RevOps FM

Your GTM message has an incredibly difficult task: to speak to the people who will love your product and take them from a place of disinterest and zero context to a place of understanding and excitement.

When done well, it’s pure magic.

I think that every GTM and ops professional should be familiar with how to do this, and so I asked my old boss, Mitch Solway, to join me for a masterclass in messaging.

Many thanks to the sponsor of this episode - Knak.

If you don't know them (you should), Knak is an amazing email and landing page builder that integrates directly with your marketing automation platform.

You set the brand guidelines and then give your users a building experience that’s slick, modern and beautiful. When they’re done, everything goes to your MAP at the push of a button.

What's more, it supports global teams, approval workflows, and it’s got your integrations. Click the link below to get a special offer just for my listeners.

Try Knak

Mitch Solway is a 5x VP of Marketing who has led teams at Lavalife, Freshbooks, Vidyard, and Clearfit, among others. Today he works as a Fractional CMO for startups.

https://www.linkedin.com/in/mitchsolway/

• [00:00] - Introduction
• [01:28] - How Mitch defines the hierarchy of messaging. He starts at the end, considering the outcome he’s trying to achieve. Then you can reverse engineer what you need to get to that point, starting with positioning, then copy, then messaging.
• [02:55] - The end result for Mitch is two stories: one broad, one narrow. The narrow story is targeted at your “Can’t Miss Customer.” This is your ideal customer. You need to understand everything about this person. Mitch calls this “Is this you?” marketing. You tell the prospect a story, and if you know them really well, your Can’t-Miss Customer will identify themselves in your message. Focusing on the person and their world vs. on your product.
• [04:55] - We don’t tell our customer’s story enough. We need to realize we are only 5% of the customer’s world - important to understand the other 95%. Interview your best customers, then translate those stories back to other prospects.
• [07:33] - The broad story. This is when you’re introducing something new to the market. You need to educate people to create a vision of an “inevitable future.” Getting the market to see the world the way you see it. Example of doing this with Vidyard using influencers to educate the market with a very low budget.
• [13:26] - Creating the “narrow story” for Vidyard. The litmus test for the narrow story is, can you get the person from no context to being excited in three questions. Mitch calls this the “context rollercoaster.” Examples of how this works in practices. If you can do this, you’ve found the “nerve center” that you need to touch on.
• [18:17] - Your product isn’t that important to the customer, most likely. Even if they use it, it’s just a fraction of their world. You need to show them that you understand their pain to spark interest. Example of why this is important in outbound. Example of how Mitch tweaked the messaging at Clearfit to better align with customer truths and how that message was conveyed in radio ads.
• [21:52] - Example of competing with ZipRecruiter on the radio. They had raised funds and were outspending 20:1. Mitch tweaked the messaging to turn the competitor’s strength into a weakness.
• [23:57] - Process for creating a messaging framework from scratch. Start with internal interviews with key stakeholders. 90% of that process is about internal alignment. For positioning, he uses April Dunford’s framework and conducts a workshop with key stakeholders. Prior to that workshop he interviews existing customers that the company wants to get more of. Example of doing this with Ourboro,
• [29:56] - Example of how customer insights also infuse the tone, language, visuals, and emotion of communication.
• [31:36] - Collecting customer insights is a deep process of understanding psychology and emotions. You need a special type of brain to conduct that research - not everyone can do it. It’s a superpower. But those who are expert in it can help the rest of the company receive those insights. Example of how we brought in a customer each month at Clearfit and the impact this had on the company.
• [33:59] - Discussion of interest vs. impact as work motivation. How to cultivate an impact orientation.

• Think Mitch Think - Fractional CMO for Startups - Mitch’s fractional CMO consultancy.
• Obviously Awesome, by April Dunford - Guide to positioning that Mitch uses with customers.

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Refine Labs has changed the course of B2B marketing over the past few years.

Challenging conventions on attribution and funnel tracking and championing new ways of generating demand, this agency has broken pretty much every mold and driven the conversation and debate.

Today we're joined by SVP of Marketing Sidney Waterfall, who produces much of the Refine Labs IP and brings together both deep demand gen and RevOps expertise. In this in-depth discussion we unpack the nitty-gritty of the Refine Labs methodology.

Many thanks to the sponsor of this episode - Knak.

If you don't know them (you should), Knak is an amazing email and landing page builder that integrates directly with your marketing automation platform.

You set the brand guidelines and then give your users a building experience that’s slick, modern and beautiful. When they’re done, everything goes to your MAP at the push of a button.

