Driving Accountability with RevOps
On this episode, we talk with Scott Hofmann, Chief Revenue Officer of GFT USA. GFT is a digital transformation IT professional services firm that develops sustainable solutions based on new technologies, including artificial intelligence and blockchain.
[MUSIC]
>> Welcome to Rizzarevops.
I'm Ian Faiz on CEO of Caspian Studios.
Today, we are joined by a special guest, Scott.
How are you?
>> I'm great.
>> Thanks for asking. How are you doing?
>> Doing well, excited to chat about GFT,
chat about RevOps, about revenue,
and your background, everything in between.
This episode, as always,
is brought to you by Qualified.
Go to Qualified.com to learn more.
Every single marketer out there needs
qualified in their toolkit or RevOps person.
Go to Qualified.com to learn more.
Let's get into it. What was your first job in revenue?
>> Well, as I think many of the guests you've had on the show say,
it was a long and interesting journey to get to where they are today within the
revenue space.
But mine started 25 years ago in professional services,
but being really on the delivery side of the house.
So I grew up in a startup in professional services.
Then there was an inflection point about 10 years ago,
where as we continued to grow,
we needed to focus a little bit more on our sales channeling,
our sales strategy, and I moved over into the sales role.
It's an interesting thing to have gone from in professional services,
just delivery to sales because in that industry,
there is usually a little bit of a headbudding between those two organizations.
The delivery folks say, well,
we're the folks that are doing all of the hard work and the lifting,
the sales guys get all the credit, the sales guys say,
I'm working so hard to get these relationships and falsies,
relationships and the delivery people go in and mess things up for me.
So having sat on both sides, it really gave me some interesting insight
into where the push pull of those things are,
and then trying to realize back then about 10 years ago,
how to bring those areas together.
We weren't using the term rev-ops,
but in reality, as we started to break down the silos,
we were in fact operating in a sort of a rev-ops type of culture.
>> For our listeners who don't know, tell us a little bit more about GFT.
>> Yeah, so GFT is a global digital transformation IT professional services
firm.
So what that means is we help clients around the world
on their digital transformation journeys.
Pretty much, for the most part,
focused on banking, financial services, insurance and manufacturing.
So when a bank says that we want to upgrade and update our banking core
from some legacy technology into something new to be more agile,
to open more opportunities for new revenue streams,
we help them on that journey.
Or perhaps they say we want to get rid of our legacy infrastructure,
we want to move that infrastructure into the cloud.
How do we do that? What are the strategies?
We're a size of around 10,000 people globally, just shy of 10,000,
which puts us in an interesting niche of being what we consider big enough to
deliver,
but still small enough to care and provide that sort of white glove service
that our customers need and want.
>> And you're remit as CRO. What are you in charge of?
>> My role as Chief Revenue Officer in US is basically to run the business of
the US.
So aside from a couple of areas around HR and a little bit of finance
from the perspective of a check and balance,
at the end of the day, I'm responsible for what we do and how we do it within
the US.
So very classically in the RevOps world,
that means that I have responsibility and accountability around marketing,
how we go to market, what our brand awareness strategy is,
what the solutions are that we want to develop and build and put out into
market,
the manner in which we put those to market, the sales organization,
and how we develop those relationships and build trust with a client to
eventually use us to help them on these strategic transformative journeys,
and then delivery and making sure that what we deliver, what we sold,
we deliver with excellence.
>> And so how does RevOps come into play?
How do you think about your definition of RevOps and what would,
or what does your team look like?
>> In professional services, that overarching manifestation,
the cultural aspect of it is maybe slightly different from a product-based
company, for instance.
So in a product-based world, there's usually a little bit tighter at times,
a little tighter joining of marketing and sales,
but then perhaps more of a chasm between sales and client success or customer
success or whatever
the terminology that that company uses.
Primarily because you've sold them a thing, and then the other group is really
worried about
making sure that that client is using that thing efficiently and effectively
and inevitably
signs back up.
