Ian Faison

BONUS: Techstack Roundup


On this season of the podcast, we’ve talked to some of the brightest minds and key voices in revenue operations.



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Welcome to Rise of RevOps.

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I'm your business on CEO of Caspian Studios.

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On this season of the podcast, we've talked to some of the brightest minds and

0:13

key voices

0:14

in business and revenue ops.

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Today, we're bringing you a bonus episode where our recent guests spotlight the

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best

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tools in their tech stacks.

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Let's begin with Sean Hiss, VP of Go to Market Operations, who gives us the low

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down on what

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kind of technology is changing the game at WECA.

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The other thing that's really interesting about our company is we have

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embarrassment

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of riches from a technology stack.

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We have just a ton of best or breed stuff, frankly, probably more than we can

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consume

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at this stage of like kind of at our size, but a lot of amazing stuff.

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Depending on the hat I'm wearing, I'll go deeper in one versus the other.

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But, you know, I was thinking about this and here's where I spend most of my

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time, right?

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So we're Salesforce Shop.

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So obviously a lot of time in Salesforce, a lot of spreadsheets, a lot of dash

1:03

boards

1:03

and reporting as we go through.

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I actually start my morning in Salesforce.

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So I don't know if that on the degree of nerdiness that makes me or not for

1:12

this audience,

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probably not so nerdy.

1:15

We've recently implemented Clary.

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And so I really love Clary as well for my sellers because I think it's got a

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great mobile

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experience.

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It puts the keeping updated forecasting and opportunity management kind of

1:28

right at their

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fingertips.

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It's all things, mostly things you can do in Salesforce, but it's just making

1:34

it that

1:34

much easier for the team as we go through.

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Also we're a HubSpot shop from a marketing automation standpoint.

1:41

So a lot of time in HubSpot.

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And gain site is what we're using, implementing for our customer success team

1:47

and kind of thinking

1:48

about that, our customer cockpit or customer dashboard of what that looks like.

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In addition, a couple of the other side tools we've been using have put in

1:57

recently also

1:58

give a shout out for Qualified.

1:59

We're a recent qualified customer.

2:01

Think of them about four or five months in now.

2:04

Really amazing how they're tying together a data set with the visitors and IP

2:09

matching.

2:10

And for me, when I thought about lead flow and how do we best enable our sales

2:14

team and

2:14

getting our customers on the digital buyers journey, it's been an incredible

2:18

tool for us.

2:19

So been really happy with that.

2:21

And the other one I'm looking at is atrium.

2:23

And again, that's a kind of a BI tool that lets me understand where my sales

2:27

teams are

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spending their time, what's the kind of effort versus reward in terms of

2:31

pipeline build,

2:33

efficacy, activity, those kinds of things.

2:36

So lots of tools on top of those, but that's probably my main kind of table of

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stuff I'm

2:42

interacting with on a daily basis.

2:44

Solid tips from Sean.

2:46

Next up, we hear from Mark Chocolate, head of revenue operations at Embrace.

2:50

Who knows your tech stack is key to automation.

2:54

The tech stack is more than just cool tools.

2:57

The tech stack is the foundation of your data.

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And in many ways, the foundation of many process that can be automated.

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And so it's more than just a CRM and a marketing automation system or a ticket

3:12

ing system.

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We use Marketo, we use Salesforce.

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But we also look for tools that in many ways are add-ons that can't be maybe

3:19

leveraged

3:20

natively in Salesforce.

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And the goal of doing this is to ensure reps and users like myself aren't doing

3:26

a ton of

3:27

manual work.

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One goal of revenue operations is always to automate, make more efficient.

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And so when we can use leveraged tools that create contacts in Salesforce or

3:38

write back

3:38

activity in Salesforce, show us intent of people who are on our website.

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Automatically assign tickets.

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It's something that helps expand capacity for the team, which means we can do

3:48

more or

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focus on other things like actually going into the data and finding insights

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that can

3:55

shift and shape how we do business.

3:58

I will definitely get on the bandwagon of a lot of rev-ups for folks who are

4:02

using

4:02

gong or a choreist or even, I mean, not related but hot-reach is also great in

4:07

terms of automated

4:08

tasks.

