Nobody’s prepared to grow a billion-dollar business from square one. So we’re learning from revenue leaders who have already done it.
Join host Alex Kracov, former VP of Marketing at Lattice and now Founder and CEO of Dock, as he has candid conversations with successful revenue leaders about their business growth stories.
We’ll talk to sales, marketing, and customer success leaders about their growing pains. We’ll interview founders who have built companies from the ground-up. And we’ll talk to agencies and consulting firms who do the behind-the-scenes work for the fastest-growing companies in the world.
If you want the true, challenging stories of what it takes to grow revenue—not generic, high-level advice—then this show is for you.
(preview)
Jen Igartua: I will say the biggest growth that I had and the biggest way that I was able to solidify the vision of the company is calling a spade a spade. We are a services company. That's what we're selling. So we're not trying to pretend that we're a SaaS company. There's a lot of companies doing like RevOps as a Service. Sure. But isn't that just a retainer, like law firms have been doing forever? I'm calling it what it is. But I'm still selling you hours and time. But ultimately, it's still a service. I'm not trying to create a product. And my experience is people.
(intro)
Alex Kracov: I'm really excited to talk to Jen Igartua today. She's the CEO of Go Nimbly, a RevOps consultancy, and one of the smartest RevOps people I know. Welcome to Grow & Tell, the show where revenue leaders tell their growth stories behind today's successful companies. I'm your host Alex Kracov.
I met Jen back in my Lattice days. We were one of her first customers as we were building out our RevOps stack. This episode is a two-parter. First, we'll talk about what went into building her RevOps consultancy, including how they develop their service offerings, how they stay profitable, and how they recruit talent. Then we'll dive deep into her RevOps, where Jen shares tips on building a RevOps roadmaps, structuring of RevOps team, and picking your tool stack. She also has a really cool board game company, so we'd get into that near the end. And if we can ask a quick question before we get into the show, if you enjoy the conversation, please do us a favor and subscribe on YouTube, or leave us a rating wherever you listen to podcast. We really appreciate it. I hope you enjoy.
(interview)
Alex Kracov: Let's start today's conversation with the story of Go Nimbly. How did you end up building a RevOps consulting firm?
Jen Igartua: Oh, my gosh. Alex, you are actually one of our first customers. So you saw me close to 10 years ago getting this off the ground. I have a pretty similar story to I think a lot of people who end up starting a services company. You do the work. You do the job for a long time. You realize that, hey, maybe I'm an expert here. Maybe my skill sets are needed. I think that a lot of the times when you first start, especially a services company, you can start with a laptop. You could just like get your first couple of clients. So, at first, it was really glorified contracting. I got my first gig. I was able to start doing the work. It was me hands on keyboard doing it. I would say for about two years, we were, you know, a few of us just selling our time and executing on the work.
Alex Kracov: Then how did you sort of think about, like, what were those initial products or services? Were you just like, "Hey, I'm Jen. I'm smart. I can help with marketing your RevOps"? Or did you have true offerings? How did that kind of evolve?
Jen Igartua: It's so funny because I did, but they were useless. I was working at a company called Bluewolf. They were the biggest Salesforce partners. I was one of their first marketing automation hires. So I was there to start the team. I got really deep into Eloqua, Marketo, HubSpot. I knew those systems really well. I also got pretty obsessed with sales and marketing alignment. What is it about those two teams? They should be so aligned. It should be so easy, yet, there's so much friction. And so I knew a lot about those kinds of problems. I had a friend of mine, who I think you know, Ian Mici, was working at Twilio, like with them consulting on their sales ops side. He knew they had marketing automation issues. So I got my first client. It's Twilio, which is like obviously huge.
Alex Kracov: Pretty good.
Jen Igartua: Yeah. And so yeah, I started building a business plan and tried to put up a website and started to create these plans and tiers, et cetera. Then I realize that actually, no, they just needed flexibility. They just needed my time. Here's my hourly. And whenever anybody comes to me saying "I want to start a services company or a fractional," leave that. I don't think you should spend time on that. Go see what your customers need. It was a couple of years before we firmed up our offerings, like really understood how our customers wanted to consume us.
Alex Kracov: Got you. So in those super early days, it was just sort of asking the customer a lot of questions, what are your problems, understanding that and then saying, "Hey, here's an hourly rate where we can help you." Then did you help in terms of strategy or execution? Were you actually getting a login to someone's Eloqua, Marketo, Salesforce and messing around in there, or were you just talking at a high level? How did you sort of think about that?
Jen Igartua: It's both. I was hired for a very specific problem. What Twilio had, which is crazy how successful they were, but they had like a lead leakage problem. They had leads coming into Eloqua, and a few of them were not getting followed up quickly. It was because of integration issues, et cetera. So I had a very real problem to go in and solve. That was really obvious. That's always very helpful, right? "Hey, I can fix that. I know how. Here's my plan." Then once I got my foot in the door and got trust, I started elevating the conversation with things like, "Hey, I don't think the way that you're handing off leads to sales is working." You're not getting back to them. They wanted to do it in minutes. It's like, that's not happening. Is this an enablement problem? Is this a systems problem? And so I was able to elevate the conversation to the point that, a couple years in, I was running workshops with them. I was really thinking about, what is your go-to-market strategy here? What is your systems strategy? And it blew up from there.
Alex Kracov: Yeah, it's so interesting. I feel like some of these super high-flying SaaS brands are just a mess internally.
Jen Igartua: Sure.
Alex Kracov: Because they have such a strong product-market fit that they didn't need to get good at operations. I remember talking to someone, I think, at Stripe. I think what they told me - hopefully, I don't get this wrong - they didn't even have marketing automation. Their CRM was a disaster. But they were like 100 million in revenue. And it didn't matter because it was so strong, the product market fit. But yeah, it's interesting how you can punt some of that foundational stuff.
