We chat with Dan Veres who does all things GTM at RevOps.io. A few highlights from our conversation:
- The importance of knowing your customer and how this permeates through everything that GTM does
- Getting leverage with a small team
- The importance of product-market fit and customer success in enabling a lean team to be successful
Transcript:
Awesome. Thanks for joining us on our Aim for Excellence webinar series, where we break down strategic, operational, career related best practices, and rev ups with leaders in the space that we admire. Again, I’m James, co founder of AccountAim. We are a go to market data and automation platform that streams line account based sales and territory management for B2B sales teams.
I’m excited to be joined by Dan Maris today. Thanks for taking the time out, Dan. Yeah, happy to be here, James. Dan, you started your career at SDR, worked your way up to leading go to market at RevOps. io. I’m sure you have a lot more you can unpack there. So you want to share the quick background of your career to date?
Yeah, quick background. I actually right out of college, I worked for SAP. So big billion dollar company. And got a little bit tired of the big company politics and wanted to, try startup life. The, I think the only way they would have hired me back then was the SDR role, which is a tough way to,
grind your teeth early on, but over time, started to pick up sales, ended up doing pretty well with the last company there. There was one thing that I remember from those years was there was a disconnect I’d say between our sales and marketing team. So that was one of the experiences I remember and, eventually found, Hey there’s a word for that rev ops.
And, funny enough, found a company actually named after that word. Revops. io, where I work now, and I’ve been here coming up on four years, started in sales, but I’ll do a little bit of marketing, customer success, a little bit of everything. Yeah, that’s why I’m so excited to chat with you. I know we were talking about that before we started recording that you’re doing some account management, some AE work, a little bit of marketing, and a good amount of Revops as well.
Kind of the polar opposite of the SAP experience, I imagine. No no negatives towards just different models. So I want to dive into some of that specifically, but maybe just to calibrate. I always like to start with some basic questions because there is a lot of differing definitions around rev ops.
So like, how do you define rev ops? What does it mean to you? Yeah, for me, it just means alignment amongst the go to market team, right? So sales, working closely with marketing, working with success, even product and finance, right? Just the whole organization being online. What is the, who is our best customers?
What is our ICP? What are the problems that we’re solving? How does our product and services solve them? So it’s really just alignment amongst the go to market team. Yeah, do you view it as more strategic, more tactical, 50 50 mix? Like, how do you think about that? I think both are important.
Yeah, I think there’s strategic act, objectives, is a good way to look at it, but also tactical as well, right? Like, how can marketing produce content that sales can leverage? When reaching out to new prospects, how can they produce content when, for existing customers to grow accounts?
How can product get involved during sales conversations or customer success? So I think both of the above are really important. Yeah. Can you say a little bit more how you got into RevOps specifically? I know you guys are a really lean team and super impressive at revops. io. Was this just a necessary thing you needed to do?
Was it always interesting to you? Like, how did you pick this up? Yeah, I funny enough, I was it was during the whole COVID thing is when I found them, it was, I had some free time. I was looking through different communities and I found, one of the RevOps communities and that’s where I actually found revops.
io and I think one of the cool things for me is we sell a. So we’re a CPQ product, which is basically a tool that sales teams use to generate quotes, and get them signed and write data back into Salesforce or HubSpot. So for me it was, a cool experience to be able to sell a tool that I actually used myself and kind understand it, understood some of the pains as a salesperson of not having a CPQ,
a lot of sales teams work from spreadsheets or word docs where there’s not a lot of guardrails or structure. So one of the cool things that kind of brought me to the company was a, there was a big opportunity. It’s funny how many sales teams will work from spreadsheets. But B was being able to, sell a product that I could use myself and had experienced a lot of the pain.
Yeah. Moving into kind of RevOps. io and your go to market model, like I’m really impressed and I think it’s where a lot of companies are going to move with this new trend, people being a little bit more cash conscious, maybe you can say the VC bubble deflated a little bit. So I think you guys have over a hundred customers last I’ve heard, really lean team.
