Modules
Session 1: Science of Sustainable Revenue Growth
Slide Deck
Transcript
Hey, everybody. Welcome. Super excited to have you guys join.
Wonderful to have all of you. I see some familiar faces. Thank you for being here. We'll give everyone a moment to get connected. Thank you for your patience as we're getting everything set up.
Welcome, everyone. If you'd like, take a moment to drop in the chat where you're calling from. I know most of you shared your, your handles and your location in the Slack channel. But if you'd like, feel free to share it here too. We'd love to see where you're calling in from today. I know we have members joining us from all over the world.
We'll give everyone a moment to get connected, get situated before we kick things off.
If you are willing and able, please feel free to turn your cameras on. We'd love to see you today and interact with us.
Hi, everyone that's just joining.
Alright. Before we get started, it is our first class, so I do have a few housekeeping notes just to make sure everyone is aware of our procedures and process during this offering. Welcome to class one of Redbox. Long time coming.
So excited to have all of you here today. Want to let you know that we do have an attendance requirement. Eighty percent of attendance is required for cohort and our live sessions. But if you miss a live session of the actual class, not to worry.
We post all of the recordings right after the same day of the class that will count towards your attendance. So you can earn one hundred percent attendance at your leisure. You'll have an additional three weeks after the course ends to review all of the class materials as well as the recordings.
And we will have a final exam at the end of the class. It will be an eighty percent to earn your certificate of completion. You'll be able to take that multiple times, and we will provide more information about that towards the end of the semester.
Alright. And if you haven't already, please take a moment to select your cohort. There is information in the Slack channel on how to do that. You will do that through Docebo. Feel free to send me a direct message after or during class, and I can help you with that if you have any questions.
And finally, most importantly, we decide to lead from a place of kindness, so please be mindful in the chat, cohort meetings, and in the Slack channel. We do love to hear from you, though. Now thank you for letting me have a long spiel there. I appreciate your time. I am super excited to welcome our instructor ahead.
Before you do that, could I ask a question? Sorry.
I'm just gonna get to you. Hi. How can I help you? Of course.
Yeah. Hi. Just on the attendance with the cohorts, is it possible to join a different cohort if you can't make it? That was the only question.
You can do that. If you'd like to send me a direct message, I can help you with that. No problem at all.
Thank you.
Yeah. Of course. Thank you.
Alright. Welcome, everyone, that is just joining. We are ready to kick things off.
I'm so sorry. One moment. Okay. Welcome, everyone. For those of you that are just joining, let's get started.
Thanks, Allison. I appreciate it. Hello, everyone. My name is Brian. I'm super stoked to be your, your instructor for this, Pavilion RevOps course over the next eight weeks. And so I'm gonna go ahead and share my screen to get started and go ahead and kick us off.
Sorry, Brian. My audio went a little funky there. Welcome.
Go ahead.
We are thrilled to have you.
Thank you so much for being here. I will go ahead and let you introduce yourself. And anyone has any questions, feel free to reach out to me. Enjoy class today.
Yep. Sounds good. Appreciate it, Allison. I've got everything ready to go in the deck, and we'll go ahead and just get started.
As a reminder, this class will be about ninety minutes, but, I I never wanna keep you that long. So, hopefully, we end a little early, for session one. So like I said, this is the rev ops course the next eight weeks except for July fourth week, over June and July. And let's go through the agenda of this first class.
So, of course, first class, I'm gonna go through an intro of who I am and a little bit about who you guys are and then go through some class logistics a little bit more, kinda add added on top to what Allison went over. Then we're gonna start with what is revenue operations, how your business model affects your operations, and then go through go to market motions and structure. So that will be the sections of this agenda, and we can do q and a throughout and also at the end.
So who am I? So my name is Brian Kreutz. Like Allison said, I am the instructor for this course. I may bring in some guest speakers towards, kind of the middle or latter, part of the course. But for the next couple weeks, it'll just be, myself and, all of you on the Zoom.
What do I do? I'm the head of rev ops prod products at RevPartners.
At RevPartners, we're essentially, like, the fractional rev ops departments. We we serve as a rev ops department for our clients. And so that means we do strategy, execution, and technical work for, our clients. And we are a HubSpot partner, and so we predominantly work with HubSpot as the main CRM, but I've got a ton of Salesforce experience as well. And so anything that kinda goes into the CRM, we kinda own, at RevPartners.
That is my LinkedIn there. If you do wanna connect with me, I would love to connect with you all. So professionally, I worked in rev ops for over ten years. Back when I started, rev ops wasn't really a commonly, used term.
So it's amazing to see all of the, kind of excitement of it over the last three or four years. And so, I've worked with over fifty companies, both from an internal user, but also external user doing some consulting and working with the current clients that I do, at RevPartners. I started out as a Salesforce admin. I think a lot of us have got into the RevOps domain or trying to learn about it through a ton of different avenues.
But mine was kind of more of the traditional one, starting as a Salesforce admin in the sales org for a software start up. And then from there, kind of expanding into, kind of the domain that we think of RevOps today. I did dip my toe in entrepreneurship. I did, found a SaaS startup, several years back.
Unfortunately, that failed during COVID. And so I've kinda seen the roller coaster of getting super excited, getting your first few clients, and then having them, you know, all go away. And so that was a great learning experience for me, but it was really cool to kinda see that side of the the business as well.
What about me personally? So, personally, I love to travel.
I saw a lot of you guys, online or international. And so, a lot of those places I've been to, and I I love traveling internationally. I've been to forty five countries on five continents, and I'm planning my next trip. After this course ends, maybe in early or mid August, I will be taking a week trip somewhere as well.
I love culinary experiences and craft beer. Usually, while traveling, I will seek out any food option, any market, any kind of, like, local brewery I love to check out. And so I'm definitely more of a walk around town and eat type of traveler than, like, a museum goer. And then, what do I do outside of work?
My biggest kind of outside of work hobby is golf. I'm an avid golfer, and I try to play at least once, once or twice a week. And so, I don't know if there's any other golfers out there, but if so, I'd love to talk shop with you guys.
So that is who I am. So let's talk about who are all of you.
So we've got over three hundred and fifty participants, and so, I think that's, amazing. So kudos to all of you for joining this course and trying to kinda learn about, you know, rev ops and and, you know, build up your your network with other pavilion members. I did send out kind of a a short survey. There's been about eighty responses.
If you still wanna participate, you can. It takes three or four minutes. But that kinda helps me understand exactly who is in this course as well. And we've got a wide variety of folks in here.
We've got people that are in marketing, sales, customer success, finance, and several, you know, traditional rev ops folks that have that as their main domain. So I love the variety here. There's people that are trying to learn more about rev ops, people that maybe sit in the marketing or sales seat, but kinda want a better understanding of different parts of the business. And then certainly some, some rev ops folks like myself that, are eager to kind of, you know, share best practices and learn a little bit more.
So let's go into a couple of the stats from the survey. So which CRM does your company primarily use? It's about seventy percent Salesforce and about thirty percent HubSpot.
I think this is really interesting to me. I bet you five or ten years ago, it would be ninety to ninety five percent Salesforce. And to see HubSpot kinda creep up in and kinda get to thirty percent is exciting for me since I'm a HubSpot partner and HubSpot user now.
But everything that we do, in this course will apply to either CRM. But, obviously, as you all know, the CRM is the source of truth for for most companies these days. So understanding kind of the dynamics of that I thought was, was really interesting.
What is the job role? So are you in a rev ops role or directly manage someone in a rev ops role? So sixty percent yes, forty percent no. And so I love the diversity here. Sixty percent of you, you probably live and breathe, you know, rev ops or some kind of operational structure every single day, but forty percent of you don't live in that world. And so I think you being eager to learn more about it and collaborate with some folks that do see it every day, I think is awesome. So I'm really excited for these cohort groups because there's people in all different business types industries and, you know, departments within their companies.
Which is your sales go to market motion that does your company predominantly use? So later today, we'll talk through. You can have multiple sales go to market motions. But I think, for the most part, every business here in the in the business of generating revenue.
And so I think the sales go to market motion is really interesting to see kind of the dynamic of the folks in this group. So thirty seven percent are in the two stage sales go to market, which is traditionally a BDR and AE. So someone qualifying and prospecting into an account and then, an account executive or salesperson closing that deal. Thirty five percent is a one stage.
These are full cycle sales reps. They get, past the leads, and they qualify them, and then they close them. That's what my company currently does. At RevPartners, we are a one stage company.
We also have about ten percent named accounts or account based marketing and then nine percent PLG or product by growth. And so I love seeing kind of the four most common ones have some, representation here, and you can see by the, the bar graph here. But a lot of other colors there. You can see people added in the other.
We've got two go to market motions or this and that. And so I love seeing people already thinking about how, you know, multiple go to market motions kind of impact their business.
