Jared Robin Reveals the Secrets Behind How He Skyrocketed RevGenius

Perfect. Hello everybody, thanks for joining us today. Super excited today, joined by Jared Robin, who is the co-founder of Rev Genius, which I'm sure a lot of you here have heard of. Um, we're going to be talking all things sales, RevOps, current state, future state, pre-old state. Um, but Jared, I'll let you introduce yourself, and thanks for coming on.

Hey, it's an honor to be here. I'm really into the tech you're building and what you're doing in the space. And I'm Jared, for those that don't know me, I'm a co-founder of Rev Genius. We're a community of about 40,000 now. Every time I get interviewed, it's a number higher. Sales, marketing, RevOps, customer success professionals that are collaborating on the future of business-to-business go-to-market. Previously, I have 15 years sales experience and all of that stuff, half in SaaS or media and related, other half in logistics. So I'm excited to chat today.

Nice. Yeah, before we get on to Rev Genius, which I'm really interested about how it started, how it expanded, what you're doing with it now, I always like looking through people's LinkedIn profiles where they started their careers. Knowing what they're doing today. So I saw you like, you know, you started off at FedEx, then you went from FedEx to like, it looked like a super early stage company, seed stage company.

Oh yeah.

You kind of went into like a growth marketing role, then you co-founded a business. So you can kind of see the path. I can kind of see it. And it's that whole Steve Jobs, you can't connect the dots looking forward, only backwards. So how did you kind of, what was your journey like starting with FedEx, that type of selling into tech? How did like those first kind of few years look?

Well, what you don't see on my resume is I was a first 50 employee of a company called seamless.com, or it was Seamless Web at the time that became Seamless that was bought by Grubhub. I was only there 3 months. Why'd I leave? I was inside sales. I wanted to get to field sales and I was tired of cold calling office managers on like a coil phone with like an early edition of Salesforce. It was just really boring. And the product was killer, right? But what we were charging for didn't really make sense to me. So like everybody now, nobody pays for— well, all the fees are baked in, right? Like, and you're using these food delivery services. But at the time, we asked like accounting firms and law firms to pay an extra 15% on top. Why, you ask? Because we were giving them accounting software. And I'm like, it's a food ordering platform. We're making money on the other side. Like, I'm cold calling an office manager. Like, I believe in the company. And then I made a suggestion. I'm like, I think you guys could grow faster. Not that my suggestion was taken, but they did do this. Not that I'm the reason. I'm like, I think you guys could grow like exponentially faster if you just take this stupid thing away and just say like, we're making it on one side of the marketplace. And actually they make it on both. They just bake it in on a per order basis. But yeah, left after 3 months. Because I really needed validation and it was hard working for an early stage company as the first company out of school. So I went to FedEx. I wanted to be like a pharmaceutical or medical device sales rep and technology wasn't going to get me there. But field sales at FedEx would. So I was there for like 7 years and I learned how to sell at FedEx. We had a pretty basic sales process. We had a really recognizable name. But we had a product that was perceived as a commodity. When you're selling something that's perceived as a commodity, that's when you really learn how to sell. Even if even if it's your name is recognizable, like why do I have to switch from UPS to FedEx or DHL? You're European to to FedEx. It's the same shit. And me having to show why there was value there, even at the same price or even at more expensive. really helped build some chops. Plus, uh, you could do— it was, it was a hustle.

How do you— like, I agree, and every— everything eventually becomes commoditized at some point.

But yeah, like, perceived to be commoditized.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Monetized if you, if you sell just on price.

Yeah. And, and like, so something like FedEx, I don't know who, who are you selling to? I've never like been in that industry, so I'm assuming you're selling to large Anybody that ships shit. Retailers. Retailers are a great customer, right? Let's spend loads of money. So in that example, surely it's a cost, right? I would think if I'm going to move from UPS to FedEx or whoever, yeah, how do you— are they only moving because it was like they're pissed off with their existing supplier? They've screwed them over.

Great question. Um, so I, I handled, uh, a variety of industries. I handled Gilt Groupe. Remember the online Like discount, like high-end retailer during its peak.

Yeah.

