How to operationalize the Bowtie model: A Q&A with Jacki Leahy of Activate the Magic

James Geyer: We are back for our latest episode of boardroom RevOps, where we are bringing you valuable tips from RevOps experts so you can make it to the C-suite. Again, I’m James, co-founder of AccountAim, the next gen BI solution for RevOps teams. I’m joined by Jacki Leahy today, founder of the fractional RevOps Agency.

Activate the magic. Great to have you on Jacki.

Jacki Leahy: So good to be here. Thank you for having me.

James Geyer: Of course. Excited to dive in today. Uh, we’re gonna go into what the popular bow tie model is, how to operationalize it as a RevOps lead, as well as how to think about early stage RevOps more generally. Um, but before we do, Jacki, do you wanna share your background in a bit more detail for folks?

Jacki Leahy: I would love to talk about myself, James. My name is Jacki Leahy. I’m the founder of Activate the Magic, where we provide fractional RevOps support to early stage B2B SaaS companies. I like to think of us as the traveling circus of technical ops, uh, full of heart, highly skilled, and just allergic to bloated systems.

So we help companies go from zero to 10 million taming that carrot chaos without, you know, being too heavy handed. Before this, I was a kindergarten teacher and I sold real estate in New York City and I found my way into SaaS sales in like 2016. Um, I’ve always considered, um, career as my medium for self-expression and RevOps is really where my inner systems meets my love for helping people really do their jobs well.

James Geyer: Love. It sounds like you’ve lived many lives, which I’m sure adds to, um, the perspective you can lend as the founder of Activate the Magic. Yeah. Um, before we, before we dive into the bow tie model, how do you define RevOps?

Jacki Leahy: Okay. Nobody attack me. Nobody fight me. Just kidding. So I see RevOps as the HVAC system for your go-to-market engine.

When it’s working well, you don’t even notice it when it’s not. Everybody’s sweating, um, and everyone’s blaming each other. But at its core, RevOps is about creating systems and processes and uncovering insights that help the revenue teams and go to market teams, do their best work, aligned, empowered, and flow in.

James Geyer: I’m glad you use that, um, metaphor because I think that’s the biggest challenge of being RevOps practitioner is that like no one notices you unless you’re doing a bad job or things are going wrong. And so I think that’ll be a really valuable perspective. Um, but let’s hop right in here. So let’s talk bow tie for those that aren’t familiar with the term.

Like what is the bow tie?

Jacki Leahy: The bow tie. So it’s a visual representation of the full customer lifecycle. So think of your traditional funnel and you flip it on its side, and then you mirror it. So you’ve got the, uh, awareness, kind of acquisition of leads. Then you convert them into deals. You work the deals, you close the deals, and then you’re on the right side of the bow tie where you are onboarding, expanding, um, and increasing that lifetime value.

James Geyer: And I know that you are a huge fan. Tell me why, why did this draw your attention?

Jacki Leahy: Tell me why.. So I’ve actually been a huge fan of Jacco van der Kooij since 2018. Uh, I went to an outreach user conference in San Diego and he was a speaker, like I got to be in the room with him. And then a couple years later in like 2021, I believe I got to be in the.

Um, founding cohort of the growth of the growth revenue architecture course that was offered through Pavilion. And let me just tell you like, it unleashed this obsession. Like nights, weekends, holidays, I was like building solutions inside of Salesforce to attempt to operationalize the bow tie. And for the good 18 months of my life, I was like, like a dog with a bone.

James Geyer: Tell me more about operationalizing the bow tie. Like what does that mean? So we have the visual representation, it’s going from leads to active deals to close one to expansion. How do we put that into motion as a RevOps lead?

Jacki Leahy: Yeah. So it’s really representing the revenue engine as a system and, uh, approaching go to market as its own ecosystem.

So when you change one thing, it’s going to change the entire. Ecosystem. So that in itself, the sort of first principles way of looking at it, it was just such a huge aha moment. And the idea is instead of. Big men yelling at me in a conference room about their opinions. I would be able to be like, Hey, this isn’t just, this is actually, let’s diagnose what’s going on here.

