RevOps Is Your Secret Weapon: From Order-Taker to Strategic Advisor

0:00 Today I'm talking with Pete Shelton, Chief Revenue Officer at Fullcast, the revenue operations platform for territory planning, quota management, and commissions. What makes Pete's perspective unique is that before he joined Fullcast, he himself was a customer. He used their planning platform as a stakeholder during high stress planning cycles and saw firsthand what good territory operations can do for a sales org. Now he's on the other side building the company that served him. We're going to dig into what separates RevOps leaders who are just executing orders from those who become genuine strategic partners to the CRO, the ones who walk into

0:46 planning sessions with answers, not just questions. Anthony, it's great to be here. Great to have you here, Pete. You've been on both sides, a CRO who depends on RevOps, and now at a company that builds the tools for them. In your experience, what's the difference between a RevOps leader who's just executing versus one who's actually a strategic partner? Yeah, it's a great question. What I've seen is that RevOps, when they become strategic to the CRO and they become, well, strategic, where they're bringing solutions to the initiatives that the CRO's getting from the leadership team, that's a game changer. What I've noticed

1:28 is the dynamics, which is pretty quick. There's one dynamic that people are likely familiar with where CRO has their goals and initiatives and they're asking RevOps to do things. And they don't really, CRO doesn't understand all of the backend complexity of go to market, and so there's impatience and there's a lot of requests and demands from CRO and RevOps. What becomes very interesting is when the CRO pulls RevOps in and says, "Hey, we've got this problem solved together, and as a partner, I'm looking for your strategy on how to best solve this problem." RevOps is bringing things to the CRO. Here's things

2:07 I'm seeing with your team. They don't align to your initiatives. I think I've got some solutions for it. It just levels up the relationship between the CRO and RevOps, and it levels up the RevOps career opportunities as well as you get more strategic and you're part of the planning versus I'm executing on what you're asking me to execute on. I totally agree. And before starting LeanScale, I was the head of RevOps for three VC-backed companies, always partnering very closely with the CRO. And what I think helped get me close to the CRO to become that trusted advisor was really two things. One, leading

2:50 with an opinion, so showing up with an opinion about what you should do. And something I think a lot of RevOps leaders really underestimate is the level of access of information that you have that oftentimes the CRO can't even get access to because most of the team will feel a little bit more disarmed and comfortable sharing real feedback, real things from the field with the head of RevOps that they may not share directly to the CRO. So you actually have an opportunity to get information the CRO doesn't have and lead with an opinion because you have that information too.

3:26 Yeah, Anthony, I've put a ton of time and thought into why this dynamic happens, right? Why there's this tension between sales and RevOps. And I speak to a lot of CROs that are friends and some of our advisors and about just their initiatives and what they're doing. And I've kind of coined this term, I call the CRO dilemma. So the CRO knows what they want to fix. I mean, it's obvious, right? The pipeline or close rates. So they know what they need to do. Then typically the CROs have lots of strategies, right? What if we launched a vertical team? What if we went into this new region? And so, but then the

4:07 CRO gets frozen because they're like, okay, that's a lot of work. How are we going to execute on that? If we really are going to go into a new region, there's lots of decisions that have to be made, lots of things to consider. So they get frozen and they don't move. The other reason they get frozen is they're worried, the CROs worried that they're going to take a step back. They're going to break what's working. And we've all heard stories of CROs that come in and they run their own playbook and things go drastically wrong or they go better, right? You've heard both sides. So a CRO knows what they want to do. They even

4:39 know some of the strategies, they get frozen. And that's really where I think RevOps comes in. If that strategy is being whiteboarded with RevOps and RevOps is saying, I can execute on this. I know some of the pitfalls that we could fall into and we're going to model this out in advance. They bring that thought leadership to CRO. Now the CRO is like great, let's go do this together. The last piece of this and every organization is different is now you have to measure that initiative, okay? We made this change and we have to watch daily, are we actually going backwards? Did we actually break what was working or is there

