Metrics That Matter: Turning RevOps Data into Executive Decisions with Josh McClanahan

Hi, I'm Michael Hartman.

I'm Naomi Liu. And I'm Mike Rizzo.

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Hello everyone. Welcome to another episode of OpsCast brought to you by marketingops.com, powered by all the MoPros out there. I am your host, Michael Hartman. Hartman flying solo. Yomi and Mike will be back, I'm sure, at some point here and there. Today, I'll be talking about metrics, but not dashboards, tools, or attribution models for their own sake. To join me in this, my guest is Josh McClanahan, co-founder and CEO of Account Aim. Josh comes from a business operations background and works closely with teams on reporting, analytics, and helping leaders understand which numbers actually matter and why. In this episode is going to be about moving from reporting to decision-making, understanding how your company really makes money, and learning how to communicate data in a way that resonates with executives. Josh, welcome.

Thanks so much for having me, Michael. Excited to chat here.

Yeah, I love this idea of like not reporting just for reporting's sake, because I think a lot of our listeners, that will resonate with them, right? They don't know the why behind it or how to communicate it. So Well, why don't we start this? Because, you know, a lot of our guests come from a marketing ops or RevOps background and yours is a little bit different, I think. So maybe walk us through your background, your experience, and then, um, kind of how you didn't purely come up through marketing ops. Um, and I'm curious because you spent time in the business operations, you even said when we talked before, shop floor. So I mean, how they like, and then how that ties into how you think about the metrics stuff that we're gonna—

Oh, absolutely. Yeah, so for me, my background, not marketing ops at all, actually did finance. So studied finance in school, started my career in investment banking, working and trying to basically sell software companies. So I was working with a lot of founders and what I realized while doing that is I really enjoyed the operations side. As they were explaining their businesses and the challenges that they were solving, I thought that that was something that I wanted to go try. And so I joined a startup. uh, pre-revenue as the first finance hire. And it turns out that there is not a lot of finance to be done in a pre-revenue business. And so what I ended up doing was a lot of business operations. Um, and that was everything from finance and accounting kind of more traditionally to doing work in supply chain. Um, it was an e-commerce business. I then left and joined a Series A business called Sendoso, uh, in the corporate gifting space. And that was really where I'd say I started to build out my, uh, operations chops, if you will. Um, Really fun time there. I ended up leading the business operations and the data operations team there and had an amazing time. I say today, it's my second favorite startup after my now current company, Account Name. But that was really kind of where I learned everything I know today about kind of marketing ops, first getting exposure to that, revenue ops more generally. So it does end up being interesting and it's in the GTM tech space itself. And so just a lot of learnings there in a short amount of time and a lot that we picked up and now try to kind of do on some of the work that we do here at Account Name.

Yeah. It's so interesting how people's careers sort of follow these random paths sometimes. We, so many people we talk to, I find it rare right now. It's really interesting because I have children who are in college and, you know, talking about where they want to go and they seem sort of focused and I'm trying to make sure that they do that, but also be open to like things, be opportunistic, right? Yeah.

You know, but 100%, I like, for me, when I was in, you know, school going back, you know, over a decade at this point, RevOps was not even on my radar. I would say even when I was in investment banking at the time, like it wasn't even a thing that I knew of. Um, like it maybe occasionally in like 1 or 2 of, you know, the dozens of companies I worked with, it was there. But, uh, it's interesting. I think sales is similar. Like it's not something you go to college for typically. Um, but it's just an amazing career.

Programs.

Yeah, 100%. But like, these are just amazing opportunities. And so I'm hopeful and I think you guys are doing a lot with like even things like this to like promote it, get it out there. I think that as more people realize like that these are options, I think they're amazing options for folks that want to kind of explore something a little bit differently, have a huge impact in a business. It's a great mix of like qualitative and quantitative. So super glad and fortunate that I fell into it.

Yeah, it's funny because I, When I was coming out of high school, I wanted to be a chemical engineer. I had an uncle at IBM, but I ended up going to a college that didn't have chemical engineering. They had chemistry and they had several engineering programs. I ended up in engineering and how I, like, I never would've predicted I would've ended up anywhere in the domain of metric marketing.

So. Yeah, I think similar for me. If you would've told me 10 years ago I'd be doing anything on the marketing front for a startup, I would tell you that's not right.

It's crazy, right? Yeah.

It is, but it's fun as I think most ops things are.

Yeah, so it's interesting, but I think ops people do have some tendencies that we can talk, kind of get into about how they think about metrics. But it's interesting for me because you, even though you said you haven't worked in marketing ops, like you've got exposure to all those, including biz ops, different ops functions. And I'm kind of curious about what you see as, maybe there's common themes across those that say like gaps where they go, like, what are those teams producing versus what do those, the leaders need for decision-making that you're seeing where the, like the biggest kinds of gaps you're seeing?

