Subscribe
Share
Share
Embed
Welcome to Founder-Led, featuring founders scaling 7 and 8 figure companies who share the strategies and mindset driving real growth.
Brought to you by LinkedIn Growth Engine. We help established recruitment and staffing firm owners land new clients from LinkedIn by turning their executive content and insights into a trust building inbound lead engine.
We partner with $1M to $20M+ agency founders to build visibility, authority, and trust that drives pipeline, without turning you into a “content creator.” Over the last 12 months, we've helped drive $20M+ in booked revenue from LinkedIn.
If you're done relying on referrals and want prospects coming in pre sold, you're in the right place.
00:00:01:11 - 00:00:09:05
Rohan
Welcome to Founder Lead, where we sit down with some of the sharpest founder operators to learn what's actually working in their business today.
00:00:09:05 - 00:00:11:22
Rohan
This episode is brought to you by Frontier Studio,
00:00:12:01 - 00:00:14:01
Rohan
a revenue minded content partner
00:00:14:01 - 00:00:19:21
Rohan
helping businesses grow their visibility, reach and ultimately their business from LinkedIn.
00:00:19:21 - 00:00:27:02
Rohan
So if you're ready to join over 30 businesses that are turning executive thought leadership content into real revenue
00:00:27:02 - 00:00:29:18
Rohan
while spending less than one hour per week of your time.
00:00:29:18 - 00:00:32:15
Rohan
Common thought leadership below and someone from our team will reach
00:00:32:19 - 00:00:34:12
Rohan
Now let's get to today's episode.
00:00:34:12 - 00:00:45:00
Rohan
Today's guest is Ben Moley, CEO and co-founder of hyperscale, a revenue operations consulting firm helping companies from series ace startups to fortune 100 enterprises
00:00:45:00 - 00:00:49:10
Rohan
fix how marketing, sales and customer success actually work together.
00:00:49:12 - 00:00:54:15
Rohan
Ben and his co-founders came out of Mendip, where they helped scale the company from 15 million
00:00:54:20 - 00:00:58:13
Rohan
140 million before being acquired by Siemens.
00:00:58:13 - 00:01:03:18
Rohan
They saw firsthand how rev ops was the force multiplier behind the company's growth,
00:01:03:18 - 00:01:08:19
Rohan
and started hyperscale when they realized that most companies had no idea how to do it
00:01:08:21 - 00:01:14:09
Rohan
if you care about rev ops and what AI is actually changing about how companies sell and grow.
00:01:14:09 - 00:01:15:09
Rohan
This one's for you.
00:01:15:09 - 00:01:16:15
Rohan
Ben, welcome to the show.
00:01:16:19 - 00:01:18:08
Ben
Thank you. Ron, good to be here.
00:01:18:12 - 00:01:24:23
Rohan
Well, then let's start off with a super serious question. What is your go to breakfast to power you for the day?
00:01:25:00 - 00:01:27:19
Ben
I'd say Honey Bunches of Oats. That's the that's the normal one
00:01:27:19 - 00:01:32:09
Ben
or whatever my kids have left for me on the cereal bar. So yeah, but that's that's typical.
00:01:32:11 - 00:01:35:18
Rohan
Okay, great. Yeah, I get that. Those carbs and sugar. And
00:01:35:18 - 00:01:47:07
Rohan
so Ben would love to start off with the highlights of your origin story and your founding story and the what led you to starting hyperscale. What was the the gap you saw in the market? And
00:01:47:07 - 00:01:49:02
Rohan
yeah, share that story with us.
00:01:49:04 - 00:01:53:07
Ben
Sure. Yeah. Well, I mean, I think you you touched on it well in your, in your intro, but
00:01:53:11 - 00:01:56:03
Ben
like you said, myself, my co-founder,
00:01:56:03 - 00:01:57:11
Ben
whose name is Nick Rose
00:01:57:11 - 00:01:58:07
Ben
and our,
00:01:58:07 - 00:02:02:01
Ben
you know, third member Tony Tarantino, we're all at
00:02:02:01 - 00:02:09:20
Ben
a company called medics, which is a software company based here in Boston. And we're some of the early US hires they actually were founded in, in Europe, came over to the US.
00:02:09:20 - 00:02:17:03
Ben
And so we joined relatively early in their journey and were responsible for different parts of the go to market motion for expanding into the US.
