How to build best-in-class RevOps from the ground up

James Geyer: All right. Hello everybody. We are back for our latest episode of boardroom RevOps, where we’re bringing you valuable tips from RevOps experts so you can make to the C-Suite. I’m James, co-founder of AccountAim. I’m the RevOps BI platform. Really excited to welcome Matt Lauer to boardroom RevOps today.

He’s the director of RevOps at Consensus. Matt, great to have you on.

Matt Lauer: Happy to be here. James. Happy to talk about RevOps. That’s what, that’s what we do

James Geyer: for sure. Matt is one of the most analytics. Politically savvy RevOps operators that I’ve had the good fortune of meeting. Uh, so much so that we had to have him on as an advisor to AccountAim actually.

So I’m, uh, extra excited to have Matt on and share his awesome insights that’s been so helpful for us. Um, but we’re gonna talk about something a little bit adjacent to analytics today, although I’m sure that’ll make an appearance too, and that’s why I take a RevOps function from either nascent or struggling to best in class.

So we’ll dive right into that. Before we do, Matt, do you wanna just share your background in a bit more detail?

Matt Lauer: Yeah, I have the very typical. Place to start for all of RevOps people, which is in politics in Washington DC doing nonprofit work. I feel like all of RevOps people have a weird background.

Mine I almost feel like is one of the weirdest, but essentially I, I started off doing this political stuff and they had a CRM and I started figuring out the CRM ’cause I was basically glorified SDR and then I suddenly. I really like doing it. And then they’re like, you should be in charge of the CRM. And they’re like, you should be in charge of the recruitment program and all the function around it, and I’m idiot, 23-year-old, I don’t know what I’m doing.

So to learn it all on the fly ended up being really successful for it. Get promoted out of doing that into doing actual politics, I’m like, I don’t like this. I don’t wanna do that anymore. So I had to figure out what I did in this nonprofit land and thankfully I got an MBA and. Found the right job description, which ended up being a marketing ops position.

Uh, thankfully a healthcare tech company in the middle of COVID. So really good job positioning there. But since that point, I’ve been at different organizations doing marketing operations within, you know, kind of like a RevOps role. And then most importantly, at, at Consensus, I started as the marketing ops person.

And since then, I am now the director of RevOps at Consensus. And so it’s been a, a journey to go from. The marketing ops position that was relatively siloed into something much bigger, which is running the whole RevOps department for the growing company. That is consensus.

James Geyer: That’s great. And you know, it’s funny, everyone, pretty much everyone does have kind of a unique background in RevOps and that includes all the folks in the show, but you’re actually the second person from politics on Boardroom RevOps.

So you guys are quickly becoming one of the larger contingents. Actually, he was a lobbyist though. I’m not sure if you were lobbying.

Matt Lauer: No, I mean I did a lot of membership stuff, but our, our C four definitely did do a lot of, I don’t know if it was technically lobbying, but all the legal distinctions, they were on Capitol Hill doing stuff.

I dealt with the people out in the field.

James Geyer: Uh, well let’s get into it then. So, you experienced what I think is a really common phenomenon when, when joining a company. And I hear it a lot, especially in RevOps, that, you know, I joined this company and RevOps is either nascent, maybe I’m the first RevOps person, or it’s turned over a bunch, or it’s just struggling.

People don’t really even know how to think about RevOps. It’s siloed. So many possible issues. Um, maybe you shed some background on kind of like the, the state of the world when, when you joined the company.

Matt Lauer: Yeah. When I started at Consensus, they were growing company. We were. You know, in a good ARR place.

Good, good and growing. But I was, I think the third marketing ops person in the last year. So there had been quite a bit of internal changeover. And we didn’t have a CS ops person. There was a sales ops person, but there was no RevOps function. Everything was still an ops person siloed in their various departments.

And I think that’s kind of the traditional way that people think about OPS and CS ops. I mean, CS Ops is relatively new marketing s. It’s not as new and sales ops has been around for a while, but when we came in, I came in as the marketing ops person. We then had a change in the sales ops person, which, and then we got a CS Ops person within the same year.

And what I found was, is that I came in, I started doing marketing ops. There was a lot of, you know, tree rings of history from prior marketing ops people, right? So you had to understand the landscape. Figure out what the problems were. And I usually try and be aggressive within the first three to six months of, of joining a company and asking a lot of questions, figuring out what needs to be done, and then just executing on it as quickly as possible without being, you know, careless or anything like that.