4:09

But to have a tool to give you insights really into the sales call and to tell

4:13

you what

4:13

the rep is saying and coach them live.

4:15

It has been pretty useful.

4:16

And in fact, we were able to utilize, we track certain words, sales reps say,

4:21

or the

4:21

prospect says, and we call it out on the call or feed it back into Salesforce

4:26

reports.

4:27

To try to see if there's any sort of variable or keyword or some sort of

4:31

indicator that can

4:32

help us on the sales call in terms of converting it to the next stage or even

4:37

closing.

4:38

Next up, let's hear from Matt Buren, VP of Global Sales and CX Operations at B

4:43

ambora,

4:44

and a new qualified customer.

4:46

So qualified, new customer, but I will give them credit where credit is due.

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I have never had a tool launch without a huge hiccup like we have.

4:55

We launched last week, it's been live, it's phenomenal.

4:58

It's everything that I thought it would be.

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So massive shout out.

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I'm not getting paid for that comment, by the way.

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We love to hear it.

5:05

So the big ones for us, obviously Salesforce first CRM, we use HubSpot for

5:09

marketing outbound.

5:10

We've got some really cool process between Salesforce and HubSpot where we're

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actually

5:15

ingesting Bambora data and building scores.

5:18

So we've got three different main scores that we use, an account score, an

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intense score,

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and an engagement score.

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It's a combination of HubSpot data, Salesforce data, and Bambora's own data.

5:29

So obviously Bambora is part of our stack because if it wasn't that'd be crazy

5:32

talk.

5:33

Sales navigator, gong.

5:35

We use outreach as our SEP.

5:37

And then we've got for the CX team, we use a tool called Plan Hat that's really

5:41

great

5:41

that helps with lifecycle adoption, health scores, and things of that nature.

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That's our core stack and then cognizant from a prospecting standpoint.

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Next up is Mary D. Alessandro, VP of revenue and revenue operations at Infobip.

5:57

She takes a compartmentalized approach to the tools that are helping her

6:01

organization

6:02

evolve.

6:03

So I would group them into three areas.

6:07

The first one is Salesforce to monitor the health of our future business.

6:13

So by looking at leads, pipeline, and revenue forecast.

6:17

Within Salesforce, I also used two other tools.

6:20

One is called Altify for account planning and the other one is called exactly

6:25

for the

6:26

revenue forecast.

6:27

Then the second area would be our own proprietary tools to monitor the health

6:32

of our current

6:33

business.

6:34

And so there I look at revenue, gross profit, gross margin, and net retention

6:40

rate.

6:41

And the third one, I would like to say LinkedIn, which I believe is becoming

6:46

more and more

6:47

and important tool for businesses.

6:49

I personally use it to monitor how our business could evolve in the very near

6:55

future by keeping

6:57

the polls on what is happening in the marketplace, not only to our customer,

7:02

prospect, partners,

7:04

and competitors, but also looking at all the new technologies that are coming

7:09

up and thinking

7:10

how we could leverage those technologies to give our customers the ability to

7:15

offer even

7:16

more connected, personalized, and on-demand experiences.

7:21

And also to me, it's very important to keep up to date with current trends.

7:25

How only to be able to better advise our customers on their existing needs and

7:30

challenging them

7:32

on new ones that they may not be aware of, but also to make sure that we keep

7:37

up with

7:37

those trends and trying to anticipate some of them to be able to pull ourselves

7:43

ahead

7:43

of the innovation curve as much as possible.

7:47

Daniel Gray is the Chief Revenue Officer at Blend Localization.

7:51

He tells us what's in his tech stack and some of the new tools that he's

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looking to

7:55

add.

7:56

I've got the base.

7:58

I'm Salesforce.com.

8:01

As a CRM.

8:02

I'm in HubSpot for marketing automation.

8:05

I'm actually, I suppose, maybe hacking HubSpot for sales engagement.

8:11

One of the more recent tools that we deployed within the last year was Zoom

8:14

info.

8:15

So that's been a game changer for us.

