Welcome And The Real RevOps Problem

Michael Hartmann 0:24

Hello, everyone. Welcome to another episode of OpsCast, brought to you by MarketingOps.com, powered by all the MoPros out there. I am your host, Michael Hartman. Today we're going to have an interesting conversation. A lot of organizations talk about RevOps like it's something you can just stand up, hire a few people, buy some tools, define a process, maybe throw in some AI. What I've seen and what we're going to be getting into today is that it's usually not that simple. So what happens when you're starting from scratch? You have no clear blueprint, no inconsistent data, and a team that doesn't even agree on how revenue actually works. To get us going on that conversation today, I'm joined by Chelsea Gill, CMO at Resultant, who recently took on RevOps and CX in addition to marketing. So what started as a need for better data and process quickly turned into something much bigger, really a full-scale change management challenge across the organization. So we're going to get into what it actually looks like to build RevOps from the ground up, why a lot of the advice out there assumes more maturity than most teams actually have. That's a great little gem there. And how marketing leaders should be thinking differently about their role across the entire customer journey. And along the way, we're going to hit some tough questions like has marketing contributed to its own credibility problem inside the business. So, Chelsea, thank you and welcome.

Why Forecasting Broke At Resultant

Chelsea Gill 1:38

Thank you so much for having me, Michael. I'm so excited about this conversation.

Michael Hartmann 1:43

Yeah, this is going to be a lot of fun. And it's it's been a it's been an interesting ride getting to this point, right? Yeah. Um learning all like topics that we've talked about before on our podcast, like deliverability and center reputation on me. So that's right. Um, okay. Uh okay, so you've been leading marketing for several years, and then uh not too long ago, I guess I don't know how long it's been now, you took on a broader remit with RevOps and customer experience as well. So first off, like maybe a little background, like what changed in the business to make that a necessary thing to do, or a just the choice that was made to do it.

Chelsea Gill 2:25

Yeah. So to give everyone a little bit of color, Resultant is a professional services work consulting firm, right? We specialize in delivering um advanced data and technology solutions to our public and private sector customers. And around June or July of last year, we realized we were having an extremely hard time um forecasting revenue. And I think that professional services has an inherently harder time, more so than like a typical SaaS or product business in that forecasting. We have, you know, MRR coming in the door. We have projects that could be a month long or a week long, up to three years. So the pipeline math wasn't clean and it was making it harder to understand where our business was going. And on top of that, we had a market that started to slow down. So the complexity of the two, it was a it was the complexity of our pipeline and the need for cleaner data was exposed really, really quickly. So we noticed that, hey, there were a lot of deals pushing right. We had a lot in the pipeline that should have had should have never been there to begin with.

Michael Hartmann 3:38

Right.

Chelsea Gill 3:39

And we as an organization don't have a centralized sales function. So Oh, really?

Michael Hartmann 3:45

Interesting.

Chelsea Gill 3:46

Yeah, we I mean, we have sales deep within the organization, and we also run under the belief that everyone is in sales. So those who are in charge of our delivery services kind of agree with that.

Michael Hartmann 3:56

Yeah.

Chelsea Gill 3:56

Also, you know, have to grow our accounts and then we have some net new, but it's sprinkled across the organization. So it wasn't that clean. Um, so I pitched building out a RevOps team. I've managed CRMs in the past because so frequently CRMs are coupled with marketing automation. And I knew what needed to be done to give us the visibility that we need. And and we were um, it was one pitch to our CEO, and we were off and running, like maybe three or four weeks later, once we understood what this team was going to look like.

Michael Hartmann 4:30

So that's incredible. Like this the pitch, yeah. It sounds like it was a uh it just occurred to me too, like a unique thing about your business. Not only is it hard to do the forecasting, it that what people who have not been in the business don't realize, I think, is that you know it affects how and when you hire too, right?

Chelsea Gill 4:50

Oh my gracious, yes. Well, yeah in private equity backed, right? So that makes it even a bit more challenging. You know, your investors and your board wants to they want to understand what's going on. We need hiring signals, we uh resource management, right? Do we have our entire data science team utilized? Is there work coming up for them? What does that look like? Do we need to hire data scientists or whatever role that is, right? So yeah, there's so much complexity in um in why revenue forecasting was so incredibly important to us. And as you all know, you know, you have to back into revenue forecasting by understanding where your book sales are going to be coming from. And that was a challenge for us. We were um just gonna say it out loud. We were really immature in our ability to do so.

Michael Hartmann 5:34

Yeah. I mean, you were like it it some of this happens when you grow too, right? So were you guys growing and that was a factor in this? Okay.

Chelsea Gill 5:42

Yeah. Well, um, you know, champagne problems during the pandemic, we we sold a lot into the public sector. And because of that, all those COVID dollars that were running into the state were just kind of being handed to us on a silver platter in some ways, right? We were doing incredible work with state governments and doing some really um, really mission critical work, but we were growing through this kind of like hand, everything was handed to us on a silver platter, as I said. And um, and then when that slowed down and that funding was taken away, we got to see, oh my gosh, we grew so much, and now we don't have that level of visibility, right? And so that also played a key factor into where we are as a business or where we were as a business at that time.

Michael Hartmann 6:30

Got it. Okay, so it sounds like the building the case and pitching the case and then getting into approval, that was the easy part. Like, so what you had a vision for it, like what was reality kind of what did you expect? What was different? What was the same? What would you have done differently?