In the professional services world, however,
marketing and sales still have a very tight alignment, need that tight
alignment,
but there's even tighter alignment with the delivery organization,
because in fact what we're selling is the delivery organization itself,
is the people that are working with the clients and building those relations
and trust.
So by the very nature of our business, there has to be a tight connection
between these entities.
And in reality, I think what you see a lot of times in professional services,
and I've been in this business basically my entire career,
is that sales and delivery are actually usually much more close to the rate,
and marketing is a little bit more off to the side.
So my job happens a lot of times to be able to pull the marketing side in,
and really connect the dots in that way.
Yeah, I think for a lot of RobOps teams that sort of starts as just a sales ops
function,
and maybe marketing ops function, and then there's a thrust to say,
okay, we need a little bit more of a 360 degree look at sales marketing,
customer success, and they all play together at this point now.
The buying journey is so connected at this point anyways, so we kind of need to
do it.
So I feel like having marketing sort of being the third child of this makes
sense.
The marketing message has to be both impactful, but also incredibly broad,
because the range of services that we provide is vast.
We have lots of capability from very early on a sort of a project pipeline
around ideation
and innovation and design oriented principles and persona and journey
development and
prototypical experience design, but then also we have to build things and
architect things and
test things and run things, and those things can be extremely varied.
If for one client it can be something deep in data analytics and something else
could be a cloud application and something else it could be a mobile
application.
The marketing team has to find something where it's not just the lowest common
denominator
that resonates, but has to speak specifically.
Who exactly am I talking to in exactly what industry with exactly the issues
that they
potentially have and really hone and craft that issue.
And again, I understand a product company has similar challenges and certainly
has similar
sort of journey of one or marketing of one type of strategies, but typically
they're selling a
thing or a couple of things with a few permutations, whereas us it's extremely
vast.
Again, pulling that in and making sure that it lines up.
What we said is what we sell, what we sell is what we do, and what we do we do
really well,
and it feeds back into the loop.
It's very critical for us as we continue to develop trust with the client.
Any other thoughts on RevOps strategy before we get on to the next segment?
There is a concept now, but it was a burgeoning concept 15 years ago called Dev
Ops.
Today really means the automation of a certain aspect of the development lif
ecycle of software.
So it's automating how we deploy and test and manage software.
But if you go back in time, DevOps really was a philosophical change that said
that
you're going to create a team and the team is wholly responsible for a product
or
features within a product.
So it meant a financial ownership, a customer ownership, a technical ownership.
That was the philosophical ethos, the cultural element of DevOps, but it dev
olved, if I should
use that word, into automation of stuff.
My hope here is that RevOps doesn't follow that pattern.
That RevOps is a cultural aspect.
It's an accountability aspect.
It's a deriving empathy between these different unique areas of skill to
understand how we each
impact the other.
And it doesn't devolve into tools, just lots of tools.
And we can automate all these things.
We know everything about a client and that's the end of it and there's a
dashboard and you're
done.
The human aspect and that accountability aspect I think is probably the most
interesting and
critical thing.
If you're head of RevOps or it could be a head of go to market, strategy in ops
, and then they
have a RevOps leader under them and then a strategy team under them so that
they're looking at
things strategically and they're looking at things operationally.
That to me is a really fascinating idea.
Some RevOps leaders have that strategy piece under them and then other RevOps
teams are more
like ticket taking from sales marketing and customer success, carving
territories doing
the just traditional ops sort of things.
And I think it's an interesting standpoint that it's not just someone who is
using a bunch of
tools but trying to find the truth, the way through the noise.
I'm a big believer in empathy driven action.
Again, in particular with professional services, it applies to other industries
as well.
But in professional services, something I like to always talk about with my
sales teams in particular
is if you're not selling downstream, someone won't have a job.
It's not just hitting your number.
It's not just I have a target.
Here's my forecast.
I've got everything in my CRM.
The client, they're not ready to make a purchase.
There's nothing we can do about it.
We've sent them all the material.
We've done the workshops and we'll ping them in a few months.
There's a human aspect which is we're selling human capability.
