The Journey of Aligning Teams for Business Success with Natalie Furness

Hi, I'm Michael Hartman.

I'm Naomi Liu.

And I'm Mike Rizzo. And this is OpsCast, a podcast for marketing ops pros and RevOps pros, created by the MoPros, the number one community for marketing operations professionals.

Tune into each episode as we chat with real professionals to help elevate you and your marketing operations career.

Hello everyone. Welcome to another episode of OpsCast brought to you by marketingops.com powered by the MoPros. I'm your host, Michael Hartman, joined today by one co-host, Naomi Liu. Hello.

Missing Mike for sure.

I know. You know what we didn't talk about before we recorded, Naomi? We almost would have been having to have like a little bet, side bet because Vancouver, but Vancouver lost in the NHL playoffs. They would have been playing the Dallas Stars.

Why do you need to bring that up today?

It's all good.

It's all good. All right. So we are, we've got a jam-packed topic today, one that we haven't talked about in a while, which is the whole concept of revenue operations roles that have started to become more and more common over the past few years. There is still, in my view, some inconsistency about what those roles mean, where they should fit into an organization, etc. So joining us today to talk about the role is Natalie Furness. She is the founder and CEO/COO at RevOps Automated. She is also the president of the RevOps Research Collective. She has extensive experience as a marketing leader and as a revenue ops leader, both in-house and as a consultant. She enjoys building systems for efficient and effective revenue operations, including effective reporting systems. Her background in science gives her the ability to design Reporting systems which focus on statistical significance. Navlis, hopefully I got your name pronounced right. I forgot to even ask. And thank you for joining us.

Yeah, thank you. It's lovely to be here. Also, I miss Mike, you know?

I know.

Yeah, never mind. I'm sure I'll catch up with him at Marketing Ops Appaloosa or whatever's coming up next.

Yeah.

But, yeah, so, yeah, good intro. Maybe I should rewrite my LinkedIn bio. But yeah.

Does it sound somewhat familiar? Yeah, I borrowed from it.

Yeah, I was like, where did that come from? But yeah, no, no, it's great to be here. It's really nice to have like a great peer-to-peer discussion about like what revenue operations is and isn't. And I'm still seeing, it's quite interesting because there's still so many like, well, I suppose it's just like marketing, just like sales. It's like, you know, misinterpretations of what things really are and what the role should be or shouldn't be. So it would be really nice to kind of have this update to kind of look at where we are now in, you know, May 2024.

Absolutely. Well, so before we get started, because I did touch on this briefly when I introduced you, um, because I did steal from your LinkedIn, uh, profile that you have a background in science, so specifically in biomechanics and neurophysiology. Well, it's like fascinating. So what, what, maybe we could start with like You give us a little more meat on the bone of your career and how you ended up starting this RevOps consulting and services company.

Yeah, thanks, Michael. I think the best way to describe it is I've always been a bit obsessed with this idea of, like, building systems or building ways of helping people. And I was very much involved in the kind of, like, healthcare space at the beginning. I actually went into clinical operations. So, really focusing on improving the experience of patient care. I actually went and studied my science degree thinking that I wanted to work as a clinician, and then move more into clinical operations, because I found this bit of obsession with the electronic health record, you know, that one source of truth, the 360 view of the patient, and how that should travel with them from, like, GP to doctor, to nurse, to physician, to physio, to, you know, it should follow their journey. And this electronic health record, when it has all the information in it about about a patient allows doctors to make better clinical decisions, providing people with the right treatment at the right time for the right conditions, optimizing their health, their wellbeing, preventative medicine, all those sorts of things. So I think back then in like the 2014-15 time, I was obsessed with like how we improve the, what we call the interoperability of healthcare, the way in which healthcare systems interoperate. Sadly, back in that time, especially in the UK, you know, it not being a privatized sector, mainly being public, creating digital change back then, it wasn't really a thing. And it definitely wasn't something that somebody without an MBA was going to be able to step into, you know. So, I found myself wanting to change these things and not being able to make a change. I ended up landing in the private healthcare space, in which they wanted me to improve the operational efficiency of their healthcare. private healthcare systems, because there was revenue attached to that, which, of course, makes things a little bit more important to include operational excellence. So, we were kind of reducing the cost of fees from insurance companies, and improving the way in which we were using cloud, which even then, in the UK, businesses weren't really using. So, started doing that, and one of the directors was like, oh, you seem entrepreneurial. Do you fancy helping me take this health tech business to market? I was like, okay, cool, why not? Like, sounds like a fun side hustle to my job while doing my job.