5:15 material progress? And RevOps and CROs will use tools they've got a lot of times, business intelligence tools. We actually, we're not going to talk about it a lot today, but we've got a tool that I use, a company we acquired to do this for me. So I know if I make a change, I'm able to watch that initiative, but that CRO dilemma, in my opinion, is the reason there's so much tension and there can be, it doesn't always have to be, but there's tension between sales leadership and leadership and RevOps because of the complexity of go to market that we all know. What are some of the catastrophes

5:52 that your head of RevOps has saved you from in your CRO role? Yeah, great question. I've got an example. So at a previous organization where we have full cast as a product, I had direction coming in of a lot of changes we had to make, right? There was a lot of restructuring of people moving from the new logo to account managers and getting the territories balanced for that and a new vertical being created and carved off that went to a different team. And just those two things alone, there was a lot of potential disruption. As we got into planning season, I took the goals to RevOps and I said,

6:31 "Okay, we have to create these specific teams. We have to balance these things out." Mainly it was ARR and we're trying to minimize disruption as we do these things. Can you model this? And the normal way that they would do it is they would go into spreadsheets and they would come back. It would take about two weeks. By the time they would come back, a lot of times I'm getting different direction and we're changing things. And so some of that data is irrelevant. What happened in this situation was the head of RevOps used a model, like they use some what if scenarios and they came back to me and they said, "Pete, we can do

7:07 what you're asking, but if we do what you're asking, you're going to maximize, not minimize disruption." And I said, "Well, explain." And what they'd done is they looked at two or three scenarios. My scenario I asked for and then scenario B and scenario C that was all modeled within the tool to say, "You can still accomplish your goals, but you're going to need to do it in a little different way." And this option B. And what's interesting is I remember that was about a 90 minute meeting. We came out of that meeting. We had the data we needed. We came out of it with decisions. And then what typically happens is the CFO

7:47 changed the rules a little bit, said, "You can't have the head count, you thought." And so that required iterations, right? But we only had like two months left in the fiscal year and we had about a month to really make these decisions and we couldn't wait two weeks every single time there was a change like that. So it was quick iteration after that on just fine tuning. To me, what became the light bulb moment was, I mean, now I'm going to RevOps and talking strategy before I'm actually asking for the execution because I knew that they had that strategy piece. So they became like more of a trusted advisor

8:24 because they had capabilities that kept me out of harm's way with decisions we were trying to make. So that aspect of RevOps that you're talking about, we typically branded as planning or growth modeling, I think that's the head of RevOps' biggest opportunity to break into that strategic advisor role. If you take everything else they're building, what tools are they choosing, the tech stack they're building, sales qualification methods, lead attribution methods, all of those other things are fantastic and great. I think they can lead with an opinion. When the head of RevOps really breaks through that ceiling of being a middle manager to

9:05 more being an executive, I think happens in that planning process. I agree with that. RevOps knows, Anthony, they know that any change you make to an account, there's implications that are going to happen in Q1. You've moved 50 accounts away from a sales rep that had 20 opportunities. What's the holdover policy? Do you allow the rep that used to own the account three months to close those deals out and then move the actual opportunity back to the account that has already moved? That's one example of the chaos that can ensue in Q1 and everyone listening to this will know the Q1 chaos. You've made

9:46 a bunch of changes and now you've got all these side effects you really didn't anticipate. Holdovers is just a really easy example that I like to use as one of about 10 things that happened. RevOps has all this complexity, the CRO and the CFO and the ECEO doesn't think about when they want to change the go to market. The more horsepower RevOps has to control all those rules and policies to tamp down the chaos in Q1, then the easier it is for a CRO and a RevOps leader to say, "We're comfortable making these changes because we know we can handle the back end impacts of them."

10:28 I don't think those things only happen during the annual planning process. I know most companies will sit down in September or October depending on what your fiscal year is and then plan for a few months and then launch in Q1. Some of the best RevOps teams I've witnessed really do continuous planning. Yes, there's an annual anchor. There's probably some strategic initiatives that they have or fundraising promises that they've made and they have to work backwards from that. Every single month they're evaluating how we're performing to plan. Every single quarter they're evaluating if we should make any adjustments or changes. Most of the companies

