Speaker 1: Let’s go. Oh, got it. Cool. We’re live. Um, well, it’s funny, I was having that same conversation with somebody the other day about are we actually going to have a, an enterprise outside sales motion again? Are we actually gonna be getting on, uh, on planes and shaking hands and kissing babies and doing that whole thing? Uh, I don’t know yet. I hope I, I I enjoy that part of it. I think there’s gonna be a shift. And sorry, everyone, welcome to Shops Talk. Andy and I are catching up. We’re, uh, [00:00:30] we’re all getting settled, so, um, grab a drink, grab a water, whatever you want. And, uh, we’ll get started in a second. But yeah, it’s gonna be a new territory for a lot of folks. I think from, uh, an outside sales mentality, I’m interested to see what happens 

Speaker 2: That events are changing so rapidly too, right? Uh, I was talking to somebody and they, they used to run events and they’re now no longer, they said they just, their email got blown up in the last two months for like, people starting to come back with in-person events. And so if like that plus sales, it’ll be really interesting to see like what the budgets [00:01:00] for events are 

Speaker 1: Yeah. 

Speaker 2: In the future. 

Speaker 1: Yep. It you’re spot on. I think the cool thing there, and again, welcome everyone to Shops Talk. Uh, we will get started in about 20 seconds. We’ll let everybody get settled and get in and, uh, get situated. The coolest thing there, I think is gonna be marketing budgets are gonna stay about the same last two years. Everybody’s been kind of drawing out of that field marketing and, and the events budget to do other things. It’ll be curious to see how that shift, uh, that shift happens, but, yeah. Yeah. Well, that being said, [00:01:30] man, we got a big group and we got a lot of talk about, we’ll get everything kicked off. Uh, Andy, thanks for being here, man. I’m, uh, I’m pumped to have you, but for, uh, for everybody that’s joined, uh, thank you for jumping in with us. Uh, hopefully this is not your first shop’s talk, but if it is, welcome, we’re excited to have you. 

Speaker 1: Uh, the cool thing about Shop’s Talk, this is a totally organic experience, uh, built from the ground up all through Wops. Um, we wouldn’t be here, especially without our, uh, our fantastic sponsors over at Salesforce, uh, making sure that we’re still able to do this and helping us sponsor it. So, as always, we appreciate that team and [00:02:00] everything they do. And, uh, and we’re gonna jump right into it. There’s a lot of things going on in the world right now. Uh, there’s a lot of noise out there. I think we can all probably agree with that. Don’t worry, we’re not gonna have many geopolitical, uh, conversations or macroeconomic conversations right now. We will talk about cutting through the noise within your business, uh, cuz there are times it can be noisy. We all know that. Uh, and there’s nobody better to talk to about this topic than, uh, my good friend, advisor. Uh, everything in between on the sun. I’ve known Andy for so long. Uh, Andy, I’m excited to be here. Tell everybody [00:02:30] who you are and what you do and, uh, how they can especially find you. 

Speaker 2: Yeah, absolutely. Uh, Andy Mott, I have run, uh, go-to-market operations and Demand Gen three unicorns, Upwork Box, and most recently Culture Amp. Now I’m starting a new company, uh, launching publicly next week, uh, gated at which basically we reduce the noise in InMail. We are building the first tool to help users control the flood of marketing and give them back control of their own inbox. Uh, rev ops [00:03:00] is one of our favorite personas, and I’ve been fascinated by what Brad’s building it, uh, uh, for a long time. So really great to be here. 

Speaker 1: Yeah, absolutely. And I’m, uh, for everybody on here, I am dropping Andy’s LinkedIn, uh, in the chat. So definitely go, uh, flood his inbox, go jump on, hang out with him. Um, I will have to say again, I’ve known Andy, I’ve known you forever, uh, seemingly can’t thank you enough, especially in the early days as we were starting sonar, um, just being a voice for us and then being [00:03:30] a sort of a sounding board for me and Jack, especially to, as we build this product, cuz you have such a, a product focused, uh, mindset and you’ve had product experience, but also, obviously we work with operations folks all day every day. Not only in Wops, especially in our community, but you know, from our product side perspective. So Andy’s been critical in how we build our product, how we navigate our roadmap, and, uh, can’t thank you enough for all the help and support. 