Why not?

It sounds great. So, I helped him with his go-to-market, realized that we needed a list of people that we were going to sell to, ICP, I now know it's called, I didn't back then. We needed to database these people. So, I started using Excel spreadsheets. And me being the kind of ops person I am, after, like, doing line however many hundred after 2 days of manually scraping, well, not scraping, searching Google and writing their names down was like, there must be a faster way than this. There must be something where you can like database your customers and track like where you are, whether you've reached out to them, whether they've replied to you, you know, where they are in this journey. And I stumbled across this thing called CRM. And I was like, okay, cool CRM thing, like customer relationship management. And I downloaded it. At the time, HubSpot was the only business that had a free one. And I started using that. And it was so, it was just, it was following my process the way exactly that I wanted. I actually went, started using HubSpot for the sales hub rather than the marketing hub initially, very different to other people. And then I discovered that CRMs are exactly like electronic health records, but instead of a patient and a patient's experience of healthcare, it's about a customer's experience. And rather than doctor, nurse, physician, it's marketing, sales, customer success. And I really wanted to improve the customer experience because my belief was if we could improve the customer experience in like the way they bought what we were selling, we would therefore generate more revenue. So, I did this first time for a founder back in like 2013, '14. And then I went on to work in the blockchain industry, went in a few other industries, started working more fractionally. Lockdown happened, everybody wanted to go digital. Some, all of a sudden I got way too busy. And then, I had to make the decision, say, no, we'll hire people. So, I hired people, and we've been implementing both Salesforce, HubSpot, we work on Marketo, across platforms to now improve the customer experience and improve the employee experience so that we can generate more revenue leveraging technology.

That's great. I just, it's fascinating to me to hear how people Have sort of, for lack of a better term, fallen into marketing ops, RevOps. And it's also interesting that you're the second guest in certainly the last 10 who also had a background in some sort of science as opposed to marketing or business or technology. So it's interesting to hear that, just how that kind of reinforces what I believe, which is you can learn anything if you've got that mindset, right? Regardless of what you study, in college or even pre-college or whatever. So great stuff. All right. So we're going to talk revenue operations. We already started this off and I'll like, I'll state my position. I think it's still an ill-defined term these days, inconsistently, at least from that standpoint. I'm curious, how do you define revenue operations?

I look at it as an alignment between people, processes, and data systems focused on the go-to-market motions across all of them. That's where I see it and would love to see it. What I'm seeing in reality is not necessarily that, though. And I'm really curious, I mean, Naomi, maybe you've got some thoughts on where you're seeing it as well.

I mean, I guess I can touch a little bit on what I had seen just from personal experience, and also where I'm curious what your thoughts are on this. So, I feel like revenue operations should be anything that generates Revenue, right? So, it can be anything from sales to marketing, to even the support teams and the customer success teams that are generating, you know, support contracts, any type of, like, field service, anything like that. So, I feel like it literally is anything that generates revenue. I don't necessarily see that in practice, and I'm just kind of curious what you guys, how you guys think about that.

Yeah, so, it really depends if they decide to work with us at RevOps Automated, is like a big thing for us. I mean, we've got one business that we onboarded them. Well, first of all, we started with strategy, helped them select their CRM and technology stack tool, did transformation with them. We're now doing the ongoing management, and we are their provider that does everything related to revenue on the business systems and processes.