Chelsea Gill 6:48

Well, tactically, I thought I knew what needed to be done. There were three specific things that I knew we needed to focus on out of the gate, and I also knew that I could bite off more than I could chew, and then it would look like quickly I wasn't accomplishing anything. So I first wrote down, well, I had maybe, oh my gracious, probably five to eight iterations of a PowerPoint of what I thought this was going to look like. Finally ended up like, you know, throwing it away and said, I'm going to a whiteboard. I'm going to write out what I think the North Star looks like. Like, what does a great sales culture and process look like in our organization? And then I thought, what can I accomplish in like a three-month period to show that we know what we're doing and this team is worth having and it's all and it's going to move the needle and we're going to be able to see that it's moving the needle through, you know, cleanly data or increased pipeline, whatever the case may be. So I thought tactically I knew what we were going to do. What I think surprised me the most was this was a giant change management exercise. You can you can put process on paper and put it in front of folks all day, but unless you get buy-in, unless they understand the why, this is all behavioral changing changes, right? And to I'm sure that there were a lot of folks sitting there saying, You're just asking me to put information in a CRM. That's all you're doing here. When it was so much bigger than that. And I really needed folks to understand it. So tactically I knew what it what needed to be done, but I realized like I'm not here to just implement process. I'm here to change behavior. But really, it was more about like, I'm actually shifting sales culture. And woof, that felt even harder when I actually said those words out loud, like, oh my gracious, sales culture. That I I think that's me. There's no one in an office above me doing that work. So yes.

Michael Hartmann 8:50

Yeah. And change management, it's so funny because I it's been a topic that's actually come up a lot recently in our our different guests and things, and uh, you know, a lot of it's centered around AI, and I think that's a big missing piece. But I think is I can I continue to go back to one of our original early day guests, Brandy Sanders, who said like best ops people should learn how to play chess, like 3D chess, maybe, and learn human psychology. Because like, and that's really what you're talking about, right? Is understanding what gets people motivated to make a change. And it's it feels like it's I wonder I one time had somebody ask me like what like what would you do for a change management process? And I'm like, I don't like it's yeah, I don't love the idea of change management process. It's like there's a lot of things you've got to do. I don't know if it's a process and you've got to continually communicate. Like this is you use the North Star. I love that, right? Here's the North Star, here's the vision, here's why. And it's like a sales job internally, right?

Chelsea Gill 9:50

Well, yeah, it's a sales job in and of itself to change, to change the sales culture and to get people bought bought in. But there's no playbook, Michael, right? There's no change management playbook someone can hand you and say, follow these guidelines and you'll be fine after you do X, Y, and Z. I am finding that every little thing we are changing requires different types of communication and different kinds of hand holding, different explanations. But I always operate under the rule of like, I have got to repeat myself at least seven times. And oftentimes I feel like a broken record, often. So um, yeah, it it really all it's all about flexing in the empathy muscle, right? Yes, yourselves in their shoes. And the thing that's been nagging me the last, well, since we like really got things off and running in September of last year. But I've been in marketing for six years at resultant. I've not been out selling, right? I've not been boots on the ground selling. I sure I'll build a campaign, I'll help with a sales presentation, I'll think of messaging and positioning, maybe help with a proposal, but I'm not the one who's having to go through every step of the process. And so something I've been trying to make space for is how do I carve out time to put myself in the activities that I'm asking these folks to go do? And the logging of information and the management of it, and the creation of the proposals, and the creation of the oral presentations, and all these things that I'm trying to enhance and make better. I'm also trying to do it myself in some way. Because if I'm not willing to do it, how in the world am I gonna expect an entire company?

Michael Hartmann 11:30

Not agree more, yeah. It's so uh two thoughts that are very different. So one, you did the point about repeating yourself many, many times. I was thinking, like, oh, this feels like the same message I got about how to get your kids to eat food that I they didn't want to try, right? Sure. Right, it's like uh keep offering it, keep offering it, right? Um, but it's it's the this idea of like being willing to do it yourself too. I I mean I'm I'm a big believer in a bit of a broken record of telling people like go spend time with the sales team if you're in marketing, right? Flip's probably true too. Salespeople understand what marketing's going through. But I remember I had a small inbound BDR team, and I I got I but I didn't get to I didn't inherit something, I had to build it from scratch. So until I when we launched technology, there was no one else to like catch those leads that were coming in from our website. So it was me doing it, and it was one of the harder things in my career, but it was also really, really helpful. I like all like I look back at that time and go, like, my ability to convince sales leadership after that became so much better because I knew like I had been in like been in the trenches with them trying to figure out is this something that's worth following up on? If not, what do we do with it? How do we message it back? And I think they it built trust with them too. And then when I hired people, it was easy, like I knew what was needed.

Chelsea Gill 12:54

Sure. Yeah, you were flexing that empathy muscle that makes sense, and then you could also have a talk track for getting, you know, the the misconception of marketing only hands over crap leads, right? Right. What that looks like and how to combat it because you've sat in that spot and had to navigate like, is this an actual qualified lead? Is this part of our ideal customer profile? Does this need a bit more nurturing? And then as a marker, I'm sure you knew what to go do.

Michael Hartmann 13:23

Yeah, yeah. I mean, and and to some degree, there's probably a grain of truth in the marketing sending over crap leads. Oh, it's just the the but what by doing that, what it gave me the ability to do is go like, I hear you, help me understand why this one, right? Don't I wish I actually got into like a big challenge with a sales leader at one point who I had heard saying, like, through the grapevine saying negative things. And so I my approach was just go call him, like what a stop, right? Come to me directly. I don't care, like I am more than open to the idea that I can you can give me feedback that I don't want to hear, but help me understand why, and then let's go figure it out together. And it changed everything with with him from to do that. But if I hadn't I don't know that I could have done that as effectively had I not been working with his team and being in the middle of that whole flow, right? So it's it's a hugely valuable experience. Uh I was I think in general, like everybody should spend a little bit of time. If they can't spend time being in sales, actually experiencing what it's like, yeah, they should spend time with them. It will change your perception. I guarantee it.

