If you’re thinking about using AI in RevOps, you NEED to get your house in order first.
In this episode of Boardroom RevOps, I chat with Lonny Sternberg (VP of RevOps at Veriforce) about what being AI-ready means for RevOps.
Spoiler: it’s not just plugging ChatGPT into your workflows.
Lonny shares what repeatable, scalable, and sustainable processes look like in practice, and why most teams need to nail the basics before they start layering on AI. You’ll also hear Lonny’s take on:
- The biggest mistake RevOps teams make when implementing AI
- Hard-won lessons from scaling companies from $0-$150M+
- How to protect your time in RevOps while still being a team player
Whether you’re scaling your ops org, navigating AI hype, or just trying to get out of firefighter mode, this conversation is for you.
Full transcript:
Hello. Thanks everybody for joining us for another installment of our aim for excellence webinar series, where we are breaking down strategic operational and career related best practices and rebels with leaders in the space that we admire. Again, I’m James co founder of AccountAim or the modern data stack built specifically to take rev ops teams for being reactive firefighters to proactive strategic partners.
Very excited to be joined by Lonny Sternberg today. Thanks for taking the time out. James, thanks for having me. Super excited to be here and, discuss, I think we’ve got a great agenda plan for today in terms of topics that will add some value to the listeners. Awesome. Lonny has had a variety of leadership roles in RevOps and Ops more generally, as a great case study for, adding strategic value beyond just, RevOps and getting a seat at the table.
Now consults for a number of great SaaS businesses too, and that’s the highlight. But Lonny, do you want to share a little bit more detail on your background? Yeah, most definitely, James. I’ve been leading revenue operations for the last 12 plus years, and I’ve specialized in building diverse, specialized teams, that are focused on helping to mature the revenue engines required to penetrate markets and really grow predictable revenue streams.
Amongst, advising or working, fractionally with other companies amongst my full time role, I really like to work with early stage startups and founders, as well as, very mature organizations to help with the complete, revenue architecture from end to end, zero to 150 plus million dollars.
And they’re all, yeah, I’m impressed. You really like span the gamut in your experience. It covered a lot of things, but I’m really excited to chat here. You’ve spoken in the market. I know, I think I have some other podcasts around like AI and its impact on go to market and RevOps. But I’m excited to cover some of the more fundamentals today because I think there’s a lot of talk in AI, but a lot of, teams haven’t even done like the blocking and tackling correctly.
So we’ll dive in there, which will be great. But before we get too far in the weeds, I always like to start high level. And you almost alluded to this and your intro, but how do you define RevOps? Yeah. So I think, traditionally speaking, if we look at like the historicals and a lot of the common nomenclature that’s being used, amongst the marketplace or really how revenue operations got it’s footing is a lot of folks have said, Hey, it’s the alignment of success sales and marketing.
I think that the breadth and depth of rev ops has expanded quite a bit. If I was to oversimplify it and try to come up with as few words as possible, I would say it’s removing friction from all revenue generating activities. That’s, yeah, that’s great. And I think, yeah, revenue generating activity is like covers the whole gamut of the customer journey, right?
So I think that’s a very broad statement. Yeah. A good venue to narrow down what is often a huge role in RevOps, I like that a lot. From a career perspective, what kind of brought you into RevOps? Early in my career, I had the opportunity to work for, as a go to market leadership and strategy, B2B SaaS organization.
And then continuing the evolution of my career arc, joined, a traditional B2B SaaS startup and really worked from, a complete end to end go to market blueprint customer journey, which the company had no revenue whatsoever. It was pre revenue. I would say it’s yours, complete traditional zero to one.
So really climbing the operational kind of ecosystem and ladder was a generalization that was used in that organization just because of the way that it was structured. To support, the gamut of all the different hats. But the real focus was everything revenue operations that we do. It gave me the opportunity, I think, to develop some very critical and unique skill sets that allowed me to, understand the impact on the P& L, understand, customer life cycle, customer journey, critical metrics, cap tables, but then also, what are the tools, the people, the process, and the systems that are all used to ultimately Impact, revenue generating activities.
That’s great. And we often talk with our guests about like, how do you make rev ops a strategic function? And I think you have done that based on that description. I think that’s what makes Rev ops really interesting. Like I think what a lot of mid-career people where they might falter is thinking of it as just like a task master role We talk about a lot and I think you kind.