Let's talk about your goals for this course. And so in that survey, I did have two open, open free text sections. And so, generally, the themes that I saw, these are your goals, your own words about what you wanna get out of this course are how to build an effective rev ops org. And so this means, you know, building an org, hiring people, and kind of building it out within your company, but also what are the metrics in reporting you wanna standardize and build upon to make your, you know, rev ops role or just your role in the company more successful.
Some folks want a better overall understanding of the rev ops function. And so, like I said, forty percent of you do not, work in a rev ops role or manage someone directly in one. So getting a better understanding of kind of how that, interacts with their business, I think is fantastic because, obviously, in the world of rev ops, it it it's beginning to touch every part of the business. So you understand how they can help you in your specific role, I think is fantastic. The connection between revenue architecture and rev ops. I'll be talking a lot about this today and next week. I think it's an awesome topic, and it's amazing to have all the new resources out there about revenue architecture.
A lot of a ton of you said, I want actionable insights and best practices. I get it. So do I. I mean, if I I wanted to design this course as if I was an attendee, and so I want these things to be actionable. I don't want you to be on Zoom for the next sixty minutes and feel like you can apply some of these things to grow your role in your business.
The hope is that everything that you learn here can be applied to your role or your business no matter, where you sit within the organization. And then, of course, best practices. And so, there's a million and one ways to do almost all of these things that I'll go through. And so these are the best practices that I use. You don't have to agree with them. You can disagree with them. But I think if you wanna learn what best practices are, I think it's awesome in those cohort groups to be able to see, how do other people do some similar types of things and just share different best practices, overall.
The next one is how to get executive and leadership buy in and alignment.
I think this is huge. I think there's a big misunderstanding of what the rev ops function does. I know this is true because a lot of our prospects and customers, they have very definition very different definitions of what the value of this role in an organization is. And so how do we get that exec buy in and alignment so that they value you or value your, participation in kind of growing revenue? And then finally, the last one here is learn to be more strategic than reactionary.
I feel this deep in my bones for the first maybe five years of my my career. All I felt like I was doing was putting out fires, plugging holes, just responding to Slacks about do this, do that, fix this, instead of being more strategic. And so being strategic, looking ninety days, a hundred and eighty days ahead to really, drive a true road map rather than always being react reactionary is something I think is super important too. So the good news for you guys is that all of these goals align with all the content I've already built out, and I just hope that I'm able to, you know, satisfy some of these goals that you guys have.
And then lastly, let's talk about the top rev ops initiatives on your mind right now. So what's either keeping you up at night, or what are you feeling do you feel like you're doing really well at if you wanna continue on?
These also align to the course, which I'm super about. So adoption and enablement. I am a huge adoption believer in person, so there's a whole session on adoption, further down the line. But, that's part of the hardest part of our all of our jobs.
How do we get adoption? How do we enable all these wonderful things in our tech stack to do what they're supposed to do? Metrics retention, benchmarks, reporting, all of that stuff. We need to be able to track and make a lot of these things actionable and, you know, generate their impact or their ROI.
And so everyone wants to know more about metrics, which we'll definitely dive into. Data integrity processes built and maintained the team. How do you get the data not only in the system, but correct in the system? Once it's correct and adopted, the next bullet point data analysis and action plan based on insights.
None of the stuff that we do matters if people aren't using the reports, analyzing the data in the report to create an action plan based on those insights. And so those four kind of go right into each other, and so that's kinda how the course is designed to build on top of each other. Change management strategies, especially with remote, remote work. It's really it's much more difficult, I think, to do large scale trans management across several departments.
And so what are strategies to do that more effectively? Reporting and dashboards, like, every everyone talked about reporting and dashboards, and so, of course, that's gonna be something that's, on your mind right now. And then finally, what is the feedback loop amongst internal teams? And so how do we get, alignment across all of our teams and create positive feedback loops so that we're actually solving solving problems that will impact the business.
So these are all the top rev ops initiatives on your mind right now. And so, hopefully, this resonates with a lot of you because your peers, thought about this stuff as well.
So I'm not looking at the chat. I see a lot of things in the chat. So, I love it because that will go into, the next couple slides. And so I don't think, Allison, there's anything I need to address right now.
So I'm gonna keep going, but if there is, certainly, certainly stop me. Okay. This is my promise to you. And so my promise is the content will be actionable with prompts to apply strategies to your business.
You will end the course with a tangible workflow of all content put into action. I did not wanna design this course so that you have to sit here and take a bunch of notes and then, you know, distill that down into something with your job and then try to present that to your company or, you know, present it internally. I wanted to make this easier for you. I wanted to have a step by step, resource guide with time built into the class so that you guys can actually take these mini sections, of coursework that I'm presenting and then translate that to your business and then have a lot of assets already built for you that you can put into action.
So that is my promise, and that is my, hopefully, goal here is that I I even got a LinkedIn DM today say that, do you promise this will be actionable? And so that's my that's my main goal here. And if it's not, you know, please let me know. My next promise is I will answer questions to the best of my knowledge.
I'm not gonna know the answer to every question. I'm not gonna pretend I'm the smartest person in the room because I'm certainly not. But if I'm avail if I can pull outside resources where applicable to answer some of those questions, I will go, you know, do the best I can to provide any other questions or details or resources that you ask for. And then my last promise is I'm gonna show up each every week to try my very best to ensure this content and session is engaging and worth your time.
I've never done a course like this before. So I'm very excited to do it. I've done a lot of webinars, and I've done a lot of speaking events and things like that. But, you know, an eight week, course with cohort sessions, all these different moving parts, I have not done. And so if you have ideas on how to make the content or the session more engaging, please let me know. Send me that feedback. I really want this to be worth your time.
And then the last piece of logistics here, I promise, is, hopefully, your promise to me. And so I really want you guys to attend each week with an open mind. Especially these first couple of classes, they are going to be foundational. You have to start somewhere.
As we said before, not everyone here is in a rev ops role. Not everyone here has the same experiences. So even if you feel like you know this stuff and you've done it a hundred times, going through it again and, applying these principles to your workbook, going through the foundations again, participating in cohort. And so maybe if you're more experienced in a couple areas, then you're able to pass that knowledge to someone who's less experienced there.
And so just come in with an open mind. There's a, there's a, you know, method to the madness in here. And, even if you feel like you're the smartest, you know, rev ops person in the world, I promise you just going back and kind of going through the process here will be helpful for you. I really would love for you guys to participate in the chat, the exercises during the course, the cohort sessions in the Slack group.
You guys all join for a reason, and, hopefully, that reason is obviously to learn a little bit, but also have this awesome network of of, like, many individuals that you can, pull resources from, not just during these next eight weeks, but, you know, connecting with them, you know, in the future as well.
I'd love for you to complete the assignments and apply them to your business. I'm not gonna do a hundred question a final exam that's gonna make you study for hours, but I am gonna expect you to complete the assignments and go through the workbooks. I spent a lot of time creating the templates for you that you just have to fill them out. So please apply those to your business, and try your best to give your full attention for the ninety minutes each week.
I know all of you have your calendar block for the next ninety minutes. That's why I'm giving you time within the session to complete these exercises because I know it's a huge time commitment right in the middle of your week to give ninety minutes. I know all of you guys have your second screens up. I know you've got Slack up.
That's totally fine. I get it, but just try your best to give it full attention and and do that. So without further ado, I had to do the logistics part in the beginning here, but, hopefully, that's two thumbs up from everyone, and everyone's ready to dive in and get started.
So I guess I had one more slide. I lied. The course of course logistics. So everyone's gonna have access to the rev ops course workbook in Doshibo.
And so there's going to be, a weekly deck that you can just go in and copy and customize. So I'll share the deck in a second, for this week, but we're gonna have, eight eight slide decks that I'll that I'm going through today, but also eight workbook deck. And then you can just go with, copy those slides over and create a master workbook for yourself. Each session will include questions and exercises. And between the sessions, participate in the keyword groups, complete homework. If you wanna share in the Slack channel, you can certainly do that.
So before I get into that, I do want to just go ahead and drop in the link to the workbook for today. So if it's if you don't have it pulled up, you can go in here and you can, click on this, make a copy of it. Of course, it's view only, and then you can just kinda have this at your disposal because we'll be using this, throughout this. Alright. Hopefully, everyone has access to that. And, again, if you want me to interrupt me or have a question or you can't hear me or something, please reply in the chat, and Allison will be there for us. So requested access.
See, these are the these are the fine tangents.
I can update the one I have.
And Okay.
That's fine. I can also just go real quick and just, Okay.
You you it's no problem. I'll reshare it. I'll just edit the restrictions and go right ahead. Oh, you got it already. Look at you.