And I think it worked out pretty well because when um, we were going to hire a new sales ops person, the VP of sales, Dan, who I, I love Dan, he was like, I wanna bring Matt in to help interview for the sales ops person. ’cause he’s like, I don’t know what I’m looking for. And hindsight, that’s, I think something people don’t realize is that when you’re a VP of sales, a VP of Cs, you don’t know what you’re looking for.

’cause the ops person isn’t just doing cs, they’re not doing, uh, they’re not doing sales, they’re doing the operations part. And the operations part is a completely different language. And so he brought me in to help do the interview. And we hired an amazing person. Uh, he’s still here, but we hired an amazing person who’s doing all of this.

And I remember he was looking back and he is like, I’m really glad I brought Matt in. ’cause he was asking all the questions I didn’t know to ask. And in particular, my favorite question I ask, and this really cuts through to see if someone knows their stuff, is what’s your favorite Excel formula? That’s not V lookup,

James Geyer: that’s index match.

Matt Lauer: You see, this is why James is a good one. ’cause he had the right answer. It’s index match. In fact, ask that question of an LLM while you’re listening to this because I found all three of the LLMs I tried had radically different answers. Um, I think it was Gemini said V Lookup. So Geminis, that’s out not right.

Um, all that to say is I was being brought in, I was helping to, you know, hire the people. I did that for our CS ops person as well. And, um, after a little while too, it was, I think nearing the end of the year and I just went to our CRO and I was like, you know, we’re constantly meeting US Ops people, us enablement people.

We’re constantly meeting yet. The people who we are taking orders from, they don’t have the full picture. And so this was creating a lot of friction, so to speak, between it, because everyone was siloed in their orders, but we were having to get intel from outside of the silo. And so you had this weird like reporting structure that was vertical, but needed to be horizontal.

And so that’s where the, the friction was coming in. And so from that point on, I was advocating for RevOps, but that’s really the landscape I came into is there was a lot of. You know, there wasn’t a lot of organization around it. Everything was siloed. And more importantly is that people didn’t know what they were looking for in ops.

They just knew what they had right now wasn’t working.

James Geyer: Yeah.

Matt Lauer: They didn’t know how to prescriptively get to a solution.

James Geyer: I honestly think that is the biggest challenge to most RevOps things is that there’s still not a great definition, or at least a great understanding of what RevOps is across, maybe even within RevOps, but certainly across like the, the broader like executive leadership of, of many companies.

Matt Lauer: Yeah.

James Geyer: Awesome. Well, you, you started to give, you kind of talked about what you stepped into and the challenges. You also started to give some of the, uh, solutioning or evolution that you kind of led to, to get RevOps into a better spot. And so maybe double clicking into each of those really quickly and then we’ll get into kind of more post that point.

But. You made a comment that really important to kind of like dive in, get a lot of things done, build trust in the beginning when you step into a situation like this. So I think there are some potholes in that as well, but like how did you approach that? Like any, any advice you’d give to someone in that situation?

Matt Lauer: So a few things. First is, when you first join a company, you have what I call the no stupid question card. You know, the first 60 to 90 days you can ask a lot of questions and people can’t really blame you because you’re new, you’re trying to figure things out, you’re trying to understand how the world works.

And so I really advocate for people to be aggressive in using that. And it’s not. But I think what’s important is don’t use that card to be a jerk. Be a know-it-all. Like of course, why are you doing it this way? No, no. Truly go into it like, okay, so I see this is how we’re running MQLs and how we’re processing MQL and how we’re sending it to the SDR.

You know, why are we doing this particular thing? Why are we doing this particular thing? Why are we doing this particular thing? And the answer tells you a lot, even just like the classification of the answer. ’cause if they say, oh, you know, it’s done for this reason because the SDR is like it this way, et cetera, et cetera.

If there’s a deep reason to it, it’s like finding a fence in the middle of a field. It’s like, well, let’s assume that the fence is there for a good reason. Now we have the justification for it. Okay, that’s great. But if they immediately say, I don’t know, that’s why we’ve, that’s how we’ve always done it.