So that was just so compelling to me as a short lady in tech. Uh, just like, let, let’s talk about what’s actually happening and not like, get hung up on weird opinions of how I used to do it at my old company.

James Geyer: That’s great. So it sounds like to recap like the value of the bow tie is a visual representation of how the system works in go to market.

It’s using data to be more objective about what’s actually happening in the funnel and post-sale. Anything else to add on like the value of the bow tie? Like why should folks really lean into it?

Jacki Leahy: Well, I think it does a really good job when you use it to like tactilely, show what’s happening, right?

It’s not market. So often, like we mean well, but we just get so disjointed, right? And it’s like under stress, I’m going to take care of my own and have my own fiefdom, I’m gonna have my vanity metrics. Whereas when you really look at it as a system, it’s like, that’s why, that’s why I’m fighting with marketing team, right?

Because they have a completely def different definition than what I’m working off. And that ended up actually being the, like the, what I realized was that building a. Data dictionary was actually the first enormous obstacle that I was coming across when it was come to, when it would come to aligning a go-to-market team.

Um, on Nevermind the bow tie, right?

James Geyer: On anything.

Jacki Leahy: On anything, anything. And if you don’t really clean and normalize that data, diagnosing off of lumpy, I’m just gonna call it lumpy, apples and oranges and a banana like. That’s actually more dangerous than just a gut check.

James Geyer: Yeah, a hundred percent. Um, it’s like blind precision and that’s not helpful either.

Okay. So alignment is like the last piece of value there, which I think, uh, makes total sense. I do wanna get more into that data piece you just mentioned before. I do like, I. I think this is a great tool as, uh, to use as a RevOps leader because it’s data-driven. It’s like a whole mental model into a system, as you said.

But you obviously can’t implement this in like a vacuum, right? Like you need buy-in from each of those functional leaders to align them. So if they’re running their own fiefdoms, any advice you’d give to RevOps leaders to get that alignment? Like how do you sell using the bow tie to executives?

Jacki Leahy: Oh my gosh.

And if anybody has a better way, please tell me. But here’s what’s been working for me on this, a good whiteboarding session. Right. And I do it digitally, obviously. I have a Lucid Spark template, um, and I’ve got an iPad with an Apple pencil, and I share my iPad screen with the team, and I’ve got the template with like the bow tie on it, and we just talk through what’s happening.

In their revenue engine. Mm-hmm. And what we’re going to do is uncover gaps. And I didn’t realize, wait, we have to work together on this, but what I’m actually listening for is uncovering their key constraint. I’m a huge fan of the theory of constraints because it is a system. And what I see so often is we’re trying, we’re doing all these initiatives at once, and it’s like, even if it works, we actually have no idea what works.

Right. So really having that. Discipline and guts to pick one thing, focus on that, and actively let other things burn. Mm-hmm. Like that. I think that is the really hard thing. And even when you do get alignment on that meeting, and you will, because people want to work together, they actually do wanna connect, but then you really gotta keep running it like a PR campaign.

Right, because then the sales leader goes back to their team and the marketing leader, and all of a sudden their world is blowing up. Yeah. It’s a big pain. It’s a big friction for me personally. But is it expensive enough? Is it, is it worth, does it rise to the level of the entire organization focusing on it?

Absolutely not.

Yeah, the, I love that description because it really strikes me as being like an internal seller. Like the white whiteboarding session is basically discovery. Like, how do I open their eyes on their own of this huge problem and lead the horses to water, and then how do I continue to sell it and make sure that the pain is actually big and upsetting?

Those are really good tips. Okay, so that’s kind like alignment in sales. Data. You mentioned this was like a thorny part of using the bow tie, like how do we align the definitions, how do we actually get clarity and what is probably a messy, uh, potentially a marketing automation platform stack? So tell me about the data requirements to do this well, so.

