There are <200 folks with the title "GTM Engineer" on LinkedIn. But somehow, this role gets discussed a lot.
And it's an interesting discussion - especially because we created a similar role at out previous startup, and it worked extremely well.
Not sure what the role does or why it matters? Then listen to this episode. We discuss
This episode is brought to you by by Everstage - the highest rated Sales Commissions Platform on G2, Gartner Peer Insights, Trustradius with over 2,000+ customer reviews. Some of their customers include leading brands like Diligent, Wiley, Trimble, Postman, Chargebee etc.,
And it's an interesting discussion - especially because we created a similar role at out previous startup, and it worked extremely well.
Not sure what the role does or why it matters? Then listen to this episode. We discuss
- (00:00) - Introduction
- (01:32) - Introducing the Go-to-Market Engineer Role
- (08:57) - The role in practise
- (20:49) - Where does the role sit?
This episode is brought to you by by Everstage - the highest rated Sales Commissions Platform on G2, Gartner Peer Insights, Trustradius with over 2,000+ customer reviews. Some of their customers include leading brands like Diligent, Wiley, Trimble, Postman, Chargebee etc.,
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Creators & Guests
What is The Revenue Formula?
This podcast is about scaling tech startups.
Hosted by Toni Hohlbein & Mikkel Plaehn, together they look at the full funnel.
With a combined 20 years of experience in B2B SaaS and 3 exits, they discuss growing pains, challenges and opportunities they’ve faced. Whether you're working in RevOps, sales, operations, finance or marketing - if you care about revenue, you'll care about this podcast.
If there’s one thing they hate, it’s talk. We know, it’s a bit of an oxymoron. But execution and focus is the key - that’s why each episode is designed to give 1-2 very concrete takeaways.
[00:00:00] Mikkel: Hey everyone, you're listening to the Revenue Formula with Toni and Mikkel.
[00:00:03] In today's episode, we talk about the go to market engineer, what the role does, where it reports, and much more. Enjoy!
[00:00:11] Toni: Before we jump into the show, today's is to you by EverStage, the top sales commissions platform on G2, Gartner, Peer Insights,
[00:00:21] and Trust Radius with more 2000 reviews from customers like Diligent, Wiley,
[00:00:27] Trimble, and more.
[00:00:29] Visit everstage. com and mention Revenue Formula unlock a personalized sales compensation strategy session with one of EverStage's RevOps experts.
[00:00:40] And now, enjoy the show,
[00:00:42] Mikkel: I feel like, are we slow today? It's already 11. It's already 11. This is like the second episode now we're recording. What the heck?
[00:00:51] Toni: mean, I already had two calls,
[00:00:53] you
[00:00:53] know, probably before you woke up, you
[00:00:55] know.
[00:00:55] Mikkel: I also did work, so it's not like I just
[00:00:58] Toni: did you,
[00:00:58] Mikkel: woke up
[00:00:59] Toni: by the way, did you hit send on the, on the
[00:01:01] subject?
[00:01:01] Mikkel: Not yet, no. How could I? We've been recording. But it's
[00:01:04] Toni: for everyone who's interested, we are also running a sub stack. It's a revenue formula on sub stack, please subscribe. You know, it's, it's basically one, one issue per week from mostly me, sometimes Mikkel, and then there is a wrap up of a guest episode you know, also in the same week. So it's two emails keeping up to date on go to market stuff going on right now.
[00:01:27] If you haven't checked it out already, kind of go in and subscribe. Yeah.
[00:01:32] Mikkel: on great episodes, such as the one you're listening to right now, because we're going to talk about a entirely new role that is starting to appear in the org charts around, especially SaaS companies,
[00:01:44] it's the go to market engineer.
[00:01:46] Toni: Yep.
[00:01:47] Mikkel: You and I have heavily focused on revenue operations.
[00:01:51] For quite a while. Why, why are we getting a go to market engineering role now when we have RevOps, like what's the difference here with, with these two functions?