That’s your giveaway. That, hmm. No one’s probably not thought about this in a while. Mm-hmm. Or at least pervasively. And then obviously if people say like, oh, it’s this horrible process and we hate how it’s done, I constantly get bad leads. Well then, you know, they’re leading you to where the problem is.

But don’t just take it at face value. You need to challenge it because sometimes there’s friction between departments, especially anytime something transitions from one silo to another, marketing to SDRs, SDRs, a sales sales to CS. CS back to sales. You need to make sure that it’s not just biases coming in.

So it’s important to ask questions on both sides of the aisle, and importantly, try not to give away what the other side says to poison the well or anything like that. Just be a listener. Take lots of notes. It’s really easy to take notes now with recording stuff and AI being able to take care of those transcripts.

So take in that information, ask lots of questions, figure out like is there a reason for it? Is there not a reason for it? Is there a bad reason for it? But don’t just start giving out your recommendations and you can propose ideas. And I would also advocate. If you are gonna propose ideas when you’re doing this listening session, couch it as like, oh, there are ways that we can do it.

Here’s an example. Don’t start prescribing within those first 30 to 60 days, unless truly like there’s a life threatening problem within the business that needs to be immediately fixed, right? Because once you’re done with those first 60 or 90 days of intaking things, writing down, listening and, and figuring out questions.

The second part that you need to do is start mapping it out in a flow chart is my preference, because you need to build something that you can interact with to understand how the process works, but more importantly that you can show someone else that they can interact with it. Mm-hmm. And if you have a flow chart and you make it relatively simple and you don’t make it chaotic and lots of different moving parts, but just a very simple like lead comes in, here’s the different ways that you can route a lead based on where they came from, et cetera, and you build something like that out, then you can essentially build the flow in a way that you can share it.

And then it’s a lot easier to implement because you’ve already done the scoping. You’ve already done the intake, you’ve already built out a structure that anyone can speak. It’s not a series of HubSpot workflows that no one understands, but you, and then you can get buy-in. And the thing is that if you’ve done all of that, that’s 80 to 90% of the work.

The actual building of it now in CRMs is very fast. So most of my time is not spent building things in A CRM. It’s spent. Asking questions, getting data, building out flow charts. Presenting it to stakeholders, getting feedback, incorporating it, and then launching it. And so that’s why within the first six months I was able to do so much is because you go slow and diligently so that then you can go really fast.

Mm-hmm. So by the end of six months, we’ve done a new lead scoring. Revamp the lead sourcing, revamp the funnel, revamp reporting, and it’s a lot of stuff that was done. But because it was planned out so much, it was comprehensive in nature too. You weren’t just playing whack-a-mole with problems and creating more and more problems.

So it, it’s important also to set expectations about that. I told people like, nothing’s gonna be fixed in the first 60 or 90 days, unless it’s a fire drill. But trust me, it’s gonna work out. And it’s not a trust me bro thing. It’s like a true, trust me, this is going to be a good thing that we do.

James Geyer: Yeah, that’s great.

Super good example of, of how to come in and build trust and do it through it the right way too. So that’s kind of like step one, at least in your experience. And then step two, you talked about like the, the team expanding and I’ll, I’ll call it RevOps, even though it wasn’t branded as RevOps yet. You gave a good specific example on, you know.

Technical aptitude as someone that’s like been in Excel and done analytics and things like that. But more broadly, what are you looking for when expanding the RevOps team? Are you some, some people are like, uh, they lean towards experience. Some people lean towards like slope. Can this person learn? You might have a different mental model.

Yeah. Like how do you think about it?

Matt Lauer: You always have to ask the question of seniority, right? Because if you’re looking for someone who’s more senior that can come in and has a lot of that background, it’s different than someone where maybe you have a more limited budget and you have to not get someone with so much experience, but you don’t wanna hire someone that doesn’t know what to do on the job.

So the first part is you gotta classify the two, the two types of people that you can. It’s, it’s a spectrum, obviously, but those are like the two ends of the spectrum. But regardless, a lot of experience doesn’t mean that they’re gonna be a good fit and able to solve your problems. Same with very little experience, doesn’t mean that they’re not a good ops person because someone had to take a chance on me when I was this idiot coming from nonprofit political space, right?

I didn’t have an ops background, even though I, I did. It’s just nonprofit titles are all made up and meaningless, so you have to take a chance on it. So I think what’s more helpful to, to point out, especially if you’re in a hiring position or you’re trying to break into operations, is you need to be able to exhibit what I, I think is an ops brain.