Talk about character development with me. Um, you could do a whole movie. I’m gonna say, well, is relative right how to do it well for so, so long, I was really hung up on getting all of the data points for the entire bow tie. So for each of those conversion points, I think there’s six of them, seven of them, the time.

The value, like the raw number and the conversion rate. I, I thought I was certain that I needed all three of those data points for the entire bow tie before, like to be able to diagnose. Mm-hmm. And I was so obsessed with that, that it, it really. Dawned on me, like literally recently, like in December. What if we just start with LTB to cac?

Let’s just like super simple to ballpark and sketch out these numbers on a napkin, right? Um, and then as you grow and build your infrastructure and processes, you can tighten that up and get better metrics, more precise metrics, but just starting with which side of the bow tie is the, is the problem child right now.

And it can switch. It can switch real fast. And just for benchmarking, if you’re listening to this, the minimum viable business is gonna be a three to one lifetime value of a client being three times as much as the cost of acquisition. Um, you are gonna shoot for like 10 to one. That’s that’s, you’re in a great spot.

Very good. Yeah. And if you’re hitting 30 to one, you are printing money, baby. Go get funding and throw gasoline on it.

James Geyer: That’s awesome. Um, yeah, so just to recap, for anyone listening that isn’t totally plugged into LGP to cac, I’ll just repeat lifetime value over customer acquisition costs. So lifetime value is kind of the combination of deal size and retention.

How long do they stick around? And there’s also usually a gross margin component in there for some of the costs. And that customer acquisition costs, usually the all in cost. Of your sales and marketing efforts. So kind of direct marketing on the account, and then the sales time and, um, budget to close that deal.

And so you kinda do the division over that to make sure that your lifetime value of that customer is in excess of your cost. That’s my quick, uh, to my, my, uh, origin as an investment banker from a past life. So tell me more LTV to cac. Like if we’re picking that one metric. So how do you then. It’s one thing to report it, and it’s great to have to report it, but then how do you use it across the team if that’s kinda the one metric we’re starting with?

Like how does that manifest like day to day or week?

Jacki Leahy: Yeah, so I, okay, so I’m, I’m also a founder. I’m building an agency, right, with recurring revenue, and here’s what it looked like for me to get started. I’ve got QuickBooks and I’ve got Stripe, and I’ve also got Google Sheets. Like literally just manually tabulating things and showing.

And then I do have a weekly staff meeting with my leadership and yeah, I brought it to them like, look, look, I’m gonna say our constraint is here. Right? At the time it was pipeline. I need, I needed to generate more pipeline. And so this is the constraint that we’re actually going to focus on, you know, bit by bit.

We’re getting more and more mature, right? Uh, and tightening up systems. But start where you are. I think I was, I was. Really holding myself to a standard that wasn’t necessary for, uh, to be strategic.

James Geyer: Awesome. I think that covers the bow tie pretty well. Anything else we missed that you wanna throw in there since you kind of have been living and breathing this for some time?

Jacki Leahy: Yeah. Um, so I’m headed to Rev, uh, RevOps AF, in New Orleans, May 6th, seventh, and eighth. And my talk is on selling the value of RevOps. Which was, you know, pick the topic and then I was like, uhoh, I don’t know how to do that.

James Geyer: That’s your job. You’re selling your services as an agency.

Jacki Leahy: I know, I know. Uh, I know.

So it’s been a, like a confronting adventure for the past, like six or seven months, like really nailing this and um, I think step one is to triage. Your key constraint and instead of like getting tied up in all the different stages, I like to one of these three things, acquisition, conversion or expansion.

Like which one, which ones holding the team back. And I actually have a free, don’t have to put in your email on gated, just want you to use it. Uh, it’s a little calculator type form thing. 36 seconds now on average to fill out and it’ll dump you onto a page of like, okay, this is your key constraint. This is what you wanna do.

Here’s the steps to do it. And you can literally just hand it to, uh, like your right hand and say, go forth and execute.

