Humans of Youwe: Rowan Smith on RevOps, AI, and the sales and marketing divide

Speaker A: Hello and welcome, everyone to a new episode of the podcast Humans of ue. I'm here with Rowan Smith, who is now head of Revenue operations here at ue. Welcome, Rowan, and thank you so much for joining me on the podcast.

Speaker B: Thank you very much for having me here. I appreciate the time and hospitality.

Speaker A: All right, well, let's get straight into it. So I just said revenue operations, and I guess that's a job title that you don't come across that often if you're not in the commercial organization. So for anyone who hears revenue operations and things, middle management, spreadsheet person, what would you say to them?

Speaker B: I'd say that's reasonably accurate. Yeah. Yeah. It's maybe not something that if you're in a delivery part of the business or if you're working on projects, you come across very often, but the principles are very similar. It's kind of about taking the things that make UE teams great in terms of what they deliver for a customer, and taking that same ethos internally as well. Revops is the short version. It's all about connecting what we do at every stage of the revenue funnel. So it's helping our ec, uh, people that are in charge of or responsible for our sales output, our marketing output, get the right data and the right information that they need to make the right decisions, but also the guys and the people in the team as well to feel better connected to everything that we do from a, uh, end to end revenue funnel. I know that's all kind of fluffy, but making sure that what we do in marketing, sales, customer success, delivery, that it's all connected up together, that everyone's kind of working as part of one collective.

Speaker A: Okay, that sounds good as a one sentence summary, as a long sentence. So before this you were in sales.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: But now you've left sales. What made you choose to make that decision?

Speaker B: I mean, I kind of have and I kind of haven't. I think, um, if this sort of move in this sort of process works, sales should kind of come along with me. So, yeah, nominally, notionally part of the marketing team from the start of this year, but the whole idea here is that we're moving kind of ratcheting the marketing and the sales efforts together into one thing. So, yeah, I've spent most of my career in sales. That's what I was doing prior to joining ue, and it's always been my thing. But the more time I've spent in sales roles, the more important I've seen the marketing, the brand, the other efforts as well. So yeah, the reason for the move is not to, uh, leave sales behind. It's to bring sales along with us and yeah, uh, bring everyone close together.

Speaker A: And now that you're on the marketing side, after being on the sales side, what's something that surprised you about marketing that you didn't see when you were in sales?

Speaker B: I think maybe the common misconception and the idea that a lot of sales teams have had in businesses I've worked in before is that marketing and sales are like completely different entities and they're different people who think in a different way. And I've always believed that's not true. And I think you ue is a great example of that definitely not being true in practice that everybody's pushing for the same goal. Everybody wants to find more better customers for our teams to work on and to find better ways of replicating the clients that we really love working with. And while sales may have a kind of like a short term, um, deal by deal, quarter by quarter, year by year, focus and m marketing may have a bit of a longer view that we're thinking, you know, years at a time or much more long term in how we find those people. The core message is the same. And yeah, it's nice to see that kind of idealistic principle kind of borne out in practice as well.

Speaker A: Good answer. But you've just touched on it, right? You said there's an old adage that marketing and sales don't get on and that has to come from somewhere. So, like digging into it further, uh, do you think that's what more of a cultural problem, a measurement problem, like a short term versus long term like you just mentioned, or where, where does that come from?

Speaker B: It's definitely a measurement problem. I think. I think, you know, culture is replicating activity over a long period of time. That's where these things come from originally. But it is just a sense of time and scale that you often have marketing teams measured on volume of numbers of leads generated or numbers of accounts touched. But. And while sales are thinking about cash in the bank and things actually being sold, but connecting those two ideas together takes away a lot of that cultural stress of when everyone's thinking about the same numbers, the same metric, the same outcomes for a business, at the end of it all, a lot of that does go away and you find yourself much more easily collaborating because you have a shared language and a shared structure of how you go about your working day. So yeah, I think it does completely come down to measurement. And that's one of the things That I need to. That's uh, a focus for me. And there's something that I need to bring to this and that I need to repair of taking away ways of measuring progress and measuring the impact of the activity we do that don't directly attribute to revenue. Because everything at the end of the day comes down to growing the business, growing the customer base, finding more better customers, more better projects for us to work with. And uh, that comes down to how we manage that measurement and manage those KPIs in every bit of our revenue funnel. And we should all be speaking the same language.