[00:02:01] Toni: Yeah. Let's maybe start out with, you know, what's the problem that those companies are facing and why is this role even popping out somewhere? Right. And I think the, when you do your average scroll on LinkedIn and maybe it's just me because I've, I'm connected to the craziest people and it's my own fault, but basically kind of what I'm seeing everywhere is all kinds of logos that I've never seen before up until today that are connected in a spider web of oh, when this happens, it goes over here, and then this, and then chat gbt, and then something. Like this is, this is starting, you know, people are realizing, Hey, you can do fantastic things by tying together all of those little microservices in order to do an up on campaign, to do, I don't know, account planning, to do whatever you think you need to do, you can now do with these you know, by stitching together a bunch of different tools
[00:02:53] in a very specific way, right. People are realizing that that can be done and that that can bring them money. But they're also at the same time realizing, like, who's gonna, who's gonna do that,
[00:03:05] right? And the first logical step, because those are also the same people that are really interested in those things, because they're so nerdy about this, are revenue operations folks, right?
[00:03:15] RevOps folks gonna be like, hey, this is my domain, give it to me, you know, I've, I've, you know, I can buy that tool, I can implement that tool, I can stitch these things together, I'm the perfect guy to do it. But what then happens, and this is, this is interesting because it also happened for us actually when we were kind of building out our go to market in Roblox, and this worked extremely well.
[00:03:36] So we, we didn't, we didn't back then call it a go to market engineer, we called it like a, it's, it's a, it's kind of a hybrid role, I think we said and we went out and hired someone that has a RevOps background. But also has a sales background,
[00:03:49] you know, has been an SDR and salesperson for a couple of years and also understands all the technical stuff, right?
[00:03:56] Kind of that profile basically emerging because really for us, it became a really a blend between doing some of the back, back office stitching together of tools and processes and data and
[00:04:08] all that boring stuff. With, actually going out there and, you know, we didn't know specifically at the time, but theoretically maybe placing calls or sending emails and doing stuff and actually reaching people.
[00:04:20] I kind of, it needed to be a role that actually encompasses both of those things. And I think what's happening right now is A lot of people at the same time are coming to the same conclusion where they're seeing very technical stuff. I can't give this to my SDR. I can't give this to my AE. It's way too crazy for them. But at the same time, I also can't give it to my Ravos person because my Ravos person just, you know, graduated from college or they came from a CPA role or finance job before or something else. They have never smelled and seen the front lines of sales and customer service
[00:04:56] and marketing. They've never kind of been there.
[00:04:58] They don't know what this is. So whom do I give it to? And, and this, the emerging solution is starting to be, it seems like the go to market
[00:05:08] engine.
[00:05:09] Mikkel: Yeah. And I think I, I told you, like, if you start researching, how do people define this role and it's interesting when it's so early on to see what are the different flavors people give it. It seems like it's heavily biased towards a function that comes in and just replaces 10 SDRs. And I, my opinion at least is that's probably too narrow a way to look at it.
[00:05:30] Certainly the role can do that. But to your point, What is the problem that this function exists to solve? And I think what we've struggled with probably the last five years or so is like, how do we scale our go to market? Maybe not during the COVID times. It was like, you know, different story, but how do we scale it?
[00:05:49] And now with this new emergence of AI, it's even more difficult to figure out, well, how, how do we apply that technology? Some, some folks like I, you and I saw Adam Robinson saying, I haven't even really played with AI. And if the CEO of that company that does 10 million AI hasn't played with AI, will that team be able to really transform their go to market using AI?
[00:06:11] I'm not, I'm not so sure, honestly, right? And that's where I think this, this role using technology we have today to, to scale the go to market, that is the purpose. And it's a wonderful purpose as well.
[00:06:23] Toni: And I think the starting out role can be Can be replacing SDRs. I think it
[00:06:28] can be a starting point for that role, right? Because again you know, even, even my own career. So one of the first things I, I was able to lead, you know, while being revenue operations was actually the SDR team.
