#19 - Darren Fay: Change Management and RevOps for Organizational Growth

Speaker A: Yeah, I think, you know, change management is really close to my heart right now and I think the reason it's resonated with me so much is as an operations person and operation, uh, operations people as a whole, we're highly technical, so we're people who understand the nuances and the intricacies that go on with the business. And we may design something that is simple in our understanding, but when we have to roll that out to the greater organization, it may not be as simple as we anticipated.

Speaker B: Welcome to a slice of SaaS. I'm your host Andreas Kongstadt. And in today's episode I'm speaking with Darren Fay who is the Senior Director of Revenue operations at Henry Schein one. And Darren leads a team of 28 people and they focus on maximizing revenue by improving efficiency, effectiveness and agility across their revenue cycle. And today we'll dive into the intent based revenue operations framework. We'll talk about effective change management strategies and how to align operational tasks with business objectives. So let's get started. So Darren, you have as I said, coin something you call the intent based RevOps framework. So maybe to kind of set the stage a bit, could you walk us through like what it is and what are the key components of, of um, that framework?

Speaker A: Yeah. So intent based revenue operations, to put it simply, is focusing on the work that the revenue operations organization is doing with the intent on driving the core metrics and KPIs that are most important to the business. And in doing so, making sure you're using your time effectively and focusing it in on the areas that are most important. And there are four main components of it, which is your foundational work, which is focusing on your people and fostering a uh team culture of accountability with investment in uh, the individuals on your team and their ability to grow as individuals and be stretched as well as uh, giving firm and clear guidance across what the um operations team is doing at any given time and making sure that it's well within line, uh, in regards to your OKRs or key metrics as a business. And then making sure you're focusing on the right behaviors to drive the right results and the expected results. So um, in doing so a key variable with um, intent based revenue operations is you may get caught up in going through your OKR practices and you have, you've gone through and developed some of the tasks and projects that you want to be focusing on and in doing so you might get married to the idea of completing the task. And intent Based revenue operations pulls you out of that mental State to say, hey, we don't care about the task. The task is a means to an end, to get to the objective. Right? And so it's keeping your focus, uh, highlighted on what you want to get out of, uh, you know, the project or task that you're looking to do. And um, the, the last piece is alignment. So making sure you have clear transparency and communication across the business to make sure people understand what is important to you, what you're focusing on and how that relates with the business objectives. And, and really importantly and often, um, forgot, is how that translates to value to the individuals you're communicating to. Because sometimes you may be doing something on a greater business scale and you may have colleagues or, uh, co workers who are seeing some work getting done and they may not understand why it drives value in the business. So keeping your intention focused on the outcome and focused on what you want to get out of the results and making sure that's very well clearly communicated to, uh, the rest of the organization.

Speaker B: And how did you come about, Was it some kind of a trigger with the framework? How did they come about coining it? Was it to kind of sell the company concept internally or like, what was the background there?

Speaker A: Yeah, I think, you know, for me, when I initially came up with it, it was more or less a, uh, you know, going through the motions of solving some of the problems at a previous company. And we were going through the motions and we were doing a lot of this, but we were doing well at it. And it was difficult to really translate what we were doing well into something that could be shared and, um, you know, educated across my colleagues and friends, uh, in the industry to be able to support them, to be able to do something similar without going through and saying, hey, listen, you need to do these things. Uh, you know, it's really difficult to pinpoint some of those things and to, you know, walk back into what are the true behaviors and foundational work that needs to, uh, be done in order to relate back to like a healthy revenue operations organization.

Speaker B: No, I think it's great. And I do like. And I would like to kind of dive into right now. I think alignment and um, change management, it's such a big thing. There's a lot of teams who grew a lot, and then they're downsizing and there's a lot of new tools. There's so much happening at the moment. And I think it's quite hard for companies to keep up with everything and keep people productive. Um, is that something you've seen as well, like that this is kind of a big challenge right now for organizations you kind of speak to. Because I know you have your Revops roundtable and you have a lot of different things going on.

