41 Minutes 
Cameron Collins:
I’m really excited to be digging into the topic today for how technical should someone in rev ops be? Or on the flip side, how strategic should someone who’s maybe using HubSpot as a HubSpot admin, how strategic should they be in their role? And I know you talked to people across all different types of roles and all different companies. I’m excited to dig in.
Mark Lerner:
Yeah, I got lots of thoughts about this because I think all of us have kind of been on this rocket ship of change. I mean for a lot of reasons, but I’m specifically talking about the kind of wave of change that AI has brought. Right? There have been shifts in technology that come in waves. There was internet, then mobile, and I think ai, there was a huge hype train. I think it’s kind of settled a little bit, but in reality, I think one of the outcomes, one of the impacts of it is there’s definitely been downsizing in companies where they feel like ai, whether it has or hasn’t, makes more efficiencies and makes certain people redundant. And in doing that, some of the internal resources that maybe anyone really would have access to help them on a technical level may have been kind of removed. And one of the amazing things that AI has done for me over these years is completely democratized access to learning how to do something technical. And I’m talking about code in particular, whatever gaps that have been completely filled by ai, having it open in here, how do I connect this API to this? How do I make this integration happen behind the scenes?
Something that I would’ve had to open a ticket and there had been a sprint I can do in a few hours. And I think not only does that open up a world of opportunity for people in a rev ops role, but I think we’re slowly or very quickly transitioning into a time where there’s going to be the expectation of that. And so that’s kind of where my mind’s at. I don’t know where you stand with that.
Cameron Collins:
I’ve been listening to some earnings calls with public companies, and it’s been interesting where a recurring theme for AI has been said time and time again. And that is companies that are likening artificial intelligence to an arms race, and every company wants to win the race in how do I use artificial intelligence the best? And admittedly, when I first heard companies using that analogy, it’s an arms race, we’ve got to win the war, I thought it’s just hyperbole and companies are exaggerating in the way that they tend to. But I think one of the things that I’ve realized in my day-to-Day, is that it is very similar in the sense that as the end user, we are oftentimes a multitude of steps behind from the companies that are setting all of this up in the periphery. And so now, how often is it, for example, where at Inbound HubSpot announces Breeze and a lot of people weren’t super duper excited, which I think at the time was maybe understandable because we didn’t see the big picture.
But now having learned how to use it, there are oftentimes where I can go into copilot or breeze and have it create a workflow that it would’ve taken me forever to figure out how to do. Or I might’ve had to go into chat GPT to figure out the logic that I really wanted because the initial logic I had just wasn’t going to work. So my take is that, I mean, it is so important to learn how to use AI and being able to do it in a way that is relevant to your role is absolutely going to transform your day to day. Looking at it specifically as an end user, I think does us a disservice. And we need to start thinking bigger picture about where are the companies heading? Because clearly they have a direction that we may not be seeing when they’re announcing whatever feature they may be announcing.
Mark Lerner:
I mean, I think there’s two arms races happening. One is the arms race of companies incorporating AI into their products. So Breeze for example, or Microsoft with their copilot or whatever, every SaaS, almost every SaaS is kind of adding some sort of AI into it. So there’s that. I think there’s the arms race of internal optimization within companies. So one of the things that’s blown my mind, and I’m still looking for more information, whether or not it was just fluff to get press or not, but have you ever heard of the company Klarna, think like, buy now, pay
Cameron Collins:
Later. Yeah, buy now, pay later.
Mark Lerner:
So they made a huge kind of a splash because the CEO was interviewed for a podcast where he said they’ve deprecated CRM and all enterprise software. They’re not using Salesforce, they’re not using Workday or anything, and they’re just using AI layered on top of internal knowledge graphs, whatever that means. And that blows my mind because are they saying that, is it true or are they saying it to get buzzed? They did get buzzed about it, but if it’s true, that’s like, okay, we’re heading in a world where maybe at some point in the future, you’re not going to ever really interact with the interface of HubSpot. Everything’s going to be done through Breeze. You’re going to conjure up whatever it is you want in a chat instance. And maybe that’s kind of where we’re headed.