[00:06:42] Because why?
[00:06:43] Well, it's, it's a lot of data. It's a lot of process. It's a lot of numbers. It's, it's basically kind of really trying, you know, 40, 50 people. It's This needs, this is not a, this is not like some artsy work anymore. This is like, no, this is needs to run like clockwork.
[00:06:58] Right. And so it already then fitted, you know, into the RevOps realm.
[00:07:02] People wouldn't do it today because like, you know, does the person, you know, can they, can they lead 40, 50 people? Is it the right setup? Well, that kind of changes today now, right? Because suddenly this engine that you want to have someone build that suddenly isn't so many people. But that is kind of the same size as maybe a revenue operations team.
[00:07:22] And and, and that's why I think it's that's why I think kind of that, that switch is, is making the most easiest sense beginning with
[00:07:30] the SDR piece,
[00:07:32] right? And yes, there's some vendors that, that are helping along the way, but even those vendors, they're not. They're not fully vertically integrated, right?
[00:07:40] You still need to find the leads. You need to kind of feed them that stuff. They need to kind of learn on something and they're going to do these things. They need to be handed off. And if you really kind of look into this, this is a lot of stitching together of different pieces
[00:07:51] of the, of the technological value chain, but also of you know, the, the sales process that you're kind of doing there.
[00:07:59] Right. And I think that's why especially for the SDR role, this is a, is a great way to, to try and test this out. And it's a great way to you know, have someone in this role and have a, have a clear path to positive RI.
[00:08:13] Like a very clear path, right? It's, it's, it's not just, oh, we're buying 11x and now we're kind of replacing all SDRs.
[00:08:20] It's not going to work anyway. But what you then have here is, is a bit more of a believable okay, we're hiring one person or we're elevating one person into this position, that's gonna be their mission. And the idea is in the next six to whatever month we will kind of keep opportunity production the same or more, but with half. The headcount,
[00:08:39] maybe 80 percent less of the headcount. And that, that feels like a reasonable grownup decision to make for like a, like a CEO or CRO or someone, someone on that team, right? Because that doesn't seem crazy. That seems totally legitimate you know, for, for this to work out. And I think that's why this is a great starting point.
[00:08:57] Mikkel: So the question is, do we want to hop into some practical examples to illustrate what this role does? Or do we want to just briefly talk a bit about where is, where should the role sit?
[00:09:07] Toni: No, I think let's start about the practical applications
[00:09:11] and then the where should it sit? It becomes way more interesting way more interesting. So let's, let's screw off this like, well, it's called go to market engineer and therefore it's,
[00:09:22] you know, I don't know,
[00:09:24] broader than just sales. It's true. It's true.
[00:09:27] But maybe you go with a, with a, with a marketing example first, where, where this role can actually play a
[00:09:32] role.
[00:09:33] Mikkel: Yeah. So let's take an
[00:09:34] Toni: Cough,
[00:09:34] Mikkel: from marketing, Just to illustrate again how. What does this role actually do? Right. And the way I think about it is you have different tasks being performed in marketing today that now can be done by AI, right? And the right solution is certainly not just to buy a open AI license to the content team, and now they can start producing more content.
[00:09:54] That's going to be really difficult. They don't, you know, I think everyone has gone through, a lot of folks have gone through that learning curve of just trying to prompt, some have probably given up, others have maybe succeeded in it, but what you really want to have is actually a more of an engineering mindset to say.
[00:10:09] What is the objective with the content we have? Okay. There are different objectives. What is the process? What is the optimal outcome? And I think even a mistake a bunch of teams make is just looking at the volume of output versus, Hey, no, no, now AI gives you different possibilities instead of just having a picture of a graph.