Speaker 1: So same thing, uh, same excitement that I’ve got for what you’re doing with gated right now. I, I think this is actually gonna be a massive game changer for [00:04:00] everybody, especially cutting through the noise of, uh, of their inbox. But we’re gonna go through what that noise looks like, especially, uh, from an inbox perspective, but just as importantly, uh, from an overall perspective of how we do business. But before we get too far, we wanna hear from everybody here. We got a lot of folks on the webinar. We’re about to launch a poll with a very easy question, what’s your biggest distraction at work? Uh, we did not, again, we didn’t put a an answer here for, uh, geopolitical, uh, things that are going on or macroeconomics [00:04:30] or what the market’s doing. We will, uh, we’ll leave that outside of the, the four walls of this conversation. 

Speaker 1: But, uh, there’s a lot of things that can distract us in our workday. So you’ve got a couple options here. Fielding requests from go-to-market teams. Yes, these are centric to operations folks. Congratulations. We’re here in W ops, uh, navigating tech, uh, fixing tech stack breaks. Um, so put your answers in. We will, uh, share those answers here in a second. But, um, man, fielding requests from go-to market is over from go to market teams is an overwhelming [00:05:00] 77%. Uh, honestly not surprised on that <laugh>. So, um, and would love to hear from everybody here. Again, please be, uh, this is a very interactive session. Please drop your, uh, comments in the chat, ask questions. Uh, if there was something that is distracting that we didn’t put us a selection, toss it in there. We’d love to hear that. But as we, uh, as we kick things off, I, you know, I really wanna start diving right in. 

Speaker 1: Andy, when we think about, uh, rev ops teams being better protective [00:05:30] of their time, we all know time is the biggest commodity from an operations perspective. Um, I don’t think anybody here, hopefully, maybe you can prove me wrong, nobody here on this call, uh, I I doubt carrie’s a quota. Um, rev ops people in general do not carry a quota. So, uh, rather than protecting the time with customers, there’s so much time for building and communicating with your current team. When you think of, uh, protecting your time and, and the attention, how can rev op teams better protect their overall time? Their biggest commodity, their biggest asset? 

Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, [00:06:00] yeah. And we’ll, we’ll get into gated later on. I think we can talk about the resources. This is, um, I mean, I don’t think I’ve ever met a soul in rev ops that says, I’ve got enough resources, I’ve got enough time. Um, you know, the, the memes that, uh, sonars dropping and a couple other amazing people are dropping, like they’re all real. And we all feel that pain. Um, I think I have spent a lot of time thinking about that and I probably throughout my entire career have spent like one to 2% of my total time as a rev op leader advocating and creating the right mechanisms so we can always have the right [00:06:30] resources. I think at the fundamental level, it’s less about like, can I get more resources? It’s much more around I need to force my stakeholders to make trade offs. 

Speaker 2: Um, so when somebody comes and asks you and says, Hey, I need this, I need this, I need this. You know, the wrong answer is, yeah, I got it. I’ll get it back to it. Like, I’ll get, I’m on it. Right? The much better answer. It’s like, here are the seven things I have in order priority. Like, where would you put this one? Um, or here’s where I would put this one and here’s how I’m [00:07:00] looking at it and it’s anot now. Um, and this is what I’m looking at over it. Um, I find that level of maturity and then being able to like visualize that for your stakeholders is critical. And then what becomes insanely powerful is when people start, instead of complaining about the fact that they’re not getting what they’re needing, they start flipping to advocating for you to get more resources. So that’s the fun and I’m sure we’ll dive deeper into that. But, and happy to take questions on it as well too. But I advise a lot of rev ops leaders on exactly [00:07:30] this, right? Like, how do you not get bold over by your stakeholders? 

