Don’t have GTM visibility?

Everyone has a dashboard, a sheet, some reports - but still the number 1 problem we hear about? It's visibility into performance.

So we discussed the problem, and what you can do about it.

• (00:00) - Introduction
• (02:16) - Why we get asked about visibility
• (08:58) - The problem with visibility
• (14:16) - Breaking down targets
• (17:48) - Having foresight
• (21:55) - The first step to build it
• (27:04) - Test the model
• (29:44) - No one does QBRs

You can find the CAC:Payback template here.

*** 

This episode is brought to you by Growblocks. Finding and fixing problems in your GTM shouldn't take weeks. It should happen instantly.

That's why Growblocks built the first RevOps platform that shows you your entire funnel, split by motions, segments and more - so you can find problems, the root-cause and identify solutions fast, all in the same platform.

***

Connect with us

🔔 LinkedIn: Toni / Mikkel

✉️ Newsletter: revenueletter.substack.com 

📺 Watch: https://www.youtube.com/@growblocks
💬 Contact: [e-mail]

Creators & Guests

Host

Mikkel Plaehn

Head of Demand at Growblocks

Host

Toni Hohlbein

CEO & Co-founder at Growblocks

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] Toni: Hi everyone, this is Toni Hohlbein from Growblocks.
[00:00:02] You are listening to the Revenue Formula with Mikkel and Toni.
[00:00:06] In today's episode, we get into full funnel visibility. Why it's the number one problem we get asked about and what you can do if you've got that problem as well. Enjoy.
[00:00:22] Mikkel: So I had yesterday, we had dinner, all good. And then, uh, it's shower time for the kids. We're back to
[00:00:30] Toni: Mondays?
[00:00:31] Mikkel: literally, you know, yeah, Monday, you know, when we don't have any intros, we just default to kids. That's, you know, safe
[00:00:36] Toni: I was also, my kid puked at me. Should we do that?
[00:00:39] Mikkel: But I literally had, to shower two kids at the same time and before I could do it I had to change the diaper and you know you also want to then throw out the diaper wash your hands while you're filling up the bathtub while you're getting them undressed while and there's like so many things happening at the
[00:00:54] Toni: you skipped one step, and then there was poop in the
[00:00:56] Mikkel: yeah but it's literally like on one hand I was holding my daughter who was like one feed Down with all her clothes on and my, uh, my, uh, eldest daughter, she like brought a massive toy that she wanted to bring in.
[00:01:09] I mean, it was just, it was such a mess. I guess I should have seen it coming. I should have seen it coming. Ha ha ha. It always works. Kids is, it's always the perfect
[00:01:20] Toni: I mean, whatever, whatever we're going to do in terms of topics, kids will be a segue, like
[00:01:25] for sure. .
[00:01:27] Mikkel: That's what it is. But as you have seen it coming, and that's kind of what we're gonna talk about today.
[00:01:32] We're gonna talk about visibility for go to market teams, and there's a reason for that. Lately, you and I, we've been having lots of conversation on, I mean especially messaging, but that also means what, what are. Folks saying to us, what challenges are they surfacing to us?
[00:01:48] Toni: that might be a completely other episode. Also, like, you know, we had Anthony Pierri on the show and, uh, he taught us all about messaging and we should do like a, oh, and by the way, this is our messaging
[00:01:59] Mikkel: journey But, but so, um, one of the things we hear all the time is, you know, yeah, we just don't have enough visibility and we don't have visibility and, and, you know, the, the weird thing is that can mean a lot of things.
[00:02:16] Toni: So it means a lot of things for a lot of people and, um, I think a lot of people, um, you know, when you say that they, they, they might respond back, Oh, but I have visibility because of my spreadsheet and this BI and the Salesforce report and stuff. But the funny thing is once people then, uh, sometimes engage with us, like, Oh, what you're really solving is visibility.
[00:02:36] And it's like, tear it out. But the, um, I think the. And that's why visibility is maybe, you know, messaging wise, and I'm not sure we're going to leave this in here, but messaging is like a little bit too, um, too simplistic, which can be good, can be bad, but really, I think where some of the need for this emerged for me personally was actually, and I'm not quite sure if at that time I was a senior RevOps person that was very identifying with the sales targets, maybe also because I had very big chunks of commission riding on the sales target.
[00:03:09] Mikkel: You had an incentive to monitor.
[00:03:11] Toni: Um, or if it came from, uh, me having been elevated to a CRO and just being paranoid for my paycheck in general. So basically, I think paranoia, you know, if, if you sum me up, I think, I think in that list of wonderful things, there will be one dark corner and section That is, Toni didn't sleep enough because of the kids, and there's a shit mood today, and then the other side is paranoia, right?
[00:03:39] Mikkel: And he didn't sleep good, because then, yeah.
