Go Beyond the Click with Post-Website Engagement, with Kieran Snaith, VP of Revenue Operations at Qualified

Speaker A: Foreign.

Speaker B: Um. Welcome to rise of RevOps. Today we'll hear from Kieran Snaith, VP of Revenue Operations at Qualified. He and Ian talk about bdr, how to increase productivity and driving action from something as simple as a website.

Speaker A: Click.

Speaker B: But first, let's hear a word from our sponsor.

Speaker A: Rise of repops is brought to you by Qualified. Qualified's Pipeline Cloud is the future of pipeline generation for revenue teams that use Salesforce. Learn more about the pipeline cloud on qualified.com welcome to Rise of RevOps. I'm Ian Faison, CEO of Caspian Studios, and today I am joined by a very special guest and an expert in RevOps. Kieran. How are you doing?

Speaker B: Well, Ian, how are you?

Speaker A: Excited to have you on the show. It's very fun because you were there from the very beginning of this show, lurking in the background with me on a Google Doc, figuring out what questions we wanted to ask Revops people. So it's full circle to bring you finally on the show to chat Revops and uh, everything you've seen over the past year. Plus, in a field that's honestly changing quite literally every month, I would agree.

Speaker B: Yep, changing every month. Very excited to be here. And we got the last episode, so I can't complain.

Speaker A: Yeah, that's right. The hammer, as they call it. So Kieran, what's your, what's your definition of RevOps?

Speaker B: My definition of RevOps is, um, essentially a singular department whose job or role it is to standardize the data, processes and technologies that, uh, each department use to get to a singular goal. In our case, that would be ARR,

Speaker A: you're the VP of RevOps. How did you think about building your team? How did you think about coming into the organization and building a RevOps function?

Speaker B: Yeah, we really took a brick by brick approach. You know, I, I joined the organization early on. I was employee number 40 or 41 and you know, I was kind of a singular Rev Ops lead at that point. What we began doing, you know, so at that point I was running marketing operations, sales operations, customer operations. I also had a unique situation and continue to this, continue to have this situation to this day where I have the inside sales team. So the BDRs and SDRs also roll directly into. Into my department. Um, you know, what we started to do is just identify areas where we needed to improve, where we need more bandwidth. And that started with sales operations. Um, um, so we made a very strategic sales sales operations hire. That person was responsible for really standardizing sales processes, quotas, things like that. From there we actually made a Very fast hire as well in our customer operations department, responsible for all things kind of net retention, gross retention, expansion, renewals, customer satisfaction, things like that. And then moved into marketing operations as well. So very kind of brick, bright brick. You know, we made those strategic hires and we continue to build out kind of, you know, each of those groups. Also our systems team.

Speaker A: It seems like in the interviews that we've done over the course of the series so far, you have sort of like two types of orgs where you have like brand new single point of failure rev ops person that's coming in at a similar sort of time that you did and building out the function, uh, or like a single person operator or you have the more senior person that is coming into a team that is a little bit established but sort of like needs to go to the next level. And then I guess the third one would be like, you know, obviously, uh, a uh, massive team that is very siloed with like, you know, there isn't a pure rev ops function. There's, there's just silos within the different things and they need to sort of like corral it all together. Because you came in as that single operator and could build it brick by brick and sort of do it, do it in your own vision. Do you feel like there were advantages there to be able to build it how you wanted to do it, or do you think that it was almost a little more challenging because you had to, you know, drink from so many different fire hoses and you had to really focus your time on building that sales operation ops, uh, function first.

Speaker B: I think there are major advantages to getting early and being able to start from scratch. You avoid kind of tech debt and maybe coming in and kind of adopting ways that things have been done that maybe weren't correct. So huge benefits to kind of being here and starting that program. I worked really closely with uh, the CEO and founders continue to till this day. But in the first year the primary goal was to give visibility into what was happening inside of a business. And that hadn't been done before. Right. So it really started on a whiteboard with the CEO, the founders coo, the go to market leaders of like, what questions do we need answered? What do we need to see, what do we need to measure? And we were able to build that structure from the ground up. Sometimes that data is not even available. So we had to implement workflows, processes, different kind of stamping mechanisms inside of our data models so that we could deliver these types of answers. So we got to build from scratch. In a fast moving organization. And eventually we were able to kind of deliver that like, visibility. From there we're now able to ask really intelligent questions and we get better and better at this every week, every month and just providing visibility, predictability to the overall business and outlook.

Speaker A: Yeah. What were some of the types of questions that you wanted to have answered or the types of questions that, that you were curious about back then?