We're selling at the end of the day people to go and work with clients in a
trusted and partnership
model. Understanding that and really putting yourselves in the shoes of the
folks around you
I think is absolutely critical and particular in this industry.
So having that kind of mindset, understanding that from a marketing perspective
, from a sales
perspective and from a delivery perspective, how intertwined that is to make
and how important
that is to the individuals involved for their livelihoods, for their families,
I think is really
critical. Again, that's why I think the cultural aspect of RevOps is the most
important aspect
of it. Breaking down those silos, but at the end of the day, make sure people
understand the
impact of what I do on those other folks and vice versa, I think is the most
critical thing.
And the one that will make a true RevOps team successful.
All right, let's get to our first segment. RevOps sickles, where we talk about
the hardest parts of
RevOps. What's one of the hardest problems that you've faced in the last six
months or so and how
did you solve it? There have been numerous obstacles that the largest ones
really not RevOps specific
is simply the fact that over that first six months you have to find out what
you don't know.
Right, so walking into a new organization, by the way, GFT is a 37-year-old
company. It's been
around for many years, but the US and the presence in the US is younger and
smaller.
So the US feels more like a startup, but it's operating inside of a company
that's well
established for many, many years. I come from a startup world and trying to
understand that
you kind of have to pump the brakes sometimes and really understand the legacy,
appreciate
that legacy and move forward is critical. But the more specific to the RevOps
focus is really
understand the measures and metrics that are involved here. It's a complex
environment,
a lot of different ways in which financial components are measured, and people
aren't
scented by the way across a wide array of financial metrics, KPIs
to lesser extent, but growing now OKRs, pulling those pieces in. So that's been
probably the
biggest challenge for me. I feel I'm very lucky to have come into and inherited
in some places or
joined in other places a very mature team who really know what the heck they're
doing.
There's still a few unknown unknowns that I have to I have to suss out a little
bit in order to
make sure that I'm being impactful as a leader. But I think folks that are in
this type of role,
you know, a multi-disciplinary role from a leadership perspective, certainly a
chief revenue
officer would fall into that, not falling victim to the tyranny of the urgent.
It's a lot of times,
especially coming into a new company. You know, you want to make an impact as
quickly as you can,
but not make a foolish mistake too early by the same token. I always thought
that that term was
really a great term. It's one that you can check yourself on frequently, which
is, am I falling
victim to the tyranny of the urgent? And you know, where's that value? So, you
know, those are all
those are all aspects of being new to a company and trying to understand and
then pulling all the
tools together in order to make sure that, you know, we're optimized to what we
need to do. But
those have been my biggest obstacles to date. What about a Revoops moment? Not
so much in this
particular role today now at GFT. But in the past, I definitely fell victim to
relying too much or looking too deeply into a problem being solved by a tool as
opposed to a
problem being solved by thoughtful strategy and development of a proper process
. And I know many
people on your podcast have mentioned that same thing from the other
perspective, right? Don't let
the tool dictate what you do. Don't think that all these tools are going to
solve your problems.
You really need to understand, you know, the overarching process. So, so
something now that I
follow that I didn't in the past, where I just said, Oh my God, you know, why
are we thinking
about all the sales forces already figured it out? Let's just implement sales
cloud. Everything's
going to be fine. You know, earlier in my career and then realizing, well, that
's actually made
things a thousand times worse. We really need to nail it down. So I use a
process called Engagement
Blueprinting. Now, some people call it service blueprinting. It's many, many
different names for
it. But basically says, you know, draw out the human journey, draw out the
business process
and where those connect, draw out underneath that the systems that are support
that business process.
So really focusing in on, okay, exactly where our SG&A is at the, it's this
exact moment against
our existing forecast and how do we adjust based on current market conditions
in order to go and,
you know, maximize profitability over this one small period of time, this month
, this next month,
as opposed to saying, what are the trends? What should we be focused in on
right now?
That's going to give us success 18 months from now, two years from now and so
on and so forth. So,
you know, combination, a combination of those things, a little tool focus
sometimes,
definitely getting a little too down into the weeds and losing track of the
bigger picture.