[00:03:41] Toni: you know, this is like a, it's a, it's a downward spiral. Um, so, and, um, I think, actually, as revenue leaders, it's kind of part of your job to be paranoid, to be honest, I think that's part of it. Um, and that translates for sales leaders to call BS on deals, for marketing leaders to be like, nah, you know, this campaign, I'm not sure if it's going to work out, um, and so forth.
[00:04:03] Right. So this is really kind of a risk management kind of, and, um, the, the way I approached this whole, I want to know, I need to know, I need to know today, uh, basically was by trying to. Build something out that aligned with my revenue targets. And we don't want to talk about go to market data modeling, all that stuff.
[00:04:23] But basically that gave me the ability to see as early as possible. When there's something going wrong that would have an impact on revenue. I wanted to know it as soon as fucking possible and those things theoretically could be
[00:04:39] Your ad spend isn't tracking in the right direction So this is like really far up the funnel, right?
[00:04:45] Your ad spend isn't tracking in the right direction that might have a knock on effect and over several steps with delays and delays and delays to your revenue, right? And maybe that gives you three or six months time. Uh, it might be your cost per lead is going up. Um, suddenly you spend all the budget, but you don't get enough leads that that will have a trickle effect.
[00:05:06] It could be that, um, your strong, uh, website traffic, uh, channels aren't working as well anymore. And that will, you know, and, uh, on the, on the outbound side, it was, um, How many, uh, hiring conversations did we have? Uh, how many hours signed? Uh, when are these guys starting? How's the ramp up going and so forth, right?
[00:05:26] All of these early, uh, indicators, I wanted to know if we're on track to do what we needed to do in order to hit the revenue target. And as soon as I could see, uh, something not working out, it basically kind of gave me, and then by default, the rest of the organization, some time to react, some time to course correct, right?
[00:05:49] And it also gave me the opportunity to, try and communicate outwards. And so like, Hey, you know, I see this thing happening and I think Q2 will be tough because of X, Y, Z reason, right? If you can say that in February, that that's job security right there.
[00:06:04] Mikkel: Yeah.
[00:06:05] Toni: At least that's what I thought. Um, and you know, long story short, I think the way we kind of try to unsolve all of these things by cobbling together.
[00:06:13] you know, some logic in a spreadsheet, some graphs in a BI dashboard, maybe some trend lines and stuff. Um, but that was basically kind of a way for us to get, uh, some of the visibility going, because honestly, you, you know, it wasn't enough to just see how many opportunities we create today or yesterday or for the month to date, or in the quarter, it's like, well, how many are we expecting to still generate?
[00:06:37] And it's that actually living up to the target that we need to hit in order to hit the revenue target, right? Kind of, that was, that was basically the kind of visibility I was
[00:06:45] looking for.
[00:06:46] Mikkel: Yeah. No, and it's funny, we talked, uh, just a few minutes before pressing record.
[00:06:51] And I kind of reflected, like I used to check and I still do to this day. I check the numbers every, every morning. That's the first thing when I open the laptop, just to see how things going. And when it was running the big team and marketing, back in the day, it was early to see the things we've delivered.
[00:07:09] Are they also delivering the outcomes we need, right? And I think there's a weird disconnect sometimes when you look at a dashboard, it is a snapshot and snapshot of today. And you might see that, Hey, we're behind on MQLs, but we actually on track on opportunities and we're on track to hit our MRR goals.
[00:07:23] So is it really a problem? And sometimes that was really difficult actually to, to quite frankly, to disseminate and understand, which was super frustrating.
[00:07:32] Toni: Yes. And I think what many people are doing, you know, spreadsheets and BI probably kind of rings, you know, alarm bells or rings true with many people right now. Right. Kind of, because that's usually how people kind of go about this. The other coping mechanism, and I call it a coping mechanism that I started, uh, seeing is, and I did the same thing.
[00:07:49] You're doing the same thing by the way, is, uh, because of the sheer amount of stuff happening, in your go to market. You'll create a rules of thumb for yourself.
[00:07:58] Mikkel: Yeah, yeah. Mental models.
[00:08:00] Toni: like if we in this week or per day generate 30
[00:08:06] Mikkel: Yeah, exactly. We are on track,
[00:08:07] Yeah, that's exactly right.
[00:08:08] Toni: You basically kind of, you simmer the whole thing down.
[00:08:10] You're trying to simplify it further and further down. And then kind of have one thing you hold on to that you look at per day instead of looking at everything else around it. Right. And this is, I think by the way that works, don't get me wrong. I think this is how we humans are wired. but it's, it's kind of not up to snuff of, you know, what you go to market by now requires.
[00:08:29] Mikkel: I think it also becomes more of intuition to some degree when you, when you apply that approach versus actually being data driven around it, right?
