Revenue Operations: the new Ops on the block? A conversation with Jeff Ignacio
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Transcript:
Steffen Hedebrandt: [00:00:05] Hi, Jeff, it's great to have you on this short video talk and maybe we could start out just by you kind of just giving us the one minute Jeff Ignacio's story, and then I'll hit you up with some questions from their.
Jeff Ignacio: [00:00:24] Yeah, it sounds great, Stefan, I appreciate you having me on. So I'm the head of revenue operations at a series of funded L.A. startup that sells to maintenance and reliability professionals prior to coming to upkeep. I spent a decade in consulting, building marketing software for movie studios. And then the second half of that decade was working in sales and commercial real estate and technical agency recruiting. After that, I went to work in finance at Intel and Google supporting the sales groups. So that's where I had the opportunity to once again work with the revenue generating teams. In the last seven years, I've been in startups, so that journey from 10 million to one hundred million hours, my primary area of focus. So coming in and really building, paying down a lot of debt and setting startups to become what we call scale ups. And it's that inflection point where you start to move from kind of hack your way, hacking your way through growth. I would product market fit and really building. What does that go to market engine look like now?
Steffen Hedebrandt: [00:01:30] Really sounds like a pretty diverse background or like something you wouldn't have been able to predict when you started to get out of school?
Jeff Ignacio: [00:01:38] Not at all. I don't even think revenue operations was a term when I was coming out of university. And who knew 10 years of fumbling and stumbling in the dark would lead to a profession where all those skills are actually useful.
Steffen Hedebrandt: [00:01:58] When you join a new startup, what's kind of the what's the one, two, three ABCs that you start looking at when you're setting up Web ups? What is the foundation and what are you what are you trying to to achieve?
Jeff Ignacio: [00:02:14] The very first thing I do is really understand what are the business objectives? So what is the clear mandate? That would be the very first thing. And I'm assuming that I come in product market fit is largely been solved for their core segments. And so now it's about really looking at how is the entire customer journey set up. And I'm not really thinking about the marketing funnel or sales funnel and really thinking about the buyer's journey. So mapping that all out, how is someone first become aware of us to the time they hand, raise and say, I'm interested and I want to engage with someone in sales or I want to convert from a free trial of some sort into a paid pain, kind of a paid license model? Then the third thing is really setting out a foundation for understanding what's already in place. You can't change and just move towards a new direction without already understanding and appreciating what's already there. And the thing I know we talk about three, but is really to identify a roadmap of what are the core initiatives and then prioritizing them so that I tackle the lowest ever highest impact areas first the quick wins and then going after high impact, high effort projects secondarily.
Steffen Hedebrandt: [00:03:29] So you actually look at the business from kind of not a technical point of view, but just kind of how would a buyer find us and what would be a good sales process or revenue process to go?
Jeff Ignacio: [00:03:41] Absolutely. Revenue operations is at the end of the day, a leadership function. It's the ability to translate what is in a leader's mind into actual tactical execution. And so the mistake that I find companies making is believing that this is a shadow it shop, that it's going to be a series of administrators who are going to be doing Salesforce or HubSpot or Marketo. And that's what Rev Ops is. Why a decade ago we had all of these functions in it. But here we are finding that there are strategic thinkers in the space.
Steffen Hedebrandt: [00:04:17] Is something I've been thinking about. I think you're right about on your Leveton, as well as kind of how to relate to revenue ops compared to the more traditional sales ops or marketing ops. Is it kind of on the floor or is it like this is a different space or is this is it the same things you look at or how do they kind of relate?
Jeff Ignacio: [00:04:41] I think quite naturally, it's functioning in alignment, so when you're early on in the career of a company's life, so it's like zero zero to 10, 10 to 20, you're just building as much as you can. And so marketing is trying to optimize their engine. They'll get a marketing operations. And then sales are trying to build up their their core capabilities are building sales operations, at some point you build up what's called the silo and there is this information that is asymmetric within the organization and not being shared with one another. And so revenue operation starts to come in and become that alignment function. And so typically it's either as the typical actually but different organization structure that you could explore or one an independent Reebok's function with thought in line management to the different line leaders. And you see them as your internal customers or stakeholders. At that moment, you're really looking at program management, product management, our core skill sets to be successful. The second is. Everyone is directly in the organization, but then DOTD lying to the leader of Rev Ops, who was kind of a chief of staff to the crew, that's another structure. And there's another there's a whole no host of org structures that if you interview another person like me, you'll probably find out they have an infrastructure as well.
