Discover how marketplace revenue operations fundamentally differs from traditional SaaS businesses in this comprehensive webinar with Chris, Director of Revenue Operations at LoadUp.
What You’ll Learn:
- The Marketplace Evolution Model – Understanding the critical transition from growth phase to efficiency phase, and why your supply/demand strategy needs to flip completely as you mature
- Key Performance Indicators – The 5 essential metrics that signal when it’s time to shift your marketplace strategy:
- 1. Search & discovery conversion rates
- 2. Fulfillment latency patterns
- 3. New supply churn rates
- 4. Supply-side stagnation indicators
- 5. Density saturation thresholds
- Balancing Supply & Demand – Learn why you need supply before demand, how to avoid the “Amazon effect” of too many mediocre options, and strategies for creating selective friction
- The Elite Tier Strategy – Why mature marketplaces should prioritize top performers and new entrants while deprioritizing the “mediocre middle”
- Practical Implementation – Real-world examples from healthcare and service marketplaces, plus actionable frameworks you can apply immediately
Key Takeaways:
- How marketplace dynamics differ from traditional SaaS revenue operations
- When and how to transition from growth-focused to efficiency-focused strategies
- The role of customer success in elevating supply-side performance
Tracking marketplace metrics across CRM, BI tools, and product analytics Perfect for RevOps professionals, marketplace operators, and anyone working in two-sided or multi-sided platform businesses.
Marketplace Theory and Equilibrium Dynamics | Download Here
Transcript:
Josh McClanahan: Chris, we are at the start of another fun webinar. I’m really excited for this one today. So appreciate you taking the time out here to share all things about RevOps that are not related to SaaS. We’re gonna give folks a, a minute or two here to, uh, to start to trickle in. Um, and then we are gonna be offed the races, but I think in terms of like the most hotly anticipated webinar, this one might be at the top of the list for the year so far.
This should be a really fun one. While folks are trickling in. Just a quick reminder here. We will share the recording of this afterwards. If you have any questions, uh, throughout what Chris is about to share, uh, go ahead and put it in the q and a. Uh, there should be a link to it at the bottom if you’re not a familiar Zoom user.
But Chris, uh, why don’t we go ahead and kick things off. Like I said, thanks again for, uh, for being on. Do you wanna give folks just a quick background and then we can dive into, uh, to the heart of it? Yeah, man. Um, so I have been in the, uh, RevOps space for about 10 years, and I am, uh, currently director of RevOps for a company called Load Up Space here in, uh, Alpharetta, Georgia.
Chris Skalicky: And just absolutely love it. Um, my primary background’s in healthcare, but mostly marketplaces. So one. Or double-sided marketplaces and then, uh, three-sided marketplaces, and then even more complexity than that. So, love it, man.
Josh McClanahan: Now we’re super excited. I feel like we get so much content out there on the SaaS side of the business that this will be a really fun session for both the healthcare experience and the marketplace exer experience.
Uh, and I’m excited to see if there’s actually overlap between the two. So, uh, yeah. We’ll let you, uh, take things away here.
Chris Skalicky: All right. Let me, uh, get my screen share going here. Maybe, of course, we’re gonna have technical issues always, right?
Josh McClanahan: Oh, naturally. This is just the joy of doing live demos at this point.
Uh, everyone that’s on the call is no stranger to these, so don’t, uh, don’t sweat in the slightest here.
Chris Skalicky: All right. Oh, lemme see here. All right. There we go.
All right. Let’s see if I can do it now.
Josh McClanahan: Boom, we are off to the races and we got some beautiful looking slides.
Chris Skalicky: All right, what I wanted to really like cover is a lot of questions around, um, the equilibrium dynamics in marketplaces. And so we wanted to do something a little bit kind of deeper, uh, and something that would be a little bit more practical for users, uh, in our audience here. So, wanted to really focus on that.
