Getting Focused to Push the Boundaries of Success - Mollie Bodensteiner - Revenue Today - Episode # 066

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Sales, marketing, and RevOps. It's sink or swim out there, and yesterday's strategies and tactics won't help you today. This is Revenue Today, and I'm your host, Jared Robin. Join me as we interview revenue leaders in our community to learn what steps we could take right now to help you scale yourself and your company. Revenue Today is sponsored by Rev Genius, and we're on a mission to bring inspiration and creativity to all revenue professionals in the world. Want to shout out our sponsor Demandbase. Demandbase is smarter GTM for B2B brands. They help marketing and sales teams spot the juiciest opportunities earlier and progress them faster by injecting account intelligence into every step of the buyer journey and orchestrating every action. For more information about Demandbase, visit demandbase.com. Welcome! Really excited to be joined today with a person that's an active leader in the RevOps community within RevGenius. She's worked in RevOps leadership roles and is an advisor for hypergrowth startups. She's now a leader in RevOps for the fastest growing. SaaS company in the space deal. This is Molly Bodensteiner. Did I get it right?

You got it right. Hey, whatever, whatever works. I'll respond to either. Thanks for having me today, Jared. Good, good.

I, I am so excited to have you today for, for a multitude of reasons, um, but mostly just to, to learn from you. You're, you're a wealth of knowledge. You've had a storied career, but When it comes down to it, I'm just curious, Molly, debunk a myth about revenue today.

Yeah. So, um, you know, one of the things that has been sitting top of mind for me, and maybe this isn't necessarily directly revenue, but thinking about just the revenue operations space, revenue generation world, one of the pieces that has been kind of near and dear to my heart lately is just, you know, how we, how we focus on our sales development. So I presented at a conference a couple of weeks ago, just Helping startups understand you know what sales development is as a function, and you know one of the things that I I want to maybe debunk or empathize and like try to put more advocacy for is like your SDRs generally get treated like the lowest on the totem pole, but really like they are your investment in your business, especially when you think about you know who from an outbound perspective are the first people who who hit your brand. It's your SDRs, right? And so I see a lot of companies feeling like they can make investments in sales development and. churn and burn them and really not, you know, do it right. And then you see them, like, one of the things that just breaks my heart is when we blast SDRs on LinkedIn. Like, I'm very, I'm very passionate about this because, you know, is it really the SDR's fault or are they not getting the right direction and the right oversight because they're not necessarily the one closing the deal? So as we think about what we're doing to SDRs, it's just killing me.

And it's crazy. And you made a point, like, SDRs are the first people you see, they're your brand. And brand isn't always, at least in the beginning, spreadsheetable.

Right.

Right. And that's, and that's to your point, but you see companies. So

they look at this as like a, as a cheaper lead generation, right? And you hire these SDRs, but you have no, you have no framework. You don't give them, you know, the directions and the tools and the things that they need to be successful. Right. It's, hey, SDR. Welcome. We're going to pay you, you know, a pretty meager— it's not to say meager salary. Like a lot of companies do this right. But, you know, pay you based on, you know, these meetings booked or these SQOs that you're creating. But, you know, we're not really going to give you the playbook you need. It's going to be still very vague. We, you know, you might have to fight for a sequencing tool and fight for some of these things that you really need to do your job successfully. And, you know, one of the pieces that we spend a lot of time on as I oversee pipeline operations is like, how do you decrease the administrative time? For your SDRs, right? Like that's such a huge component into prospecting. Like if you're spending 4 hours prospecting and 4 hours doing engagement, like you're probably not hitting, hitting your goal, right? Or you're not putting the right emphasis in your engagement.

100%. And you know what's funny, building on what you said, there was actually a hiring manager that I, there, there's this anecdote that I heard a few months ago that told an interviewing SDR that they were just lead gen. In the interview.

Yeah. And I think that's, I mean, I, you know, I'll be, I'll be honest with you. Like I've managed SDRs in the past and other orgs when I was running marketing, um, came back in, you know, with Deal and I've really taken over pipeline operations. And I would say, you know, coming into it, I probably had more of a negative stigma towards SDRs based on just my inbox and my LinkedIn, but it's like, now I really want to lean in and make sure, make sure we do it well, right? At the end of the day, like, what's the customer experience we're trying to create? What's the brand experience we're trying to create? Like, how do we really set them up for success and help, help move, move the pipeline forward? Right. Anyone, anyone can do, anyone can send mass emails, right? You don't need to hire an SDR to do that.