Steffen Hedebrandt: [00:05:55] But one of the if you kind of rev up development metrics kind of would be kind of metrics that you typically would look at.
Jeff Ignacio: [00:06:06] So, again, I think it's been on the motion, though, so there's different types of metrics. So if you're in sales, I typically break them down into coverage, capability and capacity. So they're very different on the marketing side. It's going to be breaking it out by channel and type. So awareness, content, consideration and intent. And then I'm looking at channels, volume of leads, Cosper leads. What conversion rates are they turning into? Leaves that can be worked by the sales organization. So a cost per opportunity then taking a look at the actual acquisition of a customer. So there's a marketing portion of that as the marketing customer acquisition costs and then looking at the lifetime. So the customers, if we can segment them appropriately, how long are they likely to become a customer day with us? And that then tells me kind of overall lifetime value from a nominal value basis. So there's a whole host of metrics, and I think that depends on your motion. But if your sales lead, typically thinking about reporting out at the top level, what are the key results for executive staff? Then you get to like your VP and then below that, you're mid-level. You're going to report a little bit more. You're going to show your key results, but also metrics around your objectives. And then you get to the front line managers and individual contributors. I'm layering on maybe not so much the key results, because that doesn't impact their day to day as much. I'm really looking at activity level metrics.
Steffen Hedebrandt: [00:07:35] If you were kind of. Thinking that would kind of be like a cool thing to work with. How do you actually get started? You would you say like a particular education or like a like a special skill that you would need to have? How would you kind of get into that role?
Jeff Ignacio: [00:07:56] So it's a good question. I don't think there's a typical pathway into it was like, for example, how I got into it was because I had partnered with sales in a finance capacity. Right. So I was in what's called a financial planning and analysis and a lot of work that I did overlap significantly with sales up. So building territories, quotas, executive board material, really thinking about acquisition costs quite a bit. I mean, that's really different from how some of my other peers and folks have got into the space. So there are some who got in through administration. So Salesforce administration Marketo. And that's how they got into the space that they started off with the technical acumen. Then they layered on the business acumen. Now then there are folks like me who have the business acumen and layered on the technical acumen. Later, I probably would fall way behind some of these folks who started off in the technical realm. They would are more qualified for a fixer upper type home than I am of. The best situation for me is going to be where you need a mixture of strategy and a mixture of technical delivery. So that's going to be the best situation for me. So I think there's really ultimately two parts. You have the business acumen side and you rolled into it so you can come from the finance side because I think that can be really helpful when you have the quantitative background are you probably have high aptitude and could pick up technology pretty easily. The second part of business acumen is you came from marketing or sales yourself and you were you recognize that this process could use some improvement. And so you actually are innately a process wonk. You've realized that I'm really good at designing great processes. How do I scale? So you roll in with the business acumen, then layer on technical. Then there's the second avenue of folks who come in from technology who have the layer on the business side of it later on. I think one is a little bit more successful than the other.
Steffen Hedebrandt: [00:10:04] Which one?
Jeff Ignacio: [00:10:06] The business side. The technical, I think is more successful overall. You may you may you may not be as successful in terms of solving a technical issue as the person who started off in technology. But you can always hire contractor vendor to plug the gap if needed.
Steffen Hedebrandt: [00:10:24] I think that's a great summary of what obsess, which is really kind of the merger between business and technology and kind of you can over prioritize one over the other, because then you kind of you're not impacting the organization in the right way. If you if like some tech or if you were prioritizing business, just.
Jeff Ignacio: [00:10:45] I think you can be successful with both, but you can't be successful without either one of them. So technology at the end of the day is a tool and human beings have succeeded in life by having tools. We found stone axes in the ground from our ancestors hundreds of thousands of years ago. We just have very different tools today.
