Subscribe
Share
Share
Embed
How do the biggest engineering projects in the world avoid potential disasters? They create a digital replica to address problems before they become problems.
Stealing from the world of engineering, in this episode, we walk you through how you can create a digital twin of your GTM engine in order to help you focus on execution.
Creators and Guests
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.
Introduction
---
[00:00:00]
Toni: Hey everyone, this is Toni Holbein from Growblocks. You are listening to the Revenue Formula. In today's episode, we are taking a page out of the biggest engineering projects in the world and are telling you how to build a digital twin of your revenue engine. Enjoy.
Mikkel: Oh, yes. We are back into, uh, recording Mondays. You've realized this, right?
Mikkel: It's been a bit off cadence as of late. No? You didn't realize? No.
Toni: No. The weeks just come and go. It's just a, you know, flurry by now. We went, we went sledging
Mikkel: Yeah, nice.
Toni: It's so funny, just, you know, my mom has like a sledge, which she brought home from her mom. So my grandma, she's like 90 or something like this. And the sledge is, I think, as old as my mom basically, and we had the sledge and we [00:01:00] put our kids on it, and it just, it's insane how a little bit of snow, then this piece of like wood basically, and you put three kids on it,
Mikkel: fun
Toni: fun immediately, you know. And then at first it was like, no, no, I don't know.
Toni: And then they sit down and it's like, you know, I'm, I'm scared. And then you go and it's like FASTER! FASTER!
Mikkel: So
Toni: it was really fun. And, uh, so we kind of, I mean, so this is in Berlin Potsdam kind of area. So there's, I mean, there's no mountains forget about it. Uh, but we found like little mini hills where they could basically kind of slide down. Uh, it was good fun.
Mikkel: So Daumkurve and then
Toni: That's it. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. That was exactly what happened.
Toni: So we had like, you know, a bunch of time. I was there with my, you know, summer loafers, basically in the snow. Yeah, pretty much. No, it was my older son and then his two nieces, [00:02:00] who are twins.
Mikkel: Oh, I see what you did. You're setting us up.
Mikkel: You're setting, you thought about this for change, not just leaving me to do all the, do all the hard
Toni: So do the hard work
It starts with a twin
---
Mikkel: Yeah. Uh, twins. How am I going to do? No. So we're going to talk a bit about, um, one of the biggest pains folks have is execution. It was in OpenView's benchmark. Uh, we talked about it in the previous episodes.
Mikkel: I'm not going to go too deep on that, but go to market execution is one of the biggest challenges. What we're going to run through today It's a three step process that's going to help ensure solid execution and it starts with a twin.
Toni: a twin.
Toni: Yes, it starts with a
Mikkel: Starts with a twin.
Toni: So, many of you might not know this concept, so let's spend a little bit of time on this maybe. There's a, there's a concept that's been growing up in, I would say in the consulting world a lot,
Mikkel: engineering. Um,
Toni: um, in like VCs love it, basically the concept of a digital twin. [00:03:00] Right? So, oh, is this another AI thing?
Toni: Maybe? I don't know. I'm not sure about it, but largely no. Largely no. So Digital Twin as it, as it is. What, what is it Mikkel?
Mikkel: So, one of the first, the, when you read about the concept, one of the first that actually appeared was from NASA. When they had, was it the Apollo 13 mission? Something went sideways. And to fix the problem and salvage the mission, what NASA had was actually an exact replica of the air shuttle down on Earth.
Mikkel: So the engineers could actually inspect and say, okay, this is how you could go about fixing it, right? It's obviously not a digital thing. It was a physical twin they had, but it's just to portray the power of having a twin in that scenario, right? So today. When you look at it, it's, it's big in, uh, I will say engineering.
Mikkel: So not in our tech, SaaS startup world, but think about building a medical facility for a billion dollars. A lot can kind of go wrong, [00:04:00] but actually building a digital twin of the facility enables you to find some of the problems before you actually start constructing.