James Geyer: Love it. Um, that’s great and we’ll have to disseminate that calculator to the audience here as well. Make sure that they get that in their hands so they can use it. Okay. Cool. That was awesome.

Um, let’s move on to the next topic here. RevOps by stage. And so you mentioned with Activate the Magic, you are serving companies from zero to 10 million in revenue for their RevOps needs. Obviously a company at Zero is different than a company at 5 million is different from a company at 10. I, I think at least you can tell me if I’m wrong.

Jacki Leahy: Yeah, for sure. For sure.

James Geyer: How do you, how do you view the different stages within the range? Like, are there natural break points? How, how do you think about maturity and the like?

Jacki Leahy: Yeah, it’s a little bit more, uh, ambiguous than I think later, um, where you can really, you really need to nail it in. What I usually see is when a sales team or a sales leader comes to me, it’s usually because they’re Google Sheets empire.

Is breaking, even if they do have HubSpot or Salesforce or whatnot, the question to ask is, okay, cool. But when you do your forecasting or pipeline review, what are you using? And it’s usually a Google sheet, right? Mm-hmm. And at some point, right, like you do want to have revenue lead infrastructure, right?

So it it, you do want like. You do want it to be a little bit chaotic. Mm-hmm. Right. But there is a certain point where it’s like, oh no, I can no longer keep my arms around what’s happening. And we do need to start actually documenting a process that I don’t know might become repeatable one day. So our clients are usually coming in being like, Hey, we are closing deals and we are not really sure how it’s sort of selling despite our own chaos.

James Geyer: So a good problem to have, as you mentioned.

Jacki Leahy: It’s so, so fun. And um, and the good thing is I think. You know, both the reps and the leaders and the leadership kind of come to me with like their tail between their legs. Like we, we didn’t do it right. It’s like, nah, you are absolutely fine. You are, you are generating revenue and you actually have developed.

A repeatable sales process, you just don’t know what it looks like. Mm-hmm. So we’re not, we’re literally just gonna do ride-alongs and look into your systems and honestly just like put pen to paper of what is already working, um, and just removing as much friction as possible for that.

James Geyer: Got it. Okay. So I heard a few things.

Please correct me if I’m wrong. In this range of zero to 10 million, it’s maybe less about different phases within there. And it’s more that like there’s one persona where it’s like, okay, things are just breaking. We’re overwhelmed with our sheets. We don’t know what’s happening. We have no visibility. Um, are those the right symptoms?

Is that correct?

Jacki Leahy: Yeah. Yeah. Usually they might be on HubSpot or something, but um, it’s usually a Frankenstein of like a bunch of order takers. Mm-hmm. Like somebody had an idea and they like. Put it like some consultant put it in, not really thinking about the system as a whole, you know? Um, so it’s usually like things are a mess.

James Geyer: Got it. So what’s, what’s the goal for folks hiring, activate the magic that stage? Or what are you kind of saying the end state’s gonna look like?

Jacki Leahy: Yeah, we’re definitely a bridge, not a barnacle. It’s kind of counterintuitive, but the better job we do, the faster you graduate and what graduation ends up looking like is we’ll help you either hire someone internally.

And or link you up with an agency that’s better suited for more complicated situations once you’ve got, you know, two or three go-to-market motions and you’ve got a c, like a real CPQ and you’re trying to do things from there.

James Geyer: Got it. Okay, cool. So it sounds like systems dialed in, maybe some documentation of process, some sales stages, perhaps like anything else on the checklist.

Jacki Leahy: Yeah. Uh, yeah, we wanna map out your customer journey, have a good sense of like where those friction points are and yeah, make sure when you do graduate you have the do like documentation of what is in my system, why, you know, not an essay, but here’s the rationale for what’s here. And. Yeah, we, we know that this is not going to be the end all, be all configuration that you’re going to get your series C with, we know that, right?

So it’s a let’s be as light handed as possible to kind of untangle some masks, get you move in without being too heavy handed.