Speaker A: Yeah, I think, you know, change management is really close to my heart right now. And I think the reason it's resonated with me so much is as an operations person and, uh, operations people as a whole, we're highly technical. So we're people who understand the nuances and the intricacies that go on with a business. And we may design something that is simple in our understanding, but when we have to roll that out to the greater organization, it may not be as simple as we anticipated. And so, uh, one of the things that I'm doing now, which I really love, is I have a dedicated change management person that I've, um, put together. I'm calling it change enablement, um, more succinctly. And the reason for that is there's so much that goes on that we put together in a process document, policy document, for compliance and for legal purposes. You put all that stuff together, but it doesn't necessarily, it's not aimed at the user or the reader, uh, in the sense of the people who are going to be going through it day in and day out. So I intentionally keep that person, um, from those original technical conversations so that when that information is handed over to that person, they're looking at it from an outsider perspective when they develop the content to be shared more broadly. So, um, we're intentionally putting somebody in the right frame of mind to be able to uncover how these things should be communicated so that the experience for the users are a much more positive experience and it allows them to go through the motions themselves and say, well, what are the questions that I have? Because it's likely going to be a question that somebody else has. And uh, you know, communicating those things out, I think are very important as, uh, part of my change management strategy that I like to put together, um, with revenue operations is having a very clear communication plan, so defining when we're going to communicate, how we're going to communicate, what frequency communication will go out and um, where our documentation will be stored for alignment purposes. So alignment is really big. And it's not just about talking to each other and breaking down silos. A lot of it comes down with having standardization around where you put your information, how it's consumed. Um, if you go work with a VC and they have a deck that they want you to prepare, they intentionally keep that deck very similar because they want to make sure that when they go through the process, they are going through the process to see nothing has changed. They're going through it the exact same way. So it's like a muscle that they've just flexed. They understand what they're looking at, where it's at. We do something similar with the way we store our information and we provide our information from a uh, communication standpoint to where the average user gets used to seeing and understanding how it's going to be communicated to them. So they flex that muscle and understand how to make um, the communication and the documentation effective to themselves. Now with the way we communicate, I do believe in having different types of communication stuff. It's directly uh, aligned to cross organizational communication versus stuff that is going to be uh, just directly to um, a subset of users and versus things that are not done timely. So um, prioritizing and classifying the different types of communication is very important. And then uh, you know, understanding, you know, clear raci and understanding who's going to be responsible for what so that when you do communicate those things, they understand who to go to for additional clarification, additional uh, insights.

Speaker B: And when you talk about change management, like is it just kind of the. If we just imagine like you know, you have your CS team, you have your sales team, like is it focused on the kind of individual contributors only or is it also change management from kind of the kind of management and things like that, or how would you kind of approach those different layers? Or is it purely focused on the end users when you kind of work for this?

Speaker A: Yeah, it's definitely focused on everybody. And I think um, the key thing is from the change enablement piece, it's usually focused on the direct contributors because there's one going through the change. Um, we have the policies and things like that that um, we go through for compliance, uh, purposes. But when you're looking at doing change management from a higher level organizational standpoint, the things that you're focusing on with change management are very different. So you're focusing on things like is it the right change, is it the right amount of change, is it the right time for that change? Um, and how is that going to uh, received from the greater business? And I think those things are done in a different area of change management for um, the lack of a better term, just making sure we're focusing on what matters with the right groups. But um, when you focus on the individual reps, a lot of that in my opinion is around uh, change enablement. So it's around Preparing them for that change. And on the higher end leadership side, it's mostly focused around how you go about it. So what is the change? Why are you doing it? Is it going to meet the desired impact? And then I like to keep those things kind of locked in the background to say when we reevaluate a little bit, are we actually delivering on the commitment we set out to by inciting this change? If we're not, we need to reevaluate and we need to make sure we're keeping focused on is it the right um, decision. It may require you in some cases to, to change some things, but you know, there's a change curve and you don't want to backtrack to the beginning of the change curve by pulling things completely out. But what you would like to do is make sure you're identifying the areas where you're having the friction or the, or the inciting additional risk and addressing each one of those problems to make sure that you're doubling down, so to speak, on some of the change to make it successful.

Speaker B: And how would you kind of cause like change management, not like getting people to read documentation as you mentioned there, like the kind of the vicky, like and getting a sales rep to go in and carefully skim through the vicky before they're starting. Like that's difficult. And I know for a fact that I was not very good at doing that. Um, so like, is it like, like how would you approach that? Do you like different strategies? You know, is it the carrot? Is it a stick? Is it a combination? Like what ways have you found working best? Or a combination of ways to actually get change? Because I know for a fact myself, even processes I develop myself, sometimes I just forgot it in the moment I was in a rush or something happened and then you kind of slip out of it a little bit. So it is difficult.