Jen Igartua: Yeah, there's a gentleman, Jim Gearheart, that was in IT at Zendesk. He's super smart over at Gong now. I remember him being like, "Yeah, we grew this fast in spite of our operations." That's not because they didn't invest in it. They had an amazing team, and they had an amazing tech stack. But the problem is that when you grow really quickly, every time you double your company size, everything changes. If I have 10 reps versus 20, versus 40, all of my systems and all of my processes change. You just don't have the time to fix those things. So you do some band aids, or you live with it. And so I do find sometimes the companies that have grown the fastest don't typically have the most amazing systems and architecture because they didn't have the time, and they had to just build what they could.
Alex Kracov: And as you've built up the firm, have you started to introduce more defined products and services? And then, yeah, maybe we'll start there.
Jen Igartua: Yeah, for sure. It took a while. I will say it has - COVID hit, and Great Resignation, and tech bubble and all that, it has changed how people want to consume. And so what I've found is, it can be really frustrating where you create product, like a product I service. Then it changes because your customers change. So I do change them quite often. And I'll know that in sales cycles. Obviously, people will buy it or not. So pre-COVID, tons of workshops, right? Hey, let us go and do your Lead to Meeting Workshop. Come through, and we'll tell you what your gaps are. People are less likely to want to invest in it now. You know, it's more pinpointed. Can you increase the productivity of my reps? I have XYZ problem. It's a little bit less - when you've got less money, there's a little less find me problems and a little more, hey, come fix exactly this. So we've had to change again.
And again, I think here's - okay. Let me take a step back and say one thing. You might have a lot of your listeners be product people, or services people, or trying to do both. I will say the biggest growth that I had and the biggest way that I was able to solidify the vision of the company is calling a spade a spade. We are a services company. That's what we're selling. So we're not trying to pretend that we're a SaaS company. There's a lot of companies doing RevOps as a Service. Sure. But isn't that just a retainer, like law firms have been doing forever? I'm calling it what it is. We actually call it fractional RevOps team. Because it's like you can get lots of skill sets, but I'm still selling you hours and time. Sometimes deliverables. So sometimes we'll do X. But ultimately, it's still a service. I think once I was willing to look at that, I'm not trying to create a product. And my experience is people.
Alex Kracov: It's so funny how the industry goes through these changes of people trying, yeah, product type services, whatever. I even think of this as like product-led growth. Isn't that just free trials? It's like LinkedIn, and Twitter. And all these things are like, here's a new thing. And it's like, no, it's the same thing. This is what lawyers have been doing forever. It's called a retainer.
Jen Igartua: Totally.
Alex Kracov: It's so much such a funny dynamic of, I guess, humans in general trying to just reinvent the old thing that already existed.
Jen Igartua: Yeah, that's so funny you say that because I've been repeating that. PLG, I love it. Okay? Product-led growth is awesome. It's fun, and the projects are really fun. But it's not new. I think that also that should help some people. Because I think that there was a surge of companies that were trying to solve the PLG problem, insert whatever problem you think that is, that went out of business. So like your Calixas and Correlated, and I think there's been a couple other ones. And why is that? They're like, well, our TAM isn't big enough. I look at that and I'm like, no, because you're trying to - there are some companies that don't call themselves PLG companies who are going to self-select out of that, that are Twilio had go ahead and log into your API and use. Like, you could just put in your credit card and start using it. Zendesk has had a free trial for over 10 years, and it was like a free to paid flow. And so we've been doing this for a long time. And now we're pretending that it's something new. So I'm hoping that it just kind of comes down, and we look at it as what it is, which is just another motion.
Alex Kracov: Yep, totally makes sense. And some of it is just like branding, I think, of a new way to do something.
Jen Igartua: Totally.
Alex Kracov: I think those PLG platforms are somewhat interesting. But it's like, can't you just use your CRM? I mean, I even think of that as the CS platforms, Gainsights, whatever. I'm sure they are very helpful. But it's like, you can do this in your CRM too if you just instrument it. So I definitely will get into that more a little bit later. But I still want to talk about Go Nimbly. How have you thought about defining your own ICP? I mean, is it easy? Is it just SaaS companies who use Salesforce and Go systems, or is it use case base? How do you think about who's your target customer?
Jen Igartua: Yeah, it's pretty simple. So it's funny we don't look at just tools, because we have plenty of customers in HubSpot. We used to say mid-market and up SaaS companies with Salesforce was like kind of our core. Then we excluded HubSpot. Actually, we used HubSpot. We love it. But because it just wasn't scaling, and it wasn't getting to the customers that we had. But now it's inching up, and it's starting to be real. I'm considering doing a deeper partnership with them, because customers are staying on. So I think Salesforce is definitely looking in the rearview mirror and being a little bit worried. So yeah, I look at that. Then depending on the size of the company, I'm either directly targeting a director of RevOps, a VP of RevOps. CRO, And for smaller, not quite mid-market but inching up, sometimes it's C-level that comes in and wants to have these conversations.
Alex Kracov: How do you think about the growth of the firm? Because I think one of the hard parts about service businesses is resource planning, and talent, and hours, and management. I mean, I started my career working at an agency. I can't imagine. It's so hard. You're either over resourced, under resourced. I feel like there's a sweet spot of a firm too where you're big enough and not too big. How do you think about that puzzle?
Jen Igartua: You're cool if I nerd out on services right now?
Alex Kracov: Yeah, please.
Jen Igartua: It's awesome because it's the first podcast that lets me. Okay. So I'll tell you this. When I started, I had in my mind I want a thousand-person company. I want to build an IBM or a McKinsey. I'm just going to grow and grow. I was really thinking number of employees. That was really huge. We were not immune to the growth at all costs. We were running this business sometimes not making money. That's like the calling yourself what it is and looking at yourself in the mirror.
Services is a margin-based business. We got to make money every month, and we should be looking our EBITA. Those numbers are really important. So I had a moment where I really looked at what I want. And what I want is a healthy business that can pay its people well. More than anything else, I always say this: "that treats its employees like adults." That's something that really wakes me up every morning. I love doing innovative work for our clients. And it's amazing, the SaaS companies we get to work with. But also, I want the people that work at my company to be thinking about, "Hey, I'm really well-respected here."
