Lessons in RevOps From Pardot, Terminus, and Beyond - Mallory Lee

Justin Norris: Welcome to RebOps FM. Today we're speaking with Mallory Lee and Mallory, one of the really cool things I noticed about your CV is you've kind of done it all when it comes to all the different RebOps hats you can wear. You were internal strategy consultant at Pardot. You were a RebOps and BizOps executive at companies like Terminus and Nihilus.

I did a tour of duty with an agency, worked as a solo consultant, RevOps product advisor, and most recently co founder of the RevTechReview, which is a no BS way to understand revenue technology tools. I also find Mallory sharing a lot of knowledge on LinkedIn. You can look up and follow her there. Mallory, so excited to dive in.

Thank you for coming on the show. Mallory Lee: Yeah. Thanks for the invite. I'm excited too.

Justin Norris: Maybe just to start, you know, I listed all of these different things what is your favorite? Which of those areas have you found, the most fulfilling? Mallory Lee: I think that's hard. think that I have the most fun as an in house operator, getting to be part of an executive team.

So those roles tend to be my passion. helping to steer a business and grow it. Justin Norris: there's pros and cons. It is fun as a consultant to kind of come in and tackle a very focused problem and move on to the next thing.

There's something very gratifying though, about, growing with the business, uh, long term you mentioned, in a recent post, so I thought it was really interesting. I've been seeing this too. I've been going through some renewal cycles right now. So it's kind of been top of mind for me as a, buyer, but you mentioned an interesting trend in, RevTech buying behavior.

about rev ops, no longer being the buyer. And maybe we just started there. I'd love for you to unpack that a little bit, because I think a lot of sellers, they sell like a rev tech tool, that is a persona that they focus on. Mallory Lee: Yeah.

It's been kind of a fascinating realization for me, honestly. I've been in a position before where I owned the technology budget and made a lot of those decisions on behalf of the business. I still anticipate that that is a role that RevOps people need to play. But I don't think that there's very often a budget for a revenue operations dedicated tool.

And most of the time we are spending money on behalf of other departments and trying to make sure that the holistic stack makes sense. however, you know, in the last few years, the rev ops profession and the role has been like the number one fastest growing job it's become very popular. And so a lot of founders rightfully. So have wanted to create technology to make the rev ops profession better or easier.

it's this contradiction because, as a rev ops team, We spend all of our time thinking about how to make everyone else's lives easier very few times. Do we try to make our own lives any easier or better? So I believe there is a need for some Rev Ops technology, but I don't think that we're in the kind of economic climate where people are going to be able to make a case to say, Hey, this is going to make my rev ops team's life easier. Can we purchase this?

and even if you're getting that approval from your CFO and, and yourself, people are having to make really hard choices about where to spend that budget. And I think that a lot of us just kind of default to, you know, sales and marketing efficiency for most of the rev tech budgets. Justin Norris: I totally know what you're talking about and it's hard. Cause I would love to buy technology to make my life easier, but I think if you look at like how companies are going to market, it's kind of like a week.

Positioning, to be like, oh, we're going to save your rev ops team time. It's like, well, maybe, maybe if you've got a, 500 person rev ops team that becomes compelling, but usually not. Is this a message that you've delivered, to any of the companies that you're working with, maybe that are playing in that space, like have, companies understood this or are people still trying to like, Go this route and struggle with it. Mallory Lee: I think that almost any company out there has to spend a lot of time and it takes a lot of iteration to figure out, what's the pain point we're solving.

How do we connect that back to the major impact on a business? How do we make it tie into a big enough and expensive enough problem that people are willing to invest budget on this? And it's not easy. And, and I've been there as a marketer trying to make that case, for the businesses that I've worked for.

so the way that I think about it is take the feature set, take the problem we're solving and just keep following it all the way up the chain until we figure out what that ultimate impact is. And then let's try to tie into that. In our value prop, easier said than done. Like it's, very complicated, but people are really open to the feedback.

They're open to hearing, okay, saving time's not enough. We need to also be, growing or scaling or making more revenue somehow. So how do we make that argument without everyone just sounding the exact same, I think is the challenge. Uh, and I, can't pretend to have that figured out, but it's an interesting one.

Justin Norris: I'm curious, like the, the process of iteration that you described, I've experienced it too. And it's a really interesting, also sometimes kind of painful and frustrating process. if we look at like some of your in houses experiences, either as a marketer or maybe as like a revenue operator, like working with sales teams on iterating that pitch, like, what does that look like? How do you kind of diagnose and how do you know when you're starting to hit on something solid?

Mallory Lee: I hope that data can help guide the story there. lots of data can be collected by just talking to customers, really understanding and interviewing them. What are you doing with this thing? How is it helping you?