Okay.

side. We are talking about the go-to-market motion for inbound and how we operationalize that. And then we provide marketing ops specialists to do that within the revenue operations function. So I very much believe that there are specialists within revenue operations functions. We have more sales ops focused people who are focusing on the pipeline velocity. And we, we have service ops people because they are mainly focused on service, but we're also looking at the DataOps side, which looks at actually the product-led growth approach. You know, how do we API their CRM into the backend of their product, whether they use a reverse ETL, like a Hightouch or something like that, or a native integration to pull in the information about events and products back into the CRM. So, either the CS, support, or sales, whoever owns that function, Can actually address it. So we operate with businesses that choose to work the way we work. We work like that. However, when I see jobs advertised, I am seeing everything from a RevOps person being the glorified sales administrator. I literally saw a job advertised in the UK for the equivalent of a 30k annual salary. That's in pounds. So like maybe like what, 40, 45 thousand. or something. And it was just—

Sounds about right.

It was, it was an administrative role. And that's kind of, that's not where I see it. I think the thing is, with me, I see revenue operations as a function, rather than a specific role or person. Revenue operations potentially can be a one person in a startup, just like, you know, you have those marketers that are the one marketing generalist who is not a specialist in anything, you know, you have to decide, do you want to hire that one generalist? Or do you want to build a function with specialists in it? And I'm more of a mindset of revenue operations as a function, which might have a revenue operations strategist or director or head of revenue operations at the top. And then that revenue operations leader ideally should pick specialists depending on the business's go-to-market motions. That's my opinion.

Yeah. I, you know, I tend to agree with you. It's interesting because I also have, in general, I see job postings seem to be the best way to gauge kind of what, how it's being defined right now. I see essentially sales operations relabeled as revenue operations. Occasionally I'll see revenue operations that includes both some sales ops functions and marketing ops functions. I don't know about data ops. I think that's— that may actually need to be a whole separate thing, but table that. But I rarely see where there's a revenue operations role that has sales, marketing sales, and some sort of customer support, customer success function. I think, Nambi, it's interesting because I also think in general, many, many companies get hyper-focused on, you know, net new growth of revenue or net new logos and that kind of stuff and forget about retention and the value that A really good onboarding and customer, you know, customer support environment can really enable you to really continue to grow with that. I mean, it still strikes me because I think everyone's known for 40 years that it's much cheaper to retain a customer than it is to acquire a customer.

So, I'm curious, like, for the companies that you see that have revenue ops teams, do you also see a dedicated sales ops and marketing ops team, or are they kind of lumped together?

Again, same answer. It depends on the size and structure of the business. I think we've also— there's 2 ways of thinking about it. Like, if you can think about revenue operations as a function in the terms of within the function, you need an analyst, you need people who are the strategists, and then people who are going to be implementers. Now, this is a conversation that I had a while back, which I think even Mike was on. And we were, I was talking about this belief of, I believe the future is in revenue operations is we have a revenue analyst, and we have a revenue strategist, and we have revenue orchestration, and then revenue insights director. And then actually, there's no such thing as marketing, sales, and customer success, and everything's one, and we're all one lovely, happy family. And I think Reflecting back on my thoughts initially about where revenue operations was going to go, while I do wish we could have a revenue function where we don't differentiate between marketing and sales and service, and we have this whole revenue function, people still need their identities and tribes. And marketers identify with marketers, sales identify with salespeople, service, and I don't think we're going to change that. But what I don't think particularly helps is also the way in which the business finance, like, they structure their profit and losses and attribution. And I think the way that the financial systems are set up in businesses also create those silos as well.

Yeah, it's interesting. I was going to bring up, I mean, I've heard of these sort of 2 variants of how you might structure a revenue operations team, assuming it covers all 3. One is that sort of functional vertical marketing sales, customer success, or a horizontal, which is, you mentioned there's data insights ops, there's BAs, more that go across those functions. And I could see value in both. Actually, as I'm thinking about it now, this is all just real time. I'm thinking, I think there's value. Maybe there's a place for you have a little bit of a hybrid where there's functional expertise with sales, marketing, customer success, That covers maybe more than just BA, you know, and it gets down to implementation of stuff too. But the data ops piece, I think that's interesting that you brought that up because it feels like data ops should kind of go across the entire thing because I think there's a lot of opportunity missed just even without revenue operations. If you've got marketing reporting one thing and sales reporting another thing, and they tend to be reporting overlapping stuff and they do it in different ways, you immediately get into this friction point where there's disagreement about what the data actually says.