And as I look at how do I grow this company, you're talking about bench. Bench is the thing that puts services companies out of business. If I over hire five people and then my contract ends, now I've got five people on the bench, and they're each making 100k. I can't afford that, right? It ends up being - what did I say? Did I say $5 to $50,000 of just money gone. It's very hard to re-staff people internally. It's just very difficult to do that. But you also can't sell and expand business if you don't have a bench. You will find not only is it hard as a salesperson. You will also find that your consultants will not pitch new projects to your clients because they're scared of out staffing it, right? They're thinking like I'm going to have to do it, or like we're going to mess this up. And so you need to find this happy medium. And depending on your size, it sort of scales. But you need a percentage of bench. Our investment in Latin America has really helped that, because we don't have the huge inflated salaries that we have in the US.
Alex Kracov: Got you. Really interesting. When you're talking about the bench, I'm thinking back. I used to live with a Deloitte consultant who sat on the bench for a while and all that stuff.
Jen Igartua: Yeah, oh, that rules.
Alex Kracov: And it's the best with all the bench, as long as you to get to keep your job. Yeah.
Jen Igartua: Totally. Imagine just sitting there for three months being like, "I don't have a project yet," and they're fine with it. It's crazy.
Alex Kracov: Yeah, consultive life is funny. He lived in San Francisco but worked in New York. Every Sunday night, he would fly in his pajamas. Shout out, Max. Yeah, very funny. I remember.
Jen Igartua: Insane.
Alex Kracov: Yeah, insane. Okay. So you mentioned the Latin American talent there. That's interesting. How do you think about the talent side of things? Is it all internal FTE employees? Do you use contractors? And how do you sort of make sure it's high-quality talent too? Because you're ultimately selling people's brains to somebody.
Jen Igartua: For sure. I have an incredible recruiting team. Truly out of this world. They're just incredible sorcerers. There is just something very magical that people have about having an interview and really seeing that somebody is up for the task and capable. Kyle Lacey is our Head of People Ops. He has a huge reason as to why we bring really incredible talent. Obviously, we send take home tests and lots of interviews. They know how to do it, but he also just has a pulse on it. So we have really incredible recruiting talent. So that's been amazing. Then when we think about - oh, you're asking about full time. Most people, like 90% of my team is full time. We have a little bit of contractor, but it tends to be specialists. So say, a NetSuite specialist. I don't need that person full time, but we've got enough contractors that would bring them in. So we have a pretty good network of specialists.
Then there's some - oh, my gosh, I think it was Jason Lumpkin. And if it wasn't him, then I'm going to give him the credit. I was at Pavilion CEO Summit, and I think it was him or somebody he spoke about senior talent in the US. This is going to sound a little crotchety CEO sitting in their throne, but stay with me. There is something that happened to us culturally that didn't happen to other countries, where we did have this moment of just a ton of money, really insane salaries and, quite frankly, not super high expectations. We were coasting. Nobody could tell because money was flowing, and it didn't matter. Stocks were up, and life was good.
As that's changed and it's brought back to, okay, everybody's got harder jobs, it's like do more with less, I don't think people should spend nights and weekends doing that. Go have fun. Go have other side hustles. I have them. But I think that there is something that we do need to right size. Work is work, and accountability is real. Margin is real. Productivity is real. And so I do think that there is a little bit of disillusionment going on. I think it's pretty senior. It's at the director level that they don't want to do the work. They want to direct, but teams are smaller. What do you do? I am finding that the amount of, for lack of better word, vibes that are coming from our lead. The hires are amazing. Because they didn't go through that. This just feels normal. And nobody has to be like, oh, shoot. Work is harder.
Alex Kracov: 100% agree. Amen. We've hired internationally at Dock. And I'd say our international employees work so hard, are so committed, so fortunate to be working with us. They have been awesome. And yeah, I think what you're talking about too is that just there's weird - you grow up in your career wanting to be a manager and leading a team and all that stuff. I got to do that at Lattice, which was cool.
Jen Igartua: Totally.
Alex Kracov: But the fun part is actually the work. The fun part is rolling up your sleeves and doing things. Honestly, people management is like the least fun things talking about salaries and whatever. That's the least fun thing. So yeah, it's a funny - hopefully, that's a big shift that happens in the future as people start to realize that.
Jen Igartua: Yeah.
Alex Kracov: Alright. I'd love to switch gears completely and just start nerding out about revenue operations, your wealth of knowledge here. So let's start with the basics. What's the definition of RevOps? How did that term come to be, and how do you think about that definition?
Jen Igartua: Okay. I'm going to answer you in five different ways. I think, first, we were - again, people were doing RevOps before there was a term for it, right? Some of the best companies were doing that. When we first started Go Nimbly, we taglined it "unifying the business stack." Because we didn't have the words for RevOps. What we were really focused on was breaking down whatever silos you could insert. There's a lot of emphasis right now on people's silos when you read about revenue operations, but it's not just that. It's integrations that aren't all the way there. It's products that are not - it's data structures and integrations that aren't working. It's definitely people, but it's also turns. It's like one team call something leads, and the other team calls it different. It's all this kind of what I call internal bullshit that gets in the way of your customer's experience and how they can interact with you.
So if we flip it and do a metaphor, let's say we're making a movie, and we've got directors. We've got actors, right? Our actors are our go-to-market team. They're the ones that are creating the experience for the audience, and they're the ones that are interacting with the audience. Well, everybody in the background, that's RevOps. We've got directors. We've got people writing scripts. We've got folks making sure that they're well set up. We've got the scenes. I don't know enough about movies, but I think you get the gist. We're setting it up, right? We're just making sure that the go-to-market team or the actors can show up and create that really great experience. So that shows up in a lot of ways. But I think the key thing here is, we don't want one team worrying about sales and one team worrying about marketing and one team worried about CS. Because ultimately, that's not how the customer interacts with you. If you don't have anybody worried about all of it, then you have all the handoff problems that you've probably seen between marketing and SDRs, and SDRs and AEs, and AEs and CSMs, where the customer goes, why am I repeating myself? So that's the stuff that we're really obsessing about fixing.