Part of rev ops is just doing things on the fly. Right? On the fly. Sure everyone has had to reshare a Google link before. So if hopefully, if you refresh, you should have access. Appreciate it, guys.
Thank you, Brian.
Alright. Session one session one of session, of eight sessions. This is called the science of sustainable revenue growth. By by the end of this class, you'll be able to understand what rev ops really is and how it fits into your business, interpret your business model and how it affects your primary go to market motions, and you're gonna finally define your current go to market motions and review how they align to your CRM setup customization.
Right? I think all of you here probably understand what rev ops is. You have a business model. You have go to market motions. But going through each of these in detail and applying these to your workbook is gonna have give you guys a lot of good assets that you can share with, others internally or new employees. So a lot of this stuff can be used not just for you today, but hopefully for you in the future.
So what is revenue operations? Right? Why is there a rev ops course? Well, if you Google what is rev ops, you're gonna have, like, four or five pages of, tons of definitions.
Right? It's, it's it's super hard to get, SEO on the rev ops, domain because everyone is writing about it, and everyone has an opinion on it. So if you Google it, they're gonna have a lot of definitions. If you ask chat g p t, they are extremely happy to give us ten definitions in about twenty five seconds.
I probably said if you know, give me a hundred definitions of what revenue operations is, and I'm sure they could come up with it. If you look at some of these, you'll see that it's an organization organizational function. It's a strategic integration. It's a holistic approach. It's a practice of unifying processes. It's an organizational strategy. It's a methodology.
It's a lot of vague things on kind of what it is, and so it's really hard to break it down and kinda make a lot of these things tangible. There's a reason why you ask different revenue leaders across different companies, and they'll all have a different definition of what it means to them.
So I'll tell you what revenue is not. And so for some reason, when we add operations on the back of revenue, we forget what revenue means. Right? Revenue is the descriptive word here.
And so revenue is not new. It is not alignment. It's not a methodology. It's not a mindset or a way of thinking.
And it's not it's not something a company can start or stop doing. And so just be because we put operations behind this word, everyone seems to take, all this out of context and forget what revenue actually is. People have been generating revenue for thousands of years. Right?
Revenue is not new, and we're not just always talking about alignment of it. There's not a bunch of revenue methodology methodologies out there. So if we simplify what revenue really is and how it applies to revenue or applies to operations, I think we can come up with kind of a more a a simpler approach of kind of what we view rev ops is. And so here's my first question.
I'd love you to participate in the chat. Type your one sentence definition of what is rev ops. So if I was, you know, searching Google for your company, what was the what's the the first sentence you put on your blog post for what is rev ops?
Great. I see a lot of, responses coming through. I think okay. Ricky, of course. Ricky works at my company, and so, yeah, he got my answer right.
This is great. Wow. I love all the responses here, and they're alright. I'm not gonna get through all of them, but, you can see they are they are pretty similar, and everyone can can do this in one sentence.
And so, I love it. Alignment, streamlined, business directions, practice, framework methodology. And so we're all kind of we all kinda have this space to understand of kinda what it is. And so over the next four or five slides, your definition is not incorrect.
I'm just gonna give you my definition and to see how I look at it. And so my definition is revenue operations is the the science of sustainable revenue growth. It's more a science to me than it is like a framework or methodology.
That's all about sustainable revenue growth. Right? Increasing revenue, decreasing costs. The reason I think it's a science more than, like, a framework or methodology is because it needs to be measurable, actionable, and repeatable.
Whatever you're doing in rev ops, if it is measurable, actionable, and repeatable, you're gonna be a lot more successful in influencing whatever you're trying to influence. If you're trying to get your company to have sustainable revenue growth, which I think most companies want, then you need a scientific approach to make it measurable, actionable, and repeatable. So what do those mean?
First, what makes it measurable? These are all of our favorite reports and dashboards that we that we said were, a lot of the things that keep us up at night or our top focus on our, focus up focus up.
We can report on so many things in the CRM. The CRM has think about it. You have tens of thousands of contacts and companies and deals and all those custom properties and all those data points, and you can do so much to make it measurable. Almost any project or initiative that you can do, whether it's in rev ops or any part of the business, if that data is available in the CRM, you can make it measurable.
You shouldn't be working on anything if it's not measurable here. How can you say if something's been successful if you can't build a simple report that shows the impact of it or shows at least how you're going to measure it? It doesn't always have to be positive measurements. It can be measurement about low adoption or, you know, bad process here.
But But if it's not measurable, it's gonna be hard to manage.
What makes it actionable? And so the levels of rev ops maturity is kind of an idea that I'll go through in a couple sessions. But based on where you like, how mature your business is rev ops wise, you're able to make it actionable, at kind of a larger scale. And so the higher up the levels of the stage you get, the more actionable it can be. So in stage one of maturity, you're just trying to get your process and your data into your CRM.
Maybe you have this big integration or a big migration, that you have to get the data correct. Maybe the data in your system has a tons of duplicates and you don't trust any of the data. Maybe your process isn't adopted yet and you're really not having revenue growth with, flow through your CRM like you want. Well, if that's the case, it's not very actionable.
If you don't trust the data, if it is not even in there, makes it very, unlikely it's gonna be actionable. So if you're in stage one, you wanna get to stage two as quickly as possible to make it actionable. Stage two, we call it the foundational or primary KPIs. What are the key parts of your customer journey that you can track?
And you can track the amount of customers that go through it and the converge rate between each stage. Once you have that, you can begin to get actionable from a high level in your business, different parts that you can, impact.
Now once you have those foundational KPIs in the process behind them, correct, and in the, you know, CRM or whatever system you use, stage three, you can iterate or iterate the business through these foundational KPIs. So if we're making these things measurable, how do we make it actionable?
Well, we take that. We look at insights. We look at what's working, what's not working, and we figure out how we want to improve it, and we make iterate our business processes through these foundational KPIs to make it more actionable. Sage boards had a partition data.
So all these custom properties, all these standard properties we have that we can slice data by. You'll get closed one deals. You can do it by by sales rep, by product, by average deal size, by geography, by deal source. All of these different data partitions make it that more actionable.
And then finally, stage five, what we're trying to get to is we're trying to drive business improvements. If the things you're working on a daily basis are not driving business improvements, then you're looking at it from the wrong way.
Finally, what makes it repeatable? We wanna we wanna take action and make those results repeatable over and over again. This is why I call it a scientific approach because I love using the scientific method for this. This is something I learned in, like, third or fourth grade that I haven't really used a ton since then until it finally dawned to me that, you know, rev ops and a lot of operational things within the companies, it's just simply using the scientific method.
We're asking a question. We're doing a problem statement. What do we wanna fix? What do we not wanna fix?
What's a theory that we have? Did we hit our revenue goal? Like, simple as that, asking a question. We're done doing the research.
This could be internally or externally, but we're doing research. We're looking at those reports. We're looking at some of these metrics. We're forming a hypothesis.
Why or why not we hit our revenue goal, for example.
After that, we're playing an experiment. This could be a full blown discovery, discovery session, a full blowed, and a full rollout as an experiment, or you can experiment on a, you know, a very small section or, you know, kind of one team first to see exactly how it goes. Then you analyze the data. Again, going back to the reporting, you need to analyze the data based on your experiment. Then you draw conclusions. These are the insights. These are your recommendations.
And then you repeat the process over and over and over again.
But if you look at any of the projects you're working on, doesn't matter what role you're in or what department you're in, and you go through these seven steps and take a scientific approach, I promise you you're gonna be more successful. So to recap, I think revenue operation is the science of sustainable revenue growth, and it's because it's measurable, actionable, and repeatable.
So what's the end state of this? Drive business performance using a scientific method. If I need to sum up what it is and what the end state is, it would be this.
So what's the relationship then to the CRM? So we all you know, almost all of us have a CRM right now whether it's HubSpot or Salesforce. And so we think about rev ops, and we think about the source of truth being the CRM. Rev ops is the product owner.
And so in engineering, there's always product owners. Right? It's very, very common, and the product owner owns a certain feature set or what it is. And we we talk to HubSpot product owners all the time, and they own a certain hub or a certain feature set within, you know, that that hub within the CRM.
If you aren't thinking of yourself or the rev ops function in your business as the product owner of the CRM, then you're you're not thinking of things, you know, in my opinion, correctly.
What do product owners do? They establish process and processes to create data. They drive data. They drive adoption so that the data is correct, and everyone in the company trusts it. They use the data to create reporting to measure KPIs, and they do that to drive business performance.
If that's what a product owner of a software product doing, is that if that if that's what it that's what an engineer is doing as a product owner, then why are you not looking at yourself like that as the product owner of your CRM?
As soon as you elevate yourself or someone to be the product owner or the function of your business to own the CRM like a product and not a project, you're immediately elevating that to a different part of the business. And you're saying the CRM isn't as as important as to the company as our engineering team working on our software, you know, platform or all this other tech stacks that we use.