Toni: Yeah, and it's not just a blueprint or it's not just electricity or something like that. It's kind of, you want to get as close to the final end result as, as possible. And then you want to, you know, in this context, I guess when we run a couple of experiments, you know, does it actually work like this and like that and so forth.
Toni: Right. So it's for them, it's a really cheap way. To make sure that the end product is going to work as
Mikkel: Exactly, and I think if you look at windmills it's actually a thing that's being heavily used there because when you look at windmills,
Toni: windmills.
Mikkel: they're fairly identical, they're super expensive though to build, but the placement is gonna be different. You can place them offshore, so on the ocean, or in the mountains, or on plains, and the temperatures are gonna vary, the winds are gonna vary, there's so many things that changes.
Mikkel: So what do they do to build the twin? They place sensors all over the windmill, and they basically You know, pass that [00:05:00] information to a digital twin, so they know how does the windmill perform? What is the output with different, you know, what do you call it, variables? So temperature, wind, all that stuff.
Mikkel: And it enables them to optimize when they're going to go and build a new windmill farm. How are they going to fit it? How are they going to, you know, basically make sure it runs optimally?
Toni: And in their case, right, this is also, they're kind of placed a couple of sensors everywhere, right, which is another way to translate Information.
Toni: That's kind of, that's feeding the digital twin and what's happening there is you have those sensors going on, and they kind of receive this information, they're running through the digital twin and the digital twin then expects kind of, hey, this is, this is how that should be behaving. But then what comes as the next input from the sensor is actually that it isn't behaving like such.
Toni: Which is then actually helping them to figure out which windmills to kind of maintain first, right? Kind of send maintenance crews to. So it's a very sophisticated monitoring capability that they're basically deploying there. Where if you just had a sensor of like, Hey, does [00:06:00] it still go around?
Toni: Yeah, yeah, it does. But does it go as fast as you need it to based on the wind and the humidity and, you know, all of these other things that might play a role? No. Okay, well that might give us a clue that there's something wrong here, right? So we need to send a crew out, um, and otherwise you wouldn't have noticed this.
Toni: You would have, you know, that, that problem would have, you know, manifested until the thing was broken. Then you would send the crew out. I think another, uh, another, maybe more exciting one is Formula One, uh, you know, back to Formula One. So I think McLaren actually built a digital twin of their, of their, I mean, they're not one of the top five crews or something like this, but I kind of saw this recently.
Toni: They have a full on digital twin of their two cars, um, uh, where they feed all this information that they're kind of getting through. And All of these pieces in this car are obviously kind of connected, right? If something isn't working out, it will have a knock on effect on something else, and suddenly, boom, you lose the, you lose the kind of race.
Toni: And they use it actually tactically in the race to figure out which tires to put on, when, when [00:07:00] to come up, do they still gas up cars, by the way? I'm not sure if
Mikkel: No, I don't think so.
Toni: But like all kinds of like tactical things. Um, they're using this to, uh, to run those simulations, right? I think you can, you know, adjust all kinds of, you can adjust all kinds of things in this fucking car, right?
Toni: Um, and basic kind of, there, there's so many inputs, uh, how do you know which one will actually be the most optimal? And therefore, they have the tech, uh, the digital twin that, you know, does that, you know, they can, they can try it out.
Applying a digital twin to business
---
Mikkel: And so the funny thing is, without knowing it, a bunch of the listeners, they're gonna have some kind of a digital twin. Because. Is
Toni: Is it creepy now or
Mikkel: no? . None of themself. Of the business. Of the business, right? So they're gonna have maybe a BI dashboard somewhere. They're gonna have a spreadsheet with some kind of conversion rate logic.
Mikkel: What in essence they're trying to do is build a digital twin of how the business performs.
Toni: And I think in, our world, what's pretty good is, we already have all the sensors in place, right?