Speaker 1: Yeah. I I think this is one of the candid is one of the biggest challenges that we feel in the ops world, uh, especially as we’ve made this shift from siloed operations to revenue operations. Congratulations. You’re not supporting one group anymore or one entity. You’re supporting many. And I think the hardest part of that is so much of it can be out of sight, out of mind to the other party. As an example, your fielding [00:08:00] requests all day long, that was the, obviously the biggest, uh, the biggest response that we got from the poll. You’re getting so many requests from go-to-market teams. So in this example, you’ve got three requests come in from marketing today, you’ve got five requests come in from sales, and you got two come in from finance. We’ll play that scenario out. Congratulations. The marketing team has no clue about those requests from finance or sales and vice versa. 

Speaker 1: And I think the one thing that I always suggest to folks is, you know, bang your hands on the table, be transparent. They don’t know what they don’t know. So [00:08:30] it’s your job as a rev ops leader to actually educate and inform them and be very, very vocal and transparent with what your task list looks like. We seen this all the time. We had, uh, we had our good friend Pete, is Angie on here the other day talking about that, where use something, pick your flavor, pick your poison. It could be Jira, it could be Trello, it could be Asana, it could be anything as far as some of these project management boards Monday, uh, as another one, have that share it with everybody and the the level of empathy you’re gonna get behind that from the other departments, like, oh man, I had no [00:09:00] clue you were going from a, a HubSpot to Pardo transition for the marketing team. I wouldn’t have asked you to update that one field for our sales opportunity if I knew that. So the more transparent you can be, the better you’re gonna be off. 

Speaker 2: I, I would agree that the one thing I would say on that is I do find that most stakeholders won’t engage in those task management systems unless that 10 management system is like ingrained in the whole way. So oftentimes like marketing, marketing teams will be on aana and maybe you can get it into them that way, but you know, I, I’ve ended up, like, I run our teams [00:09:30] off of those task management systems, but it ends up being like a PowerPoint or a Google sheet of like one page idiot proof, here are my top 10 like big projects and here’s how I’m looking at them. And then like, we’ve got this small bucket for little time that you just gotta trust us that we’re prioritizing the right way. Because I think that I, I think you can overwhelm them with minutia too and then they’ll tune out. I’ve, I’ve seen that happen a lot. 

Speaker 1: A hundred percent. One thing that I stole from Jack A. Long time ago, you’ll appreciate this from the product [00:10:00] standpoint. When him and I were working together at our first company, he, uh, you know, from a a product management perspective, he sent out release notes to the team. Like, Hey, we just made this update in the app, here it is. And it was one of the first times really working for a product based company like that, that I saw release notes come through. And I remember his first version was just really funny to me cuz he would always add like gifts and funny memes and stuff like that. I was like, well I’m gonna turn that around and do the same thing just from the rev op side. I’m gonna send it to the entire go-to-market team. It’s just gonna be my weekly release notes. Here are the five fields that I created. Here’s [00:10:30] the new process you’re gonna follow for sales and success handoff. And so pick your poison. Again, your mechanism and your medium for getting that message out there can be different. But again, be transparent. I’m gonna beg my hands on the desk type thing, talk, be vocal, be very, very, uh, you know, omnipresent from that whole thing. I, 

Speaker 2: I’d love to, to your point on that email and the release notes, I did that. Um, so box there was one of the head of analytics sent out a weekly email where you had like one insight and it, like, I joined and the CEO said like, this is required reading. And so I was like, okay, um, [00:11:00] we model our whole rev op thing after that. So we sent out an email every week, um, and you could opt in and subscribe and all pretty much every go-to-market leader did, we had, like, we made it super simple like what’s one data insight we’ve seen that you haven’t probably thought about? What’s one thing you’ve asked us or one feedback that has made us better? Cuz we wanted to encourage that and then like, what’s the coolest thing we’re working on right now? And that was it. Um, yeah, it was, and, and people like read it and forwarded it to their teams and that, that really works. So, um, I I’m a big fan of like being transparent and then like [00:11:30] telling your story over and over and over again. 

Speaker 1: <laugh>. Yep. If you think you’re over communicating, you’re probably not just keep doing it. <laugh>. So no such thing as overcommunication. Here’s a fun one. Um, we talked a little bit about this in this first question, but we’re gonna double click into it now. How do you know when it’s the right time to push back and say no? As a rev ops leader? 

