Speaker 1: 0:25

Hello and welcome to another episode of OpsCast brought to you by MarketingOpscom, powered by those mo pros. There I'm your host, Michael Hartman, joined today by both my co-hosts and conspirators, Naomi Liu, Mike Rizzo. How's everyone doing?

Speaker 2: 0:39

Hello.

Speaker 3: 0:40

I'm doing well.

Speaker 1: 0:41

Twice in one day today, I guess being conspirators in the current environment not such a good term.

Speaker 3: 0:48

I was like chuckling to myself, like maybe not the right time to say that.

Speaker 2: 0:53

Other language.

Speaker 1: 0:55

Yeah, okay. Well we'll leave it in there anyway.

Speaker 3: 0:59

We all knew what you meant I stepped into it. Fair trap.

Speaker 1: 1:04

All right. Well, let's get started. So joining today is Jeremy Steinbring. He is the founder of RevOnix, a revenue operations agency. Prior to starting RevOnix, jeremy led a Salesforce practice at another consultancy and before that he held several leadership roles in go-to-market and product at companies focused on CRM, salesforce, hubspot and other platforms, spot and other platforms. He has also held business systems leadership roles and has even worked in retail, banking and insurance, which I think it's often funny for me to find out about people's backgrounds. So, jeremy, thanks for joining us today.

Speaker 4: 1:36

Yeah, michael, glad to be here. Thanks for having me.

Speaker 1: 1:39

Yeah, from the other Vancouver, we realized.

Speaker 4: 1:41

Yes, the American Vancouver.

Speaker 2: 1:45

Not to be confused with the Canadian Vancouver.

Speaker 4: 1:47

The good.

Speaker 2: 1:48

Vancouver, as we discussed.

Speaker 1: 1:50

Yes, so we've got two Vancouver rights Would that be the term and two, two mics for.

Speaker 3: 1:55

Michael's.

Speaker 1: 1:56

A lot of kinds of synergy today.

Speaker 3: 1:58

Love it, it's balanced, it's flowing.

Speaker 1: 2:00

It's balanced.

Speaker 4: 2:01

Yeah.

Speaker 1: 2:02

Yeah, all right. Uh, so I mentioned like I'm always fascinated to see people's backgrounds and trajectories and how they ended up in marketing or revenue operations, so I gave the 30 second if that 15 second overview for you. Jeremy, I would love for you to share a little more about your journey and highlight some of the one things I'm always curious about, like pivotal people or pivotal moments or decisions along the way. Maybe you look back and go if I hadn't done this thing at this point in time, my trajectory might have been different, and so on. So if you would maybe go a little deeper than what I just did, I'd appreciate it.

Speaker 4: 2:41

Yeah, yeah, well, no, I'm happy to do that. So I've had a very interesting career. I've had a lot of different careers all rolled into one. So I've had a very interesting career. I've had a lot of different careers all rolled into one. So, as you mentioned, did some retail banking. I worked retail at Apple. That was actually my first big boy job.

Speaker 4: 2:57

Prior to that, when I was in high school, early college years, I was actually a musician, so I would do gigs, I would play, I'd play in bands and that's how I made money really, really early on. So my parents were like, listen, you should get a real job, went into the workforce in banking and worked at Apple, and one of the pivotal moments was transitioning from Apple to a tech startup, and at this time I was living in Arizona. A good friend of mine who had left Apple referred me into a role with a very well-known unicorn that had an office in Tempe, arizona. And ever since I've been in tech and so throughout my tech career I've worked in sales, marketing, customer success. I've even been a product manager, building a CRM to compete with your HubSpots and Salesforce, and everything had its pros and cons, but I didn't really fall in love with any one of those things.

Speaker 4: 3:57

There were aspects of each of those roles that I really enjoyed, but not enough to keep me in it long term and to say, hey, this is my niche, this is my career, and so it's actually the combination of all of my different experiences which has turned me into the RevOps person that I am today, and I think one of the biggest things that I could take away from my experience is that I've been able to put myself next to the leader that I'm talking to, based on where they live in the organization.

Speaker 4: 4:28

So, as we talk about and I'm sure we'll get into RevOps is about the overall go-to-market motion and how all of those teams function together. Well, you can't do that if you don't know where they're coming from, and so, naturally, after working ground level, in the trenches in some of these roles, and then working up to director and VP level, I got to see the gamut on how a go-to-market motion is built, is optimized. More importantly, the things not to do. Working in tech startup, I've seen more failures, and I think we learn more from mistakes and failures, and so, without it being my own business and my own time luckily, you know I was just a fly on the wall to some of those things. But you know that's all led me to being, you know, in RevOps and focusing and building my own agency for RevOps today.

Speaker 1: 5:18

That's great. I don't remember if we talked about what, uh, what did you play? What do you play Music?

Speaker 4: 5:24

Yeah, instruments, I play everything. So I was interesting, I played by ear. Play in music, yeah, instruments, I I play everything. So I was interesting, I played by ear. So, um, I have a side story. So I grew up in in boston, um, I started playing piano when I was like three or four. My parents had an old upright that I would just bang away on. And my parents, one day they walked in and like jesus is jeremy playing something like they had never taught me. I was just kind of hanging out and that led to guitar and drums and piano and school bands and everything. And what's interesting is, um, all throughout that time through my school, I had never learned how to read music. I'd done everything by ear. So, you give me a song, as john lennon used to say, you give me a tuba, I'll get you something out of it. You know, um, it's, it's been that way the entire time. So I actually pursued a career in music.