What's more, it supports global teams, approval workflows, and it’s got your integrations. Click the link below to get a special offer just for my listeners.

Try Knak

Sidney Waterfall is SVP of Marketing at Refine Labs, with responsibility for GTM strategy, demand generation, product marketing, product strategy, and ultimately driving revenue for Refine Labs services and products.

https://www.linkedin.com/in/sidneywaterfall/

• [00:00] - Introduction
• [01:02] - Sidney's background and how she joined Refine Labs.
• [02:25] - Issues in B2B marketing today. Many people still running a lead gen approach. Lack of focus on data structure and operations, although macroeconomic conditions forcing people to become more data driven.
• [05:19] - Defining terms - lead gen, demand gen, demand capture, demand conversion.
• [07:47] - More companies implementing this approach in recent years. But some still struggle with making the transition. How Refine Labs helps companies make that strategic shift. First step is accepting that buyer behavior has changed. Requires deep alignment at the leadership level. Changing measurement and KPIs, from lead generation to higher intent pipeline. This provokes terror in some. Overcoming objections. Indicators to look at.
• [15:22] - What it means to run a demand creation campaign and how to do it. You don't need a huge evangelist in your company. Only 20-25% of Refine Labs clients have that. It starts with the content that's on your high-value product and solutions pages. This gives the campaign strategy or angle. You take that and package it for both paid and organic. This content communicates problem awareness. You can also work with content teams, take assets like blog posts and repackage them for social. Distribute it in a buyer-centric way - un-gated, designed for the platform, unique. You need some offer in the middle, like a podcast or live event series, that people can engage with.
• [20:35] - Whether this approach can work for everyone. It requires a basic repeatable sales process and the ability to talk to prospects. If you don't know how to convert a buyer when they are in a sales cycle, you won't know how to create demand.
• [22:13] - The role of ops in a demand creation GTM strategy. Ops is pivotal. There's a strategic side and a tactical side. If ops is a strategic function in your org, you will have a powerhouse org. They need to offer not just data but insights - that's the step up there. Justin notes that ops leaders need to be revenue leaders in their own right, not just in service of others.
• [28:13] - How to configure systems for attribution. First step is standardized UTM values. Important to track session-based UTMs - so first touch but also tracking UTMs for each session that results in a conversion. A conversion is anytime your sales team is working something. Tracking meetings and sub-stages, opportunities and sub-stages. Definition of HIRO pipeline - opportunity stage that converts at 25% or higher. Source (offer) is what they engaged with - the destination. Campaign is a detail of that. This is more predictive of outcomes than the channel that referred them.
• [36:34] - The new Refine Labs funnel model. Traditional demand waterfall is ingrained in everything - an assembly-line approach. This new approach un-blends the funnel into pipeline sources. It's built built around what the customer is doing vs. internal departments. Ability to track how people come in and out of the market at different times. With opportunities, they look at the originating contact as the source. Separating the funnel questions from account journey questions. They are distinct, require different data sets.
• [47:07] - Definition of "conversion". Different companies have different thresholds for when leads go to sales. This model enables comparison between different conversion sources to evaluate their effectiveness.
• [50:48] - Looking at the account journey. It's about pattern recognition, seeing what things are more common for personas and stages, and using that to optimize in-channel strategy. This is more loose vs. funnel tracking, which should be black and white. Focused heavily on topics, not just formats. There is no perfect, beautiful account journey.
• [55:15] - Discussion of The Vault and WatchTower.

• Refine Labs - Official site
• The Vault - IP database of Refine Labs methodology, including frameworks, experiment reports, playbooks, and community. They have a paid membership, but I highly recommend signing up even for a free account, as there are a lot of valuable resources available to all.
• WatchTower - Conversion tracking and hybrid attribution solution built on the Salesforce platform.
• Chris Walker on YouTube - Hundreds of hours of educational content and podcasts.

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In a world where we have so much tech, it's amazing that revenue planning and forecasting remain relatively primitive in most companies.

You could have literally a million dollar tech stack and yet still be creating your business plan with a spreadsheet and forecasting results with a best guess from sales.

Today we look at how to go beyond the spreadsheet paradigm with the CEO of Growblocks, a revenue planning and analytics platform. We'll explore whether it's possible to have a truly predictable forecast and how operators can spot and fix issues before they become million dollar problems.

Many thanks to the sponsor of this episode - Knak.

If you don't know them (you should), Knak is an amazing email and landing page builder that integrates directly with your marketing automation platform.