Expanding the scope. There’s what keeps it really interesting. It’s what keeps being clear. I think that there’s a, that evolution where, you know, earlier stages of the organization, I was the taskmaster, right? Yeah. Completely implementing a CRM, the moving from spreadsheets to. Dedicated systems, tying everything together, then working amongst organizations, so you move from IC to a little bit of management to, ideally to more of a strategic function.
But I think that there’s a need to consistently have the knowledge and the ability to be tactical and strategic and to move, vertically and horizontally with throughout the business, no matter what point of the company you’re in or what point of the career cycle. 100 percent definitely still have to know the tactics to be successful.
That’s actually a great segue. We talked about being AI ready, but we got to do the basics before that. Can you share what it means to be AI ready? To get to that point. Yeah it’s no secret that AI is the conversation of choice for many people today, and I’m a huge fan, to be very clear.
I think that AI has the potential to, radically infuse a lot of different tactics, approaches, and frankly, turn a lot of assumptive, fundamentals on their head. I think that we’re in this kind of era that’s two phases right now. I think one is that we’re moving very fast.
At lightning speed, towards the target state, which I don’t know that everyone knows, but we know that AI is helping us get there. But I think at the same time, we’re also fundamentally, you have another kind of group of individuals that I think that’s what we’re going to talk about today, too. Is that, hey, we need to really lock down the block and tackle, right?
We need to block and tackle, we need to figure out exactly what we need to do. So where would we infuse AI? So I’m a big proponent of really understanding the basics, the core logic of the business and breaking down the processes, the systems, the tools, and then really gathering that information and collectively communicating it with everybody.
So to be AI ready, you have to have repeatable, you have to have scalable, you have to have sustainable. Of course, you can minimize some tasks and you can remove some things. But to do it well and do it consistently and I think really get the AI to perform at its best and as it gets smarter and better And more mature, if the more information that you provide consistently and accurately, I think those are going to be the winners in this space.
Yeah. Repeatable, scalable, sustainable. That’s a good way to narrow it down. If we were to double click like one layer deeper, what are those three things like mean tactically for a revenue organization? Yeah. So I think, as the organization gets larger and thinking about this question strategically, it’s harder to keep everybody aligned, right?
When we talk about alignment as a generalized term. But what if we really double click into it to your words and dial into the details, I think it’s really a matter of setting the top line, most critical metric, whether it be a KPI, an OKR, and laddering everything up to what needs to be achieved and then designing everything around that from every department so vertically and then horizontally saying Look, yes, you’re going to have fundamental KPIs or OKRs for your group and your department and your directs, respectively.
But it all needs to drive this one outcome. And if everybody is clear on that objective, I think then, that’s when the magic starts happening and you start really achieving those goals. Too often, I have seen and found that there’s just too many goals or too many objectives. It’s trying to please everybody.
Everybody. So what happens is you end up with a bunch of disparate objectives amongst leaders and then that’s when you start to have, a lack of, a first team principal amongst your executive team and you start to have breakdown and alignment. So everyone’s I need to hit this metric.
Why are you doing it? So I think simple equals better. Yeah. So well put. And I think in the context of AI too, like you can’t just unleash AI to run wild, right? Like it has to be moving towards a goal. And I think that’s a perfect encapsulation of how to do that. So you talked about what it means to be unified.
You talked about some of the tactical steps of laddering to actually get unified, go to market and beyond the metric layout, any other steps needed to get there? It might be that covers it, but I’m curious if there’s anything else top of mind. I think it’s really a fundamental understanding of what is trying to be achieved, but more systematically, I think if we go back to the fundamental principles of removing friction, I think there’s a lot of fatigue in the buyer’s journey.
And if everybody is saying look, if we want to make this a delightful world class experience, if we want to remove as much friction and make it easy to buy for us, and we want to deliver value on day one and thereafter, what would we need to do as an organization? And then from there, then you can bring more people into the room and you can start breaking down those specific objectives.
And then you can use the fundamentals such as OKRs and KPIs and ladder goals and SMART goals and different frameworks and change management and influencing with and without authority. I think, but before that, you really need to decide like what can we control and what are we going to react to? So like the macro economics, you can not, can’t necessarily control.
But you can control the microeconomics internally within the organization. So if you reach a point where there’s fluidity, there’s trust, there’s consistency, and everybody is just really clear akin to a pit crew of some racing analogy, whether it be Formula One or something else, that everybody knows exactly what has to happen, no matter what.
So as you’re, reaching some form of a constraint or a blocker or something of that nature, you have to Figure out the solution and overcome. I think getting into that mental state and then being really clear on the tactical, you then can focus on the solution versus fighting the dynamics of the relationships based on having that top line level of clarity.
