SOLUTIONS
TOP INTEGRATIONS
TOP FEATURES
34 Minutes 
Mark Lerner:
All right, everybody. Welcome back to the Revamp podcast. I’m your host, Mark Lerner, and director of growth marketing here at Hub. Really excited to have today’s guest with us, Brantley Pace. We’re going to dive into all sorts of topics around Rev ops and his unique experiences there. But before we jump into all of those fun topics, Brantley, why don’t you tell the folks at home a little bit about yourself and your journey?
Brantley Pace:
Certainly. Thanks, Mark, for having me. I’m Brantley Pace, and I’ve been in SaaS for about ten years now. Most recently, I was the VP of revenue operations and a VP of go-to-market for a growing SaaS company. So I’ve had the good fortune of experiencing sales and operations in SaaS from pre-seed to series D through six m and three unicorns from a million in an R up to a hundred million in an RR. And so I’ve kind of seen every stage of growth and how things develop, and I’m excited about what’s to come for SaaS and Rev ops. So, thanks for having me.
Mark Lerner:
Yeah, yeah. That’s awesome. And it’s unique, right? Because you’ve had that experience, such a breadth, right? Someone who is at a much smaller startup to be able to be at that level at a company that gets acquired, let alone several. And now you’re kind of back doing the founder thing, which we can talk about a little bit as well if you’d like. That gives you this unique view of the space. So one of the things that I always like diving into with my guests is their view on how this world of revenue operations goes to market and how it’s changed over the last, let’s say, five years. There’s been a lot of, let’s say, macro headwinds that have affected everybody. But I’m interested in your view, especially since you’ve had this breadth of experience, how things have shifted the way things look today as compared to before.
Brantley Pace:
I think one of the things that’s shifting is that more and more companies are adopting technology-first strategies outside of SaaS. That’s something that I’m seeing a lot of, which is a good thing for revenue operations because rev ops are really around increasing revenue and reducing friction all the way up through the customer life cycle. And that generally comes into play when you have a lot of technology involved. If you don’t have a lot of technology and you’re in person, you may not have a dedicated rev ops person, at least in the way that we think about it, but distributed teams that are operating with heavy tech stacks, that’s where you’re going to start feeling a lot of gridlock within the company. And then you find people focused on reducing that gridlock and improving the customer journey and the sales rep journey all the way from the very beginning of awareness to the point of renewals and expansion.
So, I’m seeing more and more of that model play out beyond SaaS and tech. So that’s where I see a lot of revs expanding beyond just the world of SaaS, which is where generally I see 90% of people operating. That’s where I see a lot of people thinking about some of the strategies that are working. They’re selling B2B strictly to tech to tech, and those strategies have some relation to expansion beyond that, but not entirely. And it’s exciting to me to see what happens. Rev, rev ops take some of that learning, which implies it is not necessarily in tech environments.
Mark Lerner:
Yeah, that’s interesting. So, do you think that’s a function of maybe some of these reductions in force that happen across companies and are looking to become more efficient and more scalable? So instead of having bodies to actually manually do some of this stuff, looking to automate it so that they can scale without increasing their costs?
Brantley Pace:
I think so. I think that’s the common denominator across ops, expanding beyond tech and even within tech. Is this question of how we become more efficient with what we have? And that’s just a root question and a root condition that Revon always operates with. And so, for a while, some people didn’t have to really know the nuance of the business, they didn’t have to understand the details of the tech, and it didn’t need to be efficient. They could just add headcount, and they didn’t really get pressure to be ultra-efficient. In fact, it was considered a negative, particularly for venture-backed companies to be efficient in profitability at the expense of growth. You didn’t do that, and some companies that are still growing at that level still can’t do it. That’s not the expectation on that side. Rev ops have to focus on the growth variable, but nine out of 10 companies aren’t actually at that level and don’t need to be, so they have to focus on profitability and efficiency in other areas of the business. Both of those are core functions of Rev Ops, and because different companies are getting that same pressure either to grow more efficiently or to be more efficiently profitable, all that comes down to that’s what RevOpss does at any company. More and more people are asking how we can do that better. There are different teams that you could call, and sometimes you hear GTM ops, rev ops, sales ops, marketing ops, and so on. There’s some team that’s focused on those core questions.