How is it making your life better? even if you learn something that sends you in a different direction, that's progress. So being able to get in front of customers, I think is the most important thing. second, having your platform instrumented in a way that you can understand what product usage is happening.

And, um, Is vital and a lot of tools that have been around for a little bit longer, that have struggled in recent months or years might not be able to really see that They might know why someone bought it 4 years ago, but they might not know what's getting used today. What impact is this having today? what kind of buyer personas are deeply engaged with our product right now to keep evolving that, that value prop as they move forward. in the case where you have a very open and extensible product that can be used a lot of ways.

That was the case at Nihilist. It was an API product that could be used a million ways. we really were attempting to dig into the data to see what Okay, this customer is in this industry, their office size, their product looks like this. And here are the 14 features they use the most.

What can we kind of derive from these combinations to get a real sense of like what they're doing with it in their use case? that might be an extreme example because APIs are. Yeah. Just inherently building blocks.

They're very open to any use case. So hopefully it's, not quite that crazy for a lot of businesses out there that started with a hypothesis of what the product was going to do and going out there and proving, that it's working. But I guess I would just circle back again to like making sure that, the customers are getting to tell their stories. Justin Norris: you know, you were at Terminus, I think during a time when the ABM category was really exploding and I've been thinking of this category a lot in light of the, demand creation debate that I see happening in a lot of posts in my LinkedIn feed, at least, um, around, is this a real thing?

Is that, is that not a real thing? And I think of that as a category where like nobody had an ABM platform budget. Like it just wasn't a thing. And then all of a sudden that, emerged, there was a lot of great messaging around flip my funnel and all this kind of stuff and everybody, you know, had to have one.

was that kind of like a gold rush to experience that? Or were there any challenges that you saw? Mallory Lee: Yeah, there certainly were a few challenges. you know, I've gotten lucky to be in the right place at the right time a few different times.

And I was at exact target when email marketing took off. I was at part out when marketing automation took off and then I was at terminus pretty shortly after everything just went insane with ABM. And I think at first we really needed to repurpose the advertising budget to get budget for something like terminus. That was the beginning of somebody spending money on technology for advertising purposes.

So we were kind of taking program dollars and repurposing them toward software budget, but both components happened in the platform. You had ad spend and technology spend. So I think it was incumbent on companies like Terminus to Continue to broaden the platform, make that technology piece much more valuable outside of advertising alone. And so that's when you saw a lot of the intent data come in, a lot of account scoring and prioritization types of things, they needed to continue to add features to make that platform fee.

You bigger than the ads themselves. And so it was, just a really neat experience. And I think this would go back to the idea that you have to keep iterating on the value prop, especially as competitors come in and begin. Doing similar things.

let's say in the advertising world, how are you going to continue to differentiate? How are you going to help your customers progress and evolve? And something that we talked about a lot at Terminus was being this trusted partner to help someone with their account based strategy. It can't just be about using the tool.

It has to be about. Their overall ABM strategy. how are they effective? How do they work with sales and have sales and marketing alignment?

Those were very front and center for us because we knew that the stronger, the ABM strategy, the better. The better retention that we would have for our, product. Justin Norris: And when you think about that, category of ABM, as a concept, ABM makes a lot of sense. My observation on the category, not necessarily specific to Terminus, cause I've never used that tool, but on some of the other players.

Um, and speaking to people in the community that hasn't always delivered, on what it was intended to do. A lot of people frustrated. what's your observation there? Is that something that you've seen too?

And if so, where do you think it fell short? Mallory Lee: Yeah, I've seen it and I've experienced that myself as well. and I think that there is a time and a place for account based ads. for sure, but I don't know if we ever quite had the right expectation for what that kind of platform should be doing for us.

And so that is probably the underlying issue is that. We were trying to create something that was going to deliver on an expectation that never made sense. And when I had used ABM platforms prior to joining Terminus, I used demand based and I used Terminus at Cheetah Digital. And when I was at Cheetah Digital, I was leading marketing operations.

So I was in the ops world, but I was laser focused on marketing and spending our budget effectively and generating demand. And my biggest message to everybody in the room was like, we should not expect leads from this. This is not a lead generation platform. We need to have the appropriate expectation about how it influences, and we need to think through what we really want to get out of this thing.

And I always have a story, back from my exact target days. so I'm based in Indianapolis and exact target was in Indianapolis downtown. We had an office right on like The circle in the center of, of downtown. and when I started working there right out of school, they were just, you know, starting to really take off.

And everyone I talked to, if they asked me where I worked, I said, exact target. And he said, Oh, I just see you everywhere. I see exact target everywhere. What do you do?