Speaker A: I agree. And I think the way I look at it is there's different types of communication and there's different types of processes that you're going to develop that need to be consumed in different manners. So for example, if it's ah, a sales rep who wants to understand how they do something, they may not care about it at that point in time because it's not something that's on their mind. So my philosophy is you need to have a, this is where I, uh, in that alignment piece I talked about having a very clear defined place to find things and a very clear, well thought out mechanism for understanding where to find things. Because often you're gonna, when you don't have an answer as an individual, you're going to go look for it. And where's one of the first things you're going to go look? It's some type of search bar. You're going to go in and you're going to say, hey, uh, uh, how do I do this? And so we use, um, I have used a variety of tools. Right now we're using something called One Source. I've used something called Confluence in the past. But you use something where there's a search directory for the content. So you can go in and say, great. The rep may not look at it today and that's okay. But if they do want to look at it, we need to make sure they have the guidance that's needed and it's built in a way and written in a way that's easily consumable, understandable, so that when they do see it, they don't get overwhelmed. So, um, the way that guidance is written is very important to make sure that it's consumable in a way that is easy to understand. I use the phrase write it in crayon all the time where I feel like it should. Yeah, write it in crayon. It's like, ah, you know, you have a little kid who's going to sit at the table and he's going to draw something in crayon for you. So for me it's like, hey, yeah, simplify it, make it really easy. So I tell people to write it in cran for me. So it's something that's really simplified that I, um, can understand. And if I know nothing about the subject, I should be able to understand it. The flow should make sense and then it should be searchable. So if they aren't going to look at it today, that's okay. But if they want to look for it, they know where to find it and they know where to go about getting it. And then there's other processes and enablement that needs to be created that may need to be forced on somebody's throat. Right. And that's going to be the ones where you may have to incite some type of training video with some types of compliance on it to say, hey, I need you to like, understand these things are really important. They may be around, uh, something that has to be, uh, performed in a certain way day in and day out, and it's going to be experienced every day. But for the things that are there to support somebody which needs to be searchable.

Speaker B: Yeah, I mean, I think it's also like a little bit like the push we mentioned there. Like, sometimes, because, uh, I think a lot of the time, especially if you're changing processes, you're changing tools, like as an individual, you also have to change some of your habits. Like you might have to do things in a different ways and that will take some time to get used to. And sometimes in the beginning, you do need a little bit of that push as well. Um, so I usually found that a combination of the, you know, reminder, the friendly reminders, and a little bit of kind of visual cues and things like that with. I really like what you mentioned there with making it super simple and easy, because I know that for myself as well, you're like, oh, this is super easy, everyone gets it. And then it's just full of jargon. But you've been thinking about it for 10 years, so for you it's obvious, but for someone else it's not. And then you just lost them.

Speaker A: I believe, like, you're going to always have that really complicated sop, right? You're going to have something that's like legally pioneered. Yeah, yeah. And I'm a big fan of putting together playbooks. So, like, for me, I really love the idea of having a complicated sop. It's for compliance, having rules of engagement that are a little bit more simple, that may reference things within the sop. Um, but having a playbook that's defined by role. So for me, you have things like, how am I going to be successful in my role? And with change management, one of the most important factors are if you change somebody's role, you need to deliver to them how they're going to be successful in their new role. And if you don't do that, you're setting them up for failure. So in, uh, appropriate change management plan, having a playbook meets that requirement for setting somebody up for success. So I come in the office, how should I work? How should I put these things together, how should I spend my day if I don't know how to do something? Where is my training? And there's links and guidance for where to go get the training, where to answer questions. So instead of having to go search a bunch of different places, if you come in and you're a role and you have a playbook that says, here's my recipe for success, but here's also all the additional pieces of information that I'm going to need to be successful and where I can find it, you're effectively giving somebody a handbook for success when they come into their role. And it, you know, to that point of simplification, it really simplifies the way they go about understanding how to be successful in their role.

Speaker B: Yeah, no, I really like that you're very much focused on the kind of making it simple and simplifying. I've, I've become such a simplification fan also. The more, the more kind of changes and implementations you do, the more you realize that like all the fancy stuff that you envisioned when you did your initial kind of process design, all the fancy stuff in the beginning at least, there's almost no point so focusing on the simple basics first, cleaning everything out, making the UI really nice if it's a tool and just getting those initial wins and then maybe scaling it up with time, um, I found that that works so much better than trying to cram everything down at once. Even though you want, you want things to go fast, you want this change and you want things to move really fast in the company. But I think like that kind of, um, kind of breaks things a lot if you're trying to do too much at once there.

