Karthi Ratnam | Becoming a Revenue Architect

Speaker A: Go to market is inherently complex. The tech stacks are complex, the motions we're running are complex. And you add on AI on top of that, where now everybody. And everybody has the same playbooks, everybody runs the same motion, everybody has access to ChatGPT, everybody now sounds the same on LinkedIn. So uh, now on top of that you also need a Go to Market engineer to go build all this stuff together and bring it. I don't think that's what RevOps was supposed to be. I don't think that was ever RevOps role. Right foreign.

Speaker B: Everybody. Welcome to this episode of the Revamp podcast. I'm joined today by a special guest, Karthi Ratnam. She's the um, co founder of the Rev Genius community as well as Audience House. And we're going to get into all of that and some conversations about how Rev Ops can kind of reframe themselves and really uh, capitalize on one of the biggest opportunities out there. Uh, before we jump into all that, Karthi, why don't you go ahead and tell the folks at home a little bit about you and your journey and kind of how you got to where you're at today.

Speaker A: Thanks Mark. It's nice to be here finally. I know we went back and forth a little bit so I'm happy to be here. Um, so yeah, my journey is I started off as like a tech writer because I'm fascinated, I've always been fascinated to bridge the gap between what's technical and marketing and be able to um, speak to the product. And from there I started my journey, uh, primarily building open source communities in Linux and stuff like that. I'm Indian, so back home, um, and there I really fell in love with the idea of community and building it like properly. Like what I mean by that is an actual community, not one that's like trying to just not a brand community that's just trying to extract value from you, but a real community which is like collaborative and wants everybody in the space to succeed. So um, and then of course after that, over time I started working at uh, with Peak. I joined Peak Community, which Stangram founded. And then I started from there. I started working at GT Partners. I was heading there, go to market and that's where I met Jared and we both had passion for similar things. And then um, you know, he asked me to come aboard as a co founder for um, a Revgenius. And then we also um, co founded Audience House together which is all about building audience and movements.

Speaker B: Yeah. And just for the folks at home, Jared, uh, is the other co founder of RevGenius.

Speaker A: Yes.

Speaker B: And RevGenius is a fantastic community. I've been a member, uh, since 2019, 2020 or whenever it first basically came out. Uh, you know, with a whole bunch of different, uh, go to market folks, sales, marketing, Rev Ops, um, really great and active community. Um, so you know, when we talked previously, um, some of the things that you had said were, you know, kind of Rev Ops leaders are, you know, kind of dealing with these systems that were never really designed to think for themselves. So what, what exactly kind of did you mean by that? Like what is the problem today that RevOps is facing?

Speaker A: So the biggest problem for RevOps, right, RevOps was envisioned, and we all know this, Mark, as like the department that was going to bring the single source of truth, right? It was going to be a growth lever, right? That was the original ethos of bringing, fundamentally setting up a revenue operations team because sales and marketing could not agree on numbers. So we decided let's bring a third party that is going to give us the single source of truth in terms of numbers and also own our systems, right? But unfortunately what that meant was robots kind of became cleanup crew. It never really truly transitioned into being like the strategic single source of truth of an organization. They never really pull that as a growth lever. From a data and insights perspective, it was all about, uh, hey, can you clean up my CRM? Hey, hey, can you enrich my leads? Can you dedupe my lists? Right? It was very much like very tactical level tasks, not so much. Hey, you're a co owner of the go to market, uh, dashboard, or rather you are the owner of the go to market dashboard. You should be driving the go to market conversations and you should be making tech stack decisions, not just playing cleanup on aisle seven, right? So that's the big problem that RevOps has. And I'm sure you've heard the stories of RevOps leaders staying up late at night trying to duct tape their systems together to make sure operations are running and the SDRs are getting their leads. So that's the big problem that RevOps is having right now. Because. And as organizations grow, Mark, and I'm sure you know this, the more and more data you collect, the more and more the filthier the data becomes, right? And then eventually you're just stuck in like it's a cesspool, right? You, you're just playing with fire and rev ups end up getting blamed for it. And that's not fair because that's not how it was originally envisioned for it. To be right. And as you know, and you and I rift on this a little bit, I'm a big fan of AI, but I believe AI should be used for human empowerment, not for replacement. I think the biggest opportunity with AI lies for RevOps because RevOps can actually leverage AI in a manner that helps them get out of the cleanup duty, which AI is pretty good at, because it doesn't have to think. Right. It can do that and be the strategic growth lever for the company.