Toni: We don't need to go out and, you know, climb on [00:08:00] the windmill, kind of the rotor and kind of attach something it's already there. and the sensors are, uh, basically our, our business tools, right? This is where we're kind of recording all of the things that are being done. On the go to market side, right?
Toni: We're not saying, Hey, you should have a twin for the whole business. I'm not sure if we're there yet, technically as a, as, as a society, I would say, uh, but the basic kind of for the go to market side. Uh, over the last 10, 20 years, everyone has been installing lots of business tools across the funnel that basically kind of, you know, create a bunch of data, and that bunch of data now can be used as input to, um, your digital twin, right?
Toni: And I would actually say that, a BI dashboard doesn't qualify as that because it does lack the logic of these different pieces. I think if there's, You know, I think kind of when, when you look at this, the closest is, what's happening in your head about the go to market engine kind of that's, that's kind of, it's not a digital, it's a, I guess, organic twin that's in your head.
Toni: We're like thinking through, you know, how [00:09:00] this, how this thing might work out. Right. It's number one, number two is, you know, some kind of a, of a broken spreadsheet that you have hanging somewhere. And, and those, those are, you know, to a degree representations of, um, of the go to market business that you're running.
What does the twin consist of?
---
Mikkel: that you're running. Exactly. So the first step, it's a digital twin, we can also call it a model, a revenue model is something other people use as a term as well, right? What does it consist of?
Toni: I mean it's, It's pretty straightforward, it basically kind of has, the different funnel pieces in there, right, kind of that's, that's a way to structure that twin, right, and there you then need to decide of how deep you want to go, uh, do you want to do every single step, do you want to have monitoring, stops in between, do you want to, uh, Um, do you want to split it in all kinds of different, uh, we would say cuts or dimensions?
Toni: Um, but you know, the funnel is one piece and I think the other one is people. So all the different resources working on this. Um, and there are some that are super close to it, [00:10:00] like, SDRs and AEs, right? That's very close to it. then you have pieces that may be a bit further removed. Maybe, um. You're a social media manager or you're like, you're a designer or something like this.
Toni: They're kind of part of it, but to a degree, they're removed, right? They're not a direct input. And then lastly, you will have things like costs. Yeah. So, uh, the funnel itself, the digital twin doesn't come for cheap. the, uh, you know, generating all of that, uh, you know, the twin needs to understand that some of these pieces cost you money, right.
Toni: Um, and especially that is then, um, you know, if you have those inputs together. Um, that is then really what, what enables you to, um, create pretty strong decision making around this, right? Kind of just to understand these things. You, um, we sometimes call it kind of a what if scenario, or you can, you can poke holes into things and, Hey, how does this work?
Toni: How does this work? Um, instead of, uh, you thinking and trying to think through these pieces, which. I think a lot of us are doing, it's like, [00:11:00] ah, if we change this thing over there, then I need to kind of keep this other thing, uh, over here in mind. Then having, uh, having kind of a twin doing these things for you.
Toni: without making the same mistakes, so to speak, I think that's kind of one, one pretty straightforward input here. and then the other piece is, planning, forecasting, monitoring. I think those are the three main, main pieces you can actually do with the digital twin of your go to market engine.
Toni: that, um, that, you know, we're going to talk about this in a little bit more.
Toni: but basically kind of bunch of, um, actual business applications coming out of this that, that are very far removed from this, like, oh, cool, a twin.
Mikkel: But I mean, we, so we had Arun Mani from Pleo, he's CRO there on the show. And he also talked about, they had built a predictive people model, which is, you know, an essential, essentially a digital twin of part of the business, which is one model and enable them to ensure that they have the capacity at any point in time, accounting for people on going on paternity, maternity, on [00:12:00] sick leave, leave us, promotions and stuff like that.
Mikkel: Right. So. That's pretty essential, especially when you're operating a larger team, which I imagine they are, right? That you, you maintain the capacity to close enough deals. And it's the same with SDRs, it's the same with marketing, it's the same. So that is the power. And it gets pretty complicated quite fast.