Steffen Hedebrandt: [00:11:13] Attribution, where were you to put that in the kind of sales ops, marketing, ops, ops, whatever it can be, ops, which bucket when you put that in or like who would mainly be responsible?
Jeff Ignacio: [00:11:26] So typically, it's going to be owned by marketing, but with incredible feedback from the sales organization, the sales organization at the end of the day doesn't really care what channel it came from. They're not going to their sales playbook. Their call is not about, hey, I noticed you came in through a Facebook ad. Now, almost nobody's going to remember that they came into a Facebook ad. So instead, you're just going to qualify them based on industry persona and whatever standards you have for qualification. So campaign clearly goes under a campaign. Attribution or attribution modeling is going to go to marketing, and it is the bunch of different models that you can explore. So first touch, which I think often skews the data very much so. Then there's the last touch model, which I think is going to be less scheme than you have your multi touch attribution, which obviously is an exercise in fractional waiting around your metrics, but a more balanced view. But almost nobody lives. It lives the world and averages right. Folks live the world in binary zero or one. But the best you have is the expected value. For every opportunity we have, 12 percent of it's going to be contributed through a paid search ad. But really what you're talking about is a holistic journey of how all the tools at your disposal are bringing leads to your shores. Right. So one building awareness through maybe it's social everywhere you go on Instagram and Facebook, on Twitter, maybe your maybe your LinkedIn junkie like me, you start seeing all these ads. Where have I seen that name before? That and getting some really seriously targeted, like campaign emails around future benefits. Right now, it's kind of a product marketing type of email where you don't need this. Well, here's the feature for that. Like, OK, well, features. OK, cool. And then I get sold on the overall platform value later on. So I move from awareness and then I start doing I separate for the actions that start to evaluate how do I do this and then break out all the pieces of marketing arsenal.
Steffen Hedebrandt: [00:13:34] Yeah. So kind of all of these touch student kind of put that into that kind of you call the data layer outside of Salesforce. How do you deal with them?
Jeff Ignacio: [00:13:45] So at some point, these leads are in your marketing funnel, but you need to exit the amount and you need to have them enter if you have a sales motion, not everyone's in sales, so you have them enter the sales funnel. So you need to define what is. What are the pieces of data that indicate to me that they should now exit the marketing realm and sphere of influence into sales and having a direct conversation and for every business that's going to be different and for every year of a business like that, that's going to be different as well, because competition changes the game, your buyer's habits change. Maybe your tactics, your cost basis to generate leads go up, maybe certain channels make expensive. And so the idea there is to really think about from year to year, how do we how do we fine tune and build a more effective overall kind of campaign? And so you don't have to have a data link for that to achieve that. You can you can do that in a lot of marketing, automation and maybe even in your CRM.
Steffen Hedebrandt: [00:14:50] And so it's kind of a lead scoring to see happening kind of. Now, this one looks like somebody that sales would love to to speak to.
Jeff Ignacio: [00:15:01] So, yeah, so that's exactly right. So when a leak comes in, you can use regrading or whether that's through a series of factors like demographic persona, usually in the form of job titles, a job title, an industry matrix, and you have your tech, the graphics, particularly for company, for companies that need complementary pieces of software internally before they go in, then the scoring is interesting because. You're not just selling based on the kind of this a priori status of a lead. Instead, you're looking at the actions of that lead or maybe their co-workers. Right. So maybe there's one person doing something on your Web site that they hit your pricing page. To me, that would be an automatic like, OK, let's go call these guys or maybe they hit your blog about a specific thing that is really interesting to them. And then three more people from their company actually read the article and then one of them. Right now, you're looking at socialization internally and that company and they say what a really interesting concept. They may not even know who wrote it. They may not even know the company that produced that piece, but they have this thought leadership there. That's really interesting.
Steffen Hedebrandt: [00:16:17] How would you say it sounds like a super good sales indicator of how to kind of your tooling kind of help, but this.