Chelsea Gill 14:38

Well, on the marketing front, we're starting to dabble in getting all of our marketers access to delivery work, right? Because if you have access to the delivery work, then you understand what you're marketing at a much more intimate level. And so that's something we've been playing quite a bit with. Um, because what we do is so complex. And we do a lot of consulting, we do a lot of things for a lot of different people in a lot of different ways. And so it's not cookie cutter in the sense of selling a product or maybe even something that is SAS. And so um, getting that experience, I think, is so key as you yourself are thinking about change management. If you're thinking about being successful and flexing your empathy muscle, I mean we could go on and on.

Michael Hartmann 15:19

I love that. I'm gonna steal the flexing your empathy muscle. So just just know I'm gonna do that.

Chelsea Gill 15:25

Great.

Michael Hartmann 15:26

Um, okay, so so you talking about this big change management. I agree with that. So are there again, and I agree with you, there's not a playbook for this or a best practice. I mean, there are, but like I think about principles, but what was it like when you think about that, like what that big disconnect, is it because most of the models out there uh kind of assume some a maturity level of the organization, revox function, data that's better than it is, like like how like how would you like what was the big disconnect there? And then how would like knowing what you know now, how where would you start if you're to do it again?

Chelsea Gill 17:31

Okay, if I had to do it over again, I I actually feel confident how we handled it at first. And I want to be really clear, I did not do this alone. I had two individuals come alongside me, um, one of which who has a RevOps background and one that did not and handled our CX program internally. And so I brought her into the RevOps team to manage CX and help with RevOps initiatives. And so this is not at all. I want to be clear that this was not just me, right? And so it was the three of us putting our heads together. But I feel really confident looking back that this whole like North Star exercise that we ended up going through and then saying, okay, like what are the three big pillars that we can start with to have a pretty significant impact to the organization, whether our sales reps and those who are responsible for sales in any way, shape, or form, believe it or not. And I feel really confident. So I would do that again. I wish I would have found like a framework of other organizations who have started RevOps teams. Most of the content I found as I was researching was really advanced. There were like 10 plus people on a RevOps team, and I'm looking to be scrappy here, right? Like I have a huge army behind me to go do all this work. I need to be lean and nimble. And so I um think that we pulled together our each individual superpowers and tied those back to like what the things we needed to accomplish. We also had a milestone in mind. We had um the announcement of an acquisition. And one of the ways I sold our CEO on this RevOps team and initiative was to say, you've been working so hard on this acquisition. Wouldn't it be great if we had the time to get our sales process in order and have training done and our way we like advanced way of forecasting done before we bring on a whole new set of what we call ourselves rezzers into the into the mold, right? Like let's go into the acquisition looking really good. Like we've got the sales process figured out. And I remember sold. Like that makes sense. So we had different milestones, but I I did find what um what ended up working really well for us is we all three of us scoured LinkedIn looking for people with RevOps backgrounds. Yeah. And I probably sent messages to 10 folks saying, I know it's odd that I'm reaching out to you. I know we are not really connected. However, I see that you have a rich RevOps background. I am hungry for some information because I'm starting a RevOps team internally, never to have been done before. Would you be willing to give me 30 minutes of your time? And every single one of them said yes.

Michael Hartmann 20:19

And it's awesome.

Chelsea Gill 20:21

That was the biggest help and resource that we could have had because we were able to ask specific questions about our situation and how they might handle something or what they've done or how they think about change management. And it was across the board, right? Like early career to really experienced. And um, it was just incredibly helpful um to have those individuals as resources as we were navigating these waters. And um, we each had our set of people that we reached out to, and every single one of them responded, which was incredible.

Michael Hartmann 20:55

It's amazing. Yeah. I was I was sitting here going, oh, she's gonna say that nobody responded. And so I'm glad to hear that was I was way off. Yeah.

Chelsea Gill 21:03

Shows you that everyone's like craving community and everyone's just got everything locked in their head, right? Like we're in content overload, which is crazy to me. We're being targeted on all these different platforms, but yet we still can't we still can't find what we're looking for, and it's still that human interaction. Um that's so powerful.

Michael Hartmann 21:23

Yeah, and I think I think what you get with those kinds of conversations, because I've done that for people as well, and is you're able to go from like there's a North Star big picture stuff, right? Strategy, which is great, but then you can go down a level or two to like, okay, what does that actually look like day to day, right? What technology do you need? You know, what are the roles, like what are the functional things you need people to do? Can you do that with like multiple with one person? Like, and you can't, it's hard to get that um tied to your specific your specific example. And and and yours is unique because I think the majority of ops people I know are in either a product or software type company where services, I think, is a different beast, it has different characteristics.

Pipeline Cadence And Sales Basics

Chelsea Gill 22:11

It's a different beast, but whether you're you know, B2B, B2C, professional services, SaaS, whatever, you're still marketing and selling to people. And when you're tasked with changing a sales culture in some way, it's still people at the end of the day. So um it all goes back to that. And we can all be a resource to each other. So there, you know, uh everyone had interesting and very differing um views of how you might handle any single situation, but I just this is what I love so much about the marketing of RevOps community. Everyone's just so anxious and excited to help each other.

Michael Hartmann 22:50

And that that I don't know, does they love solving problems?