Mark Lerner:
Yeah. And this term, GTM ops, is actually one I’m hearing more and more. I’m interested in where you stand. Is it just a different name for the same thing, or does it imply different responsibilities or slightly different tactics? What’s the difference there?
Brantley Pace:
It’s always going to pin my company. I think some places, such as GTM Ops and Rev Ops, are going to do the same thing, and some companies have intentionally made that decision because they want it to be different. What you’re generally going to see is if it’s GTM Ops, it’s going to align around a revenue organization that thinks of itself as GTM. They’ve aligned the company’s organizational structure with GTM. For instance, when I was a VP of GTM, we the entire go-to-market org, and we thought about it differently than just sales or revenue and that environment; it helps to have an ops team aligned to that same work structure, that same vision of the company. So, I don’t think there’s that much difference between GTM ops and Rev ops in general. I think you’re going to find GTM ops being more focused on demand generation capital of the funnel, and you’re going to see rev ops maybe be a little more sales ops focused.
I would say that’s the generality, but they’re both very similar. If you had a Venn diagram, there’d be a really small overlap, whereas other ops teams have very distinct differences between rev ops, sales ops, marking ops, and CX ops. I do think those have very different approaches, but GTM ops and Rev ops, I think is more of a naming play to refocus Rev ops on actually generating demand, whereas sometimes they can fall back to being analysts, report generators, pull admins, and really they’re too much of an operations focus and not enough for revenue. So, I think GTM helps those same teams refocus on the go-to-market element of operations.
Mark Lerner:
Yeah, that’s interesting. Yeah, because it’s only in the last year or two that it’s a title that I’ve come across more and more often, and I wonder if that’s a reflection of the market somehow and maybe somehow reading the tea leaves as to the direction we’re going. But from what you’d mentioned, kind of the core responsibility of rev ops or GTM ops or whatever it is, amongst other things, was kind of reducing friction, and you’ve had this kind of wide breadth of experience across companies of different sizes, different stages, but for the revenue operator watching or listening at home, maybe we can jump into some of the areas in which friction exists and how it can potentially be reduced by someone in a rev ops role.
Brantley Pace:
Sure. It’s oftentimes the opposite, too. You always want to think about whether you are applying friction. Are you reducing friction? There are times you want to apply friction, and there’s a lot of frameworks that actually teach that and train to that. And I think that’s a good way to always think about it, which is there are times you want to apply friction, the times you want to remove friction. So, some of the ways that you want to remove friction are generally when you want to go faster, and in most cases, you can identify in your sales cycle where the big steps are happening. And so if you just think from the very top of the funnel when people are trying to engage with your brand, what are the frictions that it takes for ’em to talk to somebody? How easy is it to get information to schedule meetings and get demos of your product?
So, think through those steps and collapsing that stack to make it easier and faster to do those things and make it easy to buy. That’s sometimes for most companies, and there may be some cases where you just don’t do that, and you’re trying to add friction. Maybe you’re an enterprise company, and your ACV is over a hundred thousand dollars, and you just don’t want everybody clicking on the scheduling demo when, for a fact, you’re just selling to a specific type of company. But for most companies, that’s just not the case. So you’re always looking for ways to make it faster and easier to talk to a rep once your reps get engaged with the product or with the customer. All those different types of steps that they’re doing from engaging with emails and calls, creating proposals, even things like quoting calculators, that’s a great way to, if you’re on a call and they’re trying to get a quote, you don’t necessarily need the entire quote filled, which is generally where CPQ deal hubs come in, but having a quote calculated that’s just in a Google sheet is a great way to quickly get a number but doesn’t generate any type of deliverable, but allows you to have quicker conversations so that you can go into something like Deal Hub to create the type of quote that you’re looking for.
I think a DealHub is actually a great example of reducing friction. One of the ways that we deployed DealHub is that we wanted to create fast things through deals, and so we didn’t want everybody to have to go up and ask for approval. So, the pre-approval framework allowed us to create a network of pre-approved items that we could go to those stakeholders and say are great for commanding control and quality control. These are things we want to happen. We can automatically pre-approve them under certain conditions, and we can flag them to you. They go above and beyond, which reduces friction for certain types of deals and increases friction for other ones. So, like, Hey, we want this to happen, but we need to have a conversation. Well, that’s a friction point. It’s a good friction point from the perspective of quality control; those types of things exist. There are so many places throughout the revenue; there’s really no. It’s hard to imagine the amount of work it takes to go through those steps, and that’s why I think Rev Ops has value. You have to have the full picture to be able to think through all the steps, not just your siloed view of it.
