How to Build a Revenue Engine That Doesn't Break as You Scale | Navin Persaud of 1Password

Speaker A: Uh, welcome to Revenue Execution, the podcast that turns sales theory into results. Here's your host, Ross Rich. Hey everyone, welcome back to your favorite Go to Market podcast. I'm your host, Ross Rich and today we have a very special guest, actually, uh, also a Toronto local, Navin, who is the VP of Revenue Operations at 1. Password? Thanks for joining us here today. Before we get into kind of all the details around intelligence architecture and all the fun revops nerdery, we'd love to hear a bit about yourself and kind of your path to revops leadership and some of the roles that you've had along the way.

Speaker B: Yeah, I feel like I've had two careers. My first career right out of university was at IBM and I was there for quite a long time and mostly in a sales role. And pretty quickly I discovered as you learn about yourself, that you either like something or you don't. I did not like being in sales. I liked everything around sales. I liked the journey, the forecasting, the numbers, the systems, all of those things. The process. I didn't actually like having to separate people from money. That was hard. That takes a different skill set, almost a different Persona. Right? I'm an introvert. I am very like, listen first, speak second type of person, which is the opposite of a seller, right? A seller is successful because they can do those things. They could be extrovert, they can win you over, they can sell you value, show you pain. I always see the cracks and everything. I see where things break down and the gaps and what happens tomorrow. So pretty quickly I understood I need to find a role where I am not trying to score goals, but I am passing the buck.

Speaker A: Looking back, you know, at those early roles, what's a lesson that you learned around managing rev ops and kind of sales data that stuck with you?

Speaker B: Garbage in, garbage out. I mean, we try and build a foundation, a layer of trust that you can maintain and scale a really big. And I learned this from, you know, a leader that works for me today around we configure, we, we don't customize. The minute you customize things, you then behold into technical debt that you'll have to maintain. And then, um, when you want to layer other things on top of your foundation, it'll break, it'll break fast. Uh, you have to think of your go to market systems and process as a house that you're building. Right? Your product market fit is that amazing view that you found. You're building that house. You need a strong foundation because if it's weak, it doesn't Matter how pretty it is on top, it's going to fail, it's going to cause you money, cause you pain, and eventually that view won't save you totally.

Speaker A: How did you learn that lesson in the first place? Was there something that you guys customized that you should have configured that made sure you didn't make that mistake again?

Speaker B: I learned it from why I believe I was hired in a few places. And it starts with pain. I think in RevOps there's generally a point where companies are reaching growth and then realize who's managing the spend and the systems and the process and sort of refereeing what's happening between sales and the other functions, keeping us honest, keeping customers in the data and giving us insights. And I learned that pretty quickly. My first gig in SaaS was because the CFO had a pain. They had no idea what the forecast was. They had no clear understanding of how to speak to the board relative to performance, and needed someone there to sort of understand it, take stock of it and provide insight from it. So I was attracted to pain, but pain was because I could build. And that has been the singular common theme as I've moved from company to company. It's we have a pain. We need someone to manage this stuff. We need it to give us the insight we need so we can fold it into the way we sell so that we can get better, so we can have more face time with customers and less admin time on systems and tools, et cetera.

Speaker A: Totally. Yeah, that makes sense. And it's kind of funny. Um, obviously, you know, rev ops for folks that are in the go to market world, you know, it feels like it's been around forever, but it sounds like kind of, you know, plugging into that role in the first place, partnering with CFOs like they didn't have. They were hoping that their sales leader could explain a lot of the stuff, which, you know, I don't think is necessarily their forte a lot of times.

Speaker B: Yeah, exactly. Uh, I'm full of analogies. I'm going to warn you all. But I view it as though like RevOps job. If you think of it as like a soccer game, we build the field of, uh, play, we referee the game and then we call the play by play. That's what RevOps does. Right. And when you're a company that's reached the major leagues, you need that. Else you're going to have the wrong people providing you the wrong insight. And all that insight funnels into strategy. You don't want to be making the wrong bets. But where are you going to take the company because you had the wrong insight?