Chelsea Gill 22:54

They do love solving problems, but does finance have that? Does does uh your technology teams do they all chat amongst each other? I don't know. It's interesting.

Michael Hartmann 23:03

So it's it's so finance probably does. So we actually had a guest on who's like a like does a community for night finance and finance ops people. So there is a finance ops oh there we go. Function actor. Yeah. Um, and it's funny because like the late, like they a lot of the same kinds of challenges exist. Yeah, yeah, it's it's interesting. Yeah, I love it. Um, I'm with you, like the community aspect of it, and people do want to like they're so willing to help and share. Um and it's it's one of the best things about the community for sure. Yes, it really is. Okay, so you went through all these things, you have North Star, you got the buy-in, you've got this now, you've got a deadline, which I'm assuming was not that far off. Like what so what was like the minimum that that you said? Oh, we've got to have this done in place before that acquisition happens so that we can be ready to meet the you know the objective we had with the CEO.

Chelsea Gill 24:04

Yep. So the first challenge we had in front of us is that um our business is split into two different business units. And each business unit has different sales cadence, different sales processes, different pipelines, different even offerings, right? And so we were operating in this, everyone's a snowflake mentality. And one of the things that we tried out of the gate improving upon was that we might have two business units, but we are one resultant, right? We are one company and we are all sharing in these goals together. So we think our processes and the way that we're conducting business needs to be fairly similar. Like, of course, there's going to be some nuances here and there, but we really wanted to create consistency across the business because we also wanted to fuel cross-cell across these different business units. And how do you do that well when your processes are like so wildly different and there's no really platform to talk to each other? It just felt really siloed. So the first thing we set out to do was to create some continuity across what we call pipeline call. And we still had two separate pipeline calls, but there's folks from one on the other, and there's folk, you know, so there is some shared guidance, but we wanted to create continuity across how we were gonna be managing our pipeline and how we started thinking about um certain properties within our CRM and the importance and the why behind them that drive towards forecasting. And Michael, you're gonna laugh at this, probably roll your eyes. But the first meeting we had that I ran the pipeline call, I went through the top four properties and what they mean, and you will not believe what property was number one. Like that folks just didn't understand what it means.

Michael Hartmann 25:51

Lead Stanis.

Chelsea Gill 25:53

Closed date. What? Closed date. I had to actually say a closed date.

Michael Hartmann 26:00

You're right, I'm laughing.

Chelsea Gill 26:01

Yay. That the contract is signed. It's not the day you get a yes, it's not the day that a verbal yes, it's not it's not the day the RFP is due. It is the day the contract.

Michael Hartmann 26:17

We have a signed contract. You have a signed contract contract by both sides, by the way, right?

Chelsea Gill 26:20

Right, right. So what was fascinating to me is that I realized in this journey, like, okay, I need to take a step back and think about who my audience is here. And then I realized we're not hiring traditional salespeople, Michael. We're a consenting firm, right? Like and I said, everyone's required to sell. We're hiring experts in their field. So we have education teams. We're hiring people who have been teachers before and higher ed and who have worked in state government. We're hiring folks who are specializing in data science and AI, and they're not salespeople, but they still are required to bring something to the table. So I was working with from a sale, like these are wicked smart individuals, right? Like, oh, so incredibly talented, loved by their clients. Yep. But when asked what a closed date is, they went cross-eyed. Like just the idea of sales, the way you and I think about it, and it seemed so self-explanatory. That was not the case. And so my first big hurdle was to draw some like foundational basic knowledge around what some of these things were that we were tracking towards that were influencing our revenue forecasting so critically.

Michael Hartmann 27:37

That's amazing. Yeah. No, it's it's funny because I think a lot of us, we get so close to you, make a really good point, is you we all make assumptions based on our own point of reference or point of view or experience. And this is a good example. Like if these people have not been exposed to a sales and marketing process, why would they know that?

Chelsea Gill 27:58

And shame on us. We didn't train them at first, right? We didn't break them into the company and say, here's some, here's a week-long sales boot camp, which probably is on my backlog now, right? How to well to accommodate because I don't expect these folks who are wildly um experienced in their field to know how to do some of this coming into resultant. We're not hiring them for that reason, we're hiring them for their expertise. So that was a fairly big shift. So that was priority number one. We put together a pipeline cadence that was once a week, every Wednesday. There were a lot of like, why are we doing this? And like, oh, this feels hard. You're just going line item by line item. But I'm trying to build this muscle for folks to understand, like, hey, you've got something in proposal development that's set to close next week. And we know that there's still like six more months in that sales cycle. What's going on here? Right? Like the business laughing. So it we we started there trying to get folks, and I think folks now understand that. And now we're going even deeper. Like, well, tell me about a buying signal the client told you. Uh like what buying signal is making you want to forecast this opportunity. So we're like trying to sophisticate as time goes on, and we're getting there. It's just uh process.

Michael Hartmann 29:17

So that first step was really just about making sure everybody was on the same page with just some definitions almost. Like it feels like that was a big piece of it.

Chelsea Gill 29:26

That's why I'm saying change management, right? Yeah. You need them to change their behavior and you need them to be educated as far as like what it is that you're looking for and why it was so important. So, pipeline, we implemented um a more sophisticated forecasting methodology. So we're having everyone forecast a month out. That's been a wild ride. You would think it would be easy, but right now we're sitting at about like a 20 to 30 percent forecast accuracy, which is not great, right? No, I mean for 70, 80 forecast accuracy. So again, you you know, you've got market in play here. There's just a lot of pet bloc.

Michael Hartmann 30:06

Yeah, sure.