8:18

Now I do have, as I'm sure, many of the providers for data, they have this

8:22

challenge.

8:23

When you get outside the United States, the quality of data, the constraints

8:26

with GDPR,

8:27

and so the quality of data, say, within me and then even with APAC, it's a lot

8:31

harder

8:32

to get the same quality of data and even the intent functionality that Zoom

8:36

info brings,

8:37

which is really, really cool.

8:38

And then I've got a combination of Zoom, LinkedIn Navigator, DocuSign, Unbound,

8:44

Microsoft

8:44

Teams, the whole rest of that for execution.

8:49

But I'd say the big, big tools that my reps use and my SalesOps RevOps use is

8:53

Salesforce

8:54

Tableau, Zoom info.

8:57

And then we also have our own backend platform that we're all interconnected

9:01

with.

9:01

And then I'm happy to comment on tools that I'm evaluating and looking to add,

9:05

but that's

9:06

what my stack looks like now.

9:07

Yeah.

9:08

What are you looking at?

9:09

What are you looking to add and why?

9:11

So I've evaluated sales engagement tools like Outreach, Sales Loft, and that

9:15

sort of thing.

9:17

I'm quite interested in vatting those types of tools.

9:19

I'm also interested in tools like Connect and Sell that allow me to produce a

9:25

lot more

9:25

calls, connects, direct phone engagement with customers.

9:29

I think that we have such an over-reliance on email these days, mass emailing,

9:34

cadence

9:34

sequences, and it's just a lot of email.

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And at the end of the day, it's this type of personal relationship that makes

9:41

such a difference

9:41

when you're selling it.

9:43

I don't much care if you're selling services and are high-tech products, the

9:48

ability to

9:49

engage with customers and prospects on the phone, and even real-time chat,

9:53

things like

9:53

that.

9:54

But the next ones would be things like sales engagement and then some level of

10:00

just increasing

10:02

my calls and connects.

10:04

Counseling is partner and head of revenue excellence at Sapphire Ventures.

10:08

He prioritizes tools that help make you the most effective version of yourself.

10:15

The thing is that there's a ton of tool proliferation these days, meaning the

10:20

tech stack that I

10:21

had back when I was at ArcSight, perpetual software days, which is a while back

10:27

, I mean,

10:28

I could probably put it on a single page and showcase it.

10:32

And I did, and my road shows and whatnot during the HP acquisition.

10:36

Nowadays, I see some of these tech stacks and the best and brightest of the

10:39

respective tools

10:40

you need, and it's massive.

10:43

So the way I like to think about it is it really depends from persona to

10:47

persona within

10:48

a company.

10:49

So myself as a go-to-market executive, my tool stack, transparently, is

10:53

different than

10:54

what a seller will care about.

10:56

My tool stack is all about visibility and proactive visibility.

10:59

So what I tell my teams is, look, I'll spend most of my time in our Tableau

11:05

dashboards

11:06

that connect everything from top of the funnel down to all the various data

11:11

points we have

11:13

from the disparate tools that we have available.

11:15

What I want is a single pane of glass to be able to look at all of this and

11:19

understand

11:19

how the business is trending and flowing.

11:21

So for me personally, visualization tools, that's where I spend most of my time

11:25

It's a Tableau, a snowflake.

11:27

Now great tools like qualified and others, right?

11:29

What they're also trying to do is I have that single pane of glass, so some of

11:32

those

11:32

eventually will probably replace because there's very specific use cases I'm

11:36

trying

11:37

to solve for as well.

11:38

And funnel and funnel progression, understanding the funnel all the way from

11:42

intent down, really

11:43

meaningful as well.

11:45

But for me, it really is about decision support tools.

11:48

My teams, right?

11:49

If I think about sales, marketing, CS, I see a lot of them living in their

11:54

workflow

11:54

tools or their process tools.

11:56

So I have seen sales engagement tools and things of that effect be really high

12:00

on the

12:00

list, right?

12:01

So the outreaches of the world, where they do their day-to-day jobs, right?

12:06

That is super meaningful for them.

12:08

You know, gong and chorus.