Yeah, I think there's, there's kind of 2 gaps in my mind here. There's the gaps for metrics that I'll call it have like natural start and ends with the departments that they're in. So as we think about like marketing separately from sales, there's a set of metrics that teams in marketing are focused on as like their full-time job. And that's amazing. And then you have sales doing the same thing, you have CS doing the same thing, and you've got other departments that are doing the same thing, right? The metrics that they own and operate. And I think the promise of RevOps has always been, well, can we look more holistically across all of those metrics, at least for the GTM side, and have this like end-to-end view? My background coming from finance, like that was the view that I was used to. We're looking at, you know, entire companies to understand what is the value of the entire business. I needed to understand GTM. I also needed to understand product and marketing, or product and engineering rather. And so like that for me was kind of always the natural piece. And what I still default back to is like effectively like a P&L view of the business. So I think that like that's one of the gaps that we see is when these metrics kind of cross the chasm, if you will, between departments. And that's where you start to get into the fun questions of like, how do we stay aligned? And again, we can talk about how we, you know, might use metrics to, to do that, but it's also a really easy place for friction to start to enter is when there isn't clear ownership or alignment in those kind of gaps. Then I think about it as like kind of going the other way, and that's kind of moving up and down maybe the, the hierarchy within a business. So, you know, what metrics are important to you as an IC, very different than the metrics that your manager probably cares about. Very different than the metrics that your CRO cares about, potentially different than what your CEO, founder, or board starts to care about. And so I'm sure we'll talk about it, but I think understanding who your audience is, what is important to them, and what you expect them to do with it is table stakes for anybody that is in ops if you want to succeed in these roles.

Yeah, I think that point about, because I actually wrote a white paper about this in kind of the marketing metrics space. I guess, was it last year, year before? I can't remember exactly when, but that's one of the key takeaways I had is like the metrics that you're reporting. It's not that any one of those metrics, you would, people would argue they're vanity metrics for marketing. And I'm not, my point was like, they're not necessarily vanity metrics. They're important, but it's the audience you, that gets them that matters as much as anything else, right? So if you're going to a director and going, look at all the page views we got on our website, they probably don't really care. Now, maybe you should care because it's a leading indicator, lagging indicator of your, you know, how well your brand is understood and known in the marketplace. But do you really, do the other senior executives really care about it? Probably not.

Yeah, there's a soapbox I could get on very easily, which is the idea of vanity metrics. For me, there's no real thing is a bad metric. I mean, there probably is. You'll probably get comments on like, these are the absolutely terrible metrics. But for me, there's almost always a use for some version of metrics. And I think that what good operators are able to do is figure out what metrics really matter at certain points in time and in certain situations. And the ones that struggle, I think, are the ones that are either completely wed to a single metric for probably good reasons and good intent, but might not be relevant to the audience that they're presenting to, or they're in the other case, which is boiling the ocean and not really sure what to do now that we have all of these metrics compiled. And that's how you end up with dashboards that no one looks at, trusts, et cetera.

Right.

But I think at the end of the day, like you can find great uses for many metrics. And I think one of my sticking points is always like, there's no reason why you can't walk and chew gum at the same time. Like you can look at multiple metrics. There isn't like a single metric that is gonna solve all of your business problems. We all wish there was, but I've yet to find it, at least myself. So if you do find one, send it my way. I'd love to know.

Uh, that, that is like so true there. I, I think of all the different times in my career, different domains where that I would agree, like that's the case, right? There's not a single metric. I mean, look, you're a finance guy background, right? Is there one kind of report that you, that financial people look at to evaluate a company? No, there's at least 3 major ones, right?

There's 3 major ones. There's cohort analysis that you're doing on the customer base. Like it's, it's not endless. But it's also not one metric. And again, it depends on size, stage, maturity of the business, and focus area of improvement that you wanna be focusing on. And so I think this is where, like, you know, what I always try to get to from like a metrics perspective is like, can we get a firm understanding and make sure everyone's on the same page? And then can we build a foundation that allows us to explore and click in when we need to? And again, the best operators are figuring out ahead of time and being very proactive with These are the areas we need to go click into and this is why, and this is what we're gonna go do about it. And to me, like, that is the fun of ops. Like, that's what all of this eventually gets you to is like what actions to take. And I think, you know, being in the driver's seat is like what I enjoy the most of ops and where I think data can be a great way to just level set regardless of level you're at. It's one of the few things that can get you into a conversation with the CEO when you are in your first year of business. The data doesn't change, the judgment does. Probably, um, but that is always going to be constant and you can always rely back on that. So, um, I think it's kind of like the great equalizer.

Um, so, so, okay. So I think you described sort of 2 ends of a spectrum. Like one is like all signal, but only one signal. The other one's like maybe a lot of signal, but also lots of noise, right? There's like too many things. How do you, how do you, how would you guide our listeners or audience to go like, how do you think about like which metrics matter, especially metrics that matter for specific audiences? And since that's probably the one that's the hardest for most of the operators listening is like executives.