You set the brand guidelines and then give your users a building experience that’s slick, modern and beautiful. When they’re done, everything goes to your MAP at the push of a button.

What's more, it supports global teams, approval workflows, and it’s got your integrations. Click the link below to get a special offer just for my listeners.

Try Knak

Toni is the CEO of Growblocks. He spent years as a B2B SaaS CRO and revenue operator, achieving multiple exits. Through this experience, he created a revenue operating operating model that helped his company hit targets 12 quarters in a row. This model was later on used as the basis for Growblocks.

https://www.linkedin.com/in/tonihohlbein/

• [00:00] - Introduction
• [01:33] - Toni's background. Founding Growblocks. Sharing a focus on data-driven, system-thinking approach to revenue with his co-founders.
• [04:27] - Most forecasting tools focus on only on the opportunity forecast, ignoring the rest of the funnel. Why there aren't more companies building software for full-funnel planning. Forecasts are split into silos. Once you forecast the full funnel, you can identify how a gap in one stage translates to revenue impact further down.
• [07:40] - How Toni explains this vision to the market and what benefits people are connecting with. When people finally see their actual revenue engine end-to-end for the first time, it's a huge impact.
• [10:09] - Flaws with the planning process today. How the planning process should take place: top-down and bottom up meeting in the middle.
• [14:09] - The impact of the tech bubble on the planning process and how it has distorted expectations and behaviour. You can only be efficient once you are predictable.
• [18:00] - The factors that lead to predictability. The first comes from understanding your sales engine as a whole through the entire funnel. Not relying on sales people that can pull rabbits from hats. The second factor is proactively spotting issues and jumping on them quickly.
• [21:39] - Issues with marketing and sales alignment. Why marketing will hit their number but sales misses theirs. Toni doesn't have an issue with MQLs, so long as the company splits handraisers from non-handraisers. Then marketing can't just hit their number with low-intent MQLs.
• [25:24] - Outbound is still alive and kicking. Think of it as the delivery mechanism for a message. Importance of choosing channels that work for your audience. Someone may not be on LinkedIn but they are listening to the radio all day.
• [28:32] - Starting to dive into the Growblocks platform. Growblocks works with any kind of funnel design and is also configurable across different dimensions. Solving for garbage-in-garbage-out problems. If data points are missing, it's best to go up a level and exclude that step, then circle back to it when better data is available.
• [32:58] - Identifying factors that may influence funnel performance but that are not themselves funnel stages. Toni calls them "monitoring notes" - akin to gauges on a machine that show you certain indicators about its performance.
• [36:00] - Growblocks can connect to different data sources and mash them together. It applies sophisticated math and statistics to forecast results. They are incorporating machine learning, but Toni is trying to keep it as transparent as possible so customers can have trust in the results.
• [39:30] - Main value props of Growblocks. The first is more predictability, less choppy results. The second is showing things that were invisible to enable to teams to make changes and improve.
• [42:21] - Toni's vision for the future of the product.

• Growblocks Official Site - The Growblocks website.
• The Revenue Formula - Toni's podcast.
• The Revenue Letter - Toni's Substack.

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What lies ahead for marketing operations? How can it become more strategic and impactful?

Darrell Alfonso has spent the past ten years answering these questions through his work at companies like AWS and Indeed. He's also dedicated himself to moving the discipline of marketing ops forward as an author, teacher, speaker, and thought-leader.

In this episode, he shares his vision of how marketing operations can encompass both strategy and technical expertise and describes how MOPS practitioners can level-up in their careers.

Many thanks to the sponsor of this episode - Knak.

If you don't know them (you should), Knak is an amazing email and landing page builder that integrates directly with your marketing automation platform.

You set the brand guidelines and then give your users a building experience that’s slick, modern and beautiful. When they’re done, everything goes to your MAP at the push of a button.

What's more, it supports global teams, approval workflows, and it’s got your integrations. Click the link below to get a special offer just for my listeners.

Try Knak

Darrell Alfonso is a 2x Marketo Champion, course instructor, Author of "The Martech Handbook", and frequent speaker and thought-leader.

