Episode 27, Part 3 - Lessons from Facebook, Deliveroo and a Pandemic

Matt Best: Hello and welcome to the Growth Workshop Podcast. In this podcast, we'll be sharing insights and hearing from other industry leaders to get their thoughts and perspectives on what growth looks like in modern business. Welcome to part three of three. Jonny Adams: And if we think about sales enablement, it's a passion of yours.

What does sales enablement mean to you and where do you sit as an individual in sales enablement and how would you describe it? Matt Ring: I think sales enablement does, it does the industry and the experts at disservice actually, I think it's revenue enablement. And the reason I think that is because an awful lot of focus is put on the top of the funnel and the sales teams. Hence the name Sales Enablement.

And I think often what can happen is that the account teams who manage existing relationships sometimes get forgotten. And so for me, revenue enablement is all about, giving teams on the ground the tools and the skills and the capabilities to be able to generate more revenue, and to grow in capability over time. Jonny Adams: Nice. Alright, let's get into some frameworks.

I think this is the key. So what, Let's think and we're gonna isolate towards like account based, right? Because that's your, that, that's, your focus as an individual, isn't that? So what, are some like revenue enablement frameworks that you've seen the team you have been leading or even yourself adopt and use and, anything that's worked for you in the past that the audience might grab onto?

Matt Ring: Yeah, so a big thing for me has always been to, whether I'm doing this on my own as an individual with my portfolio, or whether I'm thinking about the team, or the whole organization is, who are our clients and how do we segment them into a group, into different groups? To then be able to adjust our go-to market. You can use all sorts of, you can categorize them in all sort sorts of different ways, but effectively I think you have to identify the commonalities in there.

So who are the ones that are, strategically important, but naturally gonna grow slower and require a much more white glove, hands-on approach to everything from marketing, insights, commercials, all that good stuff. Who are the screwed with clients that are the kind of the future potential? And how do you spot those, knowing that they're gonna be the future potential? How do you support them enough to help 'em grow but not too much to take your eye off the big ones.

And then who are those other clients who are providing the kind of the, volume, who need to be managed in more of a, a kind of, consistent, process led way? And this is, so that, that's one, one key thing I always, start with, which is that is the segmentation and understanding who they really are and what they really need. Jonny Adams: Amazing. Dannii gonna come to you, what's your sort of customer success or account development framework of choice.

Dannii Mathers: I would say, again, very similar things to you when you were talking, I was just wondering whether you use any level of data intelligence now to do that segmentation. 'Cause as you were talking, I was like I remember doing that I remember how long it used to take 'cause back in the day, you used to have to do it manually. But it's a really great way, especially, when, working with reps for them to visually see where they should be spending the most time, what they should prioritize.

Matt Ring: Yeah. Dannii Mathers: And what that looked like from a revenue proportion. So again, they're like, wow, I've got all this revenue, this quadrant, what is my strategy around or account-based marketing, whatever it might be, to then, acquire this. Jonny Adams: Yeah.

Dannii Mathers: But now there's so much great data intelligence that can do this segmentation for us. I just wondered if you are using anything, to make that easier. Matt Ring: So I'm not using anything to make that easier right now. I think the challenge with all, with that, even if you have all of that data, is deciding which are the signals that you wanna focus on and which are the ones that actually, aren't really additive.

And I think that's actually the real trick to it because it's easy for systems and algorithms to tell you something, but if you haven't considered what are the kind of business priorities and boil that down into three or four key things and you don't know that upfront and do that work upfront, I think you run the risk of following something which might not necessarily be accurate. So maybe revenue growth is the key thing, the key lever that's been identified, but that might not actually be the key lever to unlocking growth.

When I was at Deliveroo, a big focus as I mentioned previously, it was on operational excellence. And actually, if you can get your customer experiences and customer outcomes really the high top 10%, that drives a huge amount of growth. So if you've miss those signals, then you are not gonna be able to identify the tactics that you need to deploy to grow them. So I think you have to be cautious.

and decide what are your kind of key signals upfront Dannii Mathers: Yeah. Matt Ring: for then using a lot of data. Dannii Mathers: I think this is the evolution that many revenue leaders, sellers are on now. It's trusting the signals.

So I think we're still at there. Yes again, there are some great technology processes, AI that helps, create these signals. But I think we're, at that stage now of, we now gotta learn to trust it because it's that fear of, say, if we miss something out, miss some important data. So I see organizations trying to adopt this like signal data intelligence approach.

