What is Revenue Operations? | S02 E01

Hello everyone, and welcome to the Adding Value podcast. My name is Guido and I'm the manager of Acquisition and Strategy at New Breed. For those of you who don't know, New Breed is a customer acquisition agency focused on helping B2B companies grow and expand their business. And we do this by following the Inbound methodology, which at its core is about adding value before extracting value. So the goal of this podcast is to bring you stories of how people add value to their customers, customers, their company, and the individuals around them. If you like what you hear, please subscribe, give us a five star rating and check out the rest of our content on newbreedmarketing.com today. I'm excited to welcome one of the newer members of our team, Wesley Clyde, to join the show today. And we're going to be talking about something kind of interesting. So Wesley has a marketing background. She's worked at a handful of places in the past in the marketing capacity, but we're going to be talking today about revenue operations and what her experience has been like in the past. So I'm going to start off by reading our definition of what revenue operations is. So to us, RevOps Revenue Operations is the convergence of marketing, sales and service operations to drive accountability, efficiency and adoption across platforms. So to start things off, what does that mean to you as someone with little to no RevOps experience?

Nothing.

Why is that?

It just sounds like a lot of big words.

So let's start off by going into what you've experienced before. So let's talk a little bit about what your role was in past jobs and what you were responsible for doing. Let's start with that.

So at my last job, I helped bring inbound to a B2B manufacturing company. So we kind of piloted the entire movement of Inbound, which naturally put us in a position to bring in HubSpot to the team as well. Over time, I ended up becoming also the HubSpot expert, which meant I was the one in charge of everything top to bottom for HubSpot, for any department in the company, not just marketing.

And how much knowledge of HubSpot did you have prior to getting into that type of role?

We had used HubSpot already for the marketing side, so we had the marketing hub, but we just used it to send emails and do a little bit of automation. And some of the forms on our website were connected, but that was it. We had no idea the breadth that HubSpot covers.

Okay, so what were some of the challenges that you faced trying to get your team, the marketing team, which was essentially you and like a handful of other people that were helping you out along with the rest of the organization to start to use HubSpot in the way that you wanted them to use it.

There was a whole list. We had three departments at my company, so we had people using the service hub, we had a handful of salespeople using the sales hub. We had different product lines that all had different sales cycles and different processes. So essentially I was the person that ended up taking control of how each one of those people would end up using HubSpot, which was a way bigger project than initially anticipated. Because each one of those people's people and departments have their own way of using HubSpot and their own things that they need from HubSpot.

And if you're getting someone that has little to no experience using tech before, which from kind of an outside opinion, typically what we find is that people in those types of industries don't really use tech as much, especially when it comes to sales. So you're trying to get someone with little experience on using that type of technology to adopt that and learn how to use it and get up and running and continue to do and produce what they are used to doing. From a sales perspective, from what I've experienced as well, salespeople can be creatures of habit. So when they find something that works well for them, it's really tough to get them to change. So did you experience any of that as you tried to like introduce HubSpot to the sales team?

For sure. There actually was no existing CRM at the company I was at. They had been around for like 120 plus years and they did things to that way. So getting them on a CRM in general, which HubSpot is a very good starter level CRM as well. So like it works out perfectly. But the package of HubSpot can be overwhelming to a salesperson, let alone when you have no processes existing already. And getting them on board with something coming from marketing is interesting because it all came to them feeling like it was just marketing things. They didn't understand that there was value in it for them as well, which is a huge part of that, because I came from marketing teaching them things about their process, which is always going to cause more issues because we were the ones owning the entire process instead of anyone from the outside speaking as to why this is valuable for them as salespeople as well.

Totally. So the next piece I wanted to get into then is like, we've talked about kind of the issues with the adoption side of things. It's difficult to get those types of sales reps to get onboarded with a tool like HubSpot. And they were coming to you more often than not, from what I understand, in order to figure out what to do in HubSpot and how it was supposed to work, how things were set up and what was intended to happen, how confident did you feel at the time being able to address those types of questions that were coming in at the beginning?

It was brutal because we also hadn't really designated whether that was my role. And that's probably what happens in a lot of positions at a lot of companies as you grow, is that people just end up taking on things that aren't necessarily theirs to take on. And so it was a lot of I don't know yet, but I can go find the answers and get back to you and let you know.