11:11 that we work with end up doing a second half replan. They're replanning their second half based on all kinds of things that happen externally, internally, you name it. There's going to be changes that come into play. I think it's really important for RevOps to be agile and I think that's going to keep them strategic and make that conversation they have with the CRO not something they do once a year. That's their one shot to be strategic but something they can really do on an ongoing basis. Some examples of that are you know the quota ramps up throughout the year and you know

11:49 that you've got allocated head count. You're going to bring in five new account executives for a team in H2. To anticipate those territories, what those territories would look like so that you're not giving a rep a dead territory when they start and setting them up to fail. All that should be anticipated and when that's all anticipated, you just feel better about your year because like you said there's pre-planned things you know are going to happen throughout the year and then there's changes on a lot of times a monthly basis. To have the engine that's able to accommodate all of that that's data driven where you can model things in

12:31 advance is a weapon for all the chaos that ensues especially now in this economy that we're all facing. That feels like every single day there's a new X thread of something that Anthropic or OpenAI is putting out that's going to fundamentally change how you go to market or build your product. We're definitely in a time of extreme change so I think that agility is super important. What type of infrastructure have you seen be successful? What type of planning cadences, meeting cadences, what does the tech stack look like to make sure you have the data? What's the team look like? How do you build that muscle internally?

13:11 Yes, a lot of our customers they look at a territory planning tool and they say man this would be very valuable and they say but the data is not accurate. My data is not good enough. That slows a lot of people down. We hear that a lot and so to answer your question there's not a single customer that we talk to including ourselves where we feel like our data is perfect. You're constantly putting duplicate records in as you enrich accounts. It just happens right and you're constantly deduplicating. So we've got some mechanisms built in our platform to address that because again everyone that's listening to this is

13:51 likely saying yeah my data isn't where I want it to be but that's common. That's every single customer. There's obviously services out there to help deduplicate accounts and do some data cleanup but in the tool there's some pretty interesting ways to look at data that will isolate where you actually need to go clean it up. So we take that step. That's the value that we have built into the platform. Long story short what happens is you've got all your assigned territories and then you've got a bucket of unassigned accounts and that's where you need to focus. You look at that and you're like it isolates. Okay this is where

14:23 I've got a situation. So obviously we see people put a lot of time into their CRM. We purposely have built our platform on the two main CRMs. So all automation works. That's Salesforce and ServiceNow but at the end of the day CRM is the heart of it and we're the execution layer on top for everything else. Yeah I think something especially if somebody's new to RevOps or just stepping into that role for the first time they may under appreciate the level of changes and asks and recuts of your forecast and recuts of the territory plan and once it goes live something goes wrong and then you need to change it. As you

15:10 mentioned before if all of this is living in spreadsheets it's going to be really difficult to be agile and keep up with the pace of change. So I think having a platform in place is super important. Something that can be flexible, can model for you and then also I think having the right meeting cadences too. I don't know what you've seen be successful but I feel like you have to have that monthly meeting. Are we on pace for all of our GTM metrics? Ramp pace for our bookings or creative pipeline or conversion or sales cycle? All segmented by the way enterprise, mid-market, SMB, product-led. Anything off, is there anything read on the

15:49 dial here that we need to take a look at? And then is it urgent enough or completely off enough to justify adjusting the plan? And I think that's where RevOps really needs to say hey is this something that we just need a course correct here? Or Pete I know we had a great sales kickoff and direction but this is running right into a brick wall and we need to make a change. Yeah, I've got a point of view on that and something I've seen work really well and I think people do this in different variations. We all know that sales will do their weekly one-on-one forecast with their teams, their sales leaders,

16:29 sales leaders will do with the reps. One thing I found hyper productive is bi-weekly, monthly is not quite enough and weekly is too much. Bi-weekly RevOps is doing a run the business meeting. That run the business meeting with sales leadership is a catch-all for all the initiatives. All the things that they're working on together but a lot of it is in a best practice is that you've got some form of a dashboard where you're monitoring five to eight things that are the initiatives and that's all captured in that run the business meeting. So my recommendation

17:04 always and CROs will join those run the business meetings if they're bi-weekly and if the RevOps comes and there's a kind of a defined agenda, we're looking at these metrics that you care about as a CRO. That's been hyper productive. Decisions always come out of those. Decisions on whether to start doing something, to stop doing something, to double down on something. That run the business means something different for every company based on their initiatives but that from a cadence perspective meant one hour bi-weekly is I've found is a really good catch-all for what normally goes out into a hundred emails and a hundred slack