Speaker A: Yeah, I think if you're thinking about, you know, everyone's focused on, you know, change management as a whole, but everybody's also thinking about uh, the customer life cycle. Right. How am I going to be successful within the customer lifecycle and how do I make sure that I'm giving a seamless experience to my customers. So that way when we do go and have an exchange with them, it's something that's done in a simplified way. And so, uh, one of the things that I like to operate by in terms of principle is everything that you do internally in terms of complexity is felt by the customer. And so if you're making something difficult, that's going to be felt by the customer. And if the customer experience isn't seamless and simple, it's a barrier for you for um, generating additional revenue. And so simplifying from the internal perspective just as much as simplifying from an external, uh, perspective, uh, you know, is just as important if not the same in a lot of ways.

Speaker B: Yeah, I think that's such an important point because yeah, you do notice that like if there's a company that got their stuff together, you know, you sign up like everything is flowing really well, there is a snappy follow up that is personalized and when you become a customer clear onboarding process, like every, everyone seems to know what's going on. Like it's just such a good experience versus the okay, I'm going to fill out a form and nothing happens and there is no follow up for four days and then I get an auto reply or something like that. Um, so I do really believe that what you're saying is true, that it's very noticeable for a customer. If you got your stuff, you can probably fake it a little bit though, uh, until you get volume. Uh, and when you get volume you get into trouble. I think that's usually where a lot of companies start thinking about process when it's so messy so nothing works anymore. I know from, I worked with a lot of agencies before and typically when they hit like 20 people because agencies normally don't have a lot of process, it's more creative people and 20 people that was the most because then it was such a mess. So nothing worked anymore so they just couldn't grow anymore because yeah, it was just fire drills all the time.

Speaker A: Yeah, I think it's, you know, there's always that iterative phase, right. You come in early and it's, you may throw heads at something in order to meet like a short term commitment and, and you know, then you develop a process that helps for the long term. But I think for me, you know, what we sometimes forget is by adding additional complexity, we sometimes can make it simpler but sometimes we can also make it more complicated. And um, I think there are situations in organizations where they get used to just throwing heads at things and doing a quick fix and then they forget about going back and fixing this process. And I think the hard part for me is when I do focus on currently uh, fixing a short term problem, I try to focus on, let's also tackle what the long term should look like so that it's part of the same scoped project. It may not be executed on right now, but it's going to be added to a roadmap and it's going to be very clear what it is because you also take a step away from that. You're going to have learnings as you go through the manual process, but you will also be coming back full circle to being addressing that. And uh, you know, it goes down to, you know, you and I were talking about earlier. There's this flavor of the week and you know, it pulls you away from priorities often because you're, you may have a request that comes in. It's like, well, how do I get all my important items done that are focused on my outcomes? And I think with intent based revenue operations it allows you to you know, build that framework to say hey, the intent of doing the short term Solution was for us to meet a gap, like to address a gap. And then we have the long term solution which still needs to be done. Because the overall objective that we're trying to accomplish, the overall underlying intent that we're going for is solving uh, this problem. And the short term solution does not solve that problem. It just relieves the pain. And so you keep focused and you keep communication across the organization to say, I realize we're not experiencing it now, but we still do have this issue and this is how we're going to be solving it. And we do need to make sure we spend time doing it because it is something that's important. Because pain's a really strong motivator.

Speaker B: It's way better than anything, uh, like better at motivating than most other things. But that's the thing as well, right? It's not enough with it being a pain, it needs to be painful enough. Because I think that's uh. We also spoke a bit before, uh, in like, was it like a month ago or something like that. We had a little pre chat, talked about uh, the importance of good discovery in this kind of roles. And I think what a lot of people miss as well is like they talk about something and someone mentioned that yeah, this is annoying, but they forget that there's probably a thousand things for the company and for the people that are annoying. So just because something is annoying does not make it a priority. But a lot of people, they would just. And that goes for sales and that goes for this as well. They then identify something they think and then they don't um, understand why no one cares and we get no budget and no one want to spend time on it. So maybe we can kind of uh, talk a bit more about the kind of um, the importance of discovery and like how you are doing that to make sure that what you are focusing on are actually aligned with overall business goals and things like that. We'd love to hear your take on that.