And they were a big UPS shipper. I handled some fashion accounts, some PR accounts that just needed to get like merchandise shipped fast. I handled like, like children's sock, like some ecommerce, all of that. So how do you get people to switch?

Yeah.

All right. I mean, one, you have to know who you're selling to, like, is very relationship-driven first and foremost. Like when, when the competitor— and here's, here's the tricky thing. They don't sign until they're at the millions in ACV. They don't sign annual deals that they can't get out of. And frankly, I'm not sure that they could ever not get out of it, right? So like if you're in a 6-figure deal, they can leave at any moment. All right. So 6-figure deal for many of the people that are listening is like a great deal. I think ACVs are going down in general with SaaS. So how do you, how do you sell? How do you protect against that? So if the competition was selling on price, I had such good relationships that the CFO or whoever my contact was would just fax me what they sent. And I'm like, you know, depending on the account and all this, sometimes I would match the price and be like, hey, are you going to stay? And sometimes, sometimes I wouldn't even need to because they would have saw the value already. Now going into an account, How do you differentiate other than price? They always want to get a good price. But here's, here's what, here's, here's a couple value things. So like, I would take the invoice that they paid and, and use it essentially to see where they were shipping to, right? Like, and there's different zones in the US. Zone 2 is the cheapest near you. Across the country, more expensive. International, every country is a different zone, right? And they'd be like, "Oh, I'm getting 65% discounts." But I'm like, "Okay, let's see how let's break it down. What are you actually getting? Do you realize the 65% zone you're getting like nothing? Like I could give you zero discounts there and five percent more in what you're actually using, and and it could net out to being like half the discounts. But you'll realize double the savings. So like so like being smart like that with price. Pricing, but also mode optimization. So what I mean by mode optimization—if there, like I had one client or prospect that became a client that was shipping 100 overnight envelopes zone two. Zone two delivers overnight on ground. So they were spending, and they'd say we have 65% discounts on overnight. I'm like, great! You're at $13 an envelope. If you shipped it ground with zero discounts, you'd be at $6 and save. 50%. I don't even need to give you any discounts. Oh, shit. Like, so like optimizing that. Also, operations. Like, if we could stay out later to pick up more packages that day, they were going to arrive a day quicker, right? So like, if UPS left at 5 PM, I'm like, how many packages after 5 PM do you have that go out the next day? 200? Holy shit. What if we could stay out till 7 PM? Again, same price or more. That's big. And then home delivery, we used to deliver on Saturday at no additional charge on ground. So if you shipped it overnight Friday, guilt group, your package will be delivered Saturday instead of Monday. What would that do for your customer service calls that were coming in? What would that do for the email volume coming in? over the weekend and stuff. And you could break it down. So those are just like a few ways to sell on value. And then just being like on top of everything. It's hard. It was really hard because you're account executive, account manager, customer success in one.

And it's, I think that you could touch on like some of the fundamentals that most good salespeople have, which is relationship building, like, you know, actually building a good relationship. Like the first thing they teach you in every sales job, people buy from people first. But yeah, the value-based selling, putting a dollar value on something, which is in your case, like, what does a Saturday delivery mean to you in terms of email volume, call volume, delivery, customer service, increased orders?

Yeah.

You're in the millions and millions of dollars for some of these companies. So, um, yeah, I think in modern-day tech sales where I think a lot of people are, yeah, I think it's getting back to that, like, you know, intangible, tangible cost savings, business benefits. It's hard sometimes because I think people have taken it too far. I will save you 6 minutes doing this piece of workflow, and it kind of dilutes the whole business case. So you have to look for the hard—

