MarCloud Podcast #4 - Stephen Stouffer on how to get started with RevOps

Foreign.

And welcome to the My Cloud podcast. The first external guest that we have on the My Cloud podcast as well, and I'm very pleased to say that I have somebody who's helped me out a lot in my career as well, especially in the early days, is Mr. Stephen Stouffer. So, Stephen, hi, welcome. How's it feel to be the first guest on our podcast? The external guest on our podcast.

Oh, wow. No pressure, huh? Good to be here. Thanks for having me.

No worries. Why don't you introduce yourself to everybody who's listening today?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So accidental admin to marketing executive. I guess so back in the day, over a decade ago, I got an internship for a marketing automation analyst position back in the. It was actually Pardot was under Pardot at the time. That was even before Exact Target and then, yeah, 2011 I think, and then Exact Target picked it up in 2012 and Salesforce picked it up soon after that. So my background was actually originally front end development kind of it focused. And then in my internship, my manager basically left the company. They're like, well, you're the next best person who knows this Pardot thing. This is yours. I kind of grumbled and was like, oh my gosh. I don't know anything about like marketing automation or anything like that. I know I didn't want nothing to do with it and then I just fell in love with it and I've been in it ever since. So I've got about a decade experience of marketing automation going from Pardot, Marketo, HubSpot, Eloqua, Marketing Cloud, Salesforce, Marketing automation, migrations. I've done a little bit of everything, Worked with nonprofits, multi billion dollar companies, like yellow Pages, gone through a couple of acquisitions, and now I find myself as the VP of digital transformation and innovation at which is a marketing ops agency.

Wow. What journey and how much of the original swag do you have?

Oh, I have original Pardot T shirts. Like the one with the like the spiky pointy part logos. Yeah. I almost wore it to Dreamforce this year because there's a meetup and it was like the Pardashians. And I'm like, oh, you know what, I should have brought that T shirt because like very few people probably would have recognized it and I probably would have annoyed a few people at Salesforce. But it's. It's like the OG Pardot swag.

Oh, my days. That's like akin to having like a band T shirt of like 1974 tour or something like that. And to say that you Were there or something. It's like that's, that's, that is. Oh, geez. That. That's incredible.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So a few people would probably appreciate it, but I would just mostly be aging myself, I think.

And Dreamforce. Yeah, you were there as well, and you were speaking at Dreamforce. How was that?

Yeah, it was a lot. There was a lot of people there. But it's so much fun. Like, you know, you know, people like you, Carl. I, I talk to people all the time on LinkedIn and there's this amazing community, but like, you very rarely ever get to like meet up in person. And Dreamforce is like that one time a year that I get to actually meet up and put faces to all the amazing conversations I'm having online. So it was, it was great. I loved it.

No, maybe one day I can get out there and actually meet you guys in person as well. Because so far you've been on the end of many a gme, many a zoom, as well as some of the other marketing champions. So, yeah, hopefully I can get myself out there. One area, I mean, you're. You seem to be very active on LinkedIn and a guru of many topics around marketing operations. But what we talking about specifically today is rev Ops and in particular how somebody can get such an operation off the ground, what to look for pitfalls, things to consider when getting this kind of thing up off the ground. So for everybody else at home, can you just explain first and foremost what Rev Ops is and potentially what it isn't?