Speaker A: Okay. Ah, I really understand in theory, because what you're talking about is essentially alignment, which is a buzzword that's obviously used in this context a lot. But could you give us a concrete example of how you would achieve this alignment in your function specifically?

Speaker B: Yeah, definitely. I think it connects up not just the marketing side of things, but the business development representatives that sit at the kind of the front edge of sales who are finding the leads and creating the opportunities originally. It's making sure that we can feed back where these leads end up. Say our marketing team put together a, uh, fantastic event. Like we go to IRX in the UK or Red Brinkel in the Netherlands and we find 10 great companies to talk to and we have some great meetings with them. The kind of visibility of what happens to those leads tends to kind of stop there. They drop into the sales funnel and then a little bit later on you see a logo pop up on a Rotterdam monthly or on the website somewhere. It's feeding back the impact of what that effort is. So we ran X number of campaigns. We put this much time into finding these customers and making sure that we're bringing them in. But what does that look like on a balance sheet? What is that final closed deal and where does that customer end up? Because if you don't see the direct impact of the work you've put in, you don't know what works, you don't know what doesn't, and you don't kind of feel the kind of validation, the vindication of what you're doing. Now that can take a long time. Our, uh, revenue lifecycles for these things are very long and we're very detailed and thorough and consultative in how we do customer acquisition, but making sure that when we have a win in sales, it's not just a sales win, it's a revenue team win. Because we're all one entity, we're all working together and that, uh, marketing the BDRs, the delivery teams that have helped get it over the line. The consultants that have been a part of this, our integration specialists, implementation specialists. Everybody feels that win together as one group which then feeds back into what KPIs you're actually tracking. And the KPIs you're tracking are the ones that matter then to everybody.

Speaker A: That makes a lot of sense. And I, um, mean speaking of right there, there are a lot of stereotypes floating around of marketing but also sales equally. What are some of the stereotypes that you've seen going around about marketing and then about sales respectively that made you wince a little bit and they want to smash, kind of destroy.

Speaker B: I think it's the, it comes back to that sense of timescale that people not noticing the long terms effect, long term effects of short term activity. I suppose. So this idea that sales are only interested in what's happening tomorrow and that I've been called a lazy salesperson any number of times and it's probably true. But having not being interested in the long view and always wanting an immediate result. Whereas it's easy to consider stereotypically that a marketing team is not interested in that because they're always having the long term focus and thinking about campaigns for months and months at a time. So it can be easy to think that people aren't moving fast enough or aren't working hard enough. But it's all your perception of time. And I think that's when we come back to that. The clear KPI at the end and the clear result that both teams want. Because if you achieve that, uh, the methodology that you used to get there doesn't really matter because you've all won in the way that you wanted to win in the end.

Speaker A: Yeah. And I think that can be a huge advantage of bringing those two views together. Right. Like if you have the people putting in the long term effort and having an overview and a direction that they want to move in versus, you know, the people that are driving it forward with conversations with concrete actions of concrete results. Now I think that combination can be quite powerful.

Speaker B: Yeah. And it takes a village. Right. Like it's not a. Not everybody has to be good at everything. But we are very fortunate in the team that we've got and the people that we're around that there are a hell of a lot of very skilled and talented people in this business who all have their areas of specialty. And just because someone is good at something you're not doesn't mean that what they're good at doesn't matter. And a lot of this is, it's a data piece, it's a reporting piece, it's an educational piece, but it's showing everybody that while we have different aptitudes, that doesn't mean there's more or less merit in everything because again, we're one entity here. We're all pulling to the same objective for the same reason.

Speaker A: Mhm. Makes a lot of sense. At the same time, I think B2B, there's a lot of wasted effort right now, especially with the advent of AI being able to automate a lot of things. Where do you think most of the wasted effort in B2B is going right now?