I think, yeah, and I think, I think being trustworthy is killer. So like, um, I actually, I handled, um, a consolidator or a reseller, right? Like that used us and DHL for Gilt Groupe. I brought that client in FedEx later acquired them. Guilt groups like you know we want to look at 200 packages a day to Canada, like like this little. I'm like that that could have been 100, 200, $500,000 business just for this little opportunity. I'm like I want to bid on it, but I'm gonna also give it to my client because there's a 50% chance we're gonna get it through them as well, and I'm gonna get it. But like I just want what's best for you. Coming in and just like looking at the opera, like making them. A hero, like like that was big. Our sales process was ready. R-E-D-D-I. The first step was research. Okay, and this is big. Like even today, second is engage, and engage didn't just we think of engage like send a cold email or something, and and sure that that that's what it is, but it's it's really connect. It's connect with the person at a deep level when you walk into an office, cold call or not, like notice things. Notice a Manchester jersey on the wall or something and really connect deeply. I remember my director giving me feedback like, oh, you missed the Red Sox thing on the wall. Then the 3 Ds: discover, ask questions, develop a solution, demonstrate that solution, and then implement. Sounds a little simplistic. There might be some things missing there, but like, It worked, and E was the most important thing. And today we say you don't have. I love gap selling. I love Keenan. I think he's one of the best sellers in the game. You don't have to like somebody to buy from them. I agree with that. But like, if you're selling a product with a lot of upsell potential, like a like like let's look at Salesforce or HubSpot or you know lots of that potential. I think you do have to trust the person to buy from them, if that makes sense. Like, like if you're just buying a widget, or you're buying a data product, not a ZoomInfo that has a whole slew of products, but just a SaaS company with like one product. It's a little different. And I think what's— we have so many people, we've optimized the process so much. With SDR, AE, account manager, CS on one account that could be doing $25K ACV. It's like, like, I get it. But I think that there's an opportunity to handle things more and a net new dollar out of the same account is worth the same, I believe, as a net new dollar period. It's probably, it could potentially be worth more.

And I think that—

thanks for that tangent.

Yeah, yeah. And I think like some of those things that we— yeah, the, the, the sales processes and the frameworks. And again, I think everyone— it's saturated, everyone's doing it. And so I'm more interested now, you started off FedEx, I know you went to a startup. Yeah, kind of fast forwarding now before we kind of talk specifically about the state of sales today. Rev Genius, like you started as an AE sales guy basically. How did you, like, how did this community, like everyone knows, like I've been in sales for 20 years, like I just assume everyone knows Rev Genius. How did you start this? Like what did it start as? Was it just like a LinkedIn group or you had a few people asking a few questions? Like how did it start?

It's a great question. So, You know, you mentioned earlier my plight, like, you didn't use the word eclectic, but you kind of inferred that it was a bit eclectic.

Pick a mix. Do you guys use that word? Pick a mix?

Oh, maybe. But I went from a Fortune 100 company to a seed startup. I was President's Club. And then I was almost out of a job because we didn't even have a product that worked, let alone product market fit.

Right?

Like, like, give me a product that works to try this shit. Yeah. And then everything in between. So to say that I had not just eclectic, like companies I worked for, but like experiences in sales and having to be crafty, having resources, not having resources, having arguably the best product in the world, not knowing your name, it, it gave me like a lot of empathy towards the journeys of folks in tech, especially because tech We have everything, the beginning, the later, bad managers, good managers, etc. So I found myself without a job at the beginning of COVID And frankly, I didn't know the direction I wanted to go. Like I'd been like a first boots on the ground head of sales, you know, like building out teams, player coach. Like, do I just want to be like an enterprise AE for a bigger company, make a really good living and work up from there? I'm like, Maybe, but there was like no jobs at the beginning of COVID like available, like, like, there wasn't the downsizing that there was is today, or maybe there was, it was close, man. Like it was a tough, tough market. And I knew I had to be seen on social. And we're talking 3, 3 and a half years ago, right? 2020, March, let's say, or beginning of 2020. I just lost my job running sales at a marketing agency. Like a smidgen before COVID started, and all my interviews—I went from like 12 to 15 interviews a week to like two—and I'm like, and it was because the opportunities were drying up, right? Like I was the same person. So I became active on LinkedIn. I followed Justin Welsh's first LinkedIn playbook. It was ahead of its time. It was it was perfect for the time, and from there I started meeting people that were also trying to be active on LinkedIn. They're also salespeople or marketers, etc. I threw four of us in a group. Galen and I, the original co-founder of Rev Genius, were like, "Okay, let's start something. I don't know what it is." And and we both came to the table with like a couple ideas or something. We put four of us in a group. Um um she's like, "I think it should be something educational." I said, "I think it should be influencer marketing agency," because I started feeling like the beginnings of this coming from the B to B to C world. And right now you're seeing. that start to pop off. But I would have been too early on that, I think, at the time. Right now is the time.