So. If you get nothing else from this 30 minutes, like this is the, the key slide. This is a, a, a model that I’m not sure that anybody else has really done it in this particular way. Uh, I, I’ve really tried to come up with something a little bit unique here. There’s a lot of players in this space who’ve, uh, in the VC world and, and other places that have.
Talked about market dynamics and, and what this looks like and uh, equilibrium dynamics and liquidity. But basically when you start a marketplace, the very first thing that, that you’re gonna encounter is this like early supply, early demand kind of battle. And then what does that look like as we sort of mature as a marketplace?
And so, uh, what I. The, the left here, this is like your, uh, initial liquidity constrained standard bell curve, right? So early supply and early demand, and then we allow all, as many supply and demand participants on the platform as possible, generally in order to try to create that velocity.
And so we’re trying to speed up the growth of our platform. So, this is where, you know, anybody can be an Uber driver. Anybody can be a a, this or, or a, you know, anybody could post on Airbnb. When it first came out you know, there was, there was not as many rules, there wasn’t as many rankings, all those kind of things.
Then over time, as your marketplace matures, you have to shift that to a, a new model. And that’s where we’re kind of talking about today, is that battle and where’s that point and what does that look like, and what are you measuring in order to know if you’re there or not. And so what that does when you.
Make the transition is it actually flips upside down. And so then instead of, we want as many people as possible, we’re gonna have some elite people, we’re gonna have some new people, uh, but most of them are just our standard performers. Over time, you actually flip the model on its head and you want only the best performers on your platform to be prioritized and the new folks.
And then the mediocre middle, as I have it labeled here, is actually below inside your marketplace. And it actually slows down your velocity, uh, as you mature as a business. So if you get nothing else, this is super important to understand. And then we’ll talk about how, uh, we go through this. I apologize.
My slides are very basic. I’m in RevOps. Uh, I’m not a marketer. So phase one, which was sort of that left bell curve, the standard kind of business that we think about, right? So in a normal SaaS business, it’s okay to have customers that, fit our ICP, but they’re not ideal. Um, and it’s okay for us to have a product that fits most of our customer’s problems, but not everything.
But in a marketplace, you’re actually dealing with com opposing forces, right? Supply and the demand side. You have to control both of those. Um, so it’s very different. I, I speak in analogies all of the time but this, this very simple understanding. We think about like Uber, right? When Uber first started.
You had to have supply before you could actually have the demand side of the business. And why that works is if you think about like, if you’re a, an Uber driver and you have a slow night ’cause you don’t have as many customers, that’s okay. You’re gonna be all right with that. As long as you get something or you’re like, okay, well it’s gonna pick up.
Like as this thing takes off and it becomes more apparent for everybody, more useful. That’s okay. But if you’re the rider and you can’t get an Uber, you’re done with Uber, you’re just gonna go somewhere else, you’re gonna go to Lyft, you’re gonna, you know, call a friend, whatever you’re done. So you have to have the supply first in order to like start to gain the velocity.
And that’s the first challenge that everybody has. And so when you’re trying to balance these two things, in the beginning you’re like, okay, we need supply. So you’re pumping supply in and you’re also pumping in as best you can the demand. But you’re okay with your supply side being maybe not your five star best experience.
As long as people can get a ride and they’re safe. It’s okay, right? And so we’re like, okay with that. They’re a little late or the drivers aren’t as nice or whatever. That’s okay because we just want them to have a ride when they need the access, but. As we start to mature in our, in our marketplace and in our business, that has to change because then people start to expect certain things from their drivers.
And drivers who do really well, expect to be prioritized. They’ve been with the platform a long time. And you don’t want a sub-tier experience for, uh, the people that are using your platform. Your, your supply side dynamic. So then you switch to this efficiency model, right? And so what we’re doing there is we’re maximizing.
Transactional yield and, and we’re trying to build a really healthy ecosystem. So this is where we flip this thing on its head and we sort of get this U shape where we prioritize this elite tier that our top performers, our five star drivers and our new people, because you want the new entrance to challenge your top.
