The Ultimate Guide to Data-Driven Marketing
Live from Dreamforce, Robert Zimmermann, CRO of Qualified, interviews Saima Rashid, Senior Vice President of Revenue Analytics at 6sense.
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>> Welcome to Rise of RevOps.
Today, we're bringing you straight to a live interview at Dreamforce,
where Robert Zimmerman, CRO of Qualified,
interviews Seema Rashid,
senior vice president of revenue analytics at 6 cents.
Seema says that data helps us make our best,
most informed decisions.
She also describes which AI tools she uses to drive
digital transformation and efficiency.
Now, let's head to Dreamforce.
>> Well, it is wonderful to have you here, Seema.
>> Thank you.
>> Thank you very much for joining us today.
>> So excited to be here.
It's a conversation I'm very excited about.
>> Well, one of the things as I was looking at your background,
and really excited to hear about your journey.
But one of the things I really wanted to understand was,
tell us a little bit how you arrived into the role that you're in.
>> One of the things you and I were talking about was data and
the importance of analytics.
How do you think about that today and what
brought you to the role that you currently in at 6 cents?
>> Yeah. It's a great question because,
and I'm dating myself, but when I went to school,
there was no rev-ops,
there was no operations function really,
even that you studied for a work towards.
So I grew up in the world of data.
I grew up in a world where we were,
believe it or not, companies didn't have their own analytics teams.
So my first job out of college was actually for
a consulting company that served as the analytics team for
great big companies, Fortune 1000 companies.
They would give us the data nightly feeds,
and then we would do analysis and help them make sense of it.
So great experience first 10 years of working with all types of data,
B2B, B2C, and really developing and understanding of identifying trends.
But most importantly, taking insights out of the data and driving action with
it.
So I feel my career since then has really just built upon that.
How do we take the data to optimize processes?
How do we take data and use it to drive better decisions?
So in the role that I am now at 6 cents,
and thankfully technology and just the automation and the AI that we have now
to
synthesize the data is only made our jobs easier.
>> Well, one of the things we were talking about before we got on stage was
that
RevOps has changed fundamentally over the last six to eight years.
And I realized you've had the RevOps function before.
You're much more focused on the marketing ops function at 6 cents today.
And one of the things we talked about was maturity of an organization.
Can you tell me a little bit more about sort of what is the definition of Rev
Ops
to you today and how should companies think about this as they mature?
>> Yeah, so to me when I hear RevOps, I think of two things.
I think of alignment and integration, right?
So really what the goal of RevOps is to accelerate business growth through
the alignment and integration of your marketing sales and customer success
functions.
That can look very different across different orgs, right?
It depends on the maturity of those ops functions within organizations.
It depends on the organizational readiness as well.
I think early on in the RevOps world, it was all about let's bring those teams
together under one chief revenue officer and that was the only way.
But I've been in companies where the marketing operations team might have
a higher level of maturity than some of the other functions or
the metrics are so different or maybe enablement isn't pulled in.
In some cases, the annual planning process sits outside an appropriate function
as
opposed to in a field strategy and planning organization.
So I think there's different flavors of it and
it really depends on the company, the structure, what's in place, and
the organizational readiness.
But it all goes back to alignment and integration, whether it's all one team,
or whether there's just an interlock and
a cadence that those teams work towards.
>> I like the way you're thinking about that.
Now, let's talk a little more about Sixth Sense and where you are today.
I understand that they recruited you to come over.
Tell me a little bit about Sixth Sense.
What does Sixth Sense do and how have you organized the revenue function or
how is it organized in the marketing operations function that you lead and
the analytics function that you lead?
>> Yeah, so Sixth Sense was born out of a very simple question.
If we only knew which accounts were more likely to buy from us,
wouldn't it make our job so much easier as sellers and marketers?
>> And that's the question really that Sixth Sense is answering every day.
It uses the power of big data, machine learning to look at the signals that
are out there, right?
