What does the future of RevOps look like? Can lean teams do it all?
Jared Barol, VP of GTM Strategy & Ops at Copy.ai, joins us on Boardroom RevOps to share some seriously thought-provoking takes on the future of RevOps. From running a cross-border consulting business, international expansion at Salesforce, and now GTM Ops at Copy.ai, Jared’s experience lends to some differentiated opinions.
This episode is packed with tactical advice and hot takes: what AI means for data architecture, why “go-to-market engineer” might be an overhyped title, and how solo RevOps leaders can still drive massive impact by thinking differently. If you’re navigating tech stack decisions, unsure how to scale efficiently, or wondering how AI will change your role, this is a must-listen.
In this episode, we cover:
- A framework for reducing go-to-market bloat without losing effectiveness
- Why RevOps should be the trendspotter, not just the builder
- How to enable international expansion without overextending your team
- The future of structured data, and why AI may render current systems obsolete
- How to prioritize as a solo RevOps leader and earn executive trust
Take a listen and let us know what you think.
Full Transcript:
Hello again, everybody. It’s time for another episode of Boardroom RevOps, where we are bringing you valuable tips from RevOps experts so you can make it to the C suite. I’m James, co founder of AccountAim, the next gen BI solution for RevOps teams. I’m joined by Jared Barol today. Great to have you on, Jared.
Hey, great to be here. Thank you very much. Jared is the vice president of go to market strategy and ops at Copy. ai. And after having pretty unique experience leading up to this role. So Jared, I don’t think I’ll do it justice by trying to explain it. So do you want to share your background in a bit more detail for folks?
Sure. So I I grew up on the East coast and outside of Philadelphia. I like to say I took the long way to San Francisco. So I spent five years in Moscow, here in Berlin, here in Tel Aviv for making it out here. So it was probably a more direct path I could have taken. That’s pretty long.
Yeah. So the whole time I did a lot of different things, very little to do with RevOps during that period. I started a couple of different companies, import and export businesses. Two consulting firms, helped to start a social media startup that no one will ever hear of. I tried importing cars, and I did import wine for a while as well, and food and a few other things.
I also ran an expat community for a few years. And a lot of different types of jobs. I got into ad tech early on, and that was the reason for a lot of the bouncing around, was the consulting firm I ran was focused on helping internationalize businesses. Primarily east to west Europe and west to east Europe, London to Tel Aviv, Berlin to Moscow.
Yeah, to London every now and then back and forth from Seoul or Sao Paulo or something like that. But thinking from both from a nationalization, from a sales perspective to open new markets, as well as a cost reduction standpoint to help okay, we’re going to offshore and an engineering group or a customer success group and, or we want to follow the sun CS teams.
And so having a team in Latin, having a team in central Europe, having a team in India, helping build all those different things up. I’ve touched all of that over that decade of traveling and I carried a bag for most of it also. By far the most colorful background event we’ve had on the podcast yet.
Hopefully we can dive into bits and pieces of it throughout the discussion about RevOps, but it sounds like we might need another one just to cover some of those specifics. Cool that you carried a bag too, I actually didn’t know that. But before we dive deep in the weeds, like how do you define RevOps?
I’m curious. Yeah, look, there are, I’ve seen a lot of really interesting definitions of it. And I’m going to, I think mine’s somewhat different from a lot of them. The goal of a RevOps organization or the, the capability that RevOps brings to an organization or other is unsticking things. And that’s super vague, but let me give you some more specific examples.
Every organization has its own problems and has ways to optimize. And it is not going to those, the things that could exist are the same across every company. I’m not the amount of times I’ve heard our company’s unique just to have it play out. Otherwise, if I had a dollar for every time, it’d be 20.
So I’ve heard it 20 times. There, there is nothing unique about if you’re a SaaS business, seat model, William upper mid market and enterprise, it’s going to be similar, but the problem that is unique to that business, it might be problem a, B not C, for example. And so when I think about unsticking things.
The goal of RevOps is to figure out what needs to be unstuck and unstick that thing and then move on to the next. Frequently, it relates to, marketing, so demand generation, revenue acceleration, and expansion, renewal after land. And that’s 90 percent of the problems, 10 percent finance. Yeah, I like that.
