RevOps should be the most strategic role in any company. But they still have to build the RevOps systems foundation. There’s no escaping it.
In this episode, we have a systems extraordinaire in Adam Beebe who shares how strong systems thinking helps RevOps escape constant firefighting and build real strategic leverage. Adam has worn every RevOps hat: accidental Salesforce admin, M&A integration lead, consultant, and now in-house ops leader at an AI company. Across all of it, one thing has stayed consistent: effective RevOps starts with clean systems and trustworthy data.
If you’re stuck in reactive mode or drowning in tech debt, this episode should help you reset your foundation and earn influence with leadership. In this episode, we cover:
- How to assess the health of your RevOps systems (and fix what’s broken)
- When it’s actually time to invest in a data warehouse
- The hidden risks of CRM migrations (and how to avoid them)
- How to build a RevOps roadmap that leadership respects
- How to prioritize tech debt over time, before it’s too late
Whether you’re a team of one or scaling a complex GTM machine, Adam’s frameworks will help you think more strategically about your RevOps systems.
Full transcript:
Hello everybody. Time for another episode of boardroom RevOps, where we are bringing you valuable tips from RevOps experts so you can make it to the C-Suite. I’m James, co-founder of AccountAim, the next gen BI solution for RevOps team specifically. Super excited to be joined by Adam Beebe today.
Thanks for joining me, Adam. Yeah, absolutely. Thanks for having me. Adam is a RevOps and systems wizz having experience in a number of different tech companies. Adam, do you wanna share your background in a little bit of detail? Sure the the old verbal resume. So it started out like a lot of people in these sorts of roles, accidental Salesforce admin at a pretty early stage, a dark HR tech company many moons ago.
That role just naturally grew into, I think, what was RevOps before A lot of us were calling it RevOps. You from there went to a couple other early stage startups, bounced around between sales and marketing ops titles. Find myself in the acquisition arm of PE firm and ran hard and fast, at acquisitions over a couple years.
That was real. My, my first real taste at learning how to scale, creating a repeatable motion. After that, went out on my own for a bit, did some consulting, went back in-house at a FinTech, series A company. Went to a full fledged RevOps consultancy for a little while, and now back inhouse out an AI org.
Still do a little bit of fractional work on the sides. Yeah, I’ve been around a few blocks. Yeah, seeing a few things it sounds like, and hopefully, you weren’t stitching together data from all those various acquisitions. I know that can be an actual nightmare. Thankfully there was a proper BI team at the time that was their problem to handle.
That’s good, thankfully, indeed. I wanna dive into some of the kind of tech stack particular since you have so much experience there. But before we do, we’ll just keep it a little bit high level, like how do you define RevOps? It’s such a broad, nebulous term. It is. Yeah, I think the old adage of people, process and technology is a pretty good starting point.
It’s definitely the intersection of all of those things. I think, if I, to put my own personal spin on it, it’s maybe a little more about, using the tools at your disposal to solve business problems most of the time with the kind of through A GTM lens. But I think more and more RevOps titles are getting pulled into more, traditional BizOps type roles.
Even, finance problems. So it’s really just about, great, how do we. How do we solve problems for the business to push the whole thing forward? Yeah, I think super fair and yeah, I think the RevOps scope only expands and you can argue it touches the entire company ’cause it really is coordinating that journey.
So that does not surprise me. I. Diving into, your strong systems background. I was curious, not the sexiest subject, but, you’ve seen this across a bunch of different companies, a bunch of different stages. Is there a checklist or some sort of framework you have of things that, reno’s folks need to, think about putting in place from a systems perspective at each company?
I’m gonna start saying this a lot now. It depends. I think what every org needs is always gonna be a bit dependent on. What stage the company is at your a CV, how big of a team you’re supporting, sales or marketing wise or Cs as well. The, I think the kind of foundational things of look is your CRM in order to where, the end users of it can do their job without having to ping you every five minutes.
Are you able to answer the sort of baseline reporting questions that, that your C-suite is gonna have to answer for their board or their investors? And are you able to intake new leads, right? If you can solve those three things, like from your. Tech stack, that’s the sort of basal foundation of can we keep this ship upright?