Speaker 2: I don’t think you ever, it’s actually an interview question. I do. I’ll ask the open-ended loaded one, which is how do you say no? And there’s right answers and wrong answers to [00:12:00] this. I think the way, what I’m really looking for is you’re not ever actually saying like, no, I’m sorry we can’t do that. But you’re guide. I think what you’re assessing is like, can I guide them to a better solution? Can I help them realize there’s something that exists that they can use instead? Or can I show them how deep down that priority list they’re gonna be and then they’ll kind of, probably kind of fade out on their own or, um, and, but it’ll, it, it, the final one’s really helping them understand like how I’m prioritizing. So I’m never actually saying no, [00:12:30] but you’re kind of sweet talking ’em a little bit and they’re like, oh yeah, I kind of get that this one’s not gonna get done. 

Speaker 2: Um, I think if you saying, if you say no, what ends up happening is they go get budget from somebody else. You end up having an orphan tool and then you’re whacking it away forever. So I, I think what you really want is like this SDR department, the sales department, the c s the marketing, like all coming to you to like partner with you on tools decisions versus seeing you as a blocker and then going around you and then you’re just gonna end up dealing with the, the chaff later on. So my job [00:13:00] is to smile, um, very politely say no in a way where they don’t actually think I’m saying No. 

Speaker 1: <laugh>. Yeah, <laugh>. I think some of the best, uh, versions I’ve heard of that same like type of strategy, it’s like, yeah, yes. When you say yes and I’m gonna do this when I can get around to it, or I can do this when I get to the bottom of my priority list or I get to these other five tasks that are obviously more pressing and and more important. The, uh, there’s an entire like great, uh, a great blog post that, um, I can look it up in a little bit and we’ll add a link to it. Uh, [00:13:30] saying no poetically and it’s just the the right way to say you wanna be transparent. You don’t wanna leave people on, but you have to do it in such a politically correct way. Uh, it’s a, a great block post. We’ll, we’ll find it in a second. The, uh, the thing that I think we all keep in mind here, especially as far as like being conscious of our time, how to remove the noise, um, has so much to do with the resources on our team. 

Speaker 1: I think we look at this sometimes, especially this rev ops revolution that we’re in right now. This, this pendulum the swinging so far [00:14:00] right now of it’s no longer a one person show or even two person show. We, we look at all the companies that, that we both work with, we got for us at Dell over at Outreach. I think his, uh, of a thousand person company at Outreach, I think is operations team is a little over 20 people now, which I absolutely love seeing. Um, so many other examples. I know Kyle and all folks over at SalesLoft have the exact same like mentality with the way that Scott’s building his team over there. And so, you know, one of the other poll questions, we’ll go ahead and launch this now. How do you feel about the resources your ops [00:14:30] team has? Um, a couple of options there. Uh, this is, this is always gonna be a fun one. Totally happy. Uh, they’re all right. Need some work or not cutting it. Uh, yeah. How do you feel about the resources your ops team has? Uh, I’m be really curious to see how, uh, I 

Speaker 2: Think Brad, you can predict why this one’s coming out, but it’ll be fun to see for sure. 

Speaker 1: I know I can almost predict the percentage of the, uh, of the answer being an overwhelmingly high, but we’ll, uh, we’ll see what the, uh, the results look like. Okay. 

Speaker 2: Okay. Yeah. Yeah. [00:15:00] Well if you remember that there’s nothing on that top line then that one <laugh>. 

Speaker 1: That’s, that’s exactly it. Well, I mean, we’ll, we’ll unpack that. I think the, the thing that we all look at, and we can use Sonar as an example of this gated as an example of this, of having resources as far as software to do these things, but it, it’s a no surprise there that it needs some work or not cutting it, or there are right where the majority, I think, uh, I don’t want your opinion of this when you’ve seen this sort of evolution of how revenue operations has gone. Uh, [00:15:30] and even for the folks that are on the call, I know some folks still have sales ops titles, perfectly fine, marketing ops, Salesforce admin. We’re all collectively in this umbrella of operations. But I think, uh, undoubtedly we can all say that we’re all wanting more and more resources, both people and software. When you think of juggling that, uh, there’s so many ways that you can, you can accomplish your goals with this. Um, sometimes it can be resources, some kind of can be software. But when you think about grabbing resources, what’s the first thing that comes to mind? And what [00:16:00] strategy do you take when you’re going to solve problems, when you know resources are minimal for you? 