Like what does go to market look like at RevOps? Yeah. It’s mainly me and my CEO who do most of the selling. So we tag team deals, but, we get a lot of our big emphasis is on right lower effort, high impact activities. And then also high effort, high impact activities as well.
What we don’t want to be doing is low effort, low impact and even high, even worse high effort. Low impact, right? We have very limited time and we’re a small team. We really have to focus on things that deliver a high impact for us. That has meant putting a lot of emphasis on our partners and in the community.
I think 1 of the channels that really works well with for us is. Some of the other systems we integrate with, and being able to leverage those partners, right? HubSpot, Salesforce as a CRM are very close to CPQ and, we just get a lot of interest in prospects in through those doors. I’d say we, by nature of CPQ, we work very closely with billing systems as well.
So we’ve really, made it a point of emphasis to. Connect with the different billing platforms out there and, their customers are having problems that our solution solves and our solution is solving problems that their customers have. So it really works 2 ways, but those are, I’d say 2 examples of some of the high impact ways where we’re able to leverage it.
Partnerships is such an interesting one. I feel like so many companies obviously want to do it because if you can nail it, the upside is tremendous. It’s one of the highest leverage things you can do. But so often I hear about, folks maybe throw themselves in the Salesforce or HubSpot marketplace, or they sign up, some integration partners and then crickets, not much happened.
So how did you guys activate this channel? I think it goes all the way. It starts with successful customers because actually. It happened a little bit organically. And I’ll use HubSpot as an example, because they we actually had our Salesforce integration first, and then we released the HubSpot integration and the HubSpot ecosystem took off for us.
And I think one of the reasons was HubSpot doesn’t have a native CPQ at the time, and, what happened was, we had some HubSpot customers who started using our platform. And they became really successful really quickly with the platform and HubSpot heard about that and organically started directing their customers to us.
And we got a lot of business that way. And I’ll just go back to successful customers, right? They were the ones who actually brought it up HubSpot. Hey, we found this new tool. It works really well with your system. And that kind of, I think, caught HubSpot’s eyes and ears and, like I said, led to a good number of prospects reaching out to us.
That’s fantastic. How about on the RevOps side, not RevOps the company, RevOps the job title. Yeah. Anything you guys needed to set up to be successful from a partnership angle? I think so you do from a partnership angle, yeah, I think just engaging partners. One of the things I think that can happen with partners, and I’ve heard this is a struggle, a lot of companies go to, is right, you sign a partnership deal with someone, maybe it’s for referral fees, whatever, but it doesn’t actually lead to anything.
One of the, one of the points of emphasis we do is like making sure our partners are equipped, with what they need to really bring us business and comfortable with our system. And a couple of comfortable A couple of ways we try to do that, is getting our partners on our platform so they understand the value, setting them up with their own accounts, giving them, different resources that they can reference, right?
Here’s the main pains we solve. This is the types of customers, I think really specific on hey. These are the types of pain points, and these are the types of customers that you should look for. Because if you can define those two things, it becomes a lot easier for them to remember RevOps when they come across their desk.
Totally. And then, last question on this, HubSpot, for example, is a big org now How do you think about enabling such a big team? Do you guys typically find a single point of contact there that runs the program? Do you need to do a lot of grassroots reaching out to CSMs and SEs, or how do you think about disseminating that content?
I think like the more executive, representation you can get bought in is helpful. So I know our executive team has made it a point of emphasis to connect with theirs. I’d say like from my standpoint, I’ve got my Account managers, customer success managers at HubSpot who I know directly and that I work with.
For me it’s building those relationships and and leveraging those and and that all goes back to trust, right? Like I said, if they weren’t getting good feedback from the customers, they wouldn’t be sending us any, prospects. So really putting in the effort to make sure, the customers who are there are successful and happy and saying good things about us.