Yeah, I mean, a couple different ways I'd approach executives. The first one, ask them what matters to them and then ask them why it matters. And you, you'll end up in 2 situations. One is like they're not sure, in which case like that could be great for you because now you can be seen as a trusted advisor and you can actually bring metrics to them that you think matters. I always try to take an ownership Kind of mindset when I was in ops, even, you know, now a little bit different as a CEO myself. But before that even, you know, I wanted to be effectively the GM of the business is how I thought about my role. And so like, I wanted to be that thought partner. And so if we were in situations where they weren't sure what to look at, like I'm coming with a recommendation every time. Now, is it right every time? Probably not. But like, I wanna be in that conversation. That was just something that was important to me. So that's the situation where like they don't know. The best case is like they actually know exactly what they're looking for and they're able to articulate to you why. And I think in that case, what you'll find is like these are going to be great metrics, probably. Hopefully you have trust in them and, you know, what they're recommending at a certain point in time. I think the mistake is when you don't adapt over time because metrics will become stale. And so it's not that they become bad metrics, it's not that they become vanity metrics necessarily. It's that it's really difficult to look at the same metric every single week and continually do something with it. And so I think what we find is like the best operators are able to figure out what metrics should we be looking at when versus kind of anything else here. So happy to double-click, but that's kind of how we, I at least think about it.

Oh, you said something that caught my attention here when you said like if you, sometimes it's hard to keep the same metric when you're looking at it for a week and know what to do with it. I actually went through this recently where someone, you know, we had executive team asking for updates on something on a daily basis. A little bit of a crisis situation, so understandable, but it was not a metric that would, like, the fluctuations day-to-day could be pretty significant. And so the team that was kind of chartered or tasked with providing that was really struggling with how do we go tell them, like, we can give you this every day, but we don't want you to overreact or whatever. Like, how have you, like, are they, do you think about that too? Like, how frequently, like, if say we've got a metric we think is solid, but You know, reporting on it weekly doesn't make sense, but maybe it's monthly, quarterly, but maybe there's something that's every day we should be looking at.

100%. I think for me, this is kind of like hits on a couple of different pieces. One is that oftentimes when you are asked to produce a metric, a report, a dashboard, and someone says, you know, Michael, this is what I need, what the best operators are doing is double-clicking in because you will often be told things that are needed that are actually not even solving the problem that the person requesting it is actually asking for. Like they're, they're trying to get this metric for something that they're trying to either do, decide, or change in the business. And you really need to understand what that is to then decide on the frequency of it. I think if you're just approaching this as a list of tasks for you to do, someone asks me for this dashboard or this report or this metric on a weekly, daily basis, pick your time period and you just produce it. If you're a junior analyst, that is probably okay. As you move up in the business though, and you want to have a real impact on it, you need to understand the why behind it. And the harsh reality is sometimes the people who are requesting it actually don't understand the why. And that is really, really challenging to be in. And that's probably a whole different episode, um, that you could go deep into. Um, but I think the more that you can really understand, like, what are they trying to get to? What are the specific actions that are going to be done? And I always try to break it down to like the simplest terms. Metrics are gonna go up, they're gonna go down, they're gonna stay the same over some period of time. Do we have ideas of what is gonna happen in each of those 3 scenarios? It's only 3. It should be possible for us to get to at least that. And if they're really clear-cut, then amazing. Like that's the perfect scenario. Usually they're not. And so that's where, you know, you can either again, rely on the people who are requesting it, ask for advice from others that have been in similar situations that might be able to help guide you, or come with a recommendation yourself. And this is where I think like, You know, you start to trust your gut a little bit. Like, you as an operator have access to a lot of other data points too. Can you use those to inform a recommendation on like what we should be doing here? And again, this is, I think, one of those things where it is easier said than done. I've been in situations, I probably requested it myself for like the, hey, can I get the daily update of this? But what you find is like the half-life of these things is not very long usually. And so I think always just trying to anchor back to like, are we really getting done with this what we wanted to originally? And just having touchpoints, like maybe end of the week, the first time you do it, even like, hey, is this still relevant? Is this still actually helping us? And if someone can articulate exactly what those actions are, then, you know, maybe it's time for, uh, for you to look at a new metric or, you know, maybe take a different approach.

Well, and I think, um, not everyone is great at to say, I mean, they may be great at describing this is what I want. They may not say, go like, I just needed this one time. Like, I've got a new decision I need to make or change I need to make versus, uh, this is something I want to see for the foreseeable future. But then you're, I like your point, like on a regular basis, it not only does it make sense, I think you should proactively ask like, is this still something you need? Right? Because—

100%.

Um, it's easy, it's easy to just like add to that list of things when it may not be relevant and that people aren't always great Kind of like the government, right? Once something comes into place, right, it doesn't go away.

Yeah, you don't, you don't find a lot of ops teams coming in proactively cutting the number of reports that are being generated. I mean, usually to your point, it's just adding to it, but I think a lot of folks would do well by doing these resets. And again, pick the time period that makes the most sense for you. It was something that we tried to do at least annually at my last business where we're looking at, you know, are these dashboards, are these reports, are they being used? Are they actually like helpful for the team or are they outdated? One kind of like framework that I like now use is like the idea of like projects versus programs. It's a program, it's gonna be ongoing, you know, we need it for, you know, extended periods of time. Within part of that, you might even have evergreen. These are the metrics we're gonna be tracking every single time forever. Revenue growth, customer logo counts, net retention. These are metrics I'm always gonna be looking at. And then there's the projects, right? This thing is on fire. I need to put out the fire. This is my indicator for why it is on fire. I probably only hopefully need this for a day in the best case scenario, maybe. But it's something where, you know, that should eventually be, you know, kind of archived, move on, and, you know, kind of now you're gonna be shifting your focus back to the probably million other fires that you have going in the fun world of ops that we live in.