But what you don’t want to do is tolerate anything in the middle because what happens is if you continue on the regular bell curve. If we think of it that way, you get the Amazon effect. So if you ever go on Amazon and you’re like, I want to find a automatic cat water dish thing like that cycles the water, right?
There’s like 2 million of them. There’s like, there’s a ridiculous and so. Your demands, like your customer actually gets decision fatigued because there’s too many options and they don’t know how to pick. And so what you want is to prioritize only the best options. The ones you know in the Amazon example who are at least returned best delivery, prime eligible, um, have the best satisfaction ratings, the most reviews.
And your new entrance to continually challenge those to build a better marketplace. And all the bloat in the middle, the 10,000 cat feeders, they all come from the same factory that are all basically the same, that all get returned, uh, a million times and uh, don’t have very good reviews, or they get 10 reviews and then they launch a new product.
That’s the same thing. All of that stuff just becomes noise and you want to eliminate the noise. So it makes it super easy for your demand side of your business, your customer, to actually find the supply that they’re looking for. And so this is where we actually create selective friction. And that can come from your algorithm.
It can come from performance based in incentives on your platforms. Um, depending on how your systems work, uh, we can use different techniques to try and drive that actual friction. And then, so what do we look at in order to know where are we? Where are we in the position to turn this thing on its head, and what does that look like?
So, search and discovery is the biggest one that we look at conversion rates. Uh, although supply is coming up, uh, it takes them longer to find the right thing on our platform, or it takes longer for the service to be connected. That is bad. So we want that to time to increase, right? We wanna get better at matching our customer’s needs, uh, with our supply.
And if we’re not, that means that they’re getting that decision fatigue that they’re, they’re just not finding what they’re looking for quickly. Too much of that mediocre middle fulfillment la latency. So, this is a, a unique problem in, in service-based businesses where you’re sort of offering your service to whoever your fulfillment teams are.
Generally the contractors or whoever. And they start to deprioritize picking those because they think they can get a better deal if they wait. So you don’t have the challenge. From the new entrants in the middle, challenging these top tiers. So basically they’re monopolizing all of the performance on the platform.
They’re taking all of your supply or all of your demand, excuse me, into, into that small supply. So you need once you start to see that, that’s a idea that you need to change new supply churn. People who come onto the platform, they just can’t be successful. They just drop right off.
They just, they’re deprioritized, they’re too low in the algorithm because they don’t have enough reviews, they don’t have enough experience, they don’t have the visibility. And so you’ll see them drop off really, really quickly. That’s another thing. Previously I worked in the healthcare space that we’ve monitored really closely because, we needed to get them a win early so that they would adopt the platform, and that builds a really solid supply base for us, for demand gen. And then, uh, supply side stagnation. What we’re looking at here is, is our, our top tier providers. Quality actually going down. You know, they were the top tier, but now it’s actually degrading over time because they can get away with more because they just keep getting the supply.
Um, so this is something that we look at in quality metrics, NPS scores, uh, CSAT from. Uh, our customers that we talk to, like, how was your experience with this particular person, uh, in our business? And that way we can make sure that these top tiers stay the top tier. Uh, if you start to see that degrading your best delivery is now starting to actually degrade in performance that’s a good sign that you don’t have enough new entrants challenging them.
Um, they’re just monopolizing the space. Last slide. I know this is a ton of texts. Uh, I am gonna send all of these slides over to Josh. Uh, and then, uh, we’ll be parsing out this information on my LinkedIn, uh, as well, so we can get this out to everybody. And, um, you can have this checklist, a couple things to look at.
Where are we? And, and you know, the nitty gritty, how do we actually make this work? Density saturation. Does 10% more supply result in 2%, uh, increase less than a 2% increase in total transactions. So like, just because we keep adding people like, but then our velocity is actually shrinking. That’s a good sign that we need to make a change diminishing returns in in that scenario.