Great. Anything we can do on top of that is just gonna be, not bonus, but, that’s I think the, that main foundation to have. Yeah. Do you have a framework for assessing any of that? I think you, you teed up really well on the CRM side. Can sales folks, do what they need to do without bothering you?
Like any other, like signals you look for if a vis person’s thinking about or am I in good shape or what does good look like? I think the red flags for me are always, how many flow errors are email flow error emails are you getting right? If you’re a Salesforce shop, those sorts of things that indicate that there’s some sort of core health, in the system.
Again, whether that’s error messages, people hitting, validation rules that don’t apply, that can be another good indicator of Hey, look, something was built for what the business used to look like, and that just isn’t the case any, any longer. E even using tools like, sonar or fields by those sorts of things to go great.
Do we have a lot of customizations that aren’t being used? Or even severely underutilized that may be better replaced with standard functionality. I find that the more you can do with. With what comes outta the box, whether it’s Salesforce or HubSpot or any other tool, the longer you can kick that can of needing to get heavy with customization, because that is, I think, a lot of times where problems start to arise.
Yeah. A lot of operational debt for sure. I feel like many folks are paying for the sins of, five, even 10 years ago sometimes to Oh, absolutely. Yeah, for sure. Once you start uncovering those bodies they don’t tend to stop. I would also add maybe jumping ahead a bit, but adding some sort of regular kind of tech debt process, to, to your roadmap.
Whether it’s, again, depending on the org and how fast you’re iterating, right? Maybe it’s a quarterly thing, maybe it’s an annual thing of going through and just setting aside some dedicated amount of time to say, look. We’re gonna go through and clean up fields, we’re gonna go through and clean up page layouts.
We’ve got 15 profiles in Salesforce that aren’t assigned to anybody. Even just deleting some of those things out, it feels good to be able to hit delete and not have to, see that thing all the time, but, can, you can even free up processing power for the system at times as well.
Yeah, that’s great. Maybe this is a really straightforward question, you already answered it, but anything more you can say around that tech debt cleanup process? Anything else you look for? Any way you decide or kinda streamline that decision? I. You can always make some sort of, matrix of an Eisenhower matrix, type thing where you go, okay, we have a lot of tech debt, right?
Are they impacting your users day to day maybe not. And those things that are impacting their day to day, those are the things I would probably tackle first, right? If you have, for example, like page layouts where I feel are always a. Are always a kind of a hot button issue at every salesforce org.
Yeah, everybody always wants them to be cleaned up or, hey, there’s, there’s fields that aren’t necessary anymore. It’s easy enough to just hide them from view, and that a lot of times moves the needle for your end users. You can always come back through and do the actual deletion or migrating and the data that you need later on.
Doing those things that are gonna be high visibility or high impact to your end users and, the org organization that you’re supporting. Those are the things I would most likely prioritize first. Yeah, that’s great. Earlier when we were talking about like the foundation or the basics or the checklist, you said, you gave like the foundation and you said everything else was bonus.
Like how do you as a rev obsolete assess when it’s time to bring in a new tool? There’s, a marketing map of 2000 things out there. There’s always a hot tool the day, like what’s your, I. Your model for thinking about this? I’m really bad at this because my first I always lean towards build, don’t buy.
I’m going to keep referencing Salesforce ’cause most of my career has been spent in the Salesforce ecosystem. But I think more and more this range true with HubSpot as well. Salesforce is a if you can dream it, it can be built. The type platform, and there’s obviously gonna be some level of, okay, is it gonna cost me more in, in my own time to build a solution versus something that might be like a $5,000 tool?
Sure. Just, just go get the easy thing if it solves the problem. Again, going back to that sort of Eisenhower matrix type assessment of going for any given tool, right? Is it solving the problem or is it just moving the starting line? Because some tools may just move the starting line, especially if you’re doing some sort of tech depth.
Cleanup type project where you go, okay, can I get some sort of export of all of the fields and their usage percentage. That’s a great, that again, that, that moves the starting line. That, that, that makes it really easy to get started. But you could probably do that on your own if you really need it, versus something more like a CPQ type solve where you go, look, I’m at an organization that has very complex pricing, maybe consumption based, billing, lots of different layers to that.
That’s gonna take a long time to build and a long time to gather all those requirements. Where there’s already a handful of very good tools out there that solve that problem. And it’s probably advantageous to, to get that in, get that set up. And when you have problems, now you have a proper support team to go rely on for assistance versus, if you’re a team of one or a team of two even, it could be very difficult to troubleshoot those kind of things and deliver fixes for your users quickly.