Yeah, but I think it, I see a lot, and I've done it myself, where I get caught up in conversation and I take a, I take an executive saying something as being, go do this, whereas what they were really thinking was, this is an idea, right? It wasn't necessarily they expected you to go run with it and do something. And I think that's an easy— it's really hard. In my experience, it's hard to know when that's happening, right? Which scenario you're in. And I've been told a lot recently, like, You ask a lot of questions because I do. I ask a lot of questions to get clarification. It's not because I'm trying to be a pest. I just, I want to make sure we're saying the same thing and agreeing on what we're going to do and when.

100%. I think like finding the balance, right? It's like very individualistic. One thing that I tried to do in any of the analytics or ops roles that I did is like really build strong relationships with these stakeholders that were requesting things from me. Eventually my last company where I was running a bigger team, like, and they were doing a lot of the analysis, like themselves, what I was actually spending almost all of my time doing was just that relationship building. So if somebody asked me for a report or asked my team for a report, I could go to them and, you know, ask them like, is this really what you want? Is this really high priority? As we think about, you know, putting this in the list of other requests that we have, like where does this rank for you? And just like diving in that way, I found it to be a really helpful way for us to like avoid some of it. And again, it's not always gonna be avoidable. Um, it's definitely still one of those things where it is easier said than done, but—

Sure.

Um, I think the more that you can just like kind of build those relationships, the more you'll start to, you know, be involved in like the decision-making, which is ultimately what I wanted to get to as an operator. And I think most operators want to get to, it's, you know, the analytics, the reporting, the dashboards, these are like a means to an end. To me, the end was I want to get into the decision-making conversations. Um, and so, you know, this is kind of a great way to do it, but to your point, it can also be really challenging if you become just overwhelmed with building and building and building and building.

Right. Yeah. So you talked about, well, I guess any of these metrics, and especially the ones you've talked about, those chasms between departmental kind of stuff. I think one of the sands in the gear, if you will, that causes problems sometimes is different definitions of metrics, right? Both reporting metrics, we use different ways of getting to them. Um, how do you think about that? Like, what have you done for that? And I know, you know, when we talked before, you talked about things like collective value and CAC and those. I don't know if there are others that you think about and maybe you have even specific definitions that you go with, but how do you, how do you handle that? Or how have you handled that kind of thing just to be aligned on those?

Yeah, I, I, I've honestly really struggled here. This is like one of those, uh, challenges I'll say that I come across that like I can intellectualize why it's challenging, but I can never get myself to understand why it doesn't take 30 seconds to solve this problem. It's one where it feels like what the answer is, is like, well, why don't we just have like a metrics dictionary that everyone uses and agrees on and goes off of, right? And if it was as easy as that, there'd be a lot less LinkedIn content probably. But I think what I found it to be, to work in the real world, I'll call it, is it's just consistent kind of over time reinforcement of what these definitions are. So the earlier you start with this, the earlier you start with data generally, the earlier you start with like clean and good reporting, the easier this does become. But in any case, it's going to take work to continually keep people on the same page. Even if the definition hasn't changed, the people in your org probably has changed. Parts of the business probably have changed. And so the definitions that you had 6 months ago, a year ago, you know, again, pick the timeframe that makes the most sense for you. They probably have changed at least slightly, or folks don't know where to look because it's only a portion of their day that they're spending thinking about this thing. And I think that's like one of the harder parts for ops where 100% of your time and energy could be focused in this one area for weeks, if not months, if not years, that takes up 1% of the time of an executive. And so it's crystal clear to you that the definition of lifetime value to CAC is in your business. And for them, they're spending next to no time thinking about this potentially. Um, and so like being able to bridge that gap, again, it just takes consistency. There's like really tactical things that we try to do. I would build a metrics dictionary. I would try to build definitions and tooltips and dashboards and reports that you're doing just to continue to reinforce.

Yeah.

Even if it seems like so basic, what is a customer? Seems so basic, but it can have different definitions.

No, that's like one of the hardest questions to answer. My man. Yeah.

And so again, I think just like continually reinforcement, I have been thinking a lot more recently about just like how much enablement is really needed here. I think it's like one of the bigger gaps in analytics and reporting is just not treating it like, again, like an ongoing program. It's this like one and done thing. That's just not the case in analytics and reporting. It is going to be continued energy and effort needed to keep consistency, to keep alignment across these teams. But I think I have yet to meet a company that has not told me they have some form of misalignment somewhere within the org, right? It's just one of those ever-present challenges that you'll have that hopefully you can just reduce over time. But I don't think the goal necessarily should even be zero, or maybe it should be the goal, but I don't know if you'll get there.

Yeah. So it's, I really love this because I think most people would go, The real, the answer is just, we just need to document it and make it visible to the right people at the right time. I think your point about the amount of time that certain people have to act, you know, that are spending with this is so small and they're like relearning every time that we can't assume that they should know it and understand it. And we don't want them to make assumptions incorrectly about what the data's telling them if Because they don't understand it. And so it's incumbent on us to make sure that we're reinforcing. I mean, I really like that idea. Think of it as an enablement one. So that, I think that's a great tip from, for just for everyone listening, like, yes, you should document this. Yes, you should figure out ways to do it, but, and you should also be reinforcing it on a regular basis with the stakeholders that matter the most.