And that’s how I describe it. And basically what an ops brain is. If you’re a person, it doesn’t even matter where you are. It could be an SDR, A salesperson, a lobbyist, an idiot, nonprofit like me. And if you have that ops brain and you show that aptitude, people are gonna take notice. And what you can look for that is number one.

When they have a problem they’re experiencing like a process problem or an inefficiency, are they trying to figure out how to make it better for themselves without having to ask for help? Like I know when I was doing my nonprofit stuff and I was logging contact reports, I was like, this is really slow.

And then I found a different view in sugar CRM. This dates me, sugar, CRM I found a different place to do it. I was like, oh, I could do this en masse. Oh, I could do a workflow to make it easier. Oh, I can make this funnel better. Like if you have this proactivity about figuring things out. That’s a really good indicator of an spr.

The second part is looking for someone who’s excited because of that. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. If they’re like, Ugh, my cr m’s being an idiot, again, it’s not working. Like, that’s not what we’re looking for. You’re looking for someone who’s like, yeah, and then I, you know, started playing around with this workflow and I figured out I could do this cool other thing and then I did this, and they’re almost like bragging and excited to share with you the technical details of what they did.

That is. A really good thing that you’re gonna be looking for is someone who’s excited by it. And then the third part too, and this is true for everything, but also true of hops hires, is you wanna look for someone who’s hungry to do more. Mm-hmm. And that actually biases towards people with less experience.

And if you’re looking at someone who is, you know, maybe a CSM, and then they kind of go into like a CSM specialist ops type role, and they’re looking to break into an official ops title or something like that, that’s the kind of indicator you’re looking at that not only are they hungry, which means they’re trying to learn and better themselves.

But they also want to get into this sphere, even if they don’t have it on their job description. So those are kind of the three core things we look, and yes, there’s all the technical stuff, but again, you don’t have to be like a Python coding wizard expert person. You really wanna see someone who, when presented with a problem, is gonna try and figure it out on their own first instead of just complaining or asking for help or just giving up.

James Geyer: Yeah, I love that. So it sounds like you lean pretty intangible, which I think makes sense. Like a lot of the systems and metrics can be learned, but you gotta have that like way of thinking and that excitement about the job, which I, I totally agree with.

Matt Lauer: Like I had a real quick thing there. Every single company I’ve been at has had a different tech stack combination.

Every single one. I had sugar and Marketo, and then I had a Pardot and Salesforce never again. And then I had a HubSpot in Salesforce, and then I had Marketo and Salesforce, and now we’re an all HubSpot shop. The tool doesn’t matter as much. What matters is if you have the brain for it and you can figure it out because no company ever has the same tech stack.

Maybe they’ll have the same CRM, but you know, everyone has a different thing. They have SalesLoft Gong engage, they have a, you know, just any combination. You just need someone who can figure it out, who can figure it out quickly, and who wants to figure it out, isn’t intimidated by having to,

James Geyer: yeah, definitely.

Okay, cool. So you now have expanded the team in the situation, but you’re still feeling friction as you mentioned. From not everyone knowing kind of what’s happening at once, people working in silos. And so you essentially, uh, I’m not gonna call it rebranded, reorganized to RevOps broadly. Before we talk about like how you did this, I’d love to hear you elaborate on like.

Why that was important to go from siloed functions to to RevOps as a whole?

Matt Lauer: Yeah. The VPs at Consensus Sales, cs, they all work with each other really well. I’m constantly on them with calls. They constantly are sharing information. So this was not born out of VPs that never get along, even though we know that’s true in a lot of organizations.

But what I still was saying is that despite the fact that they were able to communicate, they worked well and collaboratively together, there were blind spots. Like you would have the CS ops person being assigned a certain job and role and doing stuff, and we would only learn when we actually all met together what they were doing.

And then we would have someone like Jacob our sales ops person be like, but we already have this, or we already did it, or it already exists, and we could just tweak it. And our CS ops person’s like, okay, I guess that already exists. And so it was clear to me that just because you have a good working relationship across the VPs doesn’t mean that your ops people are gonna work well together.

And again, this goes back to the fact. That your VPs don’t know Ops, most of them don’t know ops. Most of them came up as salespeople or CSMs, or they came up as marketers. They’re not ops people. Ops people in those roles are not very common. Mm-hmm. Now, you can have some that are more ops minded, some that are very not ops minded.