Speaker B: Yeah. And I think, you know, this issue of Revops really wanting to be a strategic function, but often getting pigeonholed into more of this tactical cleanup crew thing, this is the fundamental issue, I think that most Rev Ops folks that I talk to deal with, or at least they feel is the big kind of fundamental issue across the ecosystem. Um, you know, and so I think, you know, one of the things, uh, that we had talked about is how to kind of reframe this, uh, to move away from kind of just being a fix it person and just taking orders and you know, dealing with fields in a CRM and become much, you know, much higher level. Um, so what is that reframe? And how do we, how does somebody in RevOps kind of go about it?

Speaker A: Yeah, so we believe. Well, by we I mean at RevGenius. And I think a lot of RevOps leaders would agree with. The core problem with RevOps is the ops part, which is the operations, which inherent implicitly implies that your role is tactical. Right, because it's revenue operations. But truly what revops is doing is revenue creation. They're building the revenue engine of the company. But people just don't see it that way because sales is always the tip of the spirit market. You know this. And then there's marketing, right. Everyone else is just supports staff. Right. Enablement, Rev ops, product marketing, it all gets kind of bundled into kind of the same thing of like being tactical. But there are situations when it becomes strategic. Right. But what RevOps actually does is it they architect, they create the revenue engine for the company and they run it. So that's the big unlock that RevOps needs to come out of. And the other big problem that RevOps has is while there's a core function called revenue ops, there's also marketing Ops, sales ops, etc. So you need, we need to get out of all of that and have RevOps be the revenue creators of the company because essentially that's what they're doing. We just don't recognize it that way.

Speaker B: Right. And you know, your background and a lot of stuff you're doing is this content, the category creation, category design and kind of a narrative. Right? And you know, I think that as marketers we, the narrative building is something that is inherent to what we do. But somebody in a rev Ops role, likely he doesn't have that background. And so, you know, uh, it becomes a movement and you know, you need to kind of hit critical mass in order to have impact. So what is the thing that revops people, individuals and as a group can do to, you know, they get seen as ticket takers, but how do they get shift the mindset? Uh, uh, so teams see them as, you know, that what, quote unquote architects rather than, than plumbers.

Speaker A: So that's a really good question, Mark, because, uh, that requires RevOps to organize in a manner which they're not inherently built for. Right? Because they're not inherently marketers. Right? And even us marketers, we're terrible at marketing ourselves. We're really good at marketing other people, which as you know, is also true because I'm terrible at marketing myself and I've heard other marketers say the same thing. But essentially like what. And um, this is really like the core passion of RevGenius is what we're really trying to do is how can we ensure that RevOps gets reframed as revenue creator and how can we drive that movement? Right. And you'll see us starting to already do that. We've put out a manifesto of what it means to be a revenue creator. Right. And we've started, um, evangelizing this new point of view. Right. So we need more and more people because what we're doing now is really interesting. Mark. We're working with. It's for a customer, but it's well thought through, which is we're actually Getting confessions from DevOps leaders of the problems they're facing being a, ah, Rev Ops leader. And it's really funny. Most of the confessions they give are very tactical problems that they're facing. Right. And that exposes the heart of the problem of RevOps. Right. And we're literally calling it the RevOps confessional. Right.

Speaker B: Are you able to give us any examples of some of those confessions?

