it's fine. It's a valid question. But there's a series of questions in an order that would be a lot better. And for a while, this is the order that I use for my questions. I do it in this order. Who, why? What? When, and then how. So instead of saying, what do we need to do to reach more customers? I will say, who is our best customer? Why are they our best customer? What are we able to do for them? When is the best time to reach them? How can we delight them better? And so in asking in the right order and in asking questions that start with who, I get to pull those answers out of the team because most of the time I really don't have them. It's the rest of the team that has the answers and it's more my job to bring them to light in order to get us all on the same page. So I encourage you to try that out, especially if you don't have all of the authority to make the calls for your team. Asking good questions will get leadership's attention, I promise you. So with that, Deanna, let's go to Q and A.

You get there, got some questions. It looks like Janelle put her question in the Q and A. So.

Okay.

However, there are some replies to her question in the chat. So let's go back to the chat because I think that'll help. We can walk through that thought process. So Janelle says, for automating, how do you manage the idea that someone sometime. Restart that sentence. How do you manage the idea that sometime that automation will backfire, especially if it's dependent on the sales team inputting data accurately? Let's see.

All right, and then James said, trial, test, review. I'm finding it.

Maybe there's a way to automate what data the sales team put in or how they structure it. And Jeanette says sometimes it's showing them what the impact is of not inputting data accurately. And Janelle says, yes, we've tried that. It works 90% of the time. But what about the other 10% where emails go out when really they shouldn't? Do we accept a certain level of automation misuse? So I think we dug back into the actual question, what is an acceptable level of automation misuse?

So I'm going to say that the question I would ask there is what is the impact? And I legitimately mean that because I can tell you we have a story that day, earlier we were talking about this, that we sent this email to like a thousand people on Cinco de Mayo and it was totally not on purpose. And then we sent a follow up email that was, we're so sorry, you weren't supposed to get this. We started the celebration early. But Janelle, I have a really good ending to that story. And that's that one of our leads that had ghosted us for six months replied to that email and said, no, don't give up on me yet. Can we set a meeting to keep talking? And it turned into a closed piece of business anyway. So you can get ROI on a mistake. It will take different forms and it will look different ways. But I think we need to be sure that we're not afraid of making the mistake. I think that it's okay to have an acceptable level of automation misuse. I mean, do you want to get it right all the time? Yeah. But I would be asking, what is the impact of that mistake when it does happen and when it is caught, how could you turn that into a positive?

So that's a great look at it. Let's see over here.

Go to chat or Q and A. Sorry, I'm trying to scroll.

Yeah, there's some in. In Q and A. So I'll head over to this. Emilia says, in my company, we have the management support to execute strategies regarding HubSpot. However, the team members are accepting it very slowly. How do you make the process implementation faster?

So I would split your team up into three segments. First, pull out the ones that are really tech savvy, the ones that are absolutely excited about the change, that they like the tools, you know, they. They're interested in implementing. And focus your time there. Do that for about 30 days. Don't worry about the other ones after that. Those people will at some point talk to the rest of your team and about how something is working, how it has saved them time. It's easier to start with people who are friendlier to get some of those wins. And then their wins will speak for themselves. And eventually your second group, that's like, oh, I see what Deanna's doing. Oh, I see what Amelia is doing. That. Oh, okay, this could save me time too. And then focus your effort on them the next 30 days and then focus on the problem children like a quarter later. Because by then you will have built up enough traction with the others that you were working with that it won't feel as heavy of a load and they'll take a lot more attention and a lot more time. So it makes your workload more manageable.

Yeah. Michelle said a good quote. Using your champions to sell you to your detractors. It's a great way to put that.

Yes. Much more eloquent than I did. Thank you.

We just need people to reword sometimes. Let's see. Rich says, do you see an average size of company that really benefits from a Revops service?

So Revops is in like. Rich, I'm going to have to ask you to clarify. Do you mean, like, is there a certain size at which RevOps makes sense to implement or for someone to purchase Revops services from someone else? So I'll kind of answer either.

He says either.

Either. Okay, we'll go with both. I think that Revops can work for anyone of any size company, will that mean that maybe your RevOps team is just two people who wear multiple hats? Yeah, maybe. But I think that using this framework can work for anyone. I have seen it implemented for small, small businesses that were six team members and I've seen it implemented for companies that have 200 plus employees. You know, so I think it can work for any size when it comes to purchasing them. Purchasing RevOps as a service, you have to have a dedicated person in house to work with whoever you're hiring to implement. So think of the person you're hiring to implement as a coach and facilitator. But if you don't have a dedicated person, that that is their job. They are the RevOps, you know, contact on the other side, it's not going to be effective. So if you don't have a person that can dedicate their efforts to rallying the troops, to building the cross functional collaboration in your company, then it would not be a good investment for you to go and hire someone to help you implement RevOps. Awesome.