Brian, whilst I don't disagree with you, I think in larger organization, that's just simply not true in the sense that IT will be the actual owner. And to some extent, that's good because then you, within rev ops, you don't need to take care of security and, I don't know, you know, purchasing event monitoring and, you know, whatever. Right? Like, you know, it it it it it takes some of the burden off. Having said that, I do agree with you. You gotta act as if you were the product owner because I think still what you're saying is establishing the process data, drive adoption, measure KPIs, and drive the business performance. That's still on you.
I just Yeah. Feel it shouldn't be moved slightly.
I'm separating this from IT compliance security manager. I'm I'm separate I I agree. I I don't I don't know enough about that to be the owner of that stuff. I don't wanna provision the accounts and manage all the different access requirements. So I'm saying this as a I'm kinda I'm taking those two separate.
Just like you have, like, a DevOps team that might, you know, run separately than, like, a product product owner for a certain part of your business. So I'm I'm kinda looking to it separately, but that is a good point for sure.
So that's actually kinda leads me into the next slide about how you structure a rev ops team. Right? Is IT part of it or is IT kind of separately? But, on the left hand side, you could say, like, rev ops is beginning to sit on top of and this doesn't need mean to be you have to have all of these roles and rev ops over the umbrella.
But there's marketing ops, there's sales ops, there's customer success ops, and now there's finance ops. Finance ops is kinda, becoming new at the table, and I think that's gonna grow over the next three to five years as we connect our CRMs to our ERP systems. But, the reason I say, like, rev ops is the product owner because we again, the key roles and responsibilities of this function are all about establishing process, overseeing data, ensuring adoption, aligning those stakeholders, doing the reporting, and making recommendations and driving decisions. That last part is super important.
We're not using all this stuff at our disposal to make recommendations and drive decisions. We're not gonna get a seat at the table. We're not gonna align our keys to stakeholders. There's not gonna be this huge, rev ops is so valuable to me and my org.
You should know the data and the process that goes into it better than anyone, so you should be the best person to make recommendation and then drive decisions. I don't I don't care if you say you're not the decision maker necessarily. That's okay. You still should be making recommendations and constantly trying to improve different parts of your business.
Gary's got a great question here, and that goes to my next question.
Should rev ops be a centralized team, or should each rev ops function report up to that functional leader? And so, I think Gary said, where do you think rev ops should support to? There's some people saying CFO, CRO, COO, CEO. So basically basically, every person on the executive team, someone has a different opinion. So so what's your opinion? Do you think it should be a centralized team, or should each, rev ops function like marketing ops report up to the director of marketing, sales ops report up to the the director of sales, for instance?
Yeah. It depends on, company stage. I totally agree with that.
Definitely depends on how big your org is. At RevPartners, we have a centralized team, and we don't have it's not everyone working on only rev ops stuff. We kind of have hybrid roles, but we've taken kind of a centralized approach. Seems like that's kind of the consensus.
But, you know, it's it's say it's it's the size of the company.
Right? Because in a smaller company, it it's easier, right, to have a centralized. Whereas, you know, like, once you're, you know, hundreds of sellers and hundreds of CSMs and bloody, bloody, blah, it's difficult to centralize that. But that being said, someone needs to have the total overview.
Yep. Hundred percent.
Looks like centralized based on company type is kinda what we're leading to. So, like, why are we all in this course? Why are there three hundred fifty people trying to learn about rev ops whether they're in a rev ops role or not? And so what has happened that has made this kind of role or part of the org so proliferate over the last, you know, ten or years or so?
So, of course, Internet and broadband access has, you know, led to the rise of this. Everyone is online now, and so the traditional buyer customer journey is very different. It's also because we've lost control of the buyer journey. Right?
On the right hand side, this Gartner image, you can see the buying journey from b two b is so different than it, once was. And a lot of times now the buyer knows more about your company than you know about them. And so the roles have switched, and we've lost control of that. And so because we've lost control of the buyer journey, all these little arrows in this, right section, these are all data points.
There's a lot more data that we have access to. Think of your tech stack and all of the different tools that you've got access to. You know, there's probably thirty, forty, fifty, probably up to a hundred if you actually do an audit of every single tool that you go to. These all collect data.
Protect we're, tracking data on different parts of the buyer journey, different parts of the customer journey. We're trying to figure out how to align it all. Because of this business is more complicated. There's a lot more that goes into it than, you know, forty, fifty, sixty years ago. And so all these different things about the buying journey journey not being win winninger anymore has led to all these software as a service SaaS applications.
Why is rev ops super popular for one reason? These these SaaS, companies need a a target addressable market. They need rev ops people to actually own and run the tech stack. Right?
If there wasn't a rev ops function, you know, Salesforce wouldn't have grown so bad grown so fast. Right? They need someone to manage this. They need someone to align it.
They need someone to establish the process, run reporting on the data, drive insights, call it make the ROI case. And so part of rev ops being this domain that is so integral to the business is that all of these, software and tech platforms that we all knew, no one need we need an owner to it. I don't know about you guys, but I've probably been the owner of way upwards of fifty different software tools in my tool, you know, in in my career. I'm the I'm the person that knows it the best.
I know how it works. I drive the process. I drive the renewal calls. I drive all that stuff, and they need that function and that role to do that.
And so there's a reason why rev ops roles the increase in I think Indeed said the amount of rev ops roles that are open was, like, a three thousand percent increase over the prior five years. Everyone is kind of saying we finally know we need this function. We needed to oversee all of revenue, and we need people that can solve problems that really help the business.
Kevin owns thirteen right now. Right? And that's not that's very that's very common, and, it's hard. And so thank god we have all the Kevin's in the world to help manage this, and we have rev ops folks that are willing to do this because it is very hard as businesses get more complicated.
So that's kind of the intro here, and now I'm gonna start diving into how we actually apply some of this stuff to the business. So there's kind of a complete method, by the folks at winning by design. And those folks, I think, have the best content on revenue architecture out there. Their their new big revenue architecture just came out.
It's like a textbook. It is, like, twenty pounds. It is massive, and it is awesome. I'm not affiliated with by winning by design.
They're not paying me to say this. I do have permission to use their materials, though, or some of them are used them to kinda influence the next couple slides. But, they have a really good framework to kinda understand how revenue architecture fits into rev ops and how revenue goes through the business. That is an amazing foundation and framework that we can use to build the foundation here.
So what does the frame mean? There's specific ingredients.
There's an order to specific orderable order. It's repeatable, and there's a common language.
If we can all get on this these common language of a lot of these key terms across business to business, person to person, it makes it a lot easier to speak to. I probably already said fifteen to twenty acronyms, and I have no idea if you guys know them. I'm sure most of you do, but there's so many out there that if we have a common language, it makes everything so much easier. Then what are the ingredients? These are the models and the tools. And so these are the things that we'll go through in the first couple sections.
The business model, the go to market model, the data model, math model, growth model, tech stack, and sales process. All these stack on top of each other, and once you have it, get all the tools you need to start doing rev ops. And then finally, the order. So the order we're gonna do, which is the order I will do today, is we had ID, the business model, the go to market, the data model, and then you select the tools to help run this, for your organization. And then, of course, you prioritize and you iterate.
So this is some of the models that you use, and they have a bunch of resources online if you wanna go super deep into it. And I actually think they've got a course, on pavilion, revenue architecture that people are saying. That probably goes, like, fifty layers deep into what I'll be going to. So if you've taken that, I'll kinda go over the highlights. Maybe we have not taken that, that would still apply. And so finally, who does rev ops?
Rev ops, it can be title independent because what it comes down to is do they know the business model? Do they know all the go to market motions? Do they know the data model? And can they prioritize initiatives and spend?
And so even if you're, you know, the head of sales or marketing or in finance, you should still know the business model. You should know the go to market. You should know the data model, and you should figure out how to prioritize initiatives and spend. That's what rev ops is.
And so part of this, what we're going through, especially in the workbook, it might not be only for you. You might already know all this. That's fine. Not everyone in your company does.
And so getting alignment from the entire company on what these things are and what the customer journey is for your company is huge. And, I still haven't seen a company yet that has all of this stuff in a super organized way that every person at the company has total alignment over these three or four different things. Okay.
So I'll go through one of these sections, and I promise we will take a break because I know we're already forty five minutes in. But I'm having a great time, so thanks for all the participation in the chat. So here's the revenue engine framework. We're gonna show at the bottom with the business model.
We're gonna go through our go to market motions, sales, marketing, and CS. Then we've got the growth data and math models, the tech stack, and then we go into robust fundamentals, which is actually what are the drivers and processes that we're gonna do within our CRM. So over the next, you know, two or three sessions, we'll kinda dive through this entire revenue engine framework. And at the end of this, you're gonna have a full, you know, apply this framework to your actual business.