[00:08:37] So, um, the thing is, we kind of talked a bit about it by now, you know, CEOs, they really worry about GTM execution. This was part of an OpenView benchmark report. This is the biggest concern, I think it was OpenView. And, um, the teams have plenty of dashboards, but there's still no visibility, right? So. of the challenges it creates.
[00:08:58] Let's get into that.
[00:08:58] Toni: Yeah. So, and let's just say the first one is kind of a, um, it's a symptom actually. You get surprised. Yeah. Stuff is happening, um, that you didn't realize would happen. Yeah. And usually. The surprise comes when everything is being tallied up at the end of the quarter
[00:09:18] Mikkel: it's at the very end.
[00:09:19] Toni: and the, and, and, and the numbers with the dollar signs attached don't add up.
[00:09:24] That's usually the surprise. And then usually, obviously what then happens is whose fault is it? Well, sales team. It's the sales team. They, you know, they had those leads that didn't do anything with it. You know, they're lazy. You know, how many can we fire, right? Kind of, it's usually, which in good times, um, it's, oh, wow.
[00:09:46] Why did we overheat? Well, it's just a stellar sales team.
[00:09:49] Mikkel: Yeah.
[00:09:52] Toni: Why are you growing so much? Well, you know, those sales guys are just
[00:09:55] Mikkel: Yeah, they're doing self prospecting and everything
[00:09:58] Toni: Um, and then, you know, when, when, uh, the story has to flip, then they're going to say something about the sales people, but it's just not true. Actually, it probably is somewhere else, right? Yeah.
[00:10:06] Mikkel: Yeah.
[00:10:07] Toni: And the thing is, if you can pin it on the sales people, then, you know, in your own head, and also when you then, you know, create a narrative around it, I mean, you can, you can B. S. All boards, by the way, most of the boards, that's why they don't, they don't care about the narrative anymore. They just care, you know, just give me the fucking numbers Um, but you can create a narrative, around salespeople being the culprit by, and, and therefore then getting outside of this like surprise thing, right?
[00:10:34] It's like, oh, well, it's the salespeople. And, you know, we, we didn't know until the very end basically.
[00:10:37] Mikkel: You know what? I'm not surprised. I've been shadowing Greg two demos and I don't like what I see.
[00:10:42] Toni: And, and the problem is because your, your, your focus is so limited. Um, and again, that's a heuristic, that's a rule of thumb, right? Kind of you work with that. You suddenly don't look at, well, wait a minute, what happened up the funnel?
[00:10:55] What happened in this segment versus that? What happened with this rep versus that rep and? Um, and that's, you know, this is where it could have gotten the. Early indicators that something was going to happen. Yeah. And thus you wouldn't have been surprised. Yeah. Right. So I think this is where, uh, this is for me is kind of a symptom actually of, yes, I have visibility in the sense that I can see all the deals and I can see all the reps and they're sitting there and over there, um, but not visibility in the sense of like, actually I'm, I'm in control, so to speak.
[00:11:25] Yeah. Yeah. Of the full bow tie. Right.
[00:11:27] Mikkel: But I think it's also like, you will probably see in some cases throughout the quarter that some of the metrics, they aren't where they should be because of the target. And obviously most companies have done some kind of revenue model plan in the background to set up those targets.
[00:11:39] So they have a good idea that if we, if we make those numbers before closed one, we'll hit our revenue target. Right. And I think sometimes the challenge becomes. You'll, you'll see a metric, let's say MQL and it's behind and you, you don't know when that problem is going to hit you and how hard, and then you put in a lot of resources to fix it.
[00:12:00] And that might not be the thing you should even, should even focus on.
[00:12:03] Toni: I know. Exactly. So this is really then this whole topic around the solution might not be where the problem is. and, uh, again, you see a miss on MQLs. and how big of a problem is this really? That, that needs to be the first question and what, and this ties into this a little bit, there's, there's usually a, uh, the ability to do some kind of a, um, root cause missing.
[00:12:28] Because it could be that you're under hitting on MQLs. In the positive scenario, it might be that the whole gap is driven, you know, when you drill in, is driven by You didn't get enough webinar or event leads,
[00:12:41] Mikkel: Yeah.
[00:12:41] Toni: Which, you you know what, they don't convert anyway. doesn't matter
[00:12:45] It's like, and why did, do we not have enough event leads?
[00:12:48] Well, you know, someone canceled the event. So that's why,
[00:12:51] Mikkel: We had to rein in the costs.
[00:12:53] Toni: So, you know, and, um, And it could be that your revenue tracking is full bang on perfect because the real moneymakers, the demo requests are rolling in as per usual, right? So, uh, you don't even know if it has a positive or negative impact, by the way.