Alex Kracov: I really love that, that movie analogy. That's a good one. No, it was good. It's like a good way to think about the distinction there. What are those key functions of a RevOps team? If we keep going with the movie analogy of people writing script and directing and whatever, what does that look like for a RevOps team? What are those kind of key functions? I don't know if you think of it as a function or a goal, but how do you break that down for us?
Jen Igartua: Okay. This is where I'll say there is theory, and there is you know how it actually plays out. And so let's talk a little theory and say there are capabilities that we expect from a RevOps team. That is sort of operations and strategy. There's enablement. There's technical, the actual tools work. And so you can think about those. Sometimes when you're big enough, you have different departments even within RevOps that are doing that, right? You have your tools or your systems team. You have your enabled team. Sometimes you have your strategy and operations team that are separate. You can think about it like that.
I've also seen companies that - this might seem against RevOps, but I don't really care if you also split it instead of function by funnel. It's okay if you still have folks that are focused on marketing, sales and CS as long as they're rolling up to a leader and rolling up to a team that cares about making it all holistic, and that they're meeting often and doing the work together. And so it doesn't necessarily have to be that. There's pros and cons to both structures. If you can think about the ones that are marketing, sales, CS, they tend to have more depth. They tend to be closer to their go-to-market teams. That relationship stays closer, but they tend to have less specialty in things like BI and analytics that the other team, I forgot, they tend to not go in depth as much there.
So there's, how does this team work and what am I looking for? I actually borrow a lot from other teams. So we think about - I don't know. You probably have a lot of people in here that are product teams. It's like, alright, great. Does this RevOps team have a roadmap? Often, the answer is no. And product teams? No, it's really hard to keep up a roadmap. It just is. It becomes stale really quickly. But I think that that is so key to knowing how to structure your team. If your roadmap is a lot of tactical tools, then great. A lot of analysts. If RevOps isn't owning analytics, which I think they should, but if they're not, they're not owning analytics and if they're maybe not even owning systems, then great. I don't need to hire those functions. If you don't have any big hairy project coming up in the next year, I don't have to hire architects. And so I think sometimes we try to make this one size fits all when I think about how do you set up a RevOps team. But if you don't know what you're building for, and I don't have an outcome or a roadmap, then I can't tell you who to hire and how to structure that. So I leave it a little bit more ambiguous than - I don't know. If you go read my content, we're pretty strong with it. But having lived it and having been in different companies, it looks different at all of our customers. We don't go in and say, hey, this is exactly how I have to do it. We mitigate any choice that they've made. Every system has its downfall.
Alex Kracov: And when you think about that roadmap, because I think that was really interesting point, how should a RevOps team go about doing that? Who's the RevOps team's customer? Is it the actual the customer customer, or is it sales, marketing? How should they go about that problem?
Jen Igartua: Wow, two ramps about to start. Okay. We'll do roadmap, and then we'll do customer. When I think about how to build a roadmap for RevOps, I'll tell you how it typically goes and why that's bad. Typically, somebody's got a document somewhere with a bunch of asks. It's like, okay, it's time to go put it in an artifact. They go, and they document all that. Then plenty of times, they bring their stakeholders and themselves, and they have a really fun meeting where they brainstorm more projects. Then they put a bunch more, as if we didn't have enough work. Let's all brainstorm more work that we could try to figure out. Then you typically put it into, alright, let's do level of effort and impact, try to plot it, and try to go from there. If you've ever done that exercise, all the consultants are like, yeah, we've played that game. Great. What do you get? You get like two low-hanging fruits of high impact, low effort. Cool. We'll do those. Then a bunch of high effort, low impact, we'll get rid of those. Then you're pretty much left with a few in low impact, high - or what is it? What is left?
Alex Kracov: High impact, high effort.
Jen Igartua: High impact, high effort. That's where they all are. It's like every ask that we have, it's like there. Then there are some that start teetering down. So that doesn't really help us. We end up with like, great. We can do two out of these 25 that we brainstormed. This is like Design Thinking principles. Product teams are very good at this, and we should borrow this more. But it's like, what are we solving for? What's the actual gap that we're in? How can we be gap first thinkers and say, hey, I looked at our analytics, or I interviewed our customers, or I did rep rides?
I found out that our biggest issue is that we're not getting back to leads within a day and sometimes three days. Our competitors are getting there first. So great. I don't have a bunch of projects. I have one initiative, which is to have all leads followed up within two hours. I can go build a bunch of - it could be tools. It could be training. It could be whatever.
What I find is, most people don't have that thing that they're anchoring on. Their roadmap looks like: implement Gong, create XYZ dashboard, implement CPQ. It just looks like those projects; it doesn't have the story back. That's what makes RevOps teams feel tactical. That's what makes them feel support functions. Because they're not telling you a story. They're not really telling you what their impact is.
Alex Kracov: And you base that all around the funnel? Is RevOps the master of the funnel, and then you kind of just look at the funnel? You're diagnosing these issues, and then you build the roadmap around that. Is that the right way to think about it?
Jen Igartua: That's one of the biggest categories. Then the other one is supporting big strategic moves. So some of them might be, alright, we're now implementing a PLG function. That's going to have a whole lot of work. That wasn't a part of our old funnel. It's like new features. And there's sometimes annoying work, like I have to go and deprecate a bunch of things that are getting in the way, a bunch of tech debt. There's architectural work like that that has to happen that is not fun for anyone. There's probably a few other categories of just ongoing enhancements for rep productivity, for example.
Alex Kracov: Then obviously, with the funnel section - we'll get back to the customer question - should RevOps own a funnel meeting? Is that a thing that should be happening, where there's this funnel meeting that's happening in the company? You're diagnosing these issues that goes into the roadmap. We tried to do something like that at Lattice. That's why I'm curious if that was kind of where you see a lot or no.