Yeah.

I think it's still early. But I'm like, okay, your idea first, then my idea second, because I feel like that. And then we're like, you know, how does education look? We didn't know it was going to be a community. We had these 4 people in a group, we called ourselves the Four Musketeers. We're like, there's so many emails, and so many digital events, and events, period. Why don't we just create like the Eventbrite for sales and marketing events and have a single place for all of them. So we're like, okay, every Sunday night, uh, Galen would take the lead and I'd help. Um, we'd create all of our favorite events, put it in a Google Sheet and give it to these 4 people in a LinkedIn chat. Um, and then we're like, invite your friends. The only rule is they have to be a vibe. Like we want to create like really good energy and the The 4 people grew to about 25 or 30 and realized a couple things. One, I don't think they were going to that Google Sheet ever.

Yeah.

Unknown, but like, I was like trying to like circulate a little and they weren't really like above the moon for it, over the moon necessarily to have like a centralized spot. And the second thing that happened was our LinkedIn apps on our phones kept breaking every day, meaning like you'd be in LinkedIn, it would just shut off and you'd have to go back in. And the reason why was because the engagement was absolutely through the roof. Like, it was like, uh, rapid fire back and forth, people supporting others. And I said, okay, I think, I think these people are telling us exactly what we need to do. And like, what is it? Is it— I guess it's a community.

Mm-hmm.

Took a look at the landscape. There was 4 major community or community-like businesses. One was for senior leaders only at the time that was paid. One was for senior leaders only at the time that wasn't paid. One was a content site that was tremendously valuable, but content first, which I, you know, looking back, I love them for it. And then the fourth, we didn't really know what it was, like what it truly was. I'm like, is there really no open, inclusive community space, community-first spaces? For everybody for no money, and I said, "I don't think so." But but by this point, the members we have the name Rev Genius. We named this chat Rev Genius in LinkedIn, and they're they're yelling at me to open up a Slack. So I opened up a Slack, and I said, "Let's see," and we started acquiring about one to three thousand members a month within the first thirty days.

And that was just all word of mouth referrals, people inviting other people.

You know, the funny thing is, and I almost put a post on Twitter about this today, and the main reason I'm— and I'll tell you on this podcast, the main reason why I'm holding back is because it's very executable, but it will ruin like social.

Yeah.

So people think, and so a lot of people grow their followings and they drop a link to sign up for their newsletter or community or course or whatever, and they do very well with that. Grow the list into the tens of thousands. And we certainly got some from that. I reached out to everybody directly, Gotham. I SDR'd myself, targeted folks in sales, marketing, RevOps, CS, maybe from certain companies, maybe as members of other communities that had on their profile, and reached out manually on LinkedIn. To all of them, I didn't use automation, and I and I did it intentionally. Automation would help me scale it. Like this is not scalable at all, but I was convinced, and I copied and pasted right. Like I I copied and pasted from a Google Sheet to be fair. I didn't I didn't spend two minutes writing a unique message, let alone, and maybe I changed one thing here and there. But I wanted to automation becomes the most apparent. It becomes pretty obvious on the outbound. But it becomes even more obvious when you have a positive response and there's a gap in time, right? So like if somebody's like, yeah, I want to join, um, I wanted to write back within 5 minutes and be like, got you, let's go, um, introduce yourself, go. And I do think that that's part of the secret sauce because if I automated, let's say, 100, um, invites, 10 people said yes, which was roughly the percentages that we're, we're saying, yes, probably 10 to 20, to be honest. Um, that 10% included cold connection requests as well, to be clear. People that connected with me already, I think we're probably closer to 20 or 25%, which is crazy. Um, and I just wrote, um, hey Gotham, thanks for connecting. Um, want to shoot you an invite for an inclusive sales, marketing, or RevOps Rev Genius Slack channel. What's the best email to send an invite?

Yeah, nice.