Mikkel: And you do need to update the model because things change. We've seen it this year, you know, some of the conversion rates, if you think they're going to keep Being at the level they've always been, they might, they might change, right? So that model also needs to be kind of calibrated, uh, every once in a
Toni: I mean, we, we, maybe this is more on the execution part, uh, but, but think about this windmill that, um, Hey, there's suddenly more wind, but the windmill isn't spinning as, as the twin expected it to, um, you know, if, if you, if you didn't have this comparison on the side, you wouldn't know.
Toni: Um, and I think what we've seen over the past year. Uh, is a lot of less and, and, and, and, and, you know, less wind, uh, you know, out there. and those [00:13:00] windmills are kind of behaving completely differently than, than, than as they should. Um, and kind of seeing that before they completely break down, right. Kind of, that's, um, that's extremely useful.
Mikkel: So that's basically the digital twin. And you said one of the other keywords, which is planning.
Mikkel: Should we start there?
Planning
---
Toni: Yeah. So once you have this thing in place, right. And it's really, um. It's really a representation of your go to market in, in code, so to speak. Right. Then you can start using it as a, sometimes we say as a bottom up planning tool, you shouldn't be caring about where you want to go, right?
Toni: It's not the model's fault that you can't hit those goals that are being set. Um, right. Kind of, that's really important to keep in mind. but what you can then start doing is you can start adding all of these things that you would do in reality in order to then to achieve something, right. You could hire some people, um, you could execute some initiatives.
Toni: You would do all kinds of things with [00:14:00] the, with the business. Uh, but you can actually do it with a twin. And then the twin kind of, you know, spits out where, where are we most likely to end up?
Mikkel: Yeah.
Toni: And you know what, this is, this is going to be your bottom up. Revenue planning, forecast, whatever you want to call it, but that's the most likely number you're actually going to hit if you do all of these things.
Toni: And if all of these things actually. happen like they used to, or they happen like you want them to, right? and that then gives you the ability to have a fairly, you know, strong, good conversation with, um, the CFO on, you know, how the, the top down and bottom up is landing. Arun was talking about this in a very similar manner, actually.
Toni: he was, in, in that case, he was basically going through, Hey, here are all the things that we want to see change. Yeah. And basically got a list of. You know, I wouldn't say hires, but initiatives and so forth. and then was talking about, well, let's go through them one by one, instead of talking about the end result, uh, which is really diffuse and difficult.
Toni: And, you know, it's going to be a non helpful conversation. Let's go through it one by one. What [00:15:00] are the things we want to do? And are they realistic to do? Are they funded, uh, by when and so forth. Right. And as you then walk through this with the CFO and, you know, strikes things out or adds some things, um, that then gives them more or less.
Toni: The agreed end result, right? And that end result will be, uh, usually less than what the CFO wants, but it will be kind of something that they can agree on. Right? So ultimately this is about, you know, planning for hiring,
Mikkel: Yeah
Toni: planning for demand, and then in essence, doing resource allocation around that, right?
Toni: What are, what are the, what are the, you know, and a resource is hiring someone, but a resource can also be, RevOps team spending time on a problem. It can be an enablement being hired, but then deployed towards an initiative and so forth. There can be so, so many things, uh, but it's really important to make sure that they're resourced in the end of the day.
Mikkel: so Yeah, so maybe also just to simplify it for the listener, because I think sometimes the digital twin and all that stuff, it can get a bit complicated, but just imagine.. [00:16:00] you thinking about hiring five SDRs in February.
Mikkel: And being able to know, well, it's going to take you two and a half months to ramp them, and then they're on average going to book this amount of meeting, resulting in this amount of deal at this point in time, at this value.
Mikkel: That is a super simple way to look at the power of having that twin.
Toni: So absolutely, and I would say for, for this example, You know, it's like, it's like running a, a paper windmill in your backyard.
