Joel Arnold

James Geyer: All right, we are back for our latest episode of boardroom RevOps, where we are bringing you valuable tips from RevOps experts so you can make to the C-suite. Again, I’m James, co-founder of AccountAim, the NextGen BI solution for RevOps teams. I’m joined by Joel Arnold today. Joel has been VP of RevOps in multiple companies and now runs his own fractional RevOps consulting practice.

Great to have you on Joel.

Joel Arnold: Thanks for having me, James.

James Geyer: We’re gonna dive into a pretty interesting topic today, kind of how to join an established company and add value as a RevOps leader, something you’ve done numerous times. So I’m really keen to get your insight.

Joel Arnold: So I got into the RevOps game about 2015, a decade now. I started off in sales operations, but then grew into what became revenue operations. We added the marketing ops team, I was at that company for probably two to three years, jumped to another private equity back, software company that needed a little bit of a different thing instead of in growth mode, they were sort of fixing a repairing mode

Move into their next stage of growth. So I helped them do that. And then one of my friends from the private equity firm that I initially was working at, I got his first CRO gig. So I helped him out for a while. I reported to him for another two, three year stint, and then I decided to sort of do it in an advisory capacity.

I could, I sort of felt like I had a lot to teach people or to share with the world. And so I started working for Union Square Consulting, love their revenue operations practice. And then about a year, year and a half ago, I, launched my own thing. So I’ve been doing that ever since.

James Geyer: Awesome. A lot of different angles.

I think the insights will be great. I understand we probably can’t get to all the nuance, but like you’ve been VP of RevOps a few times now, like what does it take to make it to vp? I feel like I hear from many folks that like, it’s not super clear in, in RevOps today.

Joel Arnold: I don’t know if I have clarity, as to how to do it. I mean, at the VPU level, you’re running something, so the buck stops at you. So being able to take on. Ownership and feel like you’ve got a grasp of many different threads. Concurrently is part of the.

Baseline. beyond that, what you’re looking for in a VP is someone who can be a confidant and advise in many different ways. in the RevOps space, you’re probably looking at everything from strategy and strategy conversations, TAM understanding your market really, really well, understanding what the buyers want and what their needs are, all the way down to how do you encode that into some technology and integrate systems together.

So I think a lot of people that get into revenue operations sort of start, if there is a. If there is a job progression kind of a thing, which doesn’t really exist for everybody, but if I’m seeing some themes, they typically start in either an analyst or kind of a technological role.

Think of like a Salesforce admin or something to get to that and sort of work their way up. So that last piece that they get. Is often the sort of 30,000 foot view of the world and how you organize a company and that kind of thing. So I would say there’s a lot of resources out there to help you grasp that component of it.

There’s education that you can obviously get, but I think you have to work on all the different, muscles or skillsets in sort of that verticalized approach in order to feel like you’re ready for the VP thing or someone at least needs to see that in you.

James Geyer: Yeah, super helpful. And something I ask everyone we have on the podcast is how do you define RevOps?

Joel Arnold: I am trying to be really conscious of what the market thinks of as RevOps, but, RevOps to me was always, a role whose modus operandi was to get marketing, sales, and customer success all on the same thread. All of them aligned and all of them reading the same data from the.

Singing from the same songbook. I think today what often a lot of people talk about when they say RevOps is typically either sales ops plus one or two threads of something else, but it’s often also seen as, more of a technological role. So I don’t think there’s a great definition that everyone agrees to.

I have my personal one, which is sort of that overarching view of the world, but unfortunately I fear that I might be in the minority on that, which is why when I, when I personally go to market, I also include sort Of go to market operations in there as well, which I think there’s a slightly two different things, but I think if you’ve at least got both of them, no matter what definition you have, you have a pretty good idea for what we do.

James Geyer: Yeah, fair enough. And for what it’s worth, I do agree with your aspirational definition too. So hopefully we can preach the gospel together. but I recognize not everyone’s on the same page yet. We’ll jump into kind of like the core topic I think is, super interesting to me today and I’m curious to get your take on it.

Just like joining an established company. And so, you know, there’s a lot of content out there for RevOps and how to do a certain task, but not as much around like, how do I join a company that kind of already exists? Is not, you know, a series a growth company, hiring RevOps for the first time, but is already big and maybe bloated, maybe has some operational debt.