Every seller, every marketer is trying to find that needle in the haystack.
We make that haystack a lot smaller.
It is really the lifeblood of our operations teams,
our go-to-market motion.
Nothing goes live unless it's gone through Sixth Sense,
which when I was a customer of Sixth Sense for five years,
I didn't believe it, I didn't know it.
And now that I run Sixth Sense for Sixth Sense, I can absolutely say that.
Every marketing campaign, every sales motion, even prep before a meeting,
starts with this Sixth Sense platform.
And so it's great to be in a company that's so
operationally minded and data driven and really values the power of the data.
And so our RevOps org today includes enablement sales ops,
customer success operations, marketing ops sits outside and reports into the
marketing function and it includes the BDRs and BDR operations.
In this particular case, you've got the BDR and the BDR operations,
but that isn't consistent with every company.
It's, tell me a little bit about why that decision was made and
why it's so important for Sixth Sense in terms of the leading that organization
today.
>> Yeah, I think there's been studies of should BDRs sit in the marketing
org and the sales org.
I think as long as there's clarity of career path for BDRs,
meaning they have a path towards moving into an AE role,
there's really close alignment between sales and marketing.
It's really fine.
I actually think our BDRs thrive because they are part of the marketing org.
We control that quality of what we're providing them in terms of hot accounts.
We don't live in an MQL world at Sixth Sense.
We believe that we sell enterprise software to complex buying groups.
And there's no one person making that decision.
And so really making sure that our BDRs are leveraging the data, the insights.
They have a voice in terms of the quality of what is passed to them.
They have a voice in terms of how they're going to attack and
account and leverage the Sixth Sense insights to inform it.
It's been phenomenal.
And we have great kind of career paths for our BDRs.
They very quickly are moving into eight year olds within the organization.
And so it doesn't really matter that they sit in the marketing org.
I think they benefit from that closeness to the top of the funnel.
But then they have great career paths beyond into sales.
>> I do believe that the BDR team is really the lifeblood of an organization.
As well, as I think about the sales organization that we have qualified,
we definitely go into those ranks to pull people up into selling in our closing
organization.
One of the- >> Actually, can I pause right there?
>> Absolutely. >> I look at the data.
Some of our best performing AEs, in fact, hands down.
Some of our best performing AEs are the ones that grew through the ranks on the
BDR.
So it's just been phenomenal for us.
>> And there you go, you're back to data supporting some of these decisions,
which is great to see.
>> As I reflect back on the last six months, it has been a challenging time
through Q1.
I feel like Q2, we're starting to see a little bit of that sunshine and
the light at the end of this tunnel.
As you reflect back, what's the hardest sort of problem that you have had to
deal
with over the last six months within marketing operations?
>> I would say it's a lot of what you just mentioned, right?
There's the macroeconomic conditions.
It's taking longer to close deals.
It's harder to close deals.
And so at the beginning of the year, I actually ran a webinar that was titled
Ideas are Easy, but Execution is Everything.
And so we really adopted that mindset of we can't control external forces,
but what we can control is our execution internally.
Let's execute to perfection.
Let's plug all the leakages that are in our revenue funnel.
Let's figure out what's working.
Let's drive consistency in our approach.
And that's very much what we've doubled down on.
And I think we've really yielded some great results.
We've optimized processes on the BDR side, on the clarity of that handoff
between BDRs and AEs on the exit criteria of moving deals through the funnel.
It's been pretty phenomenal.
So we've kind of just looked inwards to really optimize execution and
then control what we can control.
>> With that in mind, what was a decision that you made that
you really hit the mark, that it was a great decision to make.
And then conversely, I'd love for you to share what mistake was made for
others who are out there that might be thinking about the very similar things.
What would you say, okay, be careful with this, avoid this?
>> I actually don't think of the mistakes as mistakes and I'll tell you why,
because we very quickly iterate.
So if you're gonna fail, let's fail very fast and let's optimize accordingly.