Yeah, I think that’s a really good framework. Maybe you’re the wrong person to ask, given your bias to build rather than buy. But something I’ve noticed with RevOps is that, it’s often a one or two person team, as you say it. People are really busy. They would benefit from getting the leverage of many tools out there.
But Revs doesn’t always have a lot of dedicated budget, or they’re not always the best buyers of software. So like when you are ready to buy rather than build, like how do you build the business case internally to get approval? That’s a good question. Reporting into a CFO helps because you’re a little closer to the budget.
So it’s sometimes easier to maybe siphon some funds when it does come down to it. ROI is always an easy answer, right? You go, look if I can tie a tool to some sort of dollar amount, whether that’s a pipeline figure or revenue number, that’s always gonna make it easier to make the case for that purchase.
It’s, so again, something like a CPQ type project is gonna be pretty easy to tie those dollars, right? You go, okay, we’re gonna spend X amount. But we know, tie it to your current a RR, go, this is gonna impact this entire, er, entire revenue base. Something that is maybe a little more,
we call it like a flashy add-on, right? Like some sort of reporting add-on for Salesforce, whether, whether it’s it is like something off the app exchange or a standalone platform. That’s where it starts to get a little bit harder to go. Okay, now you’re talking about time saved versus, versus dollars or dollars in revenue, at least.
And that can, that’s always gonna be a little bit harder of a sell. But again, if you can at least make the case of look, if I can, if I know that this thing’s gonna save me five hours a week, right? You can probably figure out your hourly rate and then at least be able to go to, whoever does hold the pro strings and say this is gonna save you X amount of dollars versus it’s gonna generate dollars.
Yeah, makes sense. I appreciate you sharing that mental model. Last one on like tech stack, it’s a bit of a bonus question, but I think you and I had chatted about it previously. Occasionally ops folks are asked if their company should migrate CRMs. Usually from HubSpot up to Salesforce as company matures.
But more and more, I’m hearing actually the opposite sometimes, especially post market downturn. As people are scaling back and wanna simplify. Yeah. How should a RevOps lead think about this decision? What are the longer term considerations? It’s definitely not one to be taken lightly.
Yeah, I think more and more, I think this is probably, its, its own hours con worth of conversation. More and more. I think HubSpot is becoming a legitimate contender in kind of the upper half of the marketplace. And their roadmap has definitely, I think shown that, there’s a lot of promise there too, in terms of, what should you consider making the switch? How many tools are connected to it? Are all of those tools also gonna be able to connect to the other one, right? No matter which way you’re going, is your product, right? If you’re in a SaaS org, is your company’s offering tied to that CRM, so many times, especially with Salesforce, right?
Like provisioning of your own customers instances are tied to, A CPQ or deal close process. Are you gonna be able to replicate that in, in HubSpot or vice versa? Reporting is another huge component, right? Are you gonna be able to answer the same, build the same dashboards in the way that people like to consume them?
If you have a BI tool already and you’re doing all that externally, maybe that’s less of a consideration. But are you at least gonna be able to ingest the same data in a very similar table, or get the same tables in a close enough format to where you’re not having to start from scratch.
Enablement is always, I think, a pretty big concern as well. Personally, I do think HubSpot is a little more intuitive to use as a new user. HubSpot can be a bit like, or sorry, Salesforce can be a bit daunting, especially if you’re, heaven forbid, coming from a classic org and into a Lightning org.
That’s always pretty scary. Whereas I think HubSpot’s a little easier to just pick up their UI hasn’t changed a ton, but, if you have a, if you have a really big org, you, especially a large sales team, and most of them have been working on working out of Salesforce or HubSpot for a very long time, and you’re considering making that switch are you gonna lose his employees over it? Probably not. But this is gonna disrupt their day to day. Yeah, it definitely will. And that’s something I think that shouldn’t be overlooked. And if you have a great enablement team, there’s so many wonderful enablement people out there, then that can be, that’s the time to lean on them and go, Hey, look, we’re going, we’re gonna need to work really closely and we’re gonna need to lead Lean on them.