In fact, a lot of them tend not to be ops minded, so they don’t know what they don’t know, or they don’t know what to share. They don’t know where to coordinate. And so because we were all in our silos, the only way we could get stuff done and not pull our hair out is by talking a lot. And trying to coordinate our projects.

But the problem was, is that I was trying to coordinate our projects and I didn’t have the authority to Mm. I didn’t have the authority to tell the CS ops person, like, we shouldn’t be focusing on this because you don’t even have the foundation to do what you’re trying to do well. Mm-hmm. Like, we gotta get to the foundation.

And so then we have this situation where the CS ops person has to go to their boss to convince them to delay the thing they care about because something they don’t understand needs to be done first. And so there’s just this mismatch match of expertise and ownership and pressure. And so the idea was is that if you take the primary responsibility out of the silo and instead make that a dotted line stakeholder, and then you put someone that has the ability to understand all the silos.

But also understands overarching ops responsibilities. And that person reports up to A CRO, for example. So he has the final say and he has the authority to be like, listen, I know that this is important for you guys, CS, but we have to focus on this for sales because my director is telling me this is important.

He’s made the case That helped alleviate some of the pressure of. These mismanagements and frictions. And so once we switched over to that, we had built up a lot of trust too. That’s very important. We built up a lot of trust with these VPs so that when we said, trust us, this is gonna make things easier and you’re actually gonna get more of what you want, and we’ll, it will allow you to speak more in English rather than trying to get technical with us.

You say, I have this problem. Mm-hmm. And now all of a sudden, it’s not just me, but it’s also the ops people that can think strategically. And so there’s a lot of things that’s enabled beyond just the, uh. Uh, the, the ops side, it was also strategic focus. It was making sure everyone was aligned. So there’s a lot of things to say there, but it’s, it’s just all those frictions and I noticed those frictions when we had good VPs on good terms with each other and just think about a situation where that’s not true.

Yeah, it’s gonna be that charter.

James Geyer: I think you covered two of my follows. I just wanna clarify and put a bow on it to be sure. Um, the, the benefits of doing this really one, kinda like visibility. Make sure we understand what everyone is doing. Two authority, make sure that we can actually prioritize, uh, things correctly so we have the right foundation so we’re not duplicating work.

Um, and then three, I’ll call it like ease of working. It’s actually easier for the VPs to communicate what they need and, and to one spot they don’t have to be quite as technical. Is, is that a good summary of like the benefits of shifting to, to RevOps?

Matt Lauer: I think that’s a pretty good explanation of it. And, and I think the one that people don’t think about nearly as much is the failure to align expertise with authority making.

Like it’s, it’s really something that you don’t think about until you’re in a situation where they’re over-prescribing a solution when they don’t even know what’s available there. The classic one is you’re CRO coming to, you’d be like, oh, if we could just have a checkbox that told me that they attended this event, and like every.

Ops person roll their eyes and be like, no, you don’t want a checkbox for an attendance of an event. That’s not right. You wanna have like an event object or a participation or a campaign. But if you’re, if you are responsible for the ops person and your vertical, you’re gonna feel pressure to prescribe.

And it’s gonna also just put a really awkward situation for. Someone that’s typically a manager, not even like a director, like it’s a VP and a manager. And so there’s a big title gradient difference, and unless you’re a very forward person, you’re probably not gonna be willing to say, oh, that checkbox is a stupid idea.

We should do something to.

James Geyer: Yeah. Yeah, definitely. Tell me how you kind of executed post that shift then. I think, like, you might be too humble to say it, but I, I know that some of the investors in Consensus said that Consensus had the best run RevOps function in their entire portfolio, which is pretty high praise from, um, you know, a class of person investors that, you know, aren’t always quick to praise necessarily.

And so like, tell me more. How are you running the team? There’s so much to uncover here, but how do you think about running like a good RevOps function generally? Yeah.

Matt Lauer: And there’s a lot to learn. Like we’re redoing kind of our sprint planning process right now. We’re putting more meat on the bones. I think we were a little too light on it before.

So all this to say is we have not fully figured it out. There’s still a lot that we need to do, a lot that we need to, to clarify. But in general, in general, the principles of what you look for is you have your team, you’re very close with all of your ops people, you’re meeting pot. I mean, I meet with probably my ops people every single day.