Joel Arnold: How do I come in as a senior RevOps leader and actually enact change, which I think is really hard to do. And so maybe I’ll just start like really high level, like how do you approach this generally? Assuming you’ve been hired to do so, how do you,

James Geyer: Sure,

Joel Arnold: You know what, it’s actually kind of surprising. Earlier in my career I had worked at a couple of PE backed B2B, software companies, they were of a certain size, let’s say, between 25 and 200 million, kind of in that range. I thought that when you’re in a bigger company, they have completely different problems.

In fact, I had interviewed for one or two roles at larger companies, and they were convinced that the problems were just different. And if you didn’t work in a big company, you had never seen what our troubles were. And then later on I actually started working for some of these big companies as an advisor, as a consultant, as a fractional.

It turns out it’s the same stuff. It’s entirely the same thing. I mean, the scale might be a little bit different. Sure. But it’s the same problems. It’s the same problems everywhere. So the good news, I think, is that if you’ve worked in revenue operations in some capacity, regardless of the size of the company, you probably know a.

The profile of the people you’re gonna be working with. You kind of know where a lot of the skeletons are buried at. Like definitions, fundamental sales process, reporting, visualizing things, telling a story. You know, all these kind of skill sets or technologies or things that you might learn. They probably work everywhere.

Everybody has their differences. Large companies tend to be a lot more buttoned up, for example, on changes to Salesforce and what tools you’re supposed to use But I would just start by saying it’s surprisingly not that much different.

James Geyer: What’s, like when you join a new company, like what is the first thing you do? Like, do you have a diagnostic checklist or like how do you think about assessing the state of kind of RevOps at a, a company that’s been going concerned for a while?

Joel Arnold: Yeah. Always a diagnostic first. I prefer to work off of a roadmap so that I know no matter whether or not someone is directing me to do work, I’m always working on the most important thing at all times.

And that my team is always working on the most important thing at all times. if I’m in charge of. One. So yeah, I’d start off with the diagnostic. I talked to all the key stakeholders that would be sort of adjacent to the revenue operations area and then sort of helped by working with the leadership of my team, or maybe above me, of course, getting the priority sort order of all the different projects that need to be fixed sort of lined up so that we can just run full speed at it.

James Geyer: Got it. it’s meeting with everyone that has a say in RevOps, which is quite a big chunk of the company, I’m sure. Understanding what’s on their priority list. And then are you taking it back to your boss to kind of like tick through, like, how do we assign business impact to these and create a roadmap or what’s, did I get that right?

Joel Arnold: I don’t want to try to convey that. I’m just taking and asking everybody what’s your biggest problem? And then just like building a robot. Roadmap. Yeah, I feel like that’s a way to do that, but I don’t, I take, I have a series of questions that I’ve used over the last few places that I’ve gone. I keep adding to that list of questions.

It’s about 150 questions and growing. I work fundamentals first. So when I’m doing a diagnostic, I always try to figure out what is the thing that is most basic that’s missing here? It’s amazing how often you go around and they don’t have a definition for something. or they don’t have a process or a methodology for a basic kind of thing, like, renewals, like how do we do a renewal?

Or, what are our KPIs? They might say, oh their ARR or a CV or bookings or retention rates or whatever. And then, you try to pin them down on what those things actually mean and they’re, they kind of dodge and, well, I’m not sure, and, whatever. And you have two people across the table kind of pointing in different directions.

So it’s kind of getting that stuff lined up, figuring out where the most impactful playbook plays would be, would be kind of the next thing. So if I, if I know that they’ve got a, let’s say, a data enrichment problems, like there’s a lot of ways to go about improving that problem and figuring out, okay, if that’s where we need to go first, what are some, some things that we can do to fix that?

So then I build a roadmap off of that, and then I take that back to my leadership, or ostensibly the leadership of the revenue organization, whoever that happens to be. And I get them to bless it because I need to know. That if I’m working on something and someone over there says, you know, you should be working on my thing instead that I have someone to go to to say, well that’s all well and good, but I don’t know.