You would have said, I heard of Rev Genius, here's my email, right? It's so simple. Yeah, it's not brain surgery in the least. Did I get nos? I got way more yeses, way more yeses. I did. I get no response. And here's the kicker: if I got no response, one month later I would send the same message, Gotham. I, I would, I would, I would copy and paste the same Yes, I tried Thoughts? I tried Bump. Yeah, um, I want to spend as little time on— because it's a free community that I believe had so much value. I'd send the same thing and I'd get apologies. Sorry, I didn't see the first one. So that was part of it. Um, part of it was creating, uh, and, and I said, if I myself reach out to 300 people a day and 30 of them say yes, over the course of a month, I myself am acquiring 1,000 people. Now, if word of mouth takes over, that's where it goes to 2,000 or 3,000. I had an intern once, like doing the same thing from her profile, not scalable. But some of the growth loops we had, like ambassadors just wanting to get as many signups as they could, we'd reward them with t-shirts, sweatshirts, stuff like that. We took a page out of like the Morning Brew. I thought that they were very good with their referrals, people adding it to their LinkedIn profile. I don't want to say we were the first to do it, but we might have been the second or the third. Like we were early with that. That was a big growth loop. And those were some of the core things, but that's essentially how we grew it.

That's like, I love, like I've got a similar story, like, and it's the sales background. It's the like AE background, SDR background. Like it's having that skill set that you were just like, I can just outbound this. I know I'm capable of getting 10 people a day, 20 people a day. I know if I contact 100 people, if I send this message, I know I can get 10 people. And over 3 months, I remember when I was starting OneShot, I needed to get funding. And then you go on Google, how do you get VC funding? And everything you read is like, you need an introduction, you need a warm introduction to a VC. So you either have to know someone. That's everything I read. And I was like, I don't know any VCs. I don't know anyone who knows VCs. So I did what I know I could do, which was cold prospect. So I looked at every pre-seed investor, B2B enterprise tech, looked at similar, used Crunchbase, found like a list of about 100, 150. And I would probably say I got a 30% response rate in terms of like not knowing anyone. It's just head down, super clean email, looked at one of their past investments, put it in the subject line, but it's that SDR mindset.

You don't even— so what I found, and with running growth for Portion, I was trying to get art galleries onto our network. What I found is when you have a no-cost offer, honestly, no cost, not even like 2 steps to a cost, like no-cost offer, it's pretty damn easy. And also, When you have like a no-cost offer to people that aren't used to receiving emails, art galleries are not used to these kinds of emails from an individual. I was booking 25 meetings a week, a week, bro. Like, I'm like, hey, do you want to get on? My email was this. I essentially scraped everyone off Artsy. And I, and my pitch was I'm creating Artsy on the blockchain. We're going to we're going to give you more distribution, and if we sell anything, it's just a percent of the sale. And frankly, in the beginning, we're not even going to take that. Do you want to meet? And they're like, yes. So I remember closing like contract signed. I don't know. Eighty art galleries in a month. Eighty percent close rate. Something maybe it was eighty over. 2 or 3 months, to be fair. But like, got to a point where 25 meetings a week is like too many. It's like a lot, especially if there's no money coming from it. But like, to get people onto a platform like that, it's significantly easier. When I was running my fashion magazine, I was doing outbound, and people lose sight of this, to magazines to distribute our content or to Photographers to work with us. I'd reach out to, I'd qualify a list of 100 photographers. I'm like, hey, we're looking for new photographers, blah, blah, blah, blah. 10, 15 of them would say yes.

Yeah.

Like phenomenal.

Yeah.

And then, and then after you do work with the 10 or 15, and if it's good, then you reach out to the other 100 again and say, hey, we already worked with 10 of the 15 and they know that they're qualified. And then you get another 10 or 15 that you did like, hey, sorry, I overlooked this, but now I see that you work with Billy Bob Joe, who shot for Vogue. I would love to come in. I'm really good friends. We were just talking about your shoot. It's potent. If I was going to start a partnership program, I would copy because I because I think partnerships is another thing that's low hanging fruit where where you give value. I would copy HubSpot's partner list. Which is available, uh, for those that are listening, hit me up. I'll send the link if, if you can't find it on a Google Sheet. There's 4,000 partners on there. And Gotham, I strongly recommend that you do this.

