About the speaker

Amie Weizer, the Director of Global Commercial Operational Excellence (Rev Ops) at LMS365, is a dynamic professional with a passion for driving progress and fostering a people-first culture. Her mission-critical role involves ensuring alignment and integration across teams during the customer journey, from lead to cash. Outside her remote office, Amie finds solace in nature, balancing continuous improvement with activities like hiking, yoga, and travel.

Mark Lerner:

Record. Alright everybody, welcome to this episode of the Revamp podcast. I’m joined today by a very special guest, Amy Wiser, who I’m going to give the opportunity to introduce herself in just a second. But really excited to have Amy on the show today. We’re going to talk about some stuff around scalability and some frameworks and ideas around that. So before we kick it off, Amy, why don’t you tell the folks at home a little bit about you and what you do, where you work, and how you kind of got to where you’re at today?

Amie Weizer:

Absolutely. Thanks so much, Mark. Very happy to be here today and be part of the ops community. Let me say, first and foremost, I think it’s great what the podcast does to help the community and help others network, so I’m just throwing that out there to start. My name is Amy Wiser. I am the director of operational excellence at LMS 365, which is a learning engagement and performance platform. What we do is aim to bring human success to every employee. Human success is about creating unparalleled learning, growth, and engagement for every employee. That means that we like to make sure that our employees are having human success just like our customers are. So my job is really about kind of tying a present or tying a bow together, is how I like to think about it. The customer experience, the customer journey, is what I make sure all the way from revenue leads to cash.

Amie Weizer:

Everything across that whole journey is working successfully. So when a customer picks up the phone and talks to somebody on the sales team, they have the same experience When they start working with the customer success manager, when they call into support, they have a great experience. Making sure every step along the way that everybody is coordinated and communicating along the way is what we’re doing here and what my role is at LMS 365. Prior to being with LMS 365, I was working at a couple of different organizations. So here’s how I like to talk about my journey. My journey really started in sales because I knew that I could work really hard and have a lot of endurance, so I knew sales was a great place to start. I did that for a couple of years and I really found a lot of interesting things about sales, but a lot of things that I wasn’t quite interested in.

Amie Weizer:

The thing I was interested in was how technology actually helped me as a seller, make sure that I did AB testing of my emails, and make sure the CRM was updated so I know how to plan my outreach to my leads. I knew how to follow up with opportunities in the pipeline or renewals I was handling because I was doing a full cycle. I started in sales, and then I quickly saw the technology avenue, and I learned more and more about systems. From there, I got to move into more account management and then a customer-facing role. This is where the story gets fun and interesting because learning about going from the sales side of it to actually supporting the product or understanding how all of the internal teams deliver the product is a really big learning experience. I went and did that for Gartner for a couple of years, and that was a lot of fun to learn from program and portfolio managers, specifically the level of the c-suite that I was supporting in my role.

Amie Weizer:

So, I was ensuring that the C-suite had what they needed in terms of the latest and greatest research or best practices around program and portfolio management. Another super fun thing that I was able to do, and I was excited to learn about it. Then I fast forward into my current role as a head of this role in LMS 365. What I’m doing here now is making sure I’m bringing in all of these pieces of my background, so what I was doing in sales, what I was doing in technology, what I was doing in customer success, and now beautifully blending these together so that we can continue on our scaling journey at LMS 365.

Mark Lerner:

Yeah, that’s super fascinating. If we take a step back, the whole concept of revenue operations as a whole was ideally to break down these barriers that separated kind of the go-to-market organizations, including customer success in practice. Often, there are a lot of times where it ends up just being kind of a name change for sales ops. You don’t see as many people that have that CS background, so I’m interested in how much you think that colors impact the way you go about strategy, the things that you do, and what you bring to the table.