And a lot of people didn't even know what the company did, but they were so familiar with the brand exact target had. an amazing product and such amazing people, it still had its sharp edges, right? everything does. It was really hard to use, back then.

And the brand just helped us overcome so many of those potential issues. And so I think it's easy for people to overlook the importance of brand. And when it comes to something like account based marketing, it should encompass your entire demand gen strategy. But those specific account based ads, they're banner ads, they're branding, right?

They're not magical portals that people can jump to, to like get to your salesperson. And I think that we just put too much pressure on what we thought they would allow us to do. So if you think about them as a branding mechanism, and just a way to more correctly target the companies you care about with your branding, I think people see it very differently. And I think that you can start to justify pretty quickly.

For it to make sense to just have impressions for those certain companies that you want to sell to on your target list. And you can see if you're engaging your target list, you can see if they're getting impressions. hopefully you start to see those companies respond to your emails because they see you everywhere. And that's the idea.

So I think that's the best way to use it. And I think it's pretty easy to make a good case for those kinds of technologies. if we're setting the right goals. Justin Norris: one of the things that you just said that really resonated with me was around, the lack of clarity on like what an ABM tool could do.

Like this concept became so powerful and yet there was like. Almost like this magical black box of like, we're going to do ABM and ads are a very important component of that, obviously. But I've, at least personally, like using those tools, I've often like, you know, open the box and been like, this is it. where's the part where you actually help, do ABM and.

I remember, um, being in some like early design sessions, with the team at Engageo, you know, it was later acquired by demand based and they were trying to solve this problem around orchestration and how do we orchestrate multiple sellers and multi thread and it never fully came to life, but it feels like that's the piece that, you know, still doesn't exist very well. Mallory Lee: you're exactly right. And I remember back when I was working with, Cheetah digital, I really wanted to pair ABM and Engagio together.

And I was always such a big fan of Engagio and that approach, didn't work out budget wise. We never pulled the trigger on that, but I agree with you. Like there's, there's a planning component, there's targeting component, there's. There's so much work to be done and just defining your ideal customer and figuring out who is the right fit for your product.

that's a big part of the iteration on the value prop, you know, because the closer you get to understanding that the closer you will find the people who have those problems. And so obviously a lot of work to do and it's all, very intertwined. but I think that was part of the struggle with terminus back to your question before is it took off so fast and it became something that you just have to do. And it's almost like the hype, became more than what it was ever intended to be.

And so, there were a few things that we almost had to like. Not walk back, but just go deeper on and explain to people like this, platform can't be your whole strategy. Like you have to have strategy and then the platform helps you execute it. And, a lot of people make that same, mistake with a lot of different tools.

Justin Norris: I think if we fast forward today, to some extent, we're probably Probably repeating that mistake in many places with like signal based selling and everything that's going on here. and so I'm, I'm curious for your take, if you have a perspective, on the, problem still exists and companies are still trying to go outbound. Something I think about a lot just in my, my day job. what tools out there do you like, what do you see?

That's interesting. How do you see like tech and strategy marrying as part of executing that? It's Mallory Lee: So I do have a tool in mind. I'll tell you a very quick story first.

So when I started to see all of these signal based platforms come to life, there were some integrations that happened, on the tech side that just made it very compelling to understand when someone changed jobs. Right. I think that's one of the very first signals that people started to really lean into. And I remember specifically back at Terminus, we pay a contractor every month.

To go find those job changes manually, and we would upload that list and we would go work those leads. and it was very manual. And then before you knew it, the software started to support that and back it up. And I still think that it's a powerful signal, but it's also probably like the most.

Misused signal, and it's the perfect example of why the technology cannot be the only like savior because I am someone who, you know, wears a lot of hats. I've had a lot of roles. anytime I add an advisor position. To my LinkedIn profile, I get these messages from people trying to sell everything under the sun.

Hey, I saw you joined rattle. Are you interested in buying this thing? I'm thinking to myself, you didn't even look at what my position is. I don't work there, you know what I mean?

And so they're wasting this opportunity to, find out what that signal really means and approach with the correct message and the correct strategy from an outbound standpoint. So I think that is an example of where it gets ahead of you, that, signal platform is getting ahead of us. If we're not careful, we will back off of it completely because, you know, The outbound signals aren't working and it's because we're not using the information correctly. one way that I really think people should use it is to just make it a component of timing.

Now there is some research out there that suggests that when someone starts a new role as like a VP or higher, they make their plans for their budgets. In the first, like six to nine months, that's when they decide how they're going to spend money. So, you know, that there is a window that you need to get in at it's not day one, right? People don't decide those things in their first week in a new role.