He's held marketing and operations leadership positions at Indeed, Amazon Web Services, Hitwise, and the American Marketing Association.

https://www.linkedin.com/in/darrellalfonso/

• [00:00] - Introduction
• [00:58] - Darrell's definition of marketing operations: the art and science of executing great marketing. Key pillars: planning and strategy, technology management, process design, analytics, business alignment.
• [02:48] - Evolution of marketing ops from being tech-centric to business-centric.
• [04:59] - Challenges of that evolutionary process. Potential discomfort within ops of moving into a role where they have revenue accountability. MOPS people have an allegiance to craft, but should focus on what the business needs.
• [07:43] - Risk of feeling powerless or misunderstood. Need for operators to better communicate our value.
• [09:25] - Darrell's background in communications and how it's impacted his career. The importance of communication within operations and how it's helped him grow as a leader. Internal communication is not about being self-promotional. It's about playing together effectively as a team (analogy of a sports team).
• [14:43] - How Darrell's role combines both strategy and operations. Strategy is the set of choices we make in service of an objective. Tactics at one level of the business become the strategy for the next level. Discussion of how this applies within Darrell's current company.
• [26:08] - Description of Darrell's team and how it functions. How marketing technology sits within a separate Business Systems function.
• [29:46] - What Darrell's ideal org structure would look like. Pros and cons of separating tech into a Business Systems group. Need for technologists to have technical leadership. Similar issue applies with SDRs and whether they report into marketing or sales.
• [36:25] - Building a personal brand in marketing operations. Benefits and how to do it. Difference between personal branding and cultivating an audience.

• The Marketing Operations Handbook: A Complete Guide to Marketing Operations - Darrell referenced this book, by revenue operator Michael McKinnon, several times during the episode.

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Benjamin Marchal is perhaps the most effective revenue operator I've ever met.

We work together, and so I've been fortunate to collaborate with Ben often. I've learned a ton from studying him in action.

However I wanted to go deeper into exactly how he's so effective while shouldering massive responsibility as COO of a $50 million ARR company.

We go deep into his vision of operations and unpack the mindset, routines, and methodologies that help him be successful.

Many thanks to the sponsor of this episode - Knak.

If you don't know them (you should), Knak is an amazing email and landing page builder that integrates directly with your marketing automation platform.

You set the brand guidelines and then give your users a building experience that’s slick, modern and beautiful. When they’re done, everything goes to your MAP at the push of a button.

What's more, it supports global teams, approval workflows, and it’s got your integrations. Click the link below to get a special offer just for my listeners.

Try Knak

Benjamin Marchal is COO of 360Learning, a learning platform that enables companies to upskill from within by turning their experts into champions for employee, customer, and partner growth.

Ben worked at McKinsey for two years before joining 360Learning, where he started as an Operations Manager and progressed to become COO in 4 years.

https://www.linkedin.com/in/benjamin-marchal-89a01180/

• [00:00] - Introduction
• [01:15] - Ben's vision of operations. Ops exists to help each team perform better today and to be ready for the future. Four key activities. 1) Source of truth for KPIs. 2) Identifying improvement areas. 3) Helping teams implement those improvements. 4) Maintaining and running the business.
• [02:38] - How Ops teams can balance taking requests from teams they support with proactively pursuing strategic improvements. If Ops teams don't monitor KPIs, then they are stuck in implementation mode and don't partake in strategic discussions. Conversely if they focus solely on strategy, they become disconnected from the field and fail. Both are important.
• [05:34] - How Ops teams can make time for reviewing KPIs. Ben looks at them first thing every morning. Creates a sense of ownership. The need to create a KPI tree (first, second, third-level metrics). Creates a clear picture of where to focus efforts. This enables strategic discussion with executives and ability to push back on requests. Importance of being fact-based, rational, agnostic.
• [11:24] - Ben's experience at McKinsey and how it's impacted him. Types of projects at McKinsey. The onboarding experience.
• [16:48] - Ben's journey at 360Learning, going from Operations Manager to COO. Development of incentives models. Working in Customer Success Ops, fixing churn. Demonstrated that applying the McKinsey model to in-house operations worked well. Began to coach the Operations team. Building the data team. Creating the business plan - demonstrated that he understood the business end-to-end, more exposure to investors and the Board. Move to COO. He isn't a functional expert in every scope, but his job is to make sure the company works on the right things.
• [22:19] - Ben's mindset and whether it's evolved as he's gained more responsibility. He believes the mindset has been the same. Four critical things: 1) Being low ego, agnostic. Focused on data and what it shows. 2) Being both big picture and granular at the same time. 3) Ability to cut through noise and prioritize. 4) Ability to communicate at different levels. These are all things he learned at McKinsey.
• [26:10] - Looking at a practical example of how Ben prioritizes, given the huge scope of problems that he is responsible for. He thinks about the business in three main areas - demand creation, conversion, and retention. (Product is present in all three.) He identifies what is working well and what is not, then considers what will drive most value for the company using an impact/feasibility matrix.
• [28:55] - Challenges of applying this in practice. Justin notes that Ben is also highly responsive to communication, which isn't typical of all execs. Ben explains how he uses a notebook to prioritize the main topics he needs to care about. For "must-do" items, he blocks time in his calendar.
• [31:16] - Ben's point of view on go-to-market strategy. First, need product market fit. second, identify who you are selling to - ICP. Could be industry, or size, or use-case. Identify the personas within those companies. Third, how to get the product in front of those people - inbound, outbound, etc.
• [36:31] - Importance of qualitative feedback. Ben listens to a lot of calls. KPIs tell you what is happening, calls and voice of the customer tells you why it's happening. Both are important ways of discovering reality.
• [38:53] - Challenges of being an international company. Differences in business culture between France and North America.
• [43:36] - How the tech world will evolve going forward now that capital is less available.