Speaker A: Well, no, um, because it's. I can't. But if you joined us next week at a roundtable, you can hear all about it. We actually did a survey to understand what their problems are and stuff like that. Um, but they're very, very tactical problems of like, I don't understand, like at a high level, it's all stuff like I don't understand the tech stack. I get yelled at if my data is, if the data is not clean. Territory mapping is a problem. Right. So the list is not deduped. Um, why is this person who has left a job, but they, you know, they have a different email. Very basic things like that is what RevOps gets blamed for, when in fact RevOps is actually architecting the revenue engine, as I said. So that's one of the core things that we're trying to evangelize for @revgenius. And what rev Ops leaders can do is get behind that messaging and help us really craft that point of view of how do you want to be seen in the future? Especially now that, you know, everybody and um, the world and their uncle are talking about like how everyone's agentic, everyone wants to use AI, and everyone. AI is taking. Getting rid of the GTM bloat mark. Okay, so it's getting rid of the GTM bloat. Um, and then part of the bloat was of course blamed on RevOps. Right. Because you have so much busy work. What manual work are you doing? Why can't you hand it over to AI? Well, I'm so glad you asked me that, Chad. Right, Right. So, but the point I'm trying to make is this is revop's moment to shine. Right. If companies are comfortable outsourcing the quote unquote manual work to AI, this is RevOps moment to become the architects of the revenue engine, actually build it the way it was meant to build. Right. So the problem with RevOps is they not really have a tech problem. It's a story problem. And the larger problem with that story comes from being called ops, because operations inherently means you're hands on and tactical. And that's that focus that we need to change. People fundamentally understand it's supposed to be a strategic lever and a growth lever that needs to be pulled. They just don't pull it.

Speaker B: Yeah, I think it's, you know, interesting because I don't know if you were kind of paying attention to this, but a few months ago, you know, I'm pretty sure one company in particular kind of seeded this. Uh, but there was this new role that people started talking about. The GTM engineer. Right, right. So this, I would say from a marketer's perspective is a very good example of category creation and narrative building. And it created all sorts of buzz and controversy. Isn't this just what RevOps is supposed to be doing? Um, so, you know, not to, you know, create, uh, too much, you know, controversy but where do you stand on the whole GTM engineer? Is this something new? Is this in your mind how you envision RevOps should actually transition to.

Speaker A: So I have a problem fundamentally and ah, this is going to be controversial. I hope you're okay with that.

Speaker B: We live for controversy here.

Speaker A: My big talk track when that came out is that go to market is not an engineer's role. Right. It's a go to market leaders are uh, sales leaders, marketing leaders, Revs, uh, leaders, customer success leaders and product leaders. But they are not engineers. Right. So the very framing of the fact that you need a go to market engineer in my opinion adds another level of complexity to an already complex problem. Right. Go to market is inherently complex. The tech stacks are complex, the motions we're running are complex. And you add on AI on top of that where now uh, everybody, and everybody has the same playbooks, everybody runs the same motion, everybody has access to ChatGPT, everybody now sounds the same on LinkedIn. So, so now on top of that you also need a go to market engineer to go build all this stuff together and bring it. I don't think that's what RevOps was supposed to be. I don't think that was ever RevOps role. Right. I think the reason the go to market engineer became a thing is because revops was treated tactically and revops wasn't allowed to own the tech stack in a way and build it from scratch in a manner that they were meant to build it. RevOps was always meant to be the single source of truth.

Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. I mean I, you know, I won't name names, but it's very, you know, it was very clear that there was a particular company with a particular product that was trying to kind of popularize this term, uh, and then kind of make them the core user of this product. Um, and we're very successful at it, I would say.

Speaker A: Extremely. And that's. But, but as you to your point, that's the power of naming, framing and claiming. Right. And that's, that is the gap that Rev Ops is having is that the naming, framing and claiming is wrong.

Speaker B: Let's get into that. You know, uh, in this ideal kind of, you know, future state that we want to build for Rev Ops, what is that? Naming and claiming? And you know, how, what is the, you know, the, the category and that they can claim, uh, and like how do you name it and how do they claim it?

Speaker A: So I think the big unlock for RevOps is the fact that they were always aligned to be the single source of Truth, I think is still true. Would you agree, Mark?