[00:10:28] We can easily have Cursor create an interactive graph and then embed it in the blog post. So the experience is just way better. Right. And I think that person will bring that creative mindset to say, Hey, we, with this technology, we can fundamentally change the quality of the work we're doing, or we can do things that we just couldn't before.
[00:10:49] I think the Example I talked with you about at some point is, well, if Running paid advertising on a larger scale, it might not be feasible for you to test or change every single ad you're running because you're going to have thousands of ads. But guess what now with AI, you can't, you can actually do that, but you ideally want to have a process and a system that runs and that requires someone to stitch a couple of technologies together, such as a go to market engineer.
[00:11:18] Yeah.
[00:11:21] Toni: related. Some of these things will be ad hoc, right? I mean, I think
[00:11:24] you and I, we talked so much about, or how can we use product or just this thin sliver of the product that we're building and make this some kind of a, of a marketing.
[00:11:36] Marketing thing, right? And there are examples, you know, I think the best example is probably HubSpot's website grader, right? You all remember this? There's this, you know, this website from HubSpot, you can go in there, you put in a domain, and then it grades your website for what? I don't know what it grades it for, but it does that stuff, right? And and it was useful. You felt like giving your email in, in exchange for that was like a fair trade and guess what now you're on MQL, know, and and you know, a lot of people were thinking, Oh, can we do some, you know, can we take a little bit from product and maybe kind of package it like this? And the answer is always like, kind of, no you know, forget about it. Or you build some kind of a RI calculator that is basically affronted to an Excel spreadsheet that, you know, hangs somewhere. And it is not really value adding for folks,
[00:12:24] right? Guess what kind of now you can actually, you know, I literally saw this example on LinkedIn the other day, someone was using a tool, I think V0 or something like this to just rebuild the website grader from HubSpot
[00:12:37] in two minutes.
[00:12:38] And basically, kind of, he just, like, hey, you know, take this thing, rebuild it, should be doing this, that, and the other thing, and three minutes later it was there,
[00:12:45] right? And then you can, and this is, this is a, this is a low creative job, right,
[00:12:51] copying something else. But what I'm trying to say is like now with this mindset, with the coding capability that you suddenly have in the team that you don't need to have an actual developer or take budget from somewhere.
[00:13:02] You can create some of those assets and use them in order to drive leads or do something a little bit more crazy out of the box than than doing a 5, 000 keyword you know, SEO campaign or something. You can do the volume stuff too, by the way. Don't understand me, you know, you know, in the wrong way. But you now have the ability to do some other shit as well, which could be
[00:13:23] really
[00:13:23] cool.
[00:13:23] Mikkel: It's also, just think about this, like, personalization in the sense that I am running an ad towards a huge account. It's personalized to them. Like it might even mention that company and it's not a landing page that's built for them. Right. That makes sense when you're doing enterprise sales and it's like a long, long, long sales cycle and you know, the amount of revenue you get from that single account is just, Obscene, but if you're doing mid market, it just won't make sense until maybe now you could, you could actually do that with AI.
[00:13:52] You could do way more personalization at scale in a way that's not, you know, been possible before. And I think that's what's, what's shifting and where you will need an engineer to actually, to really make it work out in the end. So that's just one example of or at
[00:14:06] Toni: the, the, the other thing we discussed was the, the inbound
[00:14:09] Mikkel: marketing
[00:14:10] realm.
[00:14:10] Yeah,
[00:14:12] Toni: are a bunch of vendors obviously helping with this now, and all of this is cool. But again, what we're also seeing across the board is like, well, you know, there's still some gaps, it's not fully nicely stitched together, it's not perfect. And some of the some of the workflows that are being built with, you know, the, the, the workflow tools they're actually in, in some regards superior to the software that has been built in order to kind of do the same thing, right? They're, they're folks not saying like, Hey, what I'm doing here in make.