Speaker B: Uh, going back two and a half years ago, I think that we had 10 really large questions that we were trying to answer. I won't be able to cover them all here. I don't have them off the top of my head. But first it started with like, how are we looking from an overall ARR perspective? Okay. Now the things that impact ARR are net new business, sales, expansion, sales, your gross retention. So we wanted really high level visibility into our ARR outlook. And then from there what you start to do is like, okay, well what impacts this? You know, let's start at the top of the funnel for this conversation. Okay, so pipeline, right? How many, you know, MQLs or marketing qualified leads or marketing qualified accounts do we have entering the funnel? How many are we then moving into a working state? How many opportunities have we been able to generate from that? How many have converted to stage two? How many are progressing through the pipeline? How many have won? Right, and that's just an indicator of our, of our pipeline funnel health. So that was one question. The next would be sales. So the question is, well, how much open pipeline do we have in this period and how much can we expect to maybe come in in this period and close very quickly? Um, and then with that, what is our like forecast going to be this month, this quarter, the next six months? And then the third question is always around kind of gross retention and net retention. Right. So how do, how's the customer health looking? Do we have what, what percentage of our customers are green, yellow or red? What can we do for these red customers to ensure that they're, you know, getting roi, they're satisfied, and they're ultimately set up for renewal. And those are really like the high level, like three pillars I would kind of highlight here. It's kind of like, got it, like pipeline sales, grr, nrr and you've got that overall ARR outlook. We did a ton of additional stuff as well. Like we wanted to better understand our competitive landscape. We wanted to better understand what was like impacting our deals to maybe like slow down. And each of these would actually require its own analytical kind of packet that to uh, deliver. So anytime we had a question, it couldn't really fit within that any of the structures I mentioned before, we would deliver a new one and a new kind of way that we would maybe look at like competitive landscape for an example.

Speaker A: That's really cool. Did you explain a little bit more about the green, yellow, red and building that out and what that means?

Speaker B: Green, yellow and red is, you know, a very high level way of like classifying a customer. And that's like the highest exact language that we would maybe like speak. What we actually do is I think we've got maybe like five to ten different scoring mechanisms. Grant Guerrero is our uh, director of uh, revenue operations. So he works under me and then he owns the success area. He actually measures like 10 different plus points on a customer to identify their health. And then what we do is we weight those. We take averages to eventually give us an overall highest level score of red, yellow or green. But it encompasses a ton of different, different stuff. Ian, this could be customer usage. Are they logging in and using the software? Are they receiving ROI from the platform? What is their sen sentiment on us? So like, how do you know? How do they actually, how do we feel they feel? In any given conversation or in any given quarter, we'll do other things like CSAT and customer satisfaction, net promoter score, things like that to also measure overall health and likeliness to renewal.

Speaker A: I love it. Quick note back on, on just strategy here. Any other sort of just like strategic things that now you've been sitting in the seat for the past two and a half years. Any changes to your strategy or how you think about revops and building your team?

Speaker B: Yeah, so I mean there have been a lot of changes over the past few years and it's really, we start with identifying a problem or an area that we can like build further efficiencies. So you know, we might specialize a function further. Look for ways that we can kind of take one role and break it into three. Specialization of those kind of like functions so that people can, can become more productive. You know, that's one we're always trying to reassess. Like, you know, how can we make an individual more productive? What are the things that we need to change so that they can do more pipeline, close more deals, cover more accounts From a uh, success standpoint, sometimes this involves like systems, processes, other times it involves kind of specialization of teams. And I think that's always something that's kind of like ongoing. You know, outside of that you, when you build visibility into some of these problems, so that you can ask the hard hitting, you know, intelligent questions. You start to identify areas of improvement. And some of the things that we've just got uh, gotten a lot better at is just classification and categorization of accounts, opportunities, customers and really getting a really good lens into like okay, got it. Like if it's this type of account or this type of deal, we know how to predict this differently than like the whole pie. And that's something that's been really exciting to see is just us getting sharper and sharper and sharper being uh, able to better predict kind of what's going to come from a particular opportunity, a particular deal or a particular lead just based on technographic and firmographic information that, that we're able to collect on. On that account.

Speaker A: Yeah. So what would be examples? I know you can't share the secret sauce here, but the, but like the types of technographic or firmographic information that you'd be looking for that would base that decision, is it you know like, you know, company size, revenue size, industry, stuff like that?

Speaker B: Yeah, exactly. So yeah, I'll run over at high level. So uh, at qualified, we're purpose built for Salesforce. So first thing, Salesforce, you've got to have it, you've got to use it. Your salespeople have to be in it. Marketing people need to use it. We sell the Salesforce customers. So we use a few different tools that help us kind of collect that information and identify. Like hey, are they running on Salesforce CRM M? That's kind of the first thing. What we've typically found is that our sweet spot is, is actually driven by website traffic. So we typically look for folks that have above 10,000 website sessions monthly, unique monthly visitors actually per month. So if they've got Salesforce, they have a traffic website where they're receiving 10,000 monthly uniques. We're in a good spot. Then we typically look at like revenue range, employee size, things like that. And that's a good indicator. That's kind of the basic for us. That's an indicator for our icp. But then we also go look at additional things. Like we play really well with account based marketing vendors. Like if you're using an account based marketing vendor, we're really going to work well, uh, together you're already doing sophisticated things in the marketing landscape. We're going to compliment that ABM offering and allow you to kind of maximize the ROI of your ABM investments.