Oh yeah. And if you have too many SDRs sending mass emails, none of them are going to get in the inbox anyway.

No, they're just going to ruin your deliverability, which is a whole other fun problem to work through.

And a big one. And that's, that's a reason why a lot of sales development is going towards marketing now, because those are the minds that like get that. But help me understand KPIs. Like KPIs when you're managing SDRs are pipeline generated, qualified meetings booked, all of this. What other KPIs are folks not seeing that would help them with this brand thing?

Yeah, absolutely. So, you know, obviously time to touch comes into place. Those are things. But when we think about the brand thing, it's the personalization aspect, right? So one of the initiatives that we ran internally for one of our teams was this spiff around how many personalized emails are you sending, right? Like really, really honing into like detailed personalization and scorecarding that. So they've got, you know, their, their scorecard of who sent the most personalization email this month and like there's a good spiff at the end. And I think that just trains people to think differently, right? It's not just drop them in a sequence and spray and pray. It's like, really think about why am I writing to this person? What makes them feel like they would benefit from our product or solution? Like, how can we make a message that resonates to them? And like, ideally, based on putting that type of work in, we should see the payoff in conversion.

And did you?

We still haven't seen it fully yet, but seeing leading indicators of it. So Spiff's still running.

And, and is this like some new KPIs that you put in, or is this how you've just been managing as a whole? And, and to those that are listening, um, Deal famously, I think it was last year or at the beginning of this year, said we're gonna hire 100 SDRs, right? Was that this year? And they did. So this is scaling sales development at its finest, right? How, how's the experiment been working as a whole? Yeah.

Yeah. So it's, you know, it's one of those things when we roll out knowing we have an SDR team of over 200 now, just to put that into context, like we want to be really smart about the distractions that we put into play, right? So as you have your standard operating procedures and your framework, we want to make sure that we pilot, proof, test before we release because it's very hard in any organization to manage change, right? So if I take 200 SDRs and say, Hey guys, you're doing A, now I need you to do B, and I haven't proven the value of B yet, it's not going to go well for me. So really running these kind of key pilots and these key spiffs in a subregion to validate and test, and then start to take those best practices to move, move outward.

You know what's super intriguing about Deal as well is that you're a distributed workforce because that's your product. So you like go, you get Behind it. So, so many people right now are saying, come back to the office because they're getting like— there's this big thing with leadership, like, let's fix it, everyone come in. The irony is you're scaling departments that don't typically work well in many organizations distributed, not just LA and New York, but LA and Africa, right?

Yep. Yeah, I mean, I don't think we have Antarctica yet, but we've got every other continent pretty well covered. Probably most countries as well. So it is interesting, right? So when you think about how do you set somebody up for success, and one of the problems, you know, I see in a lot of SDR organizations is like we look at activity and activity, activity, activity, and that, you know, it is an important indicator. You need to monitor activity. That's an input. You know, it's not a leading Leading indicator by any means. Um, but it is one that you need to focus on, um, as you look at performance, but it's also one that's easy to kind of fake too. So you've got to make sure you've got the validations because like I could sit and make calls, but if they're not to the right people, that's a whole other issue. So making sure like we're really setting up our SDRs for success, um, and measuring performance and helping coach them around the right outcomes and the right, you know, I think about the daily newspaper, right? As an SDR, I come in, I come into CRM. I know exactly what I need to be doing when I come in that day. And can work through my punch list.

Yeah,

so helping reduce that admin time, right, and let— allow that focus. And then hopefully in return, they're hitting their goals, they're seeing success because they're putting the right effort in.

So you mentioned, uh, activity is not a leading indicator. And if you ask people this question 15 years ago, they would have thought something different for sure. What, what, what is the leading indicator?