So let's look at the effect of business models on metrics. We've got a ton of different people here with different business models. So let's figure out how they, affect different metrics.
So this graphic, again again, I pulled this from winning by design. Just the branding is now pavilion, colors at least. But this is the evolution of the business model. I think this is a really interesting graphic to show not only time, but also where every one of our companies, lives.
So on the far left side, we it's all about perpetual ownership and professional services. So on this, this these arrows here, you got nineteen eighty and nineteen ninety. So back in the day, pay up front for on premise hardware, and this hardware would have support contracts. It was extremely sticky.
It was perpetual. It was all about ownership.
And then as we got into the two thousands into this, upper, upper third of the semicircle, it all moved to SaaS subscription.
And these products had everything from quarterly subscriptions all the way through annual multiyear all the way through, you know, three, four, five years at a time. Right? The bigger the bigger the investment, usually, the longer term it was.
So once SaaS subscription had everyone jumped on that board, now we're going down to the right side of these things. And what's newer is a usage or a consumption model. And at the bottom, these are these are kind of the freemium products, and it's all about impact.
No cure, no pay. If you don't fix my problem, I'm not gonna pay you. Right? And so, previously, when you pay up front, you you better believe the problem needs to get fixed because you're locked into that. Now the the barrier entry is so low that if you don't have a ton of impact on what problem I'm trying to solve, if you don't cure my problem, I'm not gonna pay you. And And so using this graphic, let's see how it affects different metrics that we have.
So let's look at the sales cycle and in annual contract value. On the left hand side, when you pay upfront with the on premise hardware and software contracts, the the sales cycle could be nine to eighteen months. Right? There's not a ton of deal volume.
And if you don't close those deals, you're going out of business because you're you're spending a year, year and a half on some of these things. Software, I'm I'm sure a ton of you guys are in software. Average sales cycles would be fourteen days to six months. Some of them certainly much longer, but you can bring people in here within a couple couple weeks, and maybe there's a more quarterly or monthly contracts.
But sometimes six years, but you lock them into two or three years.
You know, that's a huge win, and that's where subscriptions going is really multiyear contracts.
Then on the bottom, it can be hours to seconds. Right? How many people here have got on their smart TV, clicked on Netflix, connected to their Apple Pay, and went to Netflix immediately, and within seconds were a a customer of theirs.
Right? I've done it. And then how many of those people immediately, quit the next day and not didn't become customers because they binge watched the show they wanted to watch? Right? You can become a customer and a churned customer or a former customer all within seconds now. And so if you don't have that impact, if your library of shows is not what I wanna see on a recurring basis, I can immediately opt out. Right?
Monthly is kind of the minimum here, but even some companies will go, full usage based here.
So it affects their, obviously, their, sales cycle, but it also affects their win rates. Right? You can see here on the far left side. If your win rate is at one out of three, you don't have the deal volume, to support this.
Usually, a buyer would have budget secure before they even start the buying process. We all think about Bayard, as kind of a sales methodology, and we're always trying to confirm if they have budget, and that's not always the case. They used to always have budget allocated, and then they would go to vendors. Now win rate one to five on this right hand side.
This is a lot of, like, software companies. A lot of them try to, you know, hover around twenty percent or so. Because the short the shorter term contract makes it easier to buy, but it results in more unqualified buyers. There are more vendors per service.
There are a ton like, there are probably ten other companies that do very similar to what RevPartners does in this session right now, all trying to go from the same buyers. And we all deal with qualified and unqualified buyers because it's the barrier to entry to talk to someone is so much lower.
Down here, the win rate keeps going down. As commitment drops, so does the quality of lead. So we get lower quality leads. The win rate drops. So because there's so many of them and there there's so little barrier entry to talk to them or or even not even talk to, you know, a person, but just sign up online, that your conversion rates really, really go down.
So what does that how does that affect the risk?
So on the left hand side, the buyer took all the risk, and now the seller's at risk. And so you can see that just over the last twenty or thirty years, the way the buying process has worked with different business models is that it's taken everything from the buyer risk to the seller risk. And so what does that mean? So on the left hand side, you know, old days, hardware support contracts, on premise hardware, or super long length, like, enterprise software.
The buyer takes the risk. Because if if they make a bad purchase and they can't implement it, they can't return. Right? They're locked into a long term contract.
This is why these major players got so successful.
People used to say you're never gonna get fired for buying Cisco. Right? Cisco is the industry leader, and so they would just default to that because they knew it was a safe choice. And even if it wasn't quite the right product for them, no one ever got fired for it because it was at least the safe choice. If you took that new startup and it didn't work out well, well, you took all that risk because you're locked into in either in perpetual or a long term contract. So the seller accelerate would bring in a whale of a deal because they know that this thing is gonna pump out revenue for the business over and over and over again.
As we move over to the subscription based in the two thousands, twenty twenty, twenty tens, twenty twenties, the seller is more at risk. So the buyer can walk away at the end and not take risk. How many times have you gotten deals to, like, the proposal stage and they just walk away and go silent at the end? There's no there's very little risk from the buyer. How many times have it has an implementation failed and that buyer actually got their money back or refund?
Right? Also, the seller takes months or even years before a profit is made. Right? The seller has the infrastructure, the services, all of this stuff here.
And so a lot of software companies, they're not profitable for the for the first eighteen months because the customer acquisition cost is high. And so they begin to take a lot more of that risk. You can walk away before the eighteen months, and you're actually a negative value to the company because you didn't have hit that. Now, obviously, as we know, if there's, the lifetime value goes up, they become extremely profitable because it's much easier to support them long term than it is to onboard them and, of course, acquire them in the first place.
And then now the seller, now in these usage models, it's all at risk. The buyer can stop at any time. Like I said, I could sign up for Netflix and quit Netflix within the same hour.
And as you sell accelerate usage, the risk from the seller continues to increase. And so you'll see here that we go nineteen eighty, nineteen ninety to two thousand, and then two thousand ten all the way here, this, like, high, subscription usage space. And then twenty twenty, we're starting to go back here. We've realized we took the risk all the way from the buyer all the way to the seller in a span of twenty or thirty years, and businesses wanna put that risk back on the buyer or at least even it out. And so you see we've gone through the entire semicircle, and then we're jumping back to the left to try to actually get a a heavier commitment from these, so that the risk isn't all on the buyer.
So what is the focus of these business models? Well, of course, on the left side, it's all about ownership. Just focus on selling and closing the deals. Once the once the deals are closed, the risk isn't there because they're locked in.
Subscriptions, you know, during, do the recurring part of the revenue, there's a big focus on not only closing that deal, but delivering impact to secure the revenue. If those implementation go go wrong, if they're not feeling, revenue or or impact for your product as soon as possible, they are able to quit. They may always sign up for a year and then, you know, and then stop and not renew. So there's a ton of, there's a ton of focus on the subscription part and making sure that they have the success that they need.
That's why a lot of customer success organizations really grew to support these subscriptions. And then finally, on the right hand side consumption, you know, they need so many the volume of the deals need to be so high that the acquisition cost needs to be so low, and they need to shift towards increasing profits of current clients. And so for a lot of these, like, you know, PLG companies or usage based companies, they get you in the door at a very low level. They just try to upsell or cross sell.
A really good example of this is Zoom. I think we're on Zoom, like, you know, webinar right now or whatever. And they're trying to, you know, push their chat product. They're they're there's, like, a workplace product.
And so they don't just wanna upsell you one more seats. They wanna cross sell you on some of these other product lines to increase the lifetime value of you. There's an extremely low barrier entry to kind of activate Zoom for your company. But if they can cross sell you onto some of these other, platforms that they have, it makes that a lot more sticky.
So you can see that they've gone on on consumption. You really gotta expand the portfolio of your product line so that they, have have a higher value than that initial product. Okay. So what are the common trends in this in this business model?
We went from perpetual to subscription.
Enterprises want to launch a SaaS SaaS service that is aimed at capturing value. Almost every single, like, like, legacy enterprise company kinda switched to SaaS. And a lot of, companies are are offering a SaaS service to kinda get that recurring revenue.
SaaS companies are now selling they're moving to multiyear contracts because client acquisition and retention, is so expensive.
Customer acquisition cost is high and their touch customer retention cost is high because they need to have the sales and marketing on the front end, but also the heavy robust customer success on the back end. And then subscription is shift shifting to a monthly subscription or usage model to, increase the velocity there. And so you can see here that because there's because, the business model changed so much in most companies over a twenty, thirty year period, they're trying to right size themselves. They're trying to stay within that zone, but also, you know, protect themselves a little bit. So let's, go through the summary here, which this is just a summary of those slides, which are you'll have that in your sheet. And let's go through, your first exercise in your workbook. And so based on those last slides, let's go ahead and fill this out for your company.