I was about to ask for that link.

I was like, oh yeah, I would, I would set a KPI of 200, 5% of that list signing up and, and, and a quarter period and just go at it.

Yeah.

And bring it on. Hey, I saw that you partnered with HubSpot. We integrate with HubSpot. Small world.

Yeah. Yeah.

Amazing. We want to give discounts to your portfolio. We want to help your portfolio succeed.

Yeah.

Et cetera.

And that's like, and actually I want to touch now and kind of go towards the final.

Now all of a sudden the salesperson's in marketing just like that.

Yeah. And like, and I keep thinking like our business, we've grown. Ours is mainly all direct prospecting partners. Something we've thought about, but we haven't resourced time, money, all those good things. But it's such a big area, right? And I think like just, it doesn't, I think when people think about outbound and pipeline generation, it doesn't necessarily mean just find your ICP, send them a cold email. There's like lots of different ways to engage with your prospects outside of a cold call, outside of an email, outside of a LinkedIn invite. And there's ways of doing things like Using the partner name, looking at the ecosystem, that will just significantly bump your response rates in that prospecting anyway.

It's going to help you grow much faster because when you do outbound, there's kind of a ceiling in your time, in all of this. And if you stop doing outbound for a month, there's going to be nothing coming in. Outbound, once upon a time, was very predictable. Now it's becoming significantly less helpful. And you see that gap, and you've created a product to help make it more predictable again for orgs. But like, partnerships is one angle. Like, there's a lot of collaborative stuff, leaning into community evangelists, customer marketing, find out which ones of your customers are talking about you on social. Harness them in a roundtable, figure out all the value adds, the non-monetary value adds that you could give folks that are already using you, that are loving you, to speak about you, like to harness word of mouth, whether it's in communities, on social, etc. Find targeted creators or influencers that have audiences of your ICP. Or personas that are part of your ICP or both, have them get on the sauce, so to speak, like, like get on your product, give it to them for free. And if they truly love you, then compensate them in some way.

Mm-hmm.

There's like all these collaborative efforts that don't require significant ad spend that you could build quite a business of marketing with that if you join with outbound, well, now you'll create some inbound, could be really stellar, right? And so, you know, it's just logical, right? Like you work with an influencer or whatever, and they have a post and it goes pretty big. And you could just scrape everybody that liked and commented on it, see who overlaps your ICP. And now you have a much warmer outbound. And there's also really cool demand gen ways that I've heard to do outbound. So you could, let's say we're using OneShot, which is going to be even more potent than the current ways. You could send an email with a sales engagement platform like a OneShot and with a marketing automation platform to all of your prospects and you could see who interacts with it, who clicks, who goes to the site, all of that. And then you could create an audience of those people and create programmatic advertising with those who have shown a level of intent on your outbound. Okay. So it's not just follow up everyone that opens, like that's, that's fine.

Yeah.

Again, we're talking ceiling. Um, yes, it's amazing.

Yeah.

Yes, you should do it. But we're talking next level, right? You create the programmatic and then you see all the people that showed intent again. Cool. So, so you reach out to 10,000 people, it becomes 1,000 or 10,000 becomes 2,000 becomes 800. And then you, that list you give the reps to go outbound to. And by the way, that's not a cold call anymore. That's warm.

Yeah. They know the name.

You're gonna hit a lot higher on that.

Yeah, yeah, they know, they know. They may not have read the email, they may not have processed it, but the name is going in there. Like they're registering that that company exists. They probably have already a high-level understanding of what you do with the ads as well.

And that's like outbound reporting to marketing, which is, it's a trend. It's a trend that's been around for a while. Should outbound like SDRs report to sales or report to marketing? It depends on a lot of factors, but like reporting to marketing is potent for a lot of people.

We're seeing, I'm seeing this maybe in the last 3 months where the RevOps teams are getting so involved in outbound now. We're starting to see RevOps leaders have business development SDRs roll into them now because they're seeing, I've only seen this maybe, I've seen 3 companies in the last 4 weeks where that's happening. fairly big BDR teams. I'm not, I'm not saying it's the right or wrong thing. I'm just— that's just something I've seen in the last month that I haven't seen before.