Jen Igartua: They should at least own a section of that meeting. So I do think that, ultimately, if RevOps is not rolling up to a leader that is essentially telling them exactly what to do, and they have a leader that's allowing them to break down basically the silos that we're saying were able to, then RevOps should be joining these funnel meetings whatever that might look like - sales and marketing alignment meetings or go-to-market meetings - and coming there with insights. Basically, being able to say, alright, friends. Here are all the analytics that you asked about. Here's what's going on in the funnel. Here's what we think you need to do next. Then the other type of big thing that RevOps does is, we need to be bringing decisions to the team about what's priority and what's not. So again, we typically have a really long backlog. What are we working on? Because if we ask our sales leader, marketing leader, CS leader, we're going to get three different answers. So a lot of times, we are that team that's kind of bringing that cohesion.
Alex Kracov: So that's a good segue. Who's the customer? Is it the sales? Is it marketing? Who is it?
Jen Igartua: Great. I love it. I don't like using the word customer, because I think it muddies the waters. Our customer is the same. We have one customer. Customer is the customer. And so I try to keep that language really clear where I can have stakeholders and I can have users. And so it's still really important that I'm ultimately building a go-to-market platform. That's what I'm building. I'm just building it on Salesforce and HubSpot and other things. But my job as RevOps is to create the processes and tooling, so my go-to-market team can be really successful. I'm building them a product. And so they're my user, right? If I really think about it like that, great. My user, what do they need, et cetera? But the same way that Asana doesn't talk about how they are making you track tasks better, they're helping you get more projects done and achieve success. It's like, well, we are, of course, we're helping the go-to-market team execute their tasks. But we're doing that on behalf of the customer so that we can maximize revenue so that we can make their sales cycles better so that when they interact with us, we have the right answers. We're not repeating questions. We're getting you documentation and contracts, et cetera really quickly. And so in some ways, if I really back myself into a corner, yeah, our go-to-market team are our customers. They are the ones using what we deliver. But we can't lose sight of the fact that our customers are our customers.
Alex Kracov: Alright. I'd love to switch gears and talk about software systems, which is a big part of RevOps and something near and dear to my heart as I'm building stuff in RevOps' land. So I'm curious for your take on a lot of different things. And so we'll go through a bunch of different questions here. I think the first interesting one is, is the CRM still the center of your RevOps tech stack, or is it data warehouse? Where's the system of record these days?
Jen Igartua: Have you been stalking me?
Alex Kracov: I did my research.
Jen Igartua: You really set me up with this one. No, it's not. So when I started my career, we definitely would go into meetings. We would get in a whiteboard, and we would draw one big circle in the middle. We would write Salesforce in it, right? One view of the customer, I think that was always like Salesforce's tagline, right? It's like one view of the customer. Now it's the AI CRM. So we've got one view of the customer right in the middle. Then we would integrate the tools with Salesforce so that if I needed usage information for my marketing campaign, I needed a product to push that into Salesforce, I would have my last login date or feature XYZ activated date. Then that would flow into my marketing automation, and we would use it there. If I needed to do any kind of big reporting, I would do it out of Salesforce. Then you had tools on top of that that kind of changed.
But I would say in the last couple of years, and I think we're early on this, right? So if anybody listening is going, oh, I haven't done this yet, just know it should be on your radar for the next couple of years. Snowflake is the winner here. But Snowflake is now that data warehouse that's in the center. The idea is that we're using reverse ETL tools and other integration tools to move data from the warehouse to the places that it needs to be. We don't need every piece of data in every single tool. We should just be pushing the ones that are relevant into each tool. Because at the end of the day, Salesforce is not a very good data warehouse and a very expensive one. So let's take that away. Put it in a place that makes the most sense so that we can have one data warehouse that has marketing interactions, CS interactions, product interactions, intent data, whatever else. That's where we're doing all of that sort of insights and reporting.
Alex Kracov: And when is the right time for a company to start investing in a data warehouse? Transparently, we haven't done this yet at Dock. It was something I've been feeling and thinking about. And so yeah, how do you sort of think about that decision? Even, you mentioned Snowflake. It's overwhelming. There are so many tools. We have a product database. But yeah, how should I start to think through this?
Jen Igartua: Sure. You know, I think that's ever changing. If you would have asked me a year or two ago, I'd be like, no, you guys are too small. Don't worry about it. It's for the big shots. That's because it was hard, right? It was hard to implement, and it was hard to manage. You had to hire people. But there's tools, I don't know, like Fivetran, and Senses, and Hightouch. You can do it, right? You can go in there, and you're not writing queries anymore that you had to do like a few years ago. You're going in, and it's all clicking configure. And you can do this. So skill set-wise, anybody can do it. It is a cost to manage it. Unless you're going to do anything interesting with it, it's like, why would you do it? Well, because you want to sync your product data with your marketing automation, do really interesting campaigns. You want to be able to do analytics on your opportunities based on usage, and automate your CS workflows. But if you're not planning on doing any of that, you're probably too early. Just keep yourself focused. I think, as an early business, that's the problem. It's too many. Too many projects and too much distraction. So at the moment, where you're trying to do that interesting stuff, that's one you should have that discussion. But you have the capability now.
Alex Kracov: Then when it comes to the CRM, so I think we both came up in a world where Salesforce was the only answer, right? At Lattice, it would have been crazy to choose anything else. HubSpot do work. But like at Dock now, I'm using HubSpot. It's been great, and it's out of the box. It is nice. And so I'm curious how you think about that puzzle. Is it just like HubSpot works for downmarket SME and, at some point, you grow out of it? Or is there certain companies you just need to use Salesforce right away? How should companies sort of think through that decision?
Jen Igartua: Yeah, so great question. Here's what I would - I keep doing the same pattern, so I'm sorry. I feel old now because I keep being like what it used to be. But I guess that's where I am in my career. I would have answered that question very quickly a few years back and say I got to choose Salesforce. Might as well choose it early, so you don't have to re-implement and just go. But HubSpot has done things like upgraded integrations, having custom objects, and ability to manage a lot more records. They now have marketing, and sales, and service and commerce. And so they are becoming this tool that allows you to do your work really quickly without a lot of customization, and basically focus on doing the work.