So this is the first time we're trying this, but we'll see if these exercises will work. So, again, the the workbook link is gonna be in the chat, and I want you to fill out slides three, four, and five. And so based on your company, where do you sit on that business model graphic, and how is that affecting your, the the business model type, your average contract value, the volume of deals you need, your win ratio, your risk ratio, and your go to market focus. So if you have this pulled up, for this first slide, I just want you to highlight kind of where you sit within, this this, area.
So I'm gonna go ahead and do it, with alongside with you guys. Hopefully, this isn't too difficult to kinda do right on here. Yes. I mean, yes, please.
Yeah.
A copy, please, so you can edit. Thank you for asking.
So where my company sits is really the subscription product, and we have, we're kind of more on the quarterly contract than annual contracts. It's really hard for us to get a commitment of annual very upfront, and so we start with about, three to six month term. And then from there, it's all about maximizing the values that they renew over and over again.
So that's kinda where we sit, but, hopefully, many people in here, sit somewhere else. And if you can, Allison, do you know if you can, add screenshots into the chat? Be interesting to see if people could, add their screenshots of what where they sit on the business model. See if I can.
I'm not sure we can.
Yeah. I know you can add the link, but for never been able to add a direct attachment.
Okay.
So maybe we can do Slack channel and view that.
Yeah.
You could do that to the Slack channel. And then the next slide is all about looking at those previous slides.
What exactly, what business type are you? So we are subscription recurring.
Our ACV is, say, medium.
Our volume is medium when ratio is probably pushing a one to five, and then the risk ratio is split between buyer and seller. Our go to market focus is definitely the sales funnel.
Yeah. Tanya says commonly seen multiple models, perpetual and subscription offerings.
Totally agree. And that is what this shift was from here is that from perpetual moving to subscription, they're adding a subscription, service on top, so that you kinda get locked into recurring revenue.
Right? I don't know if this is a great example, but, like like, the Peloton bike, I got one in my, in my garage over there. And bike is yours forever. You own it, but then you have to buy the the classes on a weekly basis. They had to add a subscription in there. And so that's maybe not the best example, but that is an example of having both kind of business models in the same product.
You'll ask, what if you are a PLG with a sales team?
Yeah. I mean, you you kinda you kinda split your business into two. You probably have two different business models. Right? You have your PLG play, and then you have your enterprise play. And I think a lot of companies are doing that because, lower annual contract buyers that are smaller, they can just kinda self serve themselves through the PLG play. But if you're also selling to enterprise customers, which is awesome, much higher annual contract value, We have to have totally different teams.
I highly doubt your your sales team is focusing a ton, on, like, the lower end PLG type customers, and so that's kind of a a split here. And so you might even name those differently and have a different column in here where you could have, this is one side of the business. This is the other side of the business.
And then lastly, imagine your business is shifting from perpetual to subscription.
How would you set up the new sales motion in your CRM?
And so if you are moving to kind of nonrecurring revenue, perpetual ownership, what would you do in your CRM to kind of shift that to subscription?
We have a question in the chat. Would you like to take it, Brian?
Which one?
Get from Meredith. Did you discover that one?
What if you sell annual subscription but are now pushing for multiyear subscriptions?
I think that's I think that's great. I I think you can, you know, put annual or whatever, and you can do a little, you know, shifting to multiyear.
And, again, it's really it's really interesting you guys are saying this because it's just kind of validating these trends we're seeing. Right?
You've got subscriptions here, but you're pushing to multiyear contracts because you need to lock in these customers for longer than just a year or six months because it costs so much time to not only acquire them, but, kinda maintain and support them. And so a lot of people are pushing for that.
We're in the services business that I'm in. It's really hard to get annual, but we are we definitely offer discounts for longer initial terms and all that kind of stuff. We're always pushing things to to be locked in longer for sure. So that's a great question.
Yeah. Lead with three year contracts.
That's, yeah. I love hearing that. At a previous company I worked at, we always sold one year contracts, and then we tried to move to three year, and the sales team said it was impossible. And then we incentivized them to do it, and then magically overnight, we had three year contracts coming in left and right. So I think it's really smart to do that. Obviously, you gotta be really good at providing value over those three years, though, because you're putting a lot of eggs in that basket.
Yeah. I know. Keith is like, the value is they lock in the rate for three years. No.
I know. There's a lot of, games you can play to say, hey. We're not gonna do five percent a year if you, if you walk in for three years, which I totally get. But when you say that as their savings, that's just funny because, no.
It's it's your savings because you get them for three years.
Yes. Seven percent. Ten percent. Great. Exactly. So I think it's really funny. People are saying how nice you are to the customer because you're locking them in all these savings when really you're the one, driving up their price every year.
Looks like we got a question from Jason.
Yeah. So, in that and that's a good point too. I think it depends on your business model because, you know, I I'm coming from the professional services side. So the amount we're able to do, right, that that initial onboarding year, if we're looking at a three year contract, we can we can build a lot better structure if we have a three year period to actually, like, pay that down.
Oh, hundred percent. I mean Yeah.
I just mean, like, you can do a more in the sales process, I found that, like, when we're when I'm proposing a solution to design, I can give a lot more to sales to offer if they're looking at a three year than one year. It's my experience.
Yeah. I mean, for sure. I mean, how many people do you think try to contract us for rev ops and say, I need all of this done in three months?
And, you know, and so No. No. No. That's okay. If you give me twelve months, I could build this really correctly from the beginning, but there's always this, urgency factor in all this stuff. So my joke is, took you five years to get it in this situation, and you might expect me to fix it all in three months. Does it really sound fair?
Can I ask you a question, like, on that?
So how I've found this been successful working with sales is to try to map out that arc for the customer, right, in terms of, like, outcomes.
And I I found that and that's just being I mean, that's not I think that's being really upfront, but really showing them the arc of, like, the value prop over a three year period and how I can be more effective on a longer period has been successful for me. That's actually been the only thing that's been successful for me.
Yeah. I mean, it's a great way to do it. Right? Don't just say you need to walk in for two or three years.
Show them exactly the impact they're gonna get by doing that. So, we're already sixty minutes in, so let's go ahead. We've talked about the business model. We're gonna go through the go to market motions now.
I know there's a question about how to fill up slide number five. If you are unsure, I can kinda just send me a Slack, and I'll kinda help you out after the fact. So, what is go to market? Right?
This is another term that has been huge kind of alongside rev ops. Which teams in your company comprise kinda your go to market teams, or do you have a specific go to market function that you kind of, outlined? So, it kinda went from, like, sales ops to a lot of rev ops stuff, and now it's a lot of go to market teams. So so how would you guys describe go to market and which teams your company, comprise of it?
And so Gary says sales marketing, CS, and partner team. Sales ops, marketing ops, sales ops. Yep. Okay.
Sales sales ops, marketing sales. It's interesting you guys are saying sales ops is different than marketing and sales. I get it, but it sounds like, Chris and Rich, does that mean sales ops folks don't report up to sales? They report up to kind of more of a centralized part of the business?
No. Sales ops reports to the CRO. Marketing ops reports to the CMO.
Okay. That makes sense. Yep.
Alright. Looks like everyone's, you know, kind of in alignment here. And so, let's go through a couple of different ways of go to market. So go to market strategy is a plan that details how an organization can do two things.
You've got your go to market motions and your go to market tactics. So the motions are what we're gonna talk about, and the tactics are what you guys do on a daily basis. So the motion is how do you engage your customer to convince them to buy your product or service and get a competitive advantage. The tactics, you know, relate to pricing sales channel, the buyer journey, product services, all that stuff.
So finding your target addressable market, your TAM, your ideal customer profile, ICP, bit of analysis, messaging, pricing. So the tactics are extremely important once you understand what your motions are.
And so go to market motions. Again, these have kind of changed terminology recently. On the left hand side, we have product led growth, which really the customer acts as marketing and sales.
The next we have it used to be called inside sales now. You know, some people call it one stage. So this is full cycle. Full cycle inbound to close one.
You can guide people to your sign up page potentially, but you're running the full cycle deal. Then we have our two stage. This is the commonly referred to as SDRAE combo. So there's an outbound motion on top of inbound with the SDR doing discovery and the AE doing demo to close deal.
This is often where quotes, proposals, and negotiation really picks up and takes place. Of course, you can do that, in one stage as well. Then you have field sales. You know, there's a region or a segment or maybe a vertical with maybe ten to a hundred accounts based on the size of those.
Those are doing custom demos, solution engineers are being brought on customer proposals, on-site presentations. You're really building out during the sales process, exactly how you're gonna implement that for their specific business. That's really not a one size fits all. And then we have named accounts.