Speaker B: Yes. I think that it's, you know, creating the single source of truth, breaking down silos. All of the catchphrases that we talk about are still the core, you know,

Speaker A: reasons for RevOps existence. Right. But unfortunately it didn't exactly play out the way it was meant to play out. Right. Like, and we've seen this in a couple of other functions too, Mark, and with your marketing background, I'm sure you'll empathize. Enablement faces the same, same issue in that, you know, five years ago, I think four store or somebody said it's going to be very quickly, there's going to be a chief enablement officer. But it didn't really pan out that way. Right. And now enablement is kind of learning and development, kind of clean up crew, give the sales people what they need type thing. Right.

Speaker B: I would argue that Chief Revenue Officer has suffered from this as well because it really in essence often becomes just the executive name for head of sales, um, rather than like this broad revenue GTM organization.

Speaker A: Correct. Uh, well, I mean, I think for not being able, not calling them chief Sales officers and stuff like that, we reframed it as CROs. And that was, if you recall, there was like this minor ripple in the market where they suddenly said there was not going to be any CMOs, that VPs of marketing were going to start reporting into CROs and sales and marketing was going to merge into one function. You remember that was the time when that talk track was happening, right?

Speaker B: Yeah. Well, a lot of those different, you know, kind of fever dreams have happened over time and never really played out.

Speaker A: Yeah. But to your point, to go back to RevOps, right. The, to me, now is the perfect time for RevOps to actually step into the role of the single source of truth of data. Right. Purely because AI gives him such a good opportunity to do that in a manner that he didn't allow them before. Right. And I'll try to explain why. And Mark, I'd be curious to hear your thoughts as well. So the um, larger problem we've always had is silos. We've always had silos and we've always, as you know, we've always had internal politics and stuff like that. This always happens between departments. It's natural where humans are involved. The beauty with AI is AI doesn't understand silos. It's not built that way and it's not political because it's not a person. It's, it's an interface, it's a system. That learns. Right. So now suddenly humans kind of almost have to unite to create processes that AI will understand. If not, it's going to break because you can't tell it, oh, up to here is marketing, from there it's sales. So you have to break this here. It's not going to understand that. Right. So now we uh, finally I think go to market as a team, will unite because we have to. Because AI doesn't understand, inherently understand silos. Right. So it breaks that. And the beauty is revops is really well positioned to lead that narrative, to drive that AI initiative. Right. And to build that tech stack to actually be a revenue engine for the company.

Speaker B: Absolutely. And you know I, I continuously go back to this thing, this phenomenon that continues to kind of boggle my mind, which is that, you know, I, I, I straddled two worlds basically. The marketing world and the rev ops world. The marketing world because I'm, you traditionally come from the marketing background revox worlds because that's who I interact with the most. In the marketing world, AI is everything, all the time, everywhere, just singing its praises, you know, very, very specific use cases. This is how I'm doing it, this is the agent I've built, etc. And yet when I talk to RevOps folks and I bring up AI, yeah, you know, I have, I use ChatGPT sometimes, uh, it's all very kind of abstract. I don't usually get a tangible use case and, or the enthusiasm that I get elsewhere. And I don't know if it's just because they're playing their cards close and they don't want to give up secrets or if in fact they're just not using it, uh, in any sort of real way. Because I would imagine, you know, like you said, the opportunity for RevOps to kind of own the AI, uh, integration into the entire go to market is so ripe and yet, ah, up until now I haven't seen it really play out yet.

Speaker A: So it's interesting you say that Mark. Uh, and without revealing too much, I can tell you this. Um, there are two customers of mine that are very much in the revolve space and in the agentic rev up space and they work with large enterprise companies. Companies. Right. So the pushback they get is not from the CRO, the pushback they get is from the RevOps team. Because RevOps, for some reason, I think, I don't know the word, maybe it's a little bit of Stockholm syndrome, like in the sense that you've done the manual work for so long, you sort of don't want to let it go because it's become part of your identity. You know, who are you? Even if you're not deduping lists and cleaning up this. Do you know what I mean? Like, I feel like it's. It's kind of. We've kind of lost the plot on the bigger picture of what we were supposed to be. So now we're kind of holding on really tight to all those manual busy work that we used to do to the point where we're actually stopping ourselves from in fact, becoming the single source of truth.