Speaker A: Yeah, no, uh, that's another good one. Another good sports one. I'm picking up on a theme here, but switching gears from kind of your personal experience and journey to this point to we were talking about before around this intelligence architecture. Before we get into that, can you define what that means to you and why is it so important to running a high uh, functioning revenue organization?

Speaker B: Yeah, I think any RevOps leader you ask today, if they don't have an AI roadmap, they're in trouble. I love being at the center of everyone's selling Persona. As a RevOps owning go to market tech, I get at least three or five. Hey founder, I want to review this tech with you. Sales pitches, et cetera. The reality is I need to solve problems and then I need to decide is that something I want to build or something I want to buy and how big is that problem and will it move the needle on what I ultimately need in the business pipeline? Growth, retention. Right. It has to drive the KPIs. I don't build for pretty, I don't build for perfect. I gotta build for pace. And I think the failings of like early tenure rev ops folks building for perfection and not being aligned to, well, it's perfect but your sales teams aren't using it because it's too damn hard. And I think that is sort of the alignment you have and the benefit of having a sales background.

Speaker A: Yeah, I was going to say I think the best rev ops teams and people like have that empathy they build in theory. A lot of the time they build thinking about pieces of paper sops, not how that meets the field. And that's usually where I see all this stuff fall down. And that tension between and friction between operations in the field.

Speaker B: Exactly. Like you know, we're a big Slack company here and I get a lot of questions on Slack every day. So is my team. Well, I always start with how can I help? Like I'm um, here sales is my customer. CS is my customer. Onboarding, implementation, solution engineers. They're my customers. I uh, have to deliver for them. It's not the other way around.

Speaker A: Yeah. And unfortunately I uh, think in most organizations I've been a part of, it kind of feels the other way around. It feels more like 80, 20, 80% of the time. It's more of a systems, I think finance mindset. Like how do we force you to give us the right forecast and put in this information versus how do we help put customers at the center of the problem solving and think about it with a lot of like client and field empathy, so.

Speaker B: Exactly.

Speaker A: Yeah. Awesome. Yeah. One of the pieces you had around intelligence architecture was this tempo mismatch between product innovation and go to market execution. What does that mean and why is that so important?

Speaker B: As, uh, someone who's worked for the few SaaS companies, pretty early on I learned that I need to believe in the product. That is super important because there's only so many things that I can go and build and fix and make better. But if the product isn't there, it doesn't matter what I do.

Speaker A: Yeah, it's not build battle.

Speaker B: That's the reason I joined 1Password. Because when I joined they were building a sales function. Strong brand, good retention, growing fast, all the things you want to see.

Speaker A: Right.

Speaker B: All the necessary ingredients to make that cake taste good. But I could come in and add the frosting and all the other layers and all that stuff because they didn't have a CRM, they didn't have process, they didn't have territories. All of those things. Additive. Additive. But if Revops is there without the product, without sort of pacing and growth and a roadmap, it's going to be hard sledding to get to success no matter how good your RevOps leader is.

Speaker A: So when do you think it's the right time to start building that infrastructure?

Speaker B: You've got to have product market fit for sure. You've got to have almost an inertia. That's saying your sales team is growing or go to market function is growing, you're adding complexity. You have multiple SKUs, you're operating in multiple regions. Once you have that scale, then I think you should invest. The biggest, biggest mistake companies make is they invest too late in RevOps because then you spend all this time catching up or, and I've spoken to a number of leaders where they say RevOps now is holding us back from growing because we don't have clear comp plans and process and good data and uh, automation. We are spinning our wheels and wasting valuable sales resources internally rather than pointing them externally.