You just manage a named account. You know people when you identify upcoming projects. So a lot of times, an entire team internally will be just on this one named account, and these are obviously the the largest, clients that you'll have. So let's talk about go to market motions and the structure of them.
And so this is kind of a graphic where we see how these overlay each other. And so on the left hand side, we've got PLG or product led growth, and so that kinda comes down right here on the left side. And then on the y axis, the vertical axis, we've got number of deals per year. So this is number of customers acquired or just number of deals generated.
And you see they're at the very top. It could be tens of thousands or a hundred hundreds of thousands. You see some of these huge companies, maybe Slack is maybe a good example, but they'll acquire tens of thousands of customers in, you know, a calendar quarter. And the reason is because the annual contract value is low.
Maybe it's fifteen bucks per user per month, thirty bucks a month, hundred bucks a month, whatever it is. But because the annual contract value per user is low, you're able to supply a ton more more deals.
On the other side of that oh, sorry. No. That's the question. So who are some of your favorite PLG companies? I think this is if you run it well, especially alongside, like, the two stage or, like, ABM approach, I think it's really, really interesting. And so who are some of your, favorite PLG companies?
Dropbox. Dropbox is a good one. Kind of early adopter in that case.
Revolt, Figma. I love Figma. Apollo, Notion, Slack, Clay, Coda, Airtable, Gong, Canva, Loom. Yeah.
I I've got over a thousand looms in my in my library, so I'm a big part of you there. Crisp. I love Crisp.
Calendly, Miro, like that, Devonte. We're gonna talk about Miro in in a bit. Chit chat GPT. Yeah.
Why not? Monday dot com. So, you can see how many examples are here, and these are awesome companies. I've almost heard of all of them.
So they're running a really good PLG approach.
On the far right hand side, we've got named accounts. So maybe you're only closing tens of customers a year, but maybe the annual contract value is a quarter of a million dollars. Right? And so lower volume, much more, higher annual contract value and, makes a lot of sense.
And so where where my company sits and where a lot of companies sits are right here in the middle. One stage, you know, the number of deals could be in thousand or ten thousand. The annual contract value is, you know, maybe between five and fifteen. Now you don't have to fit in this exact matrix.
If I'm looking at my company where our deals are definitely in the hundreds, but our annual contract value is closer to to fifty. And so you can kind of have this approach but move slightly down here. But, generally, this is kinda where we sit where as you move down the step ladder, the number of deals gets much smaller, but the annual contract value gets much higher. And so you can as we look at rev ops in the CRM, you can see how all of these different go to market missions are gonna operate so differently.
The way that I support some of our customers that have PLG approaches versus, like, field sales or named accounts are completely different. And if you work in one of these, especially at one of the opposite sides of the spectrum, it is so, so different. Right? You're using a ton of app and intent data to convert free trials to paid services on the PLG side.
Two stage, you've got, you know, qualified deals and BDRs passing to AEs, managing, built that handoff, the full cycle, all the proposals and stuff. And then named accounts, you're really trying to market to very specific companies that are in your ICP and really go after them. And so how you set up your CRM and rev ops is completely influenced by all your go to market motions.
So let's look at the marketing go to market model. So this is a sales one marketing. So all of these layer on top of each other. And so the first one, most common one is inbound.
Right? Content SEO, SEM, events, community, searching and optimization, all that stuff. And the other side, we've got multichannel, multistep sequences. This can be an outbound prospecting approach.
It can be an ABM approach. It can be a, you know, a target target account approach. And so you'll see that these begin to overlay over the sales go to market motions to kinda combine the two. And so inbound, of course, can go, you know, over this entire horizontal line, but inbound is for the primary marketing primarily market go to market motion for, PLG and even one stage, and then it goes into two stage two where there's really both approaches.
Once you get to two stage, there's the prospecting approach, and then build sales is all about account based marketing and then name accounts as target accounts. And so we talked about go to market teams and alignment. Everyone said marketing sales, CS, maybe FinOps, all the ops thing. If you guys are aligned on your sales go to market and your marketing go to market, it's not gonna work.
If you're only relying on inbound and you're in field sales down here with this, it's you might not have enough deal volume to kinda hit your revenue goals. Right?
So, again, which companies run a really good inbound motion, and what about outbound motion? And so I used to get outbounded all the time.
I can't remember a ton of companies that did it, but it it's been less and less frequent. I think, people don't give out their phone numbers or really answer the phone in general anymore, and so I think that has led to different strategies. But who runs a really good inbound motion or outbound motion?
Does your company run a good inbound motion? Would you say do you are you able to generate enough inbound leads to kinda support your goals, or do you guys have to really, get a bunch of revenue from outbound as well?
Salesforce, HubSpot. Yeah. Inbound. Right? HubSpot, kinda coined some of the term. Snowflake could outbound. That's good to hear.
I like that.
Nectar AI is outbound.
Rich's question is, does field sales ABM not utilize SDRs? Like I said, there's a combination to all these. These are not hard and fast rules. These are just generally kind of, like, industry standards.
And so, they certainly can. Field sales absolutely could have SDRs, especially if there's people in different regions going on-site. There's no reason why an SDR can't qualify something in a region and have the field, you know, field sales rep go see them. Customer dot IO inbound, Chili Piper inbound, I like that.
We work exclusively about outbound. So, good for you, Dominic and Chris. You guys that I'd be really dialed in, to kind of generate that demand. So let's talk about customer success, go to market models.
And so these overlay again. So on the left hand side, we've got community.
One stage is about help desk. So you kinda go to the support channel, support at, you know, pavilion dot com, whatever it is, or or just the chat on the website and usually go to an agent and then go from there. Once you get to the prospecting in two stage, and annual contract value goes a bit higher, volume, this really usually means that you've got a customer success manager or account manager, and they'll hold between, I don't know, fifty and two hundred accounts depending on the amount of, interaction they need to have.
Then in field sales or ABM, you segment these. And so maybe you segment by industry, maybe you segment by mid market or enterprise, but, really, you're you kind of have specialized people within the customer success team that focus on different segments of your business line. And then when you get to named accounts, a lot of times you have an internal team dedicated to just that account.
And so, for us, I would say we are more of a we're a one stage, sales go to market where all all inbound market go to market, but with more volume CS go to market. And so you can kinda mix and match these depending on your business and exactly what it is. But, generally, the sale the the customer success go to market has a direct relation to the sales and marketing go to market.
So which companies run a great community motion?
So there's a ton of communities out there. There's a lot of communities that are not, like, sponsored by the actual company. Like, Salesforce has a bunch of communities, but they're not really sales like, they're kind of like other companies run them, like, wizards of ops and things like that. Pavilion, obviously, we'll be we wanna we like to say that. Gainsight, I've seen a lot of stuff on Gainsight customer success platform.
I love to see that. It's funny that you say HubSpot community because I don't know if they have dedicated communities that there's a ton of Salesforce ones. There's one called Sprockets here that I've heard of. But, if you if you Google an answer in the HubSpot community base, I would say Salesforce is still ten times, you know, better. Almost every question is there. Klaviyo, they're awesome. Marketo, Gong.
What's the volume for CS go to market? This just means that the customer success manager, they usually usually give them a certain amount of accounts or a certain range of accounts. And so, like, the goal like, a hundred percent capacity for a CS rep might be fifty accounts they manage. They would never give that person a hundred accounts. And so once they get above fifty, they need to hire someone else to kinda take that over.
Alright. So here's the full go to market model. We've got marketing sales and CS all in there. And so let's go ahead and fill in slide six in your workbook.
And so let's kind of, this will be the last, exercise kind of the day. And in your chat, go ahead and, tell me your sales marketing and CS go to market. I'll put mine in the chat. Then let's go ahead and fill out, slide six right here.
So put in the chat, and then what I'm gonna do here is just, I'm gonna highlight the areas that I'm kind of in. So we're kind of in this section right here.
That's kind of the section in. And then if I put these over, my marketing is inbound, sales is one stage, and CS is based on volume. So that formatting is not great. I apologize, but I didn't have a ton of room here.
Oh, yeah. So what's ever put that in the chat. When everyone else is in, I'm gonna go ahead and do marketing, sales, and customer success.
Alright. So Aaron's got inbound, two stage, segment. Kevin's got ABM named accounts. It's a lot of fun. I don't know if that's sarcastic or not. I'd be interested, Kevin, to expand on that.
Prospect ABM, inbound ABM volume and segments. So like Trevor said, there's a lot of companies that kind of have different go to market motions to but maybe different different products or they're going after more enterprise long term contracts, but still support the lower end as well.
So, slide six is the go to market model. It's kind of a good visual, to kinda share with your team if they're not super aligned with how the three of these overlay. And if you do have someone like like me where we, we run a volume play for CS, we also run a community, and then we're primarily inbound, we're kind of a little bit of a a mismatch as well. So getting total alignment amongst those three teams on, like, the different plays for those different market segments, I think, is super important.