So you have a very clear back and forth communication with them. The second is just being very transparent with them, right? So if there’s a priority at the leadership level, if there’s a high priority, you wanna share that with them so they can understand the full scope. ’cause they need to understand the full scope, they need to understand strategy.

So even though they may not be in the higher level, strategic making meetings, they need to be fully read in on like, well, this is the direction we’re going. We do that at the company level as well. But you also wanna have that come from your ops person so that they can filter it into how you’re actually gonna execute on this and what this means from a practical perspective.

Because if someone says, we’re gonna be focusing on expansion more this year, for instance, well, coming from an executive, that’s one thing coming from your director of RevOps who’s going to be able to double click on the implications of that, and we can talk about it, and we can figure out what does that mean for our internal priorities.

That’s a completely different ball game. So it’s all about that back and forth to make sure we’re all on the same page. The other thing too is making sure that you empower each of your specific ops people like sales ops, marketing ops, CS ops, really empowering them to fully understand and own that vertical, and they don’t have to be the full strategic decision maker, but they should feel really comfortable with being able to do some strategic type work and be able to talk with that person and be that trusted confidant in.

So anything I can do to help build that trust between them and the confidence between them so that they can go to their VP and be able to talk about, you know, what needs to be done and feel confident that they’re recommending the right thing. And then just in terms of other practical items, you’re gonna want to constantly have check-in meetings with those.

Those stakeholders, and it’s not just your sales ops person talking to the stakeholder. You or me in this case, talks with that stakeholder on a semi uh, recurring basis so that there’s nothing that’s being missed. And you, you know, you also do some cross-functional meeting. You partner with people like in finance.

It’s just, unfortunately there’s a lot of meetings that are involved in here. I think more things can be done asynchronously. I think I over-indexed on meetings, but especially if you’re remote. Don’t skimp on talking with people. Don’t skimp on check-ins. Don’t skimp on getting feedback. You just launch something like tell me your honest opinion.

What’s going on here. Like it’s, you really wanna index on talking a lot with people because if you’re a RevOps person and you’re constantly head down and you’re just taking stuff from an intake form and you’re never talking outside of the intake form, that is going to be a failure. And if you want a way to not progress vertically in the company, that is a guaranteed way to do.

Definitely. Yeah, definitely. Even if you think you’re just doing. Basic executions, if you think you’re like a specialist or whatnot, it doesn’t hurt to just reach out and talk to the people that are the end users. And you can build some rapport there. And I think this is where the politics part is coming in me.

You gotta build rapport with these people. You gotta understand where they’re coming from. You gotta get yourself out there so that when people think of RevOps, when they think of the product of RevOps, they’re thinking about you. And if things aren’t going well because you’re. Org’s in more of a dumpster fire state than not.

This is the best way to protect yourself too, because you’re like, listen, I agree. There’s a lot of things that need to be fixed. Help me understand what’s going on. Help me understand if this is a good solution. And that’s gonna do a lot for putting you in the right light when you’re talking to a frontline worker.

When you’re talking to a middle manager, or if you’re talking with a VP.

James Geyer: Yeah, that’s great. Tell me just to round it out, we’re, we’re nearly at time here, sadly. Um, I think a lot of that was, uh, excellent description of, um, team management, stakeholder management. You’re also incredibly savvy, as I mentioned, like the, the data side, the system side, the technical side of things.

Walk me through kind of your quick checklist, your mental model around, um, I, I think you might describe just like data process systems as like the general way you think about like, foundation. I might be misremembering that. Like how do you think about the, the, the structural stuff?

Matt Lauer: You’re, you’re misremembering.

You’re not, you’re, you remembered correctly. So you misremembered, you’re misremembering. So yeah, it’s data process and systems. They typically put it in that order on purpose. So you, uh, you need to have a good foundation for data and a good foundation for processes that feed that data. And then once you have a good foundation for both of those, your systems can be in a, a good place.

And in other words, I put it in, the other reason I put it in that order is because if you think a system’s gonna fix your data problems, you’re almost always wrong.

James Geyer: Can’t throw a tool at it. Yeah, you gotta get the data right.

Matt Lauer: Theoretically, you could run a business, and I know every ops person’s gonna throw a banana at their screen, could run off an Excel sheet because what is a CRM except for a giant Excel sheet with a lot of tabs that has a nice user interface.