Yeah, I think that's exactly right. And like I said, The documentation, do it in a day. The enforcement enablement, it's going to take you probably the rest of your career. So, uh, yeah, just, uh, just baby steps.

Yeah, that totally makes sense. Um, okay. So another thing that I've seen, and I've probably been guilty of this too, is kind of over-engineering. And I, I hate to throw something under the bus, but we'll take attribution as an example, right? I get asked—

It's a great example.

Sometimes, like, which What kind of attribution model do you like? And I was like, I really don't care as long as you use the same one consistently over time. Because to me, that's the real value. So it is easy to get like, I don't even remember all the different versions anymore, like, because I just sort of stopped paying attention. But like, do you think that there's value in trying to simplify some of these things versus making them more— I'll use the word robust since it seems to have a more positive connotation, but like, but complicated.

Yeah, I actually think this is one where I'm probably maybe in the middle on, in the sense of, yes, metrics should 100% be simplified if they're going to be used for enablement of other teams. Like, it's just much easier to explain a single metric to someone than a, you know, Black-Scholes model that is uberly complex, or, you know, a machine learning-based model that you hope that your data scientist understands, but you're not really totally sure, right? Um, what I've tried to think about is like, what action are you going to be taking with it? And I think if like human in the loop is needed here, simplicity is going to win almost every time. It's kind of interesting now because there's definitely, you know, decisions and actions that can now be taken without humans in the loop. And at that point, I might argue having more better, you know, maybe not over-engineered, but, you know, more sophisticated modeling can actually be very, very helpful. And so it's very situationally dependent. Uh, one thing that I always try to do is I never want to be the limiting factor in getting to an answer if possible. So if there's complexity to be had, like I want to be, you know, at least understanding internally what the answer is for things that are very complex. But I then wanna use my judgment on what is the right level of simplicity or, you know, sophistication that needs to be given to the team based on who the audience is, what the request is, what the impact is. So one way of answering the question, I err towards simplicity for the most part, but I do think we're entering a place today where actually more, like, more sophistication could be a good thing, but it's definitely a two-sided or a double-edged sword a bit. So. You have to be careful about it. There's definitely ways to unlock it today that I think you could not have done pre-2023, probably for most teams.

Yeah, I am. I see what you're saying. I still lean towards, I would lean towards, if I had to, all other things being equal, I think I would lean for something that's simpler for At least 2 reasons. One, it's easier to understand what the output is because you kind of— the second is it's easier to explain to somebody who's less familiar with the details of how the sausage is made on the other end.

Um, yeah, I think this, this goes back a little bit to me. Sorry, I think about a half-second delay, but, um, I was just gonna say, I think it goes back to me of like, how good of relationships do you have and like how much enablement Are you doing with the teams? I think in a vacuum, I totally agree with you. And I think like for most teams, 80% of the time, simplicity is going to win out. It probably should win out more often than not. I think if you have the ability to build more robust models that are more predictive, for instance, I would build those and use those internally. Now, I'll take an example of this could be customer health scoring. You can build very, very lightweight customer health scores using 2 metrics and some weighting on there that don't really matter too much, right? Your data science team could build a 100-factor model for predicting customer health. And that model might be 5% more accurate. Now, your CSD might not take a ton of different action between those 2 models, right? And it's going to be certainly easier to enable them and to explain to them what a customer health score is if there's only 2 components. They will more likely take action with it. But I want the answer to understand what is the customer health based on this more predictive model, because me as an operator needs to understand what that is so that I have the visibility at least into it. And then we're making the judgment call that simplicity is going to win out in this case. And so I think there's like 2 sets of metrics that you can have. There's the metrics that you're actually using to take action with, but there's metrics that you should be looking at to monitor health of the business. that you don't necessarily need to share with everyone else. And I think this kind of goes back to what we were saying earlier. It's like, what are the stakeholders? Who needs to be involved in this? Um, and so again, I'm actually fine with having different sets of metrics for different folks, uh, depending on like their sophistication levels.

You know, you know, I, I'm going to walk myself back a little bit here because I think what you just described is what I would argue for in general, which is You've got your, we'll call it your simpler version of a model that, say it's a predictive model, and there's a level of effort to get to one that's 5, 10, 15, like a more accurate one. And I think the question for me is, do we think that the level of effort to add an additional sophistication, complexity, whatever, is going to yield enough benefit to warrant That additional effort, right?

That's a great question.

Initially and ongoing.

Yeah, that's a question I wish more operators were thinking about. I think that's actually the heart of a lot of ops is making those calls on when does it make sense, right? And this is where I think you can start to add in, you know, what is the revenue lift that we would get from this more predictive model? Is it worth the, you know, how many hours is it going to take? What is like, you know, are the actions going to be different? If they're not, like, then yeah, I'm going to default to the single, you know, the simple version every single time. I think as you get bigger and more sophisticated and you have more people and you can go roll out, you know, kind of more nuanced workflows, I think you probably start to make that call more towards the complex model. But again, very situationally dependent, I would say. So I love that question. I think that's such a fun, like, those are the types of questions I love just like focusing on as an operator. Those are the fun ones.