And so jumping in too soon, not useful jumping in without realizing what technology they use already today. Not as useful. there are tools out there like built with that can tell you which technologies are on someone's website when they got detected, maybe it's going to expire a year from that time. Maybe it's two years from that time.

So being as informed as possible, getting as much data as you can and forming a hypothesis that really allows you to reach out to somebody with something to say. I think is the important part. So, you know, it might be something like, Hey, congrats on joining this new company. I see you're going to be Ops.

noticed that your team today is using Terminus. I'm curious if you are looking to adjust your plans for Terminus, if so, here's the way we, Add value and solve pain for a business like yours. And would you like to get a demo so you've got like full understanding of what you're working with? something that just shows that you have done the homework to know what's going on, I think is really important.

And so if we don't do those homework jobs, kind of like surrounding. The signals, then we're going to continue to have poor outreach. Justin Norris: just saying that there's no silver bullets. 100 percent agreed on the customer job change signal.

I think it's an own signal that is hard for someone else to replicate. They don't have your customer list. shout out to user gems and full disclosure is a, sponsor of the show. but we've seen in, in using that platform, which we use internally at my company, when it works, it is magical or someone's like, Oh yeah, great.

Like, let's, go. Like, yeah, I don't, I think we can skip the formal demo. Like I bought, I already. But, you can't apply it like we had to iterate a lot on it and work through different cadences, work through different messaging, get the process in place.

It's a bit of a painful slog. At least I find. And I'm curious for your point of view on the rule of rev ops in there because There's a lot of chefs in that kitchen. There's like the SDR team and their leader, maybe sales, demand gen or marketing is there.

Rev Ops is there. Like, what should the ideal role of Rev Ops be in that process? Mallory Lee: So, the way that I think about this is that RevOps needs to have very tight understanding and very, iterative and constantly refreshed and very good command over the ICP. And that requires a lot of data and it changes a lot and we need to source, you know, where do we find the information that tells us, are you part of the ICP or are you not?

that is chiefly a rev ops role to shepherd everyone into understanding what the ICP is. Reporting on those success or lack thereof, when we're working in the ICP incorporating, you know, the strategic changes that people want for the business to think about how it might shift in the future again, like value props, just reiterating that back through and making sure that the people we are targeting. Are experiencing this big pain point that we've decided to solve and then making that data systematically and accurately available to all of the people who need to look at accounts.

And so, it's a great example. Like, when I was at Nihilist, we used, a CS platform I'm not going to call out which 1, because, um. I just don't feel like I need to, but, we were happy with it and it was great. And I signed the contract, right?

So they had me in their database as someone to reach back out to. And when I started consulting and I was partnering with union square, I was in their campaign of. This person changed roles. We know that she's thought before let's get back in front of her.

And so I got more than several messages, from this company asking if I would potentially be interested. And what they didn't realize was that union square was like a five person consulting company. We were not in their ICP at all. And so they were still targeting me.

Regardless, and the messaging was nice. It was fine. There was nothing wrong with the way that they reached out. I even actually replied and said, Hey, we're not in your ICP, but I think that a rev ups team who has an idea and has a handle.

On what that ICP looks like and how to correctly prioritize around it. And keeping in mind that it really is dynamic and it really does evolve a lot. they can help people avoid those kinds of mistakes. Justin Norris: Does it speak to like a lack of sophistication in the SDR teams or the sellers that are there because you.

look at that, you know, something that anyone with a five second look at, at LinkedIn could have made that discovery that you described and avoided that misstep. It's almost like if you're going to be that, I don't know, the word that's coming to my mind is lazy. I'm trying to find a softer word, but if you're going to not put that work in, you might as well have AI just send that email because probably with clay you could actually do your enrichment and prevent that to be honest.

Mallory Lee: Yeah. Well, I mean, in fairness with this vendor, I don't know if, it was an automated email or not. a couple of the emails I got were branded and a couple of them weren't. And I think that's.

That's still completely automated. If you know, if you work hard enough to get that rhythm going, you can do that. so either they didn't take the time to check or they just funneled me into the same program everybody else was in and those emails were automated and the ICP segmentation was not part of their audience. Segmentation and building.

And so again, we're back to like, first you have to have the right strategy. The right strategy is to say, okay, identify the people that have changed roles and if they fit X, Y, Z criteria, then put them into the cadence. but from a technological perspective, do you have a way to score accounts? Do you send that account score data over to the place where you send your emails from?

it all has to be, very connected to implement those strategies at scale. And, if you're not doing it at scale, then of course, please make the person check. But if you are trying to do these things at scale, you've got to get the tools to talk to each other. Justin Norris: Even a little bit further back into your CV and into the tech landscape.

