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Welcome to Opfocus’s podcast RevOps Rockstars. Join hosts David Carnes and Jarin Chu as they interview RevOps professionals and explore the challenges they face today. Throughout the show, we dive into how guests got started with their careers, their best tips and tricks, and what excites them about the future of the industry.
Doug Landis: In this market right now, one of the things that we're talking a lot about, um, with our companies is double, triple, and quadrupling down on your ICP.
Are you targeting the right prospects? Because the market's hard. The hardest thing right now that we're finding is building net new pipeline. Pipeline for net new logos, right? So if that's difficult, then maybe you're targeting the right, the wrong folks.
Jarin Chu: Today's guest has helped grow some of the biggest SaaS companies on the planet. He's honed his skills leading sales productivity and training at Box, Salesforce, Google, and now helps SaaS companies as a trusted advisor. We've got the growth partner at Emergence Capital, Doug Landis.
Doug, welcome to the show.
Doug Landis: Thank you so much. Uh, it's good to be here. It's great to see you both.
Jarin Chu: Doug, the first thing we want to know is when you're working with RevOps teams in your portfolio, what are some of the things you think they should stop wasting time on?
Doug Landis: That's everything. Um, and, and nothing all at the same time. Um, for just a little bit of context, uh, Emergence Capital, we're, we're a B2B SaaS focused venture capital firm. Our primary focus is Series A. Uh, that's kind of our sweet spot. We do some C deals, some Series B. So you can imagine, as we think about RevOps and Series A, the funny thing is...
It's insane how many companies in Series A don't actually have RevOps. So my battle, actually, when we invest in a company in Series A is getting them to understand the value and the importance of hiring a RevOps person right away. Typically, the challenge is, we've got, you know, largely what you find is these product led, engineering led founders.
They, you know, they, they get to close to a million in revenue on their own, hopefully, founder led selling. Um, and so the very first thing that they're thinking about is like, we need to go hire a head of sales or maybe a VP of sales, it just kind of depends. Um, and beyond that, they won't think about RevOps because they'll largely think, well, if my head of sales needs RevOps, then they'll build a business case and they'll come to me with it.
Um, but the interesting thing is also at Series A at that such early stage, it's all about trade offs. Right. So the founder and the board are going to be thinking about, well, if we want to hire a rep ops person, who are we saying no to, does that mean we're saying no to another engineer that's going to help us build that integration?
You know, so we have tighter integration reporting than Salesforce or any sort of CRM. So there's always this. And it's kind of a push pull challenge for what is RevOps really going to do? And then, of course, if you think about it, it's Series A or such early stage, RevOps is really in the weeds, building kind of the fundamental, the foundational elements, right?
They're like, do we have the right level of permissioning? Do we even have a data strategy? Oh my gosh, I can't even tell you how many companies get to Series B, and they don't even have a data strategy. They don't even know, like, okay, cool. So how are you getting contacts? Like, let's just start there. And then how does the contact turn into, you know, connected and associated with an account, and how is that then routed through your entire, all of your campaigns, and through the SDR team, and to the AEs, and even over to CS?
Having a data strategy, if you don't even have that at the very beginning. It's going to be a hot mess once you get to Series B, because, you know, as we all know, you know, what do they say, garbage in, garbage out, right? So if you don't have a good, good system or vehicle. So, so I actually rarely have a conversation of like, stop doing these things.
And it's a different, so it's a slightly different conversation. It's more about like, how do we prioritize the 8, 000 things that need to get done right now, right? And typically it's like, well, hey, you hired me as a RevOps leader. I don't necessarily want to spend all my time in Salesforce running reports, doing field desks, like reviewing contracts.
So can I hire a Salesforce admin? Can I hire a Salesforce, uh, someone at least to help me kind of in the, in the weeds, so to speak. Um, so it's kind of like a, a, a roundabout way of turning that question around. Um, as companies scale though, once they get to series B or series C, and they've got a RevOps leader, maybe they actually have one or two people on the RevOps team, you know, at the.
The one thing that I always... Suggest is probably the best word because I can't tell any of our companies what to do exactly. All I can do is try and influence them. That's my job. Um, the one thing I suggest is just to get maniacal about data and metrics. Every company needs to be a metrics driven company.
We often think that like, Oh, we're a product driven company. We've got this PLG motion or, Oh, we're a customer centric company. That's great. You know, on the outside, on the inside, gotta be data driven, gotta be metrics driven. So it goes back to that. If you don't have a good data strategy, if you don't have the right reporting, if you don't know what you're reporting on, if the CEO who's likely never been a CEO before doesn't really understand what metrics they should care about to run the business, then you need to take a step back and go, okay, what is going to be our metric strategy?
And what metrics do we really care about? And of course that also is going to roll up to the board what they really care about.
Jarin Chu: Doug, this might be controversial, but when you earlier said for Series A companies, oftentimes the founders, product and engineering led founders, they're thinking about their first hire, thinking about a head of sales. Would you actually say that they should first think about a head of RevOps before they think about a RevOps, a head of sales?
Doug Landis: Yes. And it's super controversial. Like, wait, why would I hire a RevOps person before I hire a salesperson? Again, our belief is, you know, and arguably every VC would say, well, we, we believe in founder led sales, right? Founder led sales to the first million. Because look, it gives, gets you a better sense of the problem that you're really trying to solve.
You got to understand your customers. You got to build those customer relationships. You got to build, the kind of that referral base. Uh, you need to truly understand your customers. And if you don't understand what it takes to sell, you know, your first million of revenue, how can you go hire a team of people and, put different expectations or more intense expectations on them?
The value of RevOps in the early days, again, I'll kind of refer back to this. It goes back to do we have the right data strategy? How do we think about introducing new tools and technology into our ecosystem? Because oftentimes, even when you hire that head of sales, they're like, great. Okay.
Do we even have a CRM solution? You know, how many companies that seed in early stage, will have a loose CRM, whether that's, whether they have HubSpot or Zoho, or maybe they, trust me, we've seen Excel spreadsheets, you know, in the early days. And it's like, okay, what's your CRM strategy? And then how do you get that set up?