Amie Weizer:

I love the question mark, and you always do your research, I noticed from some of these other podcasts, so happy to be experiencing it with you now. Basically from my perspective, I think not only having a customer success background shapes my opinion, but also having a sales background shapes my opinion. Because I’ve been there, I’ve done that. I know how it feels, right, so it makes it a lot easier for me to put myself in their shoes all the time so I can really understand, okay, is doing this way going to help this one person, or is this going to help everybody? Just really understanding where the request is coming from and what the pain point is. I feel like I have a better perspective on it because I’ve been in the shoes, and I built that trust with that level in the organization. Now, generally, I’ll say a lot of things that we did in our customer success team at LMS365 as we grew was to ensure that we were building a team that knew all in mind the whole time they were with us that it was always going to be dynamic, that it was always going to change.

Amie Weizer:

So when we were building out customer success for the Americas, we brought in folks who had the right mindset so we could build the right culture, which I think is important to scalability. The second thing I think is important is about expectations and trust. You have to have the folks on your team understand what is expected of them in the tasks or activities that they’re doing. You also have to have that level of trust so that the employees can feel empowered within the framework you give them, let’s say for example, you have to handle your renewals at 90 days before they’re renewing. Well, it doesn’t matter that you have to call the customer on the 89th day, the 79th day, whatever it is. All that matters is that you’re getting in contact with that customer at that touch point, at that point in time. So, having enough room and flexibility in the processes that you build is important. Knowing the people that you’re working on it with, what expectations were set for them, and how you trust them to do the job.

Mark Lerner:

Yeah, yeah, super fascinating. You had just still sticking with your background, I think it’s pretty interesting and unique working for a organization like Gartner, learning about having to leverage systems and very structured organizational strategies. Have you found that ability to, having worked at Gartner with larger organizations under that kind of rubric, have you been able to apply what you took from there to your current role, and do you find that that has been a benefit in the way you’re structuring and running the organization?

Amie Weizer:

No doubt, mark, most definitely, and I bring up this background because I, too, feel it led me to having success today because I worked at small enterprises when I was doing sales. So I really understood what it felt like to do the whole lifecycle and to keep those customers on board with you. Moving into Gartner, of course, it was a complete culture shock where there was red tape everywhere and you couldn’t get anything done at any time. So really I struggled in the beginning and I talked about this before on another podcast, that the call certification at Gartner is what actually stopped me right at the get go. In order to be a CSM, you have to go through weeks of customer service organization training to talk to clients and engage with them. You have to know what IT domains you can come across and what different roles you’ll come across.

Amie Weizer:

What are the different key challenges these roles have? How do they work? How do they work with each other? Interdependencies, I mean, a total education about the world of business is honestly what you get when you first start in that organization. So I bring it with me everywhere because there are so many things that I learned doing that. The second thing about red tape is that it is good and bad; I can give many examples of that. The call certification basically was that you had to go through these weeks of training. Then, you had to be able to conduct a role-play or a call certification with a prospective client or whomever you might be supporting. I absolutely failed miserably the first time that I tried to do my call certification because I was trying so hard to fit it into the rubric they gave me where they said, you have to do it like this, you have to do this, you have to do that.

Amie Weizer:

Oh, don’t forget to do this. I completely forgot who I was and I forgot what my voice was. I forgot how what we’re doing today is having a conversation, having a dialogue. So I had to take back that feedback very early on when I thought, oh great, I’m working at Gartner. I really can be proud of this. Oh, you just failed your car certification. Maybe you’re not worthy to work at Gartner. So it’s a big learning experience, and understanding how I take that first experience, even in the onboarding, and apply that from beyond. Those call certifications are something I’m passionate about today because I used them in customer success when I started to scale it here for LMS 365. It’s so important to give people the chance to do a role play in front of their peers and colleagues before they go out live and become customers. The worst thing that you can do for a customer success manager is say, Hey, have fun. Run with it. No, of course, you have to teach them some pivots. You have to teach them how to feel comfortable with uncertainty. You have to teach them resilience, all important things that help you on a scalable journey because what worked last year won’t work the following year, so on and so forth. Just knowing that change is constant when you’re on a scaling journey.

Mark Lerner:

Yeah, I’m glad. I’m glad I’m in the role I’m in because that sounds terrifying to me. But to jump into today’s topic about building systems and frameworks for scalability, for scalable growth, why don’t we start from a fundamental level? What is the groundwork that’s needed for scalable systems in rev ops?