Jeff Ignacio: [00:16:26] So if you can design what? What might be a good Hendry's or high levels of scoring? There's a number of ways you can instrumented. So in Marketo or Pardot, you might look at actions and give them each scores doing something where it is a multi record, multi person initiative that is not going to come standard out of the box in some of these tools. So you may have to explore some of these add on vendors that do that or build something homebrew or something home grown, which is always going to be a fun project for anyone in operations.
Steffen Hedebrandt: [00:17:10] If we move on a little bit to kind of how to create value in the box, how can we really be like a value driver of a company? What have you seen? Kind of the different kind of start up and scale up. You've been at where kind of you did something that actually became really valuable or changed the course of some action or something like that. Is there any kind of classic examples there?
Jeff Ignacio: [00:17:40] So there are like three levels that I typically think of in terms of graduating and elevating the status of operations. One is the executer, right? That's the very lowest baseline. You can't get things done without it. Yeah, that is the lead, our lead routings broken. You need to go fix it right away. OK, well leads are the lifeblood of the business. I have to go fix it. Then there's the then there's the adviser to.
Steffen Hedebrandt: [00:18:10] The form is not working and it's not putting sales force or something like that.
Jeff Ignacio: [00:18:15] Yeah, someone put a number four name in the form and I can't call someone named three. Like, what is this? But who knows, maybe someone out there in the world that has no name and good for them. But then the second level is someone who is an adviser. So they've gone they've gone beyond like an operating system. You have to have a big piece of code in binary and machine level. Yeah. Above that is your operating system. Same thing with operations. You've taken care of all the tackling and blocking in the business. You've become what I call a worry free service. And now you're able to provide additional services on top of that and what is that that is providing reporting and insights. So now you're saying, OK, here's a here here's how we're performing on a descriptive basis and then now going to take. Some of that descriptive analyze it, synthesize some ideas around it and provide insight to my partners, right. So example of that would be I noticed that conversion rates are declining. It's primarily because our mix shift is still. Looking towards that typically convert less, what we're seeing is an increase in and click through rates on these lower converting channels because of better copy, our copy is not keeping up in some of our higher conversion channels. We should go address that. That, to me is a part. Then there's the advisor, which is the highest level
Steffen Hedebrandt: [00:19:52] Of just before that. It kind of also. So it's not it's not old enough to do a good technician. You also need to understand how the business works and like have your friends in marketing who can tell you what they're actually doing and you want to be kind of benchmarking what they did versus kind of the status quo, right?
Jeff Ignacio: [00:20:11] Yes. The difference between the mechanic and a trip planner. So the person is fixing your car because you told them that the car. Yeah, but little did they know the person decided that was like telling them, hey, I know you need to drive 600 miles, 400 miles in L.A. to San Francisco this weekend. I hope you enjoy your trip here somewhere you can go. There's a difference between that. Right. But they're very interconnected. And then the third person is the adviser. They're looking beyond the landscape and they're really digging a two to four quarters, maybe even longer time frame out there saying, look, I've noticed that our cost base is increasing because our competitors have been they've woken up and they're now spending in some of these categories. I'm OK with letting them bleed dry, spending on these higher cost channels. We need to start shifting ideas, shifting our marketing towards these other channels. Let's build out a content hub. Let's become a king or a queen in the space to then occupy the Hill. In terms of thought leadership, so is very different. So that's a different kind than a trip planner and your financial adviser person saying, OK, why don't you fix your car and you go on this trip? But this is the fifth trip that you've been on past year. This is not really helping you save your way to retirement. So there's a couple ways to think about what type of operator you're bringing into the table.
Steffen Hedebrandt: [00:21:39] Is there any kind of recommendations you can give to kind of where should like. Blogs, podcasts, stuff like that, that people should go check out if they want to kind of scale up on the Web. Obviously, I recommend your LinkedIn posts that are kind of very easy, that digestible, but also very kind of experience based. But is there any other places to go
Jeff Ignacio: [00:22:02] So there's a couple of things that I would recommend. First, I'm launching my own podcast and a couple of weeks revenue architect. Yeah, I'm going to be very focused on kind of the tactical melding with the strategic. So it'll be my take. And yes, my dear and good friend Roslyn Santillana has her own podcast called Revenue Engine. I recommend that as well. She has great stories with founders of recent startups who succeeded, and that brings in the human element. The third is that I believe Tom runs a podcast called Sales Ops. Demystified is the longest running sales podcast and quite a bit of great material in there as well. I'd recommend that. And then anything from the Alexander Group or the bridge group, they produced great a lot of thought leadership around the market execution.