Mikkel: Yeah.
Toni: Do you need a digital twin for that? Like, that's, that's just silly. No one sits there and like attaches a little sensor to all
Mikkel: it.
Mikkel: It's
Toni: It's like, oh, there's
Mikkel: two of them. There's leaves
Toni: here and suddenly there's like, you know, leaves falling from the trees and it destroys the paper. So. That, you know, that kind of stuff, you don't need the sophisticated tooling for. Let's just kind of be honest, right? So if you have, um, you know, five SDRs you want to hire in, you know, January and so forth, you know, everyone with a piece of paper and a pen can kind of figure this out.
Toni: I think where, where, you know, this really becomes interesting and that's why it's also, [00:17:00] yes, it is a bit more complex. I think for sure is when this operation gets just bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger, right? And there's a good conversation to be had. Well, is it? Is it at the point of where Arun is running things like with a, with a hundred million, or is it a thing that is for a billion or is it a thing for 10 million?
Toni: Right. And I think it's somewhere in that spectrum, you know, also depending on the organization where, okay, wait a minute, those, those five SDRs in January, that's not really my problem. Like, yes, if I abstract it all the way back, really, Arun's problem is he has five SDRs in January. Kind of, that's, you know, that's the problem, but it's really times a gazillion. And, and when something reaches like a complexity level, and, and when the impact is so important, I think then, you know, somewhere in that spectrum, you're going to need to make the jump, right? And you need to, you know, figure out yourself, are you a paper windmill or your windmill farm that's offshore, you know, basically fueling Denmark right now.
Toni: Right. And, and there's just a difference between those two.[00:18:00]
Mikkel: I think it's also, especially when you, when you want to look at a full cycle of closing a deal just from the very beginning, There's a lot of steps in between on that journey, which inherently makes it really hard to do in a spreadsheet.
Mikkel: You need to account for time and conversion rates and what segments are we talking about and that makes it super difficult, right? And I just want to point out that this is actually critical for you to know what to execute and what to prioritize, which is the first step of ensuring a solid go to market execution, right?
Mikkel: This is why that that part matters a great deal.
Toni: And so I was just recently talking with a, with a CRO about, uh, and yes, it was kind of a sales conversation, but basically we were talking about the go to market execution piece.
Toni: And, and through that conversation, you know, also for her, it suddenly became so crystal clear. Well, you need to have a great plan first, or like a good plan, at least a solid plan. You need to have that first, because if you don't have an expectation where you want to tilt the engine, it's really difficult to do good execution around it, because what are you comparing things to, [00:19:00] right?
Toni: It's like Uh, let's stay with the windmill. I don't know how, I don't know how we got to
Mikkel: cut this.
Toni: But like, if, if there's a lot of wind coming, then you expect this windmill to rotate faster, right? But, um, this rotation is only okay if there's a lot of wind coming. If you don't expect so much wind coming and the rotation is kind of happening like this, something is going wrong, right?
Toni: So in order to, to set yourself up to actually manage the whole engine in the right way, you need to kind of say, okay, there are a couple of expectations we're having about the future. and those expectations could be completely, okay. You know, I think we can hire five people. It can also be much more guided being like, okay, we want to grow to 25 million.
Toni: Here, here are the expectations we have in order to kind of get to 25 million. Right. If we hit all of these on the hat, if the dashboard is green all along the way, we will hit the 25 million. Um, if there are things starting to be red and redder and even worse. Then we're probably not right. And that's kind of the, that's kind of the idea you want to have.
Toni: And sometimes we're talking [00:20:00] about digital twinning. Let's make it a little more complex. Um, sometimes we've been, you know, comparing this almost to observability. So, you have in your software stack, tons of things that are happening. You have servers running, you have. I don't know, lots of, lots of complicated pieces.