James Geyer: That’s great. I think that’s a great framework for folks who might be listening that are kind of in the earliest stages. Well, cool. Last category here. We also love to talk career too, and I think you are well suited to this because as we said in the beginning, you’ve lived a few different lives from a career perspective.

Um, happy to take this wherever you wanna go. My first kinda question was for you is, I know you came from RevOps by way of being a seller, actually. Mm-hmm. So tell me, how did you make the transition? What drew you to RevOps and maybe even like the benefits of being a former seller, uh, now in the RevOps seat?

Jacki Leahy: Yeah. I do think if you have been in the BDR seat or AE seat, I think we have just. A superpower of empathy. Right. And just like understanding of why that’s a stupid place to put a button sort of thing. Like things that you, you really gotta explain to people who aren’t coming from carrying a bag or whatever you wanna call it.

So it’s definitely a superpower. And then, what was your other question? Like what’s the,

James Geyer: what drew you to RevOps having been in the sales seat?

Jacki Leahy: Everything was accidental from day one. At my first startup, I would, everything broke. Like I would break. I don’t know how, but I just ended up breaking everything.

I took the wind out of any POC sails, right? Like I was like, no, this doesn’t work because X, Y, Z. They’re like, that’s not a problem. Like it is a problem. Right. So just being just. A nightmare. I was a nightmare to have as a BDR from, you know, the sales op manager point of view. And the third startup I was at was Link Squares here in Boston.

I was higher number 10 and the CEO and he was my mentor at the time, went in, in person and, uh, he like brought me to a back room with like four smelly AE boys. And, and he is like, see their cal. Everybody opened up your Google Cals and everyone did. And they were like, empty. He’s like, can you fix that?

It’s like, yep. And so we went from 350k ARR to 9 million in two years. Zero marketing hires just like cold outbound on a dream baby. Um, and in that process, like somebody had to figure out how to connect Salesforce to outreach right? Just like bit by bit. And I just like was completely fell head over heels.

I related to it as like business Legos. Like, what do you want done? I can make it happen.

James Geyer: Yeah. Yeah. That’s such a rev op mindset.

Jacki Leahy: Yeah, yeah. Yeah. You’ve got the what? I got the, how I can figure it out. Like, did you know they’re Zapier? I can do anything.

James Geyer: That’s great. Um, what is it like, I think Link Squares is very much a rocket ship.

Like you just threw out a kind of crazy revenue stat, like Yeah. Advice for folks doing RevOps at a rocket ship, like it’s probably crazy hair on fire burning all the time. Like how do you prioritize or what, what’s the biggest challenge or piece of advice that you might have?

Jacki Leahy: Yeah, I think know what chapter.

In life you are, are in. I think there’s no such thing as work life balance. It’s all about work life choices. Right? And if you were to watch like a high speed video of me over those two years, it would just be me at a computer, right? Like furiously trying to figure things out. Would that work for all people at all stages of their life?

Absolutely not. Right? So like, like have a reality check with yourself of what, what’s what, even if it’s not spoken, what’s being asked of me. Like in some situations, they really do need. Like someone to eat, sleep, and breathe to make the dream work. And I was severely underpaid, right? 60 grand a year and I was like building the entire thing.

But everything does pay off. Like it set me up for the career that I’m able to have now, right? Like when I did get laid off a couple years ago, I just put up my shingle and very quickly I had too much work on my plate, right? So work life choices. Know what chapter you’re in and don’t let anyone. I’ll define success or winning for you.

Right, because like when I was in the middle of it, like friends, family would be like, you’re crazy, right? Like, you should relax more. Like when’s the last time you took a vacation sort of thing. And like, Hey, don’t yuck my yum. This is like, this is what I choose to do right now.

So if that’s you, like, let your freak flag fly, baby.

James Geyer: I love it. There’s also a good segue in here because you said like it, it might not be for everyone, you know, you kinda have to choose what you really wanna do. And I wanted to ask you like more and more folks in RevOps have been going fractional or thinking about going fractional. I. I’m sure it’s not for everybody.