00:02:17:03 - 00:02:27:21
Ben
So that went very well. I had various sales and marketing roles, led sales teams, led marketing teams, Nicola Drops led the rev ops function and Tony was like his right hand guy doing all the systems work.
00:02:27:21 - 00:02:44:10
Ben
So across the three of us, we had a pretty holistic point of view on on how it all came together. And, you know, in the moment it's like, you know, there's so much happening that, you know, when you're growing at that pace that there wasn't a lot of time for reflection. But, you know, when the acquisition happened and all the stock vested in the dust settled, and we kind of reflected back on
00:02:44:10 - 00:02:50:22
Ben
the last four years, you know, the importance of revenue operations really became clear of, like, how we were able to scale as quickly as we did.
00:02:50:23 - 00:03:06:07
Ben
Right. And, you know, I think the word you used is, is is a good one of calling it a force multiplier, right? If it's not doesn't bring in revenue by itself, but it means that every sales and marketing person could be that much more effective than they would be without it, right? It's getting more and more efficiency out of your same your same team.
00:03:06:09 - 00:03:10:00
Ben
So we went through that journey and then yeah, afterwards, you know, saw an opportunity
00:03:10:00 - 00:03:14:12
Ben
to bring that expertise about what we learned at Edmunds.com and in our careers previous
00:03:14:12 - 00:03:20:05
Ben
to the wider market and help people build revenue, operations, capabilities and do it right the first time.
00:03:20:07 - 00:03:32:17
Ben
So we have worked with plenty of small companies series, ABC, etc. but we're increasingly moving into the enterprise space with some household names, you know, doing large year long projects, etc. and the experience that we have.
00:03:32:21 - 00:03:46:18
Ben
And part of what makes us different is we've done the startup thing at mix and elsewhere. My co-founder, Nick, ran operations for Dell Software for 8 or 9 years. You know, I've been a big companies where as Siemens like, we know how the small works, we know how the really big works, and we know what you need in between.
00:03:46:18 - 00:03:51:01
Ben
And so we can kind of right size recommendations of, you know, understanding
00:03:51:01 - 00:03:59:20
Ben
not not doing overkill in terms of designing features and functions today, but also making sure you're setting yourself up for where you want to scale in the future, because we know what it needs to look like down the road.
00:03:59:20 - 00:04:06:13
Ben
So yeah. So that's, you know, that was the thesis four years ago in terms of what we what we saw the opportunity as and I mean, yeah so far so good.
00:04:06:13 - 00:04:09:02
Ben
It's been a wild ride. And we're just getting started.
00:04:09:07 - 00:04:10:11
Rohan
Okay. Yeah.
00:04:10:14 - 00:04:25:07
Rohan
What is the maybe talk a bit about the the market and you know, appetite for wanting to improve rev ops functions internally at these companies of all different stages and sizes. What did things look like, say, last year? And what are you seeing in terms of.
00:04:25:13 - 00:04:30:03
Rohan
Yeah, the appetite for businesses taking this on leading into 2026?
00:04:30:07 - 00:04:31:10
Ben
Yeah. Well, I think it's
00:04:31:14 - 00:04:32:17
Ben
I think the
00:04:32:17 - 00:04:48:06
Ben
understanding of the importance of revenue operations is growing steadily. You know, when we started this thing for years ago, I mean, most of the people I talked to didn't know what Redbox was, right? I'd call up a crow. And he's like, what does that mean? Like, like, like sales ops have already got that, you know, I've got a sale.
00:04:48:08 - 00:04:50:12
Ben
I've got a Salesforce admin. Like I'm good. Thanks.
00:04:50:12 - 00:05:03:14
Ben
Not really understanding what the overall vision of bringing together both the both the systems expertise, but more importantly, the business process expertise across the whole lead to cash life cycle. Right. And then and the fact that the, you know, the total is greater than the sum of the parts, right?
00:05:03:14 - 00:05:05:01
Ben
When you do that correctly.
00:05:05:03 - 00:05:13:21
Ben
Almost no one got that four years ago. Right. And it was a lot of evangelizing, a lot of educating, etc., and finding the few folks that were really ready to take action on it, you know, in the way that we recommend
00:05:14:00 - 00:05:16:21
Ben
that's been changing over time. Right? And today there's there's a lot more
00:05:16:21 - 00:05:24:06
Ben
companies that have internally already decided, hey, this is a capability we want to build, and they're coming to us for help in terms of how do we do that?