Yeah, so I mean, I'm looking at more of like, I guess activity You know, probably is somewhat of a leading indicator. Like you've got to put the activity in, but like looking at the— yeah, yeah. You've got to do the work, right? The work's not automatically going to come, come in, but I'm less concerned on like, did you make 500 calls today or did you, did you book 10 meetings? I don't care how you booked 10 meetings. I do care how you booked 10 meetings, to be honest with you, because then I want to be able to scale and repeat that if that's the right behavior. And that's where tracking activities come into play. But I don't want to— Yeah. I don't want to say you need to make 500 calls a day.

You know, and I can't agree more. Like I actually, um, I worked early stage at my first tech company in the space after being in the Fortune 100 world. And I was with the person that developed the sales training curriculum at Groupon. If you remember Groupon 10 years ago, it really was the cat's meow today, whatever. But like those folks rocked it. He's, and he's like, okay, Jared, We need 20 meetings a month because we're full cycle, right? He's like, if we could do 5 enterprise meetings, so qualified, but 5 qualified meetings a week, enterprise, we are going to blow this out. And we did. And we went to Series A profitably. What do you know? Like, it's right. There's something interesting right there.

There's some, there's some notion in having those like benchmarks, right? But And especially when you're ramping an SDR, you know, if you're ramping an SDR and they're new, like those are good, good indicators to help them get just the momentum and get, get the at-bats. Right. But, um, you know, you think about this, if I thought about this from a marketing perspective, if the data told you that you needed 7 touches before somebody books a demo, would you send 7 emails every day back to back? You'd look

at them.

No, because it's not the— yeah, I mean, that's not the right user experience, right? So like, how do we make sure like our SDRs are also like building the right user experience? For their consumers, like there's nothing more annoying to me as you know a consumer of a lot of SaaS tools and you know building those things. If I get an email from somebody back to back or an email and a phone call within a two-day span, right? Like think about where your where your consumers are, what's resonating with them. Like give them give them time to like review and reach out to you too. Like if I accept somebody on LinkedIn and they send me an inbox.

No. And I remember when I was going back to sales dev, when I was running a sales org, I'm like looking at what's out there and I'm watching these 21 touches in 30 days, like stuff. And I'm like, okay, let me try this myself. And I'm like, I am burnt out myself. I can only imagine what's happening over there.

Right. And it's like, if you, if you're, if you can't send 2 emails a day, like, Like, I guarantee you, for anyone who's listening here, like, I read almost every email that comes into my inbox, even though I have gated on my inbox, it goes into a folder. I still will go and read those emails. And it's funny because I was just pitched by an SDR, um, last week. And, you know, we got on the call. The reason I got on the call is because he sent a very personalized email. And I said, you know what, like, you put time, energy, and effort into this. Full transparency, I'm probably not your buyer, but like, let's have a conversation. And if I can make the right introduction, Based on kind of that initial call, I will. And on that meeting he said, you know, what advice can you give me? What are the emails you read in your inbox? Like, help me learn and help me do better as I'm doing this cold prospecting. And like, I think, you know, it's having more of that. Like, we can't just take those canned templates and push them out. Like, people expect personalization. We expect you've done your research. Like, the other thing that I always coach on is like, if you're leading every single email from like My company is great. My company is great. Our customers are great. Like, you're not being customer-centric and not speaking to their needs and their business.

And specifically their problem as well, right? Because I could say you're distributed everywhere and you could be like, great, thank you for hitting Google. But I could also say, you just—

I see that you're hiring these people and these specific—

You brought on 100 SDRs. I see you reaching out on LinkedIn, Michael G, like blowing this up on LinkedIn. Have you considered other— like, one, how is that going? Two,

like, you're not following Michael Ardo on, um, on LinkedIn, you're doing something wrong.

He's doing a wonderful job, by the way. But like, yeah, no, and, and how do you teach the trade? So You had a really— it was, it was really cool. Um, when you said this example, they took the time to research, you got on the call, but they also took the time to ask. What did they ask?

How

they could do better?

Yeah, how they could do better. And you know what actually came from that is, you know, he's trying to sell into a CS operations space, which obviously isn't, isn't my domain, used to be in my domain. I said, you know, 2 companies ago, I had one of the best CS operations managers. Let me connect you with her, right? She might not be a buyer, but like, she will give you good advice on like, what are the pain points that resonate to her as she evaluates these types of tools and can help give you perspective. And she's open to doing that, right? That's how we learn. That's how we grow. That's how we use our networks. And if we can come into that from a development standpoint, no, you know, most decent human beings are going to make the time to help because they care.