Speaker A: Yeah, I love that. It also uh, that's one of those things that is so helpful from a marketing perspective and a sales perspective. Right. Because if you can dig in and say here you use an ABM software, you know that that little bell goes off for the, for the salesperson and you know, then you can create product marketing materials and say hey, this is all the people who use six Sense. Or this is all the people, you know, whatever. But then also from a marketing perspective, it allows you to go back to the marketing team and say things like hey, we should do more, you know, joint content or co created content or webinars or events with six Sense. Because we're seeing, you know, X, Y, Z. And that's where the data actually fuels marketing and sales strategy which is, you know, rather than the reverse way. Right. Which is not as, not as helpful.

Speaker B: Exactly. So by doing all of, all of that and getting all of that information integrated on the account level, we're able to have a more cohesive, go to market approach with marketing, sales, our inside sales team, all that great stuff. You mentioned making the bell go on off. In our case it was about actually making the bell not go off. Right. Don't make that bell go off. If they don't have these attributes, okay. They've got to have these attributes on the account and then we want to alert these folks to kind of go after them. So for us, the more that we're able to kind of get smarter on that account level, the more we're able to limit the noise for our reps and go to market teams.

Speaker A: You said that, that uh, BDRs and SDRs fall under your org. That's pretty neat. Can you, can you kind of share a little bit more about that?

Speaker B: Yeah, certainly. So I joined qualified at an early stage and you know, one of the things I've got actually a lot of experience in is kind of inside sales operations. Bdr, SDR motions. How do we look at like organizing those teams, how do we do comp plans, things like that. So it was really kind of right place, right time I guess where I was. You know, I joined the company. You know, my role was director of revenue operations. That we knew that I was going to uh, manage that inside sales team for the foreseeable future and kind of build it from the ground up. You know, standard operating procedures, how do we measure, how do we comp, all that, all that great stuff. It was certainly a unique thing that it sat under like revenue operations, but it was working quite well. I work for the CRO. The CRO is responsible for the sales number. So he and I are directly aligned on the types of deals that we want to produce to get to that sales number. And then I also was responsible for the marketing operations side. Right. So I have a vested interest in, you know, our leads being followed up with and hitting our marketing pipeline number. So it's a very good like neutral zone for them to sit in here at qualified. Also, you know, we sell a conversational marketing platform, right? It's Martech. It sits on your website. So one of the, the big things is, you know, being able to integrate all of the infrastructure for these individuals just around their role, the website, all those different things is, has been a big kind of reason why we've kept it under revenue operations.

Speaker A: I'm a pretty firm advocate that outbound is a marketing function. I firmly believe that it's not a sales function because it's, it's a, it is a, a one to many thing and I think it's changing a ton. And I think that the sort of old ways of just, you know, emailing hi and emailing them a million times is, is getting less and less fruitful and so, and I think that how you communicate to the masses is a marketing function. Sales closes, deals, marketing commutes, communicates the masses in a variety of different ways. So it's fascinating to me that it lives in rev ops and I understand why for y' all and I think that that's probably a pretty good um, why it's working. I think so well for you is because of sort of like all the reasons that you, that you outlaid there. But I'm curious, in those type of outbound pieces there, how are you thinking about it from a marketing perspective? How are you working with marketing as those things happen? Like uh, you know, I, you know, finish this very long question with. I was talking to a CMO the other day and they were like our, you know, our CEO was like, hey, we're going to pull a bunch of money out of marketing budget. We're going to hire 10 more BDRs. And the person was like, you know, I'm just like, I'll just quit if we do that. Because that's like crazy to me. And I thought that was just like such an interesting conversation to have, which is like, would you rather have X amount of dollars in a marketing budget or X amount of dollars for BDRs? Not that it always has to live in a vacuum, but just the idea that, that those two things would be at odds as if it's not all sort of like one joint go to market sort of function. So anyways, BDRs and sitting places, what say you?

