269: Why RevOps Might be Your Answer to Scaling

Transcript

Matt Wolach: 0:00

So what is RevOps revenue operations? What is it?When do you need it? How should you use it? How should you employ it once you have it and what can it actually do for you?Lots of questions that I know many people ask once you start getting things working within your business once you start getting leads, once you start getting some things to be closed, well Taff love he came on, he shared all of the good information about rev ops keys with iceberg Reb ops, and he explained exactly what you need to look for when you need to start really thinking of having a Reb ops person help you with this and how to make sure you implement it the right way.Check this episode out. If you start to get some traction,start to get some things working, you're absolutely going to get value out of this.

Intro/ Outro: 0:50

Welcome to Scale Your SaaS, the podcast that gives you proven techniques and formulas for boosting your revenue and achieving your dream exit brought to you by a guy who's done just that multiple times. Here's your host, Matt Wolach,

Matt Wolach: 1:06

and welcome to Scale Your SaaS. We're excited to have you here. Thank you very much for being here. My name is Matt and I am your host our goal today is to help you grow your business. Let's find the new lead let's close and deal with make sure you get where you got to get really elated today to have cash flow with you doing

Taft Love: 1:26

Hey man, I'm well thanks for having me man.Conversation

Matt Wolach: 1:37

with an agency built for growing staff companies and scaling their operation systems and processes,understand how busy fast founders are. That's why he's built iceberg puts the burden of designing and managing a revenue tech staff place to focus on what really matters, the advisor sales and marketing operations at scale Venture Partners, as it goes to market advisory revenue operations, tap advises companies on key strategic decisions related to their operations, marketing operations, and more. So he when it comes to growth, I'm super glad to be here. Thanks so much for coming on the show.

Taft Love: 2:17

Hey, yeah, thanks for having me. This is awesome.

Matt Wolach: 2:21

I'm glad. Well tell us what are you up to lately,and what's coming up for you?

Taft Love: 2:26

You know, it's interesting, I left this out of the bio, but I'm actually living two lives right now. So I founded iceberg. I've spent five plus years growing it. Last year, I hired a CEO to take it over for me, because it turns out, I suck at being a CEO, I'm actually not good at that job.And in the meantime, I actually was a VP of Sales for a company called docs. And some of the founders out there may have heard of it that was acquired by Dropbox. And now I'm running a few sales teams for Dropbox. And so really, in this interesting place, where I'm straddling two worlds and get to help companies build their sales and marketing operations, while running sales programs at a big company. A lot of

Matt Wolach: 3:18

the company will want to take over that CEO role.

Taft Love: 3:25

A few things, there are some habits that I think make you made me really good early on, and a pretty poor CEO later as we hit a couple million, a few million in, in revenue. And I think this would have been true if I were a SASS company, we're services even though it's recurring. What I found out is that the bias to action is really valuable. When you're when you're nascent. When you're just figuring things out,we're trying lots of things and as we grew, and there's now a lot more value and being a bit slower and a bit more thoughtful and planning. And I'm still moving at 100 miles an hour, it was actually helpful for me to bring in somebody who had that sort of next level skill set,which is Hey guys, let's let's press pause, let's think about what we're doing for the next six months, the next year and decide whether all of these little ideas you're having Taff are aligned with this broader vision that we've agreed upon.And so having somebody come help me exercise that discipline has been just just world changing.

Matt Wolach: 4:26

Cool. I love that thought that you put it that way is that really there's different ways that we need to behave or different ways to ask different tasks in the early days versus once you start getting rolling.And I've often asked that question to the mentors and even on Twitter, you know, which is better. There's not a perfect answer. It's more of what's better at that thing within your growth cycle, right?