Speaker 4: 6:12

I went to um a summer program at berkeley school of music in boston so where, like john mayer, went and dropped off of a lot of great it's like the juilliard for music, right, um, and I'll tell you this quick story. So the first day. It was an overnight, like two month thing, to you know, do you want to go there for school? We stayed in the dorms and all that. First day they put a piece of sheet music in front of a group of like 10 of us to determine which group we're going to be in, and it was Little Wing by Stevie Ray Vaughan.

Speaker 4: 6:42

I couldn't read music so I had no idea. So everyone was playing and I started picking up on it. But the teacher, the professor, stopped and was like jeremy, do you know what you're doing here? And I said what song is this? And they said stevie ray vaughan. And I'm like. They're like can't you read music? And I said no, and she's like. They were basically like we don't know if you can go here, you need to be able to to play. Wow, you know. And and I turned around, I turned my amp up in complete movie fashion. I turned my amp up and played the thing perfectly, because I love Stevie Ray Vaughan and blues.

Speaker 4: 7:18

That's why I was there, and so I realized, though, very quickly, that my love for music and the way that I expressed you know myself, and how I played, was not the traditional way that you would go to music for, and so, very quickly, I was you know very much like, well, screw this, you know, I'm not, I'm not going to be your, your, your chart reading. You know, be an orchestra, forget this, like, I'll just go play gigs and make money and do my thing. And you know, um, after I left Apple for a little while, I went to school for audio engineering, and I found myself in LA doing some recording as well. So it's funny, you know, life is just full of a bunch of things that you try. Even failures, though, will get you to you know where we are now, and so all the bad things that happened to us inevitably lead to happy lives, and I'm, I'm, really happy to have those memories and stories, that's really cool man.

Speaker 3: 8:11

Yeah, you can come play at Moxa Palooza if you want it. Yeah, there you go, there you go. We had live music last year. It's like here's.

Speaker 4: 8:17

Wonderwall. I'll just play Wonderwall for 24 hours and you guys can yeah.

Speaker 1: 8:22

No, you need, if you need, to play some Stevie, because, being in Texas, it's hard to get away from that, and I'm a blues fan too. Maybe offline we'll have to talk about some of the bands I know of that came out of Berkeley in the Boston area. Okay, so that's great. So very interesting stuff. So time of our recording. What are we here? Late July 2024. You started your consulting company about 18 months ago. So what? What was the? You know what was the big driver that prompted you to to take that leap?

Speaker 4: 8:58

Yeah Well, a couple of things. One is business, one's personal, so I'll go over both. Um the business side, I found that there was a massive need for especially small and mid-sized go-to-market teams to get everything that they need from a single source. So, as I worked in-house and as a consultant with multiple companies throughout my career, the customer always ended up in a position where they were overpaying, nothing was aligned, no one was collaborating and they got stuck in this loop where they'd build out a process or build out a system or integrate it, and it never got to a point where everything seamlessly worked together, like people advertise. And so I said the reason is is because it's the communication, it's the project management. These folks don't understand and aren't sitting beside the executive team to really understand their business and their goals and then take that information and make sure that things are implemented for the purpose of reaching their goals. I mean I and I found, you know, working at other consulting firms personally, it was very much what do you want built? Working at other consulting firms, personally, it was very much. What do you want built? We'll build it.

Speaker 4: 10:14

We're not forward thinking. We're building an environment where you need to come back to us to get anything changed. It's this vicious cycle that you get customers into and I'm like there's got to be a better way to do this. I'm sick and tired of helping customers 10 years in fix this massive hodgepodge of integrations and data issues and everything, and so I went out on a mission to offer CRM, tech stack and RevOps strategy services all under one roof, and we realized that a lot of earlier stage companies are adopting RevOps and systems and I'm sure we'll get into this with the market and where it is and why people are deciding to invest in RevOps and technology over headcount. We'll get into that. But we're seeing that you get a lot more value working with a team that sees all of it together and that's thinking six months ahead, not just what you need right now, and that's really resonated with folks and has allowed us to grow over the last 18 months.

Speaker 1: 11:09

So I know you said there's a second part, but just a little anecdote. So literally earlier today I was talking to a guy at a consulting company that really doesn't do marketing stuff, it's more of a networking thing, but we were talking about a client that he had, that big international company, that the people with all the MBAbas I'm not discounting mbas, so don't take that the wrong way but no, I don't have one, don't worry, I'm just.

Speaker 4: 11:32

I'm just the penniless musician over here, you know.

Speaker 1: 11:35

But but, um, these people who are like strategy, like former strategy consultants, things like that that are. The company made a strategic change. He didn't describe any of the details, but he was the one had to go tell him like to operationalize what you just the decision you made where you thought you were going to save x amount of dollars. Well, about something, 60 of that, what you expected to save, is actually going to have to be spent to change all these things downstream. So there's this come. This sort of this is like middle ground between strategy and operationalizing these things that sometimes I think I'm sure it happens at smaller companies. I know with my experience with bigger companies Naomi probably speak to that too it's just like it's. It's sometimes like the challenge of saying you know, no, that's not a good idea at a bigger company, when there's some momentum behind it or someone with a big title or whatever, it's tough because it's hard to describe what those downstream impacts are.

Speaker 4: 14:08

And you need to understand the changes that you're making, both process and tech-wise. And customer success is going to affect marketing and I think, taking an even further step back, it's going to impact your customer's experience, and the only reason any of us are doing what we're doing is to provide good experiences for the customers that we serve. It's the main reason why businesses exist, amen. And so you have to think high level but then be able to go super, super deep, narrow into a specific problem, and that's just a skill set that a lot of folks unfortunately don't have, and I I attribute a lot of my ability to do that with my career experience sitting in a lot of these roles independently. You know, I have a lot of broad experience which allows me to focus and deploy a lot of the technical knowledge that me and my team has in a helpful way.

Speaker 3: 15:04

Yeah, I think I mean to echo what Hartman's saying and just to like hone in on the niche that you can serve, right, it's a lot of fun to be able to talk to businesses at a particular size and then like architect a program really around their business, Right, I think we fall into the trap in midsize and enterprise market businesses where it's going to be really hard to get anybody to like actually sit there and try to explain to you like what the goals of the executives are, the board or whatever Like they're like no, no, no, we have a problem to solve and the problem is the tickets are not getting to the customer success team fast enough. It's like okay, like I guess we'll go build that integration, Right, and so I do think it's like a size of like you kind of called it out already, Right, Jeremy Size of company allows you to step in in that way and potentially make a meaningful, you know, set of recommendations from a people, process and technology perspective that spans probably beyond.

Speaker 3: 16:14

Just like you know, when I think of go to market, I still think of that as like a outward sort of facing type of thing right, like a lot of it's really focused on like the marketing and sales side of it, um, whereas, like rev ops as an umbrella, I think really does encompass I mean, obviously we'd love your, your take on it too too, but you know it encompasses revenue recognition and finance and how do you do invoicing and all that other stuff.

Speaker 3: 16:45

And I think those are the components that definitely get lost in the mix. Like most of the time, there's very few professionals that have ever even had to look at a general ledger right In a RevOps role. To look at a general ledger right, yeah, in a rev ops role, yeah, and so I. And again that comes back into this idea of, like size of company, how can you help? Who do you really? Who really needs that that type of support? Uh, but yeah, I don't know, like your thoughts on go-to-market and rev ops, like I know they feel very similar, but to me I think they do have some pretty fairly distinct differences and at least in my interpretation.

Speaker 4: 17:21

But yeah, yeah. Well, I think of RevOps more as an idea of philosophy versus like an actual strategy. So I think the best part is when we get to work with smaller and mid-market businesses, typically go-to-market teams under a couple hundred across all three major departments. What's great is we take the time to explain the why behind the way we think about things and the way we structure our engagements and the reason we make recommendations, and we hope that some of those best practices and some of that forward thinking seeps into the way that they think about their business as it grows so that over time, when they do become the enterprise level business foundationally, they're all thinking about it in the same way you break down, you know the and this is like you know. You break down the silos and you know take down the friction you know all the, all the stuff that you hear.

Speaker 4: 18:17

It's the buzzword, right but it's I mean, if you can think about it, where you're working as a team and you're thinking about the customer and everyone was responsible for everything. It's just that you have your focus in a specific department or role. I think it's easier than approaching an enterprise, little business with thousands of employees and trying to change the way they think about go to market and change the way they think about RevOps and how they can adopt it. However, it is happening because people are realizing that and it's funny because you know, tech and SaaS companies have really started as early adopters of RevOps, but we're actually starting to see it bleed now into healthcare and FinServ and financial services and legal. And the bigger businesses, the more enterprise-level businesses, are saying well, all of these smaller companies are taking advantage of this great tech. Could we not do a restructuring of our org, save 20% of our headcount and use systems to supplement?

Speaker 2: 19:21

And everyone is having that conversation right now, big or small I'm curious, jeremy, if you, if you see that you're able to templatize some of the stuff that you use to like when you go into an organization, regardless of the size, right? So let's say you're going into a smaller or medium-sized company do you find that you're able to do? Smaller or medium sized company Do you find that you're able to do? You always have to start from scratch every single time, or are you able to go in like 50% of the way and you can kind of size up or down, depending on you know what the needs of the business are? Are you able to do? You see that there is the ability to templatize stuff or is it? Everything is different all the time.

Speaker 4: 19:59

I'm probably going to break the room in two with what I'm about to say. There are full products being released today for templatizing implementation of systems and how data is moved. That's what everyone is going to right Connect all your tools. This will set up based on the template for SaaS, and go. If there's one thing I've learned, though, every business is different, with different priorities, different requirements, different people, the way they communicate. We do not templatize anything other than our fundamentals, like how we structure our engagements, but it's designed to templatize the engagement, not the deliverable, and I think where people a lot of agencies, and again, I pretty active in the community. I've worked at other agencies previously the idea is they're thinking about well, how can I scale the way that we deliver our business and engagements and build outs? You know systems, build outs. How can we do that? We use templates, but then you're just, I mean, we're building cookie cutter homes. So it's a different type of it's a different type of service offering, and I actually think that's something that differentiates us.

Speaker 4: 21:15

When I talk to prospective customers, you know they want to know. Is it just a template you're slapping on and then charging me 15 grand Like, what are we doing? And they want to know that we understand their business. And, truthfully, if we ask the questions like what, what is their? What metrics do they care about? You know, what is their. What is pipeline velocity look like? What are your concerns? What you know? Does your board or CEO, what does your team care about? What keeps them up at night? All of the solutions that we recommend and all of the solutions that we build, they're going to be based on that and that cannot be templatized. So I very strongly try not to templatize, but we have the same level of fundamentals when we go into every new engagement.

Speaker 2: 21:58

And one of the reasons I asked, that is because I wonder if, like you know, organize a yes, or all organizations are different, but is some of the are a lot of the differences because they've had, you know, homegrown tools, duplicate tools due to acquisition, tools that you know they've just had forever, that no longer fit business needs and they've just needed to customize or do workarounds to deal with the systems and the legacy technology that they have in place, and are they then able to streamline down and do things that are more in a, you know, best practice situation, have best in class tools, you know kind of shift, the way that they're doing things to align more with where the industry is going? I don't know if that's more of a statement than a question.

Speaker 2: 22:53

I suppose right.

Speaker 4: 22:54

Yeah, I was going to say I mean I have. I have a lot of thoughts around this because it's something that comes up a lot. You know, one of the things that our customers ask about is, or one of the initial things that gets them to reach out and have conversations with us is, you know, because we work in CRM and tech stack, we don't just work on, you know, one tool. They say well, listen, you know, I'm paying a quarter of a million dollars in licenses every year. Why is it that people are using spreadsheets? Still? I don't understand, why are we investing all of this money into this system, into these tools and this network of technology that should make life easier, when people are just using a Google sheet? And so we try to look at the entire customer journey and all of the utilization of tools and actually simplify by frankly, ripping out a lot, and this is not like, hey, you know, the only way to move forward is to just replace this tool, but we a lot of the tools that people have purchased and that that are being utilized. Very little value is coming from them, and there's actually more value in reducing the number of licenses, reducing the number of integrations, reducing the number of you know data migration between, platform it just by simplifying.

Speaker 4: 24:09

You know everyone is so ready to Google a problem and then you know there are three tools that are going to be sponsored ads and before you know it, you're on a demo signing for another product and every team is doing this individually until you get to a point where you're like, okay, I'm spending way too much, it doesn't make sense, people don't understand it, and so one of our fundamentals is to try to keep things as simple as possible. We don't want you to pay for things that you don't use. And most things, most SaaS products this is a very generalized statement, so don't crucify me but most of them I would say 60% to 70% of most of those tools you could build a solution within your Salesforce or HubSpot instance, even if you don't have all the bells and whistles. So if you're underutilizing a tool like a sales engagement tool, right where that sends automated emails, you can send automated emails from your CRM. How much is that strategy actually working for you?

Speaker 4: 25:06

Is the spray and pray still working for you in 2024? I don't think so. So all of the money that you're spending on that tool to just get that out of out of the way, you're instantly saving dollars and making it less complicated for your team. So, I mean, that's one of the fundamentals that we have, and we try to find opportunities to simplify and get rid of the tech bloat. Mike, did you have something?

Speaker 3: 25:30

I was just going to say it's an interesting, you know, I think, about who's listening to this episode. Two potential audiences, well, many audiences, um. Two potential audience well many audiences, obviously, but, um, for those that are con, uh, building an agency or or being independent contractors or what have you, um, I think what's interesting about your um sort of business model is is is that, while you don't have a template to slap onto your clients, you are going to have your sort of approach, right, and and I think what's? It's sort of like.

Speaker 3: 26:09

We just did this wonderful session with Scott Vaughn last week. My team came together. He led us in a sort of a guided exercise on a spreadsheet that was all about like you know, what do you want to be? You know who are you, who are you trying to serve, identify your ICP? It's this, it's this whole massive document should take six months, right.

Speaker 3: 26:31

So we didn't get anywhere near scratching at it, but the core message was he said hey, here's this thing, don't, don't give it to anybody.

Speaker 3: 26:39

So anybody asked me for it.

Speaker 3: 26:40

I'm not giving it to you, um, but you know, ultimately that's his product, right, and it's the methodology, the process that you go through that makes it magical, right, and and makes it what it is.

Speaker 3: 26:54

So I can, I, you know, we've got this asset that he's provided to us and we can go fill in the blanks ourselves, but his process, his insights, his experience and his ability to coach us through the things that we're talking through is is what makes that a service, right A product and a service is sort of a unique thing about what's happening in RevOps go-to-market ops practices right now is that you're figuring out what is my unique sort of fingerprint on how I want to coach somebody through working on their business and not working in their business, right, which sounds like a very small business kind of thing to say, but it's really interesting because we, we just I think it's interesting we haven't had a ton of um opportunity up until more recently to really start looking at the landscape of well, how do I work on my business relative to the art of the possible and the technology landscape we have today, because we, up until recently, we were constantly sold by this tool and it'll just solve your problem, right.

Speaker 3: 28:07

And now executives and board members are like it doesn't actually work. And now all the executives and board members are finally realizing well, you know, we sell widgets, but could we sell them faster? Right, like it's not, but could we sell them faster? Right, like it's not about how do I find more customers, it's about how do I do it in a way that isn't so convoluted and that's working on the business and not in the business. And this whole shift that's happening, you know, from enterprise down, and I think that that is an interesting like nugget for people to think, to think about right At at any level of enterprise.

Speaker 3: 28:42

Right, you're at least, that's what I'm translating for you from you right, is this hey, you have an opportunity now to work on it, not in it, um, and and you know engagements that I'm even in right now like there's a entrepreneur we're engaged with and I'm saying, hey, what do you need to be able to move a deal to the next stage? Let's figure that out so that you don't have to do it anymore. Someone else can do it and you can hire somebody and you can go focus on the next thing, right?

Speaker 1: 29:14

Yeah, yeah, it's just I don't know. It's interesting. You hinted at a couple. I have a couple of thoughts, so I may be. I think I'm in agreement with you, jeremy, about the lack of templates. I do.

Speaker 1: 29:26

There's a part of me, though, that says that it really thinks most people in some of these businesses think their business is the most unique one out there and that there's no overlap with what any other businesses, even in a different industry, and I just fundamentally think there's a lot of commonalities. At the same time, I'm with you, right, I don't necessarily want cookie cutter solutions Mike kind of hinted at it. I want to be able to move fast. I think being able to move quickly is very much an underrated toolkit in your possible solutions. So if that means simplifying what you do and adapting your what you think is your unique process in quotes, right, that you think is a game changer, but really it's not that much different and you can adapt it just a little bit and you don't have to customize a software platform that you can use Like I think that's worth that. You know there's a trade-off-off there right now. You have to be kind of smart and you know which ones really are the ones that are going to help us drive things better, and that's the. That's where the special sauce comes in and trying to figure that out. But, um, yeah, I mean, I think that's that's a big thing. But just one last thing.

Speaker 1: 30:36

The other thing, my is I think a lot of people lose track of the fundamentals of what it takes to do some of these things. So we've talked about I've talked about this before. I think you go to trade shows and if you don't have people at your booth, working at your booth, who are going to be proactively, like going and grabbing people and not literally getting people to come to the booth, like why are you even doing it? Like this is like you may have this great elaborate booth, but if you don't have the people staff there who are the right kind of people, who are going to engage and try to draw people in, it's probably not going to be the kind of success you hope it was. You might get lucky, but it's not going to sustain. And I think people get lost in this sort of the fundamentals of what does it take and think that technology is going to solve for it when it really takes really hard work.

Speaker 1: 31:29

Yeah, I mean tell people, it's not like easy yeah, I mean, I get outreach all the time from from what is either automated or highly templatized kind of outreach Right, and it's very easy to spot and I think, like occasionally I'll be in a good mood and I'll respond to somebody. Hey look, I'm not interested. But let me tell you this Like if you had spent five minutes, two minutes, looking at my profile on LinkedIn, you'd have figured out a couple of things about me pretty quickly that you could have woven in there and gotten more of my attention. I probably still wait, like I'm going to be straight with you. I'm not going to buy or whatever, but like at least try to get responses do you get responses I have in the past?

Speaker 4: 32:11

yeah, yeah, yeah interesting the problem is when you, when you respond with your hey, like I'd love to learn more and like can you ask me more questions, two weeks go by and then you get another template at email for another cadence and you're like what am I supposed to do here? I'm trying to help you out, brother, Like just you know. Help me, help you here.

Speaker 1: 32:30

Yeah, I mean, I think it was about we both had had recent experiences where, like failed sales processes, including one where I had literally submitted a contact me request form it's this one, one company at least twice, I think three times and finally, like called him out on LinkedIn or something before I got someone to respond to me and I was like that's a problem, right, you know, and if your marketing automation platform is doing, you know, automated nurture emails and you're celebrating that, but you've got people are asking to be contacted and you're not getting back to them within a really quick time, like I, I don't care about the nurture You've got to figure a problem and it's not that hard to fix.

Speaker 4: 33:27

No, people want to do the easy thing. Everyone wants the diet pill. No one wants to work out and eat good for six months. It's the same thing with tools. We run into problems all the time. First thing we do is we Google because we don't know and it's not our level of expertise. Right, and I see this all the time. And before you know it, what you find out is this is too complicated, it's scary. I don't like it. Who can fix this for me? And often there is a SaaS product that's thought of. That very problem. And the problem is you actually exacerbate the issue Because most of the time, I don't care how seamless or how many times they use the word seamless in the pitch, it's never seamless. You have to have the strategy. You have to know how your business works in order to get anything out of the tech.

Speaker 1: 34:14

Yeah, there's a lot of sort of built in assumptions that goes into those statements that, yes, if you have clean data and if you do like, then yes, this will help you, um, like. But it's not to disparage those companies. I mean, they've they're trying to solve a problem for people, which is great, um, and they are aggressive when it comes to selling and stuff. So I know you had a second thing, but I'd like to keep moving on. Maybe we'll have time to come back to that.

Speaker 1: 34:48

Sure, that was one of the drivers, because this conversation is good. But one of the things you talked about and I think it was in the context of part of what you saw as an opportunity in the marketplace was what you said sort of a perfect storm of things going on in in the economy, in the marketplace whatever for rev ops, marketing ops, whatever the boom of AI and machine learning, and then a focus on kind of a shift back to focus on profitability versus growth at all costs in the capital markets. But I think that's what you're saying, but maybe you can break that down a little more in terms of what you were saying that drove you to take the step.

Speaker 4: 35:32

Yeah, well, I want to start off by saying this is not legal advice, right Like? I'm not an economist, so I am just a fly on the wall that sees shit how it is, and so a lot of conversations that I've had with business owners, private equity firms, I would say I'm pretty active in the community. I talk to a lot of people. I have a lot of friends and confidants and previous co-workers that are in the space. I see who's being hired, I see who's not being hired, and over the last couple of years I think this is what happened during COVID, when everyone went remote, the need for SaaS products skyrocketed and so you had a massive need to hire people to handle that boom, and because they didn't have the systems to manage it, the only option was to add human capital. That was it, and so you saw no one was available. Everyone went to work from home full covered benefits, 30% raises for everybody being hired because the demand was so high and the supply of talent that could actually help them was so low.

Speaker 4: 36:40

After the Silicon Valley Bank stuff happened, which again not an economist, but from outside, right Layman's terms. The money stopped coming in, people stopped buying and very quickly we shifted to profitability versus growth at all costs and I think that kind of time in COVID, when we got to that point, I think that's what created that massive surge in the opposite direction and I think now people are more focused on well, I'm not able to sign new logos at the same rate that I was the last. Two to three years, so you start seeing more emphasis on customer success operations and how can we get more out of our current customers? How can we create promoters? Two to three years, so you start seeing more emphasis on customer success operations and how can we get more out of our current customers. How can we create promoters? How can we I mean more businesses that I talked to are more interested in starting a, you know, a division for content and podcasts and all the things like what we're doing right now, because it's an easier way to educate broadly and make people aware of your product and service versus the typical methods that we used previously. And I think, as we look at how businesses are driving revenue, I think people are more interested in utilizing systems, frankly, that don't require healthcare coverage to do their jobs 24-7.

Speaker 4: 37:59

And going forward, you're going to see leaner and leaner startups making more and more money and they're going to be more highly reliant on RevOps go-to-market op, whatever you want to call it, plus these systems and using AI to replace people, and that is going to be, I mean, even bigwigs, like there have been some talks from Elon Musk and you know all the, all the people you know who are much smarter than me um, talking about how a lot of people are going to be jobless long-term long-term, because everything's going to be automated, ai is going to take over.

Speaker 4: 38:33

So we're not there yet, but we're already starting to see it in the marketplace. Customer support, customer success, bdrs, sdrs there are tools that are starting to replace those old functions, and I can tell you there are so many people that are sitting on the sidelines who are, you know, 10 year vet CSMs that are trying to find work, and that's because they're not hiring back at the same rate. And I feel like it's just this culmination which has then created this need for professionals that understand the go-to-market motion, that understand the tools and how do you implement them, and we're finding that a lot of people are looking at fractional support or agencies like us, which is why we've grown so much over the last six to 18 months since starting a few years ago, so I gave you a lot there, but this is definitely the direction of the future and you're going to see leaner teams with less people doing more and being able to drive more revenue. That's my prediction.

Speaker 1: 39:34

Naomi, we were talking earlier today. What was it that you said you had?

Speaker 3: 39:37

heard about what ai will do to people's jobs. You know I I don't want my repetition.

Speaker 2: 39:45

I think you quoted it was not even I felt you know a good one, but it was something around. I was in conversation with something, someone and we were just talking about ai and the future of work and you know they're in a completely different industry than than um we are um, but they were. They gave an anecdote around. You know they're in a completely different industry than we are, but they were. They gave an anecdote around. You know, the farmer and the plow and industrial farming equipment and how people were concerned originally that these types of tools would replace farmers and farming, that you know, those tools have replaced farmers. It's become an addition or a complement to their jobs, but the farmers who did not, you know, learn the new technology, learn the new tools and and absorb those things into their day-to-day flow. Those were the ones that were replaced. So you know, and that we had a few beverages, a few adult beverages, as we were talking.

Speaker 2: 40:41

So my, my memory is a little hazy on how the rest of the conversation went, but you know that just stuck with me and and it was something that was like, yeah, you know, I, I see AI, you know I, for me, in the, my organization, I really want to be conscious of the fact that you know it's something that we use when it makes sense, right?

Speaker 2: 41:02

Not because, okay, it's something that is available to people, and all of the platforms and all of the tools now have some component of AI that's tied to it, and you feel the pressure to have to do it, and then it just becomes to do it, and then it just becomes. It just doesn't. It just doesn't become something that seems, I don't want to say, genuine, but if you're just trying to force it and to use applications that don't make sense for your business, I think that's worse than to not. You know it. Just, we shouldn't just force ourselves to use something to without um, understanding the needs of the business where, like, what the goals are, what the kpr, kpis are for something like this, and really understanding what it's going to gain for us right, as opposed to just blindly implementing something that can be potentially more difficult to remove later on.

Speaker 2: 42:06

Yeah, well, it's interesting too, because I think people are so desperate to use it for things that you can't do yet for your business, and you know to be able to say no, we're not, or yes, we are, and just being able to check that box to say that that's something that the company is doing. But what does that really mean, right?

Speaker 1: 42:24

yeah, and I apologize if my my audio is dropping slightly, I'm having some connection issues today yeah, yeah, so, um, yeah, I think I I had a similar thing years ago when I was at a large company and I was doing, um, doing some work across a part of the business, the customer support and yeah, same kind of similar thing, but just within an organization where we were pushing four ways to included methodology, potentially technology, to enable them to support more customers as they grew without necessarily adding to headcount, so bending the cost curve, if you will.

Speaker 1: 43:14

And it was interesting because the message could have been we're going to cut costs or reduce costs, meaning headcount primarily right, that was the bulk of it, but what, what? What I started going towards it's not really going to cut head, cost, headcount, it's going to change the nature of what the remaining peoples do. And I think that's kind of what you're getting at with that, that, that conversation you had. But because I think that, um, that conversation you had, but because I think that, um that. But it does say like, if you are worried about ai, you know, causing, probably causing issue or reductions in your kinds of roles, it's probably going to be not so much they're going to be places where that happens, of course, but it probably means more often than not it's going to change how you do that, because AI is going to do some component of it and you need to. You probably need to learn to adapt.

Speaker 4: 44:08

The roles and responsibilities of those titles today will be vastly different. Five, 10, 15 years from now. They might still be called the same thing but, as you're saying, based on how the technology changes over the next decade, those roles will be completely different. I think we're kind of aligned there.

Speaker 3: 44:35

Yeah, I think they will be entirely different for organizations to um. You know, while you may have individuals who are now tasked with leveraging the technology to its fullest, um, you know kind of going back to this idea of a rev ops professional really understanding the language of your business and then how to potentially apply you know the unique nature of your business to to to leverage technology to enable it. Um, when you think about like let's just contextually talk about a BDR, for example, that that can now leverage um more intelligent AI outreach capabilities and stuff, um, I don't think you're going to hire somebody out of college to try to understand your business and then try to optimize a tool to do that. Right, which means then, okay, I don't have to spend as much hiring. You know 30 entry level. You know professionals to go learn how to sell. Um, I got to hire maybe a couple pretty expensive people to understand my business and then understand how to leverage the tool.

Speaker 3: 45:48

So it's like maybe your costs won't change that much, your overall headcount is lower, but that skill set, then it's, this whole problem persists, right, how do you find more people that have been there, done that and can sit in the role now and say, oh, I can understand your business. I know the general med pick, sales motions and all that other stuff, and I know how to coach an AI to be able to leverage all of that stuff effectively. I don't know how we're actually going to solve that skills gap part, because ultimately it's going to come down to the skills gap right, like the experience of of being able to sell, or or like that type of skill you would have to have to be able to train a tool to do it better, right and go faster, and so the world's going to go to what? Education and ai training bots that give you the experience to then go sit at a company and optimize a tool, like maybe that's the future, I don't know like I'm a big believer that the dynamic market will figure this out.

Speaker 1: 46:54

It doesn't mean it won't be painful as it's going through that like I don't know what the solution will be. Yeah, totally. But, um, all right, so we we're we're kind of tight on time. Let me, like I'm gonna switch gears like pretty seriously here, try to get to a little more of a tactical thing when it comes to rev ops, because I think, um, yeah, there's clearly like the objective of rev ops is to like enable the entire go-to-market operations functions to work together and support the full motion for an organization and the right metrics, et cetera, et cetera. One of the things that I think is an interesting one I'd love to get your take on is where, what title should the person who leaves RevOps report into? You know? And maybe what do you think? Do you have an opinion about it? And then, maybe, regardless of your opinion, what, like, what are you seeing more you know, happening in the marketplace in terms of where that rolls up?

Speaker 4: 47:56

Yeah. So what I'm seeing, so there's a, there's like the dictionary, like what it should be, and there's what's actually happening in real life. What I'm seeing in real life is that VPs of sales and sales operations people are being relabeled as RevOps managers and CROs. 100%, that's what I'm seeing and what's interesting is they're so focused on the traditional sales KPIs, the sales priorities. How are we filling the funnel? What's our deal? Velocity look like, how are we able to convert business New logos, right? That's what people are focused on and fundamentally, that goes against the whole idea of what we've been talking about, which is this idea of RevOps thinking about it from a business and there's revenue to be made from every single team, not just the sales team. So that's what I'm seeing most of the time. So I'm seeing a CRO and then maybe a director or manager of revenue operations, and then you have people in different lanes reporting up to them.

Speaker 4: 49:02

One might be an analyst to look at data. One might be a systems admin to do a lot of the technical work, enablement, which is oftentimes missed and oftentimes one of the most important things. You build all this cool functionality, you have all these great processes, but no one knows their leg from their elbow Because no one's trained you on how to use it and why it matters and how you can get the most out of what you built. So usually to start, businesses are hiring one RevOps manager or one RevOps director and they have to do all of those things individually. And I think that person needs to be good at leadership. They need to be super well-rounded, so they need to have some systems knowledge. They need to be able to dive into data. One of the things that's often missed is they need to be able to communicate really complicated things to people that don't understand what you're talking about.

Speaker 4: 49:55

The most successful RevOps people I know are people that can take a very complicated topic and explain it in a way that everyone in the room can understand. That person needs to be at the top 100%, even if they're 75%, 80% of what you need. On the other things, they're not a trainer. They're not a certified Salesforce or HubSpot admin. They know how to work in spreadsheets, but they're not a finance Excel guru. But it's someone that understands what the business needs, can properly and communicate the value in in RevOps and why you would need certain people in those roles.

Speaker 4: 50:31

And so, thinking about it from an org structure perspective. I personally see the most success with RevOps reporting to the CFO, and that is because they are usually the ones most focused on profitability and they are the ultimate economic buyer for an organization. So, if you, I mean and this is more selfishly for me as a RevOps person I would want to be talking to the person that's actually deciding whether we're going to buy a tool or remove a tool, or we need more licenses or we need more headcount. I want to be right next to the CFO as often as possible and some of our engagements, where the people that we work with being the CFO are the most productive, because we're not just focusing on sales, we're not just focusing on marketing, we're focusing on profitability, which touches every single one of those departments, naturally. So that's what I see. I typically see it's the CEO or CRO, though most cases.

Speaker 1: 51:38

Yeah, in my take on it it's most CROs the majority of CROs I know of came up through sales, so they have a sort of a bias that way too. So I think it's interesting the CFO one. I think the idea of like focusing on profitability and the trade-offs that go in here, they're inherent with that, because it's like I I've I've been fortunate enough to work with a lot of really good finance teams over the years and, uh, it's when I get someplace it's usually one of the first places I go is to try to, you know, build that relationship because, to your point, right, they can, they can make or break some of the things you want to do.

Speaker 4: 52:18

I completely agree.

Speaker 3: 52:20

I would also say I had the very fortunate opportunity to sit at a breakfast at the CFO Alliance with just a room full of CFOs and the most wild sort of thing happened and that was they all said the exact same shit that we say in marketing and revenue operations. They were talking about optimizing the systems and the data, integrity and the this and the that and the people and the process and the technology. I mean all the same words that we talk about in marketing ops and revenue ops were coming out of this room and you could tell they were all hungry for solutions, but they weren't actually asking for answers from the lens of go-to-market operations and revenue operations. They were really truly talking just about their core. At least in that particular example, they were talking about their very core unique needs of the financial organization and the unique financial technologies that they're kind of leveraging and all that stuff.

Speaker 3: 53:30

But to just to sort of like totally add on and echo and agree with you, I think the CFO is at least many of, probably many of the newer CFOs and the ones that are looking to adapt and adopt and grow.

Speaker 3: 53:47

They and frankly, probably always have been really hungry for trying to understand the business. Like every time I've ever encountered a CFO and they said like no to buying a tool uh, often it just lacked the understanding of why it was useful and they just don't have the capacity to sit there and try to understand. And you're not trying to pitch them every single time, but if you can get with them and a lot of the CFOs are headed the direction of trying to understand the pulse of the business, I think it's like really exciting to be able to talk to that group now because, to your point, they're focused on profitability and they haven't had a lot of that indoctrination into, like exactly how the business runs, um and and they're like they have kind of a really unique chance to sort of bridge over into the broader go-to-market and anyway, I just think it's a really exciting time for that sector and it doesn't surprise me that you've had success when talking to a CFO.

Speaker 1: 54:56

Agreed. Well, we are pushing our time limit here, or time that we have with you, jeremy. So thank you for all this. I know we didn't even probably get to a third of what we had hoped to get to, which is fine. I think it was really a good conversation, so thanks for that. If folks want to keep up with you, what you're doing, what you're talking about, what's the best way for them to do that?

Speaker 4: 55:20

Yeah Well, I'll end with a little anecdote. I didn't share the personal reason for starting my business, but I think it's really relevant, so I'll go quickly. So the personal reason is I think businesses need to be doing a lot more in our communities, and so one of the reasons I started Ravonix was actually for my daughter, who is a cystic fibrosis warrior, so a good amount of our revenue goes directly to the cystic fibrosis foundation. Um, I the. The most important thing for all of us is the amount of time that we have with each other, and that's a huge reason why I do what I do. Um, and so you know. If you want to learn about my story, um, you have a rev ops puzzle for me to solve. I love some puzzles. Please reach out on LinkedIn, dm me, shoot me a message, happy to chat. And if you want to learn more about Ravonix, it's our website's, ravonixio. Feel free to go there and learn more about our team. Terrific.

Speaker 1: 56:19

Thank you for sharing that. I was hoping we could get to that. So thank you, mike Naomi. As always, great to see you. It's fun to chat. Pleasure guests, or so if you you have those or you want to be a guest or have a topic in mind, please reach out to mike naomi or me. Uh, you can do that on linkedin. You can do it on the, the marketing appscom slack. Either one works until next time. Everyone bye now.