Search to fulfillment velocity. We talked about, as they come onto the platform our new customers, they’re coming on, but then they’re having a longer time, a harder time finding the thing that they want. They don’t wanna scroll through 3 million cat feeders to find the right one. They want to find.
The one that they’re looking for extremely quickly. Um, so we want to eliminate that decision fatigue for them. Um, if we start to see that going up, we need to, um, make a change there. The first probability test is, are new people, are they activating quickly? Are they getting a win really, really quickly?
So as we bring in more and more and more of this supply, we want those people who are coming on to fit the, the profile of our elite tier. And get a win really, really quickly so we can be more selective about who we bring on. And we want them to get a win super fast so they start to get some traction.
Uh, if we don’t see that, then we’ve got a problem that we need to potentially start to make some shifts. Does the top 10% of our providers account for more than 70% of all of our transactions? But those metrics of quality are declining, like our speed. That’s where we see people in the elite tier starting to game the system down.
So like an Uber, the longer a rider sits, the more they make, so they don’t have to take it quickly, they can just wait. Then their profitability goes up. Well, yours is your margin’s going down and the writer’s having a less fulfilling experience and they’re just gaming the system to try and get a little bit more margin out of you.
Um, this is something that we really, really wanna watch. And then also just total margin decay. Are we, are we looking at all of these different transactions? Um, and then they’re trying to, to figure out, okay, what’s the way I can maximize this? I’m only gonna take the best rides. I’m only gonna take the to and from the airports.
Those kinds of things. That’s great. Except it puts the rider in the Uber example at a disadvantage, because if they only need a A to B, they don’t need all the way to the airport. They just need from, you know. Downtown Alpharetta, Georgia to their house, which is like three miles. But you’re only gonna take the airport ones.
That creates a less fulfilling experience for them. So it’s a holdout problem and they’re trying to g. Only take the highest priority stuff, but you need them to fulfill the demand from all of of the customers. So you can break this as a scoring guide, like one to two yeses. You’re still in the growth phase.
Um, and it’s okay for some of these things to happen. Uh, over time you’ll start to get more and more and more. But as you hit three to five, that’s when your market really has matured. Um, that’s when you’re really in a space where you need to focus on how do we make this shift into the this reverse sort of u shape curve where we’re prioritizing these elite and the new, so they challenge each other and we start to ignore or deprioritize that sort of more bloated middle gap.
So that’s it in a nutshell.
Josh McClanahan: It’s that easy. Chris, this is fantastic. My only critique is that where were you eight years ago when I was working in a marketplace business and had none of these frameworks? I I, I’d love to take some of the questions that we’ve gotten here and kind of go through them.
Um, and maybe, uh, I’m gonna re do some reshuffling of the order here just based on, uh, kinda the presentation. But one of the biggest challenges most common that we see, and you touched on at the very beginning, is like that cold start problem. What have you seen companies successfully do to get those suppliers on?
When, to the point you were making earlier, like there actually isn’t demand there yet. Like are there incentives that you’re seeing? Like Yeah. How, how have you seen like teams like kind of bridge that gap? I think it’s one of the, the most notorious problems and call it marketplace businesses.
Chris Skalicky: Yeah. I think the biggest thing is.
When you have a marketplace business, you have one true mission and it has to be applicable to both sides of the marketplace. But each market, each side of it, the supply and demand side, both have sort of their own guiding principles and customer journeys. And so you have to make it valuable for your supply side to actually be on your platform in some way or another, like make it useful for them.
And so. Even if it’s not something that you can necessarily control from a supply side, maybe it’s an administrative tool, if it’s like a technology platform, right? So yes, we’re gonna feed you supply, uh, we’re gonna feed you customers, we’re gonna get you stuff, but also we’re gonna help you with X part of your business, and that’s just gonna make your life easier.