[00:13:07] Um, and then you try and kind of counter the measure. And the problem then is, well, that might maybe lead to us hitting the MQL target this quarter. But where does it leave us actually in terms of revenue? Right. And this is again, right? Um, this is again where sales and marketing suddenly start hitting each other because on the last day, and I've seen this happen and under my own watch also, um, on the last day of the quarter, marketing suddenly uploads a couple of leads, which they found somewhere in Draw and MQL target hit.
[00:13:41] Um, but obviously, um, those didn't have time to process. Let's just say they're good leads. They didn't have time to process and hit, you know, revenue. So marketing high fives on the, on the MQL achievement while sales falls flat. Right. So this timing aspect there, then also isn't part of the consideration.
[00:13:57] Mikkel: it's super difficult that, and when you look at most of the insights companies have, it's kind of limited how deep it goes at the end of the day. Right. So you might have a visibility into different markets, maybe you're lucky and you have segments, but do you have different sources? Do you have different sizes?
[00:14:15] Do you have different, like, and
[00:14:16] Toni: even simpler than this actually. Right? So because we, because we have like, um, Hey, you need to be able to split it and so forth, right? Actually the thing for most folks out there is less so on, uh, Oh, I also want to split it into EMEA. I also want to split into those segments.
[00:14:31] I also want to split into whatever. That is, that is there for sure. Uh, but what's actually much more simple is yes, you do have a number of, you want to hit a thousand MQLs this quarter. You have that number or you break it down by month. I don't care. But what you don't have is once you scratch the surface and drill one level in, you don't have a clear understanding.
[00:14:56] Okay. Was it 500 demo requests and 500 webinars?
[00:15:00] Mikkel: Yeah.
[00:15:00] Toni: Or was it 250 demo requests and 750 webinars? How does the 1K actually break down? And similarly, you know, if you wanted to add that, you wouldn't have that also for US versus EMEA. So why does that matter? It matters when you realize you're going to be 10 behind on MQLs and you want to know why.
[00:15:22] Because the CRO is going to ask the marketing leader. Okay, 10%. So you're failing. but tell me why, you know, because that is the first step in order to fix it. Right. and then what's going to happen is you're going to drill in and you see, oh, you have 400 demos and 300 webinars. But what was the original expectation actually?
[00:15:42] You know, you, you don't know, uh, you simply don't know. So it's, it's really hard to say then, are we behind demos? Are we behind webinars? What's actually the reason you probably only had the blended conversion rate that sits overall on the MQLs. So all of that stuff, uh, to figure out where, where you're red, where you're green, even if you go just one level down,
[00:16:03] So this is usually where the visibility stops, right?
[00:16:06] and really that drill down, then usually leads to, additional questions you will need to ask people that is not yourself, right? So the next thing is you then need to go to, I don't know, someone to pull you a like a, like an export from Salesforce or to, uh, you go to the data guys, like, Hey, can we split this, drill it into this instead of that?
[00:16:28] Because on Looker, I don't know how to flip those dimensions around. And, you know, that usually is, what then kind of impedes you to actually get to the root cause.
[00:16:37] Mikkel: then you're going to be met with, you know what, the VP sales has a really urgent request about some commission stuff. Let me do that first. And then two weeks.
[00:16:44] Is that okay? So, I mean, I
[00:16:47] Toni: just exasperate the whole thing and kind of goes a little bit, you know, let's just say you do trust. The initial data that, you know, you, you probably going to hit the, uh, not miss the MQL piece. And you trust that that's true. Well, first of all, that's not the case in all cases, right?
[00:17:05] There's lots of, you know, data mistrust going on, especially if it's in a spreadsheet,
[00:17:09] Mikkel: yeah, yeah.
[00:17:09] Toni: especially if it's some BI thing that no one looks at. but the other thing is actually also when you then did the root cause and you telly everything up again. Guess what? The number is not going to match. So, you don't need anyone else to point out that there's a data problem here.
[00:17:26] You know that yourself, and you know what usually then happens, and I know you and I have been there. It's like, eh, it's close enough.
[00:17:32] Mikkel: Yeah, I'll accept it.
[00:17:36] Toni: close enough. Let's go with
[00:17:38] Mikkel: or you presented with, just so you know, there's an error margin. And then you pray and hope they don't ask how big, and it's like,
[00:17:44] Toni: But
[00:17:44] Mikkel: But really, so,
[00:17:45] Toni: I think that it's also kind of
[00:17:48] Mikkel: but, but I think that it's also kind of to maybe sum up some of the things, you know, with the symptoms and what we've heard really, what, what folks then struggle with is they become super reactive. They don't know which thing to actually react to. And, you know, back to the, the problem you're solving, is that actually the one you should.