Speaker B: Yes, so I agree with you. Like I actually think that the best place for the BDR team to sit is typically under marketing. And the reason why I believe that is because marketing, product marketing is really, they should be leading the charge on what we want to say to the market and who we want to say it to. Right. So it's really important that that BDR team, their messaging, their calls to action are aligned to that of the corporate messaging marketing is delivering. So I think that's why I feel that it, that it's a great fit under marketing. The area that like we are able to say in like lockstep and why it's worked under revenue operations is because we're very organized and targeted about who we want to go after. Okay, I gave you a rough idea of like our ideal customer profile. We actually get far more specific internally about what we want to go and do. And we lock this every quarter, every year. And it's like these are the accounts we want to go. All right, let's go do it. So now the big thing is orchestration. There was a world back in the day, Ian, where a sales leader would kind of give the bdrs a list of accounts and they would say, hey, here's the territory for the quarter. You know, call down the list. We do not take that approach at all. Our territories are actually dynamic and I believe they're actually set by marketing. And I'll tell you why, based on, you know, we use six Sense. We use our own tool here internally and six Sense is an ABM platform that allows us to essentially measure intent and accounts from a third party perspective. We use our own product which is tied into our website to measure first party intents. These things work really well together. All of our BDR's team's actions are based off of these intent engines which are all driven by a prospect's response to our marketing materials. They click on an ad, they read a blog, they do a search on Google, maybe they land on our website and they don't convert. All of these are the different activities or events that essentially make our BDRs go and do something. Anything that comes to the website and is not able to convert or we don't hook it there, it is immediately handed over to the BDR team and in real time they are going to go reach out. And I think because we have built this flywheel and we're obviously in a unique position using our own software on our website, but I Think that because we've built this flywheel where we know, okay, got it, people are going to land on the website, they're not going to convert. We then send them an email and we reach out with kind of personalized outreach to get them back to the website and convert. We've built this really great kind of synergy between sales and marketing where the BER is essentially another engine, another microphone to get those people back to the website. Now that's why it works well here and why we continue to have it sit under revenue operations. But everything that I just said is a case of why it should sit under marketing. If you're doing really good, real time orchestration from your website and from your intent engines, um, it should just be a continuation of what marketing wants to say to those accounts and those prospects.

Speaker A: I love it. As succinct of an answer as I have heard on the topic, um, we're going to pull that quote and throw that on the website. Um, I just love, you know, I love the way that y' all think about it. I think that you think about revenue. I have often been very flattering towards qualified sales and marketing Org, but I think your revenue Org is like truly a revenue org. It's like uh, there is such blurred lines between everything in the best way possible. Whereas so many other teams, like, it's just so, so, so siloed. And it's, it's really cool to see all that, all that stuff happened. And I think what's so important for y' all too is because you use qualified and I want to get, you know, into the qualified and qualified conversation too, but because the website is where all of this stuff is happening and how important it is to get people to your website and how that is like all we are doing in marketing is like getting someone to the website, which I think like everyone forgets. Like sometimes it's like every action, every single thing that we're trying to do, everything always, 100% of the time boils down to getting someone back to your website, right? And then the fact that you have this engine behind it and are able to use qualified allows it to work, you know, and respond much more, much more quickly, much more timely and much more personalized.

Speaker B: Exactly. Yes, 100%.

Speaker A: So tell us a little bit about sort of why, why it's so important to respond quickly and why it's so important that your team is structured that way and how do you use qualified to do that?

Speaker B: The whole speed to lead kind of concept has been around for a Long time. A lot of studies have been done on this. Prospects are more likely to buy from the vendor that kind of gets back to them first in their initial request. This was published maybe five to 10 years ago and people continue to kind of like republish things like this. We know that speed, um, or lack of speed can be a killer.

Speaker A: Okay.

Speaker B: So you know, we take that to heart. Everything that we do is, you know, really trying to drive a real time motion over here at Qualified. I think the other thing to say here is that we are now in a world where inboxes are incredibly crowded, people are digitally burnt out, they receive too many emails to get through in a day and you really need to strike while the iron's hot. And it's top of mind. If you are waiting two days to get back to a demo request form, you know that's going to be a problem because you know we're, we're busy individuals. Even last night I was in our office around 7:30pm and I was having a conversation about a problem and we submitted two vendor demos at 7:30pm before we left the office. You know, those individuals probably have 24 hours to kind of get back to us before we have kind of mentally moved on to other things. That's the need for kind of speed to lead. And then I think that it is going to become increasingly important as people become digitally burnt out. Where we're in this virtual world, everything is over email and over slack and you really want to cut through that noise and get to the top.

Speaker A: Yeah. When I first met Craig the CEO and he was talking about this and the thing that crystallized it so obviously in my head was he was like if, if the CEO of your biggest prospect walked in the front door of your office, literally the entire everyone would stop working. You'd go get some drinks, you'd go lay out the red carpet, you'd, you know, get them into like a comfy uh, chair and you know, all this sort of stuff and if the, if that same person comes to your website, they get treated the exact same as everybody else. And if you're lucky, that person, you know, submits some type of demo request or whatever and then what happens to them is they get routed to a 23 year old to hop on a 15 minute call to see if they're a fit to buy from them. It's the most archaic backwards thing. And uh, like so many companies still do this motion and it is infuriating to me. It drives me absolutely bonkers because it's So I mean like, it's just crazy. It's like so crazy that you would operate this way and yet everybody does this.