Speaker A: Yeah, I think where uh, I like to start in my discovery is uh, initially when somebody brings you a problem, they're not actually bringing you the true problem. Nine times out of ten, the problem is nested three layers deep into what they believe the problem is. And so what I try to incite in my team is not to just take the problem that's brought to them at face value, but to dig deeper. There's a, um, six sigma process around. I think it's called the five whys, um, uh, or something along those lines where you dive into additional layers of I may be messing that up. It's been a while since I've done my Six Sigma training, but there's layers,

Speaker B: there's something with the Y's I do recognize. I'm not sure if it's Six Sigma, it's somewhere and uh, number of years

Speaker A: since I've done it. But the concepts there of having the different layers and you're going into doing some fact finding and understanding what's the true problem. And if they give you an answer, you dive a little bit deeper, uh, give you that answer. Okay, dive a little bit deeper into that one. And you know what you'll find is they may think that they have a problem, but the problem that they're experiencing is tied to what they believe a solution could be. So for example, if they're saying that this territory is not right, well, it may not actually be that that territory is not right, it's just that they think the solution is to fix that territory, but it may be an underlying issue. And so diving into that, it's more focused on making sure you get down to the true root of the problem so that you can appropriately scope the multitude of options that are out there to get the most effective desired result that you'd like, which may be what they're proposing, or it may be something very different and it may be a multi prong approach or you may identify in that discovery by asking additional clarification questions that this problem could be more pervasive and it could be across other parts of the business. And if that's the case, then you just prioritize that, uh, far in excess of anything else going on because it touches a lot of different aspects of the business. But on the surface it didn't look like it was um, as important as it was messaged, uh, in discovery. The importance for me is around questioning and I believe in a challenger mindset of if somebody comes to you with something, it's help me understand why it's important, help me understand, you know, why you think you're experiencing this problem, what other things are going on with it, who's all experiencing it and really diving into what those things are to fully get a better understanding. But in revenue operations, you know, you tend to get stuck in this rut of pleasing people and you want to like, please your stakeholders and it's like, cool, I just want to be helpful. Well, helpful sometimes damages the work that and the impact that you can have. It's better sometimes to not be helpful and not necessarily be liked in some circumstances. And Communicate why you're there. And it's to make their life easier by solving problems and messaging things that are going to be better for them in the long run. And just like a good parent, you're gonna sometimes have to make some decisions for somebody for their own benefit that they may not like. But it could be for the benefit of the business and for the health of their team and for a whole slew of other things. But you may not be winning a popularity contest with some of the decisions that are made.

Speaker B: I ah, mean it's like if you're building a house, like I don't think the builders are gonna say yes to everything you want and just build it randomly based on your input all the time. They're also gonna say stop sometimes because no, you cannot have that. It's not going to work, it's going to break. But so I do agree and I think this is, it's such an, like, uh, how do you say, like under undervalued skill. I think that and so many skip overs also because I think you touched on it a little bit there that it can be a bit uncomfortable. And some people might get annoyed with you if you're actually pushing back and they actually don't really know themselves. Their response might actually be that they get annoyed not necessarily because they're angry with you, but because, because they start feeling insecure because they actually don't know. So defense is annoyance. Even though most people afterwards would say okay, they were actually right, it's cool. Um, but how would you kind of approach that? Because for some people I think that comes natural with experience you get the sweat equity to challenge. But in the beginning of course that can be difficult.

Speaker A: Yeah, I think the key is there's a book that I love called Crucial Conversations.

Speaker B: I actually downloaded it today because I listened to another one of your podcasts. It's uh, on my to listen list.