For sure. I think this all comes— talking about it, again, I'm just reflecting on what you're saying, is this whole, like, centralized versus distributed mechanisms within companies. Like, what do you choose to centralize? Like, HR is usually centralized within a business, versus what do you tend to distribute? And, you know, sales is often quite distributed with even field sales or inside sales and multiple versions of sales, and then how do you then service that with your marketing function? Some businesses have a centralized marketing function, in which people bring all their requirements to one centralized marketing team, or they have a distributed marketing function that sits alongside in hubs with sales teams. So, I think you do have to really tailor this to the business organizational structure that you have, you know, where are you? Are you a small startup where you can unsilo everything because everyone's together? Or are you a big global institute in which it might make sense to have operations person that's more specialist distributed, but then also a strategic centralized revenue operations team, which has the strategists, the analysts, and they also have like a dotted line reporting to them as well. One thing I have been seeing more of, which I am trying to get my head around as well, is there's actually this other function, business systems and processes. So, I don't know if you guys have seen that moving around, it's almost a a function in itself. For anyone who's in the Salesforce space, you'll probably follow Ben Fuller. He focuses on the kind of business systems as a department in itself. So, it is quite interesting. I see quite a lot of overlap between business systems and revenue operations. Um, and maybe revenue operations—

What we would call IT as well? Is that—

Oh no, they would differentiate themselves from IT.

Okay.

So, the business systems looks at the data and processes across the entire business, not just go-to-market.

Ah, okay.

So, like HR operations, like we wouldn't, personally, my business or my team wouldn't touch like HR operations or legal operations. I mean, we would touch the legal operations that touch the commercial side for sending out like a deal or a contract and terms and conditions, but if it's not involved with a revenue new, we wouldn't touch that operating system, is generally where we focus on, is that go-to-market, whereas business systems looks at it kind of like an end-to-end. Although, when I think about it, our largest, one of our largest clients, EVC, that we won an award for our sales innovation, we're actually touching all of their business systems and processes, and we're the business that's actually integrating their engineering system for scheduling engineers with their CRM, but that's because they need engineers to go to site presale, and the sales team need visibility of where they are in the engineering lifecycle, because the sales team can't move along that deal until they are aware that an engineer has gone to site and has actually approved it to move to the next step of sales. So, that's why we're involved with that.

That makes sense. That's really interesting.

Yeah.

Naomi, did you have something?

Yeah, I guess I'm— and maybe this might be a bit of a pivot, but I'm curious how you— your thoughts on how a revenue RevOps team should be measured, right? Because are they— do they have KPIs they need to meet? Do they— are they more of a background support character to help sales meet KPIs? Is it more efficiency? Measurements, like, what do you see? What do you see people doing? What is your thoughts on what is a best practice?

I'm curious your thoughts on that.

Yeah, I think as an ops sector, I think we've kind of done ourselves a disservice by not telling people how they should measure us in terms of our abilities. We've seen layoffs, we've seen people considering that ops is like a support, which might not be A, like, critical requirement for go-to-market. Whereas I'm also speaking to a lot of sales and marketing people who are like, we've lost all of our ops people and everything has broken. So, you know, we need to think about, as you rightly say, Naomi, how we measure this. And when we look at implementing any form of change, we focus on creating a baseline metric. And then we look at an improvement metric. What have we done? With that transformation, so there's two ways. If you're going to be running projects which are focused on improving a metric at the beginning of a project, just like a marketing campaign, you need to say, "Well, this is the goal of this RevOps like initiative. This is the actions that we're going to do, and this is how we're going to measure success for this initiative." And that measure of success should either be a change in volume at a particular stage in the revenue operations bowtie model. a change in conversion rate, or a change in velocity. If it's not changing one of those 3 things, the project itself probably wasn't going to be impactful. Now, another sort of school of thinking and something that I've been thinking about as well is, and again, I'm not entirely sure if this is just rev ops, or it will come into like revenue enablement as well, is focusing on the revenue per sales head. You know, really, if our focus is on to build a scalable revenue model, maybe not even just sales head, like revenue org, our job in RevOps or any ops is to reduce the requirement of additional heads for the same amount of revenue. So, if we're looking at changing amount of revenue on average per head in the business, like, I think I think there's an argument to say that that's really what we should be focusing on as a function.