The CRO told me that that’s the most important thing. So I’m gonna do that first and then we can talk about your thing later. it’s sort of a backstop for allowing the roadmap to work.

James Geyer: That’s really great. I love that. I’m like itching to see your 150 questions, but I won’t make you fork it over ’cause I know it’s probably your

Joel Arnold: secret sauce, my man.

James Geyer: Your secret sauce. Exactly. Are there any other themes you can add to that? Like what I heard, to repeat back to you is like, you start at kind of the most basic, let’s get to like the definitional things, make sure everyone’s on the same page or that these even exist. Let’s maybe go to call it a kind of visualizing a pyramid, the stack above.

What are the processes? Is there more that you kind of layer on there from a thematic perspective, or does that capture a bunch of the questions as a whole?

Joel Arnold: That captures quite a few questions, but there’s that to be replayed in marketing in SDRs, in sales, in customer success, et cetera.

So there’s a lot of questions that get to the fundamentals, but there’s a lot of fundamentals to cover. So I’ve never gotten to a place where they had all their bases covered. There’s always gaps in the foundation and that’s what I wanna fix first.

A place for the first time. It’s really quick to identify those things if you’ve done this a few times. And then when we move on, we try to do a little bit more around, policies and procedures work for you. So what is our, what does our lead funnel look like? Are we using a basic scoring system?

Are we using something like a six sense that’s like, trying to use our AI to address who’s the person that you need to talk to next, et cetera. Making the sure those pieces kind of fit together. That data is passing through from one system to the next. And so that you might call that kind of basic stuff, but also that’s, there’s a lot of value to be added there or value leaking out of the system if that’s not there.

And then eventually you’re trying to work your way kind of up the pyramid to, forecasting things like, there’s a bunch of tools that’ll basically go out there and tell you who’s gonna come in this quarter, or the likelihood of something to come in, or a customer dashboard.

It tells you a score that says this is a risky client, or it’s not based on activity that we’re seeing. A lot of the AI based, automation and technology that’s rolling out now is at that top level where it’s being predictive and trying to see, help see you around corners and analyze the exhaust.

Stream of data that you’ve already got kind of coming outta your systems. That would be kind of the final piece. The interesting thing is that’s what a lot of people want, but

James Geyer: gotta do the basics first though, right?

Joel Arnold: I’m here to tell you, it’s like that stuff runs on data and if you don’t have your processes, you won’t have data coming out accurately.

And if you don’t have definitions, that data won’t mean anything anyway. So you really still need to do the blocking and tackling before it can do the really high value added stuff of, you know, a tool that is going to listen to your phone conversations and document the state of an opportunity.

In Salesforce for you so your reps don’t have to do it. Boy, that’s lovely. But like do you have the right fields? Are you capturing the right fields?

James Geyer: Yeah. You got nowhere to put it. You gotta give it some advice or direction on where to run. That’s great. I think like, yeah, that’s such a good framework and you reminded me of just the value of asking good questions too, right?

It was like you asked the right questions, information just starts to flow and pretty quickly you can be on your way. Not to simplify the elbow grease that I’m sure you’re still putting into it ’cause it’s still a lot of work.

Joel Arnold: It’s elbow grease, but I’m always seeking the elegant solution nearly everywhere I go, especially if they have big problems.

You can count the number of fields that they have in Marketo or Salesforce or, churn zero or whatever their system of record is for that department. They’ve got 547 fields that need to be filled in. They’re not organized. They don’t have their ducks in a row, and so you can almost count the fields and figure out how deep in the water are you.

I want to have like five fields on an opportunity. I want that to be enough. Mm-hmm. Like, will I ever get there? Probably not. But I want it to be as less burdensome and as easy to work with as possible in every way. Yeah, there’s a lot of elbow grease, but a lot of the elbow grease actually needs to be in like pairing things down and simplifying things at the end of the day.

Like if there’s a, pyramid that you’re going up and eventually get to ai and then what’s the final thing? Is there anything beyond that? It’s like, yeah, making all this stuff smaller and simpler and easier. And I forget who said it might have been, let’s say Emerson. Not sure which guy, but, for the simplicity on the near side of complexity, I wouldn’t give you anything on the, for simplicity on the far side of complexity, I would.

