If your target is at risk, listen to this

2/3 sales reps aren't completing quota.
Sales cycles are extending.
Win rates are down.

Yeah it's tough - that's why we cover what you can do to get back on track.

What we covered 👇

• (00:00) - Introduction
• (01:35) - The problems in SaaS
• (05:05) - Only 2 out of 3 reps hit quota
• (06:44) - We need an impact now
• (07:28) - First step - do the analysis
• (09:09) - Time is neglected
• (12:09) - Where is the volume
• (13:24) - The limitations of CAC Payback
• (17:36) - Now what?
• (20:00) - Help customers overcome indecision
• (22:01) - An example
• (25:39) - Another example
• (28:32) - Find problems

Sources mentioned:
Solving underperformance by Winning by Design
Demand picking up a smidge by SaaStr
Decline in win rates by Jacco Van Der Kooij

Creators and Guests

Host

Mikkel Plaehn

Marketing leader & b2b saas nerd

Host

Toni Hohlbein

2x exited CRO | 1x Founder | Podcast Host

What is The Revenue Formula?

This podcast is about scaling tech startups.

Hosted by Toni Hohlbein & Raul Porojan, 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 Holbein. You are listening to the Revenue Formula. In today's episode, we're going to talk about some topics that are extremely relevant for you. If you are missing or in danger of missing your target this year, we're going to talk about how to identify what to focus on in order to improve, and then give you a roadmap of how to improve it.
[00:00:21] Enjoy
[00:00:25] are we recording?
[00:00:26] Mikkel: We are always recording, always.
[00:00:32] Toni: So. We had a little bit of a friendly get together this weekend
[00:00:37] Mikkel: Oh, tell me.
[00:00:38] Toni: home.
[00:00:39] Um, and a friend of mine, my wife also was there and, you know, I know her a little bit and she was like, Toni, I feel like completely know you. You know, we've met once or twice before. She's like, I completely know you. I was like,
[00:00:52] Mikkel: Yeah.
[00:00:53] Toni: okay, cool. Creepy. LinkedIn.
[00:01:01] I listen to the revenue formula, you and this other guy.
[00:01:05] Mikkel: I don't know who he is though.
[00:01:07] Toni: And then, you know, this is for no one here, but we have like, um, like a photo sharing kind of album kind of thing, uh, with the kids and everything for the family. She's part of that. And she's like, you know, she's also sees that angle. It's a. I see something popping up about you every fucking day.
[00:01:23] Mikkel: it's kind of an achievement when you think about it to know it, because I feel like I don't know you, it's not like I'm even on your photo stream yet or anything. I'm just
[00:01:29] sitting there every day with too much leverage is what it gives me too much leverage.
[00:01:35] , but you know, we're going to talk about a couple of things today that people also don't really know. Ooh, we're going to talk a bit about, actually some research that primed this conversation we're about to have by winning by design. It talks a bit about, you know, the solving underperformance is literally the name of the paper. It talks about how two thirds of reps aren't hitting. And I think you and I have been talking at great length also on this show while recording.
[00:02:01] about all the challenges SaaS are faced with today. And we're going to talk a bit about now what, what do you actually do, what can you do as a business to make an impact and ideally one that's within this quarter.
[00:02:14] Toni: Yeah, that's, that's usually the issue, right? It's like, sure, let's optimize next year. But what, what, what about this
[00:02:19] Mikkel: year?
[00:02:20] What about this long term project, a new website, it was going to be
[00:02:23] so amazing. by
[00:02:24] Toni: this is one of my favorite and I've used this myself, you know, um, when you have a tough board thing coming up and it's H2 and you're talking about, ah, this year's ads will be difficult. Then what executives usually do, myself included, is like, you know, we're, we're building, now we're focusing on building a really strong basis for success next year. And then you go into next year and it's like, so we're building a really strong basis for success next year.
[00:02:51] Mikkel: Well I'll tell you, as long as you can raise on that, it doesn't really matter. No I guess that's part of the problems we've faced, I think. So to recap some of the issues, and we've covered them also in previous episodes. Winrates, they're going down. It's not going up at the moment.