[00:14:40] com or in copy AI or whatever you're using. It's actually better than the 11x stuff that we're running, or AISDR stuff that we're running, right? Kind of, there's, there's, there are pieces here where you can do it yourself, and stitch these things together. You need to go to market engineer for that in order to achieve it. But we were talking about one vision in terms of inbound, that, that, you know, probably we had for a while. But like, it's really the, you know, you fill out a form and you call in somewhere as a, as a, as a buyer, someone picks up immediately or calls you immediately. You have a pleasant one or two minute conversation.
[00:15:11] Yes, you get a little bit qualified. Yeah, that, that's part of it. It's, it's a computer you're talking to. It's an AI agent you're talking to, like you're aware and that's fine. And it's actually good enough, honestly, it's good enough. And you know, after a certain amount of time, when basically the AI goes like, yep, qualified. They just ask you like, Hey, would you mind jumping on a call now with Tom or with, with someone, with someone on the team? You go, yes. The conversation continues very kind of seamlessly, right? And the background the team is being queried who actually has time. So now we're talking humans. Tom is able to kind of take the call, jumps on, and then, you know, when that happens, the AI is like, Hey, you know, actually, Tom just arrived, he will take it from here, let
[00:15:49] me just give a quick intro. And, you know, it's basically, you know, you kind of set the scene, and seamlessly, without delay, without waiting, without interruptions, without a shitty experience, without all of that crap, You get to have a real conversation with a real person
[00:16:04] meeting both criteria. Kind of the company doesn't take on shitty leads to, to, or send shitty leads to AEs, but also the good leads and frankly, every lead
[00:16:14] gets a pleasant pleasant experience in this, in this process.
[00:16:18] Right.
[00:16:18] And stitching that together won't be easy.
[00:16:22] I'm sorry. Like there will be teams trying to kind of do that. But there will always be a friction here. And You know, even if you have a software provider that helps with some of these things, even these things also need to be stitched together,
[00:16:34] right?
[00:16:34] And kind of really understood and tweaked. And someone needs to make sure that the AI is saying the right things and so forth. And who's going to do that? That person who's doing that will need to be someone that understands the technical part, but also really understands firsthand frontline, the commercial part.
[00:16:51] And, and again, like just one example. In many cases, if the RevOps person doesn't have that frontline experience, then the RevOps person might not end up being a good fit for
[00:17:02] this.
[00:17:02] Mikkel: yeah, yeah, I think it's like one of those levels where we've just accepted that the connect rate is X. Because there's no way for us to improve it anymore. Like we can't, we can't call these leads up faster than a couple of minutes. It's unreasonable, but now you could connect immediately. Right. So I think it's just some of those assumptions we've had about our go to market and some of the efficiencies, whether they're good or bad, they're just out the window now, potentially, right.
[00:17:29] And that's, that's, again, the mindset that go to market engineer will bring in order to scale the go to market.
[00:17:34] Toni: And just to round this out, right, we talked about marketing, we talked about kind of the intersection marketing, you know, sales, we talked about SDRs. There's certainly something around AEs as well, don't want to go into this. There's certainly something around AE enablement, sales enablement,
[00:17:47] don't want to go into that. There's certainly something about support and CS.
[00:17:50] Like, they we're pretty clear by now, basically. All the money that goes into AI is focusing first on all the volume jobs,
[00:17:59] all the stuff where you have multiple people per organization, they're all doing the same thing. AI is great at replacing all that stuff. And, and, and we're kind of seeing this and who's gonna, who's gonna run this? Who's gonna administer that? Well, it needs to be in each of these sections, someone with a very deep technical understanding and a commercial understanding.
[00:18:17] Those two things need to be combined. Otherwise, because it will become so mission critical because, you know, it's, it's not, sorry, sorry, Revo.
[00:18:25] So it's not just some sales report. This is, no, this person is going to be running my pipeline now.
[00:18:30] If you're the VP of sales and this is the SDR stuff, right? You, you, you gonna have someone there that, that you can trust also with some of the commercial pieces that you kind of care about a lot, right?