12:09

There's all these other tools out there that help you understand if you're sort

12:12

of the

12:13

most effective version of yourself.

12:16

So those folks are spending more time in like their work tools, their workflow

12:19

tools, the

12:20

things that help them run their day-to-day.

12:23

Although we also try to get them to be very data-driven as well and have a good

12:26

insight

12:26

into the reports and dashboards that they need.

12:29

So it really just depends on persona to persona.

12:31

But that's how I try to look at it.

12:33

And ultimately, when you add it all up, you do get that big smattering of, you

12:37

know,

12:37

tools that every company has at late stage.

12:40

It's just a matter of using them effectively.

12:43

Aja Corbett is Senior Revenue Operations Manager.

12:47

Go to market at Bread Financial.

12:50

She joined us to reveal the tools she can't live without.

12:54

Well, in my toolkit, Salesforce, CRM, HubSpot, Marketing Automation Platform,

13:01

DialPad for

13:02

Dialer, InsightSquared for visualization, data, Zoom for meetings.

13:10

We're rolling out a CI for conversational intelligence.

13:15

Sales engagement platform, groove.

13:17

So I think outside of the brands, the companies, the core pieces, you probably

13:25

need CRM, Marketing

13:26

Automation, Sales Engagement Platform, and an enrichment tool because you need

13:30

contact

13:30

data, obviously.

13:32

So yeah, I think those are the top four.

13:35

And I'm partial to Salesforce.

13:37

I know that HubSpot is up and coming with their CRM functionality.

13:41

So if you're a smaller company or you have less budget, you could use that.

13:45

It's really about setting the tools up correctly to support business process

13:50

and not the other

13:51

way around buying the tool first because of shiny marketing, but not

13:56

understanding if

13:58

it's going to fit your use case or the functionalities even there.

14:03

So I think those are the core, but like my favorite tool.

14:07

Yeah, that's what was going to be my next thing.

14:09

I was going to say, what's new?

14:10

What can you not live without?

14:11

I can't live without, but I am living without it for right now is lean data.

14:15

The three time user of lean data, I have self implemented it before the company

14:21

is a revenue

14:22

operations thought leader.

14:24

Evan Leang is a thought leader of revenue operations.

14:26

I respect their ethos a lot and the product is good.

14:31

So they're a lead routing.

14:35

That's how they kind of started out lead routing and lead to account matching.

14:40

And it's a Salesforce app.

14:41

So unfortunately it doesn't work for other CRMs, but they have really increased

14:47

the functionality

14:48

over the years.

14:50

There's so many really cool things that you can do outside of just lead to

14:53

account matching

14:54

can do territory management.

14:56

They have a feature called the list analyzer.

14:58

So you can check for duplicates before you upload a list.

15:01

And I use that for when marketing would have events and then they're like, okay

15:05

, here

15:05

for the event, can you upload these as campaign members?

15:08

Like, okay, great.

15:09

Do these people exist already as leads and contacts?

15:12

And then it gives you the Salesforce ID.

15:15

If you use outreach and there's an outreach partner integration that you can

15:19

use lean

15:20

data to trigger sequences versus the triggers and outreach, which are more

15:24

limited.

15:25

Now I'm getting nerdy and technical, but outreach triggers are a little bit

15:29

more limited

15:29

with the criteria that you can use to trigger stuff.

15:32

It's just like a smaller scope of things you can do, right?

15:36

So the automation is not as powerful on that side.

15:41

But lean data is and lean data sits inside Salesforce.

15:44

So you can build it all in Salesforce and the routing, like you can have

15:49

complex routing

15:50

rules or is round robin.

15:52

There's like work load balancing.

15:54

So you can say if someone has too many leads, like pass it to the next person,

15:58

you can set

15:59

that up.

16:00

Yeah, I mean, there's, I can't say enough good things about lean data.

16:05

Adam Tuddle is the director of revenue operations at Active Campaign.

16:09

And he reflects on being his own biggest customer.

16:12

Well, like I mentioned, we are one of our biggest users in the world, which is

16:18

pretty

16:19

cool.