Cameron Collins:
I think that it’s really interesting to think about where, I mean, this might be an internal CRM and they’re branding it as a non CRM. I mean, we don’t really know unless we could see behind the scenes, but I don’t think that the notion of A CRM is going to go away because ultimately it’s really just a centralized place for your data. What I think we will see is continued adoption of how artificial intelligence impacts the way that we interact and engage with it. So everything from being able to go into your copilot and saying, generate a list of my top a hundred accounts that I want to be able to target to create their messaging, create landing pages and call to action buttons that are specifically relevant to them. I think we’re going to be able to start to see more and more things that are streamlined. But I imagine that it’s also going to come at a cost. And we’ve seen that, for example, with HubSpot moving from the native data enrichment that they’ve had at the company level to now a credits model of sorts where you go in and you pay for contact enrichment. So I don’t think that even though things might be more efficient, I don’t think that necessarily means it’s just going to become a freebie plug and play, just pay a hundred dollars and now we can go and close a hundred deals.
Mark Lerner:
There was really another thing that made waves was there was an article, one of the VCs, Sequoia or something, talking about the new concept of service as a software rather than software as a service, which means that similar to what you’re saying, you’re paying for an outcome rather than paying for a software. And so the instance you’re talking about where the Breeze intelligence, I think it’s called, right? Or what is it called? The credit based enrichment that is essentially clear, but I forgot what they’re calling it.
Cameron Collins:
Yeah, I think that’s part of their breeze data enrichment. I know that they have three segments of it, but
Mark Lerner:
Yeah, so that’s an example of it. So you’re paying for an enriched record per record on the more extreme end. I don’t know. I feel like I’m your kind of insight into that other ecosystem, but when Salesforce introduced Agent Force, which was I think their kind of breeze, they’re charging per interaction, $2 per interaction, which is an insane thing. But so they’re trying to capture value in a new way. And I think that is something, I think that’s an extreme version of it. But yeah, no, I think kind of getting back to the idea where it feels like everyone needs to be technical, I don’t think that necessarily there’s a mutually exclusive technical versus strategic. I think that’s kind of where I’m at. I think it’s no longer one or the other. You got to be both. And the reason you can be both is because I don’t think, at least for simple tasks, let’s say I’m not building rebuilding product, the knowledge is there. You have somebody that can walk you through it.
I was talking to somebody at one of these events I went to recently and we were talking about how we’ve kind of implemented workflows via AI that have kind of really optimized some of the stuff that was just really annoying. And he was saying that he kind of realized there was this huge bottleneck where a lead would come in and the sales rep would have to go to the website and assess whether it was relevant based on certain very specific variables, does it say this or that? And he essentially using AI kind of built a script that did it for it. And that was the majority of the time that sales reps were working not on sales. They were working on doing this research, and he kind of built a script that did it with ai, scraped it, analyzed it, and then updated the CRM. And he did it being walked through with an ai walking through doing it, and it was a massive time saver for the company. And so stuff like that I think is going to become expected
Cameron Collins:
Eventually. And I’m curious what your opinion is on the notion of someone who’s in revenue operations. It may not be mutually exclusive to be technical or strategic, but how much of their hand in the technical aspect of the recommendations that they’re giving, how technically inclined do you need to be?
Mark Lerner:
Yeah, can you restate the question? I’m trying to wrap my head around It.
Cameron Collins:
Yeah, so someone’s in revenue operations, very strategic role. You’re looking at data, you’re giving recommendations on how to affect a business, how technical do you have to be with then being able to implement that yourself or understand how to implement it. So it’s the difference between, I think that the team needs to have better qualified M QLS to SQLs. We need to have better MQL to SQL rate. And that’s a suggestion. But then how technical does the Rev Ops person need to be to then say, and here’s how you can do that in HubSpot or Salesforce?