And how do you make sure that the tools that you're, you're going to go invest in integrate properly? So that you have the right information and you can keep making the right decisions. In this market right now, one of the things that we're talking a lot about, um, with our companies is double, triple, and quadrupling down on your ICP.
Are you targeting the right prospects? Because the market's hard. The hardest thing right now that we're finding is building net new pipeline. Pipeline for net new logos, right? So if that's difficult, then maybe you're targeting the right, the wrong folks. Right? So you've got to look into your data and you've got to understand, like, who's behind, who's expanding, what do we know about them, where do we find more of them, and does that mean our ICP needs to change?
Well, you can't make those decisions if you don't have the right, what I would call, kind of the right foundational operational processes, tools, and, and kind of data in place. That's a,
David Carnes: Well, that is so interesting and speaks to my heart in the, uh, the early days of OpFocus, we actually, we probably did a handful of Excel to Salesforce migrations, uh, believe it or not working with very, very early stage, uh, software companies, um, you, you spoke, uh, briefly, you gave a nice intro about Emergence Capital.
I'm curious what differentiates Emergence from other VC firms that invest in SaaS.
Doug Landis: that's such a great question. I, you know, um, Because arguably, you know, there are thousands of VCs that invest in early stage, you know, kind of SaaS companies. I think it's kind of threefold. One, we made a bet over 20 years ago that all software was going to move to the cloud. And that including, you know, our first investment in, you know, early investment in Salesforce.
You know, and then Box and Yammer and Feva and Steelbrick and SuccessFactors. And, you know, the, the long list of really, really early stage, iconic SaaS companies we were involved in, in the early days, because we understood that SaaS was the future. In fact, one of our founders and Mark Benioff created SaaS.
com and, you know, the rest is history. And so we've got a ton of experience. It's also all we do. We are not, you know, we, we don't also, we don't also do B2C or crypto or emerging markets or, you know, or hardware, um, or security, we just do B2B enterprise SaaS. And, um, you know, I think, I think the third thing is.
It kind of boils down to the people, right? At the end of the day, you know, what I've understand, what I've come to understand in the world of venture is, one, we're not necessarily in the technology business. We're not even in the finance business. We're in the people business, and we make bets on people.
And we've just had a long track record of really, truly identifying great human beings. I mean, you have no idea. Eric from Zoom, I mean, he was turned down hundreds of times by the time he got to us. And we were for kind of the first big institutional money in the business. And we made a bet on him. Yeah, we made it.
We made a bet on him that we think we thought he could build an iconic software company and really, really grow as a leader. And he has, he's proven that. And that's just kind of a, it's kind of a, a secret sauce or a superpower. Um, I'd say the other thing is, is we just care really deeply and this is one of our core values of being the most important partner and, and, and whatever that means, right?
We want to be the first phone call for good news and for bad news and for challenges. And, um, I think oftentimes what you find are founders like are afraid of their board partners because, you know, the board only has one job and their job, it's not, they don't only just have one job, but the one job that they can do is hire and fire the CEO, right?
And so usually there's that. I got to paint this picture and I don't want to reach out to them if I, if I'm struggling with something, but the reality is, it's like we, we believe in, in, in, you know, our job is to help you build an iconic software company, not to, you know, not to challenge you and look for, you know, look for the areas where you're weak so we can identify potentially identify replacing you.
And I think that's, uh, you know, I don't know. We just care a lot.
David Carnes: Uh, I think that's an incredible set of differentiators. So thank you for sharing all that. Um, you talked about the focus on people and that, and I know that that extends to this RevOps area that we're so focused on ourselves, you talked about hiring. The idea, the controversial idea of hiring the RevOps leader before even perhaps hiring that first head of sales, I think a lot of.
Uh, companies that we work with struggle with, and we, we hear, hear of the struggle of, um, exactly when to bring in the talent that has done it before. And they may have somebody that's a little more junior, may, may have a Salesforce admin sort of set of capabilities, but may not know some of the other. Uh, dark arts that are in the, the RevOps, uh, sphere.
Um, it, it must be an interesting dialogue with the portfolio company leadership to inspire them to make those hiring decisions. Um, but probably you pull out examples and say, Hey, look, this is where it worked well before you should, or you identify gaps.
Doug Landis: It's hard. It's hard, right? Um, because again, at the end of the day, I can't tell the founder and leadership team what to do. I can just make suggestions. Um, so to offset that, one of the things that I went out and did is I hired a RevOps person to work with me. So I have a contracted RevOps leader who is super talented.
And what we've done is we've built these RevOps packages. For Series A, early stage Series A companies, because we know that the likelihood of them hiring a RevOps person right out of the gate is pretty low. It's just the reality. As much as I want them to, and as much as like these conversations like, yes, here's the value of RevOps.
The likelihood is they're, they're, they're thinking I've got, you know, 18 other things to do and this is kind of low on my priority list. So it's like, great, we're going to come in. So long as we have a champion in place, or so long as we have a sales leader. In some cases, a marketing leader, but typically it's like we need somebody in place to kind of be the owner of this and because we've seen it where we didn't have a sales leader in place and it's kind of like CEO and kind of marketing and kind of customer success.
And we're out building, but the very first thing that we had to build. Was kind of a state of the union dashboard. Just so you have all of your data, your metrics and help them think through their whole, their whole data strategy. Right. Um, and at least at a minimum, then that way, when the board or other people are asking you for metrics, you know, how, how are we performing?
How are conversion rates? What's top of funnel? Um, what's working, what channels are not working? Where, where's your, where's your best lead source, et cetera. At least they have the data there. And, and so that's kind of like the first place to start. So we try and augment the fact that they may not be ready to hire that rep ops person.
And so by doing the work and we actually do it for them, we give it to them as a, as a little gift and a little bow, then they realize like, Oh wow. Okay. Now, and then, and then typically what happens, they're like, Oh, this is great. So we need to start thinking about like lead routing, right. From our, from our, from our marketing vehicle.