00:05:24:07 - 00:05:35:11
Ben
Right. Not not whether not what it is or should we do it, but how do we do it right. And so that's a, you know, a better position for us to be in and a change that we've seen just over the last few years and has been accelerating, I'd say, over the last year or so.
00:05:35:14 - 00:05:36:21
Ben
You know, I'll say it's different.
00:05:37:03 - 00:05:47:15
Ben
There's different levels of maturity as it comes to rev ups in different industries, though. So what I'm referring to, for the most part, are SaaS companies, which is still a good portion of our revenue today.
00:05:47:19 - 00:06:00:03
Ben
And revenue operations kind of came of age in the SaaS world, right? The whole enterprise and enterprise marketing, enterprise sales model, you know, leads coming from marketing flow into stars going to ease like that whole that whole thing
00:06:00:03 - 00:06:05:17
Ben
really is geared and kind of implicit is in a B2B SaaS company, right, is how it's all structured.
00:06:05:17 - 00:06:23:06
Ben
But revenue operations applies to pretty much every industry. Right. And may may differ a little bit, but it's very horizontal in its value. But the maturity and other industry is varies a lot. So SaaS companies, a lot of them have a rev ops capabilities today or a minimum. They've got a sales ops and a marketing ops capability even if they haven't brought them together.
00:06:23:07 - 00:06:34:04
Ben
Right. Manufacturing companies, for example, though, often do not. Even a large manufacturing companies may not have a CRM at all. Right. You know, billions of dollars of revenue, no CRM. Right. That's not uncommon
00:06:34:04 - 00:06:35:11
Ben
in the manufacturing world.
00:06:35:15 - 00:06:41:15
Ben
And and so, you know, there's a huge opportunity there. Right. But where rev ops means to them and the opportunity to help them is very different.
00:06:41:16 - 00:06:45:04
Ben
Right. You have to meet them where they are in terms of walk crawl run as far as that goes.
00:06:45:04 - 00:06:59:08
Ben
So yeah. So anyway so that's that's what I'd say there of like it's definitely been growing and changing over the over the last years but especially the last year. But it does vary by industry right. In terms of kind of what people come in asking and what what they're ready for in terms of the complexity of the solutions they're looking for.
00:06:59:13 - 00:07:01:09
Rohan
Yeah. Okay. So
00:07:01:09 - 00:07:21:04
Rohan
if we were to start with, say, a more mature industry, call it, you know, B2B, SaaS, what are and we think about, you know, these stage gates or company stages you work with earlier stage, much more mature businesses. I know there's a lot of complexity around how you might think about resourcing and when to bring you in, and maybe not over engineering, but right sizing.
00:07:21:04 - 00:07:31:05
Rohan
But do you have a simple heuristic, maybe on 2 to 3 different stages that might be relevant to our audience of business owners? Anywhere from $3 million a year, up to $500 million a year.
00:07:31:11 - 00:07:39:20
Rohan
Maybe talk a bit about what, you know, high level team structure looks like and any sort of like process maturity, how you talk through it at a high level.
00:07:40:00 - 00:07:42:20
Ben
Sure. Well, you know, what I'll say is
00:07:43:00 - 00:07:56:16
Ben
there definitely are stage gates, right. As as companies progress in terms of what do they need for revenue operations, you know, and we're the first to tell people that, you know, sometimes less less is more, right. Like it's a means to an end. It's you know, the point is to help you go to market team scale.
00:07:56:16 - 00:08:12:21
Ben
But if you are in an earlier stage where the systems in the process aren't really what's holding you back, then don't invest their invest in another product marketer or something like that, right? So for very small companies, you know, I'd say like 3 to 10 million of revenue. You really don't need much, if any. You should probably have a CRM just to track the data.
00:08:12:23 - 00:08:29:08
Ben
You know, you should have a sales process just so you can talk coherently about forecasting in your leadership team, about where deals sit. But you don't need you don't need much beyond that, right? Like your your team is probably a couple dozen people. You know, you can keep track of everything that's going on and, you know, don't don't overengineered it.
00:08:29:09 - 00:08:44:22
Ben
Right. And if you've got a dollar spend, don't spend it on an expensive Salesforce license. Go spend it again on another R&D person or product marketer or something that is actually moving along. Pull in the tent for you as you find. Go to market fit and continue to scale. Now as you get larger, right? That changes over time.