Mark Lerner:
Yeah, I think we’re going to be in a place eventually where they’re going to have to do that. And even that particular use case, it would be something like going through previous leads that contacts that had deals and closed and using some sort of machine learning model to assess creating those qualifications. I think we’re in a kind of transition point. I don’t think there’s an expectation today everywhere, but there is an opportunity to get ahead of it and provide additional value. I find myself not hitting any sort of blockers to doing stuff before. If I had an idea about something I wanted to try before, it would often require I would need some internal resource if it came to something technical and I no longer need that, so I could actually test the hypothesis, then bring the outcomes and say, Hey, I kind of tested this out and this was the outcome. And it’s a big difference. And I think, so if somebody came in the scenario you’re talking about and said, Hey, our SQL and MQL conversion rates are super low, we can see it here. I ran the numbers and was able to identify how we can tweak it based on this, and if we do, I think we’ll increase our conversion rate by x percent. That’s a big difference than just saying, Hey, I think our conversion rate from qualified feed to close one is too low.
Cameron Collins:
And I think that this is where job security really comes into play because ultimately, I mean, not only is it the difference between sitting there and going to an executive team and saying, this is what we should do, but it’s taking it to that next step and saying, this is a solution for how we can do it. And so if you’re in revenue operations and you know what to do, but you don’t know how to do it, then I think you’re going to continue to become very challenged by people that can give you perhaps more solid advice or can give more strategic input beyond just here’s what we should do as a business.
Mark Lerner:
Yeah, I mean for sure, and I’m obviously speaking in the bubble I live in, I’m in a very unique role here where I get to take risks in certain ways and do some interesting stuff. And I’m sure it’s not like that ever, but I think everyone should be thinking about how they optimize themselves for the expectations of the market going forward. And I think this is just going to be one of those things. And now is the time to get used to it so that you don’t wake up one morning and you’re the guy who fixes horse and buggy carts and everyone’s driving cars. That’s an extreme example, but we’re clearly in a moment where there’s going to be an upheaval in the way people produce are productive in the job market, especially in tech.
There’ve been a lot of changes in headcount and continue to be, and I think that the expectation of someone, of someone being an actually hands-on individual contributor while being strategic and technical, I think there’s people that are going to start expecting that. A lot of the headcount that’s getting removed is, yes, extreme examples are kind of the easiest way to make a persuasive argument, but I realize, but a lot of that headcount that’s being removed is kind of these middle management that I think people are realizing is creating more bureaucracy and bottlenecks than actual productivity. So you see things like companies are getting rid of their product managers and just having the devs take that over because they felt like this was just kind of a middleman without any technical skills. And so there’s an expectation now that developers having, so it’s kind of going both ways. But yeah, I don’t know. That’s just kind of what I’m observing. And personally, I’m excited about it. A lot of fun to be had, and there’s an opportunity to find Alpha for yourself because not everyone else has caught up yet. Eventually they will, but now is the time to grab a hold of it.
Cameron Collins:
Yeah, I mean, I think that it’s a really interesting point where you mentioned that a lot of developers are expected to start to think strategically, and that’s really just the flip side of should revenue operations be thinking from a technical standpoint? Well, if we look at people who are CRM admin or who are developers, and this is speaking very broadly now, I think there is definitely an expectation that they’re able to think a little bit more strategically. And obviously the more value that you can add to your own role, the better it’s going to be for you as an individual. But ultimately, if you are, say a HubSpot admin and you’re just sitting there building things all day long, then it becomes very difficult to articulate the value of what you’re doing. If you can’t say what you’re doing, why you’re doing it, how it impacts the business, then maybe in a very large company that has someone in Revenue operations who can articulate the technical components, that might be okay, now you have a place as a dedicated developer. But especially if we look at this small to medium sized business and these companies that are moving toward enterprise, I think that that’s really that niche of it benefits you to be technical and strategic so you can fill both roles.
Mark Lerner:
Yeah, I mean, I just kind of see a world where there’s going to be a singularity or a convergence between technical and strategic in that there’s not going to be, I think the same kind of clean separation of the two. Whether that’s a good thing or a bad thing. I’m not sure getting rid of product managers completely and having only developers manage that. Not sure if it’s a great idea. I guess we’ll find out. I know there’s, from what I can tell, a lot of friction between those two groups of people. So we’ll see about that. That’s an experiment that is now live. I think Meta did it as far as I understand, and Airbnb as well. There’s a bunch of big people, big companies that did.