You see this with Amazon, right? The big thing of Amazon is not necessarily the marketplace, it’s the distribution. So you have this huge marketplace, but it helps. With distribution. So because you can have your stuff in every Amazon warehouse, it’s like, we’ll, we’ll take care of that for you. So that’s a logistical problem they solve first before the marketplace demand comes in.
And so it’s something like that where you have to kind of think through, okay, how do I make it good for a good business for just this side and a good business for just this side? And both of those things align towards what’s most important to me and my business, the big problem that we’re trying to solve, that these two come together and fix.
Josh McClanahan: It’s so interesting. I feel like the way you describe it, at least I think about is, you know, some of the parallels of being like getting to MVP only here, you need to do it on actually both sides. Uh, you’re mentioning the example, right, of like not having maybe like the best ride experience, but you do need, you know, safe rides to get you to your destination.
And then optimizing that over time. Uh, you know, you talked about flipping the, the bell curve, right? And you, you end up with like this mediocre middle. Which I can’t imagine any vendor like really wants to be in. How do you think about like, the folks that are in the middle that maybe started out like, as, you know, some of those, like first, you know, kinda suppliers, um, when you were kinda tackling that, that cold start problem, do you try to maintain those relationships?
Do you phase them out over time? Like how, how do you kinda maintain their relationship on the supply side when you start to get to, you know, kind of like just bigger, uh, numbers of, uh, quantity on that end?
Chris Skalicky: I think it depends slightly on the type of business that you have, if it’s, you know, suppliers or, or practitioners or contractors or whatever it is.
Uh, it does, it does depend a little bit of what leverage you can pull with them. When you, if it’s a supplier, say, you know, contracts come up for renegotiation and their rates are gonna go up because. Like they’re just not performing at the level that they used to or that you expect now if it comes to like clinicians or practitioners, you know, it’s quality scoring, right?
But I think what we have to think about as a business is we want everybody that we can to be in that top tier. Not everybody will be, a lot of it’s on them, but some of it can be on us. And so that’s where like as a RevOps professional, we come in and say we have a customer service. Portion of our business, but we also have a success portion of our business.
And their focus is to understand who these elite tier people are and make everybody who’s new and everybody’s in that middle. We’re gonna push them with everything. We’ve got to try and get them to that elite tier. ’cause the more of those we have, the better our platform’s gonna be, the more healthy it will be, and it just raises the bar for everybody.
That’s where customer success is, which, you know, customer service and customer success kinda get intertwined a lot of times in the technology space. That’s where I see that team. That is where they are most effective, and that’s why in marketplaces it’s such an important function. It’s not just. How many people can we get on the platform?
In the beginning that’s the case. But then once we have as many people as we really need from a a supply side, how do we make them the most successful we can possibly make them? And that’s what encourages that new growth as well because new entrants come on and they have somebody holding their hand to help them be successful in the platform.
And that’s what really raises the bar and helps ’em challenge those sort of elite tier.
Josh McClanahan: It’s super interesting. I mean, I think that like you’re touching on like what is gonna like help spin that flywheel, right? But I think there’s so many parallels even in like just a traditional SaaS business where there’s like an area where folks should be doubling down.
How do you get more of your customers to look like the elite customers? Again, they might not be, you know, internally to driving the demand side for the business, but like, I think that’s something that everyone here should be aspiring to. Kind of switching gears slightly. There are a lot of metrics I’d say that are like pretty new for folks likely that have spent any time in the SaaS space that you kind of touched on here, uh, although I see pretty clear parallels between these and some of the things that, you know, teams are already tracking.
Mm-hmm. As I think about, you know, speed of fulfillment, maybe a parallel being speed to lead. One of the questions we get is like, and maybe we can avoid getting too technical and in the weeds, but like, how do you actually think about like, tracking all of this from like a RevOps perspective? Does this live in Salesforce?
Does this live in the HubSpot? Like how are you managing kind of all of these things when it sounds like a lot of them are a little bit more like product oriented than, you know, maybe the typical funnel that folks are used to.