16:20

So from the size of our sales team to the amount of automations that we use,

16:26

like at

16:26

any given point, we'll have somewhere between 2,500 and 3,000 automations

16:31

pumping through

16:32

our account that are live.

16:35

So we, we use our tool on a very high, high level for our own purposes.

16:39

So Active Campaign is the number one tool that we use day in and day out.

16:44

And I know that obviously, of course, like you all use it a ton, but you're

16:47

also the

16:47

best at it.

16:48

When you say that number of automate, I mean, that's a huge number.

16:52

That's a huge amount.

16:53

And I know that you have like, you know, 100,000 plus customers and all that

16:56

sort of stuff,

16:57

but like what is in all those automations?

16:59

You guys are breaking into bite-sized chunks, so it's not just rev-ops.

17:04

It's our education team and our marketing team and our, I mean, we send things

17:10

to internal

17:11

people, right?

17:13

It's all of those pieces put together.

17:16

The thing that I find really fascinating about marketing automation tools as a

17:20

whole, right?

17:21

So let's be agnostic to Active Campaign for just a second is that a lot of

17:27

users, when

17:28

they hear marketing automation, they think, "Oh, that sends email."

17:31

If you were to break down, let's just say 2,000 automations and you were to

17:35

break those

17:36

down probably only a couple dozen to a couple hundred of them, right?

17:41

So let's say a higher dozen.

17:43

So one to 200, send emails, maybe 10%.

17:47

The rest are actually doing a lot of work behind the scenes to manage our data,

17:52

to build

17:52

funnels for our sales teams, to correct things.

17:56

The mistakes happen.

17:58

There's a lot going on behind the scenes and that is where that number really

18:02

grows because

18:03

you might have a lot of micro automations, which is an Adam Tuttle original

18:08

coin term,

18:09

but micro automations that really are there just to do one very simple task.

18:13

Like, "Oh, this happened?

18:15

Add a tag."

18:17

And so there's a lot of those and when you stack them up, then you get

18:21

thousands.

18:22

Where are the rest of your sales marketing and your CSP people living and what

18:27

metrics

18:27

matter to you?

18:29

We use Looker and like Snowflake, manage our data and then Looker helps

18:34

aggregate that

18:35

and make it pretty.

18:36

That's probably where a lot of those teams tend to live.

18:39

It's taking data out of our tools, whether it be, we have some homegrown

18:44

systems that

18:45

do a lot of our processing for billing and different things and connecting that

18:49

data to

18:50

data inside of the CRM.

18:52

So if I think about it from a RevOps perspective, it's looking at things like,

18:57

"Okay, how many

18:58

trials came in and how many deals did we create out of those trials for our SDR

19:03

team to try

19:04

to qualify?"

19:06

If we see a huge gap because we know that we only strip out a small amount of

19:10

potential

19:10

opportunities, we don't let anything that has an active campaign email address

19:15

go through

19:16

as an opportunity for a rep to work.

19:18

That doesn't make any sense.

19:20

So we take those out, but we should have a very small margin of, "Should we

19:24

basically

19:24

the same?"

19:25

And so we're always looking at things like that, especially on the sales side,

19:29

looking

19:29

at how many people are progressing through the pipeline, like what are our

19:32

qualification

19:33

rates?

19:34

What are the things that we're doing?

19:36

And I would say that that actually is similar to what marketing is doing as

19:40

well.

19:40

Again, we talked about this relationship with marketing ops, RevOps, at least

19:45

in the context

19:46

of active campaign.

19:48

Renee Cinque is the one driving those trials.

19:51

But if none of their trials are converting to leads, then that's a problem for

19:55

them as

19:56

well.

19:57

It's not just something that matters to sales.

19:58

Renee Cinque is head of revenue operations at RutterStack.

20:02

And she has a new addition to her tech stack that we would love to hear.

20:06

Qualified is the most recent addition to our tool shed.

20:09

So we do use Qualified for our marketing site.

20:12

We're evaluating adding it in the application as well on certain pages.

20:15

We'll use that for conversation marketing as well as insights and signals for

20:19

our outbound

20:20

team and our account executive.

20:22

It's been very impactful for us so far.