How can we encourage people or, or create guardrails to have some KPIs around it, even soft ones to do this. And I was speaking to somebody earlier about this, um, in the sales development realm and just talking about like my holistic experience and all of this other stuff helps me. And he's like, that's great. But that's like you doing that yourself, right? Like, and I think that this is a lot of the cases today. Like you have an exceptional individual that, that gets it. But how do you get a whole team to get it?

Yeah. And how do you, you know, and especially when I think about like the SDR career path particular, right? So how do you, you know, most, and not to make a blanket statement, but most SDRs are not planning on being SDRs for, you know, 3 to 5 years. Right. Some, some might be. And I think that that's great, but generally they're using this as, you know, an initial path to break into other areas of the company, whether that's moving into more of a demand gen type focused role. or moving into a sales account executive role. And so how do you help them, you know, not only succeed at their current role, but also help build the skills for their next role, right? And as companies, we've got to be really smart about that talent and work to develop that future state talent too, right? The worst thing a company can do is say, we can't move this top-performing SDR to an AE because we can't afford to lose their top-performing SDR performance, right? Like that is horrible from a customer experience, right? Or from an employee experience, right? If I'm crushing it, like reward me and let me crush the next thing.

Otherwise, your next company is going to reward you. So you have an option to move them out of sales development into AE or move them out of sales development to another company.

Or, or that's the option they're going to make. Yeah. Especially like if you have an SDR who's hitting quota, you know, consistently for a year, like, I guarantee you they're looking for another job if they don't have a career path in your current company. Wait, unless you're monetized, unless the monetization is huge and they're like just raking in dough and not putting in a lot of effort and, you know, it's cake for them. But generally that's not the case.

So, you know, thinking about what's— and I couldn't agree more— thinking about what's keeping you up at night, there's probably a million things. Um, how many Building out a RevOps department at the fastest growing company on earth, or in SaaS anyway. And distributed workforce. I'm sure if you have 50 RevOps folks, they're probably in like 10 countries, I would guess. 15 countries. Like, what's the top thing keeping you up at night or the top few things?

Yeah.

What isn't?

Yeah, yeah. I don't get a whole lot of sleep these days, but I also have 3 kids that play a little bit of a role into it, and we're crazy enough to have just gotten a puppy too. So some of this is self-inflicted. I think the things that keep— there's probably 2 areas that keep me up at night the most. The first one is foundation and scale, right? So because of how quickly we've grown, we've got a lot of fun foundational work that most startups in this type of phase have to do, right? You've, you've hit this trajectory, you've hit this curve, now you've got to make sure you've got the right, you know, processes in place to grow and scale. So when we think about things like our SDRs, you know, do we have the right plan for onboarding? Do we have the right, you know, plan for standard operating procedures for prospecting? Is everything really well documented and distributed? How do we manage change? You know, that's kind of the one, one big piece across, you know, my domain, which is partner operations, sales development operations, and pipeline operations. Or sorry, marketing operations under the pipeline operations umbrella. The other piece that keeps me up at night is thinking about tomorrow versus today. So as we think about the company and where we're going, you know, how do I make sure that I'm properly spending my time in the future versus just what we're doing today as we want to make sure we have the right planning strategy and the right forecasting and the right pieces that help tell us what we should be doing in, you know, '23, '24, '25. Versus November 22nd.

Now, others that are going through the same challenge as you, and you're probably friends with a bunch of them. What are you telling them? We're all in this together. Yeah. So I think well, they're definitely learning from you because because you're blate. You're I promise you're hiring more people than they are. I don't know who they are, but you're hiring so many.