And you're right. You have been in a lot of interesting places at the right time because, um, you, it is, it is really, really interesting, but you were, you were at Pardot, that was the start of my career as well, not, not necessarily working at a marketing automation vendor, but just kind of like starting with marketing automation and having that be my, my My access point into ops. so we've got kind of the legacy players, and PowerDot and Marketo, and to an extent Eloqua kicking around.

I'm curious how you see this landscape today. Do we think that those players are going to be the players of the future? Or is there like does marketing automation become something else to remain relevant? Mallory Lee: don't think it has to become something else, but I think that that first generation of tools was built for different businesses.

They were just built for extreme inbound marketing. they've got good strategies for several things, right? So the reason that my mind just always instantly goes to segmentation, audience building, getting relevant, that is just in my DNA from my email marketing background. Right.

And that is what marketing automation Really taught us was don't just send everyone the same email, get the information from the CRM, send the right email to the right person. They helped us build these dynamic audiences. And for the first time, we were able to do a lot with, personalization and targeting and segmentation. So that's still like very deeply embedded in probably everything I do.

And so building on that, the question is like what do we need to keep up with the way, you know, our businesses have changed today and what I found and what I learned at Nihilus was that, none of the legacy players were built in a way that allowed product usage data to be part of the conversation. I really do think that all marketing automation is going to have to evolve to that point. Because all B2B is out there, they've got software of some kind. If they don't have software of some kind yet, they're probably trying to think of how to build it.

And a lot of people, are blending now a license based approach and a usage based approach, because we've seen that that's great for retention and net retention and expansion of our revenue. So if you are trying to do old school marketing automation, With a new school product lens. it just doesn't work and I've tried it and you can't do it. So to make a long story short, I am a really big fan of inflection.

io and their approach. And what they do is they are kind of product first and they hook up to your database or segment and they receive all the product events that are happening. And they digest those in a way that makes them available for marketing and segmentation and list building and, you know, dynamic email content. so I do think that that is the next wave of all of the marketing automation work that's going on.

And. Even for something like, Terminus, for example, we never thought of ourselves at Terminus as a product led growth company. the real growth there happened before that nickname probably even existed. So if you take a step back and you think about something like Terminus, I remember being so frustrated that our product was not originally built in a way.

That allowed us to see some of the details of the usage and that was nobody's fault. Like it just wasn't the way you did things back then. but we couldn't message people with that insight. And when our CSMs would be getting ready for a customer QBR had to go manually, see so many things about ad volumes and ad spend and how they're using the platform.

but If I were talking to someone at terminus today, I would still suggest to them, like, you can be a product led company. You can do the things to get people to use the product more to grow their ad spend further. You can do things to help them grow and their database size will grow. And so even people who haven't historically felt that they were in a PLG company.

need to be pursuing these opportunities to know how people are using the product and build that in to the messaging that you're bringing to your customers. Justin Norris: So with you about inflection, I've taken a few demos, had David Gaudi on the show before and such big fans of, of what they're doing there. I wonder if one of the advantages they have, and I think about this a lot is, just simply that they're building the tool now and not, you know. in 2010 or 2008 or whatever it was.

don't know how Salesforce and HubSpot have managed to do this, but there's almost like, you know, your legacy tech debt of the product is this like black hole sucking you back and there needs to be a certain amount of energy to reach escape velocity, to like bring the platform into the modern era. And it feels to me if I'm, I'm being Frank and I say this still as a Marketo customer, but that the legacy platforms have generally not managed to do it. Don't seem to be able to manage to do that.

And that's one of the big reasons why I feel like. They'll be overtaken because they just can't evolve past that old architecture. does that resonate with you at all? Mallory Lee: it does.

Yeah. I I'm on the exact same page as you. you know, I'm also friends with Dave and Aaron and And they will also be the first to tell you that they learned so much from the way they did it the first time. And building now is such a different advantage to the way that we built in the past.

with that said, there are times where you see companies try to take a few quarters, hunker down, do an overhaul and get more modern. I think that there is a lot of courage in leaders who decide to do that. And it's not easy. And right now the environment's not very friendly to it because all of us are just trying to keep up with any kind of growth.

especially after a lot of people's valuations got so out of whack. And so having a couple of off quarters is like, Very, very difficult right now. and it's happening to, you know, a lot of people, even who are maybe not trying to overhaul their products, but generally speaking, it just feels like a tough time to say, Hey, we're going to go reengineer this entire platform. And.

what actually happened with, Nihilus is that our team did that, but they did it concurrently. They built the V3 version of the platform alongside the V2. And now there's a big migration in the works that's necessary for customers because, nothing could slow down while the other one was being built. And I think that's the definition of, fast paced.