Speaker B: I think we see a lot of this with our customers as well. We're not unique in how we do business and most of UE's history and what we've been great at has been these kind of B2B operations. And I think what a lot of our teams will be seeing in the customer meetings they have and the wider B2B industry, vertical sector, whatever you want to call it, around us they have similar problems that a lot of companies have spent the last year frantically investing in AI wherever they can. And now they're sat with a load of disparate and disconnected systems which don't speak to each other. There's no orchestration, there's no shares knowledge. And it's again, it comes back to the topic of culture that what you see in AI and automation, which is essentially taking a human element of your business and trying to replicate it, is that it tends to follow the model of the humanity that's behind it. So when you have disparate, disconnected, siloed teams, you tend to bring in AI tooling that matches that process. So the wasted effort is always the replication. And that's what should, that's what AI should be there to do is to as kind of like a force multiplier on the talented people that you've got that you're not, you're not initiating new things here. You're taking the knowledge and skills that you have and amplifying the reach. So in revops and in what we're doing, it's making sure that, you know, the brand elements of what we do in marketing are carried over into AI tooling that sales use. So if sales are creating presenters or case guides or pitch decks for their customers, that it still has the same marketing ethos that we have in, it's just scaled up. So you then have the kind of concurrent thought process all the way through the pitch cycle that a customer Feels like they're still talking to the same company in the same way, making sure that when we're setting up campaigns to find new customers, we're learning from what sales have done at the other end of the funnel and feeding those insights back in so that we can create web content faster based on what actually happened in projects, which is what our customers want to see. That we're taking real world examples and kind of learnings from, uh, our delivery teams right at the front scale, like the cutting edge of what UE is doing and communicating that back further up rather than taking days and weeks interviewing people in different bits of the business, that we're democratizing the access to that knowledge faster and then moving it across teams. It's if what we want is a culture of people collaborating, people working together, and that kind of unification of effort, then the AI has to help that rather than getting in the way.

Speaker A: M that makes a lot of sense because obviously there's a lot of noise around using AI in marketing and in sales right now. So what is the most blatant example of just like a shiny AI tool that has a lot of buzz around it, but actually is just creating noise?

Speaker B: I mean, that's a very interesting one. I think the one that I run into most this may just be in my own role and what I'm doing. These tools that claim that they can give you data insights and create dashboards and create overviews of your information without actually having any access to it. So I've had any number of these tools sold to me that people are claiming it can bring together everything in our CRM and our ERP systems and HR systems, bring everything together in one, but without any way of accessing that data. So I suppose it's the data analysis version of the kind of content slot that you see everywhere else. But again, these things are only as good as what you feed them with. So as we get better at unifying our own data internally, the answers and the insights we can get out of it become much more rapidly attained and rapidly used.

Speaker A: Yeah. Ah, so essentially what you're saying, you know, it's a kind of version of the whole garbage and garbage out thing. Exactly where you're like, well, if we're still unclear on what we stand for, what the brand's tone of voice is, what our messaging is, what our value propositions are and so on, what AI is going to amplify is also just going to be essentially noise, right?

Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, exactly. And um, that's how these tools are best used of I think we've all seen in the last 18 to 24 months, um, whether it's our customers or whether it's, you know, other bits of the industry of people buying into AI tooling to say that they have bought into AI tooling and because that's how it works, that kind of magnification point, if your data is not structured, if you haven't got the teams in place, if the people don't know how to use it, then all it does is make more noise. It's as you say. And that's going to be a big part of getting this bit right for us from a revenue standpoint is meaning that the amazing people we have internally who are great at these kind of topics and the AI specialists that we have and the tools that we invest in, we get the value out of them because we're using them properly. Not just that we're, uh, bringing these things in just to say that we have.

Speaker A: Yeah. So on the flip side, now that you mention it, what is the scenario that, you know, in which AI has really helped you and has really made you, let's say, more productive, more efficient in what you do? Just like not, you know, theoretically, but like really Tuesday morning kind of version?