[00:03:09] Sales cycles. They're longer, you know, a lot more , Q5 deals, I think at the moment. So terrible, terrible scenario. ACV is probably also dipping. But the funny thing is though, both Gartner and G2.
[00:03:23] They're seeing software spending increase.
[00:03:25] Toni: Yeah, this year.
[00:03:26] This year and next
[00:03:27] Mikkel: Yeah, this year. So I think G2, to be fair, is next year, but Gartner is this year. Saastr, so Jason Lemkin, did a, uh, LinkedIn poll. So, ha, statistical significance, blah, blah, blah. So there were like a thousand people when I saw it, who went in and voted.
[00:03:42] Uh, they see that things are actually improving doesn't mean that now it's we are all out of the woods and everything but things are slowly picking up a smidge i think was the the term right so it's not going the wrong way
[00:03:54] Toni: No, I think he looked at the data. And so how can I, how can I make this a
[00:03:57] Mikkel: a positive i need some positive
[00:03:59] Toni: Let's let's let's use the word smidge instead and say there's an upwards trend.
[00:04:04] No, I think, I think the winning by design folks and for people who. Don't know them. Jacco van der Kooij is the founder of that thing. You probably ran, uh, you know, across him on LinkedIn already. When anyone is saying Bowtie, that's kind of the thing that they came up with, you know, the, the, the two sided funnel and stuff.
[00:04:21] and they had some really strong research on
[00:04:24] What
[00:04:24] was it? The rise and the fall of, of SaaS.
[00:04:27] Mikkel: it was this story on HBR.
[00:04:29] Toni: Yeah. Yeah, exactly. So they got into Harvard business review with this, which is pretty impressive. Um, and I'm not sure if it's a, it's research. It's basically told the
[00:04:36] Mikkel: Yeah, it's a story.
[00:04:38] Toni: Hey, the early 2010s, blah, blah, blah, then COVID and today.
[00:04:42] And you and I read this and we're like, okay, cool. It's kind of gloomy.
[00:04:47] Mikkel: kinda .We are depressed enough
[00:04:49] Toni: not happy, not happy. Uh, but also it doesn't really offer any. So what are
[00:04:54] Mikkel: what, are gonna do?
[00:04:55] Toni: what should anyone do
[00:04:56] Mikkel: Yeah.
[00:04:56] Toni: this now? Right. And then, you know, they actually followed this up recently with a thing that they titled, what did the title is
[00:05:02] Mikkel: Solving Underperformance.
[00:05:04] Toni: solving underperformance.
[00:05:05] Right.
[00:05:05] And, um, there's a, there's a really complicated chart that they're using. Maybe, maybe Bart can cut this into the video format or
[00:05:12] Mikkel: I'm not sure I'm holding up a paper to the camera. No
[00:05:15] Toni: will totally work. It will totally work. Um, but they're basically talking about what used to be your 20% top performers.
[00:05:22] And this is where it gets a little bit like weird language wise. Top performance defined by, I think hitting quota and above.
[00:05:29] Mikkel: 80% quota completion.
[00:05:32] Toni: Uh, those are your, those used to be a 20% now you're only a 4, 4% of your reps hitting quota and above. And, um, and the, the, this is basically being exasperated by the fact that, you know, you used to have 10% bottom performance, which I don't know, hit below 50%, I guess.
[00:05:49] I'm not sure what the number is. And now that suddenly became 28%, right? then. Jacco and the team are doing some complicated math to come up with like, Hey, it's really about the 40%. I'm not going to go into this, but what's really actually cool about this is, um, you know, obviously they're selling some of the services here.
[00:06:07] Right. But really the solution that's being teed up, uh, which I think is, is pretty cool. So we're going to go into this a little bit, uh, today, actually. Actually exploring also on the left and the right hand side of those, um, you know, what that, what that means maybe for other parts of the funnel that you as RevOps or CIO can, uh, could potentially use or, and, or just, you know, I guess buy, buy winning by design.
[00:06:29] I don't, I don't know, but I think that's, that's another alternative.
[00:06:32] Mikkel: left out one cool fact though about Jacco. Which is you still have to book him for the show. So waiting eagerly, but, uh,
[00:06:40] Toni: you know, this is all a tier. I'm going to send him the snippet. Uh, it's going to include just buy winning