[00:18:03] be solving in the first place. And then they're unable to be proactive in a lot of cases in the first place because you're unable to say, you know, back to me and my MQL forecast and I can see, hey, I'm probably going to miss by this trajectory I'm on.
[00:18:17] Toni: so, but I think that, that little side comment deserves a little bit of a double click because what I've learned, you know, myself, um, I never look at a graph, um, and be like, Oh, okay, today we're here. Uh, and I was okay. Now I have the information I need and walk away. In my head, what I do all the time, I try and extend the line and see where we're actually going to end, because I don't, you know, I don't really care what my, uh, month to date number is, I care about where it's going to be, right?
[00:18:47] So it's, so if someone listening has a good word for that, it would be, you know, please tell us, but it's based, it's not monitoring, because monitoring is kind of what you do on the past and the current stuff. It's actually monitoring of a projected number versus the actual plan. And that, no, but in, in everyone's mind's eye, everyone is looking at those graphs.
[00:19:12] It's like. Where does this thing end? How big is the fucking gap going to be? Uh, and that, you know, once you see there's a larger gap than you, I don't know, feel comfy with Yeah. That gives you proactivity. Right? Kind of just like, uh oh, there's something, there's something not going the right direction. So kind of let's jump
[00:19:28] Mikkel: no, I mean, you can see that it fundamentally changes the conversation that you have, right?
[00:19:32] Right now, we're having this conversation, funny enough, in our team, because we've set a really big goal for one of our initiatives. And, um, And we could just see if we just follow project, how we're performing and we add the initiatives we planned. There's still a pretty big gap. So yes, those improvement things, they need to happen early, but what are we fundamentally going to do differently?
[00:19:50] We have to do something very different in order to get to where we want to go. And that's a very different conversation and you need to be able to have those. And if you don't have the foresight, foresight, quite frankly, that's going to be really difficult.
[00:20:01] Toni: And I think, um, I think the, you know, this is what we would probably call more of a planning motion, I think that's okay. I think the Once we're going to be two or three months into this initiative, um, and we're going to sit there and it's like, Hey, you know, we still have X to go. At that point, will we, will we know if we're kind of on track or not?
[00:20:20] Because it's, it's not always just a linear thing, right? Some of, some of these things kind of are just slated to be later. Anyway, there's some complications
[00:20:27] Mikkel: But, but I think it's also just like, in this conversation, it could be easy to say, well, the target is the target. We'll, Think about the next quarter. It's like, no, no, we actually, we actually need to get moving now, my friend. So, um, you know, some of the outcomes here we, we riffed on is you basically get less predictability at the end of the day, right?
[00:20:44] You get, you know, you won't have that repeatable, predictable success that you need in order to grow in order to raise the next round and so on. And this is all stemming from visibility, right? So we kind of ran through some scenarios and some symptoms off that.
[00:20:59] Toni: But I think for everyone listening, kind of now is clear, like, well, you know, yes, I can see my salesforce
[00:21:03] report and I have visibility. There, my eyes don't hurt. I can actually see it. I've, you know, but that is different visibility from what you actually need to know to kind of run the go to market engine, right?
[00:21:13] Kind of, they're, they're kind of different layers to this thing. And, um, uh, and that's, I think what we kind of tried to outline almost with this year, right. Let's get into a little bit of a solution mode, right. And we could, um, and I think the avid listeners already picked up like, Oh, you know, Toni and Mikkel, they're talking about Growblocks, kind of get
[00:21:29] Mikkel: well when aren't we?
[00:21:30] Toni: But, but what we want to do today is actually to walk through, you know, what is a DIY, do it yourself solution potentially here, you know, what things could you cobble together? And this is really also something that. Um, we have done that in the past, right? Kind of, it's the only, and when you, when we really look out there, um, this is what 99.
[00:21:49] 9 percent of people are doing right now, because obviously lack of alternative, which we have solved with this company,
[00:21:55] but instead of jumping into all of that stuff, right? I think the first step, the first step is you need to, um, find a way.
[00:22:07] Actually, you know what? Actually, the first step is you need to agree with a methodology of what Winning by Design calls the bowtie.
[00:22:13] That's the first step, right? So really several different volume steps that are tied together by processing steps, uh, conversion rates, time delays, and then, you know, ACVs and so forth. Right. That's kind of the first step. Okay. So like, okay, you know what? and, and the time that you will buy into this. is when you flick over and become a revenue factory.