And it's like, okay, great. Well. Sorry, we gave this to you for free, so now you're going to have to pay for a resource. It's like, oh, okay. All right. So, so like that, they'll use the same person that I have and I'm like, here you go. Some, you know, extra money in her pocket. But at the end of the day, what they're starting to do is understand and get a, get a taste of the value of RevOps.
David Carnes: Yeah, that's great. I think that's. It's such an important thing. We, we, um, so Jaron and I through, since the start of COVID have hosted a number of RevOps roundtables. So getting groups of RevOps leaders together to just
Doug Landis: Love that.
David Carnes: share ideas and experiences. And it's interesting that we meet with groups at different levels, uh, a senior manager and.
for a manager and senior analyst of RevOps level and a director of RevOps level and a VP of RevOps level and, and other, other groups. And what's interesting is realizing at what level within in somebody's career tenure, they realize that the investors are an incredible resource and it's, it's probably further along in their career than it really should be.
So we're very encouraging. To the, uh, earlier stage RevOps leaders that we work with to please engage with the investors and learn what resources which could be, you know, webinars, it could be you and, and the, uh, the, the contractor that you mentioned, um, and I think so many of the investors are structured in ways to support, uh, the portfolio companies, uh, in this critical area.
Doug Landis: Yeah. It's so true. I mean, it's, it's so important because, um, you know, if you think. Well, first of all, we have, what, 50 some odd companies in our portfolio. Guess what? There's a lot of RevOps people kind of across the board. Why do this, you know, isolated by yourself in a little silo, you know, at an early stage company, why not work with and collaborate with your peers who are likely at the same stage or just moved past that stage?
And, you know, and the whole question is, is like, well, what mistakes did you make? What should I avoid? You know, how should I think about, you know, the right tooling? How should I think about my data strategy where like, you know, there's just, there's, there's always a million questions to answer. And I think oftentimes, you know, once there's a head of sales and they hire a RevOps person, it becomes the two of them.
It's like, we're going to fight this battle together. It's like, guess what? There's more. Then just the two of you that you can rely on. And so by tapping into your investors, you can get access to everybody else that is either at that same stage. So create a cohort by stage or just get access to everybody else.
So that you've got a kind of an open forum to kind of ask questions. We've created a whole Slack channel. For all of our go to market leaders. And it's open to everybody ask any questions. There's no dumb questions. Um, and I'm going to start creating functional roundtables. So we, we host sales leadership roundtables, but RevOps roundtables are next on my list because it's so important.
David Carnes: It's near and dear to our, near and dear to our hearts. Happy to hear that that's something you're, you're, uh, working on.
Doug Landis: I have a suggestion for you though. Hold on, David. As you mentioned that RevOps roundtable, one of the things that I think is really important is to have RevOps and sales leadership together. Because oftentimes sales leadership doesn't really understand what's involved in the world of RevOps. It's a, it's pretty amazing, especially if they're a first time VP of sales.
If it's their first time being, being the one in charge, they don't know what to ask of the RevOps person. And the RevOps person likely is going to end up taking on way more responsibility than, than the sales leader really truly understands. Examples. Tons of them, right? So it's like end of quarter, they don't have a deal desk person.
Guess who becomes the deal desk person that is basically going through every single contract and reviewing every single deal and, you know, like trying to determine discount ratios and all that rev ops, but it's also the end of the quarter and they're also working on the plan for the next quarter. So they end up, and I've seen this internally at some of my own companies, it's like the RevOps teams at the end of the quarters are working double, triple time, even though the sales team says, you know, they're working hard cause they're trying to get these deals done.
Well, you're one person, uh, multiply that by five or eight or 10. And guess what? RevOps is responsible to support everybody. Plus they got to manage up, plus they got to plan for the next quarter. So I think it's really important that Not just sales at a minimum needs to understand the level of, I guess, intensity that RevOps takes on, um, at different points, points throughout the year so that there can be some, you know, additional support, whether that's outside consulting, you know, to, to kind of help, whether, you know, close the books or plan for the next quarter right now, everybody's freaking out about next year.
I
Jarin Chu: Yeah, you, you're nailing it because we do hear it, uh, I lead a group, uh, like David mentioned of, uh, RevOps leaders who happen to be women, and one of the biggest challenges whenever they join a new company, whenever they're trying to start up a new team, is trying to get the rest of the team on board and on the same page, A, around what the RevOps definition is, and B, around how they can partner together.
And there seems to be just as much education and advising in That sales leader and oftentimes that marketing leader as to say, this is what we can do to actually help you. And this is what we need in return from you. That's, that's a process that happens regardless of how experienced I think some of the marketing sales leaders have been, you know, each organization is different.
So I'm really glad you're suggesting, Hey, let's combine these groups of people because they are revenue leaders ultimately together and they need to be able to support and understand each other's needs
Doug Landis: They should be. They should be. Yeah. I mean, look the way the, here, how about this, like, you know, when you first get started, if you're hiring a rev ops, you know your rev ops counterpart and you're a sales leader, uh, and part of it is like, how do you view them? Do you view it's, it's similar to the way the SDRs view, you know, AEs view SDRs or BDRs in their world, right?
A lot of AEs view their BDRs as somebody that works for them. Like, here, I'm gonna give you a list of tasks. You go do this stuff and report back to me.
Jarin Chu: Are they a partner or are they your gopher?
Doug Landis: Right. And that's, and, and to be honest, like the right rev ops leader who is really strategic in the business and understands what fundamentally we're trying to do from the top down.
Right. And so they understand exactly all the levers that need to be, you know, all the dials that need to be turned to levers that need to be pulled in order for us to meet those top end goals, i. e. the board level goals. And so then they can become the co founder of the sales organization. Like that's ultimately the goal.
But oftentimes, unfortunately, in the early days. You know, David, to your point, the sales leader will hire a junior RevOps person just to do the, to be the gopher, to do the dirty work, to do the, you know, the gritty in the weeds work, um, which is important, which is really, truly important. But fundamentally, at the end of the day, the sales leader needs that partner to help them run, run the organization.