And that actually gets into some of the value too. I think you already said it, like we talk a lot on the podcast about like reactive RevOps versus proactive RevOps. I think the line you had about figuring out what needs to be unstuck is a huge one. And that’s how you actually It starts to influence the executive team and make an impact on the business versus just being the doer of things that land on your plate.
So I really like that. Yeah, I think it’s a good point. When I was interviewing at copy AI, I said something that after the, after I said, I was like, Oh shoot, they’re not going to, that might’ve been the death knell, it wasn’t, which is, you need a report done. I will be happy to show you how to build a report.
And my goal is more on the structural alignments to help you build that. Hoppy is a small company. We are 55 people. We have had explosive growth. We have very few staff. We have very, we don’t spend a lot on external technology. Because we, the hypothesis for our business is that Go to market bloat is the single biggest problem facing go to market organizations.
If you look at the cost of sales and marketing as a percent of revenue, it’s skyrocketing over the last decade. And, one of my beliefs, and I worked for Salesforce for four years, is that every time we introduce a new tool, you introduce a new title. Salesforce, when I would present to customers, I was in the field at Salesforce for two of the four years.
We had a whole slide around the rise of the Salesforce ecosystem, and we’re very proud of it. And now, when I see that slide, my reaction is. You’re forcing me to hire staff to operate your tool. And it didn’t occur to me while I worked there, the implication of that. And I see that across the board. Yeah, and not to mention, often you have to buy other tools to feed into your existing tool to make it, to get the most out of it too, right?
It’s a never ending. Yeah. Tell me more about go to market waste generally. I know this is something that you’re passionate about from some of our previous conversations. I think Salesforce is one example, hiring more people to support. Where else do you think teams go wrong on the go to market bloat front?
I’ll break it into kind of three things. And I don’t have a good framework for this. But I think about it in terms of, yeah, there’s tools and technology. There’s process for process sake. And then there is program spend. I think all three of those as an industry being go to market being SaaS period, I would give us like a D minus probably tools and technology.
The last company I was at, I had something like 62, 40, 40 to 60 products. Why? That it doesn’t make any sense. And it does make sense in context. And especially if you think about how we go through waves of expansion and consolidation in technology. The 2010s was a massive expansionary boom. So if you’re in a tech company during the 2010s and you have a modicum of success, You’re going to be getting other technology that is a super niche thing that will improve this KPI by what percent and you don’t think about it.
Now we’re in a, coming out of recession, not recession, a difficult period in time economically for the task market. Everyone’s looking at where they can cut costs and wondering, why do I have? A separate tool for customer support and customer success. Why do I have a different system for enrichment than for scoring?
What like all these, or for quota planning and territory management, why aren’t these things together? And so I think there’s a lot of questions around that today. That’s at least where I’m really focused right now is. As I build our tech stack, I only want platforms right now. Yeah. What do you think the right, like stack of resources then, as we think about maybe copy AI or maybe even just hypothetical company, you mentioned platforms.
We’re like, what are the foundational things that you think a RevOps person needs to have it building from scratch. Are we talking in 2025 or 2027? Both or you pick. So let’s talk today. I can’t tell the future I have, but I have, I don’t have a crystal. I don’t have a magic eight ball, but I have some ideas, but today, you don’t look, we need a system of record.
Everything kind of sits around that. The reason, unfortunately, and this is a bad reason, but it’s the real reason is integration is the hardest part of any kind of software. Or tech job. We used to have kind of a rough guideline of every dollar we made at Salesforce Deloitte would make 10 on implementation.
And so in this particular segment where I was at least, and it’s not wrong that there is the integration and setup of a new tool is incredibly difficult. So you need a system of record. It is easily connectable. Out of the box to a lot of different things based on what your business does.
That’s one. Two is you need to be able to, let’s say we’re, let’s say we’re talking about series B businesses, something a bit more established. You haven’t established go to market because before that is depends, you need to be able to forecast your business, period. That’s a capability you need.
You need to be able to drive, track, measure the impact of demand. That’s another thing that you need, another capability that you need. All three of, and then you need to be able to. Expand on what you’ve already landed. And so for each of those things, there’s a set of derivatives that come out of it.