Toni: Right. And then there are a bunch of companies offering observability, for that stack. and basically what it does is it scans all of these different things and then, you know, looks for outliers. So like where's something shooting up, where's something shooting down or whatever. and then when they happen, they're kind of, Hey, here's something going on.
Toni: Um, pretty useful, pretty straightforward. Right. But in a go to market world, you actually don't want to know about the outliers. You want to know about the trajectory, right? Kind of, you know, are we, uh, are you expected for this? Is, are you expected for this to increase or not? Right. Uh, and if it does, but it doesn't, well then something needs to trigger and say like, Hey, here's something wrong.
Toni: Right. So you really need to kind of, you could say in an AI world, you [00:21:00] want to train your twin a little bit. You want to give that twin a bit, bit of an understanding and context of the future for kind of making the right decisions, kind of triggering you. And I think that's what the planning piece where it comes in, where it's kind of really important.
Mikkel: Yeah.
Toni: So
Execution
---
Mikkel: So once you have a model, twin and a plan in place, what's the next step to secure great execution?
Toni: Yeah so I think I think this is where almost, the ritual and the tradition around that needs to be built. I kind of, you need to,
Toni: Um, do all the things you need to do anyway. So let's just kind of be clear about that. but actually what, uh, what you can do now is week over week, day over day, month over month, doesn't matter. you can clearly see where the areas that we are executing as planned, where the areas where that doesn't happen.
Toni: Right. and if you have that codified in not a spreadsheet that sits somewhere in the corner that updates once a month. But daily, suddenly you can use it as an [00:22:00] operational tool. And once you use it as an operational tool, you'll have all the different participants in this go to market piece, which is, you know, it's not the AEs and the CSMs, but it's their leaders or you as a CRO, your, your lieutenants and their lieutenants basically go in and see where are we doing the right things, where are we not doing the right things according to the plan that we set.
Toni: Right. And you basically kind of give them the ability to. Sleep a little bit better at night because they don't need to worry every time they walk into an MBR, QBR and get like whacked over the head. Um, but number two, when things happening, they can proactively take action. It's like, okay, there's something down here in the corner.
Toni: you know, it's Jackie's fault or whatever. It doesn't matter if it's her fault or not. Uh, but you can say like, hey, Jackie, what's going on here? It's like, oh, actually this. Demo form in APAC broke, uh, and now we saw it and we are fixing it now. Right. and what you then can use that whole knowledge for, it's like an aggregated fashion, in your, uh, I would say your [00:23:00] CRO meetings.
Toni: Uh, to make sure, hey, does everyone have their eyes on the ball? Is it very clear where we're kind of going, where we're not going? and you know, based on the latest forecast coming all out of all of that stuff, you know, what is the twin expecting to happen going forward? is there anything we need to.
Toni: kind of account for going forward now, right? And then drive a conversation around that. and, and especially then once you, once you kind of land in that world of, okay, this is how it should be going. You almost also want to have the twin tell you, well, if this is happening like that, how much money is that actually?
Toni: Right? so I had myself multiple executive meetings. Where you spend half an hour, 45 minutes talking about some shitty webinar campaign that didn't go as planned while spending five minutes on the hiring issue that we have on the SDR side. As an example. Right. And I would have, you know, yes, in my head it was there and no one else's head it was like this, but I would have loved the [00:24:00] tool to just tell me, Hey, listen, this webinar problem they're talking about that you're like wasting 45 minutes on, you're ultimately talking about one deal.
Toni: You're talking about 20, 000 by the end of the quarter. There's a hiring problem over here. Is 150, 000 by the end of next quarter. So which, which problem should you be spending more time on actually? All right. And that's, you know, that having that help, uh, that it's not just sitting in your head, but in everyone's head, so to speak, and having clarity, kind of what are the real big issues we need to work on and spend time on, extremely helpful because.
Toni: That, in essence, enables you to hit those targets, right? Kind of, it helps you, where should you be spending the time with your team, focusing in on these, fixing those things, you know, treating it almost like a task list. It's like, okay, there's this issue now, we need this thing to be green next time we talk.