Does that make sense? It does. A really good like tactical definition to what it means to be aligned and like how you actually reach it, which is great. Cause I think a lot of people talk about misalignment broadly, but there’s not a lot of what does that actually mean? So I think that’s really, yeah, I think that the OKRs and the KPIs, I think those are tools, right?
But those aren’t solutions. Yeah. And if we talk about looking at forward looking versus, historical looking and we talk about effortless collaboration and consistency and reliability on metrics. I think a lot of the time it’s a reactive state and if you’re using the historical metrics to say Hey, this is what we know But we’re also making a bet on something in the future.
So you’ve got to be in the position where You can have as much real time data, real time analysis, not flipping the strategy too frequently because you got to let it play out. But I think too far, and that’s where AI and some other deeper conversations, maybe another podcast comes in is, Hey, how are we setting ourselves up to have real time evaluation versus historically we’ve always looked at, run rates of the past and made future decisions.
Yeah, tell me a bit about that for anyone listening that, needs to take that step of like real time analytics to guide them in analysis. Like, how do you accomplish that? I think it’s a lot easier said than done. Yeah, I think, if I was to go back to, I think, a very common principle, it’s really understanding that the journey end to end.
Every business is a little bit different. And I think that there’s some, when I was just having this conversation actually, yesterday being LinkedIn with Josh, about the idea that Hey, what are some critical metrics? And I think the metrics from zero to 10 million, 10 to 20, 30 to 40, et cetera, et cetera, are going to be a little different, but I think it’s being very clear on, what is important to your ICP at that juncture, and then making sure that you are intimate with that blueprint, that end to end journey.
And then you know how to real time analytics and tracking and visibility, not just tracking, but visibility and reliability on that information to be able to monitor the health and how things are going. But that may not be the same metric when you go to say, 40, 50 plus million dollars. That may be more of, readiness, awareness, and maturity to be able to say, hey, how do we have more inorganic growth?
And how do we conjoin These different motions, different go to market teams, these different platforms and products to be able to deliver on the diversity of our ICP that we have just ingested. Yeah. Tell me about the visibility piece there. Cause we, you covered standing up the metrics, figuring out what the metrics are.
I think there’s another challenge of how do I get folks to actually look at them and action them and drive the business with them. Yeah, I think there’s some really neat products. I think you guys got some offerings out there today that, that help with that. There’s a lot of really great products.
Talk about back to AI a little bit. It’s allowing people to really get to market a lot quicker with some tooling. And I would say some lower cost entry points that have historically been. People have been priced out of that market if they’re, earlier in the business life cycle.
But I think it’s the reliability and the dependability. So yes, having the tool and having the process. But if we take the most basic step back and look. How do we collect that data? And where does it come from? And do we have reliable, inputs and outputs? And are we moving that data into a visualization piece?
And is that visualization piece real time? Is there a lag? Are we waiting for different departments to report in? Do we have this, disparate collection techniques and different people that own different pieces, but really it should stay housed in so one area. So if we can consolidate, I think, into the right respective areas, and then everyone becomes like an absolute expert on those specific pieces, and we’re able to deliver those reliable metrics real time, then we don’t end up with the common problem that you and I hear about almost daily about FP&A and finance has.
It’s, 10 and we’re saying it’s 7 and it’s okay, I can’t rely on anything. What’s the number, right? Is it an average between the two? So I think that’s the age problem that we always have. But I think having some, I think, again, using the framework, not people process and tech, but people process systems, right?
What are the systems and the tooling? Yeah, I think that spot on really resonates with, why we build AccountAim was to bring the benefits of a data warehouse without needing all of those resources. So let’s push it out to some of these more up and coming teams and let’s build some workflows to actually put those desired actions based on the metrics, in front of people that were having to wait for that lag.
Yeah. And then to double click a little bit deeper into that, James, what the other component and that I’ve been talking a lot amongst, the community and my peers have been really making sure that the incentives. And the management objectives are aligned around the activities, the collection, the visualization and then the influencing of changing those numbers because when we’re collecting that information, if we know the expectation and everyone is really clear on the management objectives, the incentive compensation plans, et cetera, the culture is really surrounding that energy, then I think it becomes more consistent and now we can start infusing AI to automate it.
That whether it be, the traditional CRM route or some other form of, a little bit more lightweight, offerings in the marketplace and connecting them all at different points. Yeah, totally. I’m always reminded. I think Warren Buffett said it, show me the incentives and I’ll show you the outcome or maybe this is, I think it’s the pithiest best quote on that front is so true.