So, yeah, it's like you're the marketer, you use this platform. So you should be able to answer all my questions regardless of whether or not this is your area of expertise or whether or not you've ever used this aspect of HubSpot before. Because HubSpot is a really big tool. There's a lot that you can do in there. And just to address anyone who's listening who either isn't using HubSpot or is using a different CRM that even introduces further complications because now you're considering a sales team and a marketing team that are using a market automation platform for the marketing team, a separate CRM to manage your database and potentially to run some sales activities from. You might have a sales acceleration tool like an. An outreach IO or there's a handful of others that you could be using. And all of those tools need to be connected and you need someone who is an expert in all of them in order to get the most value out of them for the people who are going to be the end users eventually. So just assigning that to the marketer more often than not doesn't make a ton of sense.

Even for the sense of the way that they sent emails and did their. Even if they weren't on a CRM, they had some form of a process. It was just not all located in one platform. And even I wasn't familiar with their way of doing things. So when they would come to me with the HubSpot question, I didn't even have an understanding yet of how they do things day to day, because that wasn't my role up until that point.

Exactly. So what I'm trying to establish at this point is basically that you're going to have issues with adoption. You're going to need to figure out how to get people who have never used a tool before to get up and running on it. The other thing you're going to need to have is expertise in that tool because the sales team might have a given process they want to use. And you need to figure out how to translate their potentially manual or undocumented process into the way that a software is intended to function. So understanding how their process fits into that takes a lot of expertise in the tool and translating what a sales rep says they're doing into a formalized, documented flowchart potentially. And step by step process. Did you ever get to the point, I guess at your last company where you had all of that documented so that someone could just go and reference it and see how everything was supposed to work and how it was supposed to be set up?

Not even close. And I think a big part of that is because of time. I mean, we talked about this a little bit, but when someone's doing something that they didn't initially plan on, it becomes a side project. And that's what we're saying here is how important. It's so important. But I sometimes didn't even have time to accomplish those things for all the teams while doing my original role in marketing, let alone then also build documentation around what I was doing. And as I was figuring these things out, it was just that, okay, I solved it for you. Here it is without the formal process or documentation so that someone else could do it.

It was just like a one off. Here's the solution to your one issue. And then the next time this comes around, I'll do it again and that person will get their solve. But there's not a scalable solution that applies across the entire team.

And that just creates the same atmosphere that next time I have a problem, I'm going to do the same thing and come to you again on a one off rather than a system at all.

And now you're basically acting as a bottleneck for everyone. They're all going to you, which in one way is really good security. Like now everyone relies on you to be able to do something, but the business as a whole is not getting additional value or not receiving the value that they could be getting out of the tool to begin with. And then from the leadership's perspective, now you're thinking about, is my marketing automation platform or my CRM actually worth what I'm investing in it? Because I don't necessarily see a difference in output from the sales team now that we've adopted this new tool potentially. Right, right.

For sure.

It's so difficult to get that up and running. So what would you have done differently, looking back, if you were to introduce HubSpot all over again at the last.

Job you had documentation for sure. I would have documented even if it wasn't as formal as it should be in the end result some form of what I was doing. Because when it came time to realize how serious this had gotten and how much of my time was being dedicated to doing, call it the HubSpot expert position or implementation, it was hard to justify that because it was those one off things all the time. And over time it just got more and more one off things to where it was my entire job. And it was very hard to present to leadership or say this is eating up all our time. It needs to be either someone's role or a team's role or my role. But you need to take everything else away from me. And we had a lot of those discussions about, well, people truly were like this can't be taken up that much of your time. There's no way. And I was like, you don't know what I do day to day.

What else were you doing? What were you not able to get to as a result of what you were trying to do within Revops?

So all of the marketing things that fall under inbound were kind of on my plate as well. We were trying to launch email campaigns and nurture campaigns and all of those. And that kept getting pushed because I was. When a salesperson comes to you and says this is broken or I can't log emails, that's customer facing. So that's more important immediately than whatever projects I'm trying to get off the ground in marketing. And that's exactly what happened month over month.

Yeah. It's always interesting because both teams, marketing and sales, have immense value that they provide to a company.

Right.

But the marketing's needs are not necessarily pushed on the back burner. But if a sales rep comes up to someone and says, I can call this deal today if you give me X, you're going to get them in for sure and it's going to happen every single time. And then marketing needs to find a way to be able to incorporate those types of requests into their operations on a regular basis. And it's really difficult to be able to balance both those things. And then you're getting to the point where you're into that scenario where you're saying yes to one thing and being forced to say no to something else. Right.