So we actually look at our data.
We have our CMO and our CRO in the room every two weeks.
And we run a biweekly pipeline meeting that was instrumented early last year.
And that's probably the best thing that we've done because what it does is you
have transparency of the data.
Nobody's questioning where we stand, how we're performing against our goals.
But you have enough seniority in the room and you have a cadence that everyone
is
expecting where we can look at the data and very quickly determine is there a
problem at the top of the funnel, meaning are we not generating enough demand?
Is it that things are getting stuck mid funnel and we need to either re-enable
reps or is there an issue at the bottom of the funnel where we might need to
run
a SPIF or something.
But having that cadence has allowed us to just make those quick decisions.
And because we're meeting again in two weeks,
we will run specific actions in place and regroup in two weeks and
see what we were able to do.
So I think just taking the data beyond just the information and really driving
insights to action has been the biggest thing for us.
And so operationally, there's tons of things we've done, right?
We've tightened our inspection criteria.
We've revamped our SLAs.
We have set up scorecards so that no rep is in the dark about their performance
right?
I'm a firm believer that sunlight is the best disinfectant.
So let's not hide behind locked down dashboards or reports.
Let give every one of you of where things stand and then that will drive the
right actions.
And so.
Transparency is one of those key things that I think whether you're a BDR,
whether you're a rep, whether you're on their marketing team,
if you know what you're accountable for and you're held to that,
that is a lot of what people are being asked for and that's what they want to
see
in their careers and their career advancement.
They want to know what is expected and what do I need to do.
Now, turning a little bit to what we call affectionately the tool shed,
what tooling do you have, what software tools, what dashboards are important.
That's walked me through how you've set up your organization.
Six cents was at the center of everything we do.
I mentioned it.
It starts very much at the top of the funnel in making sure that we are all
as a revenue organization looking at that same pool of accounts.
There's not a sales list.
There's not a marketing list.
There is one ICP that we are really trying to penetrate as one revenue team.
And then using that to drive the handoff to sales,
using that to drive all of kind of where we're going to focus in terms
our campaigns on where we're going to focus outbound efforts,
where we are penetrating well and where we're not so that we can,
again, take a look every two weeks and see what specific actions we need to
take.
So six cents is the lifeblood.
And then, of course, we execute in our marketing automation system,
Marketo, Salesforce, truly is the source of truth for a lot of our dashboards.
I say that because the best data and dashboards are the ones that get used.
Nobody's data is perfect.
There's always a maybe more advanced way you can do something in an external
system,
but I need my sellers and my marketers and my CS team to be looking at the data
and consuming it.
And Salesforce is the place that they all live.
And so our single source of truth for pipeline dash and revenue lives in Sales
force.
It is open to anyone in the company.
And every number, most importantly, is put into context versus a goal versus a
historical trend
versus what good looks like.
So anyone who's looking at the dashboard can very quickly see, are we trending
well?
Yes or no?
If not for that bottom line, are we trending well for the leading indicators
before that?
Is our conversion rate up or down?
You could double your conversion rate, but if it takes twice as long to get
there,
you haven't changed a thing, right?
So volume, velocity, conversions, all of those key metrics for our revenue
pipeline
and the leading indicators to that are open in one place for everyone to go
take a look.
And that is actually the dashboard that we used to drive that biweekly pipeline
meeting
that I spoke about.
So everybody's using the same access to the same data you're talking about, the
same
information.
It's that's how you've got a pretty good partnership between the sales and the
marketing
organizations in place.
One team.
And in fact, actually to that point, there's one pipeline goal.
We don't report on marketing source versus sales sourced.
If there's a, it doesn't matter, right?
Who's sourcing the deal?
We can, I can look at it by channel.
I can see what inbound is generating, what outbound is generating, what field
marketing
and our eBx team is generating.
But the goals are the one pipeline goal.
What is going to get us to our company bookings number that we want to hit?
And that's the number that we look at.