Speaker 2: Yeah, we already talked to kind of like making resources finite, which is kind of part of the forcing people to make trade offs. I think that’s my overall philosophy. I think another concept that I work with my teams a lot on is the concept of there’s two buckets. There’s run the business, uh, and there’s change the business and, you know, run the business is all the things you’re needing to do to just kind of keep the, the things running. And then change the business side was like game changing projects. Um, and I’ve started to, the concepts so simple, what’s been really cool [00:16:30] is my team started parroting them back to me of like, I’m feeling really high on run the business. So I’m like, okay, great, I can coach that. Um, why don’t you tell me all the run the business tasks and let’s go through ’em and figure out which ones we can stop doing, which ones we can make better, which ones we can automate. 

Speaker 2: And then on the change the business, I’m like, well, you’re only gonna have so much. Um, and you’ve gotta be able to pick and prioritize. So, you know, first off, like that’s very inspiring to people and they’re able to do it. And it, it really blew my mind like three years ago where one of my team was like, Hey, I, you know, I’m, I’m blowing up on [00:17:00] run the business. So you people start to be able to self-manage on that. So I use those two concepts of kind of resources, finite and R T B C T B a lot. 

Speaker 1: Yeah. So, you know, it’s interesting. We’ll, we’ll unpack that. Cause we, we look at this so much about being efficient and making sure that we can cut through some of the noise. So often I think this is part of the ecosystem that we all live in, almost by nature or a knee jerk reaction. We think about how can we add something to make our day easier. So can we add a [00:17:30] new tool? Can we add a new headcount? Can we add a new resource, whatever it be to make that job a little easier. I think one of the questions that doesn’t get asked too often, and you just said this, what can we take off our plate to actually do these jobs more efficiently? Because so much of it doesn’t have to be additive. We can be, uh, or to sort of detractors if you want. 

Speaker 1: We can be more efficient. We can cut through some of this noise by eliminating some of the noise, not necessarily throwing software or more people at it. Uh, we’ve, I think we’ve said this almost ad nauseum on this, uh, uh, [00:18:00] on this, not this episode, but on shoptalk in general, everybody’s always asking advice for what software should I go by? Should I go by this one or that one? There’s so many of ’em out there, you’re asking the wrong question first. Like, what process are you trying to build? Or what problem are you trying to solve? Go do that first. Go understand your place first and then actually go solve it with people or software or anything else. But you’re, you’re gonna do the wrong thing if you just go buy something real quick. You think it’s a silver bullet. 

Speaker 2: So yeah, I can’t count the number of times I’ve walked with a ops person over to one of their stakeholders and then like, we think that this is a process that’s [00:18:30] really not that value anymore. Do you agree and here’s how we do it. And they’re like, yeah, yeah, okay. And I’m like, okay, great. That one’s off your list anymore. You don’t need to do that one. So, um, I think I, giving people the air cover to have those hard conversations when there’s stakeholders is, is important. 

Speaker 1: Oh, a hundred percent. Um, so we’ll go back on track when we think about cutting through some of the noise and getting to be more efficient for your rev op teams. Um, there are a ton of resources out there. We’re gonna throw a couple of ’em out there. We’re usually not the, uh, the, the webinar to start throwing a bunch of logos out there and advocating for things. But [00:19:00] there are legitimate things that we can go purchase, we can go install, we can go buy to help our days. What resources are out there that can help rev op teams be more efficient? What comes to mind for you? 

Speaker 2: Yeah, I’ll give three. I mean, um, first is like I, there’s this cool tool called text displays. It’s like back slash commands. I use it a lot. Um, very, you know, it just makes me a lot more efficient with things I type a hundred times a day. Um, sonar is powerful, right? Like all those mappings, um, that you have to like, draw and document. Um, and, and I, I really [00:19:30] am excited and that’s why you and I have been geeking out so much. And then obviously, like you’re probably overloaded with email. Every Rev hops person is, cuz we have so much, we, so many tools we own the decision processes on. So that’s what we built gate. It basically takes email from unknown people outta your inbox and challenges them to donate to your nonprofit to reach you. 