20:24

If I laundry list out the big players, I'll start at the top of the funnel

20:28

where we use

20:28

RutterStack.

20:29

So RutterStack is what we use to get our leads in from our application, from

20:34

our marketing

20:35

website, and track as well all of the interactions that those de-anonymized

20:41

folks have with our

20:42

website.

20:43

The same way that qualified, right, when someone puts their email address into

20:47

the qualified

20:48

bot, you're always able to tell that that person coming back in the future, we

20:52

do the

20:53

same thing on our marketing website, right?

20:54

So if someone gives us their email in a demo request or to register for content

20:59

marketing

21:00

webinar, we'll cookie them, right?

21:02

And we'll track how that prospect is engaging with our content going forward.

21:06

We'll actually also use RutterStack to instantly enrich those or near instantly

21:10

enrich those

21:11

with ClearBit.

21:12

So qualified also leverages ClearBit, so we do have a good consistency, at

21:16

least in terms

21:17

of MQL logic and how we think about what a qualified versus unqualified lead is

21:22

between

21:22

qualified and our marketing site.

21:24

As well, we leverage Tableau for a lot of the usage insights, analytics, just

21:29

different

21:29

go-to-market roll-ups.

21:31

So yeah, I think that's like the tool belt for us at RutterStack.

21:35

Pete Ainsett is the chief revenue officer at Fordroc.

21:39

He prioritizes tech that supports the strategic methodology there.

21:43

We got a lot of things in our tool shed at Fordroc actually.

21:45

And again, growing company there needs, there's plenty of opportunities.

21:49

I think it probably starts with the, and not even necessarily tool, but a

21:52

methodology.

21:53

So we use MedPIC from a sales methodology perspective.

21:57

And when I got here, there really wasn't a ton of rigor around sales

22:00

methodology.

22:01

And I thought it's something that we've had to put in place.

22:04

But once you put a methodology in place, how do you then drive that?

22:08

And how do you programatize that?

22:09

And that's with tools.

22:10

Salesforce is our system of record.

22:13

And really we're evolving our deployment of Salesforce constantly to trying to

22:17

make it

22:17

more of a data-driven tool.

22:19

It takes the transactions.

22:20

But then how do we get that data out in a way that we can make decisions?

22:23

One actual Salesforce plug-in that we have is an application called ClosePlan

22:27

that sits

22:28

right on top of Salesforce.

22:29

And that helps with the discipline around MedPIC and some of the pieces that we

22:33

were

22:33

able then to incorporate and make sure that, hey, we just don't have the record

22:36

there,

22:37

but now we have some of the strategic pieces on top of that.

22:40

And that's been really instrumental in making sure that we were tracking and

22:43

have a data-driven

22:46

approach to managing and maintaining all of the data that you need around a

22:50

sales methodology.

22:51

I can tell you the last couple of years on the opposite of things, we've really

22:55

gotten

22:55

much more focused on on leveraging some tools.

22:58

We put Tableau in place for real-time visibility.

23:01

Something that we absolutely needed.

23:03

I think we weren't putting our manager in the best position to make those

23:06

decisions,

23:06

those data-driven decisions.

23:08

Spreadsheets have their place in every company, but we had to have a more

23:12

proactive tool that

23:13

we could really manage the business consistently.

23:15

So Tableau's gone in.

23:17

We use Anaplan really to do everything from forecasting to territory planning,

23:21

multi-year

23:21

modeling.

23:22

And again, that's really helped us, especially territories.

23:25

Your growing company went from 50 to 100, 150 reps that we're going to have.

23:29

How do you come up with territories that make sense?

23:32

Do you have the right number of people in a certain region?

23:35

Do you go into another region?

23:36

Can all that data-driven and Anaplan's been a great way for us to centralize

23:39

that and

23:40

have a consistent approach to it?

23:42

Daniel Bornstein is a VP of growth at GenPACT.

23:45

And he considers automation versus personalization when customizing his tech

23:51

stack.

23:51

So I won't bore you with everything that's in our tool shed.

23:54

Instead, I'll answer the question a little bit differently.