[00:22:36] Early days, trust me, that's just not the case. You will be sitting there. It's like, no, it's actually kind of this sales guy being
[00:22:41] Mikkel: Yeah,
[00:22:43] Toni: that's true. That's the, that's the case in the beginning. But eventually, you know, once you cross the 10 million mark, that's when you will realize, you know, you're a couple of feet detached from the day to day operation.
[00:22:52] You will look and it's like, wait a minute, there's some, there's some, uh, there's some structure to this chaos
[00:22:57] Mikkel: I guess a good sign is we hired five SDRs and they booked the same amount of meetings as everybody else. And it turned into revenue. It's like, there's that kind of repeatability baked into the business.
[00:23:06] Toni: So this is the number one, right? Number two, you then, you know, once you agree with this, once you kind of look at the business, they're like, wait a minute, you know, these guys are right. There's some, there's some structure here. Then you want to create some kind of a representation. of it, that is not sitting only in your head.
[00:23:25] Mikkel: Yeah.
[00:23:25] Toni: Yeah. And the place where you're going to do it is going to be a spreadsheet, like in all cases. I have not seen anyone do it differently. Let me say it like this. Fine. Um, so what are you going to be doing in a spreadsheet is, um, you're going to be putting in the different volume steps. You're going to be calculating the conversion rates.
[00:23:45] You're going to be wrestling over, oh, should it be funnel conversion rates? Should it be cohort based? You know, how should this whole thing, you know, freaking work out? you will settle on something and then you take that. you will need to figure out, how your sales cycle are distributed. So you basically, instead of saying, okay, we have 45 days on average, uh, sales cycles.
[00:24:06] Which might be true, but it doesn't mean that 100 opportunities will close, you know, after conversion rate 45 days later. It's usually a distribution. You have some things closing faster, then you have the middle, the heavy middle gonna be the 45 days, and then stuff closing later, right? So all of that stuff you need to kind of build up.
[00:24:23] What you then can do with it is you can take it and pull it forward. That's, that's the kind of interesting piece, right? So not only, you know, revenue modeling up until today, but then you can do baseline modeling going forward and kind of do some tweaks on that. Right. Great. Yeah. Now you have that in place.
[00:24:41] you will probably, probably will be a revenue operations person kind of doing it. and what they will be doing is they will be trying and tweaking this model to match. What they need to hit in terms of finance.
[00:24:54] Mikkel: Yeah.
[00:24:54] Toni: right? Finance will give them, in EMEA for that team, for that product, we need to hit, 579, 000 euros and I don't
[00:25:02] know, 40, 45
[00:25:04] cents or something like that.
[00:25:05] And it's like, okay, okay. Yeah. Yeah. Let's, let's, you know, let's build this out. Um, so that's how it usually kind of goes. And that will give you an understanding How your volume steps need to improve and it will give you an understanding how in some case your processing steps need to improve, right?
[00:25:19] Now you have something you can kind of track against.
[00:25:21] Mikkel: but do you split it? Uh, like how deep should, should you go? Would you split it by the motions, the segments, the market? Like when you've built this in the past, how's how, because you can get pretty sophisticated
[00:25:31] Toni: and this is, this is one of the limitations. You can really usually only split it in two dimensions. That's usually kind of where it stops. Otherwise you will be hit with too many zeros and, you know, missing data basically, and then messes your whole thing up. there's some really intelligent math in order to take care of that, but I couldn't explain it.
[00:25:51] Mikkel: Okay, good.
[00:25:53] Toni: I'll, I'll bring the head of engineering
[00:25:55] Mikkel: yeah,
[00:25:55] Toni: another time. and, um, and then, you know, the other limitation is that, um, when you're operating in a business that has more than two dimensions, which basically everyone kind of has, In order to kind of get all the dimensions in you, sometimes they need to run two models at the same time guess what? produce different numbers.
[00:26:12] Mikkel: Yeah.
[00:26:12] Toni: So that, you know, that, that usually is kind of pretty frustrating. but the other thing is then, you know, you will need to have one person obviously managing that
[00:26:19] Mikkel: managing yeah
[00:26:20] Toni: But you will have two dimensions. and I think that can be good enough, right? What you then want to do is you actually want to take all of those dimensions, all of those targets, basically, and import them into your BI system.
[00:26:35] Um, that means I want to hit X amount of MQLs. I want to hit X amount of, you know, conversion rate. And that's then where you're kind of tracking that stuff. So I've seen that work in weird ways in those, um, in, in those BI setups. And maybe you have like a smart person who can take care of that for you.
[00:26:53] But that's, you know, a way to kind of track against that. Right. And then every day you log in and see how these things are going, to get a little bit of an idea here. Right. and that's kind of, now we're on the visualization side, basically.