Speaker B: Yeah, I think. Well, I mean, the main bit for me, as I say, I've been in sales most of my career. That's what I've always done. And now I'm surrounded by a marketing team of people who, and without we're not doing the big editing, are very good at what they do. But you have a finite amount of human resource. Right. Like I, if I need somebody to explain link to targeting advertising structure, to me, the people that are good at that are not on hand to answer my dumb questions all the time. But being able to create using, you know, Manus and Claude and structures like this, being able to create consultative agents in those platforms that will duplicate the people that we have so they can focus on the really impactful and the really creative tasks. And I have a, an automated way of turning the scattered ideas that are in my head into something that's actionable by the people that need to carry out the work. Instead of me having to go, could you just take like two hours in a meeting to make sense of this? That's the. How do I put this? That's probably the one that I'm using most at the moment, is to try and make it look like I know what I'm talking about in marketing.

Speaker A: Right. So in essence you're saying like a kind of Personalized on brand tutor. Uh, mentor, Consultants. Yeah.

Speaker B: An editor. Uh, yeah, kind of adviser. But it takes the same principles, right, of not, not getting in the way of the excellence and the talented people that we have in the business, but helping them, helping magnify what they do and increase the size of the audience, increase the size of the number of people they can help. Yeah. Without the free time of an individual,

Speaker A: being a bottleneck makes sense. And apart from companies just willy nilly installing AI tools because they're shiny and they promise to automate everything away and save you lots of time and effort, what is something our industry. So the B2B industry keeps getting wrong

Speaker B: in your opinion, in an AI sense or just in a general sense? Um, I mean most of my, most of my career prior to this. B2B is relatively new for me prior to joining Tue. I think the main thing for it's how these projects are structured from a, I guess, kind of like a value and a deliverable standpoint, like we operate. I think a lot of this industry operates in a, a time and materials mode that you would be consulted about the needs of a project and you would get a set number of hours and a set number of things that would happen in that time. I hear a lot of conversations in other bits of this industry about value based selling and you know, finding commercial opportunities, commercial partnerships that are based on an outcome. And for me it all feels very natural. That's kind of how the rest of the world works. Right. Like you go into a very uninspiring examples, but you go into a furniture shop and you buy an office chair, it costs what it costs because you believe in the brand, you believe in the value of the product and you think it's going to do for you what you need it to do. Um, the person selling you the chair doesn't pop up halfway through and go, actually, it's half the price I thought it was. And I think as we are a very consultative and a very technically specialized business, it's hard to pin it down to that kind of narrow value. It's not commoditized, it's not a. How would you say it? It's not a purely transactional relationship that we have. But moving into more of an AI led world, that kind of immediacy and transparent value on price is something that is going to become more of a want for our customers and for customers in our industry. So yeah, I think there's always things that B2B and B2C can learn from each other and bridging that gap is uh, a. Yeah, I think it's an important one to do. But yeah, that's the, probably the first thing that popped up to me after I started here was just hang on like, surely, surely it's pretty clear what all of this stuff costs. But yeah, maybe that's some learning for me as well.

Speaker A: That's pretty clear. So in essence you're saying there needs to be more transparency of, you know, on the one hand what the value of the thing is that you're delivering and on the other hand what the customer is paying for.

Speaker B: And it comes back to the relationship you have with the customer and how you want to sell that. We are not selling PIM platforms, e commerce platforms for the sake of doing it. We're trying to achieve an objective for the customer so there will always be a point of discomfort or uh, an issue that the customer wants to address in what they're doing. And if we as an agency, if we understand that and base what we're doing around helping rather than just moving product, then things like value based selling and a more of a straightforward approach to that become a lot more sensible. Because you, you know what the impact of your work is to the customer, which to wrap it back up to the start again is something that you can then pass on throughout the organization. That if your marketing teams are then understanding not just what the impact on the balance sheet of UE is, but what the impact is for their customer as well, everything you do becomes much more impactful because you are, you're not just running campaigns, you're solving problems in the real world and that makes us all feel a little bit better, I think.