But yeah, I don’t know. It’s super exciting. I think I love that HubSpot’s building this into their product, having the Breeze ai, the opportunity to create custom applications to fill the gaps that don’t exist by the existing app ecosystem, I think is going to be a huge opportunity for admins. If you have a little thing that probably wasn’t enough value for someone to create an app to solve, and it’s maybe idiosyncratic to your company and may not be relevant to other people, kind of building a solution in the form of something on the backend for your organization is, and being able to do it kind of on your own without needing to sprint and developers and all these things is huge value to your company and really kind of sets you apart. And I see all sorts of opportunities there.
Cameron Collins:
And I think that a lot of this speaks into just the notion of career progression. Because if you really enjoy coding for example, and that’s just your thing and you don’t really care to be strategic, there’s definitely a career path that is director of IT or CTO, and you maybe don’t necessarily have to be thinking, I don’t want to say you don’t have to be thinking on the strategic side because there’s certainly value, especially as you move toward the executive front, but you don’t have to necessarily be thinking both the rev ops and the technical side. So ultimately, if you are more technical, there’s still very much a career path for you. But if you are in this HubSpot admin CRM admin space and you are wanting to do revenue operations, you’re wanting to do CRM admin work, you enjoy thinking strategically. I think that that’s where, it’s not necessarily a new role, but it’s just changing the amount that people can contribute. Because with ai, the barrier to entry is so much lower.
Mark Lerner:
Oh, yeah. Yeah. I mean, when I sit down and kind of think about it, it feels, maybe this is just the third cup of coffee talking, but it just feels like anything’s possible that if you can think it, then there’s nothing stopping from at least making some sort of solution, the most minimum viable solution. You can do it at least to prove value. It’s like if you can observe a problem and kind of understand why it’s happening, then you can think of a solution and not need to go through a whole kind of resource intensive process to actually start working on it. It’s, it’s very gratifying when you get to do that stuff. So I’ve just personally over the last year have been going out of my way to do that stuff, A, to get the experience and B, because it’s fun.
Cameron Collins:
And I mean, the important thing to remember is that because all of these programs are free or have a free version, I mean, if you are established in your career and you’re not learning how to use these, just like with everything else when it comes to technology, the next generation is, and I mean
The reality of the situation is the biggest problem that teachers may have with AI right now is with students that are creating papers or whatever, that now you have to try to find a way to detect it. But I think that the flip side to that is you have the next generation coming into the workforce who have that experience of, oh no, for us it was go onto Google and I mean people could plagiarize that way. Well, now it’s using ai. And so the reality is that if you’re more establ in your career and you’re not already playing around with it, you have people that are, and that’s just the next round of competition for being able to balance what is going to become expected of any given role.
Mark Lerner:
Absolutely. Absolutely. I mean, I think it’s the way we interact maybe with a generation or two above us or the way that we see them use the technology that we’re very comfortable with a smartphone or something or try to get them on a Zoom call. And especially during the pandemic, it was kind of this hilarious meme, but I know that for me, I don’t don’t want that to happen. I want to be ahead of the curve on any sort of technological change so that you can get the value from it and not be left behind. So I would suggest to all the folks out there to try to do the same.
Cameron Collins:
And I remember not this past inbound, but the inbound prior Dharmesh Shaw said a quote during one of his keynotes where he said, inbound will take your job, but it will open up one that you can love even more. And at the time, I didn’t really know what that
Mark Lerner:
Meant. You mean AI will take ai not you said,
Cameron Collins:
Yeah, AI will take your job and it will open up a better opportunity for you.
Mark Lerner:
And
Cameron Collins:
I didn’t really understand what it meant at the time when he had said it, but I mean, again, if we go back to this example of using HubSpot and being able to use Breeze to just do things that maybe previously I couldn’t have done on my own or it would’ve taken me longer to figure out how to do it, it’s not that I would say I’ve lost what my job was. But really what we’re talking about here is just the evolution of a role and everyone’s jobs are changing in so many ways, but ultimately it’s incumbent upon us to go in and play around with Claude and Chat GPT and Breeze and just all of the different platforms and figure out how can I use this to enhance my day-to-day.