To make that transition smooth. And if you don’t right, then that’s maybe a legitimate consider consideration to go, Hey look, I can’t support, the technical build, solving the business process and doing enablement. Especially if you’re on a very lean team. And again, maybe that’s not a showstopper, but it is something to consider for sure.
That’s a great checklist, and I think a lot of what you described are. What, like risk mitigation or almost reasons not to move. And I think in many cases there can be reasons to move as well. We want more advanced analytics or better tools to integrate in the, like anything top of mind though, on reasons to move in either direction, like it might be obvious, but how would you think about that?
I’ve definitely done more HubSpot to Salesforce. Yeah. Motions. I have done a few in the opposite direction the way I’ve thought about it a lot though. When considering, should we go from HubSpot to Salesforce? There? There’s, I think, three main components, and I know HubSpot is like rapidly solving some of these, so they’re becoming less of a concern.
But I touched on pricing earlier. If you do have very complex pricing, there are just, there are fewer add-ons for HubSpot to solve things like CPQ, proper Salesforce. CPQ can, not that I’m a huge fan of CPQ, I think there are some better alternatives out there.
But that’s an area where there has just been. There, there’s just more time for development of a marketplace to support that problem in Salesforce. And so that, that’s one area where I think, okay, if you’re outgrowing the HubSpot model or if you’re starting fresh, if maybe you’re getting ready to move out of spreadsheets into one of these platforms, that’s one big area of consideration and kind of maybe, if that’s one a, one B is how does your finance team play into this?
Are you already connected to your, to your ERP? Is that gonna require a new build or are they operating completely standalone? I think another area is reporting. HubSpot I think is, again, you get a lot more outta the box with HubSpot reporting than you do with Salesforce.
But again, Salesforce is kind of greenfield, right? You, again, you can build whatever reporting structure you want, and sometimes that’s an advantage and sometimes it’s a disadvantage if you have, if you, yourself or you, somebody on your team has good experience in creating a reporting structure like that, it may be less of a concern.
If you’re a team of one and you’re being tasked with this and that’s an area where you go, maybe I’m not as strong, or I don’t want to spend my time on that, because there are other areas that are gonna require more focus. HubSpot, maybe for you, I. And then another area where, again, I think this is becoming much less of a concern now, but is gonna be that integration standpoint of like, how many other tools that may not have a standard or out of the box connection to whichever CRM you’re choosing are gonna be business or are mission critical, right?
Like again, if you got a BI tool and I know I’m, there’s probably somebody out there that’s somebody screaming at this I this isn’t even a problem with HubSpot anymore and I’m sorry, if you do need to connect. To like data warehouses and things like that, to ingest high amounts of your own customer data or like usage metrics, things like that.
And dumping a ton of volume into the CRM. I think HubSpot, at least that last check or Salesforce still had a leg up on HubSpot in that regard. Yeah, that’s really great, consideration and we won’t hold you to being, up to date on the latest and greatest of either platform. To be clear, I think it’s a really great framework for folks that are thinking about it.
One last technical topic, if you will indulge me is actually around analytics. I think it’s right where you ended. Tell me a little bit. About that. Generally, some folks keep their reporting in Salesforce, some invest in data warehouses and bi. I know the answer’s gonna be, it depends, but like how, in, in terms of what you’ve seen, like when does it make sense to invest in like a data warehouse and proper bi.
I think once you start talking about connecting lots of different data sources, especially if you’re considering your own product data, and it’s just about does that exist and more about do you need to see that alongside your GTM data, right? If we think about your CRM as being the source of truth for all of your go to market motion, you may have a lot of other information that exists in siloed warehouse.
In siloed systems sometimes that’s okay, right? Like we don’t necessarily need to see. All of the financial data for every customer in Salesforce. Sometimes you do and sometimes we don’t. So I’d say, when we start need to blur those lines a bit, that’s when it becomes time for, proper data warehouse yeah. When do you think a company is mature enough to want to be looking at those things? Is it like they just knocked down all of these other preceding priorities and it’s less about stage? Or have you connected any dots anywhere to understand like when a company wants to get to that point?
Good question. I don’t know. It probably does have something to do with stage in terms of either funding round or, are you in prep for an exit? That’s when you probably start need, needing to see a lot of these things alongside of each other and connect dots that may not have previously I.