00:08:44:22 - 00:09:00:12
Ben
I'd say roughly 20 to 50 million is where you really need to kind of get the baseline in place, right. So again, you don't need anything crazy complex by enterprise standards, but you should have a map, a marketing automation platform. You should have a CRM, right? You should probably have a customer success platform of some kind. Right.
00:09:00:12 - 00:09:05:14
Ben
To take tickets and manage requests and understand feedback and all that stuff, you should have all those bits set up.
00:09:05:14 - 00:09:18:22
Ben
You don't need a super fancy one. You don't need to buy the most expensive one on the market, but you should have it right. And and getting that going from 0 to 1, as we say, right, is no small thing because that that forces you to like formalize business process. What does it mean for a lead to go from marketing to sales?
00:09:18:23 - 00:09:21:17
Ben
Right. How are we going to track those? Like what's what's valuable?
00:09:21:19 - 00:09:34:22
Ben
What is the feedback loop going to be between customer success and sales and marketing? Right. In terms of how the whole lead lifecycle goes, those things you probably don't organically get to on your own, but when you get to that stage, it forces you to think through those which you will need later on, which is valuable.
00:09:34:23 - 00:09:53:07
Ben
So that's kind of the 20 to 50 million. Then 50 to 100 million is you're probably moving to more complex systems, right? Your business is growing. You know, you're moving from maybe a more basic CRM to a more complex CRM, right? There might be some systems migrations, data cleanup. Right. The business process is always changing as you scale, so you have to update that.
00:09:53:10 - 00:09:59:21
Ben
So it's a lot of like, you know, just improving on that, you know, and then once you get past 100 million or so, it becomes more about like,
00:10:00:01 - 00:10:01:23
Ben
you know, the governance of
00:10:01:23 - 00:10:18:00
Ben
of the systems, right? And the management of change with the sales team, whatever, you're doing something new. So that past that point, when you're bringing in a new technology and you've got 50 sellers now, not five, like the systems work, sure, it remains challenging, but the real hard part action is getting the humans to change their behavior.
00:10:18:01 - 00:10:20:02
Ben
Right. And rev ops actually becomes a lot more
00:10:20:02 - 00:10:24:07
Ben
focused on like strategy, business process and change management at that point. Right.
00:10:24:07 - 00:10:28:14
Ben
So again, there's these different stages, right, of evolution as as it goes through. And
00:10:28:14 - 00:10:36:05
Ben
I think the takeaway is that it's not one size fits all. It's not like oh you're behind if you don't have the Rolls-Royce of, you know, all the setup.
00:10:36:05 - 00:10:54:14
Ben
If you're a $20 million company. No, don't don't spend the money on that spend on something else. Right. But if you're a $65 million, your company and you don't have a CRM yet and you're a B2B sales company, you probably should. Right. So so like there's a there's a balance there in terms of when you invest. But again, going back to the, you know, the first points we were making, I've revenue operations as a force multiplier.
00:10:54:14 - 00:11:10:06
Ben
And to think of it as like without revenue operations, the return you're getting on every incremental sales higher basically is asymptotic, right? It's like approaching a limit. You know, you could squeeze a little more out. You can throw more bodies at it, but it's getting more and more inefficient. And why would you do that? That's not a good way to, you know, to spend your capital,
00:11:10:06 - 00:11:19:21
Ben
you with a nominal with a nominal investment in revenue operations, you can get a lot more return out of a lot larger group of salespeople and marketing people and customer success, etc. and that's the real power of it, right?
00:11:19:22 - 00:11:28:08
Ben
But it's it's easy for people to dismiss it as like, oh, I don't I'm or overhead, I'm just going to hire more sellers. But that only gets you so far, right? There's comes a point where they really need that support.
00:11:28:11 - 00:11:31:09
Rohan
Yeah. Okay. I would like to,
00:11:31:09 - 00:11:49:08
Rohan
during our conversation, jump to a specific customer example that you can maybe speak to where you've implemented, say, a use case that really did have meaningful ROI and there was that force multiplier in effect. Before we do that, I do want to make sure we talk about, you know, rev ops plus AI and what that means.
00:11:49:09 - 00:11:58:09
Rohan
I mean, things are moving so fast. And even this whole stack that you talked about a lot of this stuff could get, you know, say disintermediation or made much more efficient with a lot of these
00:11:58:09 - 00:11:59:20
Rohan
AI tools that are
00:12:00:02 - 00:12:05:19
Rohan
becoming available to us. So I know a lot of companies need to have a strategy, need to start operationalizing.