I've made some significant oops in the past on those.
All right, let's get to our next segment, the tool shed. We're talking tools,
spreadsheets,
and metrics, just like everyone's favorite tool, qualified, no B2B tool shed is
complete without
qualified go to qualified.com right now and check them out. Let's get into the
tool shed.
Let me tell you, before we start, I got to tell you, you're the clips that you
play right before,
as we go into this segment, you have my favorite clips of all time of Will
Farrell yelling at the
kids to get off the shed. I love that clip. I love that so much. I think it's
so funny.
And then you laugh so much when I heard the first time, one of the first
episodes you saw.
And by the way, that's actually a really good sort of example of tyranny of the
urgent.
What's more important at that moment? Was it the conversation he's going to
have to create
our lasting relationship with his neighbors or screaming at his kid? Now, of
course, if the kid
was in danger, that's one thing. But I like to think that no one was in danger.
It was just a
noise that he said to get off the shed. But anyway, I love that opening. So it
's cool.
As a new parent, I can attest that I'm going to be yelling to get off the shed.
I don't think I'm going to escape it. I have a nine-year-old daughter. I love
her to pieces.
It is very easy to fall into that exact pattern of overcorrecting, let's say.
But to talk about tools specifically, I wouldn't say that at GFT, we're at the
bleeding edge.
I think we have the right mix for our business and what we do. So it covers
most of the categories
that you would expect with some automation and integration inside of that. So
we have
different sets of Salesforce tools, primarily PAR. from a marketing perspective
and Salesforce
Sales Cloud to do our opportunity management, our typical CRM type of activity.
From a sales perspective, we also use some tools that are quite common Zoom
info,
which I'm sure many of your other guests use all the time, and LinkedIn Sales
Navigator to help
create those networks and navigate each other's networks. Really, the
cornerstone for us,
or the Keystone maybe, is a professional services automation tool. It's called
Kimball. So that
has all of our active engagements. It's built on top of Salesforce, by the way,
force.com.
So that allows us to tie it all together. So I can move all the way from my
marketing into my
pre-sales and sales activity as things convert to a sold engagement that moves
directly into
Kimball. So I can follow what's going on, how we're developing, how we're
delivering against the
the expected metrics, the expected revenue and margin associated with that. So
it's really,
it's nicely tied together from that perspective. And then we use Power BI to
kind of bring it all
together and show a lot of different views. We're not big Excel users any
longer.
That was there before I showed up. Excel, for me, is now only a tool when I
just want to do some
very fast modeling. But that's our core stack. We don't do a lot in the AI side
of customer
insight at the moment. Although I'm exploring that right now. It's a little bit
different,
again, in professional services, because we're not targeting typically
individuals.
It's a little difficult sometimes for those tools that are a little bit more
focused on
finding a person or finding an exact need and then trying to extrapolate from
that the
the the the the appropriate sales cycle. Anyway, that that makes up the bulk of
what we do.
Yeah, this I was checking out the Contata formerly Kimball PSA. Native app,
that's pretty cool.
It's something that we don't hear a lot because we don't have a lot of
professional services
on the show. So what does it give you insights to that are specific? Because it
seems like it's
about like resource management as well. It is very much so. It's somewhat
analogous to an ERP
for a manufacturer. We have our inventory and that sounds absolutely horrendous
because
inventory is human beings. But but the end of the day, it's where we have all
of the people
that deliver anything to any of our our clients. So we we know who we have,
what their skill sets
are, what their availability is, what their associated costs are, and then we
can we can make
projects. So so when I when we sell a deal to a large bank to help them on
their migration from
their on-prem infrastructure to let's say Amazon AWS cloud, right? We'll set up
a teams or one or
more teams. Those teams will be assembled in Kimball. Those teams will have
different milestones,
different, you know, project plan associated with that that we also can set up
in Kimball.