Speaker A: It's so good and especially with we have to have like very difficult conversations a lot in revenue operations. And that's why like I really care a lot about it. There's a section there where they talk about starting with heart and you start your conversations with understanding, like what do you want out of it and what are your intentions and understanding what they want out of it and what their intentions are. And when you really dive into the nitty gritty of aligning your um, motivators, uh, ah, as individuals, they want the same thing you do. You just haven't gone far enough down the path to connect everything. And in some cases it can feel like an argument if you're doing something for somebody when they want something completely different. But if you can go far enough down that path to connect those objectives, it, it's you servicing them in a way that they need. But they may be thinking more short term or short visioned and not um, thinking about the, the end result in it as a whole. And so starting from that perspective to say, hey, listen, I know you want this but you know, in order for us to get to X, Y and Z, uh, which is something that they care about and you mutually align your objectives with them, this is something that needs to happen because X and Y. And I think this is where that transparency piece is so important is because having transparency in how you communicate and being comfortable with being challenged as an operator I think is also very important. If you are not comfortable being challenged, then it's going to come off as you're pushing an initiative. But if you're willing to be transparent and share why you're doing things, the reason for it, and you allow people to challenge you back, you bring more information into the fold and then it allows you to make a more informed decision. Now um, again this is like circling back with intent based revenue operations and focusing in on the intended impact and not being focused on the task because if I get new information that leads to hey, you know what, this is probably not the right choice. That's when you need to be willing to abandon something and move forward the right choice because you're not focusing on doing the task that you set out to, but you're focusing on the intended impact. And um, I think doing those trainings to get comfortable with that for uh, how to have difficult conversations is important. But also doing your due diligence and understanding of why you're making the decisions you're making and having reasons for it also makes it more comfortable to do that. Because if you feel confident in why you're doing it, you're going to do well. If you're not comfortable in it, do more research, ask for more feedback, do a little bit more digging so that you feel confident about it. And then the more confident you feel about things, when you have conviction in your recommendations, the more confident your stakeholders are going to feel about it and they're going to be willing to push back or buy in. And there's um, a book called the Advantage, uh, written by Patrick Lencioni and he talks about weighing into buy in. And when you're doing operations, I think it's also really important to make sure that you give somebody the opportunity to have a voice in your recommendations and outlining things, give the opportunity for feedback, give the opportunity to weigh in so that when you run forward with a full recommendation, they feel like they had a say in the matter whether you went with their idea or not, but they felt hurt. And so they're more likely to then buy into it and sell it across the organization for you.

Speaker B: No. And I would also say, like, what you mentioned there with across the organization, the final piece there is like, because you are in revops, you're touching so many different departments. So by asking a lot of questions, you also learn. For example, I had a conversation with a client, like, this week, and all of a sudden no one mentioned anything, but they are gonna rework their CSM team. I didn't know that. But by asking a bunch of questions, all of a sudden, it's a casual thing, like, oh, yeah, and we're also setting up the CSM team next month. I'm like, oh, so, uh, maybe we should refocus a bit then. And maybe we should change, as you mentioned, not just ticking the boxes, but should we change the path a little bit here and not do this and do that instead? Uh, and that is also why I really, like, I'm such a big fan of the structure and the framework that you've established, because I also believe that having that kind of roadmap m. Like, this is where we're heading towards having the okr we're like, this is what we agreed on by me asking you questions, understanding what's going on within the organization. These are the key results. And then in the next conversation, you can go back to that and say, hey, this is what we talked about last time. But what I'm hearing now is this. What are we removing so it doesn't become this big thing where you have a gazillion thing to do and you get stressed out and nothing gets done. And then you end up being super reactive and doing fire drills all the time. So I think there's a lot of different things that you can help yourself to kind of stay. Stay on, um, path, but also, like, not being overworked, which I think is really easy to become in Revos, because there's a lot of things going on and you're kind of in the middle of everything, which is fun, but it's quite challenging too, if you're not careful.

Speaker A: Yeah, I couldn't agree more. You know, and I think another really difficult thing is to get everybody else to have the same level of transparency that you do. And if, uh, you're coming into it with transparency, you, you know, as with behavioral modification with kids, like if you're working on like curbing a behavior, right. You behave in a way that you expect them to behave and they emulate behavior. And a lot of that is true with business. You know, if you expect transparency, you should be willing to give transparency and people will emulate some of those things. But like you mentioned, you may have to dig. They may not give you the same layer of uh, visibility that you need. And you know, I think asking for additional clarification regularly and keeping in, in tune with other aspects of the business is super important. And I think having very large objectives being shared across the business is super important from an executive perspective. But if you can't have that, it's important to drive it from an operations perspective to say this is what we have and you share it broadly. And then that way when people are looking to make adjustments or they need something done, they understand some of the things, priorities that are going on. And uh, it may affect your roadmap, like you mentioned, right. It may affect that the desired result, if it aligns with the objective, maybe that you shift some of the things on your roadmap to make sure that you're, you're all aligned and you know, getting to that one goal, which may be revenue, maybe employee satisfaction, it could be a whole number of things, but making sure everything that the whole department's doing is in aligned with the rest of the organization.