Turning to your sales and marketing organizations, we spoke briefly about this
hybrid world
that we're living in.
How have you thought about setting up the organization?
Where do your salespeople live?
Where do your marketing people live?
Are you in office?
Are you hybrid?
What does that look like?
We have our headquarters in San Francisco.
We have an office in Austin, Texas and an office in New York.
So there are teams that live in those areas and are in the office, but it's not
mandated
except that we have brought an initiative forward to bring our BDRs into office
You mentioned they're the lifeblood of the org.
I think there's so much learning to be had when you're all in one area.
And so our BDRs are in one of those three hubs.
And they are in the office at least three days a week.
And just that motion of being in running call blitzes, having learning and deb
riefs on
how objections and all of those sorts of things have really driven improved
performance in
how our outbound team works.
And has allowed us to further refine some of the SLAs and the response time and
just the
quality of what that team is producing and doing day in and day out.
So we have a remote first culture, but we do have our BDRs in the office.
I feel like you've got a really good handle on the analytics within the Sixth
Sense business.
Are there blind spots that you wish you had data on?
Are there areas that you still today are saying, okay, we need to examine that
a little
more?
Nobody's data is perfect.
And I think as somebody who's built in the analytics teams for 17 years, nobody
will
achieve perfection.
I think consistency of measurement, single source of truth is number one, the
biggest
thing.
But there's always blind spots, right?
I would love to know exactly what, you know, have attribution down to, you know
, every
single touch point, I will never get it.
So it's about understanding that there is some ambiguity.
There's no silver bullet.
So when you are looking at the data that you have, you're putting it into that
context,
right?
Attribution tools, you know, can get you to a certain place, but they're not
going to
get you to that full view.
Similarly, you know, who is that full buying group?
I mentioned that, you know, we sell to accounts and people within those
accounts.
Our reps might not put every single contact on that deal, right?
But I know the data tells me that our win rates double when we have at least at
least
six people on a deal.
I know generally what those six personas are.
And so I do use that to inform where the sellers go, where the marketers focus
their
campaigns on, but I'm sure there's more than that, right?
There's plenty of folks that might not see.
So there are gaps.
Everyone has gaps, but we really try and plug them where we can through
automation, through
using technology to fill those gaps, but always just understanding that the
data is
not perfect.
And so we will use what we have to drive the best informed decisions that we
can make.
Is there anything that is new that you're doing or using that you can't live
without
now?
How long did it take us to get to the AI conversation?
I feel it's been such a hot topic at Dreamforce and at every conference I've
been in in the
last six months.
Generative AI is very exciting.
I think in particular for operations teams, and I think in particular for
marketing operations,
there's just a speed at which we can do things and a quality of which we can
iterate on that
wasn't there before.
So we have our own generative AI product conversational email that's allowed us
to automate a lot
of the things that the BDRs were doing manually, things like webinar follow-ups
, things like
reaching out, making sure that there's no qualified account that gets lost left
behind
because a rep didn't have capacity to go work it.
So generative AI in terms of building cadences and building campaigns and
making sure we've
got the right messaging in place, but also using our AI assistance to augment
what the
sellers are doing.
It's been game-changing.
It's just allowed us to penetrate our ICP in a much more effective fashion,
take some
of the work off of our BDRs that maybe wasn't as interesting for them or maybe
took away
from their really core areas of focus.
And so I think I'm very excited about what AI can bring to operations functions
And I firmly believe that Ops' role is really to drive the digital
transformation of the
go-to-market teams.
And so we're really well positioned to continue to capitalize on it.
I love that.
In terms of forward-looking, any particular initiatives or anything that's sort
of taking
a lot of your focus and time right now as you think about next fiscal year?
Yeah, it's all about, I mentioned this, executing to perfection.
And so one of the big things that has been an ongoing thing for us is just
understanding
what good looks like.
It's not the easiest question to answer, right?
What's working at each part of that funnel?