Because guess what? If you don't have that, you know, then the sales leader, they try and take a day off and you know, you know, then they're not relaxed. They're constantly looking at their phone and you know, there's real implications there from a life perspective, but we're, we're not going to get into that.
Jarin Chu: And selfishly, you know, being part of a SaaS RebOps consulting firm, I would say that that same filter is important when they're considering hiring any kind of RebOps consultancy. Are they looking for someone that's purely about Salesforce execution or tech stack execution? Because that's one kind of work.
And then there's the kind of strategic advice from Other executives that have gone through this many, many times before, right? We work with a lot of with mid market companies who are increasingly moving up market to the enterprise stage. And what they seek oftentimes is not just more technological addition to the team, they maybe have a team of 40.
They're looking for people who've gone through mergers and acquisitions, gone through different stages of growth, who can really advise on the strategy level. And I think there's a difference for, you know, The folks who are looking to hire, be that internal or external team, that difference.
Doug Landis: no question. No question. Um, then there's one more stage to imagine. Of course, this isn't really happening right now, but as we move in the future and companies start thinking about prepping for IPO, Holy Toledo, the requirements, the things that you have to change, the things that you have to change in Salesforce to lock it down and make it.
To make it non accessible. I mean, becoming a public company actually requires a whole team of, I would argue, consultants to come in and help you like think through what do you need to adjust and prepare for, to become a publicly traded company?
David Carnes: I wish more clients would ask us about that and let us help them prepare specifically for that, locking down the system properly. Thinking across the systems and how to protect, uh, what suddenly becomes incredibly important data as if it wasn't already.
Doug Landis: So it's true that then shifts the focus now no longer is RevOps is not necessarily as important to just sales at that point in time. RevOps is important to the COO, right? And that now becomes, that becomes the connective tissue between COO and kind of business operations for the whole, for the whole company and the whole firm.
So fundamentally, I think oftentimes what happens is RevOps because You know, they're treated as, in many cases, the gopher versus the partner. Right. And I, I kind of, I have a love hate relationship with that , with that analogy. But the reality is, is if they're, if they don't, if they don't understand what it takes for them to be viewed as a partner, to be sales leader, then they're always going to be kind of subservient, if you will, to what I would call go to market and just executive leadership.
Right. And so it's always gonna be like, Hey, we need this. We need this. We need this. And, and ultimately, I think, I think a great RevOps leader is somebody that can anticipate the things that the business is likely going to need, right? So, you're in mid quarter, if it's middle of the quarter, you know what's coming, you know what's coming.
So, why aren't you planning and preparing for that and at least pushing your RevOps leader, at least pushing the other Ops leaders in the business? To think about the things that are coming. Okay. We're, we're facing, you know, here's the stuff that we need to do in mid quarter, we've got to start prepping for end of quarter.
We've got to start prepping for the next quarter. I mean, truly a great sales leader, by the way, should always be thinking quarter plus one anyway. If they're really truly a great VP of sales, they've been there, done that before. It's like, I'm not just thinking about what's going on now. I'm thinking about next quarter, maybe even quarter plus two, depending upon how big their ACV is.
And so, I mean, I think, I think part of it is just taking a step back and realizing like, what does it take to become that strategic partner to your sales leader or your whole, the whole go to market team? Because it's not just sales, honestly, because RevOps supports marketing sales and customer success.
Jarin Chu: Yes,
Doug Landis: and I think that's another, I think that's another
Jarin Chu: advice. I
Doug Landis: How many RevOps leaders, and I'm curious from your experience, both of you, how many RevOps leaders have truly, they truly understand Marketing Ops and CS Ops? Or are they just a glorified sales ops person?
Jarin Chu: would say CS Ops, in terms of the experience, is probably the weakest out of most of the RevOps teams we've worked with and RevOps leaders we've worked with. There are definitely more, I would say maybe close to majority of the folks that I've come across have strong, uh, marketing and sales ops experience.
But I think the CS Ops part is one that is very much feels like a unicorn these days. I think maybe a handful of folks on the podcast that we've interviewed have CS experience. David, what have you seen?
David Carnes: I think it's very similar. I think there was an initial push where titles literally just had the words changed and not responsibility change. And there, the, there was that staggering change, uh, that was measurable across LinkedIn of all the prevalence of RevOps. Um, but the rules didn't change quickly to match that.
And there were others in competing roles, and they had to, that stuff just had to work itself out over time.
Doug Landis: that's true. You know, by the way, something that could help, um, I think from something that can help the RevOps community elevate maybe again, their stature and even a seat at the table, um, actually starts outside of RevOps, which it starts by changing the incentive structure for your marketing sales and CS leadership. Because here's the thing, if you think about it, fundamentally, that's the revenue organization. Marketing, Sales, and CS, that's the revenue organization. But the problem is, is marketing is often incentivized. on leads, right? Top of the funnel exposure, brand awareness, leads, et cetera. And then CS, what's CS incentivized on, you know, net promoter score, uh, you know, churn, you know, gross churn, net churn, net dollar retention, what have you.
But I think all three functions need to be measured on two numbers, top line revenue, net dollar retention, period. That's it. Marketing, I don't care if you give me 10, 000 leads or if you give me a thousand leads. So long as they convert at a rate that converts to closed one business and they continue to expand and, you know, be a happy customer, then we all win.
And so if that's, if that were the case, then it makes RevOps even more important because there's more, there needs to be more consistency across marketing, sales, and customer success. And so you start to think about the business more strategically and holistically versus, okay, here's marketing. And I got to think about marketing automation and lead routing and all that and campaigns and all that stuff over here, here's sales.
And I got to think about, you know, kind of sales process and, you know, reporting and dashboards and here's CS. And I got to think about, you know, uh, early warning systems and churn and, you know, and customer engagement scores. They're often treated as silos, even though we have this. called RevOps, which is supposed to incorporate all of it.
Jarin Chu: Yeah, I think that's probably the most important motion right now where we are in the market to get right. And, you know, you mentioned these two KPIs that would be appropriate for measuring all RevOps functions. I'm curious to kind of put that question back on you, Doug. When you look at your own role, advising so many different kinds of RevOps teams, are there certain metrics you look at to say...