So like what does it take to go fractional? What, how should someone be thinking about that decision?

Jacki Leahy: Yeah, so think about, and there’s different kinds, right? So going off on your own, you wanna be a solopreneur, great. Think about what you’re really good at, and if it’s like actually doing the job and it’s not really generating clients, then figure out a way to do that.

So paying referral fees or rev share, or getting yourself aligned with a bunch of other people, it takes time. You’re probably gonna have to give up. Some of your revenue, right? To make that happen. And you know, pretty quickly I realized that like six months in, I was like, did I accidentally build a business?

I think I accidentally built a business. Whoops. And yeah, oopsie. Um, and you know what? I ended up falling in love with entrepreneurship, which is distinctly different from doing the job of RevOps. Right. So it, it, no, I would say know thyself or, or listen to yourself. Like if you’re really hating invoicing and marketing and business development and doing all the things outside of doing the role, then like hook up with another agency.

Like, um, like activate the magic. We have contractors. Right. And we need talent. And I wish that activate the magic was something available when I left in-house and went to Outhouse Consulting side. Um,

James Geyer: that’s great. That’s good advice. And I think thinking about everything that comes along with being on your own, all of the non RevOps work is probably the best.

Litmus test. How can folks like you had an advantage of, maybe it’s relevant being a BDR in the sales seat. So you kind of knew what, you know, sales was like to an extent. Like any advice for folks, like how can people figure it out before actually taking the plunge themselves?

Jacki Leahy: Well, does the thought of reaching out to strangers?

Make you wanna puke, this might not be for you.

James Geyer: That’s probably the simple answer. Yeah.

Jacki Leahy: Right. Like I, I know that I am just like a weirdo, right? Like I live for the chase. I hope none of my clients are listening right now. But like, I love generating pipeline, having those that, that intro call and then I’m like, okay, next, who’s mine?

I love the business development part of it, so, but if you don’t like it, I would say. Figure out solutions that do it kind of for you. Like Amplemarket is amazing. Mm-hmm. You just kind of like set things up and go, but yeah, have, try it. If you hate it, you hate it. Like a lot of people hate the job. That’s normal.

James Geyer: Yeah. I think that’s fair. And then I do think like if it’s something high of mind, you should just try it. Because I think even with AccountAim, I don’t know if it make me puke, but thinking of doing outbound before we kind of jumped into AccountAim wasn’t top of my list. But now I’m kind of on in your camp where it’s.

I find it thrilling and you know, taking a deal from prospecting close is incredibly rewarding. And so I think folks can grow into it as well.

Jacki Leahy: Yeah, I know that like I was, I was put on this earth to interrupt people’s days and start conversations that change lives like that. I just know that’s just who I am and it’s fun for me.

Yeah.

James Geyer: Well put that on your tombstone. Yeah. Yeah. After you’re, after you’re on this earth. That’s a great quote about you. I love it. Um, alright. Rapid fire finish. We do, uh, with everyone here Jacki. Uh, two quick questions. First thing that comes to your mind, if you could fix one challenge in RevOps, what would it be?

Jacki Leahy: A one challenge in RevOps. Good God. Um, snap

James Geyer: your fingers and it goes away forever.

Jacki Leahy: Everyone’s one team. One team, one dream.

James Geyer: Love it. And how would you describe a great Red Ops leader in three words,

Jacki Leahy: curious, collaborative, and a heart for contribution.

James Geyer: Awesome. We’ll, we’ll count it, we’ll put dashes in between those.

Jacki, thanks so much for spending time with us today. This is awesome. I’m excited to get this out into the world. Um, if anyone has questions for Jacki, I imagine she wouldn’t mind knowing Jacki, if you reach out directly or you can ask me and I’ll funnel them uh, her way. Thanks again, Jacki. This was fun.

Jacki Leahy: Thank you, James.