Yeah. I mean, I won't say like, I think it's Thomas Sowell, economist, right? If people could go look for it, he, I think he's the one who's attributed to saying like, there's no answers, there's only trade-offs, right? Some, or something close to that. And I think it really, that's how I think about this stuff now is like, what's the trade-off for that? Like 1%, is it, is that incremental cost effort benefit going to be worth it? But I think the other part, like this is where there's a point at which the complexity probably doesn't yield much more value, but falls into what I would call the clever space, right? Where it's—

For sure.

Like it's the kind of thing like you get really excited about if you're like really into this kind of stuff and you go like, this is so cool. But at the end of the day, like it's actually not much more predictive or helpful from a decision-making standpoint. I think that's the, that's where I get stuck is like, I don't, I don't want stuff that's clever. I want stuff that's useful.

Yeah. Which I think like until you do some of the work, I think it's hard to know which of those is going to be, right? So I think there's always gonna be some form of like having to, you know, kind of figure that out. And like, I think there's good benefits of exploring that creativity, but I will say, I think you're hitting on a really good point, which I think A lot of times, if you do come up with even a clever solution, call it that is actually helpful even. I think one of the challenges that folks have when they're connecting the dots between the data work that they're doing and the reporting work that they're doing and how it's taken action is an executive unfortunately probably doesn't really care about the process that went into coming up with the clever solution, and that can be a little disheartening for a lot of operators where like that's where. I like it. That's like the most fun part. It's like, hey, I spent so much time and energy and I figured out this really cool solution. And again, it might be impactful, but like execs only care about the impact for the most part. And again, it'll be rare and you might find a case where, you know, you can go explain exactly what you did to everyone in the business, but those are rare. It's going to be small. And so, you know, what I always do in those situations and when I ran an ops team myself is like what we would do is like, we're going to share the clever solutions internally. with our ops team, give you the forum, present it out. We're interested in it. It's super cool. Explain it like, hey, or, you know, it's awesome. To the exec, I'm probably gonna give them 30 seconds of what was just explained in 30 minutes because that's what they care about. And so that's kind of one of the challenges I always came across in ops is just knowing what the right level is. But other operators will appreciate it at least. Just know that.

Yeah. So celebrate within the team, right? Because it's Yeah. The people who get it will understand what it took to get it, to get to that.

Totally.

So, but you said you would reframe things with the executives and I'm with you, right? They don't, most executives are not going to care about all that kind of detail and that kind of stuff. How, like, in your experience, like, what are the kinds of things that the executives care about? What are the metrics? And then think about how would you tie What you're, you know, an ops person might be reporting on, how do you tie that to what they care about?

Yeah, I mean, I think at the end of the day, like we're in the business, at least, you know, assuming we're not a nonprofit and making money. And so you think about your executive team, like ultimately that's what they care about. It's, are we making more revenue than we did before? And are we retaining it if we're in, you know, what's called a traditional SaaS business, but even still, are we able to retain that business, like again, partially a bias because of my background, but it ultimately does come back to just the financial profile of the business. And there's exceptions out there for sure, but that's really what executives are tasked with doing. Like their job is for the company to make more money, either from a top line basis or from, you know, a profitability basis at the EBITDA level. As you get, you know, kind of bigger and more sophisticated, everything that you need to be doing needs to be able to be tied back And in ops, like, look, it might not be the completely linear path. Like everything that you're doing, you know, the customer health modeling that you're doing might not be directly attributable back to net retention, but hopefully it will. And hopefully that there, you know, you can at least paint that picture of it. And I'd say like, if you can't figure out how you're contributing to increasing revenue, increasing profitability in the business, you might wanna take a second to pause and think about Why are we doing what we're doing? Because that's really what the job of ops is, in my opinion, is driving that. And again, I think it's, you know, wear that like the GM kind of hat. If you were the owner of the business, like, is that what you would care about? And I think, you know, in 99% of cases here, it's, that's what it's going to be.

So one of the things I say regularly on the podcast to our listeners is if you don't know how your company makes money, Right. You should go figure that out. Do you, I mean, is that, is it as simple as that? And if so, like, it sounds way simpler than it probably is. Like, how, how have you gone about doing that? You know, you have the benefit of having a different kind of background, I think, than some of the people who are listeners, but—

No, I think you're—

You can share.

I think you're spot on. Um, I, I was talking to someone earlier and I think this is totally true where like, you know, in RevOps, I think sometimes the, the revenue gets lost a little bit and we think about it as just ops, but like the, the revenue is actually The important piece here, right? Understanding how your company makes money. Look, it can be really complex, especially if you're working in like a very big enterprise that has multiple product lines. But like, that is some of the homework that I would be doing day one as an operator is like, I really just need to understand that because again, like the finances is the common language across the business with how you understand what is happening. And if you can understand it, and again, you don't need to become a financial analyst, you don't need to spend years and years going through it.

Right.