Really helpful, Lonny. And thanks for running through that. Any other kind of key processes that we’ve missed here that it go to market org needs? to be getting correct in terms of the blocking and tackling for AI, or do you think this is the foundation here? Yeah. I think that it’s really, it’s breaking out, just double clicking back on what we talked about a little bit more about, understanding what you’re reacting to versus what, where, what, where you’re, what are you running away from versus running towards?
I think making sure that you have those consistent processes. And I think really an expectation, understanding of what AI is going to do versus what it’s not going to do. So I think there’s an educational component. To everybody inside the organization on like how to best effectively use it, right? And then I think there’s buying and aligning the current tooling and offering, whether it’s third party or whether you can, intersect, some of your proprietary software pieces to, inject that AI at certain points.
And then there’s a matter of, I think, getting the ability to execute with more speed. And more precision and more reliability. So specifically, I think AI has the ability to return a lot of real time data and then even get into a lot, better forecasting and analytics, frankly, than what you or I could do, because, human beings are not the best at predicting the future.
But if we’re using computer modeling and we can get that back to that basic. Process and we know it’s true and tried, then frankly, it should be right every time. Yeah, totally. We’ve spoken to offline a bit about this and concept of go to market data backup. And I’m struck with that last comment around, if AI is going to use all this information and be more effective than a human, like it has to have that historical corpus of data, right?
Which I think a lot of companies actually lack, especially on the more up and coming, call it C series, a series B level. It doesn’t have the chance to invest in like a full data stack. It’s easy to overlook, but what should people be thinking about when it comes to this topic?
Yeah. So I really enjoy this question because I have most recently been in, in a spot where you are adding more and more users to the CRO, specifically Salesforce, and as you’re building this reliance, any type of outage, loss of data or anything else can be detrimental to the business. And so often, and everything that we’ve talked about thinking in advance of this conversation, everything that we’re saying, it’s idealistic, right?
It’s this is what you want to strive for. But we’re also trying to run a business during the day and, grow sales and put out fires and take care of clients, et cetera, et cetera. I think getting this alignment and why alignment is such a big thing is so difficult is because everyone’s busy, right?
Going back to the data and the redundancy in the backup, I think it’s something that often gets overlooked to say, do we have any recovery for our core go to market data? And most of the time in the CRM, if there was something catastrophic or accidental, yes, you have some, recycle bins and some other components, but There’s not really a phenomenal solution out there and it could take, days and weeks to recorrect a mistake.
I’ve been there where it’s accidental. You have a new hire and, unfortunately they’re like, Oh yeah, I got rid of that field. And all of a sudden. Everything goes. So I think if there’s an opportunity, frankly, and something that I’ve been very interested in, I’ve been asking for is a more cost effective way that is not 100 percent seat based or that is not connected to my, hundreds of thousands of dollars, platform or contract where I can have some form of a reliable, almost some form of a mirror to the data as it changes or real time.
So some of these smaller platforms are becoming very intelligent where they’re reacting to the data real time. But how about some type of snapshot over time, that is built for RevOps folks. Yeah. And that’s definitely the approach we’re taking and we’ll keep them nameless, but on the business model side, it’s really a point well taken to, or some of the big players, I think it’s like a 30 percent upchart on your existing contract, which is just like a wild finger in the air thing.
Yeah, it makes it, I think, cost prohibitive and that when you’re trying to advocate for, So ROI, are you looking at growth and revenue generation or are you looking at business continuity and where do you expense that? So that’s usually a lot of the things that I’m focusing on is what is the ROI?
Where can I remove redundancies and what I call flatten the stack and simplify versus adding just more layers of things that are continuity versus revenue generating. Yeah, I think that’s really well put. I also wanted to touch on, maybe slightly aside from data backup, you made a really I think salient point, and I hear it a lot from the RevOps folks, and it’s you know, in line with how we talked about how do you get from being a taskmaster to being strategic, you said RevOps folks are really busy, you’re fighting fires every day, so if we take a step back, like obviously you’ve done this throughout your career based on your career trajectory, How do you protect your time in RevOps?
There’s always a million and one things to do, but you need to keep like that bigger picture of the customer journey zoomed out. Are we, removing all friction from the process? Like any advice for folks who might be, more junior in their careers of how they can do this? Most definitely.
I think that there’s I look at it as there’s bridging the gap. Or bridging between tactical and strategic. And when you need to move in between both of them daily or even hourly, or sometimes be able to think for different objectives, I think that there’s kind of time based projects that are more.