It's like sort of a bit of an efficiency metric then at that point, right?

Sure, sure.

Okay.

And of course, we've got the CAC and LTV, but I think the problem with CAC and LTV is that everybody contributes to that. You know, it's very difficult to say, like, We're going to measure RevOps on their ability to reduce CAC, unless you put revenue operations in a strategic role to be able to change the way in which those funds are distributed based on those insights. And again, then that brings us back to, well, we need to measure revenue operations roles based on the job title of that revenue operations role, because, you know, someone who's a sales ops relabeled is going to have very different KPIs to a a director of revenue operations leading a multi-global conglomerate?

Yeah, it's interesting. I think I struggle with advocating for, well, certainly I'll do it with marketing ops specifically. I think even I've had this where I've had revenue targets as part of my metrics for my team. And I embraced it when it happened because I thought, That made a lot of sense, right? We were enabling the revenue engine. At the same time, I had no influence over what the salespeople would do and some influence over what the marketers would do, but not even a huge amount from a strategy standpoint. That changed over time as we got, you know, were brought in earlier and earlier on things. But it's just there's so many factors that were out of our control. I just, I didn't like being measured on that specifically. Now, revenue ops, I think if you've got that scope that goes across the full breadth of that lifecycle, I could see an argument for that, but I think you're right. I think it needs to be on something that is driving the right kind of behavior, right? Which sounds like— I think that revenue per head maybe makes sense, but I think it's a simple thing. It doesn't really— you don't have to argue about how you're calculating it. I mean, if you all agree on these are the heads that are going to count. The revenue is what the revenue is, and then you go from there.

There are other, like, leading indicators of that, which will help you, like, for example, pipeline capacity. Like, if you are taking away the requirements for sales to do more administrative things, the idea being is what we should be looking at is how can we increase the capacity of them to even manage deals in pipeline? And maybe if you can show, okay, well, this first project allowed us to be able to manage this many additional deals in pipeline without them you know, getting missed, or, you know, them having regular activities, then, then that, that's, that's a win. And I think we need to advocate for ourselves. I think, I think that's the core thing as well, is that when you're thinking about changing something, whether you're in marketing operations, whether you're in sales, success, full revenue, like, it's about thinking, okay, well, I'm going to do this initiative. Why? What metric am I trying to move? And just very clearly state at the beginning, I've identified that this is a problem. This is our baseline is, I would like to see a 1% increase in this. Now, if you are in a business that does like $10 million a month, or even, you know, $20 million a year, a 1% change in any part of the pipeline could have a dramatic effect on that pipeline. So, that's what you're— it's the small wins, and we need to advocate for ourselves, I think.

Yeah. The only— The last piece that is still sort of troubling, not troubling, but I'm getting stuck with is, I agree with you on the project piece, right? So, if you're doing a project that's changing something, absolutely, you should know what you're trying to affect, with some exceptions, like, oh, we have to do this because it's a regulatory requirement or something, right? Fine. You have to do that, right?

But then there's the risk of doing nothing, and that's the cost that you've saved the business. Right. Yeah.

Yeah. So agreed. But I think what I still struggle with is the things that fall into, I'll call it like, I think of them as run the business, change the business, right? So run the business stuff, I think is harder. Naomi, you're nodding your head. Like, what's your take on that?

No, I fully agree. I'm kind of just absorbing some of the stuff that you guys are speaking to. And I kind of want to circle back to something you had said earlier about when we're talking about KPIs and Measurement. If sales ops is not measured on deals and lead generation and conversion and things like that, I don't believe that marketing ops should be either. Right? Although I do know that some teams they do have a demand gen function as part of the marketing ops, I guess umbrella. I do not. In my opinion, I don't think demand gen should fall under marketing ops. I guess it also depends on like the size of business scope of the business and like how big the teams are. But to me, marketing ops is the marketing. Equivalent of sales ops, right? And we are helping the organization with technology adoption, vendor evaluations, procurement of tools, making sure that there is, you know, contract negotiations and whatnot. And the focus should be on making sure that the tools are properly utilized and that the teams are trained up effectively and efficiently, and that we're utilizing everything that We have, right? And so, I strongly do believe that there should not be lead gen KPIs unless there is a demand gen function that rolls up into marketing ops.