00:12:05:19 - 00:12:11:20
Rohan
So what is the POV or perspective that you have started to develop based on all these conversations that you're having?
00:12:12:00 - 00:12:16:01
Ben
Yeah. So that's a whole topic in its own right. Right. That's a that's a whole podcast by itself.
00:12:16:04 - 00:12:17:19
Ben
So yes.
00:12:17:23 - 00:12:21:12
Ben
Point of view on AI and rev ops. First of all it's here, right. Like, you know, I
00:12:21:15 - 00:12:26:10
Ben
was something of a Luddite when it comes to AI. You know, for the first year and a half or so of the hype cycle
00:12:26:13 - 00:12:31:23
Ben
and, and I think that was probably wise, like we kept our powder dry, you know, we didn't really jump on the clay hype train.
00:12:32:00 - 00:12:47:13
Ben
You know, we worked in it and we did some stuff around the edges, but we didn't go all in as a business. And, you know, a number of other early days of ChatGPT and Claude and whatnot. But now, you know, even just in the last 3 or 4 months, there have been continual step function improvements in these models.
00:12:47:14 - 00:12:58:23
Ben
Right. And therefore the tools and interfaces that sit on top of them. And now like the way this year. Right. Like people are actually asking us and they're ready to start using AI in their rev ops use cases. And the tools are there are actually mature enough to support it. So
00:12:59:03 - 00:13:06:12
Ben
my point of view is like there's a couple of different categories of AI solution and initiative that people should consider when they're thinking about revenue operations.
00:13:06:15 - 00:13:26:22
Ben
I would say, you know, the there's a baseline. I would say like the AI experience layer is like table stakes. So what I mean by that is, you know, layering on top of your core systems, your market animation platform, your CRM, right, your ticketing system, customer success, etc. there's a number of options out there now for platforms and various point solutions that sit on top of those.
00:13:26:23 - 00:13:43:07
Ben
They're the data that's in them, but they're using natural language to customize the functionality, to analyze all sorts of unstructured data and give you better insights than you could get otherwise, and doing it in a much nicer interface with much faster pace of iteration than you could ever do in native Salesforce or HubSpot or whatever. Right?
00:13:43:07 - 00:13:45:14
Ben
So those are really powerful, right?
00:13:45:14 - 00:13:48:13
Ben
And, you know, again, there's a number of different options you could do with that.
00:13:48:13 - 00:13:52:18
Ben
You could have a couple of different combinations together. You know, clay covers part of that
00:13:52:18 - 00:13:57:16
Ben
spectrum. There's other more holistic providers like GTM engine is another company.
00:13:57:16 - 00:14:04:14
Ben
But the point is like there's multiple ways to get to the same functionality, but you should have that layer, whatever that looks like, because that's going to let you get better insights.
00:14:04:15 - 00:14:25:03
Ben
It's going to let your rev ops team and by extension, your sales team, you know, draw conclusions from the data a lot more efficiently and also to make adjustments and, and customizations a lot faster than you could otherwise just in the, in the actual core systems. Now, beyond that, the other piece of that would be there may be bespoke use cases for your business where a point solution to address those could actually be really valuable.
00:14:25:04 - 00:14:35:18
Ben
Right. And so there's two categories. There's point solutions you're buying today that could be replaced by by vibe coding. Right. You know I don't mean that a derogatory word, but you're using an AI tool to build apps quickly.
00:14:35:20 - 00:14:40:09
Ben
A lot of point solutions out there I think are toast, right? Like if they're doing something really basic lead routing,
00:14:40:14 - 00:14:45:05
Ben
basic dupe, you know, things like that, you can build those very quickly and credibly, right?
00:14:45:07 - 00:14:50:10
Ben
At a production level in cloud code or other tools like it. Right. So,
00:14:50:12 - 00:14:52:16
Ben
so that's, so that's like another
00:14:52:16 - 00:15:02:19
Ben
tool to have in your belt. Right, is a capability around a tool like that, because there may be cases where it makes sense to build something custom for it. Now, I'm not one of those people that thinks like, oh, you should code everything and like throw out your CRM.
00:15:02:19 - 00:15:18:09
Ben
And I don't think we're there yet. Right. But I do think there are cases where when you have that, that, you know, well-established experience layer and then even on top of that, you've got bespoke apps that you're building, right, for specific use cases. Even something as simple as like custom dashboards, that's a real pain to build in Salesforce.