But you should understand, like, how does your company make money? Who are you selling to? Why do they buy from you? What is the price point of it? Like, all of those things are within the grasp of everyone in operations to really understand. And again, I think just like reminding yourself and refreshing on a periodic basis can be helpful because it's really easy to do that as part of like onboarding. It's like, oh yeah, of course, this is how we make money, right? And then a quarter goes by and you're knee deep in a CPQ implementation and you might not really be thinking totally about it, although CPQ may be a bad example since you're in pricing and quoting, but you're building a customer health score, right? It's like, how are we making money again? And so I think just consistently reminding yourself can be really helpful. Truth be told, you could probably go talk to your CFO. Your CFO would probably love to share with you how is your company making money, or your VP of finance, depending on the size of your business. They would love for someone to be as excited about it as they are. So I would go to them if you can, and then it will Talked to you for years and years about it. Yeah.

I mean, I've had a lot of interesting conversations with financial leaders, CFOs, FP&A leaders, whatever, that have really helped me understand how they make decisions or make recommendations to the CEO for decisions. And totally when I've gone to go pitch ideas, I generally now lean towards— I go to them to kind of go like, does this, does this make sense? Does this— what am I missing? Right? Because they, they will ultimately be a part of that decision process, whether you like it or not.

100%. I think it's the most closely related role to many operations roles is the CFO. And again, it's company dependent for sure, but like they care about a lot of the same things that you care about. Like they care about how the company makes money. So they care a lot about pipeline. They wanna understand who is buying, why are they buying? They wanna understand what that means for profitability. They wanna know, are you retaining these customers? Again, very similar. I think in ops you're probably gonna go click in layers deeper than they ever will because that's only a portion of their job. But I think like building that really strong relationship between the two can be just so mutually beneficial. And it doesn't mean that ops needs to report into the CFO. That again, whole nother discussion. But you speak a lot of very similar language as is. Like, I'd just encourage folks to, uh, to chat with them more frequently. Um, and I think shared learnings across both will be making literally everyone's job easier, uh, even when it comes to something like board reporting.

Yeah.

Makes it so much simpler.

Yeah. It's so, it's interesting as you were talking about this, there's, I think for the, for the people who are in here still sort of scratching their heads about how would I go have that conversation to have that like language and why should I care about how the company makes money? It seems intuitively obvious maybe to me, but I think one of the things that many of the people who are listening will say is like one of their jobs should be the advocate for the customer. So when they get a request to go do something, put something in the market, change something on the website, whatever it might be, one of the things I always say is like, my job is to advocate for the customers too, right? Make sure that we're doing right by them. And if you think about it that way, right? That should be a part of your job too. It's like if you're being asked to go do something, invest in a tool, whatever, part of your job should be, am I using the company's money wisely? Even though I was asked by somebody senior, right? So it doesn't mean you say no, it just means like you should think about that in the process of whether or not you think you should push back, challenge, ask questions before you just go off and do.

I couldn't agree more. Yeah, I don't think these things are mutually exclusive at all. It's just a question of time horizon, I think. So yeah, I think, you know, if you take a customer-centric approach in the longer term, like you are probably gonna be driving towards a more profitable business, which is ultimately great for everyone. So yeah, I don't think about those two as like separate things. To me, they're directly interrelated, even though it might not show up in the P&L in that specific period.

Yeah, I mean, I was thinking of them more as analogs as opposed to opposing forces. Totally. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And so, like, and so that's really what I was thinking about. So just real, I'm curious now, when you were presenting numbers or if you were like, had somebody coming to you like, how should I go take this stuff to my MLOps person? I'm going to be taking numbers to our leadership. What are some general principles or guiding guidance you would give them? As they're preparing for that?

Yeah. One thing I've come back to every time in my career has been the idea of a one-pager. If I can't create one PowerPoint slide, doesn't have to be PowerPoint, but a slide that has everything summarized and synthesized and they can't get it or grok it in 20 seconds, I haven't done my job well. Now I want to have, and I will likely present more than just a single slide, but that was always what I kind of anchored back to. It was, can I just get all my ideas across in this one super easy to digest way? And anytime I wasn't able to do it and, you know, you share it with somebody else on your team, they're like, what are you trying to get here? That was a disaster. Those presentations never went well. If I didn't have that one behavior, they never went well. One of the things I, I mean, I used to sit in meetings all the time and like, you'll, you know, you build a 50-page deck and you'll see people flipping through it and they'll literally stop on like slide 2. It's like people don't have the time to go through layers and, you know, as deep of analysis as you ever want. Again, even if it's interesting to you. So that's something I've always come back to is like, get the one page.

Don't bury the lead is what you're saying.

Absolutely not. This is not storytelling, like for an executive. This is like, this is what is happening. This is what we should do. This is why we should do it. And then if they want to double-click into how you got there, that's where you have your support. But that's what I found to be Very helpful. And again, I can't say that it's foolproof. Like I've been in situations where I have like what I think is an amazing one-pager and like, you know, we end up in rabbit holes or, you know, completely off track. But I think if you can do that and just like, you know, I think it's similar to maybe like the idea of like writing a memo instead. I think it can just be really helpful to like just synthesize all of this stuff. But personally, I found it really hard. I find it really difficult to do the analysis and spend the hours, weeks, months building it. Only to summarize it into one page. Like really hard, I think, to see the forest for the trees because you're so deep into it. And it's funny, when we did banking, we used to say like, I knew every model in, or I knew every number in the model tied to each other. I couldn't tell you what a single number even was. And it's because you just get so laser focused on that piece of it that you forget what's really important, which are what are the takeaways. So I think if you could start there, that's usually helpful. But Again, varies.