Yeah. It makes sense. That’s great. And then I want to talk about just like how you can make yourself successful in your role today. Like you mentioned, you’re doing so much closing, generating, doing partnership work, rev ops work. You’re still a lean team with a lot of customers. How do you think about setting up your go to market system or your processes and enable yourself?
Yeah, great question. I’ll start with, on the sales side, it’s all about targeting the right accounts. So that means if we’re doing outbound, I don’t want to be outbounding to everybody. I want to be outbounding to the ICP. That I know has a very high chance of having the problems that we solve for.
And then that also means disqualifying quickly if it’s not the right fit. So those two things are our stance from a sales perspective of, hey, we’re just going to go after really the accounts that we know we can make successful. On the I’d say on the customer side, because we do have a lot of customers and, they have needs and they need services.
That is more of an entire org approach. So one thing I love about my company and my team is like our engineering team, for example, every single one of our engineers, is, has joined customer calls is often on customer calls. Like they’re not in a back room, just writing code. Like they are with our customers in front of our customers.
Cause it’s a really good team effort. I’d say here to make sure our customers are successful. It’s not, our engineering positions might not be for everybody, but it the culture we have here is everybody talks to customers. Everybody’s aware of the problems.
Everybody’s aware of what’s going on the customer side. I love that. Sounds like a real culture of accountability and just making sure that everyone’s steering in the right direction and no one’s too good or too busy for any of the work that really matters. But it sometimes feels a little bit like gritty and on the ground floor.
So that’s awesome to hear. You’re unique in that as a seller, it’s related to the last question. You’re building like your RevOps process mainly for yourself. Yeah. So what are like the most valuable priorities for you day to day as we think about, again, kind of enablers, maybe aside from the targeting piece?
Yeah, I think, just having, for me, time blocks are really important, right? When am I going to do my prospecting? When am I scheduled my customer calls? When do I schedule prospect calls? Things like that. I think having really, for me, I’m probably one of the few sales reps who. What’s a major emphasis on making sure the CRM is clean and up to date?
Cause that’s data. I need to run reports and to do other parts of the business. A really clean, up to date CRM is very important for us. But, yeah, between those, there’s a lot of time blocks. Definitely. And clean CRM, I’d say would be 2 of the ones. It’s probably a bit easier for you because you’re the one building the reports and probably one of the few people updating the CRM.
But what is your process for keeping the CRM updated? Any, tactical tips for folks listening? Yeah, I mean for me, I try to make it not overly complicated, right? So I think one thing that can be easy to do but not necessarily correct is over complicate your CRM, right? Because we’re a small team, I don’t have a super complicated process so I can keep things relatively simple.
But with that simplicity, I have to still make sure things are updated, make sure things are talking correctly, make sure data is where it needs to be. Yeah, I want to circle back on the ICP and account prioritization piece near and dear to my heart and our heart at the company. It’s a big reason we started AccountAim.
We think so many companies miss on this and it’s one of the strongest levers to success and how you use your time and how you close deals and get retention. It really encompasses everything. Sometimes people just take a qualitative approach to this. I’m curious, like, how did you guys nail down your ICP?
How do you continue thinking about it, et cetera? Yeah, great question. This is I’m always thinking about this topic, like, how can I make it a little bit more qualitative? I think when you start I’ve two experiences when you start, sometimes you think your biggest and highest paying customers are your ICP, but sometimes they, they aren’t right.
They might actually have the most complaints, even though they’re paying the biggest contract values. For me, I, I think it comes down to, we started to see some patterns and the types of deals that were closing fastest and the types of customers that were experienced success, having their aha moment fastest and.
When we started seeing those trends, that really helped us start to define who our ICP was. And to give you some specifics, right? It’s like customers, on HubSpot or Salesforce, obviously, but usually having a sales team of a certain size, right? Usually at least 10 to 20 reps, because that’s one of the pains of, using a spreadsheet.