Speaker B: Yeah, 100%. We believe in, you know, delivering kind of bespoke, tailored experiences, you know, on the website to increase the website conversion. Right. Like let's keep in mind the website is a game of failure. You know, if you can convert 5%, 2%, 3% of your website traffic to fill out a form, you're doing an incredible job. So it's, you know, you want to provide those like really bespoke tailored experiences to get them to convert on the site and drive conversion up. But what happens when they don't? You've got 95%, let's say that are landing on the website and not filling out a form, not taking that call to action. So we have a really large philosophy in moving fast after the website visit, they don't convert. We immediately take action on that and then deliver a very personalized email experience. You mentioned the 23 year olds. My 23 year olds are really, really good at this. The best I've ever seen. The best I've ever seen. And they will be incredibly personalized. You know one of the things that I'm constantly hearing and what our team gets responses, uh, in is this is the best email I've ever received, the best cold email I've ever received in my career. And we really pride ourselves on that and every single day, every single motion. So it doesn't matter Whether you're a BDR manager, an SDR or whether you're a CEO of a Fortune 500 organization, you are going to get a world class customer experience from us. And we really worked hard to kind of get that into our DNA.

Speaker A: All uh, right, let's get to our next segment, Rev Obstacles where we talk about the tough parts of Rev Ops. Obstacle. Obstacle. An obstacle to what?

Speaker B: There's your obstacle.

Speaker A: What's the hardest Rev Obstacle Rev Ops problem that you faced recently? How do you solve it?

Speaker B: You know, I think that the toughest kind of problem is generally like getting alignment and buy in. Right. Uh, sometimes you're able to identify problems, uh, and you want to go do something about that. You want to kind of drive an overhaul or fix some different things. And uh, that can be a challenge. You know, just because you're in Rev Ops and your job is to kind of standardize the data technology processes that, you know, these different teams like run on, doesn't mean that you have full autonomy or authority to go and like do so. Right. So sometimes, you know, a challenge that I find is you identify a problem, you know, you need to go and do something about it quickly. But you need to kind of get that cross functional buy in and have everybody kind of agreeing with you on that problem. Agreeing it's a top priority and agreeing we need to kind of drive that change. You know, kind of wrangling people in this hectic, remote work world can be kind of challenging. And I think just getting everybody in the room agreeing to the plan is probably the one of the more challenging pieces that I face in revenue operations, especially when it comes to like big infrastructure changes. Right. You know, I'll be the first to admit we made some mistakes early on that were like, like as far as like some data model stuff, uh, some stamping and we're making some iterations now, but it has really big impact. When I joined, you know, I was running revenue operations and inside sales team. I was also our Salesforce Admin. I shared that responsibility with our VP of sales engineering when we were early days. And just some different things that I had set up made sense at the time, which were user lookup fields, like who generated this opportunity, who influenced it, who's getting credit? And a mistake was those were user lookup fields. So when those individuals got promoted, um, we lost our stamping. It should have stamped those individuals as BDRs, SDRs, the teams, they were on pipeline sources. Now that we've actually moved them into like a future role, you know, now, now that changes the stamp. So we have to go back and fix that historical data. We kind of had to make a decision which was do we continue when people are promoted to deactivate the old user and create a new user, or do we just get smarter and more scalable about how we do this? The answer is let's get smarter and more scalable, which requires a little bit more work on the infra side that basically we're moving user lookup fields to text stamp fields so those things don't change as other data changes.

Speaker A: That is a rev obstacle if I've ever heard one. One of the things that we've, we've talked about a few times on the show is sort of like, how do you account for Black Swan events? And like what do you do? Like, I think that we're like a massive market shift. So you're like, hey, we renew at an 80% and we historically close at a, uh, 22%. But tech has been taking a beating. That changes everything. We can't use any of our historicals none of those matter. What do you do? And so that's the sort of stuff where it's like, how do you treat those sort of like, you know, the boom periods on a good way or the. Or the, you know, bust periods on a bad way to be proactive. Like, uh, this is something that we at Caspian have, like, been trying to figure out is like, what, you know, and everybody's trying to figure this out of, like, how do you forecast accurately when, you know, the future is so uncertain? And every single person has been telling every single salesperson for the past year, wait till next year, wait till December, wait till Q4, wait till, wait till, wait till. And what do you do?