Amie Weizer:

Let’s start with even the word scalability, because I find that a lot of people are scared of the word scalability or feel an adverse reaction when they hear that word. So why is it that people feel maybe uncomfortable with the word scalability? For me, I started to dig into within my own experiences, what is it that would cause that kind of feeling? Well, it all comes down to uncertainty. It all comes down to people not understanding what that scalability might mean. Oftentimes, there’s a decision made that a leadership level saying, this is the decision, we’re going to do this now, but really what is the underneath that? Who has done the planning to ensure that you can get from point A to point Z? You can’t think about it in terms of just getting from point A to point B. You really have a long journey you need to go through, and you need to involve people in the change.

Amie Weizer:

So, when I think about scalability, I think it’s scary. So it needs to be brought down to a level that’s more comfortable for people to feel that their everyday lives can make an impact, and then it’s really about the people. So the other fundamental to me is understanding who are the people that you’re working with and you’re driving through this change, whether that be somebody who’s on the sales side, customer success side, even on the support engineer side, everybody is going to want to understand why are we doing this change? I don’t care that you told me to do it. I need to understand why I should follow you along on this journey. From there, this concept of open-source change comes into play. Are you familiar with the model on open source change?

Mark Lerner:

No. Tell me about it.

Amie Weizer:

Alright, this is a fun one. This is a lot of what I learned at Gartner as well because, in program and portfolio management, you are managing a lot of change. You are managing a lot of people, or the open source change is the idea that top-down change is when a leader is telling you you have to do it this way. This is the best way, this is what we’ve decided, and you have to stick to it. That leads to low change absorption because nobody feels empowered to make a decision, and nobody quite understands why the decision was made the way it was. Open source change looks from the bottom to the top and understands, okay, a decision has been made, that’s okay, but now how are we going to implement that decision that was made? Starting at the stakeholders who are impacted by the level of understanding, okay, dear SDRs, we’re going to ask you to do this with leads instead now.

Amie Weizer:

Okay, how do you tell me why I need to do that? Maybe I’ll word it like this. You’re telling an SDR to make a different change in their workflow. You need to understand how is their workflow today before you start saying you need to do it a different way, what can you do to get from that point A to point B and connecting all the dots along the way? It’s not like you just throw something on somebody. You really have to say, how can I empower you to make this change in your current workflow? What barriers do we need to remove in order for you to complete this next level of change or this next level of scalability?

Mark Lerner:

Yeah, yeah, that’s super fascinating. You mentioned working with sellers and obviously being a change agent can be a challenge in getting buy-in from a cross-functional collaboration perspective with the c-suite, that must present unique challenges, but also opportunities I would imagine. Given your background, how do you ensure alignment with the C-suite, and what you’re doing to drive success in scalable success?

Amie Weizer:

An awesome question as well, and really what I’m living through right now. So just happy to have the opportunity to share this mark. So, at our organization, we’re working off of OKRs and strategic initiatives. So that is truly a guiding light for us that helps us to determine if what we’re working on is the priority or if it needs to be moved to a different corridor, for example. So, right now, we have a focus corridor of three strategic initiatives. We, as a leadership team, come together and say, these are the things we’re focusing on. What barriers do we have for them? What needs do we have for them? And we directly present to the executive team, and we say on a monthly basis, here’s the progress we drove. Here’s what we still need. Here’s stopping us from moving forward. So, in doing so, we’ve been able to uncover a lot of things like change absorption, which is exactly what you’re talking about now.

Amie Weizer:

Change absorption is another type of model that is around change management that will help you to understand what impact you’re having on the end users or the individuals who are having the change happen to them. And it’s really mapping from a project-by-project or outcome-by-outcome basis. What is the impact on these individuals at this point in time? I’m talking at the granular level within a sales organization; there are many different hierarchy levels. How is the SDR being impacted by the change? How’s the business manager impacted by the change? How’s impacted by the change? Truly understanding and mapping out for the next quarter, for the next month, what does it look like in all of these changes they’re going to see, you’ll start to see patterns, and you’ll start to see things that are red because day after day, week after week change is happening to that individual or to that team.