I'm, I'm helping them be successful. Am I, you know, am I incorporating sort of the right amount of training and guidance with each company or with the right companies? How do you personally measure success?
Doug Landis: That is a tricky question. Um, because in the venture business, how we measure success is, you know, increased valuation and ultimately building, you know, an iconic software company for us, we don't necessarily care about acquisitions as much as we care about is building a big, longstanding, you know, uh, uh, software company.
Um, So, you know, the way in which we measure success in the venture business is like, as the company continued to grow and scale and hit their numbers and hit their targets in a, in a, you know, economically, uh, sustainable way, do we have a path to profitability? Do we have a path to building something really big and interesting?
Um, if you, if you were to unpack that, you know, look from a RevOps perspective, you know, it, it, it changes, right? So I think at the core, there's kind of two parts. I would, I. I would kind of double down on the first one is always going to be, you know, do we, are we tracking the right metrics so that we understand pipeline?
Pipeline is the heartbeat of any company without it. I mean, like a healthy pipeline kind of makes all your problems go away. Right. And an unhealthy pipeline. Means we all have problems. I don't care who you are. I don't care what role or what function you're in on the go to market side. We're going to struggle if we don't have healthy pipelines.
So I like to spend a lot of time there and some of it may be, are we targeting the right folks? Do we have the right campaigns? Do we have, are there technical issues in our processes or in our data? That's not allowing us to actually see what we need to see so that we can make tweaks to the campaigns or who we're targeting.
The other thing is, you know, oftentimes I feel like, you know, most people in a go to market organization think that a tool will solve all their problems. A new tool. Check out this new tool. Oh, we got to incorporate AI in everything we do. Like, oh, that's great. And then all of a sudden RevOps is like, what the hell am I supposed to do with this?
What is this? You're giving me another tool that you want me to try and test and evaluate, potentially integrate? And so I think... Having a kind of a tool strategy, you know, that, that is something that you continue to maybe evaluate throughout the year is super important because it needs to be connected to fundamentally what problems are you really trying to solve and how does that connect to what's the, what's the strategy of the business?
Right? And everybody in RevOps, if you don't know what the strategy of the business is, and it's typically going to be like, okay, we want to back in when it was super frothy. It was, we want to triple, triple, double, double, double, right? That was kind of the, the simple math, which is so dumb because nobody could ever really do it.
I mean, so few companies do it. Oh, God's the worst. Like we're going to triple again. It's like, no way. You can't find that much pipeline or create it. And so it's like, now maybe it's like, well, we want to, we want to grow at 30%. Or guess what? 2024, our target is we just want to stay flat. We don't want to lose business or lose, you know, lose any runway because we just need to survive until things start to pick up again.
And so if you don't know what that, what that goal and that target is, it's really difficult for you in your daily day to day activities to try and determine what should you be prioritizing and focusing on. And, and I feel like, you know, it's so, it's so easy to go, well, a new tool will help us to do X and therefore we don't have to hire for Y.
And so we can keep our costs down and we're going to increase pipeline or increase conversion, or we're going to be able to do better. You know, we're going to, we're going to have a higher, you know, NPS score and all that. It's like, okay, but what are we, again, trying to accomplish as a business? And then what tools do we need to, to help us to do that?
Do that at the beginning of the year and then just. Re evaluate.
Jarin Chu: Having a tool strategy seems, I would say, maybe, uh, in the medium to advanced RevOps awareness stage, especially, I think, for smaller companies. When you're first speaking to potential investments or, uh, other Series A companies, are there things that are either missing or are, um, major concerns, I even call them red flags when you're doing due diligence within RevOps specifically?
Doug Landis: I mean, the red flags are when we're talking to the leadership team in particular, like CEO or co founders, and we're asking them real questions about, you know, kind of customer health and conversion and what, what happened to that little tiny dip right there and you know, they don't have a good answer if they don't know their data.
You know, early on, that's a problem. That's a real problem. And again, oftentimes, I mean, look, I'm not, I'm not going to name names here, but we had one, we had, we had one company that was using Notion to run their business all the way to Series B, Notion. And it was like, what are you doing? How do you, how do you measure what's working and what's not working?
Like how on earth do you have visibility even into the forecast? I got, I was like, how do you forecast? And he's like, just deal by deal, customer by customer, prospect by prospect. I was like, Oh man. Holy Toledo, you're lucky that, you know, your product sells, not doesn't sell itself, but you're lucky that you've got a really good, great product because that's not a healthy way to manage the business.
So, fundamentally, it goes back to this, like, do you, do you know your data? And, um, and can it, can you tell the story of what the data says? And oftentimes, you know, early stage founders don't know that because they don't really understand, um, that playbook of the thing that all, all the, the dashboards that they need to have to manage the business, which is why we build, we come in and we'll build the state of the state of the union dashboard for them.
Right. It's, and it's, and it's amazing when they're like, oh, actually I haven't been running the business this way, so these are new dashboards for me. Um, what do I do with them? And so there's actually, there's two steps to that, right? It's assessing what they currently have and what they're tracking and measuring.
That's the very first thing that you need to understand. And, and arguably in our, in our, as we're doing diligence, doing diligence, it's like, what exactly are you measuring right now? , right? Let's just take a look at that. And so we can at least identify where the gaps are. And then it's helping 'em to understand what they should be measuring.
And how to do that.
Jarin Chu: I'm really glad you're talking about measurements and being clear around are they measuring the right things because I think sometimes even in presenting to the board, you know, a RevOps can often serve up some vanity metrics. What are the kinds of metrics you would say RevOps should be presenting or preparing so that we're having a meaningful conversation where it's not just rainbows and unicorns every time?
Doug Landis: Yeah. That's another tricky question. Because it kind of depends. You know, if we want to get in a conversation of what I call board meetings, that's just a whole other beast on its own. Because again, oftentimes board meetings are these like, let me just paint this rosy picture of rainbows and unicorns and everything's great.