00:15:18:09 - 00:15:34:04
Ben
And quite often you want to combine data that doesn't live in Salesforce. And then you have to engage with the data architecture team. It's a whole thing, right? You can use these tools to do that very quickly. If like, I want to combine product usage data with my marketing activity, right. And figure out which leads, you know, are playing around in the free version, that kind of thing people have done before.
00:15:34:04 - 00:15:47:03
Ben
But you can do it much more quickly and easily now, right? And iterate on it. So my answer to the I think would be that that one two punch of like by the platform that has the what what has become table stakes use cases, things like automatic CRM updates,
00:15:47:03 - 00:15:57:11
Ben
you know, AI power forecasting, right. You know, enrichment of data and like teeing up, you know, account research for the sales team, all the basic stuff that there's, you know, a dozen tools on the market that can do so by someone that does that.
00:15:57:12 - 00:16:14:18
Ben
Right. Don't don't build that yourself. Why would you. But then also have the capability to take advantage of the improvements that have made in these models to custom build things when it makes sense, right. And I think if you can bring both of those things together, you're today reaping most of the benefit of what AI can do for go to market or rev ops, and that, you know, world is going to expand
00:16:14:21 - 00:16:16:01
Ben
on the order of months, not years.
00:16:16:01 - 00:16:18:20
Ben
But today, that's what I'd say in terms of how to do it.
00:16:19:01 - 00:16:30:02
Rohan
Okay, so let's make this real. Let's take an example of a $25 million run rate company. What would your recommendation be? Maybe for CRM source of truth if you'd pick one and then where can they?
00:16:30:02 - 00:16:33:23
Rohan
Are there any other tools, whether it's Clay or other apps they might
00:16:33:23 - 00:16:39:07
Rohan
look look to build and what would that yeah, maybe stack look like for a $25 million SaaS company?
00:16:39:10 - 00:16:40:04
Ben
Yeah, I think,
00:16:40:09 - 00:16:48:22
Ben
you know, if it's a SaaS company, my first thought for 25 million, you probably want to be on HubSpot. Again, details vary, right? You know, but it's a great platform,
00:16:48:22 - 00:16:56:07
Ben
really solid both for marketing and now for CRM. They're increasingly adding functionality. So, you know, for kind of a core system of record, that would be my default answer.
00:16:56:09 - 00:17:03:04
Ben
You don't yet need really any of the bells and whistles that a Salesforce is going to have, right. For some time. Right. Like, honestly,
00:17:03:07 - 00:17:13:12
Ben
you know how spots been catching up in a big way in terms of feature function. So that's the first thing I'd say of without any other context, right. Just talking theoretically, probably HubSpot and start there.
00:17:13:15 - 00:17:27:04
Ben
You know what I'd say on top of that is at 25 million, you need to the systems are one thing, right. And, you know, and there's probably a few other systems that you talk about needing to have. You need to have a marketing automation system. Again, it could just be HubSpot as well. Right? You could use something else if you wanted to.
00:17:27:05 - 00:17:42:23
Ben
And there's a few other major building blocks. But what's more important at that stage is you need to you need to get your first rev ops higher at that point. Right? So it's about having a human who starts to think about the business process. How are we going to look at the data, pulling together information across the whole lead cash lifecycle.
00:17:42:23 - 00:17:51:19
Ben
And that's more important than the systems, right? Like you could build a glorified Google Sheet probably at 25 million and like run it for a while, right, for a year, a couple of years or probably be okay.
00:17:51:21 - 00:18:00:04
Ben
But the point is that you need to have it repeatable. You need to have it scalable, and you need to have a person who's really architecting that and running it, even if it's just at the manager level, just someone who's starting to own it.
00:18:00:05 - 00:18:15:07
Ben
Right? As you grow, you'll eventually need a director. Maybe it's that person who grows into it. Maybe it's a higher above them. You'll need more analysts and more system admins, like, it'll grow over time, but you got to start with somebody who is the go to person of if there's what, which data is a source of truth. We're reporting.
00:18:15:07 - 00:18:29:20
Ben
Are we going to the board? You know, where are we on the different key metrics? Someone's got to own that at that stage. Right. And it should be at person that I would that I would say ideally reports to a chief revenue officer if you have one. The point being they should be objective across marketing and sales like that.