17:43 messages and 50 text messages. It can all be captured in that meeting. I know it's going to depend a little bit on context, the company, who they are but what are some general, if you were to construct the run the business meeting, what metrics would a head of RevOps go through and who's everyone you want in that room? If you could make the perfect one. Yeah, that's a great question. The run the business meetings that I do here and that we've done in the past, a lot of times it's sales leadership all the way up. That's revenue operations leadership all the way up and then any special guests that are running a program

18:23 based on what the two leadership teams are looking to do. It varies each week but I think the key is that there is a defined dashboard with the metrics. You're looking at a dashboard a little bit differently. You're looking at where this point in the quarter and here's how we're pacing on pipeline compared to the same quarter last year and the year before. That is a different lens than a lot. Everyone's always focused on the current quarter and the current year to date but when you're running the business and you're looking at how are we pacing against our same business a year ago, two years ago, same quarter, that surface

19:06 is a different conversation. Then it typically goes back to any initiatives that you're running. Initiatives that might be, hey, we knew this product was hot in the market right now and I want this to be multi-attach. We put a spiff to it. How many of the sales team are actually driving multi-attach on this product? How much of the team is adopting this? Or we just realized the cloud destroyed this capability and so we're going to adjust. That multi-attach is just one example of an initiative that usually is measured and run the business that doesn't come up any other place because somebody knew at some point that it was important. Somebody

19:53 put a spiff out there for the multi-attach and now it's the measurement piece of it and we're talking about it every two weeks. That's a good example of a topic and run the business let alone the metrics that you're looking at always. I know this is hyper-tactical but I think it matters especially for head of RevOps listening. Where does this live? Are they pulling up a CRM dashboard? Are they pulling up a spreadsheet? Are they custom building this in Looker? Where have you seen it? Because I think the form matters. It's what's going to be presented. Do they put a deck together? What's the form that you bring to that meeting?

20:29 Great question. My previous organization was Domo and so we were a BI platform and so we ran everything in Domo. That was our BI but a lot of customers have Power BI or they've got Looker or they've got Tableau. What we do here at Fullcast, we acquired an organization called Atrium which has got sales coaching but it's got sales BI. For me, that just happens to be my BI tool. For me, that's the way I measure initiatives. The key initiatives for me right now were we knew we needed to restructure the solution engineering team because a lot of deals were stuck in our demo stage for a long time and so I was watching

21:09 progression through sales stages. That was just a card I had built on my dashboard. That's what showed up in the run of the business and as we made the changes and relaunched our demo environment and as we made changes and changed the solution engineering team, now I'm able to watch that deals progress past stage two at a much higher clip and a much faster rate. That was just my personal initiative based on we're making changes to this team. It's expensive. Is it translating to revenue? I was able to put a dollar amount to the cost of the problem with using Atrium for me again, using BI and then now I can measure are we

21:51 actually realizing the opportunity that we have in front of us if we do move X amount of deals out of the demo environment faster and move more. That's just one example. Obviously everyone's measuring how much pipeline they're putting in. They're measuring the close rates, measuring the bookings by rep but there's initiatives under that that are bigger picture that RevOps to CROs can add a lot of value to the CFO, COO, CEO by and then that changes the company direction a lot of times. Those are the initiatives that change the company direction like we should be investing here because I'm watching this every single week

22:32 and I'm seeing these trends. For us, we're launching a sales play for a specific capability within our copy.ai product that is for mass product updates. We've got a set of customers that that use case works well so we're isolating that as its own product if you will, own web domain and the key is going to be measuring it and not just measuring are we finding pipe for it but are my account executives that are focused on it like how many account touches are they doing on these target accounts that look alike our current customers. You're measuring everything from the account touches all the way to what pipe are we putting in and then

23:15 obviously we're going to watch our conversion rates on that stand that's a standalone product offering very specific to us but those are things that come out around the business that by weekly cadence. I think that's a level of depth that a lot of people aren't really going to that play. We see it a lot in marketing so you have your general lead sources and channels but then going into the actual campaign performance. I rarely see that done for sales. We're going down into the sales play performance. When RevOps can surface that information to a CRO, it's illuminating and a lot of times