Technology that the cliche you hear is like, you're building the plane while you're flying it. And so some people are literally having to like build another plane next to the plane they're flying and then try to get people to hop over to it. And it's crazy. But, there are some products out there that if they don't do that kind of thing, it'll, be really tough.

Justin Norris: It's a really interesting problem. I feel like there should be like an HBR, article either way, it seems there's pain. You know, if we think about the transition Salesforce and like how long that took and, like, they managed to make it happen. And in other cases, I look at Marketo and Marketo, not everyone was probably aware of it, but they had the, short lived Marketo sky interface, which was kind of like their new lightning.

And that project was failed and walked back. And, you know, we're left with this kind of like Frankenstein interface that no one really is satisfied with. I feel like a lot of companies don't realize what an existential problem it is, not just the UI. Of course, those are UI changes, but the whole package, the building, the new plane next to the one that's flying, I think is the perfect example.

of that, I want, I want to jump up and, and talk about RevOps, writ large a little bit. And, maybe actually I'll jump right to the punchline, which is, the thing that everyone talks about, which maybe is, least consequential, but RevOps versus GTMOps. what is your take on this? Is it just, we love labeling things.

Is it just a new name? Is it something more meaningful than that in your point of view? Mallory Lee: Yeah. I do have some strong opinions on this, so to skip to my punchline.

I think they are the same thing. don't think there's any real difference between revenue operations and go to market operations. And I actually spoke about this somewhat recently at op stars. And that was what my entire session was about.

Like. Is go to market operations, just a fad. You know, what do we need to be thinking about with this? And there are some people out there who, really think it's different.

And what I have found in the research that it took for me to prepare for that, that speaking engagement is everyone has a different opinion. There's literally no two people who define anything the same. And so the takeaway for me is that. The word go to market operations is probably not going away.

We need to find a way to coexist with it. we don't necessarily have to pick one camp or the other. I think the place where we end up having to choose is all about job titles. And, I'm a rev ops leader.

I'm up for a promotion. Should I be lobbying to have my title changed because it's going to keep me Bye bye. You know, in this like modern labeling, you know, scheme the most common thing I can find is that people who use the go to market ops label, they are most likely reporting to a CRO who doesn't really oversee all of revenue. So if the CRO leads only sales.

And the rev ops team is not solely sales ops, then they've gotten this like inherent bad name because there are people out there who say, Oh, well, sales ops is just rev ops relabeled. And it's not actually the full, bow tie or funnel or whatever. And then there were some people who are like, well, hold on. I am the whole funnel.

I am called rev ops, but I do the entire customer journey. Just because my boss doesn't do the entire customer journey doesn't mean I don't. So I'm going to be called go to market ops now. And they're just trying to continue to buck this, negative trend that rev ops is still just sales ops.

And I think, you know, both you and I have this like marketing operations background and it gives us a very unique way to think about what are these differences? Like, How do you do rev ops in a way that is not just sales ops relabeled? And I've been very lucky to work with leaders who are very supportive of a rev ops model that starts with marketing ends with CS and product. It's got to include product as well.

So if you are, fully representing every part of that customer journey, call it whatever you want. That's all I care about is. getting every single phase as part of my data set, as part of my thought process, as part of the way I support the business. And I do think there are some people out there who maybe need to use that go to market wording.

To overcome some kind of like reputation or stigma inside their company. And, you know, fine, do what you need to do. but it is hard for those of us who are just confused and it's like, well, what am I supposed to be? And one thing that I mentioned, at all stars is actually, you know, if we start to see such a divergence in these two categories, that one of them starts having.

Like more earning power than the other. That's when I think you have to start paying more attention. Like if someone is paying 10 percent more or 20 percent more for a go to market operations leader, Then a rev ops leader, that's when I'm probably going to be like, okay, this is silly. Justin Norris: Back to your early point about the power of branding, it is a real thing.

I'm so aligned with your, your point of view there, like the underlying problem is whether it actually is all encompassing of all those different go to market teams or not, no matter how many times you repaint it, it's not gonna, change that fun. So that brings me to the question, because I think for some people it is a question about whether a unified. does make sense. I've heard cases made in both directions.

It seems you're more in the unified camp, but I'd be curious to know like why you think that's important. Mallory Lee: Yep. I am in the camp of unified, team. I also prefer a non CRO boss for rev ops to, a little bit for the objectivity a little bit, because I think that your, uh, Senior rev ops person and your CRO should be challenging each other and partnering and should be peers.

is that always possible? Maybe not. I think that the unified model is really, really good for companies of a certain size and call it like series B to series D E. at some point the company becomes.

Quite large. And that is when I see people start to veer back toward a more siloed model where they've got a big enough team where they really want that, like embedded support for the team. And, I think anything can work as long as the parties are all on the same page, working together, everything fits. I prefer the unified approach, but.