And so in the, let’s talk about the far left of the bow tie here, driving demand, there’s a whole set of capabilities that need to be accounted for around, events and around track, identifying and segmenting and attributing. To some extent, where leads are being generated and how they’re flowing through, make sure you’re enriching the right data.
And you’re pushing that into your system of record and then going into the middle as we get into, processing it you need to be able to have a process from plan to pay for your reps. What are the territories or what are the quotas? What are the territories? How, what are the teams that are going after?
What, how are you measuring success? How are you paying them? That’s a whole set of workflows and processes and problems. And that kind of all spits out on the other side of we know what we want to get chart. We want to charge the customer. So we’re going to package that up and we’re going to get paid by the customer.
And then we are able to see where they’re, are they’re having difficulty with or having success with our platforms or systems or tools or whatever. And that’s a whole other set of tools and systems and processes. That’s how I think about it. And I typically go iterations left to right on that really high level to start, then a level deeper, then a level deeper, like an old, the matrix printer would like just do the back and forth.
That’s how I think about my job a lot. Yeah. I think that’s really good. Especially if you think about the jobs to be done framework and like core capabilities. It’s a lot of stuff though. So if you are reducing go to market blow, let’s get rid of a lot of these. Let’s call it more point tech solutions.
I assume they have. Some value to folks because they tell folks here’s how you should do your job, here’s best practices serves up, served up to you. Like how can a lean team build all that without these external providers? Is it an expertise gap? Is it just a time gap? Like you have to tick through it, like by the life cycle of the company or like, how do you balance if it feels like extra work to me, but maybe you can tell me I’m wrong.
I have a couple of points of view on this. One is it is absolutely a life cycle question. Excuse me. It’s absolutely a life cycle question. Early stage maturing scale businesses, they have different outcomes that they need to achieve. And so the capabilities will change over time as well as the tactics to achieve those capabilities, all that changes.
So that’s the first thing. And I would. There’s a great metaphor about how, picture, a team of Navy SEALs sitting around a table, and they’re given this mission, and it’s the, they’re based in Carlsbad in California, and they need to somehow get to insert country here that is not friendly, and they need to get through the airspace, and avoid getting shot down, they need to jump out of a plane, they need to do something, they need to somehow Get out of the country, get on another plane, get back to Carrolls bad without anyone getting hurt.
And it seems impossible when you describe it that way. And the point of view is plan each step before you start, but when you’re doing it, just think of the next step because it gets overwhelming otherwise. And so I think, the advice I’ve been given by. The good mentors I’ve had and the good bosses I’ve had is focusing on the top three things only.
Have your laundry list, have the extensive list of things you want to focus on, but focus on the top three. Yeah, but that’s the advice I was given. So I think that’s the high level of it. And the reason also is that as you go through that maturity model, I have a book on my shelf by Itzhak Institute around corporate lifecycle management and, It talks a lot about the different stages of a company and corporation as they grow.
You can go, some different companies go through these stages faster than others. And so if I were to build out that plan for you today, and let’s just, let’s say give argument, let’s say I’m a hundred percent right about everything that I’m writing on this piece of paper today. A year from now, by the time I get down to that fifth or sixth or seventh block, whatever it is, it’s going to be wrong.
Cause our company is going to have veered from the path that I thought we were on. better or worse. There’s no way for it to be exactly. No, no plan survives first contact with an enemy, right? The best laid plans of mice and men often goes wrong. There’s enough really trodden phrases to make you think maybe there’s something to this.
And I say this as a planner I’m a scenario planner. This is Salesforce. I work with the guy who built the entire foundation of scenario planning. He had a phrase, Nothing’s worth doing unless it takes 50 years to do. And part of that is because things change over time. And so keeping at it is the only way to do it.
Yeah, I think it’s a great philosophy and I’m just going to throw in everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth to, to your list of planning deviations. That’s really helpful, Jared, and I appreciate you going through it, and I think that’s a great checklist and framework for people to think about.
We don’t need to spend too much time on this next topic, because I feel like it’s going to be beaten to death, and also, who knows the answer, but I’m curious so you just described a lot of jobs to be done, a lot of frameworks to do within a platform, in terms of reducing go to market bloat. The world is changing with AI.