And then what we do is we can track that on a regular basis. So we can track
where we are from
a project perspective. We also track it from the financial perspective too. How
are we doing? You
know that the cost of our resources is constantly in flux. It's a very it's
very complicated business
because it's not just, you know, okay, once a year people might get a raise. It
's, you know,
we're delivering with people from Mexico, Costa Rica, Canada, Brazil, Spain,
Germany, Poland,
and every day their costs are moving just because of currency fluctuation, FX.
Right. So so these
systems allow us to say what's actually happening and what is the cost at
completion because our
our rates are set. So we can make adjustments. We can understand exactly where
we are from a
status perspective and then also like a financial perspective as well. So it's
the primary system
with which we understand revenue to cost over archingally for our margin. And
then we bake in
the SGNA costs on top of that all to understand what our true operating margin
is. So it's very
it's very handy tool. There are others. There are other professional services
tools out there.
Like that I use the company I used to work for prior that I came up and we used
something called
Open Air which got bought by a net suite. And then we moved to something called
Financial Force which
was also a very an exceptionally good platforming tool. Everything from
modeling a team and cost
associated with for proposing all the way through to actual execution of a
project. So yeah, for
anybody who is in this model where it's professional services the Kimball
Financial
Force those are both really great tools. What about some areas that you want to
invest some
things you want to invest over the over the coming year whether it's from a
sales perspective or
marketing perspective. We have great aspiration to continue to do brand
awareness in particular in
the United States as I said. The company's you know of a decent size of a
significant size and
has a good global footprint but in the US the brand is not well known. But we
're working very hard to
try to increase that brand awareness and I'm looking across a bunch of
different tools along
with my head of marketing and our global marketing team which are extremely
they're wonderful and
extremely supportive to help us sort of guide that path. So what's the best way
to get the
message out there and as I said and it's really a very unique message to each
not even persona but
person that we have to push it out to. So I'm just starting an exploration now
it's one of the
things that actually brought me to your podcast earlier was to listen to some
of my colleagues in
other spaces and hear what tools are working out for them. I'm not a big
believer in running a very
lengthy and expensive vendor evaluation and I shouldn't necessarily say that
publicly because
a lot of times we get hired to do that for other firms. But the reality I think
somebody else,
another guest on one of your shows had mentioned that if you pick the top three
or four in any one
of the categories you're probably going to be just fine. Right it's more about
it's more about
your strategy, your process and whatnot. So I'm in that mode right now I'm kind
of looking at
especially on the marketing automation marketing operations side of the house
what we can do to
increase our efficiency and effectiveness of getting the name out there and
then getting the right
message to the right person at the right time. Can we use Power BI but it's
relatively new for us
to kind of pull it all together and have those visualizations so we can have
real-time insight
into what we're trying to do and pivot where we need to pivot especially in
today's market with
with all the fluctuations. No one knows what the heck's going to happen with
the debt ceiling crisis
with how that'll affect global economy, how it affects for us. So continuing to
push down that
path with additional I don't say tooling but additional visualizations and dash
boards in order
to really know the health of where we are from a sales and from a delivery
perspective are high on
my list. So that's where we intend to go from a tool perspective at least that
's where we intend
to go. Culturally however what I'm really trying to do is what we set at the
top of the show here
which was just you know really making sure people understand the impact that
each of us has on the
other and making it very personal. Can I go to bed tonight and say I did
everything I possibly could
to make sure that I maximized not just value the client but value to my fellow
coworkers. You know
the folks that are relying on the sales organization, the market organization
to get the message out
there so that we have billable work to do. That's an area that I will continue
to push
forever as part of my role in any company including this one. Any other blind
spots or things that
you wish you could be measuring better? I'd love to have a better sense of an
unbiased objective
sense of the client's sentiment towards the work that we've not not just the
work that we're doing
but the the sale itself. It's a it's a tough thing in our industry and almost
any industry. It's a
really tough thing to get details from a client that said no. Really
understanding the decision
criteria and just having some honest feedback to say here's why we didn't
select you. It's
difficult to do for a variety of reasons. So I love to try to get as many
insights as I can
honest and objective insights on that side of the house. And then from a
delivery perspective
there's many tools and techniques to understand how a customer feels about what
you're actually
delivering. That promoter score obviously is one that we can use all the time.