23:52 you're seeing a lot of things that aren't working but at the same time if you've made a decision to capitalize on an opportunity and you're measuring that in isolation, it's really helpful to see what is working. I make another very quick example of something that's really easy to measure and something that I found a lot of value in. At my two previous companies that end this one here, I completely disrupted the way that accounts are assigned. Instead of having everybody have 10,000 accounts, I essentially said you have 100 accounts, you decide what those are and then you have your territory and everyone feels like the

24:26 accounts are getting ripped away. The reason I did that is so that everyone has a much larger opportunity to prospect because likely you're going to go to an event, find something that can be yours and everything's assigned but then I essentially say if you go to an event or you prospect into this account and it's not protected by another rep, there's only a small amount of accounts that are protected, they're renamed is the way it's normally said, then I will move it to your name. You'll have that opportunity to work that account. It incends prospecting and now you think about the measurement of that. It's really easy

25:01 to measure. All you have to do is say, did this account move ownership and sales force and was pipeline created? You just build a pie graph that says, here's how many accounts, here's how much pipe was created in accounts that were not moved and here's how many, how much pipe was created in accounts that were moved and what I saw when I made that change because the CRO at the point in time when I made the change in the last organization, the CRO and the CEO didn't like it. And I said, let me make this change and measure it weekly and we'll see how much pipe is created when a rep is proactively prospecting into

25:35 something that rep couldn't work before and it quickly became 64% of the pipe and it was an easy decision just to leave in place. So I did it two companies ago. I did it again. My last organization, I've done it here because I want that prospecting motion, but the more important part is measuring it. Like, are you actually going backwards? Are you hurting pipe? I think that's super unique. Definitely seen name to count strategies, but the ability to measure the performance of prospecting outside of that, I think is really, really interesting. Is there anything else that's been done in orgs that you've been in before

26:10 that are just career killers for rev ops? Yes. CROs are under a lot of pressure right now and the finger points at them for lack of execution and lack of execution isn't just a CRO that doesn't know how to lead their team or doesn't know how to sell. Lack of execution is so dependent on rev ops and so at the end of the day, most of these organizations you've got this top down from CEO, CFO, COO of what to do and the best performing organizations I've seen, the CRO and the VP of rev ops know enough about the business to actually change that conversation and push it back up. It's amazing how many things come out

27:05 where the CRO and the SVP of rev ops is pushing feedback back when you're partnered together. Tons and tons of product related data. There's tons of product that is where the product is not working, is not selling the way it's supposed to and tons of opportunity where you could double down on the product. So product feedback loop goes back and forth between product and sales. It just at the end of the day, the killer for any of these roles, any of them is you come in with a playbook, you try to run it and run over everybody with your playbook. It doesn't have immediate results. It can't be measured and then they're out.

27:48 They're out of the business. They either realize that everyone's against them because they're trying to break too many things that are working or it doesn't work. So yeah, that's not a very concise answer to your question. Well, I think those two things are huge. One, lack of focus and knowing which initiatives are going to create the highest GTM leverage and then two, inability to manage up and push back and make sure that you know the business really well and can make informed recommendations that have your CEO, founder, you know, questioning their own perspective and really leaning into

28:27 what you're advising. I think, I agree, if you're unable to do either of those two things, it's going to be very difficult to be effective. Say one more thing to that point. In spreadsheets, it's hard to get data. Like you have to a person has to look at a spreadsheet and maybe make some calculations and a point of view. But that lives at a point in time where that breaks down is back to the run the business concept. Like the run the business concept needs to have the same dashboard every single week that people are looking at and talking about with data in there. That's the only

28:59 thing that people will trust. You know, I could come to you, Anthony, and say, hey, I'm seeing this. I'm seeing this at a point in time and it, you know, you roll it up to the executive team and they say, well, that's great. It's a corner case. But to get around that so that you actually see what's happening, that's why you need that, essentially that measurement. But then you need that cadence of that run the business, RevOps and CRO, looking at the same things every single week, the same big boulders they're trying to improve and move. And that informs then when you do share that screenshot or you share the actual