Amie Weizer:

So then you bring up the conversation to say, look, this is a lot of change. This is not a good pace of change. We probably need to slow it down a little bit so that we can have a higher chance adoption over time. But change absorption is something you have to consistently monitor and you have to consistently keep top of mind. It’s a challenge. It absolutely is a challenge to do. So one thing I wanted to ask you, mark, is because it’s a new slogan for Deal Hub, I’ve seen the tagline out a lot. Scale easy. Tell me about it.

Mark Lerner:

Yeah, so scale easy, scale easily. Well, first of all, I love the role reversal here. It’s awesome. So the kind of differentiating factor about Hub as a newly onboard deal hub customer, hopefully this resonates as well. Deal Hub has the power that’s needed for complex use cases that A CPQ can bring with the flexibility to be agile in a changing market without needing to go through, let’s say a third party development firm to change anything so that you can be flexible and agile in a business environment that requires it without that becoming a huge issue. And so that’s where the scale easily comes from. It’s the ability to scale. We have the power to enable you to go to the next level, but you don’t have to give up user friendliness and its usability for power.

Mark Lerner:

When you think about some of the incumbents in the CPQ space, they are known by many to be very rigid and complicated, and if you need to make any sort of changes, it becomes a re-implementation that takes months. Whereas Deal Hub is a no-code solution, it also supports even up to enterprise use cases. So that’s where the idea came from and we kind of rolled it out in a really fun way. We found a parkour professional aggressive running here in New York, and we shot a commercial. I got to go down there and kind of oversee it where he was scaling different things in New York City and there was a whole bunch of other clips about doing flips and stuff. And so that’s the idea is to, you can scale these very high difficult or complex use cases, but do it with ease. So that’s the idea, and hopefully it resonates. I think it will.

Amie Weizer:

What I like about Scale Easy, I saw this online of course, that’s why I had to ask you about it because it’s just awesome. You got to go do something like that. That’s very fun. But the reason I mentioned it is because it really sounds like it’s about growth, right? It’s about understanding that it’s possible to grow over time, but you have to start somewhere. You have to have the fundamentals, and VL Hub is intended to grow with you over time. That’s what it means to me after having gone through the experience, right? Understanding what it’s like to bring a CPQ in to bring that level of governance and structure to an organization that didn’t previously have it. You can’t go from A to Z. Here’s my whole point. Again, you have to take the steps. You have to go from A to B. So how does everybody quote today?

Amie Weizer:

What does that process look like? How does everybody have customizations in their region? How does everybody discount, and so on and so forth? All of those steps kind of have to go in order so that people feel, they understand the expectation right around what scaling is there around bringing a CPQ into an organization. I mean, it absolutely all comes together. Still, the fundamental of it is the expectation, understanding what people need to go through of the change and understanding the culture already within the organization to have those changes, and then the trust in the person who’s rolling out the change and the people who are impacted by the change. Having mutual trust to understand that I know I’m going to give you a new button to click, but it’s not because I want you to sit here clicking another button. It’s because if you click this as a seller, the finance team and the customer success team will be more able to assist the customer, not asking a repeated question you already have during the sales cycle. Let me help you kind of think about how we can work together as a team kind of thing.

Mark Lerner:

Yeah, love that. So we talked a bit about kind of a frameworks and processes. One of the aspects of scaling is increasing the headcount and growing a team, growing an organization. How do you approach that? What’s your framework for that and what is something that the viewers at home or the listeners at home could take away when they’re thinking about headcount to do it in a scalable and structured way?

Amie Weizer:

That’s a very difficult question. It really is because capacity planning and resource management is very specific, from my experience to every organization that you’re working with. But what you can do in order to prepare for headcount and also prepare for scaling and efficiencies from my perspective, is to understand the role truly and truly understand those stakeholders, the job that they’re doing, just having a conversation. And in RevOps, this word of gemba walk, are you familiar with that model?

Mark Lerner:

No.