Thanks, everyone, for submitting the chat. I really, really appreciate it. It's awesome to have engagement here. It looks like a lot of people, are in the two stage and the volume. Is it possible to say all?
Yeah. Stephanie, how big is your how big is your company? I'm curious on if you're a small team that's trying to tackle this at all, if you're a big team that has, you know, dedicated teams for each segment.
We're too small to be doing as much as we're doing. Oh, there you go. Very we're in a very niche market in clinical trials operation software. But by appealing to, like, sponsors, CROs, and sites, our product offerings are completely different across those three segments. So, like, that slide you showed, I think I could check the box on all of them.
Do you think that you're trying to validate one or two of them and kinda run with them? Are you do you think you're just gonna go with trying to, like, balance all three at the same time for, you know, the foreseeable future?
It was more of a sequencing thing. We tried to get, like, the the small market, the site market, and then pivot to the enterprise market using that as, like, a right to play. But we are definitely struggling, like, with juggling all the plates, and we wanna move towards enterprise, but we can't walk away from our core. So I think we're slowly gonna, like, pay less attention and and not invest as much on some of those other segments. But, honestly, we're trying to be everything to everyone, and I think it's a it's a risky strategy.
Yep. That's happened at previous companies for me too is that, we decide one day we wanna go upmarket and just sell enterprise. And so we just try to go after big bigger companies and bigger contracts, but we don't have the go to market motions to support it, and it leads to a ton of internal and external turmoil. Right?
We're not used to doing, like, an ABM or a prospecting approach, and we're and our customer success team is not used to, like, having specializations based on the enterprise segment. And so I've seen that. I mean, obviously, a lot of companies do it, and it works for a lot of them. But I've seen the struggle of that because, you know, it's hard to just master one of these stacks of go to market motions.
If you're trying to manage twelve different strategies here, makes it very difficult.
And then, the last slide, which is number seven, this is kinda pulling it all together. I know we didn't get through the growth model or the data model, but if you you know, obviously, this, workbook will go over to the next sections session so you can, fill this out. But that's what we're gonna get to next session is all about the the growth model and the data model. And so, this has been an awesome class.
I do wanna get you guys out a few minutes early, just because I never like, when a meeting, goes too long. So you will get the slides to this class. And so we didn't get to all slides. I think I got through.
I got through at eighty five percent. And so we ended right here at slide sixty two, go to market motions and customers. That's where we're gonna pick up, in session two in the beginning, and we'll get through go to market motion to finish that up, then also get through the data model and the growth model. And so by the end of the first two sessions, you're gonna have about five more slides to fill out.
And so you'll have about ten slides, of really, like, what is the foundation of your business and how can you align that to the rest of your teams. And so if we go through the, kind of the where are we now, we're at the business model and go to market motions, and then we're to go through the growth from the data. But but you can see how if you're able to align your entire team to these parts of your business, it's, it's super, super impactful.
So if there's any questions, I've got time. If people wanna ask questions, if people want to finish up their slides, that is fine. I've got the cohort discussion prompts here, and the intent of this each week is that all certainly had discussion prompts. But the idea here is that you guys can compare some of the different things on the slides that you fill out and explain, you know, what challenges you may or may not have with that.
And so, like, it'd be for me personally, it'd be very interesting to me to find someone that does mainly prospect and outbound because that's something we wanna do over the next six to nine months. But I'm not as well versed in it because we don't have our sales go to market here. And so that's an example of how I'd use the course section, session to try to get, some ideas and tips and tricks on what's been successful in the prospect sales go to market. So that's why I'd use it, but, obviously, you guys, whatever is most beneficial for you.
Yeah. Shelley is I could also use help with that, but I think one of us could. So, maybe you guys can share your tips with me.
Another Brian here. You got your you got your hand up?
Hey. It's going, Brian. This class has been amazing. Thank you. So I think I had a feedback here. Great.
You're on mute, though.
I'm I'm on mute now. Okay. All good. So, two things. So one, been building AI powered outbound for the last eighteen months. So happy to share with you everything I've learned there.
But the question that I had for you is, I think most startups especially or scale ups that I've been in have been very confused about this slide.
And since you're in the business of helping, you know, leadership go to organized and rev op systems getting built, how do you help them navigate through this and understand where to put their attention to start?
So what I usually do is kind of go through some of the visuals that I'll show next time, and, really, it's about the data model. So people understand a little bit the data model a little bit more, which is really the customer journey, the key milestones in that journey. And then there, you're able to say, hey. Based on this, this this approach is gonna work better than others.
And so the the hard part of what I think people do is that they only talk about the business model, for instance. They only talk about the go to market model, and they don't bring over the, the other two sections here and combine it altogether. And so I know that's a bad answer. I'm trying to hope you'll come back next week, but the intent here is that you need to get through you need to get through really this, like, framework and connect all these together because they all affect each other.
And almost every person, they go to the tech stack immediately. Oh, we need Gong. Well, like, why? Right?
Or or we need, you know, we need this other tool, and maybe you need your AI powered outbound. But they're going to tech stack first, and they're not saying, how does the data model fit into this? What is the math model? How many prospects we need?
What is our actual conversion rate? What are we expecting, and how many people to move through the funnel? And then what is our, you know, growth model? Where where actually are we as a business, and is this feasible?
And so in the growth model, what, I figured today, maybe Aaron was saying is that, there may be another small company, maybe their product market fit, and they're trying to run every go to market motion at once. When it's like, hey. This is kind of the development curve. If you're right here, realistically, what should you be doing?
And then backing that into the specific sales good sales marketing and CS go to market and the business model.
So almost every company I've worked at tries to do almost everything at once. And the only way that I've been able to get some of our clients, our rep partners to to just sit down and pause for a second is to really show how the three or four of these go together. And if they are gung ho on this new process and it's not gonna actually impact the part of the data model that's gonna affect their business the most, a lot of time those connection points will be visible, and they're able to say, hey. Doing something here is gonna really, really make a negative impact over here. So I'm hoping that by the end of session, two, you'll have, you know, three or four visuals that you can use and say, hey. Your business is here, and this is what I'd recommend based on where you are in your business, and you're ready for this or you're not ready for this.
Charlie.
Brian, good really good good session here. And I just wanted to, answer Brian Sower's question. I spent two years of winning by design. I'm a huge fan of their product and their approach.
And the go to market model, you know, we use it in the we use it in assessments, and it, you know, takes a lot of takes a decent amount of explaining, but I think the best way to use it is to say, you know, work with your with your organization or if you're using it externally, you know, how you know, talk through the questions around how many go to market motions are you employing today, what are your growth engines, what's your average contract value, and, per go to market motion, and start just exploring those where each, you know, where where each organization is and then, talking through okay.
Well, you know, for earlier stage companies, supporting both SMB and mid market or, you know, multiple go to market motions is is really challenging from a resource perspective. And so it's just really leveraging it to get alignment and then work through the risk of, you know, multiple go to market. So misalignment between c you know, there's your marketing and your CS and your sales motions across the different approaches. So it's not an easy you know, it's not super intuitive, but it's really helpful once you begin the discussion and start to work through it and you get alignment as to where each organization is.
Yeah. I think using this as a, a visual, but actually answering those or asking those specific questions, notating those data points, and then showing the visual and kind of what their answer represent is a is a super powerful tactic. So I appreciate that, Charlie, and, hopefully, I didn't butcher the, winning by design talkbacks too much.
No. That was great. That was perfect.
Alright, everyone. It's it's two twenty six here, on the East Coast where I'm at. I will send a recap email in the Slack either today or tomorrow to kinda get everyone aligned. You can certainly DM me, on LinkedIn or Slack.
But it's been awesome for this first session. I hope you guys enjoyed this. Almost seventy five percent of you stayed the entire time, which I think is huge. And so next class, we'll go into, the the the data bottle a bit more.
And I've got a a lot of things queued up to dive into some of the data and the analytics and really figure out how we're actually impacting things for the for the business and rev ops. So super excited about, next session, and, hope you guys will enjoy your cohort sessions. And if you have any questions, reach out to myself or Allison in the Slack. And everyone, I hope you enjoy the rest of your Wednesday and a fantastic, rest of your week.
Thank you, everyone. Have a wonderful day. Please feel free to reach out to us on Slack, or you can email us at learn at join pavilion dot com. We will answer any questions related to changing cohorts if you find that doesn't work for your schedule.
Otherwise, we will see you next week. Keep an eye on the Slack channel for the recording as well as all of the other class materials. Take care, everyone. Thank you for your help.
Bye, Brian. Thank you for a fantastic presentation.
Thanks, Allison. Appreciate it.
Bye. Bye, everyone. Thank you. Bye.