Curveball.

Like, what are your thoughts on businesses that have moved the SDR function into marketing? Because I'm seeing that.

Well, that has happened to me. I now am responsible for that, actually.

That actually has happened.

So, like a year and a bit ago, yeah, that has happened.

I've had a small inbound team under me in marketing ops before too. And for, I had, I guess we called them, like it would've been inside sales back then, but sales engineers at an equipment company I worked at for a brief period of time.

But I do, I do.

So to be fair, I do run them as 2 separate teams, right? They're not like merged together into one team that I have a weekly standup call with. I run them as 2 separate teams that are independent of each other.

So, it's really interesting, actually. I'm just reflecting on everything we're saying, and it's making me think about actual real-life cases. One of my clients at the minute, who's a health tech client, their teams have been so siloed, like their sales and marketing team. And to be brutally honest, they've— I'm not going to mention names because they hadn't been doing so well. And a lot of it had to do with the way in which the platforms were siloing the marketing and sales teams. You know, I genuinely believe that technology can have impacts for how people play together. But they literally, it's only happened like maybe 2 months ago. I've been working both of them because I know they're both good. You know, like the sales team are doing some great things. The marketing team are doing some great things. They both wanna achieve the same thing, but they're doing half over here and half over here. Well, what if they just sat together and did run campaigns together and motions together? and just thought about something rather than like any form of team KPIs. They just thought, how many opportunities can we generate together? And we just, they decided to shift their mindset. And the CMO said to me, she's like, Nazli, the changes is that people have decided to work together. And just all of a sudden, we were just seeing a massive shift and a massive change. So, Can we, in an ops space, can we do something to work together? Because my only fear with like having a separate like marketing ops and sales ops and not having this bridge is that we can actually work against each other. I've seen it in like businesses that have HubSpot and Salesforce. The HubSpotter and the Salesforce person, almost like because of this weird, you know, against each other kind of vibes we have between these like blue and orange platforms, that these people actually sit in businesses like almost refusing to talk to each other, which then causes an issue with like—

Yeah. It is reality though. I mean, I've seen that many times. So, this maybe begs the question. I'm curious now because one of the things we have, I think we've hinted around it, but like, say you have a RevOps function and just assume there's a leader over that. My perception is most of the time that usually reports into Either if there's a chief revenue officer, chief revenue officer, or it reports into the head of sales or head of marketing. Typically, I'm not wild about any of those. Partially, the first one probably makes more sense than others, I think, because you assume the revenue operate— if the CRO owns sales and marketing, doesn't own customer success, maybe, I don't know, right? That's another piece of it. But my experience, most CROs, I think, have historically come out of sales. So they have a sales orientation as opposed to— it just feels like there's always going to be Like this, when things get tough or decisions have to be made, right, you're going to lean towards what you know best as opposed to what might be best for the organization. What are you seeing? The same kinds of things? And then if so, do you think it's— am I off in saying that I think it's a problem?

I think what I have observed is the teams in which revenue operations or operations get cut are the ones led by the chief revenue officers. That's what I'm seeing. The businesses that we have the best collaborations with that continue to value revenue operations and operations are led by the COO. That's what we've been experiencing. We've even been bought into a B— I always said, we're a B2B brand. We only deal with B2B businesses, revenue operations, but we've just been bought into a B2C health and fitness business. Because the COO has moved from a software SaaS space into a B2C fitness space. And she's like, well, I want to bring RevOps with me. So, she's brought us over there. We're implementing revenue operations with salespeople who are selling fitness and body transformation. Like, that's something I never thought we would ever be doing. But that's because it's what the COO wants. And the COO wants to reduce the cost of acquiring things, maximize profits. It's about maximizing the profits. And that's where we seem to find we have value, but it's not necessarily what I'm seeing. Naomi.

That's actually super interesting. I'm very curious about being able to bridge that gap between traditional B2B and some of the other industries that are out there, because I think a lot of the various industries that we all, you know, are consumers of can also benefit from some of the processes and technology and the knowledge that we've learned in. Because one could argue that, you know, we as consumers are individual microbusinesses that consume these products, right?

Mm-hmm.