[00:27:04] Mikkel: But maybe before we go deeper into that, I also remember at one point. Way back we talked about the process you went through of building the revenue model with, uh, with the team.
[00:27:14] One of the things you did was also you tested it against a previous quarter.
[00:27:18] Toni: In order to, uh, figure out the validity of the model itself. Which now we've proven this is, this is the way to do it. Also with like our customer data, is, uh, that, that's basically what we had to do, right? We had to understand how is those conversion rates calculated. It's funnel conversion rate, by the way, not code conversion rate.
[00:27:35] And you know, how does that whole thing work out? Um, which kind of got us to the point that that's actually the, the standardized way of how to do it. Right. Um, and, um, um, but still right now you have that thing done. Uh, you probably want to visualize it. So you're going to put this somewhere in a spreadsheet, uh, sorry, in a BI dashboard.
[00:27:53] And I think that's fine. I think you can build these things together and that's also all kind of fine. I think where it then becomes really iffy is when time passes. And you see, you're not hitting the, um, targets that you've kind of put in manually. You seeing that you had or below that. And then the big question is, well, where, where's that going to end?
[00:28:20] Right. And, and the thing then then comes out of it, which makes it then super tricky. It's like, well, our opportunities are behind, but our revenue is still trending in the right direction. Should we be worried? And the answer is yes, you should. Yes, yes, you should be very worried. Um, but the thing is, um, the way this is set up, there's no way of telling that, um, you know, between those two graphs and the BI dashboard or something, there's no way of telling those two graphs that because opportunities are low, you're likely not going to hit the revenue number in three or six months down the line, right?
[00:28:52] Kind of, I think the planning piece is, is not, you know, it's very cumbersome. Don't get me wrong and you have all of those limitations. I think you can overcome it once a year, but reality is, um, you want to have the, the forecasting, the go to market forecasting coming out of it, and you want to, and you're going to realize you need to change your plan all the time anyway, right?
[00:29:12] So a couple of those, it can be done. Don't get me wrong. It can all be done.
[00:29:17] Mikkel: Because I was gonna say, like, one of the rituals we ran in this process was then also the monthly business reviews and quarterly. Because then you could do some of that ad hoc research to actually figure out and match with the revenue model saying, Hey, yeah, actually we, this is going to be a problem based on this stage, how long until it hits us.
[00:29:37] And then you can kind of course correct from there. That was at least my impression that you had that insight, um, by kind of having the time to, to run through
[00:29:44] Toni: So the funny thing is, right, whoever we talk to, it's like, yeah, we do MBRs, yeah, we do QBRs, but really, actually, no one actually does, no, honestly, no one does. And the reason is it just takes too much time. And once it's done, it's kind of outdated. Um, and all of us are so programmed to only look into the future.
[00:30:01] So then having to go through like a two hour session. 15, uh, 15 days or three weeks into the new quarter talking about, you know, why you missed your target, Mr. VP of sales. It's sometimes like, I don't give a, you know, don't care. Um, so that's why usually people don't end up doing it. And then they kind of don't do that intelligent.
[00:30:21] piece on top that you could do, right? But at the same time, even if you understand, why you have been falling flat, uh, on those different areas, it's, it's really difficult to calculate all of that stuff out, right? Because you might have a conversion rate that is sliding. You might have some opportunities not being enough.
[00:30:41] You might have some people not being hired and you missed a million dollars in your newbiz target. What was now the real reason for you And especially you might have been above on ACV somewhere and, you know, better than expected conversion rates somewhere else. So how does this whole thing add up to.
[00:31:00] What was actually kind of causing this whole problem to begin with. And you can spend a million hours on your MBR trying to prepare it. You're not going to get there, right? The, because the answer is you will need to run, multiple spreadsheets at the same time and comparing the results. And no one is doing that.
[00:31:14] I mean, it's like,
[00:31:15] Mikkel: Well,
[00:31:16] Toni: you know, theoretically and stuff, but like no one does, you know, it's even getting close to anything like this. Right. but that's how you can do it. I mean, that's literally how you can do it. and, um, has, you know, all of those limitations. I think we touched up on some already. but that is to a degree how, we try to fix it back in Falcon.
[00:31:35] And one other thing, which. You know, it's probably kind of one of the reasons why we did that or could do that. I don't know, I don't know why, but for some reason our CEO like over invested on revenue operations