Can come in and you can start to have a bigger org and you need more control or guardrails. I think having a sales officer person, is a key component of who are most successful customers are because you need an admin, to have to own that product. And and make sure the team successful with it.
So like those were the things that we started to notice is team size, right? Do they have the right operator? We have a very technical product. So even if they had the right team size, but they didn’t have the right technical operator to control it. There’s a good chance. They weren’t going to be as successful.
Yeah, that’s great. I think more and more people are catching on to the team size is a really good attribute for ICP analysis. Whereas for so long, based on the nature of being able to crunch the data, people stuck to high level industry codes and like total employee size. But I think getting into the actual teams, whether that’s from LinkedIn data or elsewhere, is really helpful.
And it’s how we define our ICP as well. So that’s great to hear. I touched on this a little bit earlier, but you have the unique experience from our, Aim for Excellence webinar guests of being on the other side of RevOps as a seller. And so maybe not necessarily at RevOps. io, but maybe in your past roles, like what makes a great RevOps professional from like the AE perspective or the sales manager’s perspective?
I love working with, RevOps folks who are very strategic. Not just thinking, like today, tomorrow, but what’s the 1 year, 2 year, 3 year growth plan? Those are really the types of operators I love working with. I do think by. Nature of the role also, like having technical expertise is really helpful for that role, not that you have to be a programmer or know how to code, but just having a good understanding, standing about systems talk also when I think of like my favorite operators, they’re really, they’re not necessarily people.
People all the time, but they’re really good at navigating their organization and understanding that, they need a lot of buy in from different orgs, to ultimately be successful with their role. And, I’d say that’s 1 of the key things I’ve seen with all successful revenue operators is they really have a good understanding of the org.
They’re constantly in communication with the different departments, not always keeping everybody perfectly happy, but keeping their kind of needs and requirements in mind. What do you think, or have you had advice for someone that, just heard that and is wants to put that into practice?
Like how would you go about doing that? And maybe a slightly larger company without, I think some people get worried about, bothering people or not wanting to take up too much time with their business partners. How do you think about that? Yeah. I think it, it’s simple. You just have to, you have to make those relationships and those connections.
And, there’s no way to get around it. I think all great companies, right? If everybody’s aligned on here’s the goal, we want to be successful. Yeah, you’re going to have to take up some of their time, but it’s in the best interest of the company. It’s in the best interest of the org.
So I, and other characteristic of a good operator is you’ve got to be bold. You can’t be shy. You can’t be afraid to make mistakes. That’s a big thing is like mistakes are going to happen. And good operators aren’t afraid to make the mistakes. They’re nimble and they adjust when mistakes happen. But they’re going to be bold in how they deal with people and how they move forward.
You also mentioned being strategic is very appreciated and, strategy is this kind of nebulous term sometimes. So in a RevOps role, what do you think it means to be strategic, to be thinking a few years ahead? Yeah, I think like one, I think one way to be really strategic is you have to know your customers extremely well, and you have to understand where the maybe where the gaps are in the current process.
Because a lot of those. Gaps, you might not be able to fill right away, but having that future outlook of hey, we can fill these gaps over time. That’s one way to, to be strategic with it. But, one thing I do see is like not enough people, a lot of times outside of the sales team are talking to customers and I think that’s where a lot of the gaps come from is if you don’t, if the whole org doesn’t know their customer very well.
That’s when gaps start to show, right? You’re making the right, the wrong content. You’re building the wrong product. So it all comes back to just understanding the customer. Yeah. Okay. And then how about tactically and again, maybe a slightly larger orgs in your experience. Where do you think RevOps is most likely to break down from an AE perspective, maybe from just I’m trying to do my job as an AE or a sales manager, and this is just blocking me, or this is just driving me crazy does anything come to mind?
I think, the typical ones would be too many requirements or red tape to push through, right? We. I’ll give you the CPQ perspective, right? Do you really need six levels of approval for a 10 percent discount? Let salespeople sell, is my opinion on the matter.