Taft Love: 4:52

Yeah, that's absolutely right. And some of the irony here is one of our values is that we're bias to action because we were primarily with small companies, we help companies get from zero to one effectively in terms of building an Operations Program. And so the companies we work for are where we were a couple years ago, they're at 1,000,002million, 3 million in revenue,sometimes as big as 10 or 15million, but most of them are on the on the smaller side of that scale. And so they hire us to come move quickly. And yeah,fast is better than perfect in those in those scenarios. But as you grow that that balance starts to shift, and I think perfect is almost always the enemy of good. So I think perfect is is not the ideal, but certainly, certainly the speed with which we act is is changing. It was a gap I was feeling so if you've heard of the company panda doc I was I that was early in my sales career, I was an account executive there and eventually took over the the operations function as well as some of the sales teams. And I had some consultants come in to help us and it seemed like every consultant was focused on US system. So we'd have a Salesforce team come in and help us and it would break things in our HubSpot, and then we'd have a HubSpot team come in and help us and it would break things and outreach. And nobody, these siloed operations firms were really good at their little corner of operations, and everything else tended to break.So I actually started just helping companies on nights and weekends before I had a kid and a wife and could work early mornings, I was on the west coast. So I'd work with East Coast companies, I'd get up early and help them and work on weekends. And I essentially was was trying to help people connect before the word rev ops was really a thing, these various functions in the sense that like, let's talk about how the sales teams project affects everyone up and down funnel from the sales team before we go build things. And so that was the need that inspired me. And really what carries us through today is this idea that we sort of bridge sales, marketing and customer success operations.

Matt Wolach: 7:06

Know that there's some people wondering out there,what is robot? Explain? What exactly is revenue operations?Robot?

Taft Love: 7:14

Yeah, 100%. You know,what's funny is, it's not exactly what we do. I named the company back when people were still figuring out what the hell Reb ops meant. So if you got in a time machine and went back five years, and you heard people talking about Reb, ops, you would say, oh, it's sales and marketing systems. And that's rev ops. And that's more what we do at iceberg and what today's definition of DevOps is, now, it is a much broader function that in my mind, kind of has three pillars, IT systems strategy,and enablement. And, of course,each of those pillars is its own big discipline. And so another another sort of core key element of, of Reb. Ops is the idea that Reb Ops is not, is not rolling into any of its client orcs. So it sort of gets rid of silos,and it gets rid of conflicts of interest in the sense that the VP of sales, running sales operations or running operations, creates some pretty serious conflicts of interests and and create some questionable data for the the, the sale of the company's leaders to actually steer the ship. You can't really trust your compass at that point. And so Reb Ops is an answer to the silos, the conflict of interest, and then this just explosion of tools that now span lots of different parts of the org, you know,outreach, there are three, four or five teams that use outreach at one company. So the idea that sales ops owns outreach is another huge conflict of interest that Reb Ops is sort of the answer to so it's, it's just the newest version of operations without the silos.

Matt Wolach: 9:02

If somebody says,Okay, well, we need this, what would you say are the pros and cons of we're gonna hire somebody in house to kind of make that happen? We're gonna go with an agency, somebody who does this for a lot of people.

Taft Love: 9:14

So this is a really,this is a really important question to ask yourself and,and almost every company we talked to it, iceberg will submit a form, and we'll call them and the first thing they'll say is, look, we're hiring this role. But you know, maybe you can help us for a couple months,and often we stay with them. Our average is 14 months right now.And so what happens is these smaller companies figure out that qualified for DevOps is really expensive at that size. I talked to a CEO the other day who said, I'm spending a million dollars on a Reb ops team, and I'm actually a year and I'm actually not sure they have the level of qualification we need and so cost is huge. If you don't have the if you don't have the resources to actually develop people, you have to hire senior people and most companies don't, you know, smaller companies especially don't have don't have Reb ops in house now,as you grow that switches, so once you get your series B and C, and you can afford a Reb ops team, as soon as you can actually afford them and keep them busy, you should hire them in house. So I built iceberg to be a bridge, not a forever solution. And again, we don't really do Reb ops in the true sense of the world. So. So Reb Ops is something that's that's much bigger than any like systems implementer can do for you. And so as soon as you're able to hire it, the pros definitely outweigh the cons for owning it internally developing that institutional knowledge,keeping it not having the risk that is that comes with a vendor once you're sort of out of that,that growth stage.