[00:06:44] Mikkel: we mentioned you 25 times in this episode. No, no, no, it's all good. So, um, the thing is there's so many solutions you could consider in such a scenario, right? And the challenge is, and I think a lot of the listeners, myself included, have been in that scenario where a VP or whatever walks up and says, Hey, We have a problem this quarter, I need you to help fix it this quarter.
[00:07:09] And you go like, well, what can I do that will close in the next, you look at the clock, 40 days, right? That's, that's the challenge really. So if you are faced with all these problems we listed out, you need to make an impact within this quarter. How do you go about it?
[00:07:28] Toni: So the first step is, you know, doing the analysis to even figure out what that could be. Right. And almost think about it like a tree structure where you work yourself backwards actually from revenue closed, right?
[00:07:41] The closer something is to that number, the, the shorter the time, so to speak until that has an impact, right? And this could, this could very easily be. The bottom final conversion points are processing pieces. It sounds boring to kind of repeat these things, but it's, yes, it's your, it's your win rate, your conversion rate from opportunity to won, that's a very bottom funnel, right?
[00:08:02] You will create many, many opportunities, tomorrow. And if you can improve their conversion rate from up to won, and let's just say you have a, uh, a 90 day sales cycle, that will then deliver tangible results, uh, in 90 days from now. The same goes with metrics that are around ACV and so forth.
[00:08:20] sales cycle length, right? You shorten this, basically what, what happens towards the end of the year, if you're able to shorten your sales cycle in a meaningful way, and that might be 10%, right?
[00:08:31] So shaving off out of, out of a 90 day sales cycle, shaving off a week or two, I think that would be tangible already.
[00:08:37] So what could you use that for? Why is that really interesting? Well, You just gave yourself 14 more days to book opportunities that can still close this year. and 14
[00:08:47] days is, that's half a month, that's, you know, blah, blah, blah of a quarter. And that might actually be significant in terms of uplift that you need for the, for the rest of the year.
[00:08:57] Right? So those processing metrics are extremely interesting. And there's lots of focus on this already there because of the AEs and blah, blah, blah. But, but the bottom funnel conversion rates, that's obviously super interesting to look at.
[00:09:09] Mikkel: obviously super is often neglected. When you run all the numbers, right, we run out of the math, where should we invest and where can we get a great ROI and all that stuff.
[00:09:17] Time is often neglected. And we've talked about this also as a major, major efficiency driver. If you can even ramp new hires faster, that's a massive gain. And the same side, uh, as you're pointing to, if you can shorten the sales cycle in your end by just a week or two, that's massive. That's actually massive.
[00:09:34] And, and I think already now you should have a couple of ideas to look at. So look at your sales cycles and see what, are there any points where we're, you know, slowing things down? Is it either on legal or is there too much space between meeting booked and meeting held? Where are the efficiencies for you to get the ball rolling?
[00:09:53] Toni: And, and I think we're going to go into some of those examples in a little bit actually, but it's, I think the reason why sales cycles as an efficiency metric is usually overlooked.
[00:10:01] It's, it's a bit hard. It's a bit intangible. Um, so on the one hand side, if you put it like I just did, like, Hey, you have, you Two weeks more to book opportunities to then close. It's like, okay, cool. I can kind of see that. The other thing is then, let's just say you're able to, uh, half and you know, you get this bump once you do this increase and then it's kind of the same afterwards.
[00:10:21] But, uh, if you, let's just say you were to half your, sales cycles, whatever that is, what that actually also means. Is you can now process double of the amount of opportunities with the same sales rep. So this is really just a long term efficiency gain because then you would need to either reduce your sales team, blah, blah, blah, because it's not going to get you more opportunities just because you process them faster.