Speaker B: Yeah. And normally when you come in, everything is not perfectly aligned when you start. Right. So there might be some teams. Um, for example, marketing might be measured on some metrics that you don't necessarily agree with, but that's their compensation plan. And we have a case like that their compensation plan is based on metrics that we don't fully agree with. But the reality is that we can actually change it in the middle of the year. So I think there is a lot of this kind of, uh, diplomacy, uh, in revops as well. You need to be a little bit of a diplomat and probing and seeing like what fight should I take at this point in time and what is for later? Even though it's not perfect, let's leave it for now. Uh, what's your experience with that kind of diplomacy bit in revenue operations?

Speaker A: Yeah, um, quite a bit of experience in that, I would say. Uh, one of the things that I would say that's uh, an important place to start would be recognizing if you made a change that Healthy change, what the downstream implications are going to be. So with any change, you need to look at the impact on the business. Is it the right change for that right time? Right. In the circumstance of, you know, marketing may be using the wrong metric? Well, looking at, is that change going to downstream affect the rest of the business in a negative way? If it is, it may not be the right time to change it, like you mentioned. Right. And then the proper time may be identifying what is going on with that, maybe inciting the practice for the appropriate metric tracking. So that you can build practice. Yeah, so you can build the practice so that you can have the historical data already built up. So that when you make a, uh, full changeover with the change of an annual operating plan in the following year, you're now transferring over to that new methodology. And it's seamless because you've already done the work and prepped it, but you're still running the business off the way it was designed in the initial annual operating plan. And so it may be that, um, in order to get to the end goal, which is generating more revenue, you may have to make some, some decisions that aren't necessarily ideal, but they may be better than the alternative of doing a full switchover and changing everything last minute. And I think identifying what those things are is important, but I think the next step is starting a tracking mechanism and putting something in place to work in alignment with it so that when you do reach the new year, you have the data available to make the informed decision on what those targets should be for the following year. So you can get the trending. But you also understand that all that work is going to be translated over into the next year and you don't have to push it all to the end of the year when you're doing a full new, um, you know, go to market strategy or org design or the many things that go along with, you know, your new annual operating plan. So moving some of that work a little bit sooner in the year while it's on your mind and defining it early I think is super important as well. But also business. Yeah.

Speaker B: Um, so going back to a little bit what you said before, uh, earlier with, um, every change you're making, there will be kind of disruption, there will be a bit of friction. And I think I've definitely been guilty of forgetting that you're implementing a new process because, well, it's better, but you're not thinking about the cost of that change. You might save a little bit of time, but you might waste a ton of time and again. Mid year changes to metrics and targets super disruptive. So they're going back to the exploratory discovery phase. Okay, how do you set those goals now? When is the next time you're doing it? Like what's the process right now? So you can kind of probe your way towards how can I build up a case, um, for next year? And kind of slowly but steadily. Even though you probably want to move fast all the time and you want to have a gazillion thing done at once. But of course working as a team, it's not everything can be by your own little book. Right. That's frustrating sometimes.

Speaker A: Yeah. I think, you know, when I, when I look at change, there's, there's so many different things that can be done at a given point there. It's hard to do appropriate change management, but also not get fall into the path of paralysis by analysis. And there is a sub segment where you just need to act. Right. I think that's the other hard part is looking at, hey, listen, this is going to require some appropriate change management. And this may be a, um, the, the risk of doing this and just getting it done may be minimal and we may have to do it iteratively, learn from the experience and make some mistakes along the way. And if the impact is, you know, truly assessing the impact of the negative pitfalls of doing things is very important within change management. But don't get so caught up in not being able to calculate everything perfectly that you're afraid to act. And one of the things that I try to instill in my team is I expect mistakes. And if you're really trying to build a culture of growth and uh, leveling up your team, you really should look at the opportunity for. If I go get told by you how to do something and you tell me step by step how to do it, and then a year from now I'll probably remember maybe 20% of that. But if I have to go through the exploration phase, you may be supporting me and giving me guidance for certain aspects of it throughout the way. But if I make a mistake and I go deliver that and I have to go correct that mistake, the chances of me remembering that are near 100%. And so I'm gonna like, I don't want to devalue mistakes. And because mistakes are a great way of growing your craft and understanding how to do things correctly. Um, you know, you can look at it as finding a bunch of different ways not to do something. Right. And if I look at that Approach my team will scale uh, up way faster than the average team because they're not afraid of making mistakes. They're more bought into just making them as quickly as possible, learning from them and correcting them as quick as possible. And so that way we can continue to move at a high clip, but we also focus on the growth that it delivers to the team.