Speaker A: Got it. Yeah, no, I think that's super common. Or hey, leaders at different functions just bought their own stuff and did their own things because we shared, you know, HubSpot or Salesforce. Then they come in and spend what, six, 12, 18 months kind of fixing everything. And yeah, it's definitely a common theme I've seen in kind of series B, C, D companies.

Speaker B: Absolutely.

Speaker A: And back to your piece around intelligence and AI. Obviously we Got to talk about it. How do you think about teams, especially go to market teams keeping up with the pace of innovation. Right. Every month or quarter it seems like there's a new paradigm when it comes to that. So how do you think about arming your teams and go to market? Leadership@1Password with making the right investments, but with things changing so much, how do you make sure you know you're not getting too deep with something, but you're kind of ahead of the curve? How do you think about your job in that life?

Speaker B: Vendors and their solutions exist to solve my problems and the problems of go to market, not the other way around. They may open up interesting opportunities of scale of efficiency. But I need to know that I have a problem first. Like show me the pain that I have, then we can talk about your features and what the things you can do. I have a roadmap. I mean switching costs are real, right. Enabling a field on a new motion. Those are all real things. So it's quite possible you may be 20% better than the tech I'm using today. Or will I lose 40% of Runway in a year to make that a reality? Those are the hard choices that Revops leaders have to make, but not on their own. They have to do it with their sales leadership. They have to do it in concert because it's like a living organism and you almost have to like treat it and manage it daily and everyone needs to care about it.

Speaker A: Yeah. So who do you partner with on those decisions? When you think about getting people's buy in and making sure it connects with you, uh, know the reality on the

Speaker B: field enablement for sure. Sales leadership and uh, depending on what it is, probably your marketing function as well. You need alignment that you're going to go in a direction. You have some clear pain. You're going to make the investment both in money and time. I think people forget the time part. You think about tech as a money thing?

Speaker A: Yeah, just the budget as a, uh, number.

Speaker B: The time, not the time to enable alone, the time to implement, the time to remove something else and then the time to actually build out the reporting and the process around it. Those things generally get forgotten, but are the first things that get complained about post implementation?

Speaker A: Yeah, it's a really good call out. When we're talking to customers or prospects and talking about, you know, the dollars and cents. I'm like, this is so negligible relative to the time your field is spending on this stuff today. Or yes, the change and you know, people looking at doing stuff for A quarter. I'm like, let alone not, uh, not making sense for us to do this for a quarter. Makes no sense for you guys to do this for a quarter. Like, there's no winning here. Let's say it's wildly successful. Well, now we need to do it again for all this other stuff. So you just wasted kind of the ROI for year one. So it's definitely got to be kind of a mutual partnership when you're making those investments. Because of all the stuff that you mentioned.

Speaker B: Yeah, the sales year is 12 months and 52 weeks. Right. Like, there's only a limited amount of time where we can implement and then influence results. And if you're building for the future, fine. But I can never sacrifice the present.

Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, totally. So how do you think about just kind of off the cuff here. How do you think about the changing cost then? Right. So forget about, you know, the budget it takes and all this kind of stuff. Like if you're going to lift and shift something, like, how big does the impact need to be to put that at the top of the list?

Speaker B: I almost think about it in the terms of what won't I do? Right. I always have a list. Revop leaders always have.

Speaker A: That's what I mean. Like, the list is endless. How does something go to the top and replace something you already have? Like, how bad does that thing need to be? Or how much better does the new thing need to be to like rip something out instead of, you know, kind of net new, adding it or just looking at the list of your top, you know, 50 things that you need

Speaker B: to get through it has to move the needle on a KPI. I have to poc it. I have to have talked to other customers who are absolute about it. I need proof. I need to touch it and feel it. I need to have conviction that post sales I will actually have a team to support me. Like, I don't. I want to work with vendors, I want to work with partners. And uh, I think I have a few in my stack today that are great partners for our business and they, they maintain a relationship like that because they realize my success is theirs and vice versa.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: And I think quite often people don't realize this. And uh, I was mentioning it to our own implementation teams of 1Password is that if you're the seller, I'm cards to the best all the way through. But the minute I get to your implementation team, I, I'm an open book. Um, I have already committed. Now I'm going to tell you all my darkest Secrets because I need to be successful, already committed, I need this to happen. And I don't think enough vendors or partners realize the nuggets of gold that live in the implementation window.