[00:10:47] Right? So, so that's why it's sometimes really difficult one to, um, to kind of nail down and say, that's really cool. Well, those are the, the bottom funnel processing metrics. And I think depending on your sales cycle, you can go further up, you know, it could be, it could be around, you know, your MQL to SQL, you know, the use conversion rates there or the time delay there and so forth.
[00:11:06] So this is really what you would need to keep in mind. As further you go up the funnel, the further away that impact will be from this, uh, you know, from a timeline, which might be end of year. And, and that might be then an issue, for example, really going super far out, doing some kind of a brand campaign or demand gen campaign or something like that, where you basically invest a million dollars today, it might be that you don't see any impact for the rest of the year.
[00:11:32] If, if
[00:11:33] Mikkel: And we don't know. And
[00:11:33] Toni: Marketing, and we don't know, and maybe it was fantastic, but maybe it won't be. And that reminds me actually kind of, you know, Udi from, from Gong. He did a, he did a massive play. So he's the, he was the CMO of Gong. Now he's kind of the evangelist or something like that. Um, uh, but, but they did a massive thing on a Superbowl ad.
[00:11:52] Mikkel: Yeah.
[00:11:52] Toni: Try and attribute that, my friend, but, uh, apparently it worked out, but you know, anyway, that, that would be a great conversation
[00:11:57] Mikkel: Also, we should ask him at some point. Yeah, just LinkedIn.
[00:12:00] Toni: so this is how further you go up and, you know, that would be an example of like a, hard to identify, hard to identify, um, or it's like just too far out.
[00:12:09] And then the other pieces is really around, really around volume, right? So now you need to think, okay, so I went through all the processing steps. Cool. Some of them are too far out. Some of them are really nicely enclosed by , and then you might need to look at your different revenue streams.
[00:12:25] And check out which ones, if you were to increase volume today, which ones could still deliver by the end of the year, right? And again, the brand piece might not work out for you here. There might be some bottom funnel CPC you can, you know, start increasing again. Uh, so CPC cost per click. So this is usually kind of a Google thing.
[00:12:44] You might have scaled it down in the past, you know, now leveraging, you know, Jason Lemkin, Saastr maybe there's more demand, maybe you want to add some more there. Usually inbound is in general, a faster, a faster way to get to revenue, so play around with that. And so forth, right.
[00:12:59] Outbound, let's see, depends on your sales cycles, but this is how it then would analyze your revenue engine and it would be like, okay, what are the. Realistically speaking, what are the things that could drive some value by the end of the year, given the, uh, sales cycles and the time delay that we have plus, well, we need to decide on it.
[00:13:17] We need to implement it, you know, and so forth. Right. There's a couple of other things that need to happen before you can actually get there.
[00:13:24] Mikkel: Yeah. we also, I mean, we, we talked a bit about it, before hitting record, basically the way you sometimes look at your different channels, usually you
[00:13:38] unblend the funnel, right.
[00:13:39] But actually looking at time, which you're alluding to a bit here is, is also an important factor. So. So if Google CPC on inbound signed is faster, then that's a point where you can, you know, quotation marks easily scale up compared to a lot of other elements.
[00:13:53] Toni: Yeah and obviously our listenership and viewership is extremely smart.
[00:13:57] So me saying this now is everyone's going to be, uh, duh, Toni. Um, you measure CAC payback in month and you know, the shorter that is and so forth, but that has nothing to do how quickly you will actually see revenue from this thing. Right. This is really. Uh, this is a time to recoup and not time to kind of make in the first place.
[00:14:17] So, kind of the, the CAC payback piece is forgetting about when you actually need to invest the money in, you know, to begin with, right? And, um, it usually measures from the date where that deal is being closed to the quarter where the deal is being closed and then takes the effort that, that quarter took into account.
[00:14:34] That is sometimes correct, sometimes it's pretty flawed by the way, right? So CAC payback in that sense is actually a really bad thing to go about because it's more about the efficiency in itself, not about the time it takes to kind of get to revenue. Um, I think another thing to take into account here to, you know, maybe use or not use, um, marginal CAC payback.