Steffen Hedebrandt: [00:23:01] So out of curiosity, this is kind of a little bit on behalf of dream data. How do you go to market against the ops people? How do you kind of fly under the radar or how do you actually add value? I could imagine you be constantly pitched by its vendors who want to sell this thing or this thing and stuff like that.
Jeff Ignacio: [00:23:24] Yeah, it's hard. So if your question is how do we manage our time with all the pictures that we're getting, you know what you found the OR I found recently and it's almost frustrating, is that Rev Ops or sales, offshore marketing or whatever you call it, we've become the ICP, their first Selna that everyone goes out now because you're selling Martek or sales tax and you think you think that your decision maker is the head of sales or the head of marketing or SVP. But it's not. It's actually the person in ops and holy crap. And so the companies have realized that or are somewhat pitching the sales of your marketing. But then the VP of Marketing and Sales goes, hey, you take a look at this and you become this constant tire kicker. This person is out there. So to get ahead of that, what I try to do now is create a space of one. What's our customer journey to what is our systems blueprint? What's our roadmap? And then I start matching the technology to those journeys and say, here's here are all the logos that we have internally, adding one more new stack. We can do that if we have unlimited budget. I have never worked in a place where I had unlimited and unlimited time to implement. So it's just really good to be thoughtful, strategic around. Here's where we could make room in space for certain capabilities. Those capabilities can be unlocked if we buy a vendor or we build it ourselves or we just don't do it at all. We do it manually. Like, what do you want to do? Everything is a trade off.
Steffen Hedebrandt: [00:25:00] Do you have kind of a good feeling for how long the like how would you kind of help people understand how long a customer journey takes?
Jeff Ignacio: [00:25:09] It depends for every business, so if it's like zero to twenty one days or under a month, that's a fairly transactional sales motion. We'll typically see a relationship. If you were to plot on a graph y the number of days or time as Y and X is the number of decision makers or price points up and you typically see a positive linear relationship. And that's because of the price sensitivity typically requires purchasing, purchasing signature levels that are above certain people's authority levels. And so they have to get people involved at these organizations. And then obviously, obviously, the more departments you're selling into is cross-functional. You know this as much as I.T. companies are siloed. And so getting folks from different teams to talk together also just things a lot longer. If you're if your solution is highly technical in nature, you're going to go through compliance. If you're selling into highly regulated, regulated space, same thing. So these are things that are very different. And then obviously, if you're selling into a function with a low share of wallet, meaning like let's say, for example, a sales product, engineering, typically these groups have lots of budget and they know how to buy tools. But if you're selling to departments that famously don't have a lot of money, you really kind of selling into a hard space.
Steffen Hedebrandt: [00:26:34] Is there any kind of last remarks that you kind of feel that it's important to mention around Rev Ops that you feel you want to share?
Jeff Ignacio: [00:26:42] Yeah, I think for anyone who wants to learn more about Rev Ops, just remember, it's a partnership. I think folks who've been in marketing and sales have had a lot of literature and thought leadership over the decades. I think for those breaking into the space, Rev Ops is nascent. It's been around for ages, too, but it's just now starting to cobble a lot of literature and thought leadership. And I think we'll see more and more folks joining the space. And I also think we'll see more folks in sales and marketing becoming great partners because there's a greater level of empathy for the role.
Steffen Hedebrandt: [00:27:16] Let's call and be sure to check out Jeff on LinkedIn. There's a lot of good stuff coming out, but thanks for taking the time, Jeff. I really, really appreciate it. And I hope people will start to, like, pay attention to how much value can actually get out of Rob's rebuffs, but particularly.