I joke because I think I've, I think I've hired 20-some people in just 6 months, maybe not. And that's just direct hires, not even including, um, just being involved in the hiring process like this. I've, I've joked that I have 2 full-time jobs, one of which is hiring and the other one is my full-time job. But I mean, that's been, that has been such, um, a rewarding experience for me to be a part of, like, really building this team out from scratch and like really, you know, I I honestly think we're building one of the best revenue operations teams in the world right now. I wholeheartedly agree with what we're doing and how we're doing and getting there. And like, we've got great talent. It's— this is the first company that I've worked in that has been like, hire the best talent in the world, right? It's not hire the best talent in the Bay Area. It's hire the best talent in the world. Right. And I think just opening up that lens has just helped me realize how much is out there. And just different experiences, different perspective. You know, eventually I'm going to get better at my like swearing and British slang, but that'll come. That'll come with time and some of like the cultural norms. But that has been like probably one of the most rewarding things in terms of like this hiring is just the perspective and like working through a global team. I also think just from a development standpoint, like you become so much more purposeful with your time as well because you're crossing time zones, you're crossing regions, you're You know, I can't— the people in Singapore, right? Like when I meet with them, it's— we're inconveniencing one of us. So like we're very purposeful on how we communicate and how we use each other's times, which like you can't— that doesn't always happen when you're in more of like a regional company. It just definitely doesn't happen when you're in the office because you get the drive-bys, you get the ask, you get the distractions. So I'm very grateful for that learning. Back to, I think, your initial question of like, what am I saying to other people about this is like,

Yeah,

man. Get really purposeful on what you're trying to do and make sure you've got that steering at the top. There's nothing worse than the distractions. Um, the thing that I practice a lot with my team is focus. Like we have to focus and like, if it's coming in and distracting from, from the focus, we've either got to adjust our priorities and adjust our expectations or get it out of here. Right. So like really thinking about like the 4-box of, you know, what are the things that are due now, do later, don't do, and like Come back to kind of thing and really looking at really what matters from a priority standpoint and getting really clear focus because the more you add, the slower it is to get things done.

Well said. Now, what excites you about the future?

Oh, I'm so excited to have a fully staffed team, which we're getting closer. If anyone's looking for a job, hit me up. Got some really fun roles. I don't know that we're ever going to have a fully staffed team, but You know, working, working to get some of these great hire— great hires in. We just had our marketing ops person start recently. She's crushing it. Um, just really, really excited to get some of these key, key roles in place. But, you know, I think as Deal and as RevOps, you know, I'm gonna take this from a RevOps perspective. Like, the thing that excites me most about RevOps is like how this community has grown. Um, I think about this a lot. It's just I've made not only a lot of good friends, um, but like had some really great conversations on people. And like the common trend that keeps coming out is like none of us really know what we're doing, right? Every company is a little different. We're kind of making it up as we go. And getting some of those perspectives of like why people made the decisions that they made, whether that's from like an architectural standpoint or a structure standpoint or like what their variable comp is based off of, I'm always just so curious on like how they got to those decisions. And that's been like really, that's something that excites me is like just the wealth of knowledge that we're going to continue to get as like RevOps continues to build itself.

And there's creativity as a result, right? Because ops traditionally is pretty objective, but like, there's a few ways to skin the cat, so to speak, now because there isn't a playbook. Oh yeah.

No, and I mean, I kind of like selfishly hope that there's never a playbook, right? I think that there's some guiding principles, right? But it's I'm trying to think of who I met with, but it's really— there's a lot of choose your own adventure, right? And it's, you know, when you talk about something like forecasting and really building out like a forecasting model, there's like 15 probably ways you could do it. There's probably 3 right ways to do it, but then it's like understanding your business and like what the objectives of your business are to like figure out the best, the best of those 3 ways. You know, I laugh at this, you know, in doing consulting for several years through Marketo and in marketing operations, it was like, oh yeah, you know, You can pretty much do anything however you want to, but there's really one right way to do it. I think RevOps is similar. There's typically a best practice, but you've got to tweak it for your business.

All models are wrong, some are useful.

Yeah, that's probably fair. It's probably fair to say most of mine are just wrong.

Some are useful. That was a funny quote that stuck to me from the growth world. Because I do see a lot of similarities, right? Because there's experiments, there's different things that you're going to try.