Yeah. I think that's one of the things I've learned over the years. It's funny because I was taught to do presentations in a storytelling format.

Totally.

And it took me a long time to realize after going through that experience, like you get to page 2 of the lead-up and people are questioning that and you never get to, here's what I recommend or here's what I want to do. So I tell people like, Do a little bit of that upfront, like very quickly get to, this is the point. And then if you, like you said, like have the supporting stuff and be ready, but that's what they're looking for.

Almost 9 times outta 10, that's what they're looking for. Um, and again, there's a time and a place for storytelling, uh, for sure. I think if you're trying to build and convince someone of something to do that's like completely different, like maybe you do wanna paint like a little bit broader of a picture, but if someone's just asking you for like, what's your recommendation? Like, I just wanna give you my recommendation. What I found when you do that, for me personally, was that I could spend almost all the time just debating and going back and forth on like judgment calls versus what I never wanted to do, which is diving into the numbers and being like, are we sure that this is the right number? And like, is that what matters here? And so it's really easy to get down that rabbit hole, I find, if I don't do that. So anyway, definitely situationally dependent as all things are in ops.

Yeah, of course. Right. And you know your audience and you have to learn and adjust. I mean, I think the one thing I, when I coach, especially, well, both teams I've had, or when I do coaching with leaders too, is if you're presenting, especially if you're presenting number, you are presenting numbers, say a chart or something, and there's something that is out of phase with the rest of the pattern, right? There's some anomaly somewhere. You be prepared to answer that. Like, why is that there? Because guaranteed 100%, every time someone's going to ask, why does that say that?

I absolutely love that. Um, that is a great addition. It's something I would highly, highly recommend. It's like, once you start to work with someone, you, you know, and can anticipate the questions that are coming, that's how you build trust is if like you're seeing something, they ask it right away and you have that answer. Like that is the fastest way I've ever found to build credibility. It's the, when they ask the question and you haven't really thought about it or you have to get back to them, it's not to say that trust immediately is derailed, but like it's where it starts to chip away and like that's where, you know, the longer it takes for you to get the answer, these are where these things just like completely go off of the rails. So yeah, it's a really good add. I think like having the, like what are the 2 or 3 questions that are likely to come here? Like if you know those, that's where you can spend all your time, which is what you want to happen in these situations for the most part. Yeah.

Yeah. I mean, that's another, like, it's another tool to avoid going down a rabbit hole that is away from the main point of what you wanted to cover. Yeah.

I love that. Just avoid rabbit holes.

That's it. Yeah.

It's so simple.

Yeah. Yeah. But I think a lot of people, what they do, um, and it's true that everyone's busy and they're just trying to fulfill the request, right? We need a report. I got the report done. They're not looking at the report and going like, Why is this off, right? Or like, what is this trend telling me, right? If you do that extra step of anticipating those kinds of questions, then that will go a long way to like, so you can either build trust or lose trust in those scenarios.

100%. And for me, like, likewise, and that's like, for me, I go, I find like, that's the interesting part of ops is like those pieces. Like, what do we do with it? Why is this happening? Like those, Those are the questions I want. Whether the number is, you know, 100 or 105, like, I don't care. I want to know what we're going to do about it.

I almost never say exact numbers. I talk about, that's the other part with it, especially in the marketing and sales space. This is not finance. This is where it's different, right? This is not financial data that has standards and controls and all that kind of stuff. It just doesn't.

Totally.

So I don't go, this is exactly, you know, 2,543. It is somewhere around 2,500.

It's a great point. Knowing when to use specificity, very, very big unlock for folks. Yeah, there's a time and a place for it. And in most startups, it's probably not the right time. And so that's kind of the fun of being in the earlier stages, as like the numbers aren't gonna be more directional. And they're not going to matter. And then you can worry, let your CFO worry about being audited and like, you know, they'll make sure that that's all clean. But yeah, PipeBuddy's not in there, so you're good.

Josh, tons of fun. I know we could keep going. You and I, like, I think we're like on the same page on this stuff, so I appreciate it.

Totally.

Thank you for joining us and sharing your time. If folks want to learn more about how you think about this stuff or more about what you're doing with Account Name, what's the best way for them to do that?

Yeah, email me anytime, josh@accountname.com. Come to our website, come to accountname.app if you want to just test it out yourself. And I'm on LinkedIn. So yeah, if you ever want to chat anything metrics, analytics, reporting, RevOps, marketing ops, I love it. But Michael, thanks so much for having me. This has been a great chat. And honestly, I think you're right. We could, we could keep this going for weeks. So really appreciate it.

Yeah, of course. Well, as always, we appreciate you joining and sharing. It's a lot to take out of your day. So Appreciate that. Thanks as always to our listeners and audience out there for your continued support. Uh, as always, also, if you are, have an idea for a topic or a guest or want to be a guest, you can reach out to Naomi, Mike, or me, and we get the ball rolling just like we did with Josh. Till next time. Bye everybody.