Yeah, sure. So you have marketing operations, sales operations, and rev Ops. If you think about marketing operations, you can think about all of the marketing initiatives and the efficiency behind those. So I'll just use a very simple example. Something like demand generation with like LinkedIn legion forms, or Facebook paid media, or organic, or maybe the website. Sometimes the website can fall under it, but most of the times, you know, it's marketing. So when we think about operations, it's just the efficiencies behind all of those tactics and campaigns that that team is going to be doing. So for marketing. Now, I will say, before I say what I'm about to say, I'll say that everyone's responsible for revenue, but. And it's such a fluffy thing that I hear everyone talk about, but when everyone's responsible for it, no one's responsible for it. So I'm going to draw some hard lines in the sand which, which might be a little bit of a hot take, but marketing ops is pretty much up to the point where You MQL a lead and you pass it to sales and then you've got sales ops which basically is going to pick it up from there. Work with the sales team. You have all the go to market technology. They typically use the CRMs so they're kind of responsible for the efficiencies behind the CRM side of the house or more on the sales side. And you've got like things like drift and outreach and intercom and all those tools that maybe sales uses on a day to day basis. So that would be kind the sales ops piece and then on the rev op side it can be quote to cash. So when you think about once an opportunity goes closed one the baton kind of gets passed from sales operations to more the rev operations side where now rev ops is a little bit responsible for you know, making sure the efficiencies of getting the money, getting the renewals, getting those expansions and working with customer success to make sure that all of that is running smooth. And depending on how big your org is or depending on how it's structured, Sales ops and marketing ops will actually roll into rev ops. And revops is kind of that larger umbrella that really is trying to make everyone talk to each other and make sure that there is no hard lines in the sand. But you know, everyone has a sense of responsibility kind of across the board.

Cool. I think my next question was going to be what the difference is between that sales ops, marketing ops. But I think you kind of hit the nail on the head. There is essentially instead of having separate teams, the way I've heard what you just. If I can just repeat back to what you just said that rev ops is a way of almost bringing those teams together in one umbrella as you've just said there. So there is no siloed kind of walls between departments, right?

Yeah. And it depends on the company too because like you know, I don't want anyone to hear what I'm saying and take it as kind of law. It's, it's so different. Like smaller companies, there's no luxury of departments. Right. Like if you work at a startup or a medium sized company there is, there is no rev ops, marketing ops and sales ops. It's probably one or two people doing the job that everything. So it's a little bit of a maturity complex where once you grow in the company you're going to have so many tools that one person cannot just keep up with and then that person typically falls probably within another three buckets. Either they fall on the finance side where they might align a little bit more toward rev ops. They might fall on the sales side. Maybe you have a BDR or an AE or a technical solutions engineer on the sales side who's really technical savvy and maybe they want to take over the sales op side. And then on the marketing side it typically starts on the marketing side because the marketing automation tools are just so prevalent right now like Pardot and HubSpot and Marketo. It's almost like operations is almost like births from marketing and then it kind of spawns across the board or the organization or sometimes it comes from it too.

Where do you think that the whole thing was born from? What do you think the problem was that it was trying to solve? It might be an obvious question. But where, where do you see the problem lie and where Revop solves it?

Like data continuity is probably, probably one, compliance is probably another. And the technical expertise that is needed now in marketing has never been so high. Right. So like if you wanted to send an email, you could send just like a text email. But like if you want an HTML email and you want a landing page and you want some forms and you want to capture that data, it requires a fair, fair amount of knowledge of structuring HTML and tables, you know, versus something like front end development where you might do things in divs and then like you have the data flow from system to system. And I think that marketers were kind of caught off guard where it's no longer making pretty things and just pushing out graphics, it's now connecting systems to systems. And when you have to connect systems to systems, you need someone a little bit more technical. And oftentimes the design, kind of the design, you know, attribute of a person as far as a hard skill and then the technical side, they don't always go together. So like you can't find oftentimes one person who can do both. So then you know, it opened up the door I think to more the technical side and now you got operation folks basically running teams.

What you're saying there reminds me of, I think there was a comparison year on year from the early 90s right through to now. All the potential Martech systems that were out there, as you can imagine, like 2023, it's almost like so small that you can't even see the logos of the companies anymore.

Ye, that map you're talking about, I'm very curious to see how it looks in 2024 with all of the AI and GPT that are being created. It's just going to get Smaller and small. Marketing is going to become a smaller and smaller part of a much bigger tech ecosystem. It's exciting and a little bit terrifying.