Mark Lerner:
Yeah, that’s a really great insight, and looking at it from introducing friction as actually being a positive in some cases, it’s super interesting. I rarely think about it, but it’s obvious when I do because, for example, the opposite of what you were mentioning, whereas if you set limits to certain aspects of a deal in order to require approvals manual approval, that’s adding friction, right? You’re stopping somebody from just going ahead. You are adding those guardrails. But switching gears a little bit, you talked a little bit about ops and its role in demand generation, and it’s not a topic we often cover here, so I’d love to get your insight on that and where Rev Ops fits in the future of demand generation.
Brantley Pace:
Yeah, so Rev Ops, in the last few years, at least from the world I experienced it, there’s so much focus on growth. Your job was to help grow the companies as quickly as possible. Then, in general, there was a meta-conversation about efficiency and making sure companies were generally profitable. And so you’re not necessarily focused on growth at all costs. You’re basically saying, how do we make the existing customer base grow? How do we help the existing team be more efficient? You’re looking through efficiency through the same variables. Now, there’s a lot more around. Hey, we’ve got to grow as companies. And a lot of companies are struggling with that, and they’re using and leveraging technologies that they don’t know how to use. And I’m seeing a lot more conversations with companies around email deliverability issues. There are obviously lots of conversations going on around the outreach sales law Apollo strategy that a lot of companies built their sales team on.
It was to hire 10 SDRs, give them ten seats, and then grow. And when there were, I think, lower thresholds to buy and a high desire to buy point solutions, people did that. And now there’s a reduction in those needs, and we, they’ve only increased that leverage. It was like, well, this is the leverage. We know how to do headcount volume pushed harder on that lever, and that’s just plummeted demand generation. And so Revenue Operations has a role to play and to think through how new solutions are being adopted for their company, and that’s how Rev Ops can elevate their own careers as being part of those conversations as opposed to just being reactionary and saying, well, if you buy the tool, I’ll own it. Well, that’s just a tool admin. You’re kind of an IT-focused G TM person. Well, I’m just going to report on it.
Well, now you’re just a data analyst focused on revenue. For me, Rev Ops is just more than tool admin and more data analysis as being part of that revenue conversation and thinking through how the tools, systems, and processes come together to generate new demand. And there’s a lot of opportunity for thought leaders to think through those types of strategies that are working and those that aren’t working. It’s really an exciting pivot point because the companies that can’t adapt won’t, and they’re going to be replaced by companies that can. And that was a key element of early SaaS growth in the two thousand that separated the winners from the losers. And there are a lot of companies that got funding in the last two or three years that you can’t buy innovation, and you can’t really buy growth anymore. So what do you do? You have to have the right talent asking the right questions to come up with the right processes, and there are so many new tools coming out. It’s going to come into Rev Ops to figure out how you leverage new technology and emerging technology-generated demand.
Mark Lerner:
Yeah. Yeah. I mean, there are so many things there that you articulated so much of my thoughts that I haven’t quite been able to articulate, but this idea that people that were focused on these just as much outreach as you can do via email, like account-based marketing, direct email outreach, you just increase the volume, and you’ll get more sales. And that seems to not be working as it once did. I actually wonder if part of that is that it’s just gotten so noisy in those areas in my mailbox and others that it’s just people are not paying attention anymore. And I actually feel like one of the reasons for that is the ubiquity and ease of use or how easy it is to use poorly used things like AI for that. Anyone can kindly create these custom-at-scale emails that are different for each person, but if you can do it very poorly, that leads to the next thing. We wouldn’t be really a podcast if we didn’t cover the AI thing. So, I have yet to really see AI as a use case for AI. That’s kind of been accepted in ops specifically. I think there are many, but I don’t see it really being adopted very much. So, where do you see AI fitting into the ops tech stack and strategy?