Give you everything I have, and that’s kind of the idea. I want the simplicity on the far side of complexity.

James Geyer: I love it. Poetic. We don’t get poetic in RevOps that often, but Right. It’s great. That’s really helpful. I love that framework. Thanks for sharing. I wanna move on to team dynamics. So you’ve come into a few companies, I assume you’ve inherited some teams.

Is that fair assumption? Yeah, for sure. What’s your approach to inheriting an existing RevOps team? And there’s things around culture, there’s things around performance expectations, retaining talent, like are there a few things that are most important for you as you come in and adopt an existing team?

Joel Arnold: I think culture is the amalgamation of thousands of different things that you do on a day-to-day basis.

I don’t think a person can come in and just say, here’s our new culture. Abide by it. I think the easiest thing to do is just kind of roll up your sleeves and get down to work. But what I find is most people in most organizations that are in RevOps are firefighting a lot.

So what I do is I try to put structure to it and so everybody is able to stay sane and by doing that you kind of get a lot of people bought in. So I like to do things that we would typically associate with like Scrum from the product of departments. So like daily standups, breaking everything into bite-sized projects or user stories

Kanban boards are really helpful. Just kind of basic things that we know help people stay organized in an environment where you could literally. Do anything like in RevOps, like what projects could you possibly work on? We touch everything to a degrees

James Geyer: a hundred percent.

Joel Arnold: You have to make decisions by putting in sort of standardized approaches and like bite-sized chunks.

The whole team just suddenly starts making progress slowly in the right direction, and almost immediately you accomplish more than you were accomplishing before by just cutting out the stuff that you didn’t need to do.

James Geyer: How, tell me more about that. So I hear all like the project management tools you mentioned.

I think prioritization framework is great. There’s the internal side of this, of going from reactive to proactive, or let’s just even say organized. There’s also kind of what I’d call like external dealing with stakeholders. Do you find that those techniques that you just mentioned also help the external stakeholders, or is there more that you need to kind of put into place to get folks on board with kind of the priorities?

Joel Arnold: Stakeholders really do appreciate knowing how, where they stand and where the project that they’re working on is at any given time. So that’s the output that I am aiming for. There’s nothing that one can do If, let’s say you’re fourth down the ladder and the CEO’s got a project ahead, you and the CROs got a project ahead of you.

You kind of just understand as the director of whatever that you’re gonna, okay, fine. Sort of roll your eyes. It’s like, okay, I’ll wait a couple days. That’s why the prioritization is so important. So you take that roadmap, and you translate the roadmap items into like a prioritized, sort, ordered list of small chunks of things to do.

And then you add into that the kind of ad hoc request they get on a day-to-day basis. And it’s the person who’s in charge of my team, right? The RevOps leader, to make sure that that is aligned with the balance between those two. Worlds, you make a lot of progress.

So people tend to be relatively happy. And where they’re not happy is because in the past they’ve thrown something over the wall to you and they haven’t gotten a response. And sometimes you knock it out right away, And so by putting it in a location, let’s say a shared, Kanban board is a great example.

So let’s say we did that in a Jira, Atlassian or something. And that’s visible. We’ve got all these triggers that notify, Hey, this has been moved into in progress. This job is done. If they have a question about where it sits in the priority order, they log into the system and see it’s fourth of items in the backlog.

They don’t have to ping your for questions. They get all their questions answered. And then the only thing they have to either be concerned about or gripe about is why am I fourth and not second? and that’s another way to get a lot more, juice out of your team.

I think we had like 150 tickets in the system when we started off this project. And if we had responded, what’s the status report on all of those things? It was gonna be like 30 hours a week at the rate that we were getting pinged. So we spent as much time responding to status updates as we did actually doing any work.

And you can cut out like 90% of that by just having it in a place that’s shared and then cranking as hard as you can on knocking these things out one by one. And then people are constantly getting ped, Hey, that thing has progressed. That thing has progressed, the thing has progressed.

Your thing over here is done, your thing over here is done. And then suddenly the whole like perception of the team changes in the course of maybe a month. The only thing you have to do is make sure that people enter something into whatever system you’ve got. Otherwise it doesn’t exist and it’s not gonna work.