• The Pyramid Principle: Logic in Writing and Thinking - Book by Barbara Minto of McKinsey on her communication framework called "The Pyramid Principle." Ben introduced this into the onboarding for everyone at 360Learning.

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Sanford (“Sandy”) Whiteman is a legend in the Marketo world.

A software developer by trade, he’s one of a small handful of engineers who have focused specifically on marketing platforms and problems - not merely as a one-time project or side interest but as a dedicated speciality.

Sandy is the #1 all-time contributor in the Marketo product community with over 23,500 posts and an honorary community moderator designation.

He's also been a great friend and teacher to me over the years and a collaborator on many projects.

Many thanks to the sponsor of this episode - Knak.

If you don't know them (you should), Knak is an amazing email and landing page builder that integrates directly with your marketing automation platform.

You set the brand guidelines and then give your users a building experience that’s slick, modern and beautiful. When they’re done, everything goes to your MAP at the push of a button.

What's more, it supports global teams, approval workflows, and it’s got your integrations. Click the link below to get a special offer just for my listeners.

Try Knak

Sanford Whiteman is Chief Technologist at FigureOne, a Marketo development agency.

• [00:00] - Introduction
• [01:05] - Sandy’s background and how he entered the Marketo world. His start as an IT security person. Developing an app for the textbook publishing industry. First Marketo project: to fix Munchkin. Reverse engineering the Munchkin script. Developing fluency in the Marketo UI.
• [04:58] - Why Sandy took the Munchkin script seriously. Enjoyment of niche knowledge and desire to discover what is currently unknown. Previous experience reverse engineering Microsoft SMTP server. People even at Marketo/Adobe not fully understanding the product internals. They are not front-end people.
• [08:17] - Justin’s perspective on when Sandy entered the Marketo community. People guessing or speculating at how things worked technically but without a technical background. The contrast when a real developer focused on the same topics. Sandy’s desire to not guess and to spread accurate knowledge about systems. How early developers scoffed at cloud-based systems and refused to support them. How developer skepticism towards MarTech systems may be rooted in a resentment from the IT team. IT questioning why the company would pay for a system they believe (erroneously) could be built in-house.
• [11:49] - Why “mainstream” developers who are otherwise talented produce bad work in the MarTech world (e.g., poor integrations) and show a lack of curiosity about it. Disparagement of marketing within the developer community. Lack of understanding of core components of marketing automation: SMTP, landing pages, databases. Belief that these are unsophisticated technology. Internal IT resources haven’t had to manage email servers for 15 years or more. That knowledge has died out, leading to lack of understanding. Perceived primacy of back-end developers over front-end developers. Disparagement of JavaScript.
• [20:49] - The rationale for investing hours of time investigating obscure issues. How mastery of obscure knowledge becomes useful when those situations do arise.
• [24:32] - The challenge of being a technical consultant to marketers: you’re downstream of strategy. Discussion of how it feels to work on marketing projects where the strategy is flawed or creative seems ineffective. The political challenges of giving feedback as a consultant. Sandy’s frustrating situation with a client claiming the Marketo Lead ID is PII. How there’s also a prestige that can come with being a consultant.
• [32:19] - Sanford’s perspective on the product outlook of Marketo and whether the glory days of the platform are behind it. Lack of innovation in recent times. If Sandy was in charge, he would shut down imitation / look-alike products (Adobe Connect, Live Chat) as these won’t successfully replace more full-featured applications.
• [33:42] - Sandy and Justin build a fantasy roadmap for Marketo. The importance of getting ahead of the market and deeply understanding the needs of the customer. Questioning whether anyone at Adobe is filling that role now with respect to Marketo. Lack of focus on effective marketing. Smaller companies with dynamic founders seem more likely to come up with these ideas.
• [35:55] - Feature idea: ability to customize the UI in Marketo (like a Visualforce page in Salesforce). The challenge of rebuilding an existing app interface using legacy technology. Why Sky failed.
• [41:59] - Feature idea: ability to analyze records in the database in relation to each other. (E.g., create quartiles.) Discussion of new Activity Stream feature (outbound streaming API).
• [45:52] - Feature idea: better data manipulation within flow steps (like what is possible to do in FlowBoost).
• [46:33] - Feature idea: more control over order of operations within the system. Guaranteed ways to avoid race conditions. Question of whether this is solvable within marketing automation architecture. The ability to have visibility of database changes yet to be committed. How Marketo provides a toolkit that requires developer-esque conceptual understanding.
• [51:13] - Discussion of AI and its potential impact on marketing technology. One potential application is using it to generate documentation. AI beneficial as a convenience tool (like the computer on a Star Trek ship). Justin expresses skepticism about its generative abilities for marketing content. Challenges for AI with generating or explaining humour.