[00:18:40] So, so that blend is, I think what's, what's going to make it very interesting going
[00:18:45] forward.
[00:18:45] Mikkel: I honestly also feel like this role If you're in RevOps, by the way, and have the functional expertise in one area, I would start pivoting into that area. It's also something you and I discussed, but the reason I would do that is honestly, I believe the go to market engineer will get paid more, will have more sway in the organization, have a better career prospect, to be quite honest.
[00:19:07] I think it's just, there's a lot of things pointing in the right direction for that role, if someone, if someone is able to. Let's just say build implement an inbound SDR in this scenario and bring the connect rates from, I don't know, 80 percent to 90 percent and now you get 10 percent more revenue.
[00:19:23] Kind of significant change all of the sudden, right? And and I, and I think that's just to, to, to drive home the point. Like if you're maintaining a CRM, doing territory planning or implementing new software, none of that, you're going to be able to truly tie to revenue and say you did it.
[00:19:40] But, but this go to market engineer will, conversely, I think if you're not happy being judged on like a very numerical performance, then it might be also a little bit difficult.
[00:19:51] Toni: No, I was just about to say right kind of with more upside comes also more
[00:19:54] downside I mean this will be this will be a role that also will see people getting fired by the way Which you know, you won't have in the revolves around. I mean, I remember our guy David You know, he was He was sitting in those all hands and he was, you know, holding up his hand and saying like yeah, we didn't, we didn't get anything done
[00:20:13] this week.
[00:20:14] we failed, we didn't book any meetings, kind of, we messed up,
[00:20:17] right? And That, that kind of responsibility will come
[00:20:21] with this piece. But you know, your pick, right?
[00:20:25] Kind of, do you wanna, do you wanna have a chilled, relaxed time? Or do you want to kind of progress? And then probably something like that is going to be a faster route
[00:20:34] to achieve
[00:20:35] Mikkel: Yeah. So I feel like we've given at least some examples and try to find our view on the role. It's not just someone who does clay, right? It's, it's so much more than that. It's not just someone who comes in and does outbound SDRs. Where, where does this role sit?
[00:20:49] Like if there's someone listening now who goes, this is a great idea.
[00:20:53] We should totally do this go to market engineering thing. Where should it be placed? Who should report into it? Is this like a cross functional role? How are we going to see that?
[00:21:03] Toni: Yeah. So I don't think we're fully made up our mind about this yet either. Right. So kind of, let's have, let's have this conversation live on air. Maybe, no,
[00:21:12] honestly, maybe you go first. Maybe
[00:21:13] you go first. What do you think?
[00:21:14] Mikkel: I suspect that there are a dual approach, potentially. But for the most, for the most part,
[00:21:23] Toni: all
[00:21:23] parties
[00:21:24] Mikkel: answers are correct. No, but I think for the most part, it's going to be a departmental level role is not going to be cross functional. I'm sorry. I just don't see that for the most part.
[00:21:33] You will need it in the area because the person needs to have the functional expertise period. Right. So if, if someone is an expert in marketing and reporting to a, Sales minded leader, that's going to be very difficult for that person. Just practically speaking, org management wise, but also if we're positioning this role as heavily influencing how you scale the go to market, if I'm the CMO, I don't want anybody outside my department tinkering with that part of the go to market in terms of growing and scaling it.
[00:22:03] I just. I need to be accountable and if I'm to be accountable, I also need to have control over what basically happens and gets prioritized. And just one example would be, I think a lot of teams can go in now and basically reduce the size of the content team while lifting the quality and the output. To do that exercise I would be very worried if this go to market engineer all of a sudden did that work.
[00:22:27] And then all of a sudden was no longer at my disposal, off to the next project. And then the initiative started breaking or we needed to adapt to market changes, right? So I think it is kind of critical depending on the, and you know, this also depends on the organization, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But at a certain point I believe actually it should be more on a departmental level, at least in my, in my head.