Amie Weizer:

So gemba walk is a way of understanding a process that somebody is following. So let’s say, for example, in customer success, having a ‘Gemba Walk’ interview with somebody in customer success would be asking them questions about what the work they do is simply to understand better why they’re doing the actions they are. Because if you ask somebody, Hey, how in customer success are you renewing a customer? They might tell you, oh, go do this with this technology. Go do this here. Here’s what you do to the customer. That’s not really explaining maybe the outcomes that you’re trying to derive. The outcome is you’re trying to renew the customer or expand the customer. The outcome is that you need to track that you’ve renewed or expanded this customer. So what are the mechanisms it takes in order for you to boil it down in a way that you can then say, maybe this is something we can automate?

Amie Weizer:

Maybe this is something we need more capabilities or more resources to do. But not until you really understand exactly the kind of work that’s being done, what maybe should be automated, what maybe should be additional resources. You should not be making any determinations about your capacity planning until you really know the kind of work that gets done. Otherwise, you end up in a situation where maybe you’ve overhired, and you don’t have the right amount of work for those folks, or you’ve under-hired, and you’ve not automated enough. So you really have to walk a fine line between understanding what are the outcomes that need to be driven from the roles that you’re planning the capacity for.

Mark Lerner:

Yeah. Is that an acronym? Does it stand for something, Gemba?

Amie Weizer:

I do not know if it stands for something. I just know it’s referred to as a Gemba, G-E-M-B-A,

Mark Lerner:

G-E-M-B-A. Okay. Very, very fascinating. Yeah, I wasn’t familiar with that. So as we have gone through some of this and discussed these frameworks and your experiences, what do you think in your journey, you’ve done a lot of things and you’ve been in a lot of different kinds of roles and companies. What has been one of the more challenging aspects from a scaling operations perspective and just career perspective that challenging that you’ve learned from that maybe you have been able to formulate some sort of strategy to overcome or not that might be interesting to the folks out in the podcast world?

Amie Weizer:

I love that you say folks back home. It’s great From my perspective, definitely a good question. Lessons learned along scaling journeys. It starts with the people, right? Back to what I was talking about earlier. My lesson learned is that you have to really involve the people who have to make the change. You can’t just make a decision on their behalf and say, Hey, you’ve been doing it this way for the last ten days, and you’re new to the organization, so tomorrow, we’re going to have you do something completely different. Why I’m in an uncertain condition, I’ve only been here ten days. We haven’t even determined if it works yet; it’s really about understanding the people and understanding the change that you’re asking them to drive. The second thing after the people is absolutely about empowerment. So, let me tell you a positive story actually of what you should do as a leader and how you can enable change and scalability.

Amie Weizer:

The leader I had above me in customer success when I started at LMS 365 was truly the embodiment of what we refer to at LMS 365 as human success. Someone who wants to engage and grow the individuals who are within their teams by empowering them to make decisions. The boss that I had, Thomas was always empowering me to make decisions. When I came into the customer success organization at LMS 365, I was the first one who started this, a whole idea I was managing almost 500 clients, and that quickly got uncomfortable, right? I realized that there was no process in place; there was no scalability here. After coming off of a large enterprise where everything was defined down to the T, moving into this open place, I could run anywhere. I could decide to do anything. But what I really needed was to get my hands into it and understand the work as a customer success manager, what are the things that I need to do manually?

Amie Weizer:

What are the things that I could automate? How can I rely on my colleagues? How can I collaborate with them? I am just truly understanding what a day in life is like so that I can build out a model to make it a scalable customer journey. So, within six months of having the customer success team, I was promoted from just customer success manager to the head of customer success. So I could start bringing on other individuals to help me and to support me and those individuals that I was able to bring on. It was the same experience I got from my boss. I was able to deliver to them, Hey, you’re going to come into this role. We don’t have it all figured out yet, but we’re going to learn together and figure it out together. So I brought them in and I started letting them talk to customers and letting them start to feel their book of business out.

Amie Weizer:

From there, we could determine, oh, this is maybe something we want to scale. Oh, this is something that we don’t want to, helping us to really understand what a framework or a lightweight foundation should look like. And then being able to iterate on that, build that over time. Again, hiring the right people who have the mindset that, Hey, it’s not going to be like this forever. It’s going to change over time, but it’s going to get better every single time we make a change or every single time that we improve. So it’s about having a lesson of empowering individuals and understanding that they’re going to do the work if they feel engaged and empowered to be able to drive change in their own book of business. That might look like a customer success manager giving a customer an extension because they maybe were promised something that they didn’t receive that might be making sure a customer success manager goes above and beyond. If the customer is going live and they need some extra support, whatever it might look like, it’s about setting that kind of culture and empowering the employee to feel like this is my thing. I get to do this. I feel empowered to make these decisions. That was a big thing I learned from this manager, who taught me something positive.