• TEKNKL :: Blog - Sanford’s blog. A critical resource for the Marketo developer.
• FlowBoost for Marketo - Sanford’s app providing additional data processing capabilities for Marketo.
• Data Streams - Marketo Developers - Documentation for the “Data Streams” functionality discussed during the show.

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Today we're joined by Jen Igartua, a RevOps leader and 10+ year operations consultant.

We discuss her vision of the go-to-market engine as a product, how to ensure the work of RevOps is aligned with C-level priorities, and the importance of focus for enabling deep work.

Jen shares some awesome knowledge here for how RevOps teams can achieve greater impact and how operators can level-up their careers.

Many thanks to the sponsor of this episode - Knak.

If you don't know them (you should), Knak is an amazing email and landing page builder that integrates directly with your marketing automation platform.

You set the brand guidelines and then give your users a building experience that’s slick, modern and beautiful. When they’re done, everything goes to your MAP at the push of a button.

What's more, it supports global teams, approval workflows, and it’s got your integrations. Click the link below to get a special offer just for my listeners.

Try Knak

Jen Igartua is CEO of Go Nimbly, a revenue operations consultancy for scaling businesses.

From Jen's LinkedIn: "I’m...working with high-growth companies to create a frictionless, human buying experience with RevOps."

https://www.linkedin.com/in/jen-igartua/

• [00:00] - Introduction
• [01:02] - Jen’s consulting background. How she helped start Go Nimbly.
• [02:37] - Definition of RevOps. Metaphor of a business as a film studio, where the goal is to make a movie, GTM teams are actors, and RevOps is the director.
• [03:56] - How operators can step into this director role. If you’re mid-to-junior level and in a company that doesn’t get RevOps, you likely won’t make a huge impact and need to find another environment. Or it may be more a matter of you needing to improve your skills. These include the ability to say no, having an intake process, and keeping priorities aligned to the C-level.
• [07:31] - Whether operators have a self-limiting mindset, focused on their craft vs. business impact. Growth mindset is important. A lot of this is new and people are still figuring it out.
• [08:34] - RevOps as a product and whether the “customer” is the GTM teams or the literal external customer. Jen’s point of view is that we need to understand what RevOps truly brings to the business and to the things the CEO cares about. Sometimes that may be solving for customer needs, but in other times it could be something different (e.g., data readiness in preparation for an IPO). Ultimately we achieve our customer-facing goals via the GTM teams, so we need to care about their experience and happiness.
• [14:52] - How Go Nimbly interacts with the different GTM teams. Whether RevOps is just sales ops rebranded. How silos form and evolve in companies. People are good at aligning vertically but poor at aligning horizontally.
• [18:13] - People align themselves based on how power and authority flows in an organization. If the CMO and CRO aren’t aligned, their teams won’t be either. Justin’s experience on the importance of having a unifying force, like a COO, to bring them into alignment. Jen thinks this is ideal, although not something every company has. Ultimately a company is like a complex system. All systems have weaknesses, and so we need to mitigate those weaknesses somehow.
• [20:22] - Gap-first thinking: how to identify initiatives with the biggest impact. Start with the business gap vs. with ideas in a backlog. When you have your goal, then identify what levers you can pull to reach it. Typically these levers include “3VC” - volume, velocity, value, and conversion. You can identify where your weaknesses are via reporting or through durability testing (aka stress testing). Go ahead and become the customer.
• [24:32] - Why gap-first thinking is hard. Lack of time for operators to step back and audit their work.
• [26:13] - The importance of focus at work. Distractions are pervasive. How we can create space for deep work. Completing tasks quickly gives a dopamine hit but doesn’t always yield the impact of deep work.
• [28:43] - Machine work vs. innovation work. Both are necessary. It’s a great exercise to audit the effort needed to run business as usual. Then you can explain to the business what your capacity is. The innovation work is how we transform the business.
• [31:11] - Pros and cons of outsourcing RevOps. Companies can dial up skillsets when they need them or manage case work that internal resources may not want to do forever. The importance of having an internal champion at a company that can help connect the dots with their own leadership. The challenge for consultants of context switching. Why Go Nimbly tries to keep consultants on only a few accounts at a time.
• [36:32] - Jen’s journey growing Go Nimbly. There are people who have figured out professional services firms - important to learn from them.
• [38:28] - What innovations is Jen seeing in the marketplace? Product-led sales is a major focus. Data is also important. Companies no longer putting every piece of data into Salesforce.