29:35 dashboard with the CEO or the CFO or the CEO, then they could see the historical data. They can see exactly what you're seeing. It's not a spreadsheet, which is a point in time. I can share my screen real quick if it's valuable and just walk through the way that we think about this. And how do you actually operationalize some of the chaos? Is that helpful? Yeah, I think that'd be great because it go back to what we were talking about earlier. I think form is almost as important as function because a polished form will build trust. I think it builds that muscle memory in that meeting that you have people, they know where

30:10 to look at the dashboard, they are starting to familiarize themselves with what normal trends look like. And I think having that consistency is huge. So the decision of, okay, where are we going to house this data and share it with the team is a much bigger decision than a lot of people in RevOps or CROs probably think. Yep, absolutely. Okay, so I'll make this very brief. I just have a couple slides prepared that are screenshots that kind of go to the talking points we've already kind of hit on. What we're looking at now is just the way we orient the territory planning, which is

30:51 everything that is highlighted in the blue boxes, and then ultimately into commission calculations. It's within the platform, but people typically isolate that out. A lot of people have commissions handling another platform. We think of it all in one, but really what I'm going to talk about for the most part is everything in blue, which is just the territory planning, the capacity and the coverage of the people that you have in there, feeding into quota. And then lastly, talking about the policies that you can put in place to automate, which saves a lot of the chaos and then some reporting. So at the end of the

31:27 day, if you have the ability to do what-if territory modeling and it's data-driven, and you can model these things out rapidly and say, if I create these territories, what will be the impact? How many accounts will disappear from this person or this team and how many will be added? And then what's the ARR and what's the booking's potential? So the what-if modeling is the punchline here. And really, when you think about what-if modeling, there's a lot of ways to do that. You got your firmographic, right, where you're just literally doing this based on the team you're trying to model for, how many territories you're trying to create,

32:02 and you're going to make enterprise over X amount of customers or under X amount of customers, you can add as many firmographic pieces of information you want to do this modeling. What a lot of our customers use is what we call smart plan. But this is just really when you're saying my priorities are to minimize disruption, my priorities are to balance by a field value. Maybe it's ARR or maybe it's a number of tier A accounts, whatever that might be. And then you're bouncing by any amount of metrics you want. You can keep going and then you can change your priorities and it'll immediately tell you exactly what the

32:38 territories will look like. So, you know, then the last piece is modeling by geography, right? And usually organizations have both concepts. It's I have a named book of business or I call them protected accounts. And then there's a territory underneath that that has, you know, greenfield. And how does that look? So within all those lenses, we've anticipated that a customer could need, you know, you can get there, right? And really the punchline is what if modeling? This is when you look at this, it doesn't immediately stand out. But now you're thinking about coverage. Okay, what is the account team per account? And

33:19 this can change this. This, you know, a lot of times it's got, you've got CSMs in here, you've got ADMs in here, you've got different solution engineers in here, overlays in here. But the key punchline is when you're really thinking about your coverage, maybe I've got some anticipated new hires that start and end on a certain date, and I need to carve five territories to anticipate those new hires, right? When you think about the coverage piece, that thought leadership is in this tool and likely in other territory planning tools, you need to be thinking about that in that way, not just carving the territories, but

33:57 okay, what's the coverage of what who's going to handle it? Now you go into the quota side, all right, now I need a model quota, I've been given my target by the CFO, and I need a model how many territories, how many people do I actually need the business either bottoms up or top down, and there's other models, but modeling out that quota piece, which is a big category, so that now you know, you know, how you're pacing against hiring quota ramps throughout the year, a quota gap, you might begin the year and not have enough people to cover the quota, you know, you need to isolate that out and bring that to everyone's attention

34:34 from the get-go. Okay, we talked a lot about reporting, so this is reporting on what it is you've built, and then you've got the other lens of like bigger picture BI reporting, and so really what we're doing here is territory analysis reporting, right? Built within the tool, this is the way that these territories are built once you're done carving, this is just another lens of the way you communicate to the CRO and you communicate up the chain to the executive team of what you're doing. Last thing, policies, I've talked a lot about automation and rules and policies, these are the policies that we've built in, there's