You hired them to negotiate. All right, give them a, Give them, some room to negotiate with the customer. They’re the one having the conversations, their pace tied to the end result as well. So I think the less you want some guardrails, you want some red tape.
So people aren’t, it’s not the wild West, but I think I think at the same time, you want to give those, the reps, the flexibility to be successful and own their own, their role. Yeah, for sure. I heard one sales leader recently tell me that, rather than get bogged down in that specific example, that they’ll give each AE like a certain number of deals that they can do each discount by in a quarter.
And I thought that was like a pretty elegant way to solve it. Hey, we trust you as your judgment, but there is going to be this limit on like how much you can actually discount. So it’s not a habit. Exactly. Yeah. Dan, it’s been great. We’re coming up on time here, so I just want to do like a rapid fire finish real quick, where we finish up and ask just a few quick questions, and it’s fun to compare between folks.
I’m curious, what do you think is the biggest myth about RevOps? Yeah, I think, that, I hear a lot of people looking for RevOps people, and then I look at the job description, and it’s basically like a CRM admin, or somebody to own the CRM. I don’t necessarily think that’s the right person.
That’s the right way to look at RevOps. It’s not just the CRM, it’s the org as a whole. It’s the go to market promotion as a whole. Yeah. Yeah. Couldn’t agree more. We talked a little bit about RevOps pet peeves by salespeople, but what is your biggest pet peeve of sales reps? Yeah, I everybody, a lot of people complain about this and we’re in the age of the AI SDR, but look, if you’re going to send me a cold email, get my name, right?
Or get my company’s name, right? So I I I hate it when I see stuff like that. That’s a good one. I think the funniest one is when, and it’s probably happened to me too in my prospecting, but when some of the automation brings in like the full legal name, right? So it’s yeah, I don’t know, like, how are you guys doing at RevOps.
io LLC or whatever it is. It’s come on, no one writes that. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. How would you describe a great RevOps leader in three words? Yeah. So I think strategic. I think bold and I think, communicative, right? Good at communication. Yeah. Maybe breaking my rapid fire finish here What do you think good communication strategies are for RevOps leaders?
Yeah, I think relationships aren’t built in one conversation, right? If you, if your goal is, hey, I’m going to connect with everybody, the heads at all of these departments, and then that’s it, you’re going to, that’s not relationship building. I think it’s, I think it needs to be multiple people.
Yeah. Communication. I think it needs to be consistent, to really build the relationships. Yeah, that’s great. And to wrap up here, one piece of advice you’d give to someone starting in their RebOps career. Yeah. Jump on sales calls, jump on customer success calls. Like I said, I’ve. I think the biggest problem with orgs today is like not enough people are meeting with their customers and understand like what their customers day to day is like, even how they’re using the tool.
A big thing for me, I’ll go back to my first experience, but I remember we were putting out our marketing team was putting out like top 10 biggest mistakes, content and stuff like that. And yeah, that might get you some clicks. But is that really valuable content? And to me, it just speaks to like.
They didn’t really understand what our customers were looking for. And I think the more time you can spend with customers, the better idea of like, how are you actually fixing them and making their lives better? That’s great. I love that. I met a, now retired, but we’re CEO and CRO who had a very successful career say, and I think this was his quote that he coined, you can learn everything you need to know about a company from sitting on a sales call or two, because it all just manifests right there.
So I think that’s very true. Yeah. I think that’s a good place to finish. Thanks so much for the time, Dan. I know this is really interesting. For those of you watching, if you’re on HubSpot and need CPQ, reach out directly to Dan, or Salesforce. Yeah. Or Salesforce. Fair enough. Or if you have any questions or follow up questions for Dan, you can reach out to me, I can track them down for you and obviously always happy to chat more about account prioritization or data with AccountAim.
So thanks a lot, Dan. I appreciate it. Thanks, James. Talk to you soon. Bye.