[00:14:55] So this then really talks about the, you know, in some of your channels, you can spend a million more dollars. But you won't see any additional, revenue coming out of this, right? overall, you might actually see that, well, the CAC payback still is okay, you know, after I spent this additional, you know, 1 million.
[00:15:15] But, you know, the marginal CAC payback will be terrible, right? Because the 1 million didn't give you anything. And that really speaks to the fact of some channels simply being capped. So, unfortunately, channels that you think are being, are capped already or, take a, take a step function to unlock. You would probably also take them away from your analysis.
[00:15:34] You would be saying like, okay, there's revenue stream over here. Don't think we can do anything about this. Um, so that then drops, drops away from, from your short term impact analysis.
[00:15:45] Mikkel: I think I've, I've had this conversation quite a few times where, cuz when you look at the numbers in a sheet, black and white, you instantly assume that you can preserve. those outcomes meaning for example, CAC payback when you then double the budget. But for example on paid search, it's not necessarily the case that you have a marginal cost.
[00:16:03] It's sometimes exponential. And that is terrible
[00:16:07] when you go and execute. So it's super important to, um, to keep in mind.
[00:16:12] Toni: So now you did your big analysis and it's so funny. I kind of the other day posted something. Hey, here's another analysis you should do. And then, then I got one comment. Oh, thank you, Toni. Finally, you know, this was on a Saturday. Now I know what new analysis I can run on one day, you know, and it's like, you know. If, if this is, if this is what, what everyone thinks is cool, then that's cool. And you know, this is certainly another analysis you maybe should be running or could be running, uh, if your team is currently on the, on the, on the heels and trying to still hit target for the rest of the year.
[00:16:43] Right. So we're going to just quickly recapping this number one.
[00:16:47] look at your conversion or processing metrics further down in the funnel because the impact is kind of much faster. Number two, look at different, volume streams that it can still drive that should ideally be, uh, you know, end to end super short.
[00:17:01] And then take everything away that, um, is capped or it takes too much money to unlock or, and so forth. Right. And now you're probably going to be, you know, stuck with. A small handful, as people in Denmark would say, a small handful of options here to even, even think about improving.
[00:17:18] Mikkel: Yeah. I was also reflecting that a point for some businesses here, once you've run the analysis is you're going to realize that you might be allocating some resources wrongly.
[00:17:30] And that's also part of the opportunity. Maybe we put a pin in that
[00:17:32] and just
[00:17:33] Toni: another
[00:17:33] Mikkel: speed on. That's another, another episode entirely though.
[00:17:36] Toni: So.. Now that you have those options, what are you going to do about this? And this is again, where we're kind of actually going back to the, the paper from, from winning by design here. they talk about, sprints. Oh, wow. Never heard about that before. Um, but it's, it's pretty cool, right?
[00:17:52] Uh, I really love how, they are also. going into this Agile direction almost, right? I'm not sure if sprint, yeah,
[00:18:00] Mikkel: are they listening to the show?
[00:18:02] Toni: Uh, well, you know, let's see about that. Um, no, so, um, that's, that's, that's actually what they're talking about in the paper and talking about like very specific, Hey, you should do this 60 to 90 days sprint, in order to improve this one thing, right?
[00:18:18] And, um, I think we have, wait, I wanted, do we have kind of a. Printed off this print thing themselves. No, right. You didn't do
[00:18:26] Mikkel: No.
[00:18:28] what? Episode over.
[00:18:29] Toni: time I would love one time to actually work with a professional here, but, um, so, so they, they talk about, uh, basically kind of taking two weeks time just to analyze, right?