Mikkel: Yeah,
Toni: And if it's not then, when is it going to be green? And you need to be pushing this thing until it's okay again, right? And, you know, we sometimes talked about this, and this was also kind of talked to another CRO the other day.[00:25:00] The, the, the solution is not always where the problem is. It could be that, yes, you have a hiring issue over there and it's tearing a whole of half a million into your forecast for the rest of the year, but there might be a way to find a half a million somewhere else and that's basically kind of where then this forecasting comes in, right?
Toni: To say, yes, you have your plan and there will be some magical point of time where your financial plan and your, your go to market plan are fully aligned. And then in the next second, they will start to, to, to drift away and it's going to be a go to market and then we call it a forecast. The go to market forecast will be the more reliable things because it, you know, relies on, you know, up to date information, both fresh data coming from the sensors, but also you as a team sitting there and doing some, some updates to the twin is like, well, I don't think that hire is going to start here.
Toni: I think it's going to start over there. I think these things are actually not going to go like we planned. They're going to be slightly different. and then the twin basically kind of adjusts and kind of gives you the new forecast. Right. and [00:26:00] having that, that ability and that conversation and being so precise about that, um, that basically kind of helps you to hit your targets at the end of the day.
Mikkel: I mean so it’s such a powerul tool to have, yet it’s. I've been in those situations where someone shows you their model in a spreadsheet and can you see this is how we need to do it, just cell b5 and then we’re home. And then you’re like
Mikkel: what is this magical wonderland I'm looking at on the screen? I have no clue, right? It's, it's someone else's logic. It can make it really difficult. So I think it's, it is an essential tool to have because it's great for decision making and understanding whether you're in marketing sales or CS. If you need to make an impact, what are your options and how do you kind of Decide at the end of the day, but you kind of need to have the knowledge of how the model works.
Mikkel: And, and actually whether it's a spreadsheet or you buy Growblocks, doesn't matter. Someone, those leaders, they need to know, uh,
Toni: No, absolutely. And I think, um, I think the, um, I think the way I'm sometimes seeing it, it's like when you [00:27:00] have a fairly straightforward setup, I think you don't even need to have a spreadsheet.
Toni: I think it is in your head. And I think it works out. I think at some point, uh, you will start scribbling something in the spreadsheet. and then at some point, and at least CROs will know this when they open up the, uh, the spreadsheet and they just see the mess and they're like, you know what, that's too late now, you know, we we've gone over kind of, this is, I think we need to have a more robust solution for this.
Toni: Right. And I think the, the main downsides when, you know, using, using spreadsheets in this sense is really the. Uh, the inability to collaborate, share and so forth. Right. So
Toni: So for many reasons, not everyone is as literate in spreadsheets as someone else, and then it basically becomes a, um, useless tool, right?
Toni: It's not being
Mikkel: But I think there's more, there's more than that, right? Because what's going to happen eventually as we start the new year, Q2, three, whatever, someone is going to face a challenge. And the first task is to understand what [00:28:00] is even happening, right? And if you, if you don't have a model already there, it's going to take you longer to get to the root cause.
Mikkel: Right. And it's just, it's just so essential to be able to define then how do you solve it at the end of the day? And that's where if you, you know, if you don't have a setup, you're going to have to do some custom work and RevOps is going to spend one to two weeks, get back to you. And you've lost an immense amount of time in fixing a problem that you, you know.
Toni: but one of my favorite problems in this context is by the way, um, let's just say you miss target. And, um, and then there's this whole finger pointing happening. Whose fault is it?
Mikkel: Yeah
Mikkel: is Is
Toni: it marketing? Is it, you know, sales and so forth? And what's pretty cool when you have like a twin kind of on the side.