• The Boutique: How To Start, Scale, And Sell A Professional Services Firm - Amazon - Recommended resource for running a professional services firm.
• Leverage Points: Places to Intervene in a System - Another resource on systems thinking.
• Thinking in Systems - Amazon - One of Jen’s recommended resources for systems thinking.
• How RevOps Teams Find Gaps - Go Nimbly article describing durability testing and 3VC.
• What is Gap-First Thinking for RevOps Teams? - Article on Go Nimbly’s website describing their philosophy of gap-first thinking.

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Note: I've also shared a full video version of this episode, where you can see me screen share everything I'm describing. You can find it here:

Documentation Episode - Full Video

I’m incredibly (absurdly? ridiculously?) enthusiastic about documentation.

Part of that is just my personality, but it’s also because I’ve seen what a game-changer good documentation can be.

This first hit home when I started consulting. It was incredibly stressful (in the very early days) to work on poorly documented projects. They were filled with assumptions, misunderstandings, client disappointment, and re-work.

We quickly improved our documentation game, and it was transformative. We now had a clear source of truth for what each project should be, approved by the client before we started building. It also created space to think things through in more detail.

However, each doc existed in isolation. We never had the mandate or scope to create a complete knowledge base for any one client.

When I started my next in-house job and we began a company-wide Confluence implementation, I finally had the chance to go beyond disconnected documentation and build a true RevOps knowledge base.

This video shares everything I’ve learned, including a screen-share walk-through of my team’s knowledge base and tips for overcoming the time deficit that every team faces when trying to create docs.

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Many thanks to the sponsor of this episode - Knak.

If you don't know them (you should), Knak is an amazing email and landing page builder that integrates directly with your marketing automation platform.

You set the brand guidelines and then give your users a building experience that’s slick, modern and beautiful. When they’re done, everything goes to your MAP at the push of a button.

What's more, it supports global teams, approval workflows, and it’s got your integrations. Click the link below to get a special offer just for my listeners.

Try Knak

Data is the raw material we work with in marketing. You can come up amazing campaign ideas. You can even build them out. But if your data is junk, everything falls apart. Today's guest spent a decade building Digital Pi, a top marketing automation agency, and is now making a pivot to customer data ops.

We chat about the data problems facing revenue teams, the issues with traditional data warehouse approaches, and why Syncari is his data platform of choice.

Many thanks to the sponsor of this episode - Knak.

If you don't know them (you should), Knak is an amazing email and landing page builder that integrates directly with your marketing automation platform.

You set the brand guidelines and then give your users a building experience that’s slick, modern and beautiful. When they’re done, everything goes to your MAP at the push of a button.

What's more, it supports global teams, approval workflows, and it’s got your integrations. Click the link below to get a special offer just for my listeners.