Been connected, but when you’re in VC or series A mode, it’s still about just great, how do we get to that next a RR milestone? And a lot of times it’s, you’re not doing, at least I’ve found that you’re not pro probably not doing that level of kind of deep analysis across all of your different data sources to find those trends.
It’s more about finding what works in A GTN motion and refining that. I think. Yeah, I think that makes sense. Assuming you’ve worked with the data engineers and data analysts that kind of coordinate with go to market on the data warehouse and bi side, any advice or like common pitfalls from the RevOps front that you’ve, learned the hard way that you’d advise folks on trust them because they trust they’re gonna know it a lot better than you?
I don’t pretend to be like a sequel wiz or, super, like a analyzer of any data sets. And so when somebody else that I know is has that skillset, says, Hey, look. We’re gonna look at this in a certain way, regardless of my feelings, I may go, are we sure about that? And they say yes.
And you go, okay, I trust you then. Yeah, I take that to heart too. And that’s my mo in working with technical folks. Okay. Thank you for chatting systems and all things deep in the weeds with me. We’ll pull you out a little bit and hopefully hopefully that was a fun enough conversation for you.
But I like it. Yeah. You’ve, worked on quite a few lean te, lean RevOps teams. That’s the norm for a lot of RevOps folks too. I think a common, pain of this is just prioritization. ’cause RevOps is responsible for so much. Big question. How do you prioritize? What to work on is a really lean team.
One of my favorite little devices, spoil I’ve already mentioned a few times is the Eisenhower Matrix. Which if you’re not familiar is, priority and impact basically as a four quadrant matrix. And, you end up with really three main categories. There are four quadrants, but I bucket them into do now, do tomorrow, and do later.
And that do later. Sometimes just never gets done. I. But that’s a really quick, easy way. And, but maybe that’s a little more tactical in terms of what do I need to accomplish, like when I’m setting out my day or my week. Another tool I guess, that I was taught very early on in my career by a, former manager and mentor, was always asking the question of what is the business impact?
And you can, use that internally in your own, a quiet dialogue to yourself, but also as like a legitimate question back to somebody. If you get a request and you’re like, I’m not sure how this fits into my. In, into my work stream, right? What is the business impact?
And that may mean a few different things, but it can be a little disarming if to act, actually ask somebody that. But it does force them to then prioritize it in terms of I. Okay. Maybe we don’t need a new checkbox field on a lead, right? I need it for this one thing, but it’s, it doesn’t really have an impact long term.
Okay. It sounds like what you’re really asking for is just some sort of report, right? Like you, you’re, this sounds more like a reporting solve and you could probably help with that without needing to go create a field and do some sort of data load. That one has always been, that’s always been something that I’ve clung to as use that in the back of my mind in terms of okay.
Even when doing like quarterly roadmap exercise and you come up with a, list of 15 different things that you’d like to try and tackle and you just rank them by what is the business impact for all of these? You are gonna very quickly eliminate a handful and a few of them are very quickly gonna come to the top and you gotta go, okay, this, these are, this is definitely my focus area.
’cause these are the things that support. Larger business objectives and doing, going through that motion before bringing some sort of roadmap or some sort of documentation to leadership, I think it, it saves a lot of the back and forth and you need to justify like why something’s on your roadmap.
And then we will maybe getting a bit further ahead, right? Like when they see that and they, they can then learn to trust, okay, look, if you’ve got room for five things and you nailed the first three of them. We can have a little bit of, a little bit of debate on what those last two are or maybe, right?
There aren’t, but those two extra things and you get to slot in some sort of passion project. So yeah, I’d say Eisenhower Matrix and what is the business impact or have been two of the, two of the things that I’ve leaned on a lot. I really like that. And I think you answered my next question, but I’ll ask it in case there’s anything to add, is around like sticking to that roadmap or trading, right?
Like in reality, so many things come up all the time. Yeah. So is that a tool you use to manage like the day to day with, senior folks who want a lot of. Stuff or how do you manage like the shifting priorities? Exactly that. Okay. And again, some, sometimes it’s going to them and maybe you’re not asking it word for word, what is the business impact, right?
But you say, okay hey, I have competing priorities. Is this above another ask that you may have already put on my plate? Or, okay, cool. Look, I have this other thing, like you tell me is this above or below or I’m gonna take this, I’m gonna go check. And yeah, there’s always gonna be some sort of horse trading, but the more I think the more you can get.