Longer term, I think that there’s asks, right? If I put it into another framework or category that’s just real time, whether it be email, Slack, text, phone call, any mode of communication. And then there’s this, like, where are we taking the business? Let’s call it just strategy for lack of better terms right now.
I think creating visibility to a process. I like to use sprints. And have planning sessions similar to a product team, Scrum, Agile, et cetera. And say, look, we’re going to do two week sprints and we’re going to publish our board or wherever we’re keeping this medium.
So you have visibility and you have a line to understand. A lot of folks, I think, especially on the go to market teams are resistant to wanting to put a ticket in because they’re like, Oh, great. A ticket. I’m just another number, but it really is a phenomenal way to keep track of everything and to prioritize.
And then you can say look, this is what we’re working on. And then you can organize it by sprint and deployment. You can tie it back out to a key metric. You can organize it, up front and you can plan out. And then you can see and track, through analytics what is the diversity or the segmentation of the type of request.
So I think that’s number one. Number two is having the ability to build trust early on in these relationships. And to build trust with the team and say, look, we are here to serve and we are here to, I don’t, it’s sometimes you have to be neutral. It’s sometimes you have to be, very focused on.
No, my number one goal is to help remove friction from other generating activities. I think amongst that conversation, you need to build trust and a relationship early on. So you can be in the position to go in the conversation and say, I really want to help you James. Can you help me understand how you think this is going to impact the business or what objective or OKR does this roll up to?
Or I know you’re trying to hit a number. Can you help me understand? Okay, great. Thank you. You’ve been heard. It’s genuine. You’re using empathy and you’re like, let me get back to you after I evaluate that. Let me talk to some people that are a little smarter than me, the experts, et cetera, et cetera, and then come back.
And I think then you get folks thinking about what you’re up against. It’s I’ve got to focus on what’s going to really make, not all activity is going to lead to impact. Yeah, I think that’s the best answer I’ve heard to that. It balances like the micro and human interaction, but also the macro like process.
I’m a huge fan of sprints. And I also think I’m guilty of asking people for requests without fully thinking it through. But just getting them in the habit of thinking through, why am I asking for this? You make them go through that a couple times. And I’ve found that they become a lot more thoughtful and understanding of what they should even prioritize.
And I think you combine one and two within that framework, then you have the ability to say okay, most of the things that are being asked are tactical, or we don’t have a lot of self serving capabilities, or, there’s a big disconnect between what we do and what the expectation of what we do is.
So I think that allows you to now move into that strategic lens. And really focus on if you’re given the autonomy and you’re provided a seat at the table, which I think we all talk about within revenue operations, you can say, look, like strategically, this is where we need to have one message and one voice.
From the executive layer. Yeah, that’s great. And the irony here is that I think the executive team, CEO, CRO, CMO, they want RevOps to be strategic because that’s how you add value. But at the same time, they’re often the ones that inadvertently cause a lot of this firefighting just because I don’t blame them.
There’s a lot of stuff going on. But I think with that sprint process, you can track where you’re spending time and surface that they might be surprised at the negative side of, Oh, wow, you’re not able to spend any time on the things that really move the needle. I’ve experienced it a lot of the time, it’s usually the revenue operations is faced with a double negative where it’s if I say no, I’m going to be the person that’s always saying no.
Yeah. So I might as well just do it, but then am I expanding the scope of what I really should be working on? Totally. Because a lack of departmental organization or something somewhere else. This has been great. We’re almost at time here. We’d like to finish with a rapid fire finish of just some common questions across RevOps leaders.
First thing that comes to mind, one sentence answer. Biggest myth about RevOps? That they’re tacticians. Biggest sales rep pet peeve? I don’t have time to enter any information, and I don’t know where to find it. If you could fix one challenge in RevOps, what would it be? A lack of general understanding and alignment amongst the entire organization.
And last one here. How would you describe a great RevOps leader in three words? Empathetic, strategic, discipline. I love it. I think that’s a great one. Lonny, appreciate the time. I think this was really excellent. A lot of things to be thinking about before implementing AI, which I know is very top of mind.
So I think listeners will be able to take a lot of actionable advice from this. Anyone listening, if you have questions for Lonny, feel free to funnel them my way and I’ll track them down for you. Of course, if you have questions about AccountAim or data, generally happy to chat there, but Lonny, thanks a lot for the time.
James. Awesome. Thank you very much for having me. I really enjoyed it. Awesome. Until next time. All right.