Try Knak

Ryan Vong is a marketing technology leader with over 20 years experience. He was the founder and CEO of Digital Pi, a global marketing automation agency acquired by Merkle Inc. in 2020. In 2023, he founded Helix CXM, an agency providing data operations for revenue teams.

https://www.linkedin.com/in/ryanvong/

• [00:00] - Introduction
• [00:45] - Evolution of marketing operations over the last decade.
• [03:08] - Marketing ops vs. sales ops. Need for marketing operations to become more strategic. Campaign execution becoming commoditized. Limits on the size of MOPS teams.
• [05:59] -Marketing operations as a force for accountability, evaluating effectiveness. Approaches and challenges in interpreting the customer journey. Not all the data is there.
• [08:24] - Ryan's pivot to customer data ops and founding CXM. The pains he saw that led him in this direction. How marketing automation was limited by dirty data. Helix is data operations for the revenue team. AI requires clean data to function properly.
• [13:02] - Data operations involves both technical and process / strategy components. How Ryan aims to address those. Three phases of data - as a utility, as an enabler, as a driver. Data as a utility is the first priority.
• [14:49] - Perspective on traditional data warehouse/lake. Centralized system is needed, but with current approach it's too slow. Everything is outdated by the time it's ready.
• [18:25] - Deep dive into Syncari, why Ryan selected it, what makes it unique. Single source of truth vs. distributed truth. Ability for users to work where they are already comfortable. Having a data store incorporated into the tool. Similarity to how the Marketo/Salesforce sync works. Ability to revert to previous state.
• [24:02] - Ownership of the customer data engine within the organization. Natural home is within revenue ops teams. Collaboration with IT department.
• [25:36] - Structure of a data ops engagement. Ability to preview data before turning the system on. Importance of speed/agility. Build vs. run components of the engagement. Data monitoring - similar to home security monitoring.
• [29:29] - Lessons learned and plans for taking the agency founder's journey a second time.

• Helix CXM - Ryan’s agency website.
• Salesforce Shouldn’t Be Your Single Source of Truth - Top Reasons Why - Syncari article about a single source of truth vs. distributed truth.

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Operations can be difficult in organizations of any size, but in large companies, there are special challenges.

What does it take to succeed as an ops leader in the world's biggest enterprises?

Today's guest is a former marketing ops leader from Marketo, Adobe, Slack, and Salesforce. He delivers a master class on navigating enterprise complexity.

Many thanks to the sponsor of this episode - Knak.

If you don't know them (you should), Knak is an amazing email and landing page builder that integrates directly with your marketing automation platform.

You set the brand guidelines and then give your users a building experience that’s slick, modern and beautiful. When they’re done, everything goes to your MAP at the push of a button.

What's more, it supports global teams, approval workflows, and it’s got your integrations. Click the link below to get a special offer just for my listeners.

Try Knak

Paul Wilson has been a sales and marketing leader, consultant, and marketing operations executive at some of the largest companies in the world, including Marketo, Adobe, Slack, Salesforce, and OneTrust. Today he is the CEO of GTM Systems.

From Paul's LinkedIn: "GTM Systems is dedicated to reinventing the intersection of marketing, sales, and customer success operations into a unified go-to-market operations framework."

https://www.linkedin.com/in/pwtoday/

• [00:00] - Introduction
• [01:24] - Which type of work/company size has been most rewarding for Paul. Enjoyment from working with people to solve challenges.
• [03:54] - What to do when joining a new enterprise. Establishing the mandate of the role and what resources you have.
• [05:54] - The role of marketing ops in the enterprise. Important distinctions between MOPs and Sales Ops. Lack of sandbox environments in the MarTech stack creating greater risk. Everything is in production. Marketers are reliant on their tools to deliver experiences and are more impacted by issues.
• [09:00] - Why we can't we have sandboxes in MarTech. Possible perception of finance that this is less critical. Proximity of CRM to IT. Growing distinction between operations and technology in many companies. Business Systems / IT teams absorbing sales tech.
• [16:09] - Relationship between marketing operations and marketing strategy. The right way to relate to stakeholders. Need for campaign engineering and MOPS to have a voice in marketing planning discussions. Analogy to a structural engineer in discussions of building construction.
• [23:50] - The biggest changes someone should expect moving from a smaller org to an enterprise company. Big companies don't move quickly. Importance of establishing relationships with navigators who can teach you. The experience taught Paul how to communicate effort, developing tiered messaging for different levels of the organization.
• [36:28] - Inevitability of dysfunction in an enterprise. Will all enterprises approach being a real-life Dilbert strip? Some dysfunction comes with the territory.
• [40:21] - The coolest/most complex projects are in enterprise. Paul's experience doing large projects and the thrill they bring.
• [43:04] - Is Paul a lucky charm for M&A?
• [43:41] - The implications of AI be for marketing. Justin sees some benefit as a convenience / efficiency tool but is skeptical of generative capabilities. Paul believes AI will be revolutionary, but we are still in the "dot-matrix" phase. Discussion of ethical concerns.
• [48:56] - Paul's new firm, GTM Systems.

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