Agreement on that, that roadmap through whatever, whatever that exercise looks like for, for you or your org right? The more agreement you can get on that, and then a constant communication to say, look, we’re progressing on these things. This thing’s behind this thing’s ahead, or this thing’s been deprioritized for a variety of reasons, right?
It just, it allows for less of those kind of immediate fire drills of I need my thing and I need my thing now. And you’re going yeah, I have all this other work that I thought was also equally important. If you can get agreement on the, that, that list of priorities and, the sort of bonus to that would be Okay.
Cool. We have agreement on maybe the top five things. Also tell me which thing comes off first. When something else comes up. If you can get that question answered early on, but proactively that saves a ton of time later and all that back and forth. ’cause you go, okay, cool.
Remember we all agree that this thing would come off the table. If something else come up, we’re midway through the quarter. And now that same thing is happening, it just saves, it can save so much, so much of that, headache of, hold on, I’ve got competing priorities.
Or somebody else is now gonna be upset ’cause they’re not gonna get what they asked for or, you’re not gonna be able to solve it. Like very unlikely that you’ll be able to make everybody happy. But if you can at least be honest with them about who, who is gonna be unhappy, can save some.
So social capital. Yeah, I think that’s really helpful too. Especially the last bit of just already knowing in advance what’s gonna trade if something does come up. Because something does always come up any other. Big unlocks. You’ve found being a team of one or a team of two, and this is a big question, but it could be having some aspect of the job like really ticked and tied and done.
Maybe it’s a tool, maybe it’s a framework or anything else that you feel gives you leverage in like your day to day or month to month. I don’t know. To go back to the kind of roadmap, honestly it probably just is this sort of roadmap thing. Even when you are a team of one, just to lay out, Hey, this is what I anticipate on working on for the next three months, and like whoever your leader is going to them just being like, tell me if I’m wrong.
It can, again, you know it. Even besides all that kind of horse trading and that sort of stuff, right? It gives you clarity on where you should be spending your time, which can be helpful when those random ad hoc requests do come up it becomes much easier to go maybe I can choose not to work on that right now.
Or, I know that this isn’t gonna be a high priority thing in a, a week from now. In the same vein of like you, the more, and I don’t wanna say the more buffer you can build in the better, but like definitely you build in some sort of buffer for yourself to where. You’re not scrambling, at the 11th hour on the last day of the quarter to hit all of your project deadlines.
Oh. And also like it’s board deck season and you have deals coming in because you’re the only deal desk person, right? If you can build yourself a little bit of extra bandwidth to either do some of those kind of like fun passion projects where you go, I’m gonna build something in the sandbox and just roll it out and see what happens, or to where it’s great, I anticipate finishing all of this other work, like with three weeks left, because you’re not gonna actually have those three weeks.
Just saving yourself a bit of that headache I think can be, at least, for me, like it’s preserve some of my own sanity. Yeah, that’s a good tip. And even just hearing all of those things that quarter in between deal desk and board reporting with your day job too, are already makes me uncomfortable.
Yeah, that’s the reality. We’re at time, your Honor, and this is awesome. We like to finish with a rapid fire, so I’ll ask you a couple quick questions. Gimme the first, sentence or few words that come to mind. If that works. Let’s do it. The biggest myth about RevOps, I don’t know.
Apparently I’m not very good at rapid fire. The biggest myth that is that, that it is the silver bullet to unlocking revenue. ’cause sometimes it’s not. That’s a good one. That’s a new one actually, from all these conversations. If you could fix one challenge in RevOps, just snap your finger. You never have to deal with it again.
What would it be? CPQ implementations? I thought you might say that. And LA last one here. How would you describe a great RevOps leader in three words? They’re knowledgeable, they’re quick, trustworthy. I. Alright, there we have it. Adam, we’re at time. Appreciate you spending 30 minutes with us. This was great.
Absolute. I love diving deep into the weeds. I think it was the best insight we’ve had on the system side of things so far. So I get outta here indebted to you for that. I know you got a ton going on, so I’ll let you go. But if anyone has questions for Adam, you send ’em my way and I’ll track ’em down for you.
But yeah, Adam, thanks again. Thanks so much. See you.