Speaker 1: Yeah, it’s, it is, I will tell you this, it is the most humanizing aspect of, of what Gate is doing. Um, again, cutting through the noise. Uh, there, we [00:20:00] all know this to be true. It can be very noisy when you’re a target of a sales cycle. <laugh>, spoiler alert, everybody on this call is a target of the sales cycle. Everybody’s ever gonna watch this recording. Uh, everybody always wants to sell you something or get in contact you about that. The human nature that we can all provide for that is, again, so humanizing when, hey, I’m gonna go donate a dollar or two or whatever the threshold is to go get that, to make sure that that message gets through to Andy. Now that’s a great way of thinking about how to be a human for once. Um, absolutely the one, uh, the one thing that [00:20:30] I think about too, we, we use it here. 

Speaker 1: Um, Jack is a, a massive, uh, advocate for it. Uh, command e um, software that’s out there, you can quickly find it, aggregates all of your stuff. And so instead of doing command F on certain applications and try to find things, you hit command E and it’s gonna find it through some of your applications like Gmail, through Salesforce, through reports, through spreadsheets. And so it’s just a massive, massive search engine. The reality is, everyone here, we’re all juggling a ton of data, uh, a ton of ways to communicate between [00:21:00] Slack, email, text message, messenger, pigeon, however else you’d want to, uh, communicate with everybody. Um, and we’re all juggling a bunch of systems and data. And to be able to have that at your fingertips, find it very quickly, uh, it’s always important. So, uh, we do thank you Sarah. We do have some, uh, we do have folks on here. 

Speaker 1: We wanna hear from you guys. Uh, give us your questions. I, uh, we, we definitely wanna jump into it. We got about eight minutes left, so, uh, I know a couple familiar faces on here that folks that I’ve had, uh, plenty of conversations with can jump in and ask questions. I’ll [00:21:30] throw you, uh, a first one that I think will be intriguing, especially to everybody here in the, in the rev op world. Um, we’re in the movement. I don’t think we’re at the tail end of a movement if in all reality, I think that we’re in the first mile of this marathon of, of what revenue operations does and how we actually go and continue to build, uh, what we’re building through all these different companies. If you were to time box it to the next, we’ll make it easy 24 months, next two years, what do you think one of the big ships or big changes that [00:22:00] revenue operations is, has not gone through yet, but likely will go through over the next time Horizon? 

Speaker 2: That’s an easy one. I’m a lot of time talking to companies in the space cause I’m just passionate about it. Um, and investing in a couple, um, modern data stack. It it is, I I, I’ll break it in. I’ll make it really simple. Like there are a lot of questions, for example, that you can’t answer in Salesforce because of the way their data’s structured. So a great example is, um, pipeline coverage, right? Like, I wanna look back at any moment in time and know how much pipeline did [00:22:30] I have and how did that close? Like that’s a very hard question. And, and when we were building out our rev ops team at, at Culture Amp, you know, the cl when we were interviewing people, like 95% of the rev ops people we interviewed were like, yeah, easy. Totally. I downloaded this from here and this spreadsheet and I manipulated it over here and I do this. 

Speaker 2: And I’m like, no, no, no. Like, do you know how to get that in real time in a, in a configurable dashboard? And most people didn’t. Um, but in the next two to three years, I foresee a lot of systems, um, parti. I think first your data layer [00:23:00] and your visualization layer, uh, abstract above to the modern data stack. And then I do think the actual systems we use will get rebuilt on the modern data stack. I’m seeing that happen first with marketing automation next with like PLG sales software and it’s, people are poking around on it, um, in the c R M space. So I think if you don’t have a data, um, background and D n a I think you’ll be left behind in three years in rev ops. 