[00:18:41] So once you have identified what it is you want to improve. Spend a week or two on actually analyzing what, what is happening in this step, what could be done better, what should be done better. then they spent, um, I think six weeks on, uh, fixing the problem, right? So let's just say you have a discovery.
[00:19:02] problem in your sales process or something like that. They spend six weeks on training the AEs and getting better on the discovery side. Right. and then, uh, now you're down eight weeks. really the rest of the time, uh, they're spending then on follow up and follow through. Right. So this is, we talking human beings here.
[00:19:21] So you, you coach human beings, you teach them something. Um, and it's not going to stick the first time it's going to stick over time. So that's why. Uh, you'll need to follow up on these things, right? what is really, really powerful is you, focus your sprint on one area. Uh, you improve that area in a tangible way.
[00:19:39] and then basically, yes, you have, um, your compound impact kind of hitting in, coming in, uh, and then over time, right over time, you will kind of reap the same benefits and you can actually move on to another part of the process somewhere. And if those two, pieces of improvement are in the same stream, so to speak.
[00:20:00] Uh, they will compound each other, right? So this is extremely powerful. If you're, if you're able to find that 10% improvement in the same line, so to speak, those 10% will kind of, uh, you know, add each other up really nicely. so, and you know, examples that they have, Help customers overcome indecision, right?
[00:20:18] Every, every VP is going to be like, Oh shit, I have that problem. That's that's VP language. Um, uh, what it, what it means for revenue architect language kind of in our world, well, you shorten sales cycles and you increase the win rate, right? So they're basically kind of covered or created those, um, those sprints, around, very human language issues, or, you know, it's better with.
[00:20:43] discovery, whatever. And then they say, well, there's an, there's an impact metric that this is then driving, how they're then measuring success of that. Right. And that impact metric usually is tied back to either volume or a
[00:20:54] Mikkel: In the bow tie.
[00:20:55] Toni: I mean, they have stuff like uncover impact, uh, and you know, whatever.
[00:20:59] And this is maybe for the discourse. So this is lead to opportunity and win rate. Get sellers building pipeline more, increase, you know, number of opportunities per rep and pipeline, you know, they're surely have something around CS. They're surely have something around other areas. So wherever a human being is interacting with the, with the process, you know, those folks will come in and have like an idea how to coach them and, you know, improve them over time.
[00:21:20] Right. So that's cool. And, um, and I think this is a really cool, um, tip also for everyone listening here to sell this stuff internally, instead of talking nerd language, like Mikkel and Toni here saying, Oh, you know, we're going to shorten sales cycles by 10% and increase the win rate by, you know, 0. 47, 8, 8, 9%.
[00:21:39] Uh, you just say, Hey, we, we need to help our sellers to help customers overcome indecision better. Everyone, every, every CFO is going to be yes.
[00:21:49] Mikkel: I would like to buy
[00:21:49] Toni: You know, I walked, I walked, uh, over the sales floor the other day and I think that's what I heard.
[00:21:55] Mikkel: having. There's
[00:21:55] a lot of, there's a lot of indecision there.
[00:21:59] Toni: we need to help them with that.
[00:22:00] Right.
[00:22:01] And I think that, you know, decoupling of, uh, the impact metric and the actual issue at hand, I think that's pretty powerful. we didn't do that work. We, we went into a couple of other examples. Um, you know, from our side and some of that stuff is, um, I think we kind of mentioned on this, uh, on the, on the show before, but you know, one thing could be that, you are, uh, you know, MQL to SQL conversion is not boring, but let's just say that's what it is.
[00:22:28] Uh, it could be a conversion rate thing, could be a time delay thing. You know, either of those would actually be impacting your revenue in this sense and would also have an impact. Uh, probably sooner rather than later. And, uh, so step number one, you would analyze. We're like, okay, what's going wrong here?