Mark Lerner:
Yeah, I mean, I think I agree with what he’s saying. It depends on which you he’s talking to because there are people who it’s coming for their job and their job won’t exist. I mean, if you look, unless they’re at the top 1%, right? So if you look at something like freelance writers, there was a huge industry of people churning out SEO content freelancers. And if you follow the Reddit groups of those people, they’ve been decimated all of them. Unless you’re the best of the best, the best. And if you are, then you’re getting a lot of business, but there’s not a lot of room at the top. If not everyone can be in the top 1%. So there are people, if you’re not striving to be that if your job was really just kind of papering over inefficiency in something and not really being strategic in any way, you’re just kind of clocking in and clocking out or kind of putting a thing in a peg in a hole or whatever, that’s not going to last much longer. It kind of comes back to you have to, the technical and the strategic I think is the thing that keeps you in the game.
Cameron Collins:
And so if we use maybe the most straightforward example, someone who’s a developer, you sit here, you code, you’re in JavaScript, you’re in Python, you’re developing all day long. Do you foresee AI making that obsolete?
Mark Lerner:
Listen, I don’t want to sound hyperbolic, but over the last week I have been working on my own little side project where I essentially built a React application using a database and serverless functions and headless CMS and all this stuff using ed ai. I’m not a developer. I didn’t even know what those words meant, and over the last week I kind of did it. And so yeah, if you’re a junior developer whose job is to just someone sends you a ticket of write this code, it’s just not going to be around much longer because the ability for a non-technical person to have access to that knowledge and have someone actually essentially walk them through doing it, if they can articulate what it is they want is going those junior people who are really not the ones thinking about what the end product is and they’re just kind of getting a ticket to fix a bug or whatever, they’re not going to be around much longer because maybe this is an extreme example again, but anyone can do it today.
If there’s a bug in a code and I sit in front of it, I copy paste the bug into the chat window and say, Hey, why is this error there? And then after maybe 20 minutes back and forth, we kind of figure it out and we update it. And that’s only going to get easier. So yeah, if you’re a junior developer and you’re not thinking about how can I also be strategic in some way and be kind of thinking about strategy about where this goes, the moat around your technical abilities is just not as deep as it once was.
Cameron Collins:
Do you foresee someone who is strategic being wiped out? So you’re that same developer and you learn how to think strategically about what needs to be developed, how to implement it, where to go next.
Mark Lerner:
I mean, listen, I think you give yourself the best chance, the only chance to stay, to keep going. And everyone always talks about how whenever there’s a technological innovation, jobs are lost, but jobs are gained in ways that we never imagined. We don’t even know what the infrastructure or whatever that’s going to have to support this change. And so there’s probably a lot of other jobs that are going to be made that we don’t know exist, but they might require training and it’d be a hard shift. So yes, if you’re strategic and technical, you could be replaced, but I think the people that are going to, the only people, I don’t want to make absolutes here, but basically the only people that are going to be the ones that thrive are going to be ones that can do both. And it’s maybe not happening tomorrow, but the ability to do it is there for anyone or most people. And so you can kind of make yourself more valuable. And I think people are looking for that. I hope.