Does any of this change your perspective on things? I know we had a short conversation previously around data architecture might fundamentally change. Any thoughts you have here to Wax Poetic, or how do you think about that? Yeah, I’ll have two, let me give you two topics. One is, yeah, let’s talk about data architecture first.
And then I want to talk about the role of RevOps as a react, or go to market ops, RevOps, insert title here, the frequent term, go to market engineer today, as a reaction and kind of response to some of this. So this is, Not full hyperbole, but I’ll say next, some hyperbole. The reason for structured systems of data was to make it easier to query, join, to export, to process.
And I’m sure someone will have a way more detailed answer than that. But at a high level, that’s the reason we have structured systems. When you learn SQL, when you learn Visual Basic, it’s about building the table, expanding the table, shrinking the table, querying the table. Combining the table, searching the table, printing from the table.
That’s pretty much the entirety of it. What Salesforce did really was they made embedded tables basically. And I have a very large question mark over what the future of systems of record is going to look like, because. In a world where you do not, where you could have a computer system, call it AI, call it machine learning, insert your term here, with natural language, you can communicate with the system to then go ahead and Take whatever data in whatever table in whatever format and compare it against some other data, whether it’s using workflows or a future structure like the stuff I think that Richard Socher was just publishing about recently, I have a question on the purpose of these rigid structured data sets, and I can imagine a world.
In the not very distant future where unstructured data lakes are cheaper to build, cheaper to maintain, and the cost to process query, print, join, draw insights from is probably less than today’s cost of doing the same in structured data sets. Because the cost of compute, as we’re seeing with some of the more recent models, look up like DeepSeek and R1, like it’s approaching zero.
And it’s no longer tied to the cost of energy. It seems there, no, there’s different perspectives on this. And, but I don’t pretend to be an expert in that, but I’m seeing the cost reduce. We’re seeing the cost reduce of copy AI as well. And building out these thought models behind this and leveraging vectors as a way to identify trends.
It unstructured data. I, I ran something yesterday with our product team and our data science team. And we were able to pull out, I don’t want to go into too much detail. Thoughts were in, in the words of our customers, ways that we are exceeding expectations and proving the point of an industry in a market that no one didn’t exist a couple months ago.
I, this would have been nearly an impossible task to go through every phone call, transcript, every email, every interaction record, identify these Points in time and trends and like key moments and conversations that change trajectories. That’s you would have an entire data science organization, not a team, multiple teams, just to answer a question like that.
And we did it and let’s call it a business day. It’s insane. What does this mean for RevOps do you think? More solo RevOps folks that can just query their way to all of those jobs to be done that you mentioned earlier? So I think there’s the short term, the mid term, and the long term. Short term is yes.
I think the short term is that people don’t know what to do about this. They don’t, there’s a whole set of skill sets that didn’t exist two years ago. And the thought process didn’t exist two years ago. So two years ago, you still had your sales, your marketing, your CS, business partners, and your teams, and operational structures.
And two years ago, they would they had the systems that they used to ask the questions they did, and you get the answers that they did. And then you hit them with this, we don’t need those systems of record today, you can have kind of a big like blob of data and you can query the data.
And they also ask similar questions, trying different ways, and it’s like, how do you figure out how to use it, the first thing. And so what, yeah, I think that if you were to take a population. What we’re seeing right now is a lot of scrambling on like, how do we use these data structures and systems?
Yeah, we have the data that we need and skill sets rise, fall, rise, fall across all the different tools and processes. The next step that happens there is typically a consolidation of, do we need teams of 30, grab ops roles for a midsize business when really just one person can ask five different questions of a system that’s going to pull out data.
I can get insight and what they instead need to do is think more of what is the architecture of a business as opposed to, what is the architecture of a process in a business? Yeah, that’s all they had time for. And so that’s definitely where we see you’ll talk of deflationary impact of AI too.
That’d be really interesting to see for sure. Yeah, I can see it. I had a somewhat of a hot take on a frequent phrase used though. I am seeing the phrase go to market engineer on LinkedIn every single time I open up the website. And it annoys me to be very honest, because it’s another bloat.
It’s just another thing. So cool. Now you AI now we need these engineers. No, you don’t. You need to learn how to use a new tool. You don’t need to hire a new role to do the same job that you were doing before with a new system and a new. Get me started if you want, James, but this is, I feel, I don’t think you need to have a separate function for this.