I've been working in businesses of a size where that's easy to do and makes a lot of sense. Justin Norris: I prefer the unified approach to just conceptually and based on some experience, but I do think, and you highlighted like the marketing ops background. I do think there are a lot of marketing operators who have a justified trepidation about Am I going to lose my autonomy? Am I just going to get sucked up underneath the sales ops person who reports to a CRO and marketing won't care.

And then marketing brings in like shadow marketing ops to replace what they lost. like, how do you address that fear? Mallory Lee: Yeah. It's hard.

I have been the marketing ops leader before who didn't want to go to Rev Ops. And so it's hilarious to me, uh, just thinking back because actually the digital, I was the marketing ops leader and I reported to the CMO. And then there was a sales ops team. That became a Rev Ops team and they started by joining, sales and CS and services operations altogether.

And so it was like, what's Mallory going to do, you know, and I was already, appear to the Rev Ops leader and I already had a team of like 6 or 7 people. And for me personally, it was a career path thing. It was like, why do I need to go report to this guy? Who is my friend and buddy, who I totally respect and love, but like, I don't want him to be my boss.

And back then I was much more in like a marketing career path. And so I thought it was going to mess up my career path. And I didn't want to combine, my very next role after that was terminus. And when I got there, They already had the combined unified model reporting to the CFO.

And so I was really open to it. I didn't know what I didn't know, and I just wanted to have an open mind. And then I found out how much I liked it and how great it was. And I think that it depends a lot on who is leading that team.

And when a marketing ops person. Is under a rev ops umbrella that reports to the CRO who doesn't own marketing. I don't blame them in the slightest. I don't think I would want to do that either.

is it doable? Yes. Is it ideal? Probably not.

every company has to kind of decide what kind of CRO they're going to have. A lot of people are hesitant to move marketing under a CRO because they already have a CMO. So again, that's a career path thing. Like what do I do with this amazing CMO?

Who doesn't want to report to her peer, who leads sales and CS, like you can't unify in that model. And, a lot of times it does come back to the people, but on the same topic of people, if everyone can work together and everybody knows like how to, how to, how Talk about things and unify the data across the customer journey and work together. You can overcome, being on different teams if you have to, Justin Norris: I'm curious what your experience was like reporting into the CFO, because I do agree that like having some Switzerland neutral, like party makes the most sense.

CFO is often like they have a really valuable lens on the business, but they're often a bit distanced from the day to day. Did that impair at all? Or was it, was it useful? Mallory Lee: for myself, it was very useful.

I was lucky because I was working with a CFO who had a Rev Ops background. So, not exactly normal. but that's the kind of CFO that I was working with. now at other businesses, where the CFO doesn't have a Rev Ops background.

I still think there's so much value there and there's so much exchange of knowledge that goes both ways that everybody benefits from. And so I have really loved learning about the more financial side of operations. And. Being tightly connected to an FP and a team can be a really big help for a rev ops group that doesn't have a lot of analyst horsepower.

And that's been me. I've been lucky to have a lot of big teams, a lot of great teams, but there's just never enough analyst horsepower to. Look into all the things you want to look into and go as deep as you want. So those FPNA analysts have been my lifeline more times than I can count because they just, You know, they know how to get in there and find answers to things.

and I think that if Rev Ops and finance are on the same page, you can do the right things for comp plans. You can do the right things for, you know, all kinds of different applications, but the Rev Ops leader has to have that ability to speak up and not just like be cheap because they work for the CFO. so for that reason. CFO is not necessarily my number one choice.

I think that it is a fine choice, but I think for me, CEO has always been my preference because when it's time to sit down and plan and put something together, you know, you've got the CEO representing the board and the insane growth targets that are probably out there. You've got the CRO representing his team and his bottoms up view of what is possible from a quota attainment standpoint. and you have the CFO view who is going to be pushing for higher quotas, going to be pushing for a more scalable comp plan where, you know, we're not maybe paying out as much commission.

Like everyone has these vested interests and their job is to bring their vested interests to the table. And then you've just got your neighborhood Rev Ops person mediating this whole thing. And it's like, okay, I see everybody's perspective. I understand like why everyone is motivated the way they are for me personally.

I want to help us get to an answer that serves as many of those goals as possible. And the right answer is typically somewhere in the middle. And so that is the kind of leadership role that I've just really come to enjoy is like. Hey, Mr.

CRO, like you're getting a little crazy. Like we're not going to be paying X, Y, and Z when so and so is only at 50 percent of quota. That's just not going to happen. And you have to be that like translator between these guys that are gals and, and the voice of reason sometimes, um, But that's, the fun part.