00:18:29:20 - 00:18:51:01
Ben
Everyone who's worked in go to market knows there's a classic tension between marketing and sales of sales is like, oh, I'm not getting enough leads, and marketing's like, oh, you're not doing a good enough job with the leads we give you. And in sales, like your leads aren't any good and it just goes back and forth. Right. You're arguing about how many came through, which ones are good, where in the sales cycle are things going right, going wrong, etc. ideally, rev up should be kind of an objective arbiter, right, for those kinds of discussions.
00:18:51:01 - 00:19:06:16
Ben
And then the business can focus on making decisions, not arguing about what the data is. Right. And that is easy to say. Anyone who's been in a sales leadership role on Martin leadership role knows that that that can spin teams for months, right? Like if you don't have that figured out. And so at 25 million circling back, I would say yes.
00:19:06:16 - 00:19:19:15
Ben
Get the baseline systems in place. Don't overengineered it right. You don't have to buy the Rolls Royce yet. Get the four focus to commute to work. Right. But you know I think the key thing is you need to have your first rev ops leader. Right. And then you can grow from there at that point.
00:19:19:17 - 00:19:23:09
Rohan
Yeah okay. Yeah. That's a really comprehensive
00:19:23:09 - 00:19:36:21
Rohan
answer. So that let's switch gears a bit and talk about manufacturing. I know this is a highly underserved market. And so I also know that you published some original Research and Industry Week. You did a LinkedIn live really speaking to this industry. So
00:19:37:00 - 00:19:39:00
Rohan
maybe talk a bit about what is a
00:19:39:00 - 00:19:50:01
Rohan
what is that most common use case, or what is the most compelling use case you'd want to get out to leaders in this industry where, you know, they're just leaving money on the table, but they're not aware of, like the thing that they should start with.
00:19:50:02 - 00:19:51:08
Rohan
What does that look like?
00:19:51:12 - 00:19:53:22
Ben
Yeah. So yes, manufacturing is
00:19:53:22 - 00:20:04:20
Ben
near and dear to my heart. We've had a lot of success there and we see a lot of opportunity. You know, like I was saying earlier, there's a lot of places that really have not made big investments in revenue operations to this point. And what that means is that there's a huge opportunity to add value, right?
00:20:04:21 - 00:20:11:10
Ben
Like even getting the basics in place for a large, successful, established business. It has that force multiplier effect we've been talking about. Right.
00:20:11:15 - 00:20:14:17
Ben
You know, coefficients that much larger. Right. So the impact is that much larger.
00:20:14:21 - 00:20:27:05
Ben
You know, I'd say like manufacturers, you know, the use cases that they typically come in articulating are range from their less marketing use cases, usually right or wrong, they're not really doing digital marketing in the same way.
00:20:27:05 - 00:20:43:09
Ben
And for many industries it doesn't really apply in the same way it does for SaaS, right? They might have a very tight customer base and like, you know, they sell through distributors or whatever it is, right? So marketing usually isn't the focus initially at least the focus is more on six. My CRM improve my data, my sales forecasting is a big one.
00:20:43:10 - 00:20:49:21
Ben
A lot of manufacturers really struggle with that, either because they don't have the systems in place, or they do have the systems, but their humans aren't using them. Right.
00:20:50:00 - 00:20:57:23
Ben
So, you know, so manufacturing salespeople tend to be pretty old school. You know, they work out of physical notebooks. You know, they go shake hands like that's how deals get done.
00:20:58:00 - 00:21:02:21
Ben
And making them log into Salesforce and like putting next steps is just it's a it's a huge undertaking, right,
00:21:02:21 - 00:21:04:02
Ben
to get that to happen.
00:21:04:02 - 00:21:13:14
Ben
And so forecasting becomes really difficult right. And tracking where the status of deals are and everything. And so that's a common pain point right. How do we do this. And then the last thing I'd say is quota cash is another big one where they come in.
00:21:13:15 - 00:21:30:10
Ben
You know, it's it's one thing when you're selling a software. Like if you screw up the quote and you, you know, provision the wrong, you know, the wrong license for someone, you can fix that in an hour right with your it. Okay, cool. Take them off that plan. Put them on a different plan. Great. If you're a manufacturing company, you shipped $1 million of the wrong parts to somebody, right?
00:21:30:10 - 00:21:43:20
Ben
That's a big problem because they can't build it, doesn't fit their doesn't fit their machinery. You got to ship it all back. You got to send them a new ones. It costs a ton of money. Right. Like it's a big issue. And so quota cash and getting that right in a timely fashion and a correct fashion is actually really viable for them.