Where they start to fail is anything super complicated. So yeah, they're not really winning enterprise, right? They're doing really well in SMB, and they're coming up on mid-market. Mid-market is staying on HubSpot longer. We are still doing migrations from HubSpot to Salesforce, but they're much later down the path. One of the main reasons, for example, is there's a limit in number. Don't quote me on the numbers. But there's a limit on the number of custom objects that you can have. There's a limit in the number of records that you can have within those custom objects. There's not as much things that you can customize the UI, for example, or automate certain types of records or certain types of quotes. But here's a good example of why they're moving upmarket. Are you familiar with the company DealHub?
Alex Kracov: Yep.
Jen Igartua: So DealHub is CPQ competitor. They integrate with HubSpot. So all of a sudden, now HubSpot can do more complex pricing and quoting that it couldn't do a few years ago. So it's just, it's getting better. Now it's not as easy to integrate, for example, product usage into Salesforce to automatically update your opportunities to be accurate. I don't know. Stuff like that.
Alex Kracov: Yeah, the Dealhub example is very near and dear to my heart, because we've been building similar stuff that's competitive with them at Dock. And we built into HubSpot line items and all that stuff. I think one observation I had was, HubSpot natively can't really do tiered and volume-based pricing. But we could do it. And so it's like this funny way to reverse engineer, right? How do we fit that in their model and stuff? I assume eventually, they build some of that stuff. But I found they do a good job of getting v1 products that help a lot of things. But then, yeah, as you said, some of that advanced functionality. I assume they will build it or maybe the ecosystem will build it like Dock. I don't know. That'll be interesting.
Jen Igartua: I don't know. I think it will be more of an eco - if we take Salesforce as an example, they're not even very good at pricing either. They let the ecosystem do the innovation on top, and they just stayed really flexible. You know, it's interesting. I didn't really think of Dock and DealHub as strict competitors. I'm sorry.
Alex Kracov: Oh, no. It's totally fine, yeah. No, I look up to them. Yeah.
Jen Igartua: Okay. I name them as like one of the reasons why I think HubSpot was able to move up market. It's there without it. A lot of people would have self-select it out.
Alex Kracov: Actually, let's stay on CPQ and stuff first. When should a company invest in a proper CPQ system? Then how do you see this order form process evolve as companies scale?
Jen Igartua: Yeah, so this is another one where - alright. When Salesforce bought Steelbrick, that CPQ - they're an incredible machine, right? They're an incredible marketing machine - is they're going down market. And so we're seeing younger and younger companies adopting something like a CPQ. It is a very complicated implementation. You really have to be so good at your pricing and packaging and understand it thoroughly, to the point where we actually we tried to do a CPQ implementation at Lattice. And I will say that was one of the hardest projects for Go Nimbly, and probably one of our bigger failures. Everybody at Lattice knows that. Hopefully, we cleaned it up, and we did our best. And we learned from it. And since then, we've invested a ton in it. Because we had to. Because all these companies were adopting it early on earlier, and our customers have it, and so we've had to really amp that up.
But I'd say the real change too is that you've got companies that are competing in that space, and that it's no longer just CPQ. These cycles are becoming more competitive, where we are seeing other vendors come through that are more focused on SaaS. You have to remember Steelbrick wasn't built for SaaS. It has like manufacturing terms in it.
Alex Kracov: My observation, as I've been staring at so many order forms over the past year and trying to figure out Salesforce and stuff, is that companies are so unwilling to bend their pricing model to the software. And so you have to configure yourself. You have to have so many toggles and so many little options to solve for so many different edge cases. That's one set of problems. Then the other, actually, no, it's escaping now. But yeah, that is the one set of problems that I've noticed a lot.
Jen Igartua: But should they? You know what I mean?
Alex Kracov: Yeah, and maybe not.
Jen Igartua: Should they bend the rules to what the software can do? I think the harder part is less that they're not willing to bend, but they're not willing to decide what their pricing model is. Right? They want to customize. It's like, well, I have an enterprise deal. They want us to do a percentage of price for the implementation fee. It's like, okay, cool. But we didn't do that. So I don't want to create a new process for you to have that now. And so, all of a sudden, you have these teams that have blown up and have 18 different pricing models. Portfolio companies have something different, and that makes it very difficult to manage.
Alex Kracov: Switching to a different part of the tech stack, how do you think about customer success platforms? When is the right time to have one of those systems? Why do people even need a system like that?
Jen Igartua: Do you need a system? It's a nicer UI. It gives people in CS operations an ability to make changes. It's the same thing that you could argue, although Salesforce has never really tried to play in marketing automation. But it's the same thing. If you look at how marketers can go in and they can deploy campaigns and automation and workflows, they can really manage a good chunk of their workflow without needing to go to RevOps or systems, et cetera.
When you have all of your processes living in Salesforce, you can't do that. Your teams are going to shut that down really quickly. So you can't add an extra picklist field. You can't add an extra workflow. And so I do think that these CS platforms unlock that for teams. It makes them more independent and makes them more capable of doing their processes somewhere else. It's just the sucky part of a CRM is that it gets locked down really quickly. That said, could you mimic a lot of what CS platforms do write in Salesforce? Yeah, I can track health scores, and I can create QBR objects and implementation objects. I can do all of that. You just need to ensure that you have coverage within the RevOps team to think about CS and CS operations, and then you can build it yourself.
Alex Kracov: You mentioned health scores there. Maybe that opens up a broader conversation around just scoring in general. So there's like customer health scores. Then there's your MQL lead score, PQLs, all these different things. Should companies set up a scoring system? How should they go about doing that? What's your take on scoring systems?
Jen Igartua: I think that we've really messed up scoring. I think that we - I don't know. Whatever the theory ever was on scoring, it has been thrown out the windows. For marketers, the whole point of leads, I'll tell you a story. GE was my first customer when I was at Bluewolf. I didn't just have GE. I had 20 business units. It was like energy and health care. It was the same. We did the same lead scoring project over and over at each of those business units.