What you need to do is rethink the current structure you have. You hire a go to market engineer because you already have sales ops, marketing ops, CS ops. Who’s going to figure out how do we tie all these different waterfalls together? You already have three people on your team or more, maybe they should take a stab at it.
Yeah. I’m hearing a common thread from you, which is. Prioritize, think of things from first principles, and be willing to learn. And I think that sums up probably a good Rev Ops person, no coincidence that you’ve made it, to the VP level. Thank you. I want to pull this back a little bit, Jared, because I know you had really good experience on international expansion, so I’ll take a hard left here, if you will.
This was your role, you mentioned in your background so many international roles and a lot of scope. I know at Salesforce, my memory serves, you were doing a lot of international expansion work as well. So I’ll maybe start by asking like, how can RevOps best support international expansion?
Like what’s the checklist? What should folks be thinking about if they’re tasked with that in their company? It’s such a good question. Here is how I think about international expansion in, at a high level. When you’re ready to go international when you’ve already been international for a few years.
So meaning you’ve already had customer pull. And I’m talking about in 2025, not 2020, by the way, when money is not free and buying patterns have changed, decreased, become much more internal. When you’ve already developed a pull in a market, that is when you start looking at that market. Let me rephrase, phrase, and clarify.
I would not generally advise a business to make the decision of, Hey, we’re ready to go international tomorrow because of these other metrics. We have this ARR, we have this win rate, blah, blah, blah, blah. Let’s just go international. What does that mean? Typically the way that’s internalized is let’s hire maybe.
Let’s have our, we focus on product marketing into UK, for example or insert English speaking European nation here, and then we’ll start hiring maybe the customer success or sales while we’re like, it’s just so expensive. Why would you do that in that way? The only reason that it makes sense is if you are placing a massive bet for some strategic reason.
And there’s a couple of good ones I’ve seen, if you’re in you’re in a very small industry where there is really one. A buyer in that industry and they happen to be based in a region or they have a gap in a region and you need to access, penetrate, win that region to be able to be considered for acquisition, then do that.
I know that’s the case like in Agritech, for example, there’s seven companies in the space and the only big PE buyer pretty much buys companies that have a presence in the UK. Okay, then you have to do that, right? So that’s an exception, not the rule. So instead, what I advise is build a really good product, European, Asian company and Asian companies and Latin American companies, Australian companies.
They will they will seek you out if it’s a good product and you start identifying gaps in your product for their market this way and. Your job as RevOps leader is to to quote my wife on something the other day, one point is an exception. Two points is a line, three is a trend. Be the trend spotter here when you start seeing significant acceleration in market pull.
That is your job is to identify trends. And so what are the trends? What should you be looking for? It’s harder to say, depends on your industry. What I look for specifically is. A series of use cases that are not terribly different from my current use cases that I offer the bit that we offer the market that might have a slight spin because of a regional significance language is probably a frequent reason we use the exact same product except it’s in except it’s in British English.
The exact same product, except it’s in maybe French or Spanish or German, just translation. That’s great, but it’s never just translation, is it? Because then you need to start dealing with data residency, and you need to start dealing with other questions. And so you pick the one that has the great, the highest win rates.
The best business model is an isolated business, and that’s where you start to look at a kind of a global approach. Yeah, that’s a really good framework, I think, for selecting, should we go international and where should we go international? How about once selected, like if you’re in the RevOps seat, what should you be thinking about to enable that expansion from like an ops perspective?
Is it a different framework than just The same stuff you’re doing in the U. S. today, or? Yeah, the short answer is yes. The long answer is it depends. The framework is global. 70 percent of what you do is global in scope, 30 percent of what you do is local in scope. Same, this is for product, this is for product development, for marketing, for sales, etc.
70 30 is an efficient model. More or less efficient model. And so you build a product for the market for your company and like what your company does. And if there needs to be changes, you try and figure out what is that structure of change and you structure that out. So it’s ideally 30 percent of what you’re doing.
Let me give you a more specific example because that feels really high level to me. When I look at a previous business that was selling into healthcare providers in the UK have a different business model and healthcare providers in North America, single payer versus non single payer.