But yeah, back to what you said, it's that trust in the data at the moment, isn't it? Matt Ring: Then? Do you think that's because they haven't got a really well defined what their actual customer is they might have their ideal customer, but they maybe don't have it really defined who their real customers are. Do you think that causes problems, for them in that situation?

Dannii Mathers: I think it's, probably a number of things. I imagine, a lot of it is down to having the right customer interactions in place in the first in, in the, first instance. When we think about account planning, in some cases it might not be a great account plan in the first place. So then how can you trust a process that is already quite broken?

And I think this is where we're seeing a lot of gaps in AI right now, we wanna get to that end solution or outcome really quickly, but what we're beginning to uncover is, ah, we've got those for holes in our current processes because people are skipping steps. Jonny Adams: Yeah. Dannii Mathers: So I think when you've got a lot of gaps in your current processes, you're not gonna get to that north star easily because you have to go back to doing things properly. Matt Ring: Yeah.

It's interesting. I think as well, you have to consider the kind of the, human element of it. So as you say, if you've got your account plan, how you articulate either the will or the skill of that client, is, difficult and obviously, and the humans do it and they're probably naturally, overweight, the ones that they like working with versus the ones that they don't, which is a common thing I think we've all done in our careers, but I think that's also a difficult element. How do you articulate is this person, someone who's gonna actually partner with me and go on the journey, which I think always will require human interaction.

Dannii Mathers: Yeah and I think that the part where AI serves is the triaging. Matt Ring: Yeah. Dannii Mathers: So whether it's triaging from, intent from contents when they're, being served content, whether it's from calls I think if you can just triage a lot of that insight and then let the human deal with it, I think that's the, blended approach, isn't it? Jonny Adams: I'm thinking about your career and I'm thinking Sky, and I'm like connecting Facebook and Deliveroo, they're fast moving hypergrowth, I could just imagine all about the margin, as you say, how do you take what you've learned in those sort of years of your formative career and take that to organizations in the future?

What are you gonna do, what lessons learned to... Matt Ring: Yeah, so lessons learned, I think, we've talked a lot about communication, and I think that is a, really, key principle. I think it's quite hard to package up and, and say, this is how you should do communication. So I think you have to go back to some of the frameworks we've talked about.

And I think for me it's really about understanding who are your, clients that you are interacting with today? What do we know about them? What are the signals that we can take, and how are our teams interacting with them? So that's where the enablement side of it comes in.

So if you've got, a good, really good proposition, but maybe the processes behind it aren't on working towards that proposition that it's gonna fall down. If you've got really good processes, but you're not clear on your proposition, then that's gonna be very difficult, to actually deliver and if your people, who are behind the scenes running, all of this, aren't aligned on either the processes or the proposition then you're really in trouble. So they're the kind of three things that I always come back to.

I think they're the things that, for me, ultimately are what a successful revenue team needs to be focused on. Jonny Adams: It all sounds great, Matt, it sounds very rosy. But let's, look at the other side of the coin maybe if we think about your career, you've done some amazing things. Has there ever been a time of some adversity or any challenges you've had over the last years?

Matt Ring: I think I'd be lying if I said no. Yeah, of course. I worked in number of high growth businesses that have had numerous challenges, internal external pressure. Maybe if I give two examples, one from my time at Facebook as it was then called, and one from my time at Deliveroo.

So at Facebook, the business had recently become gone public and a month or so after that, we realized that whilst 75% of our traffic was on mobile, we didn't have a mobile advertising product. And this is a well known, well-known story, wellknown fact, my job was advertising sales, as was the entirety of the team. And so that threw the whole team and, to be honest, the whole company into kind of quite a lot of chaos. And our partners and our clients were coming to us and asking, what's going on?

What's happening here? You've publicly announced that three quarters of your consumers are on mobile and you haven't got anything for us, and we've been spending all of this money and time and effort. What are we gonna do about it? And in those days we didn't have an answer, so we had to go back to good relationships, understanding their business, demonstrate what we've done before, trust in the company, the technology prowess, all that kinda stuff.

And that it would become it and we had been told that Zuck had take in all engineers, put 'em through a bootcamp to learn to build on mobile, and that we would figure it out. Telling a large enterprise client, we will figure it out in some months is quite challenging. So that was a very stressful period of time for me, just as I was, getting married and moving house. And then if we fast forward to my time at Deliveroo, I joined there in September 2019, which was six months prior to when the world shut down for lockdown.

And so the time over that kind of couple of years was incredibly challenging, both personally and for the business. And so this was, I was relatively new into role at the time I was running the, the account enterprise accounts team, so managing the relationships with all of the largest restaurant partners. At the same time, we were waiting for the Amazon investment to come through. and so the business already running pretty lean, was worried about, running out of cash.

and then all of a sudden, we heard that the country was going into lockdown. And so naturally all of our restaurants and all of our grocers started calling us and saying, what do we do? Can we still do delivery? And we were said, we have no idea.