[00:22:50] I don't know what you, what you think about that.
[00:22:51] Toni: So I'm, I think I think it's an Uber to Uber Eats moment,
[00:22:56] actually. So I think we're currently at the Uber stage.
[00:22:59] So what does that mean? Hey, you, you happily jump into a cab.
[00:23:04] You know, that's depending on the country as a specific colour. You jump in, you pay, you're done and over. And and suddenly, you know, you can summon this car from your phone, it's a stranger, it's not a cab, they don't have a license, it's just some pal dropping you off somewhere. And, you know, previously we were kind of super uncomfortable with this, now we're comfortable with that, right? And, and that, that jump from, you know, a cab to Uber, that was kind of weird already. But then it took an even crazier turn that this pal that you don't know that you just kind of summoned over the phone delivers your lunch or
[00:23:39] your dinner.
[00:23:40] Like, isn't that super weird, right? We're basically kind of two abstraction layers of weirdness that we are now totally okay with, but you know, you know, 10 years ago, we're like, no, thank you. You know, I'm not, I'm not even going to buy anything on e commerce because I don't trust what they're doing with my credit card information.
[00:23:52] You know, I'm not even going to buy anything on e commerce because I don't trust what they're doing with my credit card information. You know, let it, let alone deliver any crazy stranger my, my dinner, right? And, and I think what we're seeing here right now is we're, we're kind of thinking about it in a way where the, you know, way of companies and how they're operating is going to kind of stay the same, which can totally be the case, by the way. If you have someone replacing the SDR team and you've been owning, you know, you're the VP of sales and you own the SDR team. That person, you know what, go F yourself, it's going to report to me. Like, you know, I don't, I don't want to hear
[00:24:29] any of your fancy arguments of like, Oh, go to market and connect it.
[00:24:33] No, screw that. You know, this person is producing 50 percent of my pipeline. I'm not going to have that person go anywhere. Right.
[00:24:40] And I think the same is going to be true for the CS leader, for the marketing leader and so forth. Right. And I think as we are you know, Micro optimizing, well, micro is maybe the wrong word, but kind of basically replacing AI in those silos, which will be the first path.
[00:24:55] And this is how it's going to happen. I think then this, this structure will be the same. I think where we're going to the Uber Eats moment is where you know, once we're starting to kind of realize that some of those issues that we're kind of not fully aware of right now, but some of the cross departmental issues, Which are mostly actually human issues.
[00:25:13] Let's just kind of all boil it down to oh, Yeah. It's targets and this and it's kind of human issues. Actually once all of them break away And you know all of these different agents kind of know everything about one another Then it's like well, you know, maybe there's a different kind of structure Actually here that would optimize across the go to market. And that now becomes the Uber Eats moment.
[00:25:36] And I think once this then becomes, you know, once this becomes the norm, I think you're probably going to be thinking differently about it, whether or not that's going to be kind of a matrix structure,
[00:25:45] right? Which. Mr. McKinsey and Mr. BCG kind of thought of it at some point or it's going to be like a flock thing, or it's going to be its own department.
[00:25:55] I don't know,
[00:25:56] but there's, there's going to be some change to the organization because, you know, the, The, the benefits from having it siloed, which were people centric and rah, rah, rah, and us against them, and you know, all of those reasons, they kind of start to drop away and then this, this other way of integrating becomes way more important, but, but I think we are far out from that.
[00:26:16] I think it's going to take some time
[00:26:17] and I think in the beginning, if I was CRO or if I was, you know, VP of sales or something like that, I think I can, I can live with waiting for the sales report another week or not having direct, you know, I can live, I can live with that. You know what? It's, it's fine. If you want to manage that team,
[00:26:35] go, go, go go fucking do that.
[00:26:37] But if it's my SDRs
[00:26:38] and it's, it's just, I'm sorry, it's
[00:26:40] a different, it's a
[00:26:41] Mikkel: it is.