35:18 a lot of thought leadership in the platform for people that have run big revenue operations teams. The founder, actually going back 10 years, our CTO and the founder of Fullcast was at an organization with 150 people in his team and like 1500 spreadsheets, you know, he was at Salesforce, you know, grappling with this challenge, and about 10 years ago he founded and started Fullcast and put a lot of thought leadership in the tool, that's where these policies come from. You know, you see the holdout policy toward the bottom, there's lead and account routing policies, new hire policies, employee termination ending

35:56 policies where this person is leaving, new people are coming on board, what happens to the territories, everything's dependent on each other, so that's really the way we think about this, how do you handle all the different pieces that then mold to your business because every company thinks about planning and territory carving differently, so that's why you need to have the ability for geo-carving, you need to have the ability to do it on firmographic data and/or use the what-if modeling to say these are my goals, how would the territories be broken out, and then what's the disruption going to be, you know, team by team, rep by

36:36 rep. A lot of people underestimate how critical territory planning is to achieving your overall GTM goals, you know, I think people think of it as okay let's make sure we carve them out and let's make sure they're fair and they tend to leave it there. I think one metaphor that a CRO that I was working for, hopefully he thought of me as his secret weapon, he shared this metaphor with me that's really stuck with me about territory planning, he said hey imagine you owned a gold mining company, number one thing you'd want to know is where's all the gold, so to me that's the first version

37:18 of okay where are the most valuable territories, and then second you have a bunch of gold miners, where are you going to send them and assign them to go extract the gold, and then to your point hey miner goes down you need to put in a new one, how do you keep the operation flowing and orchestrated in a way where you never miss a step, and I think the very first part of that is so critical and something that we do, we call it market map, but basically we'll go survey your TAM, we assign a potential revenue valuation to each and every one of those, so when you're saying hey how can you take a field and align it to how you would

38:02 break out the territories, we use that how much revenue is this worth, and then we make sure hey each of the sellers has an equal amount of TAM that they can go after, so their mountain has just as much gold as the next person's mountain, and then sometimes I don't know how you feel about this, I think this is a gray area on the territory planning conversation, but if you know you have a set of miners that are really really good, you're probably going to mine more gold if you get them on the better territories, so all of that though takes so much data, orchestration, planning, and then especially once you start scaling you have

38:42 20, 30, 50, 100 reps, then you're really really needing to manage that process with the holdouts, with new reps starting, reps leaving, it becomes unbelievably complex, but it's the most critical component of your GTM strategy to hit your overall targets. I've got a data point around that, I love the market map concept, I mean knowing where to focus and having that as a field within your CRM so that you can then our territories on it is amazing, McKinsey says that if you do nothing else other than get balanced books of business there's like a seven to eleven percent revenue lift, if you really do just

39:21 place everybody in the right places, no one's got a dead book of business, no one's got too much, just seven to eleven percent, that's the ROI metric that comes out of some of this, it's pretty powerful, I've been in an organization where I asked a sales leader to create a couple new territories for me, that person knew their territories very well, he ended up creating two new territories and he carved off two, what I didn't know at the time were dead books of business, it was mainly because he didn't want to disrupt his current sellers, he didn't want to take the accounts away, but he wasn't losing these territories, he wasn't losing

39:56 the accounts, but he still created two dead books of business, it's just the way, it's just what happens, if you use a tool that's doing it on data then you would at least, you would have been able to see that, you would have been able to see hey these two territories were going to be putting two new people in that are going to be set up to fail and how do we then not disrupt everybody but we're going to need to pull some and make this balance a little bit more, examples like that, we all know how expensive it is to hire a sales rep, try to rent them for six months and then they just fail and they get managed

40:27 out of the business but it's easy, it's easy for a CRO and then the RevOps leader to actually set account executives up to fail in that kind of scenario where you're just putting them in somewhere where they just can't be successful, so anticipating the new hires and making sure that territory is carved out in advance, when I say that to RevOps leaders they say well what do you do with those accounts while the person's not hired yet and the beautiful part with coverage is yeah you might have two territories up until this date and now you have one again but then you know the opportunities that were created you have to decide what