Speaker B: Yeah, great question. I mean, we're in a black swan event, right? We have. We're able to adjust very quickly. And, uh, some of the things that we do is, you know, we just can't take, you know, like a win rate, a gross retention rate, or like any of our conversion percentages and kind of take them for granted. So one of the things that we're constantly doing is we look at conversion all the way through the funnel. We do some waiting here. We apply seasonality, but more importantly, we actually all get agreement and alignment on the conversion percentages that we use. This goes all the way up to our CEO. So when we're forecasting, building models, things like that, we often review the rates. We will look at times before we were kind of in this kind of down downturn. We will look at our trailing six month, our trailing three months. We will look at different weighted averages. We will pull data in and out of our subsets so that we can get to kind of the rates that we believe are going to stick. So there's a lot of homework done here to just help predictability set smarter goals, things like that.

Speaker A: Cool. Any? Yeah. Uh, anything else? What about revooop's moment? Any mistakes that you made?

Speaker B: You know, I mentioned how important technology capture is to us in reporting on the technologies that accounts use. You know, tech data is never perfect. And it doesn't matter where you go to any of the vendors out there in the space, it's not going to be 100% accurate. People churn off of vendors every week, every month, and it's not going to be accurately reportable in real time. You know, one of the mistakes that we made is we kind of took like a, uh, data vendor, like, for granted in the sense that what we get from them is the single source of truth and. And go. But what we actually have is we have an army of salespeople and BDRs, SDRs that are truing up this data all the time and they're like, oh, well I went to their website and I could see that this wasn't on and this was off. And they go and actually they make updates to the account on all of these different fields and they true it up. What we didn't do is we weren't stamping those updates. We didn't know that a human had actually gone back in and said, hey, no, this is incorrect data that you're feeding into my account. So what would happen? The vendor kept writing it back in every week, right? So they would remove it and try to true up their accounts. But we had a situation where we continued to override that information. So, you know, we kind of had this realization where we're like, okay, we need to trust the humans over the systems, right? They know, they know the right thing to do and we need to just do a better job of prioritizing those edits. Not, not really kind of overriding. So I think that was a big thing, you know, that we're kind of working on as well. You know, another, another Revoox, you know, moment I think for us is, you know, I joined the organization and a unique thing that we were doing here is we were just taking an opportunity as stage one and kind of like classifying that as like pipeline. We had a lot happening in those, in that early stage of a deal and I think that was an oops moment that we didn't act on that sooner. What I mean by this is like everybody has opportunity stages. Everybody has a stage one.

Speaker A: Okay.

Speaker B: Ours is named Prospect. What was happening in Prospect is uh, too many different inspectable events. So meetings were being scheduled, meetings were being canceled, meetings were being rescheduled. We had multi threading building out the buying team, we had follow ups occurring and all of this was kind of happening within a singular stage. So you could imagine the amount of visibility loss that we had on all those different things that I mentioned because it's just parked in one singular stage. And one of the things we did is we kind of decoupled our um, opportunity objects. Uh, Vivek, our systems administrator, he created what we call a pre opportunity, which helps us measure the meeting effectiveness and how we actually do in these early stage calls. So this is kind of a meeting scheduled, meeting, rescheduled, multi threading, meaning that you're trying to get to additional contacts within the organization. Accepted and dq. And I think this was a really good move for our organization just to get better visibility and measures within the early stage pipeline. Because before what it looked like is we just had drop off. We couldn't necessarily explain like oh well, these people no showed or these canceled and these people rescheduled or we were below the line here and now we're in a position where we can answer all of these questions after kind of decoupling those stages. So these are things you learn over time. You're never going to get it right the first time. That'd be advice I have to anyone listening to the podcast. You're going to build something and you're going to grow, you're going to scale and you're going to be like, oh, okay, right. Like we're now finding this nuance. We were kind of blind in this area and you need to adjust. But yeah, I would say that's one of the revoops moments that I have here is kind of the uh, you know, the lack of granularity that we had in our stage one deals.

Speaker A: Yeah, I totally agree. To me, I, I think lack of stage one and then for me it's the freaking ghosting. That's what kills ghost accounts where it's like super high intent, super interested, took a sales call, was like this is the best thing since sliced bread and then just don't respond forever. That those. I'm like, where do you put these things? Like, it's like, is like you can't email them 500 times, right? They're like, hey, yeah, just sorry, just you know, been busy. And you're like, you've been busy for a year. Just don't respond to emails. I don't know. What do you think?