I will say this, um, you're gonna see RevOps teams own revenue more. Um, the CRO role initially was a VP of Sales getting promoted more often than not. Yeah, that was very sales-focused first and not necessarily aligning of all the departments there and some people better than others, right? The RevOps person persona is a bit more objective to see like what needs to go where, look at the reports and stuff. So you're gonna see that type of person climb up and oversee things, perhaps the future of CROs. We wrote an article on does there need to be a chief GTM officer instead of a chief revenue officer? The difference also aligning with product and have and having a more of a thin line to finance in an org because why? Yeah, sales and marketing aren't siloed anymore. Let's say, but then why is product siloed in all of this siloed still? And I'm seeing it. I have a great friend who works for Hopin now RingCentral that was the VP of RevOps. His title now is the VP of GTM. He has more responsibilities. Things are easier this way. So I think to your point, and RevOps people love this, like, it's really smart to— they're so thoughtful and so objective with their thinking.

I found it interesting. Like, I've been in tech sales since whenever, 2004. So like almost 20 years. And that role, there was no RevOps role 20 years ago. What started coming was a Salesforce administrator, a CRM administrator. That was someone who was mainly looking after CRM, making sure people can run some reports. Then it just became more and more strategic. And then people started to realize, oh, these are super smart people. They're using this data to actually provide us with intel about our business that we didn't know about. And then that role went from CRM administrator to a sales ops role where it's like, hey, they were a bit more strategic, they were aligning more. And then with the rise of the CRO role, the RevOps person is incredibly closely tied. It's their right-hand person now. And this has happened in the last 10 years. So I think in the next 2 to 4 years is exactly what you're saying. I think you're going to see this chief, chief RevOps manager or whatever you want to see, chief GTM person.

Yeah.

And it's happening. It's great. I love it for one.

Yeah, it's crazy because salespeople are clamoring. You can't have this person running sales, but sales in some organizations early stage have been reporting to the COO, right? And doing very well. This is even more aligned. Yeah.

And the final question for you here. Like, super insightful, everything we've covered. Um, and especially some of the— like, it's thought-provoking in terms of opportunities to build pipeline outside of, like, out— like, using outbound, but in the different channels and the way you can use it. I think it's, like, huge, like, for me as well. Um, AI is going to change the world, everything we do. It's started to happen. What's your take? You know, everything— there's tons of noise on it. I think sales is a prime use case for AI in a lot of areas. What do you see are the big use cases you're seeing today? Where do you think this is going to be in a couple of years from now?

AI is— the biggest use case is in content today, content production where people are actually using it. Projections. AI is good today. It's good enough to test out. You're seeing it in copy for emails from a sales perspective and marketing perspective. We use Jasper. expert on marketing, Reggie with some of the sales stuff. And I know they have like posts on LinkedIn and stuff. What I'm seeing with sales copy is it being good, but you need to still edit it. A human still needs to edit it on top. I think within time that may improve. I think same thing with marketing copy, you need to make it your own. Over time, it could be the whole machine. Like, it's got to ingest that. Over time, it could actually call people perhaps and have full conversations. Is it going to replace anybody is like the big question. I mean, I think if you're good at what you do, you're going to always be safe or always recalibrate. And if you're not or average, You're gonna have to learn how to be better or like optimize these tools to get there. I think organizations are gonna look different. I think the outbound structure might be aligned differently. If everybody is just using AI to write everything, is there a need for outbound to be aligned to sales? Aren't marketers better, maybe not in sales copy, right? But maybe they'll learn. So AI's been going in programmatic and some of the other stuff, It's going to be interesting. It's, it's, there's a quote like, we always do more, you know, what we think we could do in 1 year versus what we think we could do in 10 years. What we think we do in 10 years always happens early. We think we could do in 1 year might happen late. So it's going to be, it's going to be wild.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And I think we're seeing, I think if you can use AI and, like you said, the outbound function, I think the question always comes up, which I think is a bit ridiculous. It's the main topic. Is it going to take all these jobs? Are people going to get fired? I think that's just a general technology discussion across any technology. Most technology is brought in to automate a function that is repetitive and can be automated. And if you can get technology to do that, then it's not necessarily replacing people. It's like it's replacing an automated task that's a low-level task. And actually, you can now do more high-value work, more intelligent work. You can upskill, you can get better at your job, you can earn more money, you can find more opportunities. So I think the discussion should be around what the technology is going to allow people to do to make more money. But the discussion is always it's going to fire every SDR in the world, every AE in the world like that. And I just feel that the narrative around it probably needs to be like, how can it help those people do their job better?