But I still find
that sometimes they're a little bit biased. So I'd let you know any any tooling
any process that
really provides an objective and unbiased view. So how are we really doing?
What do you really
feel? And how can I do better? At times you might get one or two surveys back
from a client.
And that's not really the sample set that you need. You need a much larger one.
So
I'd love to I'd love to shore that up with some with some with some great
insights that don't
necessarily require the uncomfortable or eliminate any sort of uncomfortable
conversation that a
client doesn't necessarily want to have with you. Just just keep going, get the
work done. It's fine.
I'll tell you when there's a problem, which is fine. But I'd rather I'd rather
know
what those indicators are that the problem's coming objectively from you early.
Any other cool stuff that you're doing data or any any tips?
What happened early in the rev ops sort of cycle, there's a lot of predictive
stuff, right?
There's all this. How do you predict customer behavior? How do you how do you
hone in on
forecasting and make sure those forecasts are hyper accurate? And I think we
kind of moved away
a little bit from sort of that predictive component and just into real time for
decision making.
But I think there's a lot of value in in the predictive aspect of things. So we
're trying to,
we have a very strong internally. We have a very strong data practice. It does
leverage a lot of
AI. We do really cool projects in the AI space for clients. Things I didn't
know when we came in,
like visually inspect the quality of welds. And you know, computer says whether
or not that the
the weld passes a particular test to lower the cost and increase the safety for
machinery, for
instance. So applying that type of industrial grade artificial intelligence
machine learning
internally to predict the things that we're talking about. When will someone
need a particular
service? What what what what are the environmental aspects, the the industry
aspects, the market
aspects that drive someone to make a decision to either replace their banking
core or delay
replacing their banking core are interesting. So that's that we're working on
that internally.
We're not really looking at third party, but internally it's sort of an eat
your own cooking,
right? We do these really interesting analytic projects for others. And we don
't want to be
one of those, you know, cobblers, children type of organizations where we do it
for everybody else,
but we don't do it for ourselves. So so really trying to drive that industrial
grade institutional
insights platform thought process into what we do on a daily basis is where we
are. So maybe
in the future, I can give you more details because it's it's kind of skunk
worksie for us right now,
but but we're getting a really interesting view into into customers, you know,
based on applying
those types of analytic techniques. All right, any final thoughts on tools or
tech or data or
anything like that? For not delivering software, we're delivering human beings
who are delivering
software. So, you know, any any person responsible for rev ops, any person
responsible for the customer
and maximizing value to and value from the customer needs to focus first and
foremost on those aspects,
you know, developing real honest to goodness trust, which which means you have
to have skill,
you have to have integrity. You know, you have to you have to do what you say
and say what you do.
All right, let's get to our last segment. Quick hits. These are quick questions
and quick answers.
Let's get to it. Quick hits. Scott, are you ready? I'll do my best. If you
could make any
in-the-morning size, what animal and what size? For my daughter, I would shrink
an elephant
to like a dog size. I think that that would be a very fun creature to be around
Do you have a favorite book or podcast or TV show that you've been checking out
recently?
My favorite podcast is Taste Buds. I'm also a big fan of Malcolm Gladwell. So,
anything he writes, anything he puts out there, I will consume voraciously.
What is your best advice for a CRO trying to figure out rev ops?
It's understanding where your team is coming from. That's that empathy-based
sort of leadership
style. Understanding what motivates them. Understanding where their challenges
lie.
And then being a leader, not leading and doing or two different things. I'm all
for general,
not colonel. I'm all for being in the field leading by example. But knowing
when you need to allow
your team to actually exercise the skills that they have, as opposed to dict
ating those skills to them.
Scott, awesome having you on the show. Thanks so much. We really appreciate it.
No, it's been a real pleasure, Ian. I love the show. It's very insightful. I
love listening to
folks, especially coming from other industries and sharing and participating.
So, it's been a real
pleasure and an honor. Thank you.
[ Silence ]