I'm almost expecting that map to grow so big that it's going to form the picture of a portrait of somebody like maybe the first person to coin marketing or something like the guru of marketing. Like you know, one of those lazy eye type things. It's just getting are massive. It's almost untrue. But I guess what you're saying there is that what marketing was thought of as making pretty emails that were responsive on a mobile or anything like that, just designing really cool, nice looking content. It really is a technical occupation now. It really is a technical team. So I guess what you're saying there is that Rev Ops is a way of trying to marry that up and bring in that technical expertise into the marketing team as well. So where do you see the overlap between, between the teams? And do you think that's the reason that revop exists as well?

Yeah, I don't know if it's why RevOps exists, but it's definitely relevant to any organization who even has these departments or those who don't. But you've got data compliance. I think there's an overlap. Right. So like GDPR comes to mind. Everyone's responsible for gdpr, right? Someone comes in from a marketing email and they reply to that email and they say unsubscribe or they exercise their right to be forgotten. Marketing's responsibility is to make sure they handle that. But when you have all these systems within the organization from marketing all the way up to finance, like finance also has to delete some information, Sales has to delete information for the CRM. Right? So everyone is responsible for data compliance and they have to be talking to each other because if marketing gets the request and they just deleted from their systems, but then finance and sales doesn't, you're no longer being compliant. So I think compliance science brings everyone to the table a little bit and it forces the conversations around data quality and height, you know, data hygiene, regularly cleaning up things and just doing what you should be. And then I would say as far as like the optimization of those batons being passed from kind of department to department, there has to be conversations and then also just overall, just strategy of like, you know, what do we want the user experience to be, right? You can't be talking in silos. Marketing can't be in one silo and then have sales in another silo and then finance in another silo. Like all the teams have to kind of talk to each other and figure out what, map out what that user experience is going to be. And then also I think it's important that they, they draw lines in the sand and they say, you know what, marketing, you're responsible for this, we're responsible for this. Otherwise you're going to get, you know, people saying, oh, everyone's responsible for revenue. And it's like everyone's respons for revenue. No one's responsible for revenue. And I'll allow someone to say that when marketing is opening opportunities and they're marking opportunities as closed one. So like, you can say that all you want, but until I see it, I'm, I'm not gonna, I'm not gonna buy it. No, that's fair.

And I think what people shouldn't lose sight of is that that whole quote cash cycle, cash isn't the close one opportunity, but it's actually money booked invoice books.

Right.

So we aren't just talking about marketing and sales here. Like you're talking about customer success, finance, who invoice the customers and actually get that booked in against their, their accounts. That, that's all part of the process as well, right?

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I mean, getting the money, setting up the recurring payments, making sure that that's a seamless process. When, you know, banks foreclose, having a system and an infrastructure in place to be able to pivot a little bit on that and, and just making it eas. I can't tell you how many times I've wanted to like purchase from a company and it was like jumping through hoops. Like you had to send fax, you had to do this, you had to do that. So like adding all of that friction just makes customers, even if they are customers, to not want to do business with you and do business with someone else. Not because of your product and service and customer support or anything like that, but because it's just difficult to do business with you and payments and stuff. It's just not flexible. So. So yeah, I mean the revops side is super important because that's how you, it's how customers become sticky is because they, they, they continue to have a great experience above and beyond just the marketing and working with sales.

That's a really good point. Curveball, one of possibly the only one curveball I'll throw at you on the conversation.

Oh, no, do it, do it.

Let's do it, let's do it. Let's pitch, let's throw. Essentially you've just come back From Dreamforce where it was, no doubt it was just all AI, but the one product that Salesforce are uber pushing at the moment and seems to be the direction that they're taking Data Cloud. So with that in mind, where do you see a system like that coming into play where you're just talking about that customer experience? And you're totally right. We've kind of been spoiled, I think as end users that we can order something, get it the next day. If we want to watch, binge watch a series, we don't even have to wait a week for the next episode. We could just binge it all in one night if we wanted to. Right. So Even from a SaaS like a B2B perspective or even B2C, we expect that level of service, service and for everybody to know who we are and not explain who we are again and have that friction. So where do you see something like Data Cloud fitting in that in terms of like trying to unify all that data so we can provide that better experience?