It's like, the reality is it's not. And let's just have a real honest conversation about What's not great. What are, what are the options and what's, what's our strategy trend, you know, kind of reset or, or, or course correct. Um, what, what I often see, um, is it, the vanity metrics are like, you know, top line revenue and churn and growth, right.
And, you know, open pipeline and, you know, deals in the pipe of what we, what in our forecast and what we think we're going to close, right. All that. You just check the boxes. Here we go. But what really matters? Well, um, I want conversion rates. I want conversion rates by source, by stage. I want to know where deals are getting stuck.
How many deals are getting stuck? Why do we think that is? I want to know, I want to know, Okay, are we tracking lead source? And if not, why? Because if we're not tracking lead source, how do we know where to double down on what's working and what people are responding to and engaging with? I don't care how many, you know, I don't care the activities.
I want to know what's working and what's not working so we know, you know, what to, what to adjust. I want to look at, I want to know competition. How many times is competition coming up in conversation and at what's their pricing and packaging strategy? And should we be evaluating that? Pricing and packaging, unfortunately, in the early stages tends to be something you do once and then they forget about it for the rest of the year.
It's something that needs to be evaluated every quarter, every quarter. Are we leaving either money on the table or are we losing business? Because we are not priced appropriately to how our prospects and customers want to buy from us. Right. And, and want to continue to buy from us. These are the things that I want to see.
And I want to like talk about, you know, in a meeting. I also want to know like downgrades and churn. Okay. Why it's going to happen. What did we, did we know about it ahead of time? You know, it's interesting at series A, again, something that RevOps can do for a series A company right out of the gate, build an early warning system.
First thing, because what happens is this is usually by the way, where somebody, where a founder go, I need RevOps. So you hire, you know, you land all these early customers as a, as a founder, you get to a million, right? And then you go raise your series A, you're like, no, I need a head of sales, then you go hire salespeople and SDRs and all this, and RevOps can wait.
And then all of a sudden those early customers that you hired, they'd come up for renewal, kind of like mid series A, right? Maybe late series A, they come up for renewal. And then out of nowhere, somebody turns and everybody freaks out. What? How'd that happen? How'd we not know? What's CS? Now CS is on the hot seat because like somebody churned, we didn't know about it.
Well, it's because you didn't have the right system in place. You had nothing in place to help you understand utilization of the product and what are the signals that are going to show you whether or not someone's maybe not using it right, or maybe they're not happy, or maybe there's something going on in their business, because instead what we're focusing on is landing all these net new logos. Right? And so, Series A, build an early warning system. Do it. Right out of the gate. Yes, you can go buy the technology, you can also build it, you can hire somebody to build it, but get it in place so that you know what's going on with your customers.
David Carnes: we, and for years now, we've been absolutely 100 percent able to surface SAS utilization metrics within Salesforce. We can absolutely connect with each of our clients, uh, own SAS platforms and pull in relevant data and marry it with accounts so that we can build those. Early warning systems. I wish we had more of those conversations.
So perhaps this, this dialogue will inspire that,
Doug Landis: I hope so. I hope so. By the way, David, to your point, you don't have to go out and buy a solution or a tool, you know, to go do this for you. Because there's a, there's a whole bunch of CS, you know, tech right now is going through a big upswing, uh, in terms of investment. But the reality is, yes, you can do it in Salesforce.
David Carnes: we can do it with a lighter touch. Um, absolutely. So you, you talked a little bit about time. You talked about the pricing and packaging and, um. Portfolio companies should be looking at it quarter to quarter. That got me thinking about planning for 2024. So, because it's no longer growth at all costs. How do, how do you inspire your portfolio companies to look at planning for 2024?
Doug Landis: Yeah, yeah. Well, it's October 4th right now, which also, by the way, I think it's with National Save the Air Clean, Save the Air Day or something. So, you know, everybody stay out of your cars today. Um, if you didn't start this planning exercise in August or September, then you're behind. And here's why I say that.
Because if you happen to, if you happen to have an enterprise sales motion at all, right, anything that I will say north of 50k ACV and you realize you're going to have to hire people for next year in order to hit some of your targets for next year, you're already behind, you're behind, right, because you've got to build in ramp time.
And the reality is oftentimes they start to build a plan, then it's December, they're like, Oh, we got to go hire. They try to hire people in January, February, maybe they get them. But guess what? Now there's a six month ramp time because these deals are over maybe, you know, 50k to 100k. Well, they need six months to ramp.
But guess what? Founders are like, no, let's give them three. It's like, what? That's, that's bananas. You know, enterprise reps need more time to ramp. And so if you haven't even, if you haven't thought about your hiring strategies and your capacity plan for next year, Already and you're in the enterprise, you sell enterprise grade products that are north of 50, 000.
You're behind the eight ball, which means most likely you're not going to get full output from your reps that you hire next year until middle or late next year. So the whole first half of the year, it's going to be a stress case because you're going to feel like the targets have gone up now. My hunch is they haven't gone, they're likely not going to go up significantly.
So at the end of the day, when it comes to your 2024 planning, it's important to understand from the board what we think the goals might be. Now, they may not have identified or decided on them now, but if the business has been growing 30%, you know, kind of quarter over quarter. So maybe the goal will be, well, let's continue to grow 30% Great.
So if you're 10 million, your goal is to get to 13 or 14 million. Awesome. Well, now, and again, you might have to, you might have to build a couple different plans because you don't have that goal just yet. Um, but it's pretty easy to look backwards and go, okay, how are we going How have we been performing?
What do we think the goal might likely be? And kind of plan against that. So let's say you're a 10 million and you need to get to 13 or 14 next year. Well, the question is, is can you do that with the reps that you have today? So the first thing you have to look at is can we do that with reps that we have today?
And the thing I want you to look at is how they've been performing. If they're underperforming, if they're performing at say 50, 60 percent attainment, which is not unlikely. Then the first thing, instead of going out and hiring a bunch of people, the first question I have to ask you is what would happen if we got them all to 80%?