All right, I'm going to give everybody another minute. Janelle actually did put some additional automating details. Okay, so that first question. So I'm going to reread that one since it's in the Q and A. And Janelle, you can let us know for automating, how do you manage the idea that sometime the automation will backfire, especially if it's dependent on the sales team. So that was the original question and then the examples were lifecycle is now customer send an email. Yet the sales team is still taking actions that are incorrectly changing the life cycle. So does that change your tackle changing the life cycle?

Then I'm gonna say, say.

Feels very tactical items.

So yeah, I would, I would say, I would just create a different automation that would be like your backup to go back and check, you know, to clean up your data and then just have that. Because I think some of those mistakes are going to happen anyway. I mean you want that life cycle stage to be fixed. I'm trying to think through, I would want to take a little bit more time to think through what kind of automation could help on that end. But to me in that situation, I would actually use a different automation, maybe something in Ops Hub to flag it for me. I'm just trying to think of what that would be. You might have someone that's just, you know, that you have a single person that's the culprit and then it might just make sense to have a list where you're monitoring that one person's input into the system.

Yeah, I think some, some of it comes back to priorities. Right. What's your priority? If. If someone changing and adding notes is sending another automation happening, what is it really going to change what your North Star is?

Yeah.

Why are they. Why are they changing it wrongly, though? Frank's response, good question. That's a, that's a great conversation to have with them.

Yeah.

Let's see. I saw another one come in. Oh, how can. Courtney says, how can we effectively communicate the strategic value of revenue operations to the C suite? And when is the right time to advocate for separate roles like a dedicated CRM administrator and a rev op strategist? Especially when one person is currently handling both. Great question.

Okay, so I think that one of the things that the assessment can help with even if you didn't do the assessment, be having something to document to C suite that shows the current state. And then the possibilities, I think effectively communicating can roll back to decision making. And I say this because a lot of the conversations that I have with, you know, like in a sales function for my company is often with someone in the C suite. And the best thing that I found that I can tell them in those conversations is what if you could make better decisions faster? Because that's the overwhelming. That is the thing that weighs most heavily on someone in that seat. How do I know that I'm making the right call? And how long will it take to know that I made the right call? And you know, regardless of seat, I think everyone has a fear at some point of man, I want to be sure that I get this right and how can I be sure that I'm making the right call? So I think, Courtney, to your point, effectively communicating to a C suite, I would use that. The value of revenue operations to me is in if I implement this, then I can make better calls faster for my team. So I'm not going to be holding them back. And they'll be able to see the proof as, you know, as easily as I can. So if at some point I have to make a hard decision, I have to give the team bad news. Like we're, you know, we're going to have to downsize or we're going to have to do this or we're going to have to do that, they'll see it too. By putting everyone on the same page, you're also able to, you know, everyone. There's that sense of deferred responsibility goes away because everyone can see this is where we are. So we all have to rally. We all have to pull together to make this work. We all have to, you know, put in, put in the effort. And then for the second half, when is the right time to advocate for separate roles, dedicated CRM admin and a rev op strategist, especially when one person is handling both. I think the, I think that you got to take in phases and a lot. We're going to have to do this or we're going to have to do that. They'll see it too. By putting everyone on the same page, you're also able to, you know, everyone. There's that sense of deferred responsibility goes away because everyone can see this is where we are. So we all have to rally. We all have to pull together to make this work. We all have to, you know, put in, put in the effort. And then for the second half, when is the right time to advocate for separate roles, dedicated CRM admin and a rev op strategist, especially when one person is handling both. I think that you got to take in phases. And a lot of times at that point, Courtney, it's better to get a little bit of outsourced help, whether that's an agency or a freelancer, to help with some of the parts that you cannot keep up with before you advocate for complete extra headcount. Because I think a lot of times when it comes to splitting out those roles, it has to do not just with our bandwidth but with the load that we're carrying, the mental load that you're carrying. And it helps to have someone kind of like in a coaching seat to help you navigate that part. I think there does come a point where you've got to split both, but with automation, it takes quite a while to get there. I think you, from a headcount standpoint, you'd have to have, I see it at about the 250 user threshold, where at that point you've got one person that's more in the rev op seat and you've got someone else that is in the admin seat. It has to do more with, with the headcount than it does with anything else.