Sure, yeah. I mean, I kind of put Data Cloud in the bucket of almost like, almost iPass solutions. Right. So you know Salesforce's model. I mean, once you get to the size of Salesforce, it's easier to just. It's easier to buy companies than it is to create products and services. And they bought some really good companies and I think plugs all like lots of little niches. So like you don't tableau comes to mind. Slack comes to mind. Right. You can kind of see the problems that they're solving for. But when you buy all these companies, you have to unify the data to integrate it into your core platform. So Salesforce is their core platform. So Data Cloud, I think is their solution to that. Right. So they can pick up these companies, they can move quick, they can innovate, they can, they're, you know, they're probably going to acquire some sort of GPT or some sort of AI tool. I don't know that for sure. I'm just speculating. I have no insider information. It's just, it's. It's blown up so much and Salesforce is putting so much time and effort behind it. I would be surprised if they didn't buy some sort of AI, you know, startup or something. But like when they do that, they need to, they need to put it into some sort of central repository where they can augment and change the structure of the data to fit it into what can be injected into Salesforce. So when I hear Data Cloud, I hear integrations I hear flexibility. I hear, you know, ERPs, you get things like NetSuite and you want to plug something as complicated as NetSuite into Salesforce. Well, good luck. Data Cloud, I feel like, can help solve that. So you can pull data from NetSuite into a data cloud and then you can augment it, you can change it, you can create those data layers, data structures, and then funnel that into Salesforce and then you can start to get the reporting and whatnot, you know, into tableau. So it's kind of like if you think a hub and spoke model, I think Data Cloud's becoming the hub and then all of the spokes are going to be the integrations and the Salesforce being probably the biggest one.

No, that's a really, that's a really good summary. And just to caveat, you can don't base your investment decisions in Salesforce on what me and Stephen have just talked about there. We have no insider information.

Oh, yeah, no, no, I have no insider information. It's just, you know, it's, it's inevitable that all of these companies like HubSpot, Salesforce, Marketo, which is Adobe now, like, they're going to be putting time and money behind AI. Either they're going to create it in house and do it themselves, which it seems like that's what Salesforce is doing right now, or they're going to buy a company like OpenAI or, you know, I know Google's creating their own licensing too. I think it wouldn't be completely unheard of if OpenAI were to just license out their tool and then like give it to salesforcing and give it to HubSpot for them to like, do a white label solution and have it integrated that way. Yeah.

Certainly an exciting time. I am looking forward to seeing what 24, because it's moving so fast. Like, 24 is not even like what we're in the 10th month of the year. We're talking about 2024. It's only two months away.

I know we were talking about Christmas before, before we hit the record button. That's crazy.

And a spoiler alert Christmas episode coming up. But yeah, it's, it is crazy, but it is moving. It is moving that quick. Like, I don't think we were talking about AI as seriously as we are right now back in 22. Right. In terms of the capabilities of AI and then 23, it just seems to have just taken off like crazy. So for an organization then looking to try and bring all of this together. Right. If we've Got an organization that want to bring the teams together, essentially create a rev Ops umbrella. What are some of the advice you would give in terms of how to start that process and even some of.