Matt Wolach: 10:53

So what are some of the challenges that if a business says, Okay, we want to implement this one in front of the talent? Is there that? What are some of the mistakes that they might make? Yeah, so

Taft Love: 11:02

a lot of the challenges are just nothing works. And I mean, that if you talk to sales leaders, and they'll say, like, I don't, I don't even have the data, I need to make decisions, and we don't really have process. And so the first time you hire rep ops,it's usually to address this wild west thing where, you know,I know marketing is creating leads, I don't know what sales is really doing with them. And,and the the common thread across all these complaints is visibility. I just can't run my business by field anymore. We're too big for that. But I don't know what's going on in my business. I used to tell founders, hey guys, your VP of marketing, how many leads they created last month? Now go ask your VP of sales, how many leads that got last month? And don't tell them that you just asked the other one. And if that number doesn't match, call me back. And you know, it's kind of a silly thing to say. But it's it's a good proxy for like, Hey,you, you don't have systems in place that are actually going to enable you to get to the next level, make the most of your inbound or build quality outbound pipeline and even know when you have pipeline, have you defined pipeline, those are a lot of the like, questions that people who hire iceberg are thinking about. And then there are as you grow bigger, it's different challenges. There are other firms like your go nibblies out there that are do what we do for small companies,but for much larger companies and a more fenced in project,you know, we're, we're struggling because our reps can't create order forms quickly and easily. And we need the Salesforce to talk to our accounting system. So can somebody spend the next six months making CPQ work perfectly for us? And so there's like another level above us that helps with that. But we're,we're usually focused is yeah,the sort of nascent company scaling problems.

Matt Wolach: 13:00

Okay, well, we need to do is, I mean, one of the things you brought up is the thing that I want to get on with each other. Dan pine rather, one of the reasons.Don't want that we want people working independently. And how many different numbers? What's the takeaway tell was, so it was? Great. Working together? Is that the way to do it?

Taft Love: 13:36

Yeah, I think that's a that's a big part of the answer. And and so to sales,marketing, customer success,sort of across your business,when you reach a point where you realize a few things are true, I don't trust my data, or my data is incomplete or whatever your data is untrustworthy for some reason. I don't know the path to fixing that quickly. And I need somebody to own this. Like when those three things are true.Because data is a good proxy for a lot of other things. If your data is bad, that probably is a good indicator that you're lacking process, that's probably a good indicator that there's an enablement issue. And so yeah,reporting is is sort of a good proxy for how everything else is working. And as soon as you stop trusting it, that's the time to start thinking about having someone own it, whether you call it DevOps or something else having a single throat to choke,with the goal of getting you the data you need to run your business is is like the point at which you know, the point at which you decide that is the case is probably when you should start considering looking into DevOps, either internally or through an agency

Matt Wolach: 14:51

or something that metrics in order to optimize their revenue operations.

Taft Love: 14:56

Yeah, so we generally come in after board meetings.Somebody has a rough board meeting where their board doesn't trust the data or they're not confident in it or whatever. It's a bad board meeting. So some of the things we're often brought in to answer are really simple. What is our arr? Right now? What is our annual recurring revenue right this minute? What is our net churn? And then some, some sort of deeper level ones are which of my sales reps aren't working that hard? I don't think they're all working that hard. But I don't actually know the answer to that. How do we tie all these systems together so that we can surface an answer to who isn't?isn't working hard? And does hard work actually correlate?Well, with success on my sales team? I'm not actually sure that it does, but I need some data to work with. Another one is, I think we're spending a ton of money on marketing. Where is it going? I you know, what are the outcomes of the spend? I think I know, but I I'm not confident enough to feel good writing another $25,000 check to some agency next month, to go spend it across five platforms without having a really clear answer to what's my Roelofs? What's my return on adspend? On every dollar of this? Those are some of the data points where you know, running your business becomes more and more impossible if you if you don't have trustworthy data.

Matt Wolach: 16:22

Yeah, I totally agree. That's something even as smaller stages I've seen within my companies is, you have to understand some of those metrics to be able to know are we doing the right thing? Are we putting our money in the right place, or putting our focus in the right place? And without the brilliant thought, oh, and I noticed this with my clients, I asked them,Hey, what are you at this? What do you make? In many cases, I have no idea these, these companies are, you know, small,sometimes bigger, and oftentimes, they just have no clue. Right?

