29 Minutes 
Mark Lerner:
All right, everybody. Welcome back to the Revamp podcast. My name is Mark Lerner. I’m the director of growth marketing here at Deal Hub, and I’m joined by a very special guest, Colette. Colette and I had a chance to meet in real life this last week. We both were attending the Rev Ops AF event in San Diego, which was a lot of fun. Before we jump into our conversation, Colette, why don’t you give the folks at home a little bit of background about yourself and your role and how you got to be where you are today?
Colette Molteni:
Yeah, totally. Thanks, Mark, for the intro. Thank you for having me here on the podcast.
Again, I’m Colette. I got to meet Mark last week in person, which was fantastic at Rev Ops af. It was the first conference of its kind for Rev Ops folks, which was fantastic. A little bit about me: I have been in the world revenue operations, more so on the sales ops end for about seven years now, data analytics for a little bit over a decade, and I got into the role, I suppose I stumbled into it a little bit, which I think a lot of us have, right? When I first heard what on Earth is, I met somebody at my company who was looking to build out a new team, and we got to know each other. We were working on a project, and he said, I’m going to get this team moving. I told him, Hey, I’d like to be on that team, and the next week, I was his first hire. So that’s how I came into this world and learned as I went along.
Mark Lerner:
Yeah, that’s super. It’s true. I mean, I have the opportunity to interview a whole bunch of folks in Rev ops, and almost all of them have a similar thing to how they fell into it because it’s somewhat of a new role. Many people come from the sales ops world. Some people come from other marketing ops, less CS ops, though almost everyone’s kind of transition. Not many folks have started their careers, at least that I’ve talked to yet, in the rev ops role because it’s kind of this new thing. But because it’s new and still kind of evolving, you actually don’t often see a very standard template for a type of person or approach to ops. I think we all have some people who have this kind of idea of what a rev ops person is. Very nerdy, very data-oriented, very kind of stoic and decision-making, and not really relying on anything but data telling you the numbers. But I know that at the event we both were just at, you had the opportunity to give a session, and the focus of that session, I think it was called What’s most important in Rev Ops, something like this, and in parentheses you said that emotional IQ was critical, so maybe you can talk a little bit about what that is and why it’s critical in rev ops.
Colette Molteni:
Yeah, absolutely. IQ is sometimes called eq, ei. You hear different phrases; don’t let that trip you up. It’s all the same thing. Emotional intelligence. Why is it so critical in rev ops? I am going to argue it’s important in almost any role. There’s almost no role or career out there that you can completely avoid people if you like to. I like people, so that’s not an issue, but when dealing with the data, we can get in the weeds so much in the data, and we know the processes. We have our flow charts, and we talk to the various stakeholders, but a big part of our role in rev ops is we’re the glue that holds it all together. We are that intermediary; we’re that party. We’re helping to drive decisions. We’re bringing our research and our data to the forefront, and it’s not just about slapping it up there on a slide or showing it on your screen.
When you’re on a Zoom call like this, you really have to speak to your audience, and a big part of that is emotional intelligence. What is emotional intelligence? Let’s get into that, the phrasing of it, right? You have IQ, which is your intelligence, but EQ is a big component as well. There’s actually a book I really like. I highly recommend Emotional Intelligence 2.0, which came out a little bit over a decade ago. It had a huge influence on me from a very early age in my career. I actually have it right behind me here, and one of the stats it’s given early on in the book that catches your attention is that 58% of your performance success is attributed to the EQ granny job role. That includes rev ops. I’d argue maybe even a little bit more since there can be so many people facing it, and we have to have that influence.
EQ in itself is having self-awareness, being able to manage relationships and social awareness. You mentioned an interesting term with stoic, right? Or that assumption of being geeky, which is guilty. I’m a big Comic-Con geek. I do go to Comic-Con engagements. Been doing that great. Oh, fantastic. I’ve been doing that for about a decade, and thankfully, it’s here locally where I am out in San Diego, but I don’t think we’re one monolithic group in Rev ops. I think there are those stereotypes. Regardless of your personality, interests, or background, I truly believe we can all learn it. We can take different aspects of it and adjust it to our own, and that empowers us to be more successful in our roles.