Brantley Pace:
It is going to be; I’m very bullish on ai. I’m excited for it, it’s going to be developed for it. I think it’s going to look like this. They’re going to take a hit, and then it’s going to evolve and mature into really useful tools. I’ll give you an example. So my company’s name is Forge Works. There’s not a lot of information on it. It’s a new company. I get daily AI-generated emails where the personalization is conflating me with a blacksmith and software. I’m not kidding. I could screen share and show you where clearly AI is written. In fact, they’re proud of it because at the bottom, it’ll say generated by an AI agent, and it’ll list the company that generated it. But in the very beginning, everyone loves to personalize that front part. That’s kind of what AI’s pitch is: we can aggregate 50 different data sources and personalize them.
Well, people aren’t paying attention to what they’re sending out, and it’s doing a little bit of brand harm because immediately after telling me that they can help me grow my tech company, but they also love the blog. I’m not kidding about the Bronze ES that we made on my wrong Ford Works, man, that is, and then no one’s paying attention to it. And so I think what people are seeing in AI is they’re just going to burn through what little credibility they have when it comes to AI-generated text, which is 90% of what people are using AI today for, and mass adoption is AI-generated text. And that’s cool. It reduces some friction, but it’s not critical, I don’t think, in most use cases. But that’s what we call AI outbound. What you’re doing is you’re just going faster on the solutions that don’t work.
It means you’re just massing emails because you’re not calling all those people, and you’re using AI to generate it. That is sometimes accurate, and they just nail it, but it’s a little bit of a selective bias. They don’t ever share the screenshots of the ones I get. They’ll share like, oh, this was amazing. You’ve done okay. How many millions of emails did you send? I’m not even kidding. Had conversations with people sending millions, millions of these emails to generate the ones that were like, oh, these are, that was perfect. They had no idea it was AI. But then all the people like me who get them who AI doesn’t know, the AI is only looking at aggregating Forge works domains and doesn’t know that or somehow is combining different companies to get it wrong. So that’s kind of the negative side of it is that they are generating some demand, but then they’re destroying the deliverability rate, they’re destroying the open rates, and I don’t know if this is really going to scale.
So that’s how Rev Ops generally uses it today through generative texts. I’m really excited about how AI models can help with data analysis and a lot of what ops busy work is. That’s what we’re focused on at Forward Works. There are a lot of things that Rev Ops does today that are manual, that are just stuck in the CRM that no one wants to go out and do and dig for, and there are a lot of tools that were never built for Rev Opss. They’re built to do a function in sales that Rev Ops now owns. That’s very different than a tool built for rev ops. And that’s functionally what Forge Works is focusing on, is building a platform for ops to do 80% of the work that they’re doing manually today. It leverages and works with some of these other bigger point solutions that, again, sell to Rev Ops but aren’t specifically Rev Ops tools.
And then there are a lot of rev-ops people who will have millions of dollars in software and still work 80 hours a week. That was my dentist. I was like, hang on a second. How do I have a whole team of ops people? I’m working 80 hours a week; I can literally buy whatever software I want. And it’s because it wasn’t just the tools that weren’t consolidated, right? There are a lot of tools consolidating that’s kind of good for both the users and the tools. They can expand their user base, and their users have fewer tools, but there’s also a core amount of ops functions that are still very manual today. That manual work is very focused on data. Still, that stuff is just not available today to Rev ops. So when you’re using some AI models to be able to look at data and present insights, that’s something that I think ops is going to see more of in the coming years that’s different than generative text.
Mark Lerner:
Yeah, I actually agree as a marketer; when I saw the first iteration of ChatGPT, I think, like most marketers, I had my eyes lit up because I was like, oh, this can generate endless content. What I found, and I think most people have found, is that if you are interacting with the model, the outcomes can be very good. But if you just set it on its own without the kind of rules and even with rules, but there are hallucinations, it is not there yet. What I found in doing some of the operational work that I do is sentiment analysis, projecting and coming up with potential close rates, and things like that. That is an area that seems ripe for optimizing with AI. Are those some of the things that you were kind of talking about
Brantley Pace:
Exactly. In the models right now, there are too many hallucinations for it to be considered accurate. So you basically have AI and generative texts, and you’ve also got the ability to look at text. You’re seeing a lot of tools, particularly in conversation intelligence, to be able to replicate a lot of what you’re seeing in Gong and drive those insights. I think that’s a good use case. Basically, you’re creating texts or reviewing texts, but I’ll give you an example. One of the things that we’re working on with some early pilot customers today is rep support. So, a lot of people create ticketing for the rev ops process, but no one has it. They’re all adopting all of their tools, products, and project management, which literally do not have a feature or line written for Rev Ops. So you’ve got Asana Clickup and Jira. That’s one of a dozen tools Rev Ops is using that’s not built for them.