Do you feel safe? They said, not really. And we said, okay, we need to figure this out. It was a really difficult time.

the business was under an awful lot of pressure financially, we didn't know like everyone what was happening. And we just decided that we were gonna have to, get a collection of people together across all of the key functions. we met twice a day, morning and evening like I'm sure many businesses did really just taking the information that we could get from the government, from our partners, and building that into a kind of a playbook that said, okay, now we realize, now we don't understand that you can open how we're gonna operate this industry safely, effectively.

And so those first sort of three or four weeks were very, difficult. it was everyone suddenly at home, we're all, locked in, our little rooms, for 12, 13 hours a day. And then what started to happen was that people started to realize that food delivery was really valuable during a pandemic. And so the business absolutely took off.

and we were still like, really not sure about how we could optimize the system in such short space of time. So we were coming up with, new ways to do things we'd never done before. Restaurants were still looking to us for guidance and advice and we got to a point where, one of our large restaurant partners actually said to us, if you can give us more grills, we can cook more food. And we were seriously considering buying grills.

That didn't happen, obviously. But it was a, it was something which collectively we actually thought, you know what? This might be a good idea. and the other thing that started to happen was that there were loads of restaurants who hadn't done delivery previously, but realized they wanted to do delivery.

But then we started to run out of the tablets that the restaurants used to power their, power Deliveroo. At the time you had to have just a tablet, because they were stuck in an airport on the other side of the world. And so the tech team had to figure out how can we give you something, to operate your, operate on delivery to help you out and, facilitate, you getting onto the platform and actually keeping your business alive. Without these tablets, they're all stuck in a warehouse somewhere.

So that was the kind of early iteration of the tools that, that Deliveroo now has today, to allow people to, to operate, online. Jonny Adams: And then, and that growth, did it just hockey stick... Matt Ring: yeah, absolutely, the business basically doubled overnight. It was crazy and just continued to continue to, increase and that puts a huge amount of pressure on the riders.

The operational side of the business gets really difficult. it puts a, lot of pressure on the, people who are running delivery in the restaurants because their restaurant managers are not only deliver, now dealing with loads and loads of riders, but loads and loads of orders, which, they haven't been used to preparing in such a short space of time. Dannii Mathers: Yeah, so unprecedented scale, isn't it? Matt Ring: Yes, absolutely.

Absolutely. Like many businesses, we just had to figure it out as we went along. Dannii Mathers: Yeah. Excellent.

Let's try and end this on some even more positive news. Everyone likes a scaling business, but if you are, if you were to give a commercial leader, commercial contributor, some advice for 2026 for them to have success. Yeah. What, would your advice be?

Send us home with some great advice, Matt. Matt Ring: I think, given the current economic climate, everyone is under more pressure than ever to deliver more revenue, faster, from their existing clients. So I think it's about making sure that you are doing the basics really well. As we've talked about before, have you really narrowed your proposition?

Do you have the right processes in place to enable your team to unlock that and do your people have the right capabilities to be able to deliver on that? And I think that's like absolutely core and will always remain core. But I think there's some really exciting, new tools and AI capabilities which allow you to scale some of those processes once, and you're really confident in them. So for example, I've recently come across a company, that does a really cool, a practice scenario, for frontline teams, just by a phone call.

So the tech behind it is fantastic. But you get a phone call on your mobile phone, and you can prepare the objection handling or the piece of the proposition that you want to land really well or anything and the phone call is an agent, which basically takes you and pretends to be, the customer that you are talking to, and obviously on the back end of that, you get so many rich insights that you know, you just previously wouldn't have had and if you think about the, kind of the applications, a lot of technology in my experience focuses on those kind of seat based enterprise sellers it's during the call, notes next to me talking about, helping me, guiding me, or retrospectively not many people think about practice.

And I think that's really, key. 'Cause we would practice for a race or a sport or whatever. So that's a, an really interesting technology that I think, things like that will just, really help accelerate the basics, that you do it well. Jonny Adams: Awesome.

Matt, just to say thank you so much for joining us on the Growth Workshop podcast. It's been amazing. Matt Ring: Thank you so much for having me. I've really enjoyed the conversation.

Matt Best: For more insights, make sure you subscribe, and if you enjoy the journey, don't forget to leave us a review. Your feedback fuels our growth. Until next time, keep up that forward thinking mindset. Goodbye.