[00:26:41] It's like the equivalent of saying, Oh, now the design team that does all your ads for your advertising reports to another department. Can you wait a week more? It's like, no, it's the same point there. No, I can't wait. And that's also what I was reflecting over as you were talking through this rationale here.
[00:26:56] It's like, we we will see a lot of compartmentalized changes first. So paid advertising, you can talk about revenue operations, having the view of the entire customer journey. And, you know, sure the advertising is part of that, but a lot of the work that happens there, I'm sorry, it just doesn't matter.
[00:27:16] It doesn't matter for the sales team or the CS team or the product team. It doesn't, it matters to the marketing team and the person managing that. And that's where I think it's not like they're rolling out a CRM now that needs to go across all teams that I, that I think is some of the good arguments of having a.
[00:27:35] Cross functional team. It's when it's touching every department, but at least initially, I feel like a lot of the changes will be will be compartmentalized. And with that, I think you're right. That's kind of. To your point is the Uber Eats moment is not there yet. Like maybe if someone is building a new company and they don't have any kind of go to market, you know what, maybe they could just have a go to market engineer and that person owns the SDRs and owns the AEs and owns the whatever.
[00:28:01] Like that, that could totally be a thing, but you know, think it could, but we'll, we'll see. It's, it's tough making these kinds of changes to an existing organization. It is like just this whole example of now we'll be able to replace headcount, but we're depending on a technology another department manages.
[00:28:18] And it is mission critical. It's like, it's not going to sit right with a lot of folks. So, I think there's just going to be some structures preventing that,
[00:28:25] Toni: And I think there will be some serious lack of talent.
[00:28:28] Mikkel: Oh, yeah,
[00:28:29] for
[00:28:29] Toni: least at least in Europe, kind of what we've seen with, with revenue operations, Europe versus US is Europe. You have a lot of folks in revenue operations coming from a finance background or consultancy background or something like that, right?
[00:28:40] They've never, never seen the front lines in that sense. In the US it's the other way around, kind of lots of folks coming from SDR, MDR, CSM, AE positions into the operations role. And they've, they've kind of seen these things before, right? And, and I think I think in Europe we'll see a severe lack of go to market engineers.
[00:28:59] Frankly, I, I think, I think that's what's, what's going to be the case. And if you, if you kind of overlay this with a bunch of companies wanting to do this, well, you have an unproven talent pool.
[00:29:09] And do you really want to put them in charge of all the critical stuff immediately, or do you want to just take You know, test it out in pockets and then see it grow over time, right?
[00:29:17] I think, I think it will also just be a good business decision to do it step by step. And then, you know, if something works out, kind of consolidate further. But, you know, the other way around, I can totally see in a small organization, You, you know, you found a lead the first thing you start to maybe experiment with is maybe the SDR, you know,
[00:29:37] maybe some outbound thing, right? Someone is doing that, then, okay, cool, now we have some inbounds, you know, someone needs to kind of maybe do that in a better way. Why not that guy?
[00:29:46] Right? And then, oh, you know, now inbound, outbound, kind of that, that piece of the, of the fun is organized here. Can you maybe help the marketing team to get more efficient there? You kind of, you add things on top, on top, on top. And I can see how that grows over time.
[00:29:59] Right. And and, and, and this makes sense organically. I think flipping the switch in a larger organization, I think it will be a different
[00:30:07] approach.
[00:30:07] Mikkel: Yeah, I agree. I think that's about it on on this subject for now. Definitely interesting to see how this role is going to evolve. If it's going to just stay an outbound SDR role with some tech, or it's actually going to evolve into something way more mission critical. I'm at least excited to see that.
[00:30:24] If you haven't subscribed already, make sure to hit that button. Toni. Thanks so much for joining me on the episode today.
[00:30:30] Toni: Thanks Mikkel. Thanks everyone for listening and have a great day. Bye bye.
[00:30:33] Mikkel: Bye.