So if Salesforce tickets come in, deal hub tickets come in, and HubSpot tickets come in, why are those not automatically creating backlog items for a roadmap? Because those platforms have no idea that they even need to happen. So when you think about a rev ops platform like ours, we’re thinking about those workflows from operational support, quotas, and territories. We’re thinking about those core use cases and figuring out how we use AI to, again, reduce friction and increase friction. For a lot of reps, it is important to know these things. You have to be in the rev box, which is when reps submit tickets either through Slacker, through teams, or through cases or some system. They’re being resolved by the frontline managers and ic, the ICV ops person, but it’s almost like a whack-A-mole comes in, solves it, keeps ’em going. But then this is literally how things get brought up, which is like, Hey, we’ve gotten this five times this week.
Like, wait, hang on a second. How big is this a REOC recurring issue, or is this a one-off use case? Well, that’s a very manual thing. Seems the community comes faster when they understand some of the blockers happening within the company. If you knew that 10 of your reps are all bogged down in almost one step, but no one ever tells you how you solve it, if you can have systems in place where, again, leveraging the value of reading texts today and AI models and kind of exploring future use cases for data analysis, that’s a great way for rev ops to leverage AI today. But you’re not going to get through Asana. You’re not going to get through Clickup or Jira, which are the other tools. They’re not going to build a model specific to Rev ops. They’re focused on project managers and product managers. They’re thinking about their integrations, not about rev ops. It’s a small use case, but Rev Ops is the fastest growing, one of the fastest growing job titles on LinkedIn, and there are a ton of people who are new to it, so I think that’s the opportunity for companies forward works and others to think through rev ops problems, solve it with Rev ops first solutions that leverage ai,
Mark Lerner:
I’m looking forward to seeing those enter the market because there’s definitely a need to talk about reducing friction and making, especially bringing in a Rev ops role for the first time or being in a Rev ops role for the first time. Maybe we can talk a little bit about where Rev Ops sits in an organization. Who does Rev ops report to? Who reports to ops in your experience because you have kind of been in a bunch of companies of different sizes? How does that break down?
Brantley Pace:
I would say it breaks down into two main phases. You get your build phase in your optimized phase, right? Your build phase should just sit with whoever is trying to improve the efficiencies of the company, and at your early stage or a small company, I don’t think it actually matters to your report, too, as long that person is supporting you. The organizational structure is just not mature enough to matter. It’s like rev ops reporting the person who’s going to help. Maybe it’s the sales, the sales lead, and the marketing lead. It’s just whoever cares about the details of their operation, as can your air cover. What do I mean by air cover? You need somebody in the C-suite who’s going to go to bat for you when you’re trying to do something and prioritize it. It’s not always intuitive to everybody else why this project matters.
Well, if we do this, we can get 20% leads. And they’re like, you need somebody who can bank on the intuition of a Rev ops person to understand the world and how they think about the business. So, whoever that person is at the organization and the build phase after the build phase, you need the organizational alignment that creates a separation of church and state between operations and revenue. I think there are two good options, and then there are some that create pros and cons. I don’t necessarily say they’re bad, but the best option is Rev Ops person reports to the CEO O director level or plus, so Director or VP, I don’t know if there’s ever going to be a C-suite for Rev Ops. I don’t think there needs to be. That person is basically just the COO, so the CEO or the operations lead is who the Rev ops person should lead to, so the COO CEO can report to the CRO if that CRO owns the entire go-to-market function, not just sales.
I think it creates a little bit of a conflict of interest if you’re calling shots for the C’s number. I’ve seen that play out where that can be tough when it’s like, Hey, this is the correct answer or this is the correct way to do it, but the C is like, well, that reduces my number, and they’re now financially incentivized to choose another option. Yeah, that’s a good point. That’s not just the CRO that applies to the marketing lead, the sales, anybody who has a target and is incentivized, even if it’s a bonus structure off of the outcome, the person who is the team that’s responsible for calling balls and strike is now in an environment where they and you may never see it. It could be a one-on-one where it can be like, Hey, we make this call if we change, it could literally be changing dates on something.