What if we were just able to get our reps are that we have today up to 80 percent because replacing them and hiring new ones is expensive as we all know. And it's, there's, it's the time to value to get them in place. The next thing you want to do is like, okay, if I do have to go higher, how can I do that?
Um, in a manner that is, that is, it is what I'm gonna call economically, uh, efficient. So let's focus on efficiency more than growth at all costs. Don't go to high, don't go, you know, you need 4 million. Let's say you've got million dollar quotas. So, okay, do we, well, if we have some solid net dollar retention, do we have to hire four people next year?
Maybe we have to hire five. And if it's a million dollar quota, then I'm guessing you've got a pretty high ACV. And so, that's the cases we might have needed to hire somebody, you know, in September or October, at least to get them ramped. So they can start performing for next year. Well, maybe what if you put in some, I don't know, what if you think about the business this way?
I call this the earn it model. What if you told your team you have to earn your way to adding new capacity? What does that mean? Well, here's the thing. If your team hits a hundred percent of its, of its number two quarters in a row, then you automatically get one new headcount. Here's the kicker. If you're a frontline sales leader, I'm going to give you one new headcount and no new quota.
Ah, so you get an additional head, maybe two heads and no additional quota. The VP of sales will keep the quota, but the RVP doesn't. So now there's incentive for the RVP to get the team humming. Right. The other caveat to that is you need to have 80 percent of your team at 80 percent attainment. Because you don't want the two people that are crushing it and they're two, 300% of their number and everybody else is 30, 40%.
'cause that is, that is outta whack. That's not really super efficient at all. So then, okay, cool. So now we're focused on like, what do we need to get each person up to 80% from their 50 or 60%. So it slows down the hiring, but it focuses on, on, uh, efficient growth. The other thing you can do is put in some automatic promotions.
So how do you keep AEs incentivized? Well, what if you created, what if you created layers in AE1, AE2, AE3, and even doing this at Series A and you're really clear about the responsibilities for AE1 and what is required to consume from an enablement perspective for AE1, right? And so as an AE, if you hit your number two quarters in a row, automatically you get promoted to the next level.
Automatic, just happens. We don't have to negotiate. It's already set in place. You get a bump in pay, you get a bump in equity. Great. Now the responsibility is on you. You don't come to me and be like, what am I getting promoted? Because that's what happens all the time, right? That silly conversation. And now the responsibility is on them, right?
So the goal is now there's an incentive for the AEs, there's incentives for the, incentives for the RVPs, and the business is focused on growing efficiently.
David Carnes: That
Doug Landis: earn your capacity.
David Carnes: Sounds great. So I would like to shift gears and talk about you before we wrap up this episode. Uh, you, you're based in LA, pretty cool part of the world. You studied at University of Oregon, uh, did a BA in business administration and management. Your previous role was chief storyteller at Box.
And I feel like we could do a whole other episode just to talk about that role. Um, How did you get into the VC world?
Doug Landis: Luck, uh, connections, network, brand. Um, funny enough, actually lucky is one of my nicknames is tattooed on my arm. Um, I think, you know, look, I love, I love building. Um, I was really fortunate that I was early at a lot of great companies. I was early at Oracle. I was early at Google. I was early at Salesforce.
I was early at Box. So I've seen this crazy trajectory of growth, um, I've seen a lot of mistakes, uh, I've seen what it takes to take a company public. One of the things that we were talking about before is prepping to go public from a RevOps perspective. We struggled with that at Box, it was really difficult.
And, you know, I, I focused on, you know, one of the things that that happened, actually, the retail. So I was fortunate in all the companies that I was able to work at, but when I was at Box, one of the things that was really interesting was Andreessen Horowitz would host. These what I would call speed dating exercises, right?
So they would bring a huge company in like USDA, Aon Insurance, GE Healthcare. They would bring them in and then they would introduce a whole bunch of their portfolio companies to these ginormous companies. And it was kind of like the speed dating exercise. In the beginning, the company would come in and talk about their strategy and initiatives.
And then each one of us would get a chance to kind of tell our story about who we were. I was a representative from Box because I was basically Aaron's kind of right hand as the chief storyteller to have, to, to, to do these, to have these conversations every week. So from Box, I would go there in the morning and I was the only one that would show up first thing in the morning and listen to the company talk about what their strategy was.
And then I would listen to their strategy and I would go sit in a little cube in the entrance to Horowitz office and I would reorient our messaging and our, our kind of our positioning to match to what they're trying to accomplish. And then I would go in and I would present. And by the time I present all these other folks from these early stage companies that Andreessen had invested in, we're sitting in there and afterwards, they'd all come to me like.
Oh my gosh, how did you do that? That was, that was crazy. Like, what, what are you doing? What can you, will you help us? And so I started advising all of these startups. So it's like, look, it's really not hard. Listen to what they're doing and they're saying what they need and, you know, the problems they're really struggling with and, and, and just realign and reorient your messaging and quit making it all about you.
Right. And what I realized was like, geez, everybody does this. Everybody just shows up and throws up and talks about themselves. They don't talk about their hypothesis or point of view about the other company and what they may be experiencing. They don't talk about like, you know, other customers just like them.
It was just, it was super fascinating. And so what I found was, I was like, I realized at that point in time, I'm like, at some point in time, I'm going to go into venture and I'm going to help all these little startups because there are all these products and engineering led founders that don't know anything about going to market.
And the good news is I'd seen it. I'd seen it at these amazing companies and I'd seen it at early stage all the way to scale. Um, and so, you know, I just had a lot of things to pull from in my arsenal to, uh, to help.
Jarin Chu: The other thing I'm hearing, Doug, is you're very good at picking ponies. Seems even when you are picking companies to join and now to picking rev ops teams to support. Um, and, and that brings me to my, one of my final questions on this show. You know, you are staying ahead of the game by working with so many rev ops teams, for rev ops leaders and teams who seek to stay ahead and advance their careers.
The way, you know, your, your career trajectory has seen. What are some of the resources you would suggest, or maybe people that you would suggest they follow who demonstrate kind of this thought leadership and people you really respect?