Mark Lerner:

Yeah, I love that. I really do. And kind of along the same vein, when we were chatting and messaging prior to recording today, you had identified mindset leadership and directness as your superpowers. So, can you give an example of how some of those traits have played a critical role in a specific project or decision and how those superpowers came into play?

Amie Weizer:

Oh, I love it. So we talk a lot about superpowers at our organization because we definitely understand everybody brings something to the table, and you have to feel pride in your work to be able to bring those superpowers you have to your colleagues to help your peers. So we use that term quite a lot because we are really into it. From my perspective, the thing about directness is something that I personally learned over time, and it was about building up my confidence. I would say growing up myself in a pretty small town where everybody stayed in that town and retired in that town, people didn’t leave. It was a very much, this is where you are, this is where you’ll always be. So, growing up in an environment like that, I really had a lot of questions, and I really became very curious about the outside world and how I could learn new things to acquire new skills to get myself out of that situation.

Amie Weizer:

So, in doing so, I was able to really get my voice and really understand how to use my voice or communication to make the decisions or movements I want to in my career. Funnily enough, one of the directness examples that I could give you would be the first time when we brought on our new CEO into LMS365 2 years ago; Happy anniversary; we just had met for the first time the CEO, and I was running our customer success conference in Denver, and we came to that conference so that he could get a feel for what it was like to be a customer success manager. Hey, he’s new to the business. He wants to better understand how everybody’s working together and what it looks like to be on the customer success side, especially how the customers were feeling, right? He also came to understand how the customers were reacting and what it was like to be a customer of LMS 365.

Amie Weizer:

So from that, him coming out and being in Denver, I saw that as a really big opportunity to obviously have his ear and to start building our relationship there. So I actually was able to get that CEO through conversations and my directness to say, Hey, look, here’s how I think things are going. Here’s how I think I could improve them. Here’s how I think we could work together. That’s a pretty bold thing. Not anybody is going to feel like they can have the ear of the CEO and have that conversation with them about how they are growing or how they’re trying to influence the organization through some of the things they’ve seen. I was very lucky. He was very receptive to that, and we had a long two-hour conversation where I actually was able to express my interest in revenue operations and in this future that I have today; it took some time to get there, but because I had that directness of saying, Hey, look, I’m happy with what I’m doing. I think I can do even more. Here’s how I’d like to do it. Having those conversations that are uncomfortable is something that you can get used to the more that you practice them.

Mark Lerner:

Yeah, love that. So as we wrap things up today, for the listeners who are eager to learn more about you, your strategies, what you’re doing and your insights, are there any resources or social channels that they can follow you on to learn more about your insights and just maybe follow you a little bit more?

Amie Weizer:

Mark? I feel like it’s the part of the Sean Evans Hot Ones where it’s like this camera, this camera, this camera. Tell them what you have going on. Exactly. So it’s fun. So, from my perspective, you can find me on LinkedIn. I am really happy to be part of like I said, the front part of this Rev Ops community because I have a lot to learn. I’ll be the first to admit that, and I’m excited about that because other organizations have been through these journeys, and I really want to understand best practices and give where I can as well the best practices I’ve learned along the way. I’m going to the Rev Ops AF event in May, bringing my team along. So please shout me out. I’d be more than happy to meet up at that event. And otherwise, you can find me on LinkedIn.

Mark Lerner:

And we’ll be there as well. And I don’t know if you saw the swag we had this last week at, I did loss event in New York City, but we’re to do a redux of that. So I’m looking forward to it, and I’m looking forward to getting to meet you in person and the lovely weather in San Diego. So thank you so much. Cannot wait. Thank you so much for joining us today and looking forward to seeing you soon.

Amie Weizer:

Same to you. Catch you later, mark. Thanks. Bye.