So what the core architecture of our product set didn’t really change, what changed was a UI, global, what changed from a sales perspective, instead of having a dedicated health team, we instead segmented the market differently. In that location, we didn’t have revenue data or didn’t have an employee data.
We had revenue data for what may have been, or not revenue. Maybe it was employee data we had. So we did a different type of segmentation for that team. Now, if you zoom out, the company still looks the same, but when you zoom in, you start seeing the more little differences. That’s an example of local, of a local approach.
Yeah. I hear like maybe to put it in slightly different terms to make sure I understand just aligning. There’s a slightly nuanced customer journey now, right? And so if you were to take a map of your U. S. based customer journey of what does the market look like, how do we interact with, Folks at every stage of the customer life cycle.
How does that compare to the ideal customer journey in a new market? And then that’s where you need to find some of the tweaks based on some of those local nuances. Is that a fair representation? It’s a great, yeah, it’s great representation and a great point that I missed. Which is the first step you do is is what is your customer journey in that market?
And if you don’t know that in your own market, congratulations. I just found one of your top three priorities for the next quarter. That is exactly yes. Thousand percent. Yes. The right way of thinking about it. That’s great. I think we’re almost at time here, Jared. This has been great. I have two topics left.
We only have time for one. I will give you your pick of the topics from our previous chats. I think you did an amazing job of like cross functional alignment. Some of your past roles. So we can talk about. Best practices there from row off seat. Or I know you’re sitting in the, solo go to market op seat at copy AI right now.
Gross, really big. There’s probably a ton to do. We can talk about how you prioritize in that seat. Pick your poison. Let’s talk about prioritization because that’s top of mind today, but they’re both like they’re connected. So let’s talk about both at once. The short answer is this. If you’re a new employee versus an established employee, it’s a different framework.
I’m new here today and I’m looking for my first 90 days book. There it is. A great book. If you haven’t read it. Everyone can have it. And I reread it for chunks of it each time I joined a new company. Your job at a senior, an executive role in the go to market operations function at any business of any size is to build trust.
Period. Full stop. That’s it. Trust in yourself. Trust in the data. Trust in between team members. That’s the job. Everything else is secondary or something that feeds into that. That’s one. And so from a prioritization perspective, early on in your tenure, you’re going to be really reactive. You don’t know the business.
You don’t know the people. People are going to ask for things and you’re going to do them. And part of it’s the build trust that you can do the things they ask for. Part of it is because you don’t know better. Especially early on, what’s important, what’s not. So that’s the main thing of how do you prioritize.
It’s who are your main business partners? Stack rank them in terms of priority and then focus in that order. As you get more established, then it’s leverage. What are the points of leverage that you can drive in the business? I’m going to make things up here. Win rate, ASP, time to sell. For example, those are the three big business levers for your particular business.
And right now your win rate is well, well below benchmark. Your ASP is below benchmark. Your time to sell seems fine. Maybe you don’t focus as much on time to sell improvements as you do on win rate. And you focus on going real deep in win rate for all your business partners and all your stakeholders.
What are things that you can do to help improve that? What are things they can do? Pull out the insights because one thing I found also, Salesforce had this whole point of view around beginner’s mind, open any situation come with the beginner’s mind. I don’t think a lot of companies have that point of view.
And so they assume the beginner doesn’t have the context. I disagree with that point of view strongly. I think that the beginner’s mind is the best way to see structural problems before you get into the assumption of this is just how it’s done. And so use that beginner’s mind point of view to identify big rocks.
That might be blocking whatever those big levers are. Now, don’t assume you’re right. You might not be, but take each of them, shop, shop them around with your response with your business partners, and that’s what you should be thinking about. Yeah, that’s great. I heard starting with understanding the business goals.
You talked about, hypothetically win rate ASP. Sales cycle, aligning your priorities to it and making sure that everyone else that has influences on board. And I think there’s a lot else in there too, but I think that’s a really good kind of senior level approach to that. Jared, we are out of time.
Regretfully, there’s probably a lot more we could unpack here. Really appreciate the time. I thought this was great. A lot of actionable frameworks, a lot of interesting philosophies too. So thanks so much for spending some time with us. Thank you very much for having me. It was a great time and I’m looking forward to talking to you again soon, James.
Awesome. Thanks, Jared. Thanks.