We also had actually a customer. We had outside sales and inside sales, and some of the products were sold off a shelf. So we had double levels of that. Because we use the ticketing system at HubSpot to serve customers. They would call and say, I need to order this. Okay. It's this much money. Put the order in. And if those people needed help, that was the definition of this requires your attention now because if HubSpot is not working or something's down or not connected, I.e. someone's on the phone waiting. Oh, yeah, That's a whole nother level of like, I need you now.

Totally. So let's go back to the, like, onboarding and adoption process because there's one way that we typically try to recommend doing things here, and I want to see if you feel like this could have worked at your last company. So what we've done for some of our big rollouts is we'll do like a essentially a pilot program. And either that's done one of two ways. We'll either identify a champion that we think is going to be able to use this product really well and get value out of it on their own so that they can kind of be again the champion to introduce it to the rest of the team that's going to end up using it. The other way is to identify like a small, isolated group that's going to use a product for a certain amount of time before we roll it out to the rest of the team. So they're kind of similar in a lot of ways. But I'll describe the differences. When we got Slack for the first time, we used that. When we went to one of our events, we went to Inbound and the team that went to Inbound used Slack, and the rest of the company wasn't going to be using it at all. So that team had the opportunity to kind of test out what it was like to use it. It was an isolated group of people. And then once we brought it back to the rest of the company and introduced it to the then we already had this cohort that was already well versed in Slack could help other people get onboarded to answer questions. So there wasn't that bottleneck scenario of only one person understanding how to use Slack. Slack's not a super complicated tool, so that's not necessarily going to have the same level of difficulty in getting issues addressed as like a HubSpot might. But that rollout process worked really well. For us then we also provided like hands on coaching sessions for anyone who had like deeper questions and concerns about what we were migrating away from. The other scenario is Drift. So with Drift, we wanted to identify one person on the sales team that we felt like was going to be really good at using conversational marketing to engage with prospects. They used it for a handful of weeks, started to book meetings, and then the rest of the sales team saw what they were doing and thought to themselves, oh, I want to be able to do what Ben's doing right now and I want to figure out how to get the most value out of Drift for myself. So rather than forcing this new tool on the entire sales team at once and saying, hey, you guys all need to start using it, we got them into a situation where all of the sales team wanted to start using Drift so that they could get the same value that Ben was getting from it. So going back, do you feel like you had the opportunity to use either of those onboarding approaches to get buy in from the rest of the team?

It's funny because we kind of did the opposite. And I think it was that we were a little scared at the beginning because we had had a lot of failed implementations before with different programs and softwares. So we almost segmented them too much and tried to teach them in small batches. And what we found at the end, which would have benefited, there's salespeople are naturally competitive, we all know this. And there's a lot of value in that. And that as long as it's done correctly and addressed the right way, that can be so beneficial. And we found toward the end, once everybody kind of got word of what everybody else was doing without us intentionally doing that because we taught everyone very separately. There was a lot of that going on. Oh, he used tickets, I want to use tickets. Oh, what's that? And we were looking at it going, why didn't we do this from the beginning? We should have had that champion or the people communicating much more to let them guide themselves rather than trying to hand feed everyone individually because it, it naturally ended up that way and we regretted it at the end that we didn't do it more as a have a champion or have a group that spoke to everyone else.

And once that happened, did you have any sort of documentation that they could go and reference after the fact? So once the onboarding was completed, they could go back and see. Oh yeah, like here is my reference point to see how I'm supposed to do activities A, B and C. Yeah.

We didn't and we really disconnected it, which I actually ended up doing a presentation four or five months after original implementation of. Here's how. The entire company is using HubSpot because we realized that there was a huge lack of understanding of big picture because I was so at the ground level teaching everybody and trying to get my time to them that they all missed the big picture of why we were doing this. And I think that's really common to do when you're just trying to get your tasks done.

So I think we've covered most of the big points. I'm going to read the definition that we have for RevOps again and see if it's something that you feel like actually resonates or that is easily understood from someone that might be coming into the whole scope of marketing, sales, service and revenue operations for the first time. So the convergence of marketing, sales and service operations to drive accountability, efficiency, adoption and adoption across platforms, looking back, does that, like, make sense for some of the challenges and how RevOps addresses those that you had faced in the past?

100%. I think the big word is the convergence of. So the fact that everyone is coming together and communicating and that it's not just one department, it's all of the departments working together.