The meetings are really fun. We would go into a meeting. We would be like, how will we know that someone's ready to talk to our sales team? Great. We'll look at their webinars and what they're doing online and their title and all this kind of stuff. We will get the lead in the hands of the sales team at the right time, and that should increase conversion. Beautiful. We implement it. Everybody's so excited. Then pretty quickly, sales was like, "Hey, we need 20 more leads this week." Great. Well, we don't have time to deploy new campaigns and engage with them and send ads and do more webinars and do whatever it is that we're saying makes them ready. So instead, we went from 100 to 80 score. Then we went from 80 to 70, and then over and over. I wish I could tell you it was just one company. But this happened over and over and over. So lead scoring became a threshold management system. It was like the way that we could feed the sales team. The same thing is happening now with PQLs. And if you're not careful, you're going to kill PLG because you're going to have the sales team just call on every single lead as soon as they sign up for your product. So I don't know. We're not using it in the best scientific way to try to truly identify when someone's ready for a conversation.
Alex Kracov: Yeah, it seems like a bunch of ways for revenue leaders, marketers. I've been guilty of this, too. It's like, oh, we hit our numbers. Look. Look at the scores. We did it. We hit our numbers. It's like, no. Did it turn into revenue? Did it create pipeline? We should think about that a little bit more critically.
Jen Igartua: Yeah, I made 100 MQLs. You want 120? No problem. I don't really have to do anything, except send 68 now. So it isn't a model that works in my opinion. It becomes, again, a threshold management problem. But people are implementing. We did over at Intercom real systems that are looking for signals, that tells us somebody is ready for them for an expansion. I've seen really cool models of this happen. Like for Intercom, they have a product called Fin. That's AI. They will look at all customers. Give me the customers that have thumbs up, that have a really high number of conversations that they're having, and that the team is growing. So the number of conversations is growing month over month. Super easy. Yes, they need AI now. Because the volume says that we're going to save them money. Life is good. That's very cool. In a way, it's scoring. It's just looking at usage and ICP and saying this person is ready. I think that's what we need to change. I think we need to think about it like place. Give me people that - are this kind of person showing this kind of usage? That tells me they're ready, as opposed to a blanket score of five points for every website visit.
Alex Kracov: I think we're moving towards a world of a bundling in sales software. It seems like Gong, Clari, SalesLoft, ZoomInfo are all building each other's stuff. There's this race going on. How do you see all this playing out? That's maybe a hard question. Or maybe a better question is, like, how should people think through these decisions as a buyer? Because it's all merging, and they're all similar. But yeah, it's really tricky.
Jen Igartua: For sure. No, I think that everybody's scared. I was just on a call today with Chili Piper. They're launching their Distro product. It's really pushing into LeanData territory. ZoomInfo has RingLead. It's like, what's LeanData going to do? I'd be scared. I'd be thinking about who's going to buy me. Same thing. I don't know. I'm not surprised that Drift got bought. Because where the heck did it go? Right? It became a chatbot. There's plenty of those. Everybody created one of those within their offering. And so yeah, Gong now has a tool for sequencing. That's encroaching on your Outreaches and SalesLofts who are also busy building Gong's capabilities. Gong is building a forecasting tool. Great. What happens to Clari? Clari is still really amazing. But what happens to these other products that are point solutions?
Some smart man whose name I don't remember said that there's only two ways to make money: bundle and unbundle. Do you know that smart man? There is a man that was smart that said that. And so, yeah, we're in that, right? We're in the bundling. Then soon enough, we'll start to get point solutions again. But AI, obviously, if we're all going to be able to build point solutions with AI, I think that's maybe the next horizon as we'll all be like, I don't need six of those features. I'll just build one myself. We'll see.
Alex Kracov: The other funny thing that's happening - and it reminds me of what you're talking about earlier of free trials, PLG, all that dynamic - is the outbound landscape. I don't know if you see. Year bound, all bound, every bound, all these things. Isn't that just like first party triggers that you send an email to? We were doing that five years ago. Yeah, what's your take on outbound landscape?
Jen Igartua: I'll look at it in two angles. First, the angle of just me as a human and you as a human. Our inboxes are wild, right? My LinkedIn is wild. I'm really impressed by humans. It is amazing how quickly we can just look at an email and be like sales elite. It's so fast. I use Superhuman, because Superhuman rules. The letter E is like what I used to delete. I'm telling you, it takes me a second. And so to break through the noise is like, yeah, well, you can't be at all noise. Because we're so good at figuring that out. We're going to be just as good with AI. We're going to be just as good at figuring out that something is AI and automated. There's no way around it. Because we can tell when a human wrote it. I can even tell if a person writes me an email. Even if it's not automated, I can tell it's a sales email, and I'll delete it.
So the pendulum basically needs to swing back. Because if you think about when marketing automation came, we started automating emails and messaging and sent that to marketing. Then the way to disrupt it was we gave that to the hands of the sales team, and they were able to do sequences, which is honestly marketing. It is. It's just marketing messages, if they're not customizing and doing the research, et cetera. A lot of sales teams are going into Salesforce getting a lead and saying add to outreach, hitting the campaign, pressing save and calling it. Well, I'll just do that for you. I don't need you to click those three buttons. I'll put it into the sequence. And so I think the pendulum needs to swing back when marketing is doing the warming up of leads, which is what we were supposed to do, and wait for sales teams to have leads that are a little more ready so that they can wow them with research and book that meeting and really start that sales cycle. So it needs to swing back. For no other reason, your buyers aren't buying that way. I don't know. Pick up the phone. Do some social selling, something different.
Alex Kracov: Yeah, and it feels like the age of the giant SDR team is a little bit over. Where it's like, okay, marketing can do this with AI and a bunch of other resources. Maybe there are still SDR teams for super enterprise sales or bespoke stuff. But yeah, it seems not as big anymore.
Jen Igartua: Yeah, I think the role is changing. I think I see two trends. One, I think we're going back to the '80s doing business on golf courses. Events are up. I'm flying around and going events. I wasn't doing that two years ago. People are, I think, craving that human connection, and they want to buy in person and through humans again. I think that's going to influence the role of SDRs and AEs. And if you're an AE, I heard recently a friend of mine who was saying that his sales team didn't want to travel. I was like, alright, well. There was a huge deal in New York. I was like, show up. Go. Go on site. Go say hello to these people.