Speaker 1: [00:23:30] I can’t agree with you more. <laugh>. Uh, I think here’s the reality of that, the biggest piece of that, the modern day stack is growing. We all know that there’s a new piece of software out almost every day. We’ll, we’ll take our line from our good friends over in Andies and software is eating the world. We know that. Um, and that’s fine. I think how we toggle it and how we juggle it and how we rationalize which ones we use and why is always gonna be important. Um, but your point on data, we are in a world now where there is more data than we know what to do with. And I think if we tied [00:24:00] this whole thing back together to a lot of, uh, of this topic, the signal to the noise ratio, Brian, uh, on, on our board, you know, Brian Mario over craft, uh, says this all the time. 

Speaker 1: Are we tracking this because it’s a signal or are we tracking this? Cause it’s noise. We’ve got phenomenal data to go track it. Do we actually need to track the shoe size of our customer in Missouri? Probably not. So do we, is that a valuable piece of data and how we do it? The, the amount of data that we’re now subject to and toggling and juggling is massive. I think the one I’ll say you this, the one [00:24:30] interesting conversation I’ve had most recently is, Hey Brad, do you think, uh, like data warehouses and BI tools are, are now the thing of the future and they’re gonna take away, uh, the c r m at some point? Uh, I’m, I’m not gonna go on the record right now and in March of 2020 and say no or yes. I think it’s an interesting question. I don’t necessarily think CRMs going away. 

Speaker 1: I think you’re always gonna have a UI and a user interface that you have your go-to-market teams needing to use, um, and no bashing to anybody and go to market teams. But using a [00:25:00] a data warehouse or doing, going into data science mentality is not up for everyone, is a very tough skill to go have. So I don’t think you’re gonna ever have anybody being power users of, uh, things like Tableau or things like that. But it is interesting that data is being used in a different way. And sometimes it’s not necessarily in the, the epicenter of what we’ve always said, which is our c R m, it is sitting in other places. But I think from a usability layer here, you’re always gonna have the C R M side of things. 

Speaker 2: The one thing I could see happening is the database layer and the rules around it stay in Salesforce, [00:25:30] but the UX goes to something like a scratch pad or a truth. Yeah. Yes. Um, and so I mean, that’s not where they are now because they still rely upon that. But you know, we all know that. And again, this is not me. I love Salesforce. It’s, it’s, it’s been my whole thing. But the UX side and the database structure, what we can all do as rev ops people in it is amazing. Um, and like that would be very hard to replace in some data warehouse layer. But the should our, we also know that we’re [00:26:00] inflicting a lot of damage on our teams with like point through this click and the UX get to worse every year as Salesforce rolls out lightning and then they roll out the next thing. And, and you know, and so I think the UX of Salesforce as our functionality as rev ops people gets better. I think the UX as Salesforce gets worse and worse for our end users. And that I think is where somebody like Scratchpad or troops or, or all of them are starting to innovate on. 

Speaker 1: And then you, you also make [00:26:30] my next couple of comments too easy. We talk about, uh, pipeline coverage and everything we’ve talked about having Pete on here, if you’re checking things like out that out, uh, please go check out Atrium from a sales performance and metrics tracking perspective. We had, uh, pon on, uh, shops talk of sometime a long time ago. It was a couple months ago. Um, time warp style. And we’re actually having a, uh, a troops webinar in next week, but next week or the week after that, I gotta look at my date. So we got a lot of excited. Uh, yeah. Yeah. So we all keep, uh, very, very tight circles. So, um, I know we’re getting close to the top of [00:27:00] time. Uh, if you have any other questions, drop them in. I always love this one. This is my favorite question we ask everybody on every Shop’s Talk episode from the, the start of time when we had Monte Co Carney from, uh, at the time, CV Insights, um, now at our Spring health. 

Speaker 1: Um, Monte was great and he was one of the first people that really helped me get this question out. Um, we’re all on this rev ops journey together. Some of us have been on it for years. Some of us have been on it for days or weeks or months, but not for a long time. Um, so always encourage everybody, [00:27:30] let’s fire up the DeLorean. Let’s go back in time. Let’s go back to when you started, uh, in your operations journey. Cuz you’re, you, you’re still in operations journey, a little bit of a different role, but you’ve been in many of ’em so far. What would now Andy tell early Andy, uh, advice wise of how to become a great revenue operations leader? 