So you get adherence as well in this process. So that’s why I really like this kind of a program. I really feel like it does a great job of. Trimming out the fat and then cutting off all that extraneous stuff that you have to deal with.

James Geyer: Yeah, a hundred percent. And I think knowing people, knowing where they stand is so big too, because it’s hard to complain when you see the other priority things ahead of you.

Yeah. Okay. This has been great. So we talked about prioritization, just staying organized. We started off with the diagnostic key questions to ask, and the pyramid analogy that I love of getting to the gold standard of, you know, AI driven whatever, fill in the blank. Anything else that we, or anything we missed around like upleveling, RevOps leadership as you come in as like a VP of RevOps, is there any big category that we missed or do you think this is the, you know, the, the 80 20 of that?

Joel Arnold: Structuring your data around all these visualizations that we inevitably get asked to build. I would say just like a secret that I’ve learned has been taught to me by a really great VP of analytics at three RevOps leadership roles ago was have a, a standard definitional report for everything that you work on.

So if you say, Hey, we’re gonna look at pipeline for 2025. Have your source of truth documented, have your KPIs definitions written down, and then create a report that shows that in the system of record. So let’s say our system of record for pipeline is Salesforce. There needs to be a report in Salesforce in a folder that only like you, the CFO, and like the head of revenue, can like mod, modify.

It says, this is the Salesforce report for pipeline with all the right filters, with all the right criteria. And then if anybody wants to create a dashboard off of it, let’s say in Tableau or Power BI or whatever system you’re using, reference back to that, it needs to have the same filters, the same criteria, the same parameters.

If someone wants to create a dashboard in Salesforce based on pipeline, they need to copy that report chain, modify it in the way they want, but that’s like their starting point. So you’re always have this sort of baseline in existence for all of your key, performance criteria. And if you do that, you have so fewer opportunities.

For people to just like, well, I wrote a pipeline report from scratch and I forgot to put that filter in there. Darn. And that’s why my number is 25 million when yours says 32.

James Geyer: it’s in the board deck.

Joel Arnold: Right? And then we spend like cycles spinning around like, why are these two numbers not line up?

And it’s just as problems that are like more fundamental, get knocked out. That’s the crap that you get sucked into spinning around and board decks, et cetera, So create a definition report for every key performance indicator, and that’ll save you months of extra effort.

James Geyer: It’s great advice and actually something we’ve seen, show up with AccountAim too. So we’re a data platform. We’re bringing data from a bunch of different sources for RevOps, kinda like a data warehouse. That source of truth use cases come up a bunch too, because of exactly what you just described.

So definitely a big pain point. Okay, cool. So I’m, I want like kind of final category of topics here, just communicating with the C-Suite. I think we already covered like expectations around timelines and priorities for the road mapping and like the project management we talked about. But how do you communicate like the value of RevOps to the C-Suite, the things we should be doing versus not like, and to give you more context, what comes up a lot in at least conversations I have is like, you know, the C-Suite doesn’t understand what I’m even doing as a RevOps person.

They think I’m a CRM admin. How do I get us to like actually valuable work? This may not be a challenge for you because you know, you’re clear to company in values, relevance enough to have a vp, but curious like what your advice would be on that front.

Joel Arnold: Two things. As a leader of, revenue operations, you need to think of things like an investor.

So I don’t think a lot of people will give you this advice, but this is kind of my thing. I did not come to Revenue Operations as a salesforce admin working their way up. I have, an MBA in finance and analytics. I went to work big corporate. I worked in product for a while, eventually found my way into, a PE firm, or I was hired by a PE firm and placed in one their portfolio companies as a chief of staff.

So I was helping the CEO with whatever the biggest hairiest project was. That was my path to suddenly I’m doing revenue operations. It was ’cause someone stepped away and they needed that role filled and they’re like you. Kind of smart, you get the business side of things, you know, you go figure it out.

And it worked out. so I don’t have the working themselves up from the bottom kind of mentality. What I have is someone that spent years in the executive room, you know, the office of these people and like how did they think about things? And I think that helps with the sort of questions around getting the seat at the table

How do you influence people and what do you talk about your job in revenue operations is actually pretty unique, whether people know it or not. It’s the only place in the business outside of the CEO or the CFO suite that can pull both the efficiency lever and the growth lever of a company. And that’s powerful.