The pitfalls to avoid as far as starting the process? I think it involves a conversation. I think that teams need to talk to each other, they need to have a seat at the table, and they need to understand each other's processes. Because I can't tell you how many times I've stepped into an organization where someone's just said, you know what? Nothing works. The last person who set this up didn't know what they were doing. But then you look at like this last person was there for like 10 years. Like, like, you know, maybe they did know what they were doing and there was a reason why they didn't do it right or didn't do it a certain way. So I think everyone needs to approach conversations from a point of good intent. Like just assume good intent from each team. Assume that they're wanting to do best for the organization. Understand the problems that they're trying to solve. If you're in marketing ops, maybe sit on some sales calls, maybe sit on some internal meetings on the sales ops side of the house to understand how the CRM runs. And then if you're in marketing ops or sales ops, you know, if you, if you're working and partnering with finance, understand their pain points, understand, you know, what they're trying to solve for or the biggest issues that they run into on the customer side or maybe just getting money, like, what's the problem there? So just talk to each other. It seems like such a basic thing. And then my other thing would be have a central repository for documentation. So we use, My team uses Miro. It's an amazing tool. You can map out all of your data processes, you know, the customer journey, all of it. I would encourage each team to basically even yearly map out their, their process. And maybe the things that have changed from marketing, sales, finance, have those individuals and then have one master, have one master record of just be like, okay, this is marketing, this is sales. This is rev ops. This is how they fit together. This is where they overlap. This is the do's and don'ts, you know, and having that document, this living and breathing, I think is invaluable, especially when you hire new people and try to scale the business.

No, that's. I think you touched on that when you were talking about bringing everyone together and documenting each other's process. So to touch on document again, I think is super important. I think it begs the question that who would own that documentation? Because essentially, if you've got marketing, sales, customer success, finance, there's four teams there at the table.

Right.

So who owns that process in terms of keeping that documentation? Who owns the documentation?

Yeah, that's. That's probably a little tough to answer. Every business is a little bit different. But I'm going to go ahead and point the finger. RevOps, if there's a RevOps leader, it's their responsibility to make sure that sales and marketing are aligned and they're aligned with, with the, the RevOps department. So if you've got a rev ops department, I think it's. It's up to them to make sure everyone's aligned. Otherwise, I would say whoever has the biggest budget. So like, if you've got a big sales ops team and a small marketing ops team, I think it's up to the sales ops department to make sure that they're aligned. Or if the budget's on the marketing side, maybe it's up to them.

Okay, cool. And then obviously start out in a central place that everybody can access. And I think you make it a good point as well. Not everybody thinks of trying to do something now for new starters. So you would have, as you grow, you'd have new people joining the team. They obviously need to get up to speed of how you do things as well. So even from that standpoint, it's not just a way of everybody who's at the table now essentially saying, this is what we've discussed right now. This is a way of kind of safeguarding the future of, you know, people joining the team, getting them up to speed, making sure that new hires are essentially doing things the customer way or the client way, whoever the client may be. So that is super important. And I think one of the things I was going to ask you about, actually that seems to be. In every single org that I speak with, there just seems to be a natural divide, particularly between marketing and sales. Just seems to be this unwritten law that there seems to be this divide. So do you see this as a way of bringing those two together? And why do you think that would solve that divide?

I think there's going to be always a little bit of a natural, I don't know, competitiveness between sales and marketing. Right. Marketing is going to think that sending the best leads over to sales and sales is going to, you know, always think that maybe they're not as good as they should be. But I think that if you hire the right people and you have the right culture and leadership is really demonstrating what they want the company to be. There's always room for, I think, healthy rivalry, but there isn't. There isn't room for, like, big egos in the room. So I definitely think Revops can help smooth things over between marketing sales and make sure that people are communicating and, you know, they're, they're aligned. But I'm all for a little rivalry between. Between. So long as it doesn't become like, toxic or too much. Yeah, yeah, it's okay. And I'm going to say it again, when, when someone says everyone's responsible for revenue, no one is responsible for revenue. And I think that ambiguity across the organization can cause conflict and frustration. So that's where I think defined roles and responsibilities, as much as you can, then puts responsibility on marketing. So marketing knows exactly what they're responsible for and they can be held accountable to it. And when people don't get held accountable, departments see that and get frustrated. So if there's big conflicts between teams, it's probably because they don't know what they're accountable for. They're not being held accountable for it. And there's no metrics or KPIs up against those, those people. So ambiguity, I think, kind of breeds discourse.

Yeah, no, okay, that makes total sense. We talked a little bit when we were setting up this episode as well, about technical debt and things like that. Could you just touch on that and what that means in the context of Revops?