Mark Lerner:
Yeah. Yeah. I mean, excuse me. I definitely need my own way, and I think we all are. And I think I would be interested in your experience where some folks in the Rev ops space, people in Rev ops roles, whether it’s leadership or visual contributors, where are they sometimes have stumbling boxes with regards to their EQ or EIQ and maybe some ways in which things they can work on in order to increase that.
Colette Molteni:
I think a few areas; one that really comes to mind is thinking about your intent and the impact that you want to have. We can get really trapped in the minutia of day-to-day; I have to get this done. I have this meeting. This report for the KPIs is due. I have to talk to this person. We have so many moving parts in rev ops. It’s been my experience regardless of any organization or team I’ve been in, but going back to it, thinking about the intent and what impact you want to have, whether it’s an email you’re sending, A really good piece of feedback I had a few years ago was I was sending an email out to the sales team and the CS team about a minor process change we were going to have in our CRM, let’s go ahead and mark this, make sure to update it, or you’re going to get a pop-up warning if you don’t want to warn you in advance, and I had feedback from somebody on my team and he’s like, Hey, can I give you a quick call?
Sure, sure. I’ll give him a quick call. I’ll call him James, but not his actual name, sir, the J. But James gave me a quick call, and I’m like, Hey, what’s up? What’s going on? And he’s like, what is this for? Why are we doing it? Why are we making this change? I get a lot of these emails from you, and I didn’t even, I’m like, oh, I thought I explained it, but I didn’t explain it in a way that was when I reread my email, I get it. I didn’t explain why this little change was beneficial for the sales team and the CS team. It was going to be beneficial down the road. They were going to have fewer steps in their process. This was going to be locked in there so everybody could see this information. We were going to capture it early on.
It would make it easier months from then, so they wouldn’t have to remember, and I explained that to him on the phone. He’s like, okay, well, next time, put that in the email. Put that in the email, and then I won’t call you. Then I’ll know. He’s like, I admit, sometimes I get annoyed when I see these emails from the team, and I just delete them, or I get too many emails, so put that in. It was a really good perspective, and I was really thankful for that, that he took a moment. Even at that point in my career, I was still working to develop my eq. I think it’s continually a learning journey, but taking that time to think about the intent and the intended impact.
Mark Lerner:
Yeah, it’s super interesting because it’s like there are so many different elements to consider in that kind of thing, so there are different organizations within a new company, and there are goals and incentives that you kind of have to map back when you are communicating. Then there’s culture; if you’re working in an international company, some cultures prioritize longer, more descriptive emails. Others, if it’s not one sentence, I’m not reading it, and it’s like you have to have to feel it out, and it’s kind of a minefield.
Colette Molteni:
For sure. For sure. I work actually collaborate right now very closely with some of our team members, part of our ops and data analytics team in Germany, and one of the things about my German team, it’s very, and I’ve heard this culturally before, I’m very detail oriented, so are the people I work with, which is fantastic. I love it. I get into the nitty-gritty sometimes. I get the opposite feedback here where, okay, Colette go at a higher level on a higher level, but I think adjusting to different cultures and where you’re working internationally is really critical. I’ve worked closely in the prior organization, cross-training some of our APAC team, specifically Australia, and not so much in my career right now, but in the Asia Pacific. Actually, there’s a fun tidbit about me. I didn’t put it in my introduction, but I actually grew up in Japan until I was about ten years old. Of course, I wasn’t working in an elementary school, but it’s something I’ve really carried over into my career, and a sense with EQ and working internationally and having that perspective that we are in a global workforce for the most part, and I really try to, it is part of eq and as part of listening and interacting with others and working with the global team, taking a moment before I go in, if there’s somebody from perhaps a country I haven’t really worked with before, I try to refresh myself on some cultural norms.
I don’t go in with the expectation that everybody’s going to conform automatically to American norms. Even if it is an American company. I try to bridge that gap and build that rapport. That’s part of EQ, right? Having that interaction, we definitely have to take that global perspective into account.