Speaker A: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. And speaking of, I mean you can't have any of this and you can't keep improving and keep iterating on what you're doing. If you don't have the measurement in place, if you don't have the metrics and the KPIs. So what would be in your view, a B2B metric that if you could ban, you would ban forever?

Speaker B: Um, yeah, that's a very good question. I have never been one for activity for activity's sake. So again, it comes back to what I was saying at the start. But the overall ambition and the one number that matters is the revenue figure. It's are we generating turnover? Are we generating profit? Are we. Everything else maps into that. So the number of phone calls it takes a BDR to find the right customer or the number of emails we have to send Activity tends to be an indicator. It tends to show up problems that are happening somewhere else. But activity for activity's sake is usually a crutch to hide behind. So this is. Yeah, this is what I want to get right for us. That everybody understands the part that they play and the value that they add and how important their expertise is in growing our business and growing our revenue line. Everything else needs to be a means to an end.

Speaker A: Yeah, that's very clear. And that. That's why you've got that word revenue in your title.

Speaker B: I'm just going to keep saying it. I think that's probably the easiest way.

Speaker A: Cool. And putting work aside for a little bit because I think we've spoken enough about B2B for now. What's keeping you curious outside of work right now?

Speaker B: That's an interesting one. Yeah. I think the weird thing for me at the moment is you've seen lots of businesses crop up in the last, in the last kind of decade or so that are, uh, maybe more data focused than they actually claim to be. Like you have businesses that sell cars, but actually their real revenue center is the data that they collect and what they do with that information you have. There's an example of the last week or so of a company that sells shoes, which is now apparently AI first, as in that's the service that they sell. Doesn't really make a whole lot of sense, but I think in the last few years, outside of a particular industry, a particular sector, we as people and we as consumers are starting to cotton onto that a little bit more, asking questions about why is X Data company involved in our health service or in our government structure. So I think as much as it's, you know, we've talked about, it's a very AI led world at the moment. And that's something we've talked about a lot in this. But seeing people's, the average person's interaction with these systems changing and starting to be more curious and ask more questions. Yeah, that's something. I don't know. Am I saying I'm being curious about curiosity? Is that a little bit too meta? But I think that's, that might be the answer. Yeah.

Speaker A: I mean this is your episode, so you say whatever you want. No, uh, I like that answer. It's very interesting. I mean, I think it's always great when you can take a part of that like curiosity and those things that interest you outside of work into work as well, so that they inform each other essentially.

Speaker B: And um, I mean that's been a, that's really been something I've enjoyed while I've been at ue that I'd worked with a lot of digital agencies as a customer, as a, like a business client that's hiring an agency before, but I'd never really spent any time inside an organization like this. And the kind of, the breadth of expertise and the number of different things that are going on and how skilled the people are that we have that are, uh, operating these projects and are behind this all, it's. It really opens your eyes to a lot of kind of how the rest of the world works that you may have not seen before. So, yeah, I think I learn more around the, around the lunch table, in the kitchen, in the office than I do outside of my private life at the moment.

Speaker A: All right, well, last question then.

Speaker B: Go for it.

Speaker A: If someone was sitting, you know, on the sales floor where you were, I think, two, three years ago, listening to this, what would you want them to take away from our conversation?

Speaker B: If, especially if it was two, three years ago? I think I would ask them to have a healthy, introspective look at, um, their. The part that they play in the work that they do and understand the people that they rely on, understanding that they are an element within a system and a very important element within a system. But we're seeing where those codependencies are. Who do they rely on, who is instrumental to them getting their work done and hitting their objectives, and when they understand that, making sure that they appreciate those people and make sure that, yeah, they look after the people that get them to where they are.

Speaker A: Great. Well, I think that's it from my side. Anything that you still want to add?

Speaker B: No, I think. Thank you very much. It's great to be a part of this series, and I look forward to watching the next one.

Speaker A: Great. Well, thank you very much, Rohan. And that was it for today, so stay tuned.