So, yeah, that's always been super fascinating because, you know, while B2C is not something that I've ever worked in career-wise, it's I've always been curious about how that can translate, right? Because I do think that there's a lot of overlap. And I think it's super interesting that you have the ability to see all of these different interesting technologies and are kind of at the forefront of enacting this change, right?

So.

Yeah, it is great. It's nice. That's what I love about the whole operations space, especially the revenue operations, is that you get to put your fingers in everything that talks to revenue operations.

Absolutely.

One thing I would say that we are starting to explore more is actually that revenue enablement side, the kind of sales coaching and helping them utilize the tools that they have better. Because there's, what we've been finding, there's a big difference between training teams on how to use them and actually enabling them to do their best habit and their best work with the resources that they have around them. It's kind of like a different, you know, I built this, you use this, this way, versus me understanding you. How do you like to sell? What's the sales experience you wanna do? What are your habits like, and how can you leverage the tools around you? So, we've just started exploring that space a bit more now, and looking at rolling some more sales enablement side out, because it's all very well building something you want people to use, but we do have to enable them to use it.

Yeah. I think that's a great idea. I'm curious, so you mentioned that those RevOps teams that roll up to a COO tend to be ones that perform better. I don't want to overstate, but that's what I think you said. And I'm tying that back to that thing you talked about where those, you called it the business function or business operations kind of connection as well. And it's interesting to me that there's a— it feels like there's a connection point to that, right? You've seen that pattern and now you're seeing COOs taking the lead. I have not seen many situations where COOs are managing this kind of function. It sounds— that's where I would have suggested, if not CEO.

But I don't, and I don't know what maybe size businesses that we're comparing. The ones where I've seen the COO is usually businesses that have been invested in, and they have bought in a CEO/COO. I mean, a lot of the times when we speak to businesses, we'll also engage the CEO, but the CEO never seems to be intrinsically interested in what we're doing, unless they're a CEO/COO, unless they are. that kind of operations mindset.

Right.

The one role I would like us to have more involvement with, which I'm not seeing yet, but I'm hoping we will see more of, is the kind of CFO function. It's like understanding or working more alongside them. I mean, I don't know if you guys run things like marketing attribution or revenue attribution, and there's lots of talk about attribution. And actually, something quite interesting happened to me recently in which I got a financial model done on my business, and I work directly with a fractional CFO from a founder perspective. But even at that point of view, the CFO turned around to me and said, what is your deal source for marketing for sales? Tell me that divide. Like, so they were coming in with that model of that is how we, how we kind of attribute Revenue. And she's like, well, what percentage is inbound? And what, like, so she was telling me, and this isn't a fault to her, she was amazing. Like, we had a great discussion about this, but it got me thinking that if new founders have that voice early on, telling them how things should be attributed by a financial person who helps them raise millions, that is going to change the way in which they think the attribution should be split. So, it just got me thinking a bit more about how maybe we need to align better with the CFO so that we can be reporting in the way in which makes sense for the profit, you know, the balance sheets, the profit and losses.

Yeah. I think this makes me happy to hear this too, because I'm an advocate for everybody who's ever worked for me the last 10, 15 years. They've heard me say, if you don't know finance, go learn it. Because the finance team can be your, your, your best friend or your biggest challenge on getting more headcount, more budget, you know, approval on a big project. Because if you can speak their language and you can understand where they're coming from, and I've, I've been lucky to have worked with several great finance folks who have really dug in to help understand, like they want to understand how things work and they wanted to make sure that I was providing them what they needed. And so, do you think those should be a reporting structure going to CFO rather than COO?

I don't know the answer to that right now. Pass. Can I come back to you next year? Should we do this again? Yeah. So, I think I'm a naturally curious person. So, my plan is potentially to bring some more CFOs onto my Road to Revenue, my podcast, as well, and actually ask them, like, just kind of talk to them about this stuff. For anyone who doesn't follow The Secret CFO, if you don't, you should. I've learned so much from that person. They're anonymous, not sure who they are, but yeah, I'm learning about that. And I actually reached out to The Secret CFO on Twitter just to ask them what their thoughts were on RevOps, and he replied, to be fair to him, or she. Still don't know.