James Geyer: Yep.

Matt Lauer: It’s, it’s kind of just that, right? So you really need to master your data. You need to master your processes. You need to go slow so that you can eventually go quick. And the reason why I think we’ve been so successful here is because for 18 months we did very little else then master the data and process.

Within our system. That’s what we exclusively focused on. And so once we were done with that, once we had really good understanding of how the marketing data was flowing, we had a really good understanding of our pipeline. We had a really good understanding of our customers and the health of them, and we were able to measure and map all the levels and the trends and the rates of this.

Well, now you can do the cool stuff. Now you can start layering in clay and being like, well, now I want to analyze all the transcripts for churn risks and what’s mentioned, and then put it into a report and see what the most likely version is and what the most likely reason. And I can do that in 15 minutes because I know.

All of our customer data’s accurate. Yep. Trust it. That’s what it means to go slow, to go quick. That’s all like, that’s how I, I think about it, getting those foundations down, and that doesn’t mean once a year the foundations are down. You stop. Like, this is something else that I think about too, which is if you have an idea for a piece of data and you know the data’s important, but you don’t yet have a use for.

If it doesn’t cost you much, just start making it. Mm-hmm. So a good example of it is we have, uh, we have our, our, our user data. And for the longest time I’m like, I know this is gonna be important, but I don’t know how to use it yet. So I worked with one of our bi uh people, Kyle is his name, who’s I, I wish I could steal him onto the RevOps team.

I can only steal a little bit of his time for the RevOps team. But we basically took a lot of our customer data, I understood it, and then we constructed different. Things like an active user rate of consumption, number of the number of licenses we have, the kind of activities they did, like we bell curved the kind of activities a certain persona does, and then mapped it across all of our users.

And I’m like, I’m just collecting this data. And then we fed it into HubSpot and we fed it in on a consistent basis so we could have a time series and like I’m only now starting to figure out how to use this stuff, but we started feeding it in 18 months ago, and so now I have 18 months of this data. And I can start using it and I can start building things like, you know, what percentage of our user base is in the top 15%?

’cause that seems to correlate really well with their active user rate, which also correlates with if they’re gonna renew or not, or if they’re gonna expand. And so the other thing just to speak to people is as you’re building out your data process and systems, if you’ve got an opportunity to start recording things, even if you’re not sure what you’re gonna use it for, data’s cheap.

So do it. You never know. We say that all the time

James Geyer: too. Just start snapshotting everything. Like the more you can snapshot and trend, you’re gonna want it later for sure,

Matt Lauer: because you will kick yourself endlessly when 12 months down the line you’re like, I wish I had 12 months of this data. ’cause how am I supposed to measure churn if I don’t know where, where we’re starting from until now.

So, and that’s the other reason why you wanna get your data in process in a good place, is because for whatever lagging indicator you care about, which churn tends to be the biggest lagging indicator, right? Because if they’re churning ’cause of onboarding and they signed a few year contracts.

James Geyer: Yeah, 12 months or 36.

Matt Lauer: Like, what, what are you gonna, how are you gonna study that, right? You can only like guess and check, or you can’t even check guess really. So get your data process and your systems in order now so that you can start getting that data and then you can build the exciting stuff on, on top of it. And also it makes your life easier.

A hundred percent do it once there’s like a three legged stool where you’ve got. Fire drills, tactical and strategic. And a lot of people talk about RevOps being burnt out because of the fire drills. But the thing is, is that if you do the tactical and strategic to stop the fire drills, well now you have an unbalanced stool because the fire drills is small.

The other two are really big. But you get the point, right? You’re now. You’re now investing in preventing fire drills by having a good structure, and then you can keep, and then that means you can invest more in doing more strategic, more tacticals. Essentially, your flywheel gets going faster and faster and faster because you’re spending less of your time fixing up your screw ups or fixing up the screw ups of the system that hasn’t been optimized.

James Geyer: Yeah, definitely. Matt. Sadly, we’re out of time. I suspect we might need to have you on again next year to talk more about data. ’cause I, I, I feel like we could have spoken another 30 minutes about that, but thank you so much for joining. This is awesome. We will chat again soon, I’m sure.

Matt Lauer: Yeah. Happy to talk James, and happy to talk data anytime.