The revenue org is going to look different as a whole. An SDR might be a different position or a different title. That person is going to still be in the org. There's an evolution happening in solopreneurship, and side hustles and creators happening that B2B is going to tap into as well to generate demand. Outbound was very straight line 10, 15 years ago. 5 years ago, it added social, right? Like, and it was like, hey, let's connect with people. 2 years ago, it became create your own social to get inbound, right? Not just use LinkedIn to do outbound. That was 5 years ago. 2 years ago was become, uh, build your personal brand and have them come to you. Now it's, uh, you built your personal brand, make money off your personal brand. And, um, and, you know, people, you know, people are going to harness this for business as well in products. I already know, um, Andrew Newborn's building a product called Distribute— shout out Andrew— that, uh, is gonna essentially create landing pages Canva-esque that people could have their own links to. So when they post something, sign up on my landing page for my one-shot after all of this and streamline that. So, you know, I pause to answer these questions because I think that AI will allow us to do a lot more, but I think we're thinking about it slightly myopically in the sense that we're thinking about, hey, What could we do now and add AI to when the whole game is going to change? We just spoke about RevOps being aligned differently. We talked about like creators, like communities coming in now and all of this. I'm watching people like the head of sales development of Sendoso becoming the head of evangelism. Gotham, things are changing like like without the AI.

Yeah.

So do we want the AI to do what? Yeah, let's see. Let's see. We'll set it loose in some way.

I'm excited. And then on top of that, I think everything you're mentioning, everything's changing. The roles are changing. And then we're also forgetting, well, we started with this, like COVID only happened like 3 years ago. Remote work became— I know like people are going back to the office, but like more employees from all parts of the world, everything has changed. The B2B landscape has changed. Funding has changed. Everything has changed. So the way businesses are operating is changing dramatically.

Everything's changing, right? So like asking what AI is in regards to this, everything is going to evolve even if there was no AI. And that's really exciting. That should be exciting for everybody.

Yeah. Yeah. I think the excitement is you can reimagine the way your org works. Like it doesn't have to be We have 5 SDRs reporting to 10 AEs. We have this there. We have a sales ops person there. Like you can change the entire playbook on how you build a business, like from the ground up. You do not have to do anything that has kind of come before you effectively is the really exciting piece.

Yeah. And there's so many more resources to sell a company like MicroAcquire, for instance, as a small like bootstrap company, you're going to see more people want to bring a company to $5 million or less in revenue and get rid of it owning 100% of the company, then grow it to $50 or $100. So they're not gonna have the need for the 10, 20, 30, 40 SDRs. Even assuming this, there's so many dynamics happening. Yeah. And it's so brilliant. We're in the fastest moving period of my life by far, in so many moving parts and And there's going to be a lot of opportunity for all.

Yeah, I love it. What a brilliant way to end out. I'm always going to say, it's the age of the entrepreneur, the age of the individual, the age like anyone can go do anything. It's going to get hypercompetitive with that because there will be more people doing it. But go do it. It's almost like a new gold rush, but in a really powerful, empowering way for the individual.

Let's go.

Jared, thank you so much. Man, this was amazing. Thanks so much. If anyone wants to kind of keep in touch with you, reach out, what's the best way to do that?

LinkedIn, um, /JaredRobin. Uh, Twitter, @TheJaredRobin. I'm building my Twitter out. Uh, come into Rev Genius, everybody. It's free. I'm here to support you. I want to learn with you and collaborate with you.

Amazing, Jared. And when we release this, we'll include all those details as well. But Jared, thank you so much for Coming on, it's been an absolute blast. Thank you.

I'm amped to watch you grow and and to support you as well. It's a pleasure to be here. Thank you for having me.

Cheers, Jared. Thanks.