Justin Norris: It's a great vision. I love it. I have one more random question that I want to talk a little bit about what you're doing with RevTechReview, because I think it's a really cool idea and, something that's needed, um, but it's run product consulting because I'm a little bit jealous if I'm being honest, because. When I use a tool, all I want to do is like tell them how to change it.

Like, like fix this, do that. Like you just feel as a user, like you really know. And when you've used enough software, you can really see it. So it feels like a really plum job.

So is it, is it as much fun as it sounds like getting to help some of these companies? I Mallory Lee: It has been for sure. how do I describe it? So, at exact target and part, well, part out specifically, I had some pretty strong opinions because I was a user and they were receptive.

But again, it was like, we had just been acquired by Salesforce. Who knew what was going to happen with the product? Like everybody was a little hesitant to say, yeah, let's just dive in and change everything. and at Terminus, I was always trying to get them to pursue some product ideas that would give us better data for our customers and better ways to like prove the ROI of doing ABM.

And sometimes they just didn't get prioritized. and so as an employee, I think the. Opinions that you bring to the table. A lot of times they are listened to and valued, but they're not the same as a customer opinion.

And so we're always kind of like favoring the roadmap for the customers. being a product advisor specifically, I should, clarify for A young product, like for a startup, it has been, just so cool because you describe your pain point. you help people understand what you personally are going through and like why you want to see a thing. And if you can describe it well enough, and if you can, get your point across in a way that someone can actually go and build that.

And then they go build it. And then a couple of weeks later, they show it to you has like mind blowing. it's the coolest thing that I've probably done, so far, which has been really, really fun. So it's not a full time gig.

I'm never going to be like a chief product officer. but to shed that light for someone who wants your expertise and to see them go act on it. And, then to hear, Hey, we demoed your new feature and they loved it. You know, like That's really cool.

Justin Norris: feel you a hundred percent. well, hopefully it's something you can keep doing, uh, you know, as a, Side gig, Mallory Lee: Yeah. Except I keep telling them that Rev Ops is not the buyer. So I, I might be like working myself out of a gig here, but Justin Norris: Of the bar, but we can speak on behalf of the buyer quite often, which Mallory Lee: yes.

Justin Norris: just maybe just as good maybe better than they can speak on behalf of themselves let's talk rev tech review and I love maybe just in your own words what the vision is why you started it? I working with molly who I also know molly bodensteiner so it's a small small world in rev up. So yeah, tell us about it Mallory Lee: Well, first Molly's just so cool and awesome. and the way that this got started was, I was continuing to see on LinkedIn, all of these different founders posting about their tool and their product.

And we have the best data and so and so lie about our data and ours is better. And we did a study here, look at our study. And how can the vendor put out their own study of whose data is better and expect us to just believe it? cause it's totally biased.

And it And I literally had just left a comment on one of Linda's posts from common room. And I said, we need an unbiased, open platform. Rev tech review to do this stuff. so that's just kind of where the idea popped into, um, my head and, talk to Molly about it and she liked it.

So the whole premise is that we have purchased a lot of technology and. We are not the expert in everything, but we're not afraid to have an opinion. And I think that is a little different than some of the review sites out there who don't necessarily try to advocate one way or the other. They just kind of put it in the hands of customers to, you know, get those ratings, get that volume, get their scores.

And I don't know about you, but I've worked at several companies that have been in meetings talking about their bad rating and how can we fix this? How do we send gift cards to the right people to get them to go and change our rating? And it's just really frustrating. Like it's not the right way for people to learn about technology.

and it's easy. Easy for me to sit back and try to, but anyway, so what we decided to do about it was, the RevTech review. So we meet with the vendor, we get a demo, we do a lot of research. We try to talk to their customers.

and we try to use it ourselves if, if we can, if there's like a trial or something, or if we have that past experience. And then we just do one editorial style review to give people, our perspective on it. And so it's been really fun so far. It's, a passion project, I guess you could say.

and we're not doing much with like any kind of monetization. So it's a slower growing thing, but it's been great so far. Justin Norris: Well, something that's very much needed. As you noted, I mean, the G twos of the world are useful.

are ways to influence with gift cards with things. and something that's objective, something that's also coming from a. An operator that's putting their, face on it and stamp on it. I think is, really useful too.

So very cool. congrats. I know, uh, from experience, how much, passion projects can take a lot of passion and a lot of work and a lot of free time, wish you good luck with that. And yeah, I just want to say, thank you so much for coming on the show.

And we, we went through a lot of different territories, but yeah, just super, super interesting, really appreciate all your insights Mallory Lee: Yeah. Thank you. Appreciate your time too. And there are some really good questions in there.

It felt like memory lane for a couple minutes, but, uh, I appreciate it. It was fun.