Speaker B: Yeah, like I definitely, I'm a big fan of the kind of. I think it's Amazon who did the one door and two door decision. Uh, so that's kind of what I'm talking a lot about that internally. Like the, the two door decisions. Like okay, just kind of go figure it out. If and I so agree with what you're saying there. Like if you're never making any mistakes like you're, you're not, you're not moving fast enough. Like you are way too careful and you're taking too much time to do everything which means you're not going to learn enough. And uh, I think in revops like things move so freaking fast right now. So if you're just sitting by being super careful all the time and always waiting for feedback like things are going to move too slow, I think you're going to struggle. But of course the one door decisions, like I think um, this is going to be live in a month or something like that. But ClickUp, I think they sent like a Lorem Ipsum email yesterday and it's like well it happens. We all been there. That was a marketing email and I've triggered workflows that made a mess. Like you just fix it. Uh, but be more careful with the one door decisions. That's my general thing. Um, and very liberal with the two door decisions.

Speaker A: Yeah. And I think there's ways of avoiding unnecessary risk too that we can always take. Like uh, I think Sonar has a, a product where you know, they look at uh, you know you can see the downstream implications of a change in salesforce. So if you do this it breaks all this downstream stuff and you can leverage different things in a capacity to under like different technologies to help support you in a way to do your job well and you know, mitigate risk. And I think the other key piece is revenue operations will continue to have to do more with less as you know the economy is in the state it is and it's going to be important to leverage technology to help support a lot of the work that we need to do as operators and to be able to deliver at the same rate that people are expecting. Mhm. Yeah.

Speaker B: I think Darren, like we uh, we have run a little bit of time here so let's ah, let's end up with a bit more philosophical. Unless there's. Is there anything you feel like we've missed here that you really wanted to share on this topic? No.

Speaker A: Yeah. Appreciate you letting me talk through intent based revenue operations.

Speaker B: Yeah, no, not at all. Um, so as kind of a final, a little bit more philosophical thing. So looking back at past whatever time frame you want to have, what's some kind of learning or insight that um, have had a big impact on either your kind of private life or your professional life and how,

Speaker A: you know, every year I started doing it about four years ago and every year instead of like doing like a New Year's resolution, I determined some type of behavior to change and I focus on that one behavior all year. Um, when I was, you know, in 2020, I focused on making all my negatives positive and it really opened up my frame of mind and my thinking and I believe in karma. So I think, you know, I had a lot of great things go, go well for me during that time and it helped you deal with a lot of different things in a positive way. But um, you know, each year focusing on, you know, last year I focused on uh, being uncomfortable, so making myself uncomfortable and so giving into things I think can uh, be translated in work or personal life. But finding something that you want to change and being maniacal about how you focus on it and just make it very specific I think leads to really gigantic change in your life.

Speaker B: I love it. And I think that goes into so many things and I really like that the focus on one thing because I think it goes into so many other parts that we are always so impatient and we always want everything to change at once and all habits at once. When we are working out, we're going to do everything instead of like, okay, if I can just fix this one thing and make that better, like that will have a massive impact. And I think that approach, I'm such a big fan of that myself. Uh, uh, I think that's a great, great thing for people in general. Just like, you know, find one thing at the time and focus on that and don't just stop focusing on it after a week because you're going to slide back into old habits again.

Speaker A: Yeah, so true.

Speaker B: So Darren, absolute pleasure having you on and where can people go if uh, they want to connect with you and find more about you?

Speaker A: Yeah, LinkedIn. Um, you know, go to uh, just search Darren Fay and then if you'd like to look into the RevOps Roundtable community. Just RevOpsroundtable.com.

Speaker B: i'm gonna check that out, actually. Awesome, Darren, absolute pleasure having you on. And, uh, yeah, have a great, uh, rest of your day.

Speaker A: Excellent. Thank you.

Speaker B: And that wraps up the discussion with Darren Fay on the Intent Based Revenue Operations framework and effective change management. So don't forget to follow a slice of SaaS for more episodes on, um, topics like business alignment and business optimization. And this actually wraps up this the first season of a slice of SaaS. So see you again in September.