I laugh because we've been doing all of 2023 planning right now. And I've been talking to my analysts. I was like, it's about the journey, not the destination here, right? Whatever we put in place for this model is going to be wrong, right? At the end of the day, if you build this type of model, it's never perfect, right? If you do a perfect revenue model, call me because you must have something that I don't have, right? It's going to be off, right? It's directional. It's about what is the work, what are the assumptions you're making as you go through and get the actuals, like how does it change? And it's building that infrastructure. It's not saying like we are going to hit $100,000, right? And like, here's how we're going to get there and every month's going to be perfect. It's not. If it is, then you're again crazy. But it's, it's the journey of like how you're thinking about your plan and how you're managing your plan and like what, what you're putting in place to make those assumptions.

I love that. You must be crazy if your model's right or you're not pushing it hard enough, right? Like, I think I'm going to sell one thing a month. Well, you sold one thing by the 5th day and then you just cut out because you wanted everything to be right.

I always joke and like I've said this over and over is like, if you're hitting your plan, you've got the wrong plan. Right. So, if we're really striving for growth and striving to really push our boundaries, if you're hitting 100%, it's not hard enough. You've got to be pushing it harder and looking at 80% as success. 100% is like, you shouldn't have the boundary.

Isn't that like the typical old-school OKR framework? If you're at 70% to 80%, you're at 100%.

80% is green, right? Like, and I— 80% is green. As somebody who like would cry in college if I didn't get like an A on a test, I still remember bawling to my mom when I got a C on a biology test. She's like, C's are great, C's get degrees. And I'm like, I'm a failure. Like that, that mantra of like the 80%, like kind of kills me inside. But like, I know I've got to lean into that because at the end of the day, like that's where we need to be to have growth. And have that flexibility to grow and scale and learn.

I love that. And 80% is really like 100%, but you should— but like, you've left it all out on the field. If you're at 100%.

Yeah.

Let's just, let's just hope that you aren't at 100 2 quarters in a row, right? Because then you're like—

Right, then you're, then you're probably like, if you think about that from, you know, revenue impact, you've probably shot yourself a bit because you didn't, you know, you didn't test, you didn't test hard enough. You didn't, you know, make some of those risks and make some of those bets, right? You stuck with what you, what you knew. And I'd rather have people come in and try something new that might, it might fail, right? Fail fast. And that's okay. Or it might be really successful. So when I think about like, you know, even just like our sequencing and like sending out our outbound, like let's have a champion versus a challenger and like, let's push ourselves and like, It might not work, but let's at least align to what works and what doesn't work and fail fast on it.

What's the craziest experiment in the sales dev realm that you did in 2022 or last year?

Oh, I don't even—

When I say crazy, like crazy at the front end and no matter how it ended.

I'm going to have to think on that one. Because I've only been taking this one over for like the last like month and a half here, so I haven't gotten totally into it. I'm trying to think of some other, some other roles. One of the things though, like when we talk about sequencing, and I'd love— I probably need to hone in on this more, is like the gifting concept. I can— Don't think that's a crazy thing at all, but I also kind of hate it. And I really struggle with it of like, I'd rather, you know, if you have to pay somebody to take a meeting with lunch, like their intentions aren't right. And you're already kind of setting yourself up for failure, right? I'd rather see companies gift to employees of like, hey Molly, congrats on the promotion. Or like, hey Molly, I know you've talked about like you've been knee-deep in 2023 planning, like let me buy you lunch kind of thing. And like showing more of like that from like a vendor support and like a relational standpoint, but not to get the demo.

No. And I, I actually gift a little bit when I, when I mess up and like miss, like show up really late to a call or like something. And then they're like, you know, I'm busy now. And I'm like, oh shit, I fucked up. Pardon my French, everybody listening. But like, I'll send them like, like a really cute, like $20 or $40 thing and be like, listen, when I get my act together, I hope that you take the meeting. And they're always like, yeah, that's so nice.

Right. And like, that's— and to me, that's like totally different. Like, if I asked somebody cold— so I've, you know, emailed people cold on LinkedIn and just said like, hey, I saw you made a post on this. Like, I am really interested in learning more about this. Like, can I buy you a coffee and spend like 15 minutes chatting? Like, and that, that's, you know, something different than like, hey, click here, get a coffee, take a meeting.