Speaker B: That's an interesting point. Yeah, I mean, there is maybe there is a level of kind of gatekeeping, uh, you know, holding on to these things that in fact are not the kind of natural type of work Rev Ops should be doing. I also wonder if, like, you know, these folks are often the gatekeepers of what gets added to a tech stack, and they maybe are so jaded by how bloated, as we've talked about things have become. And there were so many tools that were promised to kind of fix everything, and then they just ended up gathering dust. And so maybe they're just very hesitant to allow another thing into the. Into the fold. I'm not sure. But like, it really surprises me because I know that for me, and I. And I, um, do some op stuff, I do some marketing stuff. I have AI tools open all over the place. I have like, many different ones. I've been using it to like, build internal tools, to build interactive tools as marketing assets, to, uh, automate and integrate and build internal agents. All these things that have been, you know, really great. I see that as a natural place for RevOps to be. Yet I don't see many RevOps folks kind of inhabiting that.

Speaker A: So there's an interesting old adage, which I'm sure you're familiar with, that you don't get fired for buying IBM or SAP. Right? Yeah. Or Salesforce. Right. Or HubSpot now and stuff like that. Um, I think part of the problem is everyone is seeing. So part of the reason why RevOps is the single source of truth is, you know, us marketers, we always had this when we were buying tech. We have shiny object syndrome. Right. You show me a really shiny tool, more often than not, marketers will run behind it. Right? We're all guilty of this. Part of RevOps role is to sort of temper the shiny object syndrome a little bit with truth. Part of that. That's part of them being the single source of truth. Right. So an argument can be made. That part of RevOps is gatekeeping, is that everyone's running behind AI, like it's a bit of a silver bullet to fix things. And RevOps is probably like, hey, let's take a beat. Let's audit our existing tech stack. Let's understand our processes before you put AI in place. Which is, if that's what they're doing, it's a really smart thing to do. Because AI isn't. And we covered this before, AI isn't going to work. If your processes don't work. It's just going to be more garbage in, garbage out. You're just going to amplify the bad data you already have and it's going to learn from all the shitty data you have and put out even more shittier stuff, uh, in the future. Right. And then the worst part about the cautionary tale for me about AI is people wanting to use agentic. Agentic. Agentic everywhere. Right. And just running simple workflows. No, agentic. Right before agentic, when we run major workflows with large data sets, when a workflow breaks, we all know the amount of manual work it takes to reset that. Right. And now on top of that, you're saying, oh, okay, let's turn these all into agent take. Right. Without proper processes in place and people and ownership and roles and responsibilities and not truly understanding what the GTM new gtm.org looks like. What's an agent? What's a person? Roles and responsibilities. Right. Can you imagine the pardon my French shit show that's going to come if some of these agentic workflows start breaking?

Speaker B: Yeah. Or become sentient and self.

Speaker A: Then they come for us all. Which is why we always say please and thank you. Even though, um, you know, Sam Altman doesn't want us to. But that's just, you know, us future proofing ourselves. Right.

Speaker B: Um, so, you know, we talk about it's a story problem. It's that there's a need to create this movement. And obviously, you know, given your background, this is your expertise. So I know that we talked about it, but is there something, uh, that we could maybe empower the folks at home with that could help them in the process of creating that movement? And what are the steps that would need to be taken? What are some of the things.

Speaker A: I mean, just for the purposes of this, uh, Mark your podcast, I actually created a bit of a movement maker kit. Right. I'm happy to have that, uh, be a giveaway that you can, um, give out to your audience, uh, to build their own movement. But essentially what we need is Revops leaders coming in and like creating a pitch, quote unquote, a consolidated pitch that they now need to not just be the cleanup crew, actually own the revenue engine of the company. Right. And the more leaders that talk or speak out about this and they can use the movement making kit to do that. I'm happy to share that after the call, of course. Uh, Mark, um, is the more we need to talk about it. Right? Because. And also you'll see this. Mark, you see this. Marketers, salespeople, heavily active on LinkedIn. Right. Love readers, not so much. Right. They need to be talking about the problems within the organizations that they're facing. And as a group, marketers whinge about their problems all the time. And that's a good thing. Right. Cmos m talk about the problem they face all the time. Growth marketers talk about problems they face all the time. We talk about attribution issues that we're facing all the time. Rarely would you see Revops people actually sitting and putting it out there. All the duct taping, the late nights, everything that they're doing in order to keep the revenue engine running.