There was a BCG report that came out earlier this year where they quantified
that sales
and marketing teams are collectively leaving $2 trillion annually on the table
through
wastage throughout that go-to-market motion.
Most opportunities, mistimed opportunities, focusing on the wrong accounts,
process leakage,
right?
And so that's like a big part of what we want to be solving for.
And so we run a lot of analyses on close one deals and how a close one deal
this quarter
looks different from last quarter or last year.
I mentioned this, right?
It's taking more people on a deal to win.
It's taking longer.
So let's look at what did work and let's just do more of that.
And so we're really doubling down on the campaigns, the channels, the messaging
, the
specific tactics that we see show up again and again on our close one deals.
And then we're building upon those, expanding their reach, maybe verticalizing
them.
And then we're also providing that insight not just to sales, but also to CS
because
upsell, retaining the customers you have, providing them with a phenomenal
experience,
helping them drive adoption within their organizations.
We want all of that to be happening more and more.
So let's have the data and format.
Well, I want to say that in listening to you, I am friendly of the belief that
you run a
world-class analytics and marketing ops operation.
Interested part of this segment, which is sort of quick hits.
And so let's run through this pretty quickly.
All right.
You could make any animal any size.
What animal would it be?
I would make all the creepy crawlies microscopic.
So I don't have to see them and I don't have to be freaked out by them.
100%.
Where is your favorite vacation?
So I have two children.
They are at that age where they're in middle school and high school.
And so that's just a lot of fun to travel with them.
It's easier to travel with them.
And so I think this past summer we spent some time in Scotland and the UK.
My favorite vacation with them most recently was Granada, Spain.
It was just such a unique area, such a beautiful architecture and palaces.
And I just think we had a great time there.
So I would say Alhamra in Granada, Spain was my favorite recently.
All right.
Best concert attended.
Oh, I've been to so many.
I'm an eighties baby.
So Rolling Stones, ACDC, you two.
Love ACDC.
You know, and then I think recently I went to a killer's concert.
So anything I have to find out a way to take my 12 year old to Taylor Swift.
So I'll be a hero if I do that.
I think you will be.
If you had a superpower, what would it be?
Being able to revisit and go back to moments that were really special.
I say this to my kids all the time.
I'm like, take a picture with your heart.
Like this is a really special thing.
Like just be present in the moment.
And I feel like with the speed of the way things are going, we tend to lose
things in
that shuffle.
So being able to go back and relive whatever memories.
Yeah.
Okay.
And then what advice would you have for somebody who is newly leading a revenue
operations
role or function?
That's a great question.
And we have great folks on our team who are growing in the ranks, right?
And it's all about becoming a strategic partner for the business that you
support.
Operations teams can often fall in the trap of just executing on the orders of
someone
else and the best ops teams and the best ops leaders are the ones that forged
that partnership
with the business.
Come with strategic recommendations, take that data to insights.
I encourage everyone on my team, even when they're sharing a report to go
beyond the
report and what is the so what?
Why should I look at this?
Why should I care?
And so I think using the information and really becoming a strategic partner,
number one,
understanding the business and the goals of the business and making sure you're
driving
an integrated plan so that you have this goal and you're all working
collectively towards
it.
I think ops plays a big role in setting the right plan for the organizations
and then
ruthless prioritization.
We can't do 10 things.
Let's focus on the three most meaningful things.
Again, in conjunction, there's like a three-legged stool, I feel.
There's the business, there's ops and there's analytics.
And if those three teams are working in harmony, I think that it's really
effective for a business.
So prioritizing the right initiatives and making sure that there's a cadence
and operating
rhythm that, again, ops can own and keep things on track.
I think that's great advice.
I am a true believer in ruthless prioritization as well if everything's
important.
Nothing is.
But Simon, I want to thank you for your time today.
This was a great conversation.
I really enjoyed it and I hope you have a great rest of your dream force.
Thank you.
It's my pleasure. [MUSIC]
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