Doug Landis: Um, gosh, it's so interesting. I think the thing that I would say is... Like, become a master of your domain in the world of RevOps and really understand what it means. What does a strategic RevOps partner for the sales that go to market and the broader executive leadership team look like? What do they need to know?
What do they need to do? What skills, what are their superpowers? From a skills perspective. So the very first thing is like find senior RevOps leaders and try and understand what, what they're great at and how can you, how can you replicate that, or at least identify where your own strengths and weaknesses are.
So that's one thing, know and own your domain. And once you do, pick a point of view about it and talk about it. Share, share a thing. We live in a world right now where there's no more, there should be no more gated content. If you've got something that's interesting and it's a strong point of view about something and you've got some experience with it.
Share it. Don't, by the way, claim you're some sort of expert in anything because, you know, you're, you don't claim your brand, your brand claims you. That's just the reality. But the more you share some level of knowledge and understanding based on your own experience, the more you start to develop your own personal brand.
Then, here's what often I see, RevOps folks just stick, stick around and talk to other RevOps folks. That's short sighted. You need to go out and talk to sales leaders. You need to go spend time with sales leaders. You need to go spend time with marketing leaders. You need to go spend time with CS leaders.
Go where they are hanging out. Spend time where they are spending time so you understand what they're good at, maybe what they struggle with, what they're not good at, what the difference between a sales leader at Series A is and a sales leader at Series D. Because, again, your job in the world of RevOps is to become a sales leader.
The co founder of the sales organization, or maybe even the co founder of the whole go to market organization. Well, you can't do that if you don't understand your audience.
Jarin Chu: That's a great reframe. And I would actually then ask you, Doug, if I reframe my question, who are the sales, marketing, CS leaders, and RevOps leaders that immediately come to mind that you would recommend following and maybe trying to engage in conversation, say on LinkedIn?
Doug Landis: I mean, look, I'm, I'm, I mean, Mark Koslow is one of the, he is just one of the best. He took outreach from zero to 100 million. Um, I can't, where is he now? He's at, uh, it's a, it's a CS company. I totally. Blanking on the name. He's going to kill me for this. Um, so he's amazing. Of course, Amy Bolas does, creates amazing content from a sales leadership perspective and largely from a hiring perspective.
Um, but she was also a sales professional and sales leader. I mean, she still is because she's CEO of her own company. Of course, you know, look, and for the early days when it comes to like, you know, lead development, you know, my, my good friend, Sam McKenna, um, you know, John Barrows. Um, but, but, you know, at the end of that, Ian, Ian Cognac, you know, at the end of the day though, I, I would follow, and this is why I'm such a big Mark fan, um, Kevin Dorsey fan, because they're actually in the job itself, doing the job.
Right? You know what's really interesting? There's no broad, there's no like major RevOps voice of a RevOps person who's in a company at a role. I don't see that. So like, imagine you're a RevOps leader at, who's a RevOps leader at Snowflake? What are they doing? Why aren't they posting every day about the things that they're dealing with and struggling with?
So there's real opportunity there. I also find like RevOps people tend to like to want to be behind the curtain and not so much in front of the curtain, right? Sales leaders want to be in front of the curtain. So they're great. They've got a megaphone, give it to them and then watch out. But, but I, I recognize that like RevOps people like to talk to other RevOps folks and kind of stay behind the curtain.
Well, we, we need some people to start to branch out and to break out and really, really, um, elevate their voice on things like, Hey, it's October 4th, everybody. Have you started your planning exercise? My hunch is maybe you haven't. And if you haven't, here are the four things that you're likely going to face.
Right? Like, get it out there. I see a lot of cons I mean, unfortunately, LinkedIn, it's, it's also driven by a lot of consultants and training companies that, like, have a pretty loud microphone and voice. I want more in role operators that are talking about the shitstorm that they're in the middle of right now because all of a sudden rev you know, revenue's going down, pipeline's down, conversion rate's down, everyone's freaking out, we're doing riffs.
And, what's happened to RevOps? No one's talking about that.
David Carnes: You know, Doug, certainly for anyone listening that is in that role and wants to get that voice out there, perhaps for season two of the RevOps Rockstars podcast, we'd love to have you as a guest. Certainly something that we've been trying to do is encourage more people to share the shitstorm like you've, like you've
Doug Landis: Yes.
David Carnes: So, so Doug, this has been incredible. Um, I want, before we wrap up, to share where people can find you. Uh, you're on LinkedIn, just Doug Landis. Uh, you're on Twitter at Doug Landis, is
Doug Landis: I'm not a, I'm not a Twitterer, by the way. So if you tweet about me or if you said something or mentioned me, I probably won't see it for like two weeks. It's just cause I never, like my home base is LinkedIn is that's where I spend most of my time.
David Carnes: I think it's a good, good spot. Um, for learning about emergence, they could go to mcap. com to learn about it. Uh, it would have been great if we could have talked about, uh, smoking meat and some other really fun topics to talk about with you. Um, but this has been really such a pleasure.
I loved the advice that you gave about doubling and tripling down on ICP. Uh, the somewhat controversial take on hiring the rev ops leader before hiring the sales leader for some, for an early stage, uh, company. Also, um, your strong suggestion to get maniacal about data and metrics is really just so valuable to, to hear that.
Uh, Doug, it's been such a pleasure to have you on the podcast. I've really enjoyed the conversation today.
Doug Landis: Thank you both. It's been great. And if you can't tell I'm a huge RevOps fan.
Jarin Chu: And I also want to thank our audience for listening to all of these last 30 some episodes of RevOps Rockstars.
If you learned something that blew your mind, gave you an idea of how to improve RevOps, maybe improve your board presentation. Please tell a friend about this podcast. We are so, so happy to have Doug today here as our finale guest. Thank you again, Doug, for joining us on the show today.
Doug Landis: Awesome. You're welcome.
Jarin Chu: Great. And this has been our very special finale episode of RevOps Rockstars.
Doug Landis: What do you know? Yeah, that was
David Carnes: Hey, classy rock stars.