Speaker B: I think there are, I mean this is, we're facing a huge challenge. Like we're feeling this right now. Like reschedules, no shows. The ghosting is, it's certainly something that we're, we're kind of facing right now. I believe that there are two kind of parties in that camp, right? There are the end of the prospects that you talk with that are going to, if something comes up, they're going to let you know, they're going to write you and they're going to say, hey, time's not right. And then you've got other individuals that have full intention of talking with you again, but they are not going to take the time to respond to your email and let you know what's going on. You've got to be able to identify those, those two parties and understand who you're Kind of dealing with that's first and foremost. Next is we're really trying to get sharp about bringing the pain and identifying those compelling events. Okay. Because we have a really good focus on the technology stack, their website traffic, their revenue. We can kind of connect some dots and make some assumptions of what that business might be dealing with and what that demand gen leader, that marketing leader probably has his priorities entering into next year. And we're really trying to hook um, on that. Right? Um, use those compelling events, use that pain that we identified early on, um, in our conversations to get that meeting to occur. We're also experimenting with all types of personalized incentives. You know, uh, the time of year where Starbucks comes out with all types of holiday drinks and we're like trying to buy coffees to get them on the call, like, hey, can we send you a $5 coffee gift card? All these little touches that just make it that much more personal. We're leaning in as much as we can. So we really want the prospects to kind of feel that and we want them to understand that they're going to get something from our meeting. They're going to understand how to be more efficient with pipeline, how to generate more pipeline from their website. They're going to understand how to make their BDRs more productive. They're going to understand how to orchestrate website visits to their BDRs. These are really important topics in today's landscape that not a large percentage of people are really nailing. And I think that that's one of the things that we're really trying to drive home is these are problems that we are faced with today and we can help with that. And if you're really just focused on that and the value they're going to get from the call and you're staying personalized trying to build that relationship, that's all we can really do to get people to show up. But in the event that they're not, we've got a really good motion for kind of getting people like back in the loop. But again, it remains a challenge. We're always improving. I've got a team of 11 BDRs that are the most creative writers I've, I've seen in a BDR team to date. If anyone can get it done, it's them. But we are still battling the no show reschedule issue.

Speaker A: My biggest thing is the, the demo and then ghosting which is like, oh

Speaker B: my goodness, you never really know what's going on inside of a business, right? Especially in this time of year. People are in Q4 and they're being told to wait to see where they land before they kind of like get their budgets, you know, allocated or their budgets finalized. You never know what's happening inside of an organization. So like, Ian, your example, may I call it podcast as a service?

Speaker A: Uh, indeed.

Speaker B: Okay, awesome. So podcast is a service. Like, you're probably talking to the demand gen leaders, the marketing leaders, you know, things like that. You know, they, they talk with you. They kind of get like a scope of work and they're like, wow, uh, I really like what I'm seeing here. And they kind of go back and they're like, they're like, no, your budget's actually being cut further and you're being asked to like, wait and like, no, we can't get this in as an additional line item. So I think that there are things that are happening at the board level, the CEO level, the finance level that are impacting this. And again, that goes back to. There are two camps in the party. The ones that will take the time, write you and explain to you what is going on, which they don't need to do. And then there are the folks that have full intent to circle back, but it's not the right time and they can't get into it.

Speaker A: Yeah, I couldn't. Couldn't agree more. All, uh, right, let's get to our next segment. The tool shed, where we're talking tools, spreadsheets, metrics, just like everyone's favorite tool, Qualified. Have you ever heard of that, Kieran?

Speaker B: I have for sure, 100%.

Speaker A: Well, no B2B tool shed is complete without qualified. Go to qualified.com right now and check them out. I mean, if you've been listening to Kieran for the last 45 minutes, you know that he is just as smart as they come on this stuff. And, uh, you can reach out to him, he'll get you. He'll tell you exactly how they use it, and we'll link up his LinkedIn in the show notes. You can shoot him a note too. Or you can just go to qualified.com right now and you can talk to someone right this second. Go to qualified.com. hey, Brandon.

Speaker B: Michael, Wanna do me and mom a favor?

Speaker A: Get off that shed.

Speaker B: This is my favorite place.

Speaker A: The tool shed.

Speaker B: Get off the shed.

Speaker A: Kieran, what's in your tool shed?

Speaker B: Yeah, we've got a lot. So let's maybe start with some of the basics. You know, obviously we operate on Salesforce CRM and then going to kind of move into like pipeline generation. Tools so qualified is, uh, you know, obviously very important to us. That's what converts our website traffic. It allows us to engage our website traffic. But more importantly, it measures the accounts that are on our website so that we can give that to the BDR team and they can go after the folks that matter the most. Outside of that. Sixth Sense is very important for us. Being able to kind of really understand, you know, who out there is showing intent towards these buying topics, these different products, different keywords, things like that is very important to, to kind of our motion. The next thing is kind of orchestration. So the big thing that I would highlight there is like, we. We've got just a series of processes and flows built inside of Salesforce that are enabling us to kind of get things to the reps at the right time. We use a tool called rattle gorattle.com. if anybody hasn't heard of it, they're doing really amazing things. I'm super impressed by, by what's going on there. That has actually kind of been a backbone of like, connecting all of our different systems and alerting the people at the right time. Ian, earlier you mentioned the bell going off. We want the bell to go off at the best times possible, but only when it's actionable, all these systems together and provide a really great experience for the BDR so that they're alerted on everything that matters. We're assessing a number of different kind of AI tools right now. Some we're in trial with, some we're kind of looking at further down the line, but just things that are going to be able to enable our BDRs to be more personalized faster on average. I think some of our reps spend five to 10 minutes just to find the nugget on which they're going to personalize around which, Ian, that could be that you like a football team, it could be like dogs, you like cats, whatever. We're going to figure it out. Right. But I want to find a tool that makes us more productive and efficient in finding that information. And I want a standardized way to store that inside of Salesforce to kind of save time. So. So I think I kind of hit on like, the big main kind of platforms that we're running on right now that are kind of like driving their emotion.