Speaker A: Uh, yeah, people, I mean SaaS like you get paid up front, you sign a three year deal, maybe they think they can mess up for a while and still kind of, you know, keep it back on track and maybe get the renewal. But being in, you know, only being businesses before this, where we didn't get paid until someone was processing. Right. In the payments world and fintech and other stuff like that, or in consumption based models, I think they nail implementation onboarding way better because it's commercially aligned with their business.

Speaker B: Right, Absolutely.

Speaker A: Yeah. Well, before we wrap up here, did have some questions around this concept that you had around the revenue engine and thinking about it from like an engineering perspective. So curious how you think about automating things especially, you know, we've talked a bit about AI. How do you think about building this engine and kind of iterating on it to drive the results for your team?

Speaker B: It dovetails well to what I said at the beginning around building a strong foundation both in systems and data and integrations. I think once you have that, then you have the capabilities to leverage AI in more places to really remove some of the grunt work that RevOps teams face. But not only because it's a RevOps time saver, it's a business timesaver. Right. Your Sales teams, your BDRs, they're not unlimited. Your CSMs are not unlimited. So how do you point them where they're going to drive the most value? Because human interaction must win. And then how do you leverage the rest of your customers so that you can leverage automation so they get what they need and you get what you need and everyone's happy. One Passover, for example, we have over 180,000 customers.

Speaker A: Wow.

Speaker B: Uh, we don't have 180,000 CSMs, so we have to be good where it counts. Right. And then we have to be great with CSMs where it's needed. So you got to find that balance. You have to find the tools and the tech. You have to have good alignment with like your, your revenue architecture and your business strategy. It's my job to take the strategy of the business and make it tactical awareness and tactical delivery. And I think sometimes when the tactics don't align to the strategy, you have these systems that are disconnected. Yeah.

Speaker A: What are some of the things maybe in the last six or 12 months that you guys feel like you've Done really well to align kind of changing strategy to what you guys have been launching for the field at 1Password.

Speaker B: We use a couple of vendors in the convo intelligence space. The one I really like and Salesforce picked them up the other day was momentum.

Speaker A: Oh yeah, yeah. We partner with them as well.

Speaker B: Yeah, we were an early customer, early adopter for them. Absolutely amazing in terms of like there's such a rich data set of conversations that was poorly mined by go to market teams, revop teams, the administrative lift that we remove from like field updates and notes and all those things. But then the insights we're able to draw and give to our product teams or CS teams. But what customers are saying and how do we align to our sales methodology? That's uh been pretty eye opening because now like when we onboard new reps we can understand are they working. Right. There's no hiding anymore. Right. And that's the other thing that's sort of illuminated. Right. AI has removed the ability for you to like plug away and do the bare minimum and hope to achieve. Now it's very readily transparent. You can't hide in the.

Speaker A: Yeah. The performance management side of taking unstructured data, uh, not just call everything you saw I think first in engineering it was most obvious some of the stuff they were doing at GitHub and now just across the stack taking all this kind of really hard to like you said mine data. Uh, especially with the push to have smaller, more efficient teams it feels like that's yeah, really, really interesting.

Speaker B: Absolutely.

Speaker A: Maybe last question before I let you get back to it. Kind of maybe on the bridge between what we're talking about with some of your partners in AI and you know, kind of this macro push for every company, even high growth companies like 1Password to be more and more efficient. How do you think about the role of like salespeople and talent in those things changing? Right. We're seeing a push for consolidation of you know, maybe AI agents for just like at scale customer success. Maybe for like your B2C business versus your B2B business or maybe like the support from the employees at your B2B business. How do you think about like where humans really thrive and the investment in like people and talent versus the investment in agents in AI to obfuscate the human side of things.

