Revenue Operations Is About Enabling the Customer Journey - Eddie Reynolds, Darrell Alfonso, and Mollie Bodensteiner - Revenue Today - Episode # 030

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Now we have an awesome panel coming up to talk about how to scale your RevOps. We have Darryl Alfonso, Global Marketing Operations at Amazon, Molly Bodenstein, Director of RevOps at Zenkari, and moderating this panel, we have Eddie Reynolds, CEO at Union Square Consulting. This is going to be an incredible panel. Eddie, please feel free to go ahead and take it away.

Awesome. Excited to jump into this. So I think the place that we wanted to start was by talking about how to build revenue operations at various stages of the company. So Molly, Darryl, I'd love to ask you how you see the best way to build revenue operations at 3 stages: before the company reaches product-market fit, immediately after they reach product-market fit, and beyond that, once you have built out a full sales and marketing team.

Perfect. I'll, I'll jump in and kind of kick things off first, and then maybe might be best just to talk about each stage and get perspective too, because Eddie, I know you have great perspective based on your background. But when you think about, you know, revenue operations, it's really, you know, how you're enabling the customer experience, customer journey across your go-to-market infrastructure. So before product-market fit, most companies are typically doing founder sales, right? Really working to figure out figure out how they're going to go to market, getting that definition in place, and starting to gather, you know, market feedback and getting those definitions. So I think it's really less about full-scale, you know, revenue operations at this point and more about starting to understand, you know, what your process looks like and gathering that key, key data. Darryl, any thoughts on that?

Darryl, you go first.

Yeah, yeah, and before I start, I Interesting fact, Molly and I know each other actually, so it's pretty awesome. She consulted for my company back in the day and we're actually friends, so it's really nice to be here. Yeah, so when it comes to product-market fit, I think of it— the easy way that I think of product-market fit is that it's when your customers sort of take you to the different companies that they work with, work in, and they— you become a part of their sort of toolkit. So if you go to a company or you switch companies and you tell your leadership, I need this set of tools, that I think has a— in that event, you have a really good— product-market fit. So there's a lot of parallels with product-led growth, I think. And pre-stage, before you know that that's happening, I don't know that there's too much that you can do. And I speak mostly on marketing operations and a little bit on revenue operations. There's not too much you can do from an operations standpoint to get that there. That's more of a strategic and sort of experimental thing that you're figuring out as you go. So operations, in my opinion, really comes into play a lot after, and we take on the role of more of a strategic advisor, giving leaders and the go-to-market team the intelligence and the data points and the sort of indicators of what's right and wrong. So that's how I kind of view Product market fit before and after?

Yeah, I agree with you both. I think that revenue operations ultimately should strive to make the go-to-market process more seamless and repeatable and scalable. And if you haven't achieved product market fit, there's not much to optimize there. I think if you think about founder-led sales, and I can speak mostly from personal experience, having built my company and done founder-led sales myself, founders are leveraging their network and the experience they've built over decades. all the people they've met, all the things that they have learned. And they're oftentimes reaching out to folks in their network to tell them, hey, you know, we built this better mousetrap and I want to tell you about it. And then they're getting business from those people or people that are referred in. And that's not necessarily a scalable practice. It's a lot harder to hire an account executive with a few years of experience and say, hey, go sell the way I sell with this Rolodex and this like couple decades of experience that you don't have. But I think from a revenue operations perspective, you know, there's not much to build. But you can set up a basic CRM and track some really basic information, like how long it takes you to close a deal and really who is buying your product. And you, I think you achieve product market fit when you have a number of people that are willing to pay you money for the product that you have designed, that MVP. From there, you then need to think about, well, how do we scale this? How do we start to hire account executives, SDRs, bring in marketing, et cetera, and start to attract more of the people that look like the customers that the founder was able to attract? And what is the step-by-step process in order to achieve that? And how are we going to build that around people that are not the founder? And as you scale that and you have more sales reps and more in marketing, that's when you start to think about various systems that are being used and data that is being captured. Curious if you guys have any thoughts on that or if we should go to sort of the next phase of the company as we discuss this.