Yeah. That's like the one thing that I think gets missed a lot is all of those departments typically get siloed at a company. Like you have marketing working independently, sales working independently, and then the customer service team is doing their own thing too. All of them should be using tools that speak to each other at the end of the day. Like, your CRM is going to be the core of the core database that all of those teams are referencing when they're trying to market, sell to, and service your customers. Right. So if you're not using a standardized process that all of those teams can reference and understand what's intended to happen. And when it makes everything a lot more convoluted, less convergence, I guess. And the experience for your customers at the end of the day gets a lot worse because of all of that. There's just confusion that results from that all the time.

And someone needs to be owning that that's outside of one of those teams, which we proved, because coming from one of those sides, it's always going to seem, oh, we're doing this for marketing. Oh, we're doing this for sales. This is a sales tool. But when you have a third party or other department speaking to that, it gives it so much more credibility and they're able to look at it with a different lens.

That's one of the things that you mentioned recently too, where it's like if you're a company that doesn't have revenue operations today, or you don't have a person, a department, a team devoted to doing that, you're still doing those functions. Whether you realize it or not, you're doing revenue operations without necessarily devoting someone specifically to that. And when that happens, you're probably not doing it the best way possible. So now you have someone that's juggling a handful of things. It might not even be an expert that should be doing revenue operations is trying to execute in that regard for you. Right, Right. So we'll always recommend that a company gets the expertise that they need with an individual who's experienced in those tools that understands how they're supposed to be used, can translate that documentation into a way that's digestible to anyone who's going to be using it so that the entire company can get the most value out of that toolset and that document. What else do you feel like is worth someone knowing when it comes to RevOps, especially if they're getting introduced to it for the first time, or maybe they don't. They're not seeing the value that a revenue operations department can provide to a company.

I think it's important to point out that we talk here a lot about like the rise of RevOps or how it's becoming so much more prevalent now. And I think it's important to point out that technology drives that. And that's why, and that makes sense because if you, I mean, there's some statistic about the average amount of platforms and technologies every company uses and it's an insane amount.

Yeah, we didn't even get to that point. So, yeah, I don't know if I've even mentioned this term to you before, but that whole concept, there's two terms that we use for it. There's a Frankenstack and shelfware. So Frankenstack is when you just piece together, you get the best in class every type of software. So you get the best in class marketing automation platform, the best in class CRM, the best in class sales intelligence or acceleration tool. And then you've purchased all of these, you've onboarded all of them, and then you realize that they don't all speak together and you haven't evaluated them with this holistic lens. So now you have this like mishmash of software that your company is using and you further, you make that siloed approach Even worse, right. And it just makes it that much harder for the company to function.

We had that problem just with our accounting software because it had been around for 20 years plus. And when we brought HubSpot and all these things, it was like this amazing line of oh, we can close deals automatically and it can speak to, to the software program we use. And we found out there was no connection and it was super outdated. And all of us looked at each other and said, okay, but who's going to connect them? Whose job is that? And that was one of the first major points towards RevOps. We didn't know it at the time of like this is a big deal and it's a very technical position that none of us can just Google this and figure out how to do this.

Companies try to have knowledge bases. They try to make it easy for customers to get service for these softwares that they create. But at the end of the day, it's really good to have someone with hands on experience in how the company is intending to get to use it and what they're trying to get out of it. It's going to be different for every company. I remember talking to someone at one time that was. They were talking about their Salesforce Instance and they said, oh yeah, our Salesforce Instance is so unique. No one has something as complex or as difficult as ours. The amount of times that we've heard that from clients is astounding. Every single instance is unique in its own way. They all have their own nuances and differences. And trying to translate that to different companies is going to be really tough to do.

Mastering both the platform and then the value that RevOps adds is that even for me, I was inside of my company, I'd been there for almost three years, so I knew our processes in and out. And that's where if you would just pick someone from whatever platform or whatever company, they don't have that knowledge. And that's so important because yeah, you can understand the platform, but can you understand the platform and then make it work for my company? And those quote unquote unique instances that you have. And that's the value that RevOps provides.

Totally. So yeah, that Frankenstein concept and the other idea of shelfware that I didn't even touch on is when you purchase software that you ultimately don't use at all, you're paying a subscription for something that you never even touch. And the reason that both of those occur is because of poor evaluations up front. So again, people aren't thinking about how all of these Tools are going to connect to each other and how they're going to adopt them within the company, who's going to be using them, why they're going to be using them, and how they're going to speak to each other. Whenever we go through a new software evaluation in New Breed, we do a series of checks and balances to make sure that it's going to integrate with every other tool that it needs to be able to speak to, that it covers all of the features and functionality that we needed to accomplish within the organization and we stack rank each of those features against each other so that certain ones are rated higher than another. It makes the whole process a lot easier for us to go through then. And we don't have to spend time like going through and translating everything that we've heard from the sales process to all of the key stakeholders that might be involved in making that ultimate decision. It's just all documented in one place. They can all see it quickly and easily and understand what's supposed to happen. At the end of the day, that's.