23:58

In terms of how I think about what should be in a tool shed, we use kind of the

24:02

common

24:02

tools that you would think a company like ours of our size, or even frankly, a

24:06

B2B

24:07

SaaS company would use, for example, Salesforce or Marketo as part of Sales

24:11

force, right?

24:12

Or tools I qualified.

24:15

So I think we're very much trying to be on the cutting edge of what we need to

24:19

license

24:19

to make our business a modern sales organization and so on and so forth.

24:24

But I will tell you two things.

24:26

One is my approach traditionally, because I built a number of tech stacks when

24:30

I was

24:31

more in startups, is I always look at anything licenseable or any suite of

24:37

tools within a

24:39

must have or a nice to have bucket.

24:41

If you're nice to have, probably you're not going to want to contract with us

24:46

if you're

24:46

must have your must have.

24:47

And I like Salesforce only.

24:49

I know it's so obvious, but I'll give you like a very, very short anecdote.

24:54

A year ago I was visiting my dad and my dad is a retail investor.

24:59

And he invested a number of companies, like for example, in this particular day

25:03

, he said,

25:04

what about Salesforce?

25:05

So he knows Salesforce.

25:07

He knows the financial metrics.

25:09

You can see the growth of the stock.

25:11

It doesn't necessarily understand the business.

25:13

He says, should I buy Salesforce?

25:16

Now I can give my dad any piece of advice I want on Salesforce because I'm not

25:19

an employee

25:20

of Salesforce.

25:21

There's no moral hazard there.

25:23

So I explained to him this paradigm of companies licensing software in nice to

25:27

have versus

25:28

must have.

25:29

And then I explained to him that Salesforce has this thing called ARR.

25:33

And this is what ARR is.

25:35

And they're so sticky because you have to customize and you have to build your

25:40

own instance of

25:41

Salesforce.

25:42

And they have all these other technologies like qualified, for example, that

25:45

bolt onto

25:45

Salesforce.

25:46

So effectively their customer churn has got to be one of the lowest in the

25:50

industry.

25:51

So like, yes, it's probably a pretty safe stock to buy.

25:55

So that's kind of my view on licensing.

25:58

And then one of the things that I think is interesting and I don't mean to be

26:03

controversial,

26:04

but this is a podcast about revenue operations.

26:09

There's been some debate over the last few years on personalization versus

26:15

automation.

26:16

Right?

26:17

And what I mean by that is in your sales go to market.

26:21

We all know people are listening to this podcast know who the players are, but

26:26

there's a set

26:28

of companies that create what I call sales ESPs.

26:33

They don't call themselves sales.

26:34

ESPs I'm calling them sales ESPs because essentially what you're doing is you

26:39

're using

26:40

a marketing approach to sales.

26:43

Instead of doing one to one, you're doing one to many.

26:46

Now I'm not criticizing these companies because I think what these companies

26:49

did is genius

26:50

because they're doing well.

26:52

They found product market fit and they found customers who are looking at the

26:56

promise of

26:57

how do I make myself force more efficiently.

27:01

But in the act of using automation, again, we're a company that embraces

27:05

automation and

27:06

we do it on behalf of our customers.

27:08

But where does it make sense and where it doesn't, it makes sense.

27:12

So if you're treating your sales prospects like you're treating your marketing

27:17

prospects,

27:18

I think it's a race to the bottom.

27:20

I think people are trying to find what is that latest technology or what is

27:24

that latest

27:25

trick to get a higher conversion rate and they're sending these cadences and

27:30

they're

27:31

semi-personalizing them and guess what?

27:34

People are smart, right?

27:36

Decision makers at companies are smart.

27:39

And when they're getting an email, which feels impersonal, where somebody didn

27:43

't talk

27:43

about their business, their issues, something that feels authentic, they're not

27:49

going to

27:49

respond.

27:50

So it's no wonder when people start talking about, I have a 3% conversion rate

27:54

on sales

27:55

emails like, wow, that's amazing.

27:57

Because it's a little bit, if everybody's doing it, if everybody's automating

28:02

this, it's

28:02

really no different.