[00:22:45] You would, uh, obviously dig into the systems as every good Revolve person would do first. you would, probably have a conversation with some of the reps. Uh, you would talk to marketing. Uh, you would talk maybe to the VPs and, and what's going to end up happening, especially in this MQL to SQL thing is both sides will.
[00:23:01] Just blame each other. Uh, those MQLs are shit and those sales reps are shit. Right. and, uh, you know, this is the analyze stage. Uh, the next step then for you could be, okay, what is it actually that we could implement to fix things here? and this one is a, is a twisted one, but basically. You would actually say, okay, let's implement a sales accepted lead stage, which is across the board used in order to be a better judge between those two things, right?
[00:23:27] There's usually a very clear definition of what enters an SAL stage, right? So that's. That's then clearly defined that actually the MQL that are being passed onto that stage are actually solid. Yeah. and then taking the SALs from down to SQL then gives a better understanding what are the reps actually doing right or wrong in order enough to take those.
[00:23:46] Right. And if the reps are saying, well, these SALs are shit, okay, good. Then have a conversation about, you know, changing the definition and stuff. but you have clarity on either side of these issues now. Right. Which will make then the next step, you know, potentially when you, uh, then. Try and figure out what to actually improve much easier.
[00:24:03] which then hopefully improves your conversion rate, right? So that's, that's one of these examples. And, um, the, what I do like about this sprint framework and setup is really the, it's focused around those 60 or 90 days, right? Which kind of fits also into the RevOps world in a sense, where you have time to analyze and, Pick things apart and then have time to come up with a fix and implement it actually at the same time.
[00:24:28] Right. And kind of creating that kind of world. I think that's, that's extremely, extremely close to our heart as well. And I think it's really close to how people are running the revenue engines.
[00:24:37] Mikkel: I think also you said something funny. It's like the. Boring problem and there's also going to be the boring solutions, but I think it's super important to disassociate that as part of the whole analysis and what you choose to actually implement.
[00:24:49] At the end of the day, it's about the impact you need to make, and that's not boring at all.
[00:24:54] And, and I think the most impactful things I've seen being done, they were boring things. Honestly, there were, there were, simple was not this massive project where like, yeah, I really want to go on stage and present this to the entire company.
[00:25:09] No, no, you don't want to do that because then people are gonna go like, wait, we didn't have a scheduling tool before, you know, that's,
[00:25:15] Toni: know, no, that's true. But it's also, and I think this is something where RevOps should actually start moving towards.
[00:25:22] and you know, I'm, I'm keep saying the same thing in this, but it's really, you know, use all the arsenal of, of tools that you have. Use them to move something like this here. Um, that that's really, that's really the, the, the key point for driving efficiencies and so forth, kind of use it to do something like this.
[00:25:39] And articulate it then to the person needing to make a decision for you to spend time on this. In a better way, right? Which apparently the winning by design folks, you know, did much better here. Um, but I did want to kind of do another example here as well. So let's just say, and this is really a way for you to, you know, scan your engine, you know, find, find trouble quickly or replicate success, right?
[00:26:01] It's always those two things. And, and especially on the replicating success side. So one of the typical issues is outbound is working better in one region than another, or something is. Um, going better here than it's going over there. Take two weeks, do a discovery, analyze, figure out what's wrong. Sure.
[00:26:21] Use, use tools, use data, but also talk to the fucking people involved, try and figure out what's going right and wrong, and then try and, you know, replicate that success. The one way that I've seen this done extremely well, and this wasn't revenue operations solving it necessarily, but RevOps found that there was an issue.
[00:26:42] and then actually proposed a solution, which was to send the respective leaders of those inside sales teams, just, you know. Across
[00:26:51] Mikkel: yeah.