Yes.

And they mentioned that it wasn't something that they have direct experience with. But, you know, I'm curious, I'm curious to see if it will leak that far. It's definitely started with, say, like, started with sales leaders, starting with marketing leaders. And then I'm seeing it kind of as businesses grow, if you get the right COO who gets RevOps, them wanting to kind of own it. But again, it depends on the CRO. Like, you've got very different CROs in businesses. You've got, like, you know, Latanya at Sixth Sense, who comes from a marketing background, which is very different from CROs that I've worked with, who maybe have only ever worked in sales, maybe from the '70s, who have a very different view of what a revenue operations person should be like. So, yeah, I think there's no one-size-fits-all. And I don't think that's helpful, but sadly, that's fact.

I mean, I think I'd like this, in general, CFO would be preferable to, say, a CRO who's got just a sort of primary set of experience in my mind. But it feels like COO is their, the right place for it because there's that knowledge about how to optimize and make things efficient. And I think also the data piece of it is, well, like really, like in general, I think marketers, it's funny, I've had this conversation lately a lot, but yeah, I know probably every marketer out there is going to go, I want, I either am or want to be data-driven. And I just, I think they're full of it because they don't really know what that means. And not, this is not meant to be disparaging, but I think, I think they should be data informed is really it because the data is always changing. That's in general in B2B world, it's usually not accurate, right? So if you're looking for the, in quotes, right, accurate data, you're never going to get it because you're never going to be satisfied because there's always nuance.

Yeah.

We don't have strong controls like you do for finance numbers, right? And so, but should say the key is to use the data appropriately to inform what your decisions are, but don't assume that we contribute, especially like things like attribution rate, we influence exactly down to the dollar or penny or whatever the equivalent it would be in the UK. You know, I just, that's, I think it's just a fool's errand a little bit.

Well, it's like what they say about, like, they say that scientists who study physics, there are more people who study physics that believe in religion because they suddenly realize there's so much they don't know. It's the same thing with, like, data people. Like, the more you understand about data, the more you understand the stories you can tell just by changing a bar chart to a pie chart. And the and putting certain charts next to each other, the stories that you can tell with data, you realize that, you know, you can influence somebody to make a decision one way or another by just the way that you present the same set of data. So, yeah.

Yeah.

I think we shouldn't get drowned down by thinking that data is the be-all and end-all. And actually, what's interesting, Michael, is if you read some of the stuff written by finance people, They talk about the fact that they don't have great data, and they're telling stories with their data and numbers. And, you know, finance is a mixture between art and science. It's not a pure science in itself. So, I kind of, this is why I think we sit really nicely between COOs and CFOs, because I kind of feel like ops people are there. And then you can have your additional specialty, whether you are a marketing ops person that, gets what the COO is doing, gets what the CFO is doing, but also, you have this kind of like specialty in marketing. So, you kind of know the campaign ops and the go-to-market motions that, say, like the marketing team wants to do. Same for sales, same for product-led growth, et cetera. But yeah, I don't know the answers to a lot of these things. I'm still exploring. I've joined a COO roundtable recently. To kind of network with a few other COOs to see, like, do they speak the same language as me? And I think we're all still trying to find our tribes, but at least we've got this, like, marketing ops community that we can all discuss definitely our ops thing.

Absolutely. Well, I think we are running short on time, unfortunately, because I think we could probably go on for a while here. But Natalie, is there anything that we haven't covered that you're like, oh, I want to make sure the audience hears this?

No, I don't think so. I'm always, I think the one thing to sort of share with everybody is that I'm always curious to hear what's going on in your RevOps, marketing ops world. I'm very open to conversations, chats. If you, if you want to DM me on LinkedIn, please do. You can also find me in Marketing Ops Community, as well as many other communities in the RevOps space. So, let's keep this conversation going, because I think the only way we're all going to learn is if we all share our insights.

All right. Don't think I could add anything more to that. Well said. Well, Natalie, thank you for joining us. I appreciate it. Naomi, always great to be with you. So thank you.

Thank you.

All right. So, and to all our listeners, thanks again for letting us invade your personal space, as you will, and continue to support us. We look forward to our next guests as well. Until next time, bye everyone.