28:03

You might as well just send emails from our keto and those are going to have

28:06

lower conversion

28:07

rates as well, depending on what it is and maybe it's promoting an event, has

28:11

higher

28:11

conversion rates.

28:12

So I think about this personalization versus automation as being somebody that

28:16

's worked

28:16

in tech companies that wants to license the best technology as a company where

28:21

we use

28:21

technology to help digitize our client's business to help them digitally

28:25

transform.

28:25

And where does it become too much?

28:29

So for us, again, and this is my own personal opinion, when we're reaching out

28:33

to potential

28:34

prospects, everything is hyper-personalized.

28:37

Of course, easy for me to say because as we discussed, we're not going after

28:41

thousands

28:41

of companies at scale.

28:43

But if everybody's doing it, how effective is it going to be?

28:47

So I think I'm not trying to pick on these cohort of companies and I'm not

28:50

trying to

28:50

pick on SaaS companies that use this kind of sales automation.

28:55

And I think by the way, it certainly works.

28:57

Like if you're using it for inbound SMB advertising with tens of thousands of

29:02

customers at scale,

29:04

you need automation, but there is a rate of diminishing returns there.

29:08

And I don't feel like that's debated in nothing in industry.

29:11

First in Gray is CCO at Shift Paradigm.

29:15

He shares the CDP tools he's excited to add to the tech stack.

29:19

Of course, you've got the basics, right?

29:21

Like I think most organizations have a marketing automation platform and the CR

29:24

M these days,

29:25

so we've always been a Marchetto and a Salesforce shop.

29:28

I think the last time we did an analysis, we've got over 60 tools in the stack.

29:35

We get a lot of technology, obviously, for our partnerships and we've got some

29:39

great

29:39

partners out there and a robust network of those folks.

29:43

But I would say at the end of the day, the stuff that we can't live without,

29:46

certainly

29:46

Marchetto Salesforce, Sixth Sense does all of our segmentation.

29:51

It does all of our scoring.

29:52

It does all of our digital ads.

29:55

A lot of our ABM metrics reside within that platform.

29:58

We absolutely are an account-based go-to-market motion.

30:01

We want to be focusing on our ideal clients only, so it makes a ton of sense

30:05

for us.

30:05

Certain mail, we do a decent amount of print mail, so we do a use sendoso for

30:09

that from

30:10

a criticality standpoint.

30:11

Tons of little widgets like LeanData that help us route and earlier segment

30:15

data within

30:16

CRM.

30:17

That's the core stack.

30:19

Any tools you've been trying out recently, something new, something cool?

30:22

Yeah, a lot of the new stuff that we're looking towards is CDP-focused.

30:27

Our friends over at Tillium, we love their product.

30:30

We also love, I think, any marketing department these days should have a snow

30:34

flake instance

30:35

that they don't already have one, just in terms of getting access to metrics

30:38

that make

30:39

sense that span marketing, sales, customer success.

30:43

We see a lot of that from a customer standpoint as well.

30:46

Snowflake has just gotten incredibly popular.

30:48

Light that up with an ETL tool to extract data with a visualization layer in

30:53

Tableau,

30:54

and frankly, a lot of organizations would solve their KPIs and their visibility

30:58

challenges

30:58

that are created by opinionated software that doesn't necessarily jive from an

31:03

architecture

31:04

standpoint.

31:05

Especially as we're talking about marketing, sales, customer success, bringing

31:08

those together,

31:08

I'd highly recommend that Orbs explore some sort of data warehouse solution

31:13

with a light

31:13

ETL and Tableau, Power BI, whatever they have access to for visualization.

31:19

I think we get away from a lot of spreadsheets and last minute board decks with

31:23

the type of

31:23

added-dip toolset.

31:25

We hope you enjoyed this bonus episode.

31:27

If you'd like to hear the full conversations, I encourage you to listen back to

31:31

the earlier

31:32

episodes of the podcast, which we'll link up in the show notes.

31:35

Thanks again for listening.

31:36

I appreciate all of you.

31:38

I'm Ian Faizan, CEO of CastMean Studios, and we'll see you next time on Rise of

31:41

Red Ops.

31:42

[MUSIC]

31:49

(upbeat music)