Speaker 2: Make sure that, I think all of our roles are typically internally focused, right? Like all of our stakeholders are internal. Maybe we talk to a vendor or two [00:28:00] here and there, but like fundamentally probably most people listen to this are like my role as an internal role. Make sure it’s not just an internal role. I think my career path in ops opened up when I made it external and I did that by one writing. Um, so I would write down my thoughts. I’ve written a rev ops handbook, I’ve, I’ve write on a lot of the things and I just share what I did. Um, two, I say we would bring in, uh, like once to twice a month, we would bring in a guest, uh, that had done something, right? So we brought in like the Splunk marketing operations teams to geek out with us or [00:28:30] we would. 

Speaker 2: And so I was, I was big on like having a network of people that I could bring in and mindshare. And I think anytime I’m trying to do something, you’re going out and asking communities. Now, when I started my career, like W Ops didn’t exist. Brad, you you’ve built that, which is I think the first way we found each other. And it’s really impressive of like, you know, if you need to find something now there are these great communities. And so that’s another way to make it external. Um, and then like I tend to learn a lot from talking to vendors and you know, those become strategic if you engage them strategically. So like, all of, [00:29:00] and, and vendors will take you to dinners. They’ll put you on stage. And so if you wanna build your rev ops, like you can’t just be a great rev ops practitioner. Um, doesn’t mean you need to be like always influencer and talking about it, but I think, you know, just sharing your wisdom and and wanting to geek out on calls is, is really we’ll open up lots of doors for you. 

Speaker 1: I couldn’t agree more. Ask questions, be curious, use your vendors. I’m gonna double down on that. Uh, on that comment, one of the very first, um, it wasn’t even a webinar, this [00:29:30] is God, six, seven years ago, uh, our good friend, uh, Eric Martin, who was at Data Fox now over a Vanta, um, he had me join a panel that he was leading one day and was like, Brad, tell me about your Rev op team. He’s like, I know you’re a, a lean, mean team of two, right? I was like, no dude. I’ve got, I’ve got a team of like 30 plus people. There’s two people that are internal to me. Yes, it’s me and you know, Todd, who’s on my team. I look at every one of my vendors as someone on my team, and I use them heavily as that [00:30:00] I delegate to them. 

Speaker 1: If I’m having trouble using something in SalesLoft or Outreach or Drift or Intercom, anything like that, I consider my counterpart over there on their CS team or account management team, whoever my point of contact is. I rely on them. They are part of my team. And it’s a, it’s a different little bit of a mindset, but you have to go and leverage that. You’re, you’re purchasing their software. Yes. Like that’s a great thing to have happen, but we encourage all of our customers, I’m sure you do the same. I’m on your team if you have a question, I may not know the answer to it. It might not perfectly [00:30:30] be SOAR specific, but it’s probably close, it’s tangential enough for me to help, uh, find you the right answer. Leverage your vendors. It is such a crucial thing. I didn’t do that earlier in my career. 

Speaker 1: Uh, it took a while for me to realize I have a bigger team than just one or two people that were on my team at the time. So, um, I love that answer. You’re so, you’re so spot on. So, um, God, just like that time flies when you’re having fun. We’re writing one minute over. But, uh, Andy can’t thank you enough for, uh, for jumping on with us dropping knowledge. Mm-hmm. <affirmative>, um, again, we put your, uh, your LinkedIn message in there. Put your [00:31:00] email in there. Uh, everyone please get ahold of Andy. Um, great. Gotta talk to learn from. I can’t say you how much I’ve already learned in my, uh, time hanging out with you. So can’t thank you enough for being here and, uh, dropping the knowledge on us. 

Speaker 2: Fun session Brad. Thanks a lot 

Speaker 1: Always. And thank you everybody for joining. Uh, we’ll be back in two weeks for another, uh, another great shops talk. Uh, if you have any questions, jump in w ops Ping me or Andy. We’re happy to help and we’ll talk to you all soon. 

Speaker 2: I’m in Ms. Ops, we’ll see you there. Bye. 

Speaker 1: All right, have a good one, Andy. See ya.