Speaker A: Yeah, and I just chatted with the Rattle team, uh, a few days ago, so that's very, very, very timely. Any other thoughts on, on tools or metrics or anything like that?

Speaker B: Always looking, you know, tooling. I mean, the, you know, one thing I'm always saying is always innovate, always improve, always break things. Just do it quickly and fix it quickly. The big thing that I think on the horizon for us is just how can we make people more efficient? Is there areas where AI are going to be able to make recommendations to us? Are there areas where AI is going to help our reps become more productive? We're not using too many tools in that space right now. The one thing I will highlight is gong. Gong we use for, um, conversational, um, intelligence. They're doing a decent job with that AI transcript. But what I found was actually that, uh, go rattle. They have their own way of plugging into that transcript. It is just night and day compared to what kind of what we're getting from gong from being able to prompt and get like proactive insights after a first call. So GONG is just one other thing I would mention, but that enables us to do a lot of other things with that transcript. Now, it's not per se that like GONG is helping us get all the value from that call. There's a lot of other tools that are kind of plugging in and analyzing that now.

Speaker A: Okay, let's get to our final segment. Quick hits. These are quick questions and quick answers. Are you ready?

Speaker B: Yes. Quick, quick, quick, quick.

Speaker A: If you can make any animal any size. What animal and what size?

Speaker B: I would make a cheetah the size of a cat. And I know these exist out there. They're savannah cats. I love them. I would love to get one, but I'd love, love cheetahs. They, it would be great if they could be a little bit more sizable.

Speaker A: Like it tiny cheetah. Revops misconception.

Speaker B: I think the biggest rev Ops misconception is that like maybe all RevOps teams follow the definition that I provided earlier. Standardizing data, processes and technologies across marketing, sales and customer operations. I have talked with individuals that run RevOps team and they focus on deal desk and quoting and LTV type calculations, things like that. I think that there's a varying definition with everybody that you talk to. That would be the biggest misconception. There is no standardized definition of RevOps.

Speaker A: RevOps prediction for us.

Speaker B: RevOps prediction. I think more people are going to adopt this model. We've seen this really take off, I think over the past like two to three years. But I think this is going to become m more standardized rev Ops prediction. I'm really interested to see the tools that are going to kind of come out here that are like rev ops in a box. Right. Connect us to Salesforce and we give you Kieran's analysis in. In 30 minutes. Right. So I think that a lot of things are going to become AI driven. I hope that the tools are going to become a lot more, uh, kind of malleable. But I think that that's what I would say. I think that a lot of things are going to move to AI. I think that there will be a world where there's AI rev ops in a box. I'm excited to see it.

Speaker A: All right, final question. Kieran, what is your best advice for a person who is VP of RevOps?

Speaker B: My best advice would be this stuff is hard. There's a lot going on. You're going to be surrounded by challenges. Really work with the cross functional leaders to get that buy in on the top priorities. Focus in on those. We've been in times where we've just had too much going on at a given time and we're doing, you know, too many things at 95%. Really focus on the things that are going to impact the metrics that matter the most to you. Prioritize that. Get the cross functional buy in and take those on. And the next thing I would say is be reasonable with yourself. You're not going to be able to get everything done. Don't have that expectation. It's all about prioritization and moving the needle with the changes that you're driving. If it's not going to move the needle, maybe you shouldn't do it.

Speaker A: Kieran, it is amazing chatting with you as always.

Speaker B: Thank you, Ian. Pleasure to be here on the last episode of the season. If anyone ever wants to chat, learn more about what we've discussed today, feel free to kind of look me up on LinkedIn. Send me a message. You can go to qualified.com and say, get me Kieran and I will do my best to be there. So that's also a more fun example. Qualify.com and talk with one of the SDRs and say you want to talk with Kieran and we'll get it figured out.

Speaker A: I love it. That is awesome. That's so sweet. Thanks, Karen. Appreciate it. Take care.

Speaker B: Awesome. Thanks again. Thank you for listening to Rise of Revops. If you enjoyed today's episode, please leave us a review and subscribe wherever you're listening. This podcast was created by the team at Qualified. The pipeline cloud is the modern way B2B revenue teams generate pipeline. Learn more@qualified.com

Speaker A: Sam M.