Yeah, I mean, you brought up data cloud, so let's talk about technical debt. I mean, ChatGPT, Salesforce ecosystems, HubSpot ecosystems. I think, think as we get new technology more and more and more, I mean, the, the operations teams are just going to grow. We have to find a way to ease the tech burden. I think on the ops teams, if I go back to like 2000, oh gosh, let's say 2005, I feel like everyone was in a buying frenzy, right? Everyone was like, oh, you need new technology. Drift just came out. There's chatbots. Chatbots are going to be the new thing. Forms are going to go away, Everything's going to be ungated. Email is dead, right? So people were just buying new technology. And I feel like that's starting to settle down a little bit now that technology has been bought. Data is no longer something that people are trying to get. And we're looking at our ecosystem of technology and we're like, oh, my goodness, like, we've bought so much tech, we can't even keep up with it. So I think tech consolidation is inevitable. People are going to try to make the most of what they have, especially right now where the tech economy seems like it's not exactly flourishing. So yeah, I mean, I mean it's, it's. You kind of have to do an in house audit. Having the documentation I think is key. Understanding all the systems that you have access to and license for how they're connected to each other. Audit it almost like on a quarterly basis and figure out what's needed, what's not needed. Because as fast as tech moves you should also be looking at your contracts that you have and making sure that you are staying in aligned with the vision of the company. So you, you know, if you have an ERP and you're trying to integrate into Salesforce and Salesforce comes out with something like data cloud, it might be a really interesting thing for you to adopt because it's going to remove a lot of the burden on finance to do manual like data entries or if you're, you know, Salesforce expands its, its, its feature sets and you have another tool that is kind of redundant, get rid of it. Don't have it cut the things that are no longer or have become redundant.

Okay, that's perfect. And we've got a few minutes left. So I just wanted to ask you in terms of KPIs, does this change anything team wise? Is there a joint KPI or does it not change anything in the sense that marketing is still responsible for MQLs sales are still responsible for close one business. Customer success are still responsible for renewals and retained custom like does it change anything on that front?

Yes and no. First of all, I don't think marketing should be actually be held responsible for MQLs. I think they should be held responsible for MQLs because you know marketing has sole responsibility over scoring and grading and what gets passed over to sales. So they're measured by something that they define. I don't like that. I think that they should be measured by a metric that sales agrees is also good. So I think that that's important. I think having defined KPIs for each team and department is good and then Also for closed 1 revenue of course looking at how much marketing contributed from a source or an influence perspective. But, but yes, having key KPIs per department is important. And then maybe one overarching revenue goal. Of course as the end goal. We're businesses, we have to make money. We can't our vision or our story forward without revenue so, you know, revenue of course, is a key metric that everyone needs to pay attention to.

Cool. The key message is bringing teams in alignment and understanding each other's journey. So you can join the dots, right, and make sure that that everybody's journey kind of joins into the next journey. So you've got one long, big, kind of smooth, cohesive experience for the customer.

At the end of the day. Absolutely, yeah.

Awesome. In terms, if the listeners at home actually want to learn more about Revops, have you got any more. Have you got any resources or go to's that you can suggest and that we can share in the show Notes?

Yeah, there's some amazing communities out there. There's Ohana, which is a slack community by Salesforce. There's the Mo Pros which is an operations community. Salesforce Ben, which is an amazing BL out there. And of course there's like trailheads that Salesforce has created and you know, the blogs and user feedback that Salesforce has created. So yeah, absolutely. There's a lot of communities out there. Highly recommend. There's so much out there to learn and thank God there's all the resources now because when I started there really wasn't a whole lot of resources. I'm so envious of people starting out today.

No, that's all awesome. Thank you. And Stephen, thank you so much for. I wish we had longer, but what a conversation. Thank you so much for joining us today and I think there's a lot of takeaways there for everybody listening at home. So thank you so much for joining me and taking the time out of your day. Really appreciate that. Thank you.

No problem. Thanks for having me.