It seems small, but I’ve seen this play out with just the decision of whether you accept free emails in a company, right? If you’ve got sales ops and marketing ops, the head of marketing is incentivized to create pipeline, which is volume generally. Hopefully, you have some, and then there’s an opening up in their box on how you incentivize marketing, but the point is. Generally, pipeline and sales are focused on closed pipelines, and that sometimes creates friction around how you classify a lead. What’s the right stage? Is it closing? Those conflicts come up when you have either siloed operations teams or you report to the person who owns that number.
So COO, CEO. I’ve seen some trends of conversations happening for the chief financial officer. I think that’s a bad call. That’s probably one of the worst options. Again, in the build phase, it’s not a big deal. If the CFO is going to be air covering has got your back, then that works. Once you start building an organization where there are more defined roles and responsibilities, it is hard for me to see how the CFO understands things like approvals, and, well, actually, they might not understand the nuances of lead routing for marketing. They’re too far removed. They’ve never experienced it in their career. Why does it matter to call somebody in two hours or two minutes? Sure, they would get it, but are they going to prioritize that over your QBR and your board deck on Monday? No, because that CFO’s ass is on the seat for that board call on Monday, so guess what?
He has Rev ops doing Thursday and Friday. They’re doing data analysis, guaranteed. You find me, anybody reporting to the CFO, and I stack rank their time; it’s going to be data analysis and financial analysis. First, the argument is if the CFO owns it owns that, there’s a singular view of the finances, and that’s fine if you view Rev ops through the lens of exclusively analytics and revenue reporting but ignore a Rev ops team reporting to the CFO is not in the trenches with your demand gen marketing or helping them create leads. That is the key priority because the CFOs oftentimes think about revenue way differently. That’s too far off the pipeline, so again, it comes down to priority. There are too many fires going on. It doesn’t mean that they want to support it. It just means every rev ops team out there has got 50 things on fire, and they can only do ten this week, and they can only do three well, at best, so which three is it, and which five do they try to squeeze in and ignore?
The other 20, whoever they’re reporting in, is just going to have a bias. Your marketing person is going to have a bias toward pipeline branding and events, as well as attribution. We just had an event on Thursday, so I need to spend the rest of this week getting event attribution where your customer success leads are going to be like, well, hang on a second. I’ve got my five biggest customers, core QBR, coming up in the next two weeks; I need you to help us build these decks or build a renewal playbook. And so that’s where if you report to an individual head, head of finance, head of sales, head of marketing, head of us, they’re going to be incentivized for rev ops to focus on that, and that’s where I think anybody who reports to those teams is really just marketing ops plus sales ops plus CX Ops plus or finance ops plus if they report to those teams.
Mark Lerner:
Yeah. The idea of we are basically, our actions are very much kind of dictating the outcome. Our actions are dictated by our incentives, and I see that playing out in all sorts of wacky ways everywhere, but especially the larger a company becomes, the more it comes into play. I’d love to dive into that even further, but we’re actually kind of at the end of time here. But before we sign off, Brantley, if there’s anywhere that folks can go to learn more about you, about what you’ve done, what you’re doing at Forge Works, or the insights that you provide, why don’t you tell the folks at home how they can learn more?
Brantley Pace:
Great. I’m available on LinkedIn. I love to chat with people, especially in this space. There is so much information that’s tribal knowledge. You just have to learn from other people, so I’m always learning and connecting with people in the junior-senior; it doesn’t matter. I just love to figure out how you are approaching and how you are solving it. What do you find that’s working today? Because the playbooks just changed that fast, so LinkedIn is the easiest way, but also communities like Revgie and Rev Co-op, those types of communities are just, I’m on those. I’m active on those. I think it’s a great place to connect with people in this space.
Mark Lerner:
Awesome. Brentley, thank you so much for taking the time to chat today and looking forward to continuing our conversation maybe sometime in the future.
Brantley Pace:
Sounds good. Thank you, Mark.
Mark Lerner:
Bye.