That’s powerful. So what a CEO is always struggling to have is, you know, how are we gonna grow faster? So anything that RevOps can do to help the organization grow faster is incredibly important. So there are a lot of plays in the RevOps playbook that help with growth. You know, something like data enrichment, so finding a bunch of source data.

So phone, phone numbers and email addresses. As simple as it is, if your company doesn’t have that, if you go find a solution for that. And so salespeople can spend more of their time actually talking to customers and reaching out to right people as opposed to researching on their own selves. You can increase the throughput of that system and therefore sell more stuff.

So that kind of a playbook, as boring as data crunching is, or going to find a data source is that’s incredibly valuable. So there you can have an impact right away. On the other side of it, sort of maybe the CFO mindset of like efficiency is like there’s not a lot of people that can drive efficiency at a company without, you know, chopping heads.

For example, you can do it in the RevOps seat. So having a really strong understanding of what you need as an organization so you don’t waste a bunch of money on, vendors that you don’t need, that you get the core set of vendors that you really have a lot of value from, like a visualization, CRM, marketing automation tool, customer support, like core things.

And I think that’s what we actually have seen the last couple years is people are downsizing that a little bit. Or at least finding things that overlap, and figuring out like what is the capacity of every role. So understanding, if I want to cover a certain number of accounts, we have a certain cadence that our salespeople go through or marketing has a TAM of a certain size.

You might be the keeper of what is the size of the TAM, how do we define that? What exactly are those accounts, and can we get ’em into our systems of record so that we can market to them? If you’re doing sales capacity, it might be how many phone calls can someone make, or how many emails can someone send out?

With, you know, at least a little bit of personalization. Ideally, you pull in the AI piece there, you get even more efficiency out of it. So there’s a lot of things that you can do there. On the retention side, it’s actually about not trying to get more out of a person, let’s say, but like, how many renewal cycles can a team do?

How many midyear reviews can you do? So you need to understand how the sort of the year of the life of the customer happens and then match the resources appropriate to that throughout the time. So all these kind of efficient. efficiency, things you are the owner of, and if they are out of line, you have too many salespeople, it sort of twiddling their thumbs.

Well, that’s not a great use of resources. So like convey that upwards. You have, you don’t have enough counts in the system. Just conversely, you don’t have enough counts in the system in your TAM to justify. Or to keep the people that you have on staff busy and fed. That’s another problem. All this kind of boils down to, there’s a million things you could do.

There’s a million playbooks that you can have, but if you understand that you can pull the efficiency lever and the growth lever, and if you understand the rule of 40, it’s kind of your own little engineering project to maximize the value of the firm. There’s no one else that can.

James Geyer: That’s so good and spoken like an MBA too.

And for anyone listening, rule 40 is the sum of your growth rate and your EBITDA margin. it’s a, metric that investors look at as a threshold for like a really attractive company. And so CEOs are very incentivized to hit it, but that framework is so good. I love it. I have a few more questions, but I think that’s the best place to stop, but real, really sticks out to me.

Well, one of the things of many of this sticks out to me from that explanation too, is just like as a RevOps person. If you’re on a lean team, you’re thinking about how can I be proactive? How can I add value? You have all the data, like put that data to work. Do any one of those analytics that Joel just mentioned here, bring it to the CEO if it looks interesting.

I think that’s how you start to have really interesting value added conversations, and so I love that. I think it’s such a great framework. This has been great. We always finish with the rapid fire. I’m gonna ask you two questions. First sentence that comes to your mind. Just let it fly. If you could fix one challenge in RevOps, you snap your fingers and it goes away, what would it be?

Joel Arnold: Challenge in RevOps, the definition of RevOps is.

James Geyer: All right, and if you could describe a great RevOps leader in three words, how would you do it?

Joel Arnold: Strategic, collaborative, analytical.

James Geyer: Perfect. You heard it here first. Joel, thanks again. This is awesome. Getting into the mind of someone who’s led RevOps multiple places, I think it’s super valuable.

Really appreciate you coming on the podcast.

Joel Arnold: Happy to be here. Thanks, James.