Mark Lerner:
And it’s so nuanced. I mean, being able to do that kind of homework is great, but there are cultural nuances and communication that you can’t pick up on reading things. It’s like you have to get a feel for the conversation, and it’s a challenge, and if you don’t have that ability to pick up on those signals and kind of reinforce your own learning, like, oh, they reacted a little strangely to that, maybe I need to take a step back and understand that if you don’t have that, it’s tough. Now, you were saying that EQ is something that can be learned. Are there people who are predisposed to having an easier time as opposed to a greater challenge, and is there a floor or ceiling, a ceiling to how much you can learn if you don’t have a certain kind of innate ability?
Colette Molteni:
Sure. I’ve had a similar question posed to me, and I think a really big foundation is something that I advocate with eq. A big part of it is your underlying empathy. Depending on what resource you read, you even sometimes see that as a fifth pillar of eq, your overall eq. I think of it more as a prerequisite, like a feeder into that. I think we all have the capacity for empathy and to build upon it, and I think we forget it throughout our lives as we continue to grow older and get into our day-to-day routines. I see this in my young daughter, who’s three years old. She has quite a great deal of empathy, and her friends just naturally, I don’t have to really teach her. I model the behavior for her, but she does it without thinking in terms of the floor. I’ve had a post-meal, Colette; not everybody can be empathetic.
That’s absolutely true. There’s roughly about one to 2% of the population who are sociopaths or something else, so technically about one or two out of every a hundred people, and I’m not talking about somebody being violent necessarily, just the way their brain operates, so maybe in that case, no, I know there are challenges for some of my friends who do have children who are autistic, there is sure it can be learned in interaction, but the neurodivergence out there, it can be a little bit different. How you process information, how you see signals, it can be a little bit more challenging to pick up on that, and some of that has to be a little bit more learned, and I don’t think there’s at all a lack of empathy. It just is expressed differently. That’s what I’ve witnessed in terms of EQ and learning as a whole, and this actually came up during the session last week when somebody was speaking up and asking a question.
Sometimes, I feel like I have really good EQ, but other times, I don’t. I’m guilty of that too, and I think a big part of that is getting to know what ticks you off, what ticks you off knowing, I mean, look, we’re not perfect. There’s something that may be a pet peeve, there’s something, or there’s something that’s going to have you; it is not going to make you happy when it happens, but having a game plan in advance, acknowledging it, being self-aware, being self-regulated, knowing what to do in that situation, having a game plan, it’s a lot better than being cut at the moment, and yes, I do think it’s possible. Just to summarize the question again, in the book Emotional Intelligence 2.0, there are 66 different ways you can do it. Do I do every single one? No, but I think I’ve taken about a dozen that I can actively do easily that work for me.
Mark Lerner:
Yeah, yeah. I have some experience at home with some of those things with our kids, so that was kind of the source of that question, but I think I, like everybody else, also question my own, and sometimes I feel like I have that self-awareness, especially within the workspace and then I’m like, I kind of get everything and then other times I’m just like, did I just totally miss the signal there? What happened? To drill down into something as relevant in a rev ops role, I think of one of the challenges that come up a lot, and that is, let’s say, adoption of a new product or solution or process or whatever the kind of very data-oriented person could map out, it’s going to take this many hours to this many fields is the most optimal because of this and this and that, but there are obviously other elements at play that would impact adoption when approaching a project like that. Where does planning for utilizing your EIQ come in, and how do you add it to the workflow?
Colette Molteni:
Yeah, that’s a really relevant question. I am in the middle of a giant implementation project. I’m the SaaS team lead on IT, in particular leading the data portion, and I’m working with a lot of stakeholders for the new program we’re going to be implementing. They are completely unfamiliar with it. They’re doing most of this process right now outside the C-R-M-A-C-R-M. They’re doing well on post-its, in some cases, Excel award documents, and phone calls. It isn’t tracked in the way we will be getting it, and a lot of what we