Chris Skalicky: Yeah uh, you can definitely in your CRM if all of your data’s united in there.
I think that’s a, a place where you could, um, track these types of things. Uh, a lot of times it’s, it’s really complex data analysis, so you need, uh, like a bi tool. There are extra services out there like AccountAim that help you understand revenue and, and where that stuff comes from. Um, so you can actually pull in these different data sources, combine everything together, and that’s what’s gonna give you this more clear picture, um, because it really is like two separate businesses and you control how they do business together.
So, it, it’s less like in a traditional SaaS is like an Italian restaurant. Everybody c comes in, they want Italian food, and so you just have to serve them Italian food and it has to be the best possible Italian food you can do. When you have a marketplace, it’s more like a food court. So there’s a, just all these different dynamics of like, you can’t have all Italian restaurants ’cause that’s not helpful.
You need Italian and a Chinese restaurant and a pizza place and a, a burger place and all that. And so then you have to just like curate between all of that, how all of this works together. Um, so it really is different in how we think about. The metrics themselves because it’s interplay between two businesses, but a lot of them, like you said, are very much the same.
Uh, it’s just more extrapolated to two businesses versus us and, and our customer.
Josh McClanahan: I love the food court analogy. Um, I’m gonna shamelessly steal this one, uh, going forward. Maybe the last question as we, uh, as we get a little bit closer to time here. Any advice for somebody that’s making the transition, maybe from SaaS into the marketplace model, from a Rev OS perspective?
Like any common pitfalls that they should be thinking about avoiding, or anything that they should maybe approach differently than they would in kind of like a, a traditional, you know, kind of pure B2B type of business?
Chris Skalicky: Yeah, I, I mean, I think the biggest thing for me is. I would say know your customer’s journeys.
So you sort of have two customers, your demand side, supply side, you gotta know both of those in and out, through and through, just as you would in a regular SaaS business. But now you have two. And so the optimization, all of the benefits, all the things that you know, even from a product feature and release perspective how they interact with your platform, how they interact with your teams.
All those things are different. They need to be two separate and unique journeys. There’s rider support and there’s driver support. They’re different things. Um, and so you really want to create clear goals for each, clear metrics for each. Clear processes and, and setups for each, and really understand those journeys so you can optimize each one independently, but always keeping that focus on, you know, your North Star and what’s most important for your business overall.
So I think that’s really where I would start.
Josh McClanahan: Chris, this has been so helpful. Um, I was excited before we chat. I’m even more excited now, um, after having gone through this together. Thank you again so much for, uh, taking the time out to do this. Thanks for everybody for joining. Chris, if folks have more questions on the marketplace or that you just wanna follow your journey, what’s kinda the best place for them to, uh, to kinda find you or reach out?
Chris Skalicky: Yeah, you can definitely find me on, uh, LinkedIn. Feel free to shoot me a DM if you have questions. Like I said, I’m gonna put up all this information, uh, on my LinkedIn and, and, and I’ll give it to Josh. Um. Uh, if you’re interested in coming to work at, uh, a marketplace and you’re in the Georgia area, uh, Atlanta area, you can come work at load up.
We got lots of stuff available. Uh, our RevOps team is expanding. We got lots of technology physicians lots of cool stuff. Um, so if this is something that you wanna get into, uh, in, in any capacity, we’ve got lots of of openings and, uh, we’d love to have you.
Josh McClanahan: That’s amazing. Well, Chris, thank you again so much.
Uh, like I mentioned at the outset here, we’ll be sharing the recording, reach out to Chris if you have any questions on the marketplace side. He knows it better than anybody I’ve met. And so, Chris, thanks again. We’ll have to do this again soon. I feel like we can talk for hours and hours.
Chris Skalicky: Absolutely, man.
Anytime. You just let me know.
Josh McClanahan: Awesome. All right, well take care everybody. Thanks so much.
Chris Skalicky: Bye.