[00:31:50] Mikkel: I
[00:31:50] Toni: we had, I mean,
[00:31:52] I, I think we said we were like 15 million or 10 million. And I think we had eight people in revenue operations,
[00:32:00] Mikkel: Yeah. Yeah.
[00:32:03] Toni: And I can tell you, those people weren't super cheap either. Right. And, um, when I look at, you know, out into, you know, how other people are running it, do you maybe have two people in rev ops by 10 million, right? Usually that's, that's kind of the ratio. and we were like crazy over invested. which, you know, is good and bad for many reasons, but.
[00:32:19] We were literally sitting there like, what, what cool shit are we going to do next year? Right. And, and we had the, the luxury of doing all of that stuff, which then helped us to figure a lot of things out, get them right and kind of get going.
[00:32:31] Mikkel: Yeah, so that's like the DIY solution. Lots of limitations we've gone through here as well. There's the one person with the keys to the sheet and really understanding how it works because I remember seeing, by the way, the sheet and you trying to explain to me something in there.
[00:32:46] I was just like, are we done now? I don't get anything. And you know, so there's some problems there. And then we talked about, again, the ability to actually. predict what's going to happen when a number is underperforming, overperforming. It just takes a lot of time to do. Running that root cause analysis and getting to the the actual cause based on some symptoms you're seeing, really difficult to
[00:33:10] Toni: And so this is kind of the message here today though.
[00:33:13] It's um It can all be done, right? It can all be done. Uh, you just need to, uh, live with the limitations and, or with the additional money you would need to spend in order to kind of get this done.
[00:33:25] Mikkel: Yeah. And, and I think, especially in the environment we're living in today with efficiency being the focus and building a durable business, this is absolutely critical to achieve.
[00:33:37] And I think you will see a lot of companies make it or break it on the back of figuring this stuff out, how their business actually works. and, uh, I also think time is running out for a lot of folks. We talked about BI. It takes you, I mean, probably a year to get into shape. It's going to.
[00:33:53] Toni: think, um, I think that the bigger, broader picture here actually is, you as an organization, if you're struggling for whatever reason, and you're still blaming sales.
[00:34:03] then something is broken in how you look at the organization. I think that's the much bigger thing. Are you going to achieve that by an army of, you know, spreadsheet wielders or by some data scientists and BI or whatever? I'm not sure how you're going to kind of get that necessary. It might be different for all the different organizations out there, but you, you will have to detach yourself from that being the problem area.
[00:34:26] And then, you know, once you broaden your view and I can promise you that. So, I mean, we've seen this now a couple of times, We've consulted people and doing it themselves. You know, we gave them the spreadsheets and so forth. And, and, and guess, guess who's now a customer, you know, it's like, it's, we've seen this all the time because once you broaden out, once you realize, Hey, it's this whole thing here.
[00:34:46] And once you see all the things that can go wrong and that need fixing, then, then I think number one, what happens is you feel less, you know, you feel less like your hands are tied.
[00:34:56] Mikkel: Yeah.
[00:34:57] Toni: It's like, ah, you know, CAC Payback is going up. We can't do anything.
[00:35:01] Mikkel: Yeah.
[00:35:02] Toni: Right. You feel more like you're in control. You have, we can do things now because we're seeing them.
[00:35:07] and number two, I think, um, and this is for all the paranoid CROs out there, which I know are plenty of. Um, you can sleep a little bit better at night. My kind of, those are, those are probably the two
[00:35:17] Mikkel: of the kids, they're, you
[00:35:18] Toni: Unless, unless of the kids. but yeah, that's it. I think we kind of unpacked what visibility means in, in the go to market today, uh, drilled a little bit into kind of the different aspects and, What we believe, and some of that is clearly our Growblocks perspective, also, what we believe true visibility actually means for CROs and revenue operations leaders and how kind of they're seeing it.
[00:35:40] And then we kind of gave a, fairly straightforward, difficult,
[00:35:43] Mikkel: you
[00:35:43] Toni: you know, not easy, uh, doable and stuff way to, um, try and, you know, uh, you know, work yourself through that and, and try and claw some of that visibility back.
[00:35:53] Mikkel: And by the way, if you're, you know, now you got a hint that this is also what we do.
[00:35:59] If you're curious. You can go and check it out on growblocks. com. Uh, reach out to Toni or me on LinkedIn. Probably Toni is better. otherwise I'll just give the marketing spiel. and, uh, we'd be happy to tell you a bit more.
[00:36:10] Toni: That's it. Thanks
[00:36:11] Mikkel: Strong CTA. Thanks. Thanks everyone.
[00:36:15] Toni: Thanks everyone. Have a good one.
[00:36:16] Bye bye.