Speaker B: Yeah, I think that, uh, some of these communities, Revgenius being one of them, created a quote, unquote, safe space, um, for a lot of those folks, uh, to coordinate and, um, you know, kind of get best practices from each other and gave them an outlet that maybe they weren't as comfortable using things like LinkedIn for. And I think that was a function, I think partially of kind of COVID and work from home and these live events. Um, but, you know, we're, we're five years, you know, past that. Um, and these communities are very active. But I agree, I think that there are tools, uh, and ways of uniting, uh, in order to kind of create that movement. Um, are there any examples where you've seen kind of a group of people or a title that was suffering from something similar and successfully kind of did this and like, could be used as kind of an example to, you know, as your kind of North Star.

Speaker A: I think one group that did it really well is customer success. Right. But, but so Customer Success was also like, uh, a little bit cleanup crew because they were help desk. Right. They weren't really customer success. They didn't have a seat at the table. Right. But the difference there was that kind of movement was driven a little bit by a SaaS company, like Gains. I drove that movement a little bit. Right. So maybe part of what's lacking is one B2B tech company stepping up and saying, hey, we need RevOps to be. Why aren't we spotlighting RevOps as a single source of truth? Why aren't they the revenue leaders? Right. Because building a movement regardless of everything else does require that brand narrative, that spotlight and dollars spent to evangelize that problem. Right? So having just RevOps leaders talk about the problem might not be enough to move the needle. However, having a company, a tech company that truly believes in that point of view of RevOps being the single source of truth and being the revenue architects of the future, that helps move the needle.

Speaker B: Do you think that the reframing of customer success to uh, you know, from let's say customer support, which is, I think that had had a big part of the way it changed. Was it just that, that simple kind of title change?

Speaker A: So because from Help Desk we went to customer success, right? And with it we had dashboards and matrices, right? And then suddenly we started talking about acquisition and retention. Right. And then over time NRR became the North Star. And how do you keep NRR going? You can't do it without your cst. Right. When we started measuring Churn, then we started thinking, oh, maybe Help Desk should be more than what Help Desk should be. It should be customer success in terms of retaining the customer. Right. And so that's the problem in that RevOps, while RevOps is a single source of truth, RevOps is not directly connected to a, ah, core metric that the business owns. Marketing is sales is CS is. Right. But RevOps isn't. Enablement isn't. See the problem functions like RevOps have is if everything's running really well, nobody notices they're doing their job. Do you know what I mean? When something's broken, it's like call the RevOps person and have them work overnight to fix this.

Speaker B: Yeah, it's like uh, keeping the trains running all the time. And so you just kind of take

Speaker A: it as a, you take it for granted. Right? But you never take like sales or marketing or CS now for granted. There are war rooms, there are tactics like, so there's a really good example help desk when CS was help desk, right. If say a $500,000 account is churning, suddenly the CEO, everybody is talking about how to retain that customer. What is that use case for RevOps which helps move the needle of them just being like whatever they are right now, Ops team to being the architects of the revenue engine.

Speaker B: Well, um, we'll definitely add ah, a link to uh, that book, uh, the kit, uh, in the uh, show notes uh, for the folks at home. Um, before we wrap things up here, Karthi, why don't you go ahead and tell the folks at home where they can maybe learn more about you, about Audience House, about Revgenius, about all of it. Um, where they can follow you where, where they can learn more.

Speaker A: Yeah. So people can connect with me on LinkedIn. I'm always passionate to talk about like community and social issues as well as, you know, movement marketing, category creation. And then Revgenius of course is revgenius.com anyone can come and click and join the Slack Channel. It's free for all. And we're really trying to do something different for the AI age with, um, Revgenius trying to teach people what it means to manage humans and AI.

Speaker B: All right, well, Karthi, thank you so much for joining us today. I really appreciate it and hopefully, uh, we'll get to do it again sometime soon.