Speaker B: I think there's a volume and value separator here. There are absolutely amazing use cases for AI when it comes to like navigation, simple questions that hit you at volume that you can't support with humans. That absolutely makes sense. We're about to look into whether an AI SDR makes sense for our business. And we have a ton of volume of inbound demand. It's difficult to treat it all and treat it all consistently and to respond everywhere.

Speaker A: Yeah, speed is super important with those inbound, especially smaller leads.

Speaker B: Yeah, exactly. And as we grow that's not going to slow down, that's going to pick up even more. So there's ah, a how do you service awareness efficiently and effectively but more importantly how do you bridge the automation and AI to the human? Then how do you have that handoff? Because every handoff is an opportunity for a ball to be dropped. Again, another football or sports analogy, but it's absolutely true, right?

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: The go to market engine is a series of handoffs and if you don't maximize your ability to touch and grab the ball each time, you're going to fumble.

Speaker A: So how do you think about that?

Speaker B: I think at the bottom end of the spectrum, depending on how you layer your business and your business model, you absolutely want to be more weighted to automation and AI and good data. But then you're going to reach a threshold where customers need human interaction. Maybe there's some gaps that you need to solve for in your product or maybe they're just large enough where the value requires a conversation. Yeah, you're going to need to put your people there. Every business is different. You're going to need to draw a line on uh, where your customer segmentation is. Ultimately that's probably more important than the question you're asking is what does your business look like today and what's the bottom end of the top end look like and where are you going from there? You should be able to then, okay, bottom quartile. Need to keep that running. It's a long tail but I don't want to put a lot of people there.

Speaker A: It's usually the lowest margin business side of the business anyway. Even if it was a lot of uh, people, you know, it's probably costing you the most to service but you

Speaker B: don't want those Reddit boards and everything else firing up uh, because you're not responsive.

Speaker A: True. Yeah. It can cost you in other ways. Yeah, it's a good point. Yeah, that's interesting. And yeah, I think it gets even more complicated now for companies that maintain multiple segments versus hey, we just do plg at scale stuff or we just do enterprise. Cool. We could think about giving them tools to be more efficient per person. When you have that blend, you're kind of solving two big new worlds at the Same time.

Speaker B: Yes.

Speaker A: Like you guys. Right. Like you guys have large enterprise customers, but then you also have, you know, I'm a happy user on the B2C side of my family.

Speaker B: So yeah, that's the juggle. Right. And that's where it gets really complicated.

Speaker A: Yeah. Because most tools and partners optimizing for one of the two. And like we see this a lot with businesses that have both ends of the spectrum. We primarily focus on businesses that are more upmarket. Well, if you're buying us, then you're maybe a part of your business is missing out on that value. So how do you juggle now? Maybe you need two vendors for each problem you're solving.

Speaker B: Right.

Speaker A: Because you need to solve it on both ends of the spectrum. So yeah, it's an interesting challenge.

Speaker B: Absolutely it is. And it's one that revops seems relish because they're the nerve center of the go to market engine. And again, if you're too late in hiring one and building that function out, who's going to solve these problems for you?

Speaker A: Yeah, he'll just be fixing them for a while. Awesome. Well, speaking of which, I'm sure you got a lot of things to get back to. Any kind of final thoughts for folks maybe early in their career in the rev ops world thinking about, you know, going down a similar path to you.

Speaker B: Be curious about how things work. Have uh, empathy for the selling process. It's hard out there and getting harder and look to be in service of sales. Right. Don't build pretty, don't build, you know, perfection. Build for pace because you need those incremental gains to grow over time.

Speaker A: Amazing. Awesome. Well, appreciate you taking a few with us and sharing your insights with the community here.

Speaker B: Uh, thanks for having me, Ross. Sam.