41:08 to do with those, do you let the person that actually found those in somebody else's territory that was kind of an open territory, do you let them work them for three months if they were stage three plus, whatever your rules are automating all of that which then causes a lot less of those phone calls where a sales leader's calling the CRO saying this isn't fair my rep just lost this opportunity, he was working it for six months, he's got the relationships I need to do a split with the new rep and then you just navigate all that chaos that you know like you can you can get in front of some of that with with your rules

41:42 and policies so that you're not wasting your time on things that are not strategic, yeah and it just highlights how much data how much orchestration how much of an opinion you need to have to make those decisions and help facilitate that process so with all of the complexities needing the leverage in the planning process needing someone who can lead with an opinion understand how to focus on high leverage activities be your trusted advisor get that secret data from the data to make excellent decisions and then orchestrate some of those complex processes and go to market like territory planning and assignments how do you hire for

42:22 this role because I know a lot of CROs that are looking for this person and they're having a very difficult time finding them where do they live how do you suss out if they're the right fit or not and then how do you convince them to come up yeah the qualities that you're looking for with RevOps are obviously somebody that has confidence to challenge and push back confidence and and confidence in that like you're directing a CRO to focus second one is you know you're looking for you're looking for a RevOps person that's that's a leader they you they literally are leading the CRO to the goals that the business is

43:08 assigned to the CRO and the initiatives CRO wants to drive so leadership confidence not somebody you know not somebody that that is comfortable taking orders but as somebody that's that's that's comfortable taking requirements translating them into a solution and bringing them back so a lot of it is a RevOps you know expert that's good at translating requirements thinking through all the execution of how to be done and knowing enough about the tech stack that's available to all of us the tools that are needed to execute that they can actually hit deadlines so the confidence you're leading a CRO the ability to hit deadlines you know

43:50 we're going to put this initiative in place at this moment in time and it's not gonna slip and is there any particular background you're looking for or questions you ask in the interview process to make sure that this is a good fit is this something you need an executive recruiter for it has to come in through network how do you actually get them in yeah it's a great question there's a lot of communities out there that we participate in that are out there for RevOps leaders I highly recommend people joining some of these communities they're always sharing opportunities for different organizations the one characteristic

44:26 that I would that I would call out on RevOps so we have a large group of advisors that are RevOps experts they advise us on our platform and our product and we see them going to different organizations and finding different opportunities in their career we interviewed all of them the one career path that was most consistent that most RevOps leaders that were that were moving up in their career the one rule that was pretty consistent with COO a lot of RevOps leaders ultimately want to be COO so the most so for me like when I talk with with people that helped me in my business I'm looking for operationally minded people that know how

45:07 to run a program know how to translate a requirement and actually work through the details to make that come to life so operational minded with the leadership piece like those two things together and that's a that's a recipe to grow the career grow your career in RevOps I think it's a fantastic path for anyone who's in RevOps and I think it also if you're putting on that role in your current role of saying hey let me operate RevOps as if I were a COO I think that would give you a whole new perspective of what you should be doing how you should be spending your time and the level of confidence you should be bringing to the role as well

45:47 yep operate as if you've got that role right now and you'll naturally have those opportunities yep I tell my I tell my team on the sales side the same exact thing on a daily basis well Pete this has been awesome I think there's so many people in RevOps who were looking to break through just the tactics but really step into that strategic advisor role with their CRO and really lean in on some of the most strategic decisions and processes that are happening I think everything you shared hey starting with that planning process making it a continual process leading with an opinion and being being the confident person that's

46:25 able to push back during those high pressure moments is is huge and that's how you gain the trust and then I think the two things ways you could you could break the trust for every RevOps leader to avoid make sure you focus you know what initiatives are going to actually move the needle get the things off your plate that are not and then having the ability to manage up and push back in a healthy way if you can't do those things it's gonna be difficult to do that and if you capture all of that you will 100% become your CRO's secret weapon Pete thanks for being on the podcast I appreciate everything you're

47:03 doing at full cast and what you're doing for the RevOps community and can't wait to watch what you guys do next that's great to be here Anthony great conversation appreciate the opportunity