Toni: you can basically, you can basically kind of figure out, well, we missed by a million. but 600k was because of our sales execution. So let's say CVRs, ACVs, I don't know, was trailing behind. you can say, uh, 700k was because of the MQLs and some [00:29:00] conversion rate, whatever. Now we are, you know, 1. 3 million above, basically.
Toni: So, so, or below. But then you might have some other areas. In the twin that are positive,
Mikkel: yeah.
Toni: actually take it from the 1. 3 down to the 1 million miss, right? And how are you going to have a conversation about this? Because what you really want to do, you want to, it's not about blame or anything like this, but you want to, it's about root cause.
Toni: We, you know, you don't want to whack people over the heads, but you want to have a conversation. It's like, well, the problem why we're not hitting is there. And yes, you're responsible. and, uh, and that means you need to start going and fixing it, right? But if you have this constant finger pointing in a completely diffused world where yes, you didn't hit target and it's binary, you either do, you don't.
Toni: How do you know where in the funnel was actually the problem, and how, where do you know how much of it was the case, right? It's like when you have a car accident, and like just a smaller one in the city or something like this, yes, someone was running, I don't know, around the corner [00:30:00] a little bit too fast, but the other one kind of didn't look and so forth, and then there's a huge law fight, at least in Germany, I'm not sure how it works.
Toni: To basically kind of say like, you know, if you run a red light, you're 100 percent guilty, period. But then there's so many thousands of examples where it's kind of not that clear. And in Germany, very often it's like, well, it's 50 50. Both of, both of you, it's both of your fault. Both of you fucked up to a little bit of a degree.
Toni: And you want to have the same, the same system in your go to market. You want to like, well, to a degree. You know, it's not all of us, all of us messed up, right? Kind of sure, yes, have that message and have that conversation, but that's not going to help you with a great go to market execution. You want to have a good understanding who messed up by how much and why, and let's go, go fix
Mikkel: I think, and I think there's a more fundamental piece, which is, could you have uncovered that problem sooner? Right? We, we talk about it. You don't want to sit in QBR and figure out, ah, We could have, we should have fixed that in, you know, week two, when the quarter began. And I think that's the other dimension, when you have [00:31:00] that twin, you can see it really early, what's happening, and then you can decide, what are the course corrections you as a team need to make.
Toni: I actually believe that those QBRs will kind of die. Because right now the reason why you do a QBR on a quality level is because it's a lot of work. And the reason why many people say they do a QBR but don't is because it's too much work, right? They don't like doing it. But if you have the same logic of a QBR daily happening for you, you know, why would you sit there on a quality level?
Toni: And you know what? You should because of, you should have the conversation and the focus and blah, blah, blah. We talked about this and it's totally there. But I think, you know, once the laziness of people sets in, it's like, why, why would it be? discussing the same numbers that we've been tracking and fixing and changing.
Toni: Like, you know, why would I do this? It feels like a post mortem, uh, when I had this right, right there when it
Mikkel: it happened. Yeah.
Toni: anyway. So
Mikkel: So I think those are some probably non obvious ways to address execution when you think about it. Because [00:32:00] usually it will be a lot on the tactical level. This is basically about having a digital twin that enables you to spot some of the challenges.
Mikkel: You talked a bit about observability, which is just as an example is Datadog. Massive company you might have heard of, they're big on this, but for engineering teams, right? So it should totally be a thing you consider for your go to market as well.
Toni: as well. That's it. Um, and we talked about digital twinning. Once you have that thing set up, do a proper plan, and then basically kind of using this digital twin that is trained now with your plan to help you make the right decision.
Toni: NES. You need to still, you know, make all the phone calls. You need to fire the people, you need to hire the people, you need to be a leader and all of that stuff. Uh, but this kind of gives you a backbone to really, you know, make decisions with confidence and execute like a, like a rock star.
Mikkel: Wow.
Toni: Maybe there was too much energy in the end here.
Mikkel: Probably. Probably it was.
Toni: Thanks everyone for listening.
Mikkel: listening. Bye. [00:33:00]