No, I think those are, you know, great points. Once you've established product-market fit and you've got to get out of founder sales to true professional sales, Just getting those processes aligned so you can actually enable and drive and capture the right KPIs and metrics that you need.

Yeah. And I think it's going to be different as you go into that next phase, whether you're, you know, product-led growth or, um, you know, you're more marketing heavy or you're really more outbound heavy, but I'd be really curious if you guys could share what you've seen in your experience as the company hits their stride and starts to build out sales and marketing, what you think are most important in building the revenue operations to support them.

For me, I think that when I think about operations, I think about how can you most effectively help a company reach their objectives and how can you do that in a productive, efficient, scalable way? So I think that's how I think about operations. So I don't, I don't think of it as operations are the people, and then, you know, I'm happy to debate this. I don't think of it as operations are the people that actually define the strategy and vision for the product or for the company. I think that operations people are really important, and I think it's almost like a sports team, you know what I mean? We all have different roles to play, and by playing all of those roles, you know, that's how we win. You know, I always compare it to like, like in basketball, you know, the point guard has a role and so does the center. So you're not going to have the point guard, you know, boxing out in the paint trying to get a rebound, right? There's different roles that we play and it doesn't mean that one role is lesser than the other. So I do caution people on the idea of needing to try to take over strategy where I don't think that, that, you you need to do that in order to be successful. So I think that, you know, depending on the stage of the company and sort of the challenges that you face, we look at operations as, are we effectively outputting and delivering the things that we should? And if the answer is no, then there's a lot of operational efficiencies that you can put in place and a lot of innovations that you can put in place. If the answer is yes, I think that it means you're doing a good job. I kind of look at it in a simplistic way. Hopefully, that's not gross simplification, but that's how I look at it.

Yeah, I think it's a really complex issue. Before I respond, Molly, I'd love to get your take.

No, I mean, I agree with you, right? I think it's less about— and the other part of this is, like, when we talk about revenue operations, I think it's important to stay like, this doesn't necessarily mean a revenue operations team, right? Thinking about revenue operations in terms of more of a mindset of how does go-to-market work together and center around the customer as you have, you know, marketing, CS, finance, sales teams driving together. How do you ensure that those strategies, though, do make sense and are aligned and that the tactics that the teams are pulling together work in the same way to deliver that value to the customer? So thinking about this truly as more of, you know, an operational mindset around, you know, people, process, data, technology to drive that experience.

Yeah, and I would take it even a step further and I would say, you know, if we're thinking about really early stage, let's say that we're gonna build an initial sales team and they're primarily gonna go outbound, for example. We really just need to think about what is the step-by-step process that we need to take in order to have an effective outbound strategy? Who's our ideal customer profile? Who are the buyer personas that we need to address in that ideal customer? What tools are we gonna use to reach out to them? Who's the list of folks that we're going to call on? You know, what is our sequence or our cadence in whatever tool we're using to reach out to them? Once they respond, what is the next step and the next step after that and the next step after that? And how can we optimize that? And our company works with a lot of early-stage companies that are doing exactly this. And we're just trying to think about, well, how can we make that first sales rep's job easier and more seamless so that they can walk in the door and they can say, okay, I've had my training. I understand who I'm supposed to reach out to. And these people are all right here in this particular tool. And I click this button and I have the information I need to pick up the phone or write an email or send a LinkedIn DM or whatever it is that I need to do to do my job. Then we could have the same corollary for inbound as well. I think that that's where this is really nuanced and complex because it depends on what that go-to-market strategy is for the company. Darryl, to your point, I think it's really interesting when you think about RevOps informing strategy, and that's a question I have later on in this session, but obviously your chief revenue officer should be informing the strategy, but what can RevOps do to inform whether or not that's working well or not?

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