Cameron Collins:
I mean, a year ago I got frustrated, I would go into chat, GPT, have it generate code, and then I couldn’t run the code in chat GPT, and I was like, Ugh, now I’ve got to go get another program and figure all this out. And it is mind blowing to think that we’ve gone from that to where now we have agents that can essentially run on your computer and we know it’s not perfect, but I mean it can do all the things for you now
Mark Lerner:
For sure. These are the things that we’re seeing. These are the things they’ve released. Who knows what’s in the pipeline in the skunkworks right now, I suspect there’s a level of holding back. For all we know, the A GI is already there in open AI’s office and they just aren’t releasing it yet, whatever that means. So yeah, I mean the level of innovation and disruption is really is big. And there were a lot of other kind of false starts. I think the big one I can think of is, and no offense to the crypto folks out there, I’m sure you can give me a million reasons why crypto is valuable, but there was a huge hype wave around it and everyone should learn about it and what it is. And yes, Bitcoin’s crushing it and all this, but NFT stuff, I was very skeptical and I remained skeptical. And I think maybe some people were jaded by that. They see this other kind of hype train coming in and they’re like, ah, it’s another crypto, whatever. But they’re very different things. I mean, I can explain to you why AI is valuable. I still can’t explain to you why there’s any value in a token,
Cameron Collins:
Even if artificial intelligence didn’t have more development from where we stand today. And we know that’s, I mean, there will be continued development, but even if there weren’t, I mean, there’s so much value that’s been added just by what we have access to today publicly. And so one can only imagine where we’re headed as we move toward a GI and just an even stronger capability. I mean, it’s going to be amazing. And so I think that over the past year for myself speaking just for me, I’ve definitely gone from being someone who was on the more skeptical end. I know I saw value in it, but I was certainly on the more skeptical end to certainly realizing, no, this is something that has a day-to-day impact, and you’ve got to get with the program. And so for myself being on the strategic side, being in revenue operations, it definitely means learning how to use it so I can become more technically capable myself. And then again, if you’re on the flip side and you’re more technically inclined, use it to learn how to think strategically.
Mark Lerner:
I think that transition is, at least for me to conceptualize Scott, is tougher because I wouldn’t, the technical information is basically information. You just need to learn information. How do I do this strategy and strategic thinking and all this? It is much more abstract to me at least. How do you explain that? There’s thousands of years of philosophy around it, but I don’t know. So I actually have empathy for people coming from the other direction because I wouldn’t even know where to start.
Cameron Collins:
I mean, it’s a very different skillset from you think technically you’re developing, you’re thinking strategically. And I’m going to overstep and say I think that people can learn beyond their comfort zone because even for me to learn coding and even to do it with artificial intelligence is a big, big, there’s a learning curve there that’s pretty significant for me. And so if we flip it, it’s certainly not easy, but to your point, if it gives you the best shot for growth development, for stability, then I mean ultimately it’s just how safe do you want to play it? How much do you want to learn? And to your point, where do you start? I mean, it could be anything from a HubSpot certification on revenue operations up through reading books on business development, strategy, philosophy, revenue operations, et cetera. So it’s certainly not an easy transition, but I think that to your point, if it’s going to give you the best chance, it’s one that people should be thinking about today.
Mark Lerner:
And that’s for sure true. And I think thinking strategically might be my default. So it’s not something I really ever think about. It’s just always kind of the thing my mind has always been kind of training on. But if you are coming from the other direction where you’re strategic and you want to incorporate something more technical, I would say that the lowest hanging fruit is just kind of observe the various workflows that happen within your organization, whether it’s success or sales or marketing and the bottlenecks, the challenges. If you see something that breaks a lot or you’re like, why do they need to download this CSV here and upload it there? That’s crazy. If you see something like that, take it down, sit down for a minute, open up Chachi, bt, and kind of work through how you might be able to automate something like that and present it. And A, it’s very gratifying. And B, you might kind of start establishing some additional value for yourself.
Cameron Collins:
And I mean, again, it won’t be easy, it won’t be overnight, but learning a new path for career development never is whenever someone undergoes any type of career change, there’s going to be that learning curve. And so this might be our opinions on this podcast episode, but it is certainly something that one should be thinking about because I mean to the point we made earlier, if you’re not thinking about this today, the next generation, they certainly are. And so I think it’s incumbent upon all of us to do what we can to elevate our careers and educate ourselves as much as we can
Mark Lerner:
And elevate our minds. There’s so much knowledge to learn, and there’s the opportunity for an infinitely patient sidekick to walk you through it that will never get frustrated or to call you dumb. So like you said, what I’ll end with is that these are opinions and we all know what they say about opinions.
Cameron Collins:
And we’ll almost certainly be revisiting this episode 12 months from now, reflecting on the developments of artificial intelligence between now and whatever happens a year from today. Stay tuned. Always
Mark Lerner:
A pleasure. Have a great weekend, everyone.