Then I think the other, with PLG companies, I think the SDR needs to be more highly trained on the actual platform. They need to be a team that is just really focused on helping the customers reach that aha moment. So it's less about calling and saying, "Can I sell you," and more, "Hey, I noticed you were using Dock. I saw you were trying to do the integration. It seems to have failed twice. Can I hop on the phone and help you do that?" Or, "I noticed you were doing X. Other companies like you are doing it this way. Can I help you set it up in that way?" And getting folks to adopt than spend more and becoming more product specialist and adoption specialists as opposed to SDRs, that will turn into meetings.
Alex Kracov: I love that. We're going to do that at Dock. That's where our SDR team will be.
Jen Igartua: Great.
Alex Kracov: Alright. I'd love to end today's conversation talking about your consumer business, Side Effects? What is Side Effects? How did you end up building this?
Jen Igartua: Do I have one nearby? I don't. What a terrible salesperson. So Side Effects was a hobby turned - last year, we did more than half a million dollars. So like real business. And real business that we do on nights and weekends, the four of us here in Brooklyn. So trying to figure out like how much I invested in this side hustle turned business. We sell board games, truly like $25 board games. If you want to buy one, pillboxgames.com. You can use promo code 'promochode.' Because that's funny.
Alex Kracov: Love it. Love it.
Jen Igartua: It's been really interesting trying to sell a consumer product and also selling $20,000 services at the same time. I had to learn some hard truths. I didn't know how to do it. After we were done building our first game, the manufacturing company told me that it was the most expensive card game they had ever made. I was like, I don't think that's good. Right? That's not good. It's because when you're talking in thousands of dollars all the time, and somebody says for $0.20, you could put gold foil on the box. $0.20? Yeah. For $0.5, you can make linen finish on the cards. $0.5? Yeah, add that. And all of a sudden, it was a game that's twice the amount of money that it should be. We since course corrected and brought it back. But it is really fun to make a physical product. It's just a very different marketing and selling motion.
Alex Kracov: What's the process like of even making a board game? Because I don't know. I play a lot of Settlers of Catan. I always think of like, what's the guy? Klaus, whatever. His brain to come up with this idea and this puzzle. I mean, is it just like you try, make little prototypes, see, play with friends that go back? How does that all kind of look?
Jen Igartua: Yes, so there's definitely play testing. You put it out. You try and try again, and you make little tweaks. I will say one gentleman on my team, Jade, he really has a brain built for - he's very good at incentives and being like, well, the player will want to do X. How do we make the player do that? How do we balance things out? Or if we play a game and it was too easy to win, what lever do we pull? And we'll create spreadsheets. We'll create spreadsheets with number of cards, what they do, what they balance out and make sure that it works really well. And so it is like a little bit of math definitely then play testing and seeing that sometimes your math was wrong. And doing that over and over again. It's really fun what you can tweak to. Sometimes, we'll even change the winning condition completely. So it's definitely a whole lot of getting together and playing games and playing with strangers and seeing how they do it. Watching people read your rules, that's fun, and be confused and be like, how can we change those?
Alex Kracov: How do you think about growing this business? Is it all word of mouth, using TikTok, social media? How do this work?
Jen Igartua: All of it. Mostly, we're figuring it out. So we've definitely done - well, we've sent games to a bunch of influencers. We've even gotten small people with 2 to 10,000-person followings. At the end of the day, what does my game cost me? $5. I'll send a game to everyone. A lot of these influencers are just trying to get free games. So go big. Send everybody a game. Life is good. Then actually, some of it is really organic. The theme of our game, I think, gets a lot of people's attentions. So the theme is mental illness. You get an array of mental disorders, and you have to be the first to treat yourself with drugs and therapy. It's a little dark humor on those commercials where you're trying to fix your restless leg syndrome. Then it tells you it could end in death. So you're trying to cure yourself, but you get other side effects. So that alone gets people talking. Overnight, one time, we had one TikToker pick up our game and do it, and we have thousands of sales in the morning. Our inbox was just flooded.
Alex Kracov: That must be so fun.
Jen Igartua: It's really fun. We didn't know why. So we had to be like, what's happening, get online and try to figure out why we sold stuff. But really, 90% of our sales are coming from Amazon, and Barnes and Noble and hobby stores. I don't really have much insight other than raw numbers.
Alex Kracov: I love it. Yeah, you haven't gone full on RevOps tech stack. You got to keep the side business fun, too. Yeah, I guess you can.
Jen Igartua: No, it's a very weird, very cagey old-school business. You have a publisher, and then a distributor, and then the store that buys it. The distributor won't tell the publisher anything. The publisher can't tell us because they don't want - that feels like their data. I have no idea if I'm selling 1,000 games to one store or if I'm selling one game to 1,000 stores. I just have the number.
Alex Kracov: So funny.
Jen Igartua: Yeah, it's really crazy.
Alex Kracov: Alright, my last question. Are you going to make more games? Are you starting with just this?
Jen Igartua: Yeah, totally. So we made Side Effects. We have a booster. We have another game called MUD. It's an election game. Then this year, we're going live with a kid's version of Side Effects that Target and Walmart are interested in. Then we also have a cult game coming out ala Secret Hitler.
Alex Kracov: Very fun.
Jen Igartua: And you can play it right now. We have like a wordle game called Ampersandi. You can go to ampersandi.game and it's like a crossword wordle type game.
Alex Kracov: Awesome. Well, really excited. I got to go play all of these. Thank you so much for the conversation today, Jen.
Jen Igartua: Yey. Thank you.
Alex Kracov: This was really fun.
Jen Igartua: Super fun.
(outro)
That's a wrap on another episode of Grow & Tell. If you enjoyed the show, subscribe to us on YouTube or your favorite podcast platform, or find every episode at growandtellshow.com. I'm your host Alex Kracov. Thank you for listening.