Episode Summary:

Travis and Kevin talk with the VP of Revenue Growth and Enablement at Clari, Kyle Coleman, about what revenue operations is and is not, how a mutual accountability system can be successful, unpacking what it means to be empathetic, and more.

Kyle Coleman Short Bio:

Kyle is currently the VP of Revenue Growth and Enablement at Clari. Prior to working at Clari, Kyle worked as a Director of Sales Development and Senior Director of Sales Development and Optimization, at Looker, a business intelligence and analytics startup. Kyle is an experienced sales and marketing leader with a passion for people development, identifying and solving problems, creating and optimizing processes, and unifying departments across the revenue org.

Episode Highlights:

SDRs downplay their position- “I promise you I would not be doing today if not for the skill set I developed from being an SDR.”

“Any SDRs out there, don’t discount what you’re doing now.”

What we do:

Growth team: Focus on creating and accelerate pipeline

Marketing: Focus on awareness

Sales: Focus on closing the deals

There is no competition between teams, clean divisional labor

Approach growth in an integrated way

“I don’t care who created the pipeline, I just care that pipeline got created.”

“Having us all on the same team allows us to entertain the grey area and not be grabby about who gets credit for what.”

“Instead of fighting between one another about who created the pipeline, we fight together to get pipeline.”

Reflecting on work at Looker

“The only real way you can fail is if you don’t learn anything from the experience.”

Evolution:

Number of MQLs- model needs to die, avoided this at Clari

Opportunities we are creating that the sales team is accepting

Mutual accountability system, no longer assembly line approach

“The demand waterfall is not invalidated, but MQLs are not the defining success criteria

“MQLs are not as predictive of future success as they used to be.”

Clari’s missions: making sure everyone knows their role in the revenue process, inherent in DNA

Aligning views on success criteria

Revenue operations is a new category- not clearly defined

Revenue operations is not all ops coming together

“Revenue operations is thinking about revenue as an end-to-end business process that can be dissected into component parts, and each of those parts can be optimized in service of one another.”

Good at listening to customers

Customer success team- caring about prospects

Need to get better at creating a peer-to-peer community so customers can talk to one another

Once we figure this out, that is going to be our secret to success

Get your customers to do your selling for you by creating conversations not trying to sell- empathy

Views on empathy:

Without unpacking what it means or how to do it- it's meaningless

Understanding the day-to-day pains of your prospect

Being understanding, not forcing your sales

Wanting to actually help even if it’s not through your business

Keeping people happy, trying not to burn any bridges

“Trying to genuinely help people is my main mission in life.”

Getting SDRs in interviews to pitch on a passion, not their product- see their excitement

“Care about the person behind the persona.”

Manual drip

Borrows from marketing automation principles, but manually executed by salesperson

Identifies unique scenarios, their unique objection right now, what can I do to add value

“If you’re not giving your SDRs the license to think, then you’ve just hired people that may as well be robots dialing a phone.”

“The SDRs that are successful are those that build the strategic muscle early and use that in their SDR process.”

Learning and thinking in an interdisciplinary way/studying things like poetry and flow, economy of word choice

“There’s lessons to be learned about becoming a better salesperson pretty much everywhere.”

Technologies help with tactics, mindset/foundational layer is not solved with technology,