00:21:43:20 - 00:21:45:09
Ben
So those are the places I'd say
00:21:45:09 - 00:21:48:05
Ben
we typically would start with the manufacturing company.
00:21:48:07 - 00:21:50:13
Rohan
Okay. Yeah, that just sounds super painful
00:21:50:13 - 00:22:00:09
Rohan
to have that discrepancy with quota cash. You're shipping out real hardware, real cost. And if there's something that's off there that's, you know, millions of dollars that could be impacted.
00:22:00:09 - 00:22:03:21
Ben
So we see it all the time pretty compelling. We see it all the time. Yep.
00:22:04:01 - 00:22:07:06
Rohan
Okay. Well then you know as we start to wrap it up here, what is a
00:22:07:10 - 00:22:10:06
Rohan
you know, if you could have a message on a billboard,
00:22:10:06 - 00:22:19:02
Rohan
you know, a busy intersection, what is a message that you want to get out to these businesses that they know they need to. This is a force multiplier.
00:22:19:02 - 00:22:26:21
Rohan
There's a lot of efficiencies that could be driven, a lot of morale, that can be built around training and enabling their their revenue, their sales teams and marketing teams.
00:22:26:21 - 00:22:31:05
Rohan
Customer success. But what is a message that you'd want to put out on a billboard.
00:22:31:09 - 00:22:31:23
Ben
Let's say
00:22:31:23 - 00:22:49:02
Ben
skate to the puck or something to that effect, right? You know, use a hockey reference of the thing about revenue operations is most people invest in it too late, right? Not too late in it. There's no way to correct it. But they miss a lot of opportunity because they invest in it later than they should. And then there's a year or years where they could have been growing much faster if they'd made the investment sooner.
00:22:49:02 - 00:23:04:21
Ben
And so, you know, if you're that $25 million SaaS company we're talking about, you know, and you're growing really quickly, you're going, you know, ten, 20, 30% a year. You're not going to be 25 million for very long, right? And so rather than focus on what's the minimum I can get by with today, that can be a part of the conversation.
00:23:04:21 - 00:23:21:09
Ben
But really you should be thinking about what am I going to need in two years, three years, four years, and making sure that in a minimum, you're not painting yourself into a corner to to restrict your ability to get there. Right. So, you know, I think it's funny. I mean, we're a consultancy, right? So we're supplementing teams. Sometimes we're replacing teams.
00:23:21:09 - 00:23:40:08
Ben
But even then, I'm the first to say that you should invest in your own rev ops capability. A little sooner than you might think. We see that as complementary to us, not like a competition. We think people should have their own rev ops teams. And so my advice would be skate to the puck like get get ahead of where what your business will need a year or two years from now and you will you will thank me for it when you get there.
00:23:40:09 - 00:23:45:19
Ben
Right? This this, doing this correctly and getting a rev ops capability will just enable you to go that much faster.
00:23:46:00 - 00:23:47:17
Rohan
Yeah. Makes complete sense.
00:23:47:23 - 00:23:49:18
Rohan
Great. Well, Ben, where can folks
00:23:49:18 - 00:23:56:21
Rohan
find you if they want to learn more? Will include your LinkedIn and the website and our show notes. Is there anywhere else you want to direct our audience?
00:23:57:00 - 00:24:13:02
Ben
I mean, I think the yeah, the hyperscale website and my LinkedIn, if anyone's, you know, you know, in in this phase and wondering what they should do for revenue operations and happy to give it a reverse. We can and our website has a lot of good materials to like. It's got, you know, that industry research you were talking about, you were talking earlier about maturity.
00:24:13:03 - 00:24:25:14
Ben
Like we have a whole rev ops maturity model, which again is a topic in its own right, so I didn't want to go into it here. You can download that on our website, all the frameworks and everything, and help you understand where you are today and where you should be based on the complexity of your go to market, motion, etc..
00:24:25:15 - 00:24:32:10
Ben
But yeah, I think the website and then feeling free to reach out. Personally, I think that covers it. So we're we're here to talk. If you're looking for help.
00:24:32:13 - 00:24:44:19
Rohan
It sounds great. Well, Ben, thank you so much for joining the pod, being so generous with your insights and real customer examples from what you're seeing in the field and look forward to having around to at some point. Have a good one. All right.
00:24:44:20 - 00:24:45:11
Ben
Thanks, Rowan.
00:24:45:12 - 00:24:46:18
Rohan
Appreciate it. Thank you.