Like, this

one, you're probably not getting their Yeah, you're not getting the right stakeholders on that, right? Like,

this is a $250 free microphone from taking a 30-minute meeting. Um, and, and it was like one of those days where it was worth my time, you know? Like every once in a while you're like, I just need to— I actually could see myself using that product. I mean, I'm not in the market, but like my current vendor is like whatever. So I'll take the meeting. And then during it, I'm like, yeah, just send me the card.

Yeah. And that's the thing. It's like, you know, thinking about then what that ROI comes down to, right? So you probably were, you know, an enterprise-level target for them, like top strategic account, something like that that puts the microphone behind it. But like, if I'm talking, you know, working SMB trying to get a CEO to book a meeting, like, is that $5 or $10? Because coffee is expensive. Expensive now Starbucks gift card really going to be what gets them to take the meeting? Or would you rather actually like appreciate their time after the meeting and send them something for a follow-up and motivate that way?

If you're going to do this, is there a need to have SDRs? Your cost of acquisition is now a couple hundred in addition to the couple hundred you're giving that SDR there, in addition to their base salary, in addition to everything.

In addition to the marketing spend that's going through it too.

So, so, so now it is a marketing, it needs to be aligned as such and made it black and white what it is. Um, you could argue that demand gen could run outbound with full cycle, right?

Oh yeah. All through outreach or all through HubSpot or whatever. You know what I mean? Like, so think about, think about where you're making the investment and why you're making the investment. And that's what comes down to, again, like The personalization and like the actual like skillful prospecting and outreach, right? Um, versus like the plug and play mass, mass send, mass blast.

Couldn't agree more. And you can mass send, mass blast these gifts to an extent as well. So like you, mm-hmm, you get away with it cuz it's nice. But Molly, this has been awesome. So the, you know, in the beginning, I spent up until now learning from you, and and I love opening up your mind, especially because of everything like all the all the tricky problems that that you have to solve. But now I want to learn a little bit about you. So,

oh geez!

Who is Molly?

God, is that the question?

Who are you?

Um, yeah, I don't question you know. I don't really know who I am. I mean, I can tell you like the things that I enjoy, right? Um, I'm naturally a problem solver. Like that is, you know, even early in my career I took— she's right out of college, got a Six Sigma Green Belt, right? Understanding DMAIC and process improvement has like really just sat in my mind. I would say, um, I'm an optimistic pessimist, meaning that my glasses always Always half empty because I'm always looking for opportunities to fill it, and that's the optimistic side of me. You know, back to our point is like if you're hitting 100%, you're not doing good enough. Generally, where where I'm at, which is probably why like I've really leaned into revenue operations because it is just one big problem that you're trying to solve between like the people process data policy technology. It all it all comes to place, and at the end of the day, we're we're applying DMAIC so the define measure analyze improve control to every. Problem that we're trying to solve as we make things better. You know, at the end of the day, we're just, we're trying to help figure out how do we get from A to B in the best possible way and doing that across the entire customer lifecycle. You know, I hate, I think we've probably talked about this. I hate the term revenue operations because of the connotation of revenue. You know, I think about this just really as, you know, lifecycle operations, customer operations. I know we've thrown out like growth operations, but it's just really like, how do we build the best Now,

mother, dog mother. Yeah. From, from, uh, Midwest to West, back, back again. Walk me through that.

Yeah, I mean, um, so I, you know, first took a big, big risk early on in my career and moved out, moved out to San Francisco. So I've been, I've been in San Francisco for the last 10 years. Was Des Moines, Iowa native. Went to college in Missouri, even in a smaller town than where I grew up in Iowa, and you know made the whim to move out and start working at Marketo at like 22 years old. About gave my mom a heart attack when when I did that, which is a great learning experience. Like I think about you know what helped me the most in my career, and it was putting myself in such an uncomfortable situation where I was probably extremely underqualified for the roles. So thank you, Marketo, for taking a risk on risk on me at that point. Point, um, and like really put in a situation of really high performers around me and started to like figure it out and measure up. I remember, um, my first day at Marketo, literally my first day at Marketo, they're like, hey Molly, do you know what person accounts are in Salesforce? And I was like, yeah. And they're like, great, can you jump on this client call and talk them through it? And I was like, yeah, I'm sure, I guess sink or swim, right? Um, and I think those are like the types of situations that I, I probably thrive in, um, is being okay being uncomfortable and like Being okay with failing and seeing failing as also learning and as success.