Taft Love: 16:51

That's 100%, right.And before six or eight months ago, I think you could sort of get away with a lot of that,because the money in the bank is is not burning down too fast.But as of 2023, the rules of physics apply, again, even if you took around and have some money to spend. And so it is even more critical than than it has been the last few years to have a pretty clear understanding of of the return on on all of your spend.

Matt Wolach: 17:26

Your clients are able to sustain these improvements that you've made with the revenue operations.They don't just kind of throw them in a face.

Taft Love: 17:36

It's a really good question. So first, I want to challenge the premise with the idea that rev ops and really all of operations should be an iterative process, there is nothing we're going to do today that will last through the next five years. And we have to accept that we have to understand it. And we have to build for today's problems and know that we're going to keep adjusting. The trick is to have people who can help you think around corners and make sure that today that the today's solution doesn't fail tomorrow.And so the first is bringing people to the table who have the answers to the test. There's nothing more valuable than bringing in somebody who can say, Look, I've worked with 50companies that look a lot like you, I know you're special in these key ways. But I've done this thing before you're asking me what your ARR is, I know exactly how to go do that. So you need that person at the table. Even if you're a brilliant engineer who's built an amazing product that's changing the world. If you don't have the answers that test the time it takes you to figure it out. And sure you could you could you could toil and figure it out and eventually get it right. But that time is so so expensive. So So yeah, that's that's the first thing is like,bring in people and it can be in house too. It doesn't have to be an agency but bring in someone who knows the answers to the test.

Matt Wolach: 18:57

All great piece of advice for somebody who's running a company is find somebody who knows the answers has already been there, done that you understand that that's why a lot of people come to me that I've been through it and they say, Hey, Matt, what about this? How are we going to do that. And it's cool that I'm able to share my experience and experience that I've had with other clients so that they are able to get through it. Same thing when people come to you,you've been through this many times. I think that's the key to business is don't try and figure everything out on your own, you may eventually figure it out,but it's gonna take you a long time, it probably cost you a lot of money. Much better this sort of dance is a test and what advice would you have for now,

Taft Love: 19:36

well, if you're just starting out right now, I in some ways in view, I think I think you're starting out at a time when it's really hard to be successful and you've probably gotten funding or hopefully you've you've got enough traction that you're gonna make it and so envious of the people who are getting their start now,which sounds crazy, but my advice would be first keep it simple. I don't know how many times I am gonna come at this from an operational point of view. Don't try to don't operationalize everything early.Not everything has to scale.It's okay to keep things simple.And beyond that, whether it's again in house or agency, and across operations, and sales and marketing, bring in the experts you can afford. And focus,especially if you're a software founder on giving yourself the time back to talk to customers and understand the market. Don't spend your days toiling in systems trying to figure out how all these things should connect.Even if you're an engineer, and it's fun to solve problems.Every minute you're spending doing that stuff or building a playbook for your teams forget operations for a minute doing things a sales leader should be doing or a marketing leader should be doing. Every minute you're spending doing those things isn't you're not out talking to customers,understanding what they need,figuring out how to get your business to the next level. So operations aside, bring in experts, just as you said, who know the answers and give yourself the time back to go build a great business not to work in it.

Matt Wolach: 21:16

And I want to make sure that people get to know a little bit more about you and I heard what's the best way for them to learn about you and

Taft Love: 21:23

well, iceberg ops.com Go check out our website.There's a lot of information on us and how we work my LinkedIn is there and write me I try to respond to everybody that reaches out to me happy to I'm always happy to give somebody half an hour and talk through a problem you're having you don't have to you don't have to pay us to just like get an answer to to a quick question you have. I love talking to founders out there so so reach out to me directly if you'd like

Matt Wolach: 21:49

the show notes. So much for coming on and sharing all your wisdom.

Taft Love: 21:55

Yeah, man. Thanks so much, man. I appreciate it.

Matt Wolach: 22:00

You don't want to miss on any other upcoming leaders like we're looking for reviews. Definitely give a review that would really help us performance.

Intro/ Outro: 22:18

Thanks for listening to Scale Your SaaS for more help on finding great leads and closing more deals go to Matt and wallach.com