Like revolutionary to someone like me comes from where I come from. Because when we bought HubSpot, even marketing chose it, Marketing used it and we didn't know. And then some of the other departments didn't even know that we had it. And that's a problem. And I think a lot of companies are in those situations and it's not uncommon and I understand why. And it makes so much more sense that everyone should know what everyone else is using and they didn't.

So we had a presentation last night about Darcy's Right. So Darcy is a. It's basically like a project management and decision making tool where you have the ultimate decision maker, an accountable party, a responsible party, someone who's in full informed and someone who's consulted. So we try to use that framework before we do software evaluations to make sure that we know everyone that needs to be consulted and informed on this decision beyond just the people who are the ultimate decision makers and the people who are accountable and responsible for actually like using it and implementing it on an ongoing basis. So in that scenario, you apply that to your evaluation and your experience with HubSpot. You probably bring sales into the conversation, you might even bring service into the conversation. And now they're both providing their feedback on how they might want to use this.

And if you look back, it's, it's a lack of evaluation. It all comes down to because we didn't even understand. We knew there were sales tools, but we didn't even understand what HubSpot was at the time. We just saw the marketing piece and said, oh, that's for us. Because there was no one third party saying, yeah, but look what else this does and what's going to happen down the road. We just had one lens. Turns out HubSpot ended up spreading to our entire company and we had already put ourselves in that box.

Yeah. And it's funny now because you, you talked about HubSpot and I imagine that it was maybe you and someone else on the leadership team who chose HubSpot. Right. For us, we usually have that conversation. Start with a revenue operations team. Like, they're the ones that go out and do the evaluation for us. Marketing might identify that, like, we have a need here. But the actual task of doing the evaluation, looking at the different products and the different options that seem to wrap up because they understand the process and the features and functionality of the tools that they're using better than anyone else.

At the for sure. And we didn't have that. It just was us. And we're like, we want this. Okay, let's fight for it and get it.

Exactly.

Yeah.

So what else, what else do you think we could cover at this point? We've talked about onboarding, adoption, the evaluation process, making sure that everything is documented. Is there anything else that you feel like is necessary to know about or to consider before you start to adopt the RevOps department or team at a company?

Not necessarily. I don't think so. I think that's a pretty good coverage.

Do you feel like a RevOps expert now?

Should I say that at this company when that's not my position?

I mean, for us, we're in an interesting spot because being on the marketing team, we're gonna be executing on some of that. But we still have a business operations team and revenue operations team that can come in and make sure that we're not putting it on the back burner for us. So you get the opportunity to kind of get your feet wet, dip your toes in whatever phrase you want to use into revenue operations and learn as much as you want to about it. But it's also not necessarily going to be your full time role unless you want it to be.

And it's, it's refreshing. Like, I mean, I know what I know because of where I come from, obviously everyone does and no one regrets their experiences. But stepping in here and not having to take that on it shows the value of RevOps because I came from somewhere where everything was dependent on me in those aspects. And I just didn't have the time. So coming here and being able to still have a hand in automation and platforms and those things without owning them is the definition of why you should have Revops at your company.

Again, we totally recommend that everyone, regardless of size, consider how this function is going to be solved for at the company. You might not have a person or a team that's devoted to doing it from day one. Right. Like, you're probably going to figure out a way to manage it with someone who wears multiple hats, and one of those hats is RevOps. But at a certain point, as you grow and as you reach scale, you're going to need to have someone either on staff or that you can consult with, that can deliver this for you. Right?

Agreed. Yeah, we had HubSpot consultants from another HubSpot partner, and you need someone to go to with questions because you're not going to become an expert in any platform in two weeks. There's just no way. So consulting on someone else, if you are not already an expert, is 100% the way to go.

Awesome. Yeah. Well, Wesley, I really enjoyed this. Thank you so much for joining today. We've got more great episodes on the way, so make sure you subscribe to the podcast so that you can get notified when our next episode comes out. In the meantime, check out newbreedmarketing.com for our other great resources. Thank you everyone else for joining. We'll see you next time.