Have you failed a lot in your career? Oh,

I fail. I think I fail every day. I hope I'm learning, right?

You hope you don't fail twice at the same reason.

Yes, correct. I try not to make the same mistakes twice, but I do think making mistakes help you realize like what you're doing, um, and why you did it. And I think you've got to look at that as learning. And I, you know, I appreciate that my coworkers and like even the people on my team will call me out when they disagree with something too. And like we can have those types of conversations to get different perspective. And, you know, trust me, I know I'm not the smartest person in the room, which is why I think I'm in the right room. Again, advice to people, if you are the smartest person in the room, get in a different room because you're not growing. Yeah. And you're not learning. So I do generally, you know, that's one thing I love about Deal. And I will say this every time I'm on interviews with people when they ask me why I love it here is like most companies, you know, 80% of the work is done by 20% of the people. And that's not the case at Deal. Like the caliber of the people here and like how collaborative and how everyone works together is just unparalleled. And I love it because I'm continuing to learn from everybody.

That's, that's Pareto's principle, and I believe it's true still, right? Or no?

Oh, I think—

I mean, it just might be a smaller gap, much smaller.

Yeah, I think smaller, probably smaller gap. And some of that's just, you know, as we're lean workforce and like continuing to move, like just people genuinely care and are like working towards the same goals. So I think you see that efficiency, and it's, it's a lot harder. You know, you think it's a lot easier when you're a distributed workforce, but I think It's a lot harder in Deal to like sneak away without like delivering, right?

For sure.

Which definitely helps because I think when everyone went remote in corporate environments, it was like, oh yeah, I think that person's working today. Not really sure. You know, they've got their mouse hooked, hooked onto a remote control car moving around so teams stay active. I've seen like those memes and I'm like, yeah, that's— I wish that would fly.

I love Deal. I mean, I just paid one of our employees Uh, through it the other day, and I hope to pay many more through it. You have a product that's solving a major— what was a major challenge no longer is a major challenge. What, I'm gonna PayPal somebody in India? Like, no.

Um, like, not for full-time work. Super bullish on, on, on the product. And like, it was something, you know, even just— I was probably pretty myopic too, like, in coming into this on like how hard this really was. And just true problems that they're trying to solve.

Anyway, how could folks get in touch with you, Molly, to learn more about RevOps, to learn more about you?

Yeah, hit me up on LinkedIn. You know, I'm fortunate enough to work with Rev Genius to do a weekly podcast on What the F is RevOps, which I think has been great. I laugh because I'm like, this is just really like me having therapy with people that I've wanted to talk to and like geeking out and asking them all the questions that You know, I haven't had a chance to like ping them on directly, so really appreciate that time. I also have a link on my LinkedIn for just if you want to book 30 minutes with me. I've blocked an hour each week off, like book the time. Happy to just have one-on-one conversations with people. Feel free to use it. That's what it's there for. Like I'm really vested in this community, invested in this network, and you know selfishly I learn a lot when I talk to other people. So. It benefits me as much as it benefits you.

Selfishly, she needs to hire you if you're good, so please book that link.

Yeah, if you're looking for your next DevOps role and you're anywhere in the world, please reach out. Um, happy to, happy to have conversations, especially as we've got some great roles open too.

Molly, this has been amazing chatting with you today. Thank you for joining.

Yeah, thanks for having me, Jared. This has been fun.

Awesome. And listeners of Revenue Today, if you learned something today or laughed, tell somebody about this podcast. Thanks again, Molly.

Yeah, perfect. Take care.

See you next time, everybody. Whoa, another great episode of Revenue Today. For show notes, links, and mentions, visit revenue today dot live. For all my friends in the Rev Genius community, thank you. It's been awesome to spend this time with you. Please DM me any feedback and ideas in our Slack channel or on LinkedIn. If you're not in Rev Genius, join us at revgenius.com. It's free and it only takes like 2 seconds and you'll be joining a group of 27,000 revenue professionals strong. We've got it all. Looking forward to seeing you there. Catch you on the flip side.