[00:26:51] To see. Yeah. Yeah.
[00:26:53] Toni: for three weeks. And, and I think they did it in sequence. So they're basically kind of, uh, then together almost like a month or longer than a month. but at first the sales, uh, the inside sales leaders were kind of shattering what the, the better team quote unquote was doing, uh, what was doing differently.
[00:27:09] and then basically kind of replicated the same thing on the other side. And what happened then was, a lot of things were seen as like, Oh, cool. Yeah, let's totally do that. Instead of this, Hey, let, let the U S folks tell the Europeans how things are being done. And it was funny enough, was the other way around was actually Europeans going to the U S and, you know, teaching them a little bit, you know, how, how this could be improved, but it really became a, picking and choosing of things that they wanted to implement and see their, you know, metrics came afterwards.
[00:27:37] Right. Again, that's like a 60 to 90 day timeframe, right? You analyze what's the, what's the fricking problem. Then you figure out, okay, it's, it's this here. And there are like 20 things they're doing differently. How do we change management that in the best way? Instead of trying to copy paste this over, you basically kind of create a, you know, a melting of the minds kind of situation between those two, um, you know, inside sales leaders.
[00:28:00] Mikkel: of when it's coming from a peer versus a revenue operations person, right? They will speak exactly the same language and have exactly the same trail of thought. Um, and the other reflection I had is when you do the, when you're in the analysis stage. Don't just hop on a call and do that and then be done with it in a couple of days.
[00:28:20] I was literally thinking, no, no, you fly there, you spend a lot of time, you hop on sales calls. If that's where there's something to learn from and actually spend the time with the people, uh, to really unearth what is going on.
[00:28:32] And
[00:28:32] Toni: everyone here on the call is going to be like, well, my boss is never going to allow this and blah, and um, and that might be true. Um, and there's, you know, uh, there are kind of some ways to fix that. We're probably not going to cover this right now. Uh, one story I just wanted to. Salesforce. So I talked to some of the RevOps guys at Salesforce and asked them about how they're running the operating cadence and so forth.
[00:28:53] And one really cool thing was they have those, uh, monthly and quarterly business reviews, yada, yada, everyone has that. And then they have a sales programs team. I think that's what they were called. and basically every learning, everything that came out of those business reviews, wasn't put on top of the pile of things to do.
[00:29:11] That revenue operations had already, it was actually handed to a very specific team that, you know, focused on generate, you know, taking those insights and those action points that were, that were created out of those, uh, review sessions. And then running them through the organizations. Um, so this kind of approach, you know, it's not just winning by design coming out, but there's not just us, uh, you know, having that idea as actually, you know, teams like Salesforce implementing this, I think the difficulty will be for some, some of the ones listening here that are on the RevOps side.
[00:29:41] You know, find the time to do it. And I think the way you need to convince your decision makers is really to put it into human language that they understand and can connect back. And if they're, you know, for the CROs listening, maybe, maybe give you a rev ups this episode and say like, you know what, you know, figure out what you want to do.
[00:29:58] I'll, I'll give you time for that.
[00:30:00] Mikkel: and a flight ticket. Yeah.
[00:30:04] Okay. But, uh, I kind of like how we ended up actually having some very practical stuff you can now go and execute. You know, you said it before we hit record, this is something you could have done before we had all these challenges,
[00:30:17] Toni: yeah, a thousand
[00:30:18] Mikkel: keep it, keep it in, you know, in the drawer, use it going forward.
[00:30:21] Uh, this is not just a one off. Hey, now we have a challenge. as with anything RevOps, there has to be a process and this could be a part of that. That's
[00:30:30] Toni: That's it. Thank you, Mikkel.
[00:30:32] Mikkel: Thank you, Toni.
[00:30:34] Toni: Everyone, bye bye. Bye.
[00:30:35] Mikkel: Bye.