I like that. And that kind of plays into the next question. Any major recommendations on scaling that rev ops team? So once you've, once you've gotten it to that point and you're large enough to have the dedicated headcount, maybe you've gotten some coaching and you have that mental load split, what would be your next recommendation on getting that team to scale?

So next recommendation on getting that team up to scale, I would say that if you've got, if you've got one person in each of the buckets, it's good. I say each of the buckets. You know, your sales, your service, your operations. I think at that point, getting junior level team members up to speed to where they're in the rooms, asking the questions and gathering data for the places where you cannot be will lead you to make better decisions over time, over just relying on the data. Because that's the number one mistake that I see made when you get to a certain size and you're like, oh, well, I can rely on my data. I've got all of the things that I need. You get to a point where you rely on just the numbers that you're seeing and a little bit less on the conversations that are happening in the room. And I think taking a junior level team member and scaling that team with people who are in the rooms asking good questions, having those conversations will bring you insights that you probably didn't think of and don't necessarily have the manpower to be at every single meeting all of the time. We need time to work too. And it helps balance your approach to RevOps to still keep it human. Because that's my biggest concern, that we get to a point where we engineered this thing so that the data could tell us what to do and you forget about the people. So I think it's really important that you don't forget that element. And the biggest reason I say to take junior team members to do it is because people do not feel threatened by them and they see them. They're literally in that learning seat of, oh, I'm here to ask questions, I'm here to learn. And so when people don't feel threatened by their presence, they're likely to be more honest. So that would be my recommendation. I hope that's helpful. Morgan, good insight.

Taylor says in the chat, I added a data analyst to supplement RevOps, which has been really great. I can see that being a great role to add to that. Let me see now Rich asks the million dollar question. Are you asked to prove ROI for your service? And if so, how do you measure that for RevOps? How are you measuring the ROI of RevOps?

So there's the qualitative side and the quantitative side. So on the quantitative side, whatever scorecard. And I know, I saw someone said earlier, said something in the chat earlier, how, oh, this reminds me a bit of a bit of eos. So yes, there's some elements borrowed there from eos, but knowing that you have that scorecard and being able to take the snapshots of how the company has improved on the whole over time, how customer experience has improved. That's one that we typically do measure. You know, what is our customer saying at the beginning? What is our customer saying post implementation? But that's not the only one. I think a lot of people forget to do that same kind of measurement for their team and how their team is feeling about the company and the company's overall progress. So I would be sure to add that to the list of things that you want to be sure that you have a pulse on. And sorry, what was the other half of the question?

It was about what to measure. Like, what are the.

What to measure? Yeah, so I would say that. And then the other one I would say is time spent waiting for a decision, you know, like, how long before you're actually able to move on something. And for that, in the cases that it's not an actual metric that, you know, a client might ask us for, but it is a conversation that we have. You know, how are you feeling now versus how you felt then? You know, back at, you know, at this point, we. It took us a month to decide this is the direction we were going to go, and now you're able to make that call, you know, within a week. So being able to have those, those conversations. And yes, Deanna, you're totally right. You. You feel free, answer away.

I'm used to letting Kyle ask all the questions and we handle the chat, so. No, but you're right in action. If you're. If you're not able to do something and move fast, then that is definitely something you want to share and measure with your C suite. Because not not being able to move forward is. Is just as bad as acting on the wrong thing. Yeah, sure. I love it. Ashley, thank you so much for sharing. Is everyone wants to get in contact with you. Is LinkedIn the best place or LinkedIn works here.

I forgot my last slide. Thank you, Deanna. So LinkedIn is there. Feel free to connect with me there. And then I've left the link to the robots assessment. We will send this out, share it with you so that if you'd like the slides and all of that, you're able to see that. But thank you for having me, Deanna. I really, really appreciate it.

Revops is near and dear to my heart, so I'm happy to hear it spoken like loud and wide and deep. At this point, we dug in really good. And your assessment, I think, was a really good place for people to start, especially if they're questioning whether they're on the right track or maybe they're thinking they want to go a little bit deeper into their team and get their rops even more supercharged. So I love it. Thank you, everyone. I will make sure that this gets sent out and posted on the YouTube channel. Have an awesome day, and I will see you all next week.

Sounds good.

Bye, guys.