Chelsea Gill 30:06

There's a lot of people who are not buying, and there are um, you know, clients are starting to slow down a bit based off the market, right? Especially based off the industry. Um, but then you also have people who just don't understand buying signals and how to think about did I ask the right questions? Do I know if I'm in a competitive situation?

Michael Hartmann 30:25

Um Do I actually have the right people involved?

Chelsea Gill 30:27

Do I have yeah? So we've had to roll out bands, which is a very simplified qualification process. Do you know the budget? Do you know the need? Do you know the timing? Do you know the authority? I know I got those off order, but you get it. So um we've had to do a lot of rolling out of what I would say is like very simplistic sales methodology. Um and that feels easy. I'm sure to a lot of people listening, they're gonna be like, oh, that seems like no big deal. But again, the change management side of it was and still continues to be challenging.

Michael Hartmann 30:57

One of the things I would expect from the type of people you're talking about who are um highly competent and successful in many ways is that they probably have a bit of optimism built into their just their normal demeanor, which is a hard thing to like. I know when I was in sales for a short period of time, that was probably one of my weaknesses. I felt I was too optimistic about where I thought things really were. And I suspect that's probably part of that.

Chelsea Gill 31:24

100%. But we all are. I think we all have a little bit of that in us, and as we're not everyone, but Mark Yeah, it's challenging. It's challenging, but yes, I think that's why you're seeing the 20, 30 percent, right? We're tracking every single month. We'll look at a deal and we'll say, hey, this opportunity you forecasted for the last three months in a row.

Michael Hartmann 31:44

Yeah.

Chelsea Gill 31:44

Still hasn't closed. What's going on here? Like, what do we actually know about the opportunity? How can we move it along faster? Turns out we're just not asking the right questions. And so we're we're we're trying to accomplish a lot of that in our pipeline call along with the forecasting. And then also sales process. Like it wasn't really written down in a way that was easy for someone coming in the door to digest. And so crafting that sales process and we're chipping away at it. We're trying to make every bit of it easier and easier. We've gotten through the qualification side, right? We have a lead pipeline now where everyone knows what needs to happen related to qualification. And now we're tackling proposal development. So, how do we think about proposal? Who's involved in that process? What does a good proposal look like? All of that down to pricing and solutioning that's being looked at right now to QA. How are you making sure that um you're not putting the company at risk in the proposal that you are sharing with a client, right? So there's so much of that. And Michael, the one thing I want to admit to is that I am not an expert in a lot of this, right? But I can bring the right people in the room and we can have conversations and we RevOps can listen and understand like what's right about the process, what's wrong, and then how do we systematize this process and then roll it out to the masses and then keep hold people accountable to it. So RevOps is coming in in some ways, like pricing and solutioning, like we aren't deemed to be the solution in pricing experts. We have no reason saying that. But you're gonna listen and document and make sure that we're rolling it out appropriately and we're systematizing it. So we've been very um we're we're being honest with ourselves about where we have strengths and where we have weaknesses. And some of the sales process stuff is not our strength, and we we acknowledge it.

Michael Hartmann 33:38

Yeah, when it sounds like I mean if I'm hearing you correctly, what I'm hearing, it's interesting, it feels like there's a little bit of a flywheel you're trying to build, right? Well, get everyone on the same page on definitions, get in a consistent habit of reviewing the pipeline and clear, like telling everybody the goal is not to be at 20, 30 percent accuracy, but to get to 78%. The way we're gonna do that is we're gonna continue to hold the people accountable for what is in the system. And uh at the same time, try not to put a burden. Like, I think that's the tough part about being like in these roles. Like, how do you how do you hold them accountable for what's in the system? Because that's the system of record, because you don't want to be off building stuff. I've seen that happen where people lose confidence in the the forecast, and instead the reaction is don't go fix the problem, it goes it's like we'll build another one that's outside of the system and excel at stuff.

Chelsea Gill 34:33

And I think that being the root of the problem, yeah, uh putting and processes always fix the problem, right? You can't just process, um, yeah, you've got to really determine what the route is, and so it's it's been a wild ride.

Michael Hartmann 34:50

It has been, and so this is like less than six months or around six months-ish. Because we're let's say we're early May 2026 recording this, so yes.

Where AI Helps And Where It Hurts

Chelsea Gill 34:59

So we are um as of October of last year, we rolled out pipeline forecasting. We hit our milestone. We rolled out sales training since then. We've oh my gracious. I mean, the amount that this team has accomplished in a very short period of time, it's very much I'm so proud of them. And also to our detriment, it feels like now it's like give it to RevOps, give it to RevOps, like they'll go solve for it, right? Um, because we're very much in the get it done. Like we see a problem, let's go solve for it, which we've talked about is you know, typical of your marketing and RevOps teams.

Michael Hartmann 35:34

Yeah, the danger is seeing the problem, thinking you understand what the root cause is and try and fixing the wrong problem. Right. Especially like, and so this is why I really struggle with ones where we're going back to salespeople, because I'm a big believer that you know salespeople should be selling. I want to minimize it, doesn't mean they get off the hook for all administrative stuff. At the same, so how can we minimize that for them to get the best quality, right? There's that trade-off, like and you could easily go build in a really well-structured, say, technology. It's a this field, and when this field's updated, does this, or you can't change the status of the opportunity to or the the likelihood to win to probability to X percent until you have these other like all that stuff is possible. The question is, should you do it? Right. And I think that that's the like those are the trade-offs that are real, and it's hard to figure out what's right with in a given organization.

Chelsea Gill 36:33

Well, you can believe that about every day I'm getting asked, why can't we just have AI do this?

Michael Hartmann 36:38

Oh, of course.

Chelsea Gill 36:41

Yeah, right. The conversation that comes up in every other comp AI, AI, AI. Um, yeah, it I think that we are trying to bring AI in um thoughtful ways. What I don't want to have happen is that our whole sales process is run so much by AI that it's this just gonna be. I don't want to be an AI slop cop. That's not what my the best use of my time. And so I want there to be thought. We are a consulting firm. Everything we do is bespoke in so many ways. And so it just a level of thought needs to be put into it. And I think the same is true about our sales process, right? We're not gonna just rely on AI to tell us whether banned has been checked off, right? Um we we've got to be really thoughtful about how we bring it in.

Michael Hartmann 37:36

Yeah, I mean, I'm like I'm a I'm a fan of technology, but I also recognize like when you automate, in this case, AI, like if you're if you have something that's broken and you automate it, it just makes the broken thing happen faster, more efficiently. Doesn't make it better. Um, and I think I think that's still true in today's world with AI, and I'm sure people will jump at that and say, no, no, no, look at what we're doing. Like my my thing in sales, like I I was actually coaching someone, early early career person today who's in a rotation at a company and is in a sales role, which is a stretch, and asking, you know, what would I do? And I was like, if like with AI, and I was like, if I was in your shoes, I would be using AI to accelerate my research on my targets. Like, absolutely.

Chelsea Gill 38:26

It's great. Yep. There's that is there's always a place for it.

Michael Hartmann 38:30

Yeah. Would I let it replace everything? I might have it propose, like the messaging I would go to, right? But I would I would absolutely be checking out every time.

Chelsea Gill 38:45

Is this red Chicago style? Does this have our approachable active tone?

Michael Hartmann 38:51

Yeah.

Chelsea Gill 38:53

What I'm I you still have to put the layer of bot into it.

Michael Hartmann 38:57

Yeah. And I'm actually going, like, hey, like, what's going on with this company? What's the latest news? Is there a public company? Right? If they had like how was their last quarterly report, what are the challenges they're talking about? Who are the people I should be talking to based on what we know? Do I have the right people? Like, I would absolutely do that.

Chelsea Gill 39:16

Yeah.

Michael Hartmann 39:16

Like but I yeah, I would I also see. No, I would because I would be like I know I could be a hypocrite in many ways. I'm sure my children would tell me that too, but um I would, I would, I would at least feel guilty if I didn't do it.

Empathy With Accountability In Pipeline Reviews

Chelsea Gill 39:35

So yeah, right. I feel guilty using it today. I I almost wrote a LinkedIn post the other day saying I was in the office and I needed to get something done quickly, and I pulled up Claude, and there was a bit, there was like a five-second window where I thought, ooh, I'm gonna go cower in the corner because I feel like I'm cheating right now. I'm I'm cheating because I'm using this to help me write a headline in a PowerPoint, and felt a little bit of shame for a minute.

Michael Hartmann 40:03

But it was I was yeah, I mean, it was like I think if I think of it as a tool, like I would still I would use a calculator over an abacus, and I would use you know, a spreadsheet over you know that like I just it's a tool. Like it, yeah, I think it's appropriate to use it if it's you're doing it to replace everything you're doing, I think you're at risk of replacing yourself. So anyway, uh that's my rant on AI today.

Chelsea Gill 40:34

Yeah, so we can move on from that.

Michael Hartmann 40:37

Um okay, so you talked so you you brought brought the the uh empathy thing up a couple of times. So how do you balance that with this accountability piece, right? Because I think you need both, right? Like I especially going through this massive change, like the mandate is still there to to to have a more predictable pipeline. So how do you how are you balancing that?

Chelsea Gill 41:05

This is a really good question and something that I'm still working on every week, every Wednesday before our pipeline calls. I'm looking at the data. I'm trying to understand where there's gaps. Um, I'm also trying to understand, like, if I'm a piece of the puzzle to change sales culture, I can't be the one that's like coming down on them all the time, right? I can't be constantly negative or looking at the data and being like, it's not good, guys. It's not good, right? Um, so how do you manage both? I think what I've tried to develop is a rich relationship with a lot of the managers and delivering them the news. And so I'm not here, like the call creates accountability, but I'm not here to put everyone on blast. And I am still trying to bring a level of energy and excitement to the call that lets people know we're here to get things done. We're here to make things work make there, we're here to make sure things are in order. This is also a chance for us to collaborate and also celebrate some of the wins that we're seeing. And so that's where I'm trying to the lane I'm trying to stay into, stay in.

Michael Hartmann 42:17

Okay.

Chelsea Gill 42:18

I'm also trying to serve up some information on a silver platter to certain managers that then can do their job, which is manage the people and be the ones to hold them accountable, right? I think showing up as an executive leadership team member is accountability enough in some regards, but I also have I'm thinking church and state in some way.

Michael Hartmann 42:40

Yeah, yeah.

Chelsea Gill 42:41

Be the one that is showing wins. I want people to be able to come and talk to me. I don't want them to feel like they're scared of me, or I don't want them to feel like they can't trust me. And so I am very much trying to. So finally to try it successful, successfully, but I am trying to manage um accountability in what that line is, right? I'm not their manager, but I am a very vested member of the executive leadership team who knows that we have a job to do and knows what the board wants to see. And I need to be able to deliver that because there was a time period wherever after every pipeline call, a board member was calling me. How'd it go? Like so what are the wins? What big things are moving through the pipeline? And so if that data wasn't accurate, it was making me look silly. So I am trying really hard to forge relationships with a lot of the managers and serve them up information on a silver platter that allows for them to do the coaching accountability case. And I'll still say on a call, like, hey, this isn't accurate. Let's talk through why. Not go do your freaking job, right? Like there are some days where I actually want to say that, but I very much have decided to try to bring the energy and be the positive piece of the sales culture puzzle and let managers do their thing.

Michael Hartmann 44:10

So I was just curious. I'm gonna go down a tangent here, but um, two lines of business. What is it like what is a normal sales cycle like? Like, is it months, weeks, years?

Chelsea Gill 44:21

Totally depends on the business unit. So we have a managed service aspect of our business where um we do have some net new clients coming through the door. It's a smaller pipeline because we heavily rely on expansion opportunities. That sales cycle is two to three months max, maybe even sometimes.

Michael Hartmann 44:38

Oh, interesting. I would have expected that would be the longer one, but okay.

Chelsea Gill 44:41

Nope. On the other side of the house where we do a lot of work with state government, you have RFP cycles, and RFP cycles in state government can be really, really lengthy. Um, yeah, some an average of like six months, but there's a lot of like larger, more like whale opportunities that can sometimes take a year, year and a half. Like we submitted an RFP a year and a half ago, and we just heard, like we like wrote it off a long time ago, and they were like, Hey, we actually selected you as our top three. Come to orals, and we were like, where have you been? So it's it can be a very lengthy process.

Michael Hartmann 45:17

Interesting. So the reason I asked that is I was working um in a role where marketing, there was a lot of pressure on marketing to deliver leads and leads that would be sales accepted and qualified, yada yada, right? The typical three traditional funnel focus with expected conversion rates. But when I started digging into the sales data, I kept finding opportunities. This was a long sales cycle business, right? Months kind of would be a pretty normal thing. And there were outliers, right? We were faster and longer. It was pretty typical. And so what I what was finding is that there was this like huge volume of stuff out there that had been open in Salesforce for a long period of time, like months and months, like over 12 months in a lot of cases, with pretty large dollar values attached to them, but no apparent activity. Oh. So so what I would what I did, like I asked the CMO about it, and I just said, let's bring it up to this leadership team meeting. And I did, and it felt like it got like not ignored, but like almost it almost undermined relationship. Like it's a regret that I have actually about how I think if I had could do it over again, I'd go have one like you did, like more one-on-one discussions. Like, hey, like if there's actual activity, like just make sure that it's updated. I get that these are long sales cycles, and and uh, but I what I came to realize at the moment through that process though is that the focus on the the forecasting they had was on the next quarter. Like the current quarter and next quarter, so at most six months, five months, but usually less than that. And so it made sense that there was not a lot of focus on stuff that had been out there where the expected close date was still months, months away. Um, and it was a pretty big organization, so it was like it was a challenge and a lot of embedded stuff. So I I feel your pain there, like balancing that, like, hey, I want to be like I'm trying to be transparent. Like, here's what it is, like you're and I was just talking about stuff that marketing had sourced. So um and it's unfortunate because it it could have been a good opportunity for everyone to go, like, oh, well, we need to be thinking about what's in the longer-term pipeline too.

Marketing Earns Trust Through Stories

Chelsea Gill 47:36

Well, when we first started the pipeline calls, we went through a really heavy cleanup phase where we slice and dice the pipeline in every single way, right? We had people, we met one-on-one with like every single deal owner and said, let's look at everything in your pipeline. And we want to understand like what needs to go into the lead pipeline, what's still qualified. There's not been activity here for three months. What's going on? And usually there is activity, it's just not logged, is what I'm finding. Um, and the pipeline call itself, like we know every week what the cadence is going to be. And once a month, we're looking at deals that just have not moved or there's no activity on them. And so we are trying to not just look at what's going to close 45 days in advance, but we're also flipping the script a little bit and looking at what's in the pipeline but stagnant. And how do we how do we get it out? Does anyone have any ideas? Does anyone have a relationship? Have we talked to Google? Have we talked to Databricks? Have we talked to how you brought Greg, our CEO, into the mix yet? Right. So we're asking questions, trying to get this things through the sludge. And sometimes it's just disqualified, right? It's this idea of constantly qualifying just because you have a qualified deal on your pipeline doesn't mean it's going to be qualified 45 days from now, right? So what it what does that look like?

Michael Hartmann 48:53

Yeah, I think that's that's good. That is a good one. Like just going through that. I like that idea of like sort of flipping the script. Like focus on short term most of the time, but or relatively short term, but then at least once every month, it sounds like you're doing a like a deeper look at things that are expected to be further out. All right. So maybe, okay. So a big part of this for you was, and it sounds like still is, is trying to, for lack of a better term, right? Build the sales and marketing alignment and cooperation, which is uh you know brought up probably by everybody as a challenge in most places. What um like my my take on this is that there's a lot of marketers who struggle with telling stories internally, which is odd to me, because they should be the best storytellers in the company, but they aren't how like what do you think why do you hear do you agree with that? If so, why do you think that's the case? And like, has any of this helped you kind of rethink how your relationship, how marketing's relationship with sales should be ideally?

Chelsea Gill 49:55

A thousand percent. I as I was reflecting and thinking about what RevOps has done for me as a marketer, one of the key things it's offered me is a platform. How many meetings do most companies have a week where the marketer, the CMO, or someone on the marketing team is leading it? And I now have three pipeline calls a week that I lead. And it gives me a platform of all the right people in the right room, and we always offer time for added topics. A success story, um, collaboration is needed. We're launching a new offering. Hey, check out this AI readiness assessment we just launched. We're always leaving room for that. And so there will be times in these calls where I say, y'all, I'm gonna put on my marketing hat real quick. We're gonna talk about a story where we had a client look at our a potential client look at our website. We saw that they came in through this page, Google my local business, and we were able to point to all the touch points. And then they kind of went dark for a while. Turns out they called someone, a client of ours, a client story of ours to get a referral, came back, filled out a form. Six months later, their client. Or, hey, we've got this incredible conference coming up. And this is how we this is a phrase that one of our EVPs uses quite a bit. We hunted in PACs and we were able to meet with like over 20 states at this one conference because of the way we prepared ahead of time and worked collaboratively with marketing to do all these multi-touch points around the specific event. Let's talk about that. That is gold star standard. When you say that you want to go to an event or sponsor an event or you think that this is gonna be the holy grail of your activity and you just show up, walk the halls and nothing else, and then go drink at the bar. Yeah, not ideal, right? What marketing is expecting of you is that we're doing X, Y, and Z and you're coming back with meetings scheduled. Meeting scheduled and leads that you're putting in the pipeline, right? So I now have this platform where I get to talk about how marketing and sales are intertwined and how it's all about like the collaboration and working together. I didn't have that before RevOps. I mean, I could like I could have made the opportunities, right? But I didn't because it was one more thing, or um, I was getting the right resources I needed because I was able to tell those stories to our CEO, and that's what mattered to me. But getting the buy-in from the company and then wanting to work alongside marketing is just so much sweeter.

Michael Hartmann 52:46

Yeah. I love that first one you did the storytelling because I've done that same kind of thing when I was in that role where I had the BDR team. Uh I was reporting attribution type things to sales leadership meetings and like just body language, like nobody was paying attention, nobody believed it. When I flipped it and we started talking about, we tracked started tracking leads that were handed off and what happened with them, and talking about like how we worked together to close something. Like the body language changed, and eventually they were the ones telling the stories about how they work together with marketing. And to me, that was my big aha moment when I realized like that's like the numbers are great, and everybody says they need them. And I'm not against the numbers, but I'm like, the stories are what people remember.

Chelsea Gill 53:30

Well, just like a client story is so much more powerful when the client is the one telling it versus you. Yeah, it's the same thing here. When I can come alongside a SME and have that SME speak up in a pipeline call to talk about what success they saw from this specific event or campaign, or they're the ones that are being like, Hey, I got four last week. Our early childhood expert said, I am so underwater. I have four new leads in the pipeline because my marketing manager launched this campaign and we had four people raise their hand right away saying, like, I want to meet, I want to talk. And to them, like, these are big states, right? We're not talking about like a small SMB. We're talking about, you know, lieutenant governors who are raising their hands saying, like, tell me more, right? These are she problems. But when it's her the one saying, like, look what I did because of marketing, it's so much, so much more powerful. And then you get, you know, everyone else excited. I want that.

How To Connect And Closing Thoughts

Michael Hartmann 54:31

Well, and I think that's part of what gets earned you the right to do the other part, which is hey, when we do this event, we this is what we expect from you. Yeah, right. If you're gonna be there, it's not just to goondoggle, right? Um, and if you're not the like, if you think there's there's somebody else that should be there who's gonna be more like they're not gonna stand back in the booth or whatever, like because like I when I whenever I worked a booth, like I'm out there like grabbing people out of the aisles and like and yeah, you have to have that, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I love it. Yeah, yeah. I mean, but that was the like that to me, that was like I don't like it, just like I assumed everybody just knew like the job was to draw people in, see if there was something there, set up a follow-up, right? Yep.

Chelsea Gill 55:18

It wasn't just scanning badges and giving out trinkets and having so anyway to answer your question, if you have a platform, I have found that it's so much easier to share your story.

Michael Hartmann 55:32

Yeah.

Chelsea Gill 55:32

Um and it it's it really goes back to having other people come alongside you to um share the good news of all the things that went right to get to that specific outcome. Yeah. Even better when the deal closes.

Michael Hartmann 55:49

100%. 100%. Well, I think and to me, kind of going full circle, right? Like would you say exercising the empathy muscle and and and sitting there like being in in the in the mud together with the team, right? I think makes a big difference in how those messages come across.

Chelsea Gill 56:12

Yes. And on that latter statement, I I'm still trying to figure out how to handle how to manage it all. How do you get into the how do you get into the weeds, get your hands dirty with the team and still manage your full-time job, you know, on top of everything else? It's still a work in progress, but I'm slowly chipping away at it.

Michael Hartmann 56:32

Well that's good. Well, I would love to continue, but I think we need to call it there. Uh, we've covered a ton of ground. This has been so much fun, Chelsea. If folks do want to follow up or continue the conversation with you or learn more, what's the best way for them to do that?

Chelsea Gill 56:45

Oh, you can reach out to me on LinkedIn, Chelsea Gill at resultant.

Michael Hartmann 56:50

Yeah, here, watch out. Here they're gonna come.

Chelsea Gill 56:52

I know, right? I hope.

Michael Hartmann 56:55

All good, yeah.

Chelsea Gill 56:56

I need to pay it forward, right? So many people responded to me that the least I can do is respond to others. So I welcome that.

Michael Hartmann 57:03

Fair enough. Well, that's great. Well, again, thank you so much. It was it was been a fun conversation. I'm glad we were able to do this. And as always, thanks to our uh audience out there for your continuing to support us uh with with your feedback and viewership now and and following. If you have ideas for topics or guests where you want to be a guest, like help Chelsea, feel free to reach out to Naomi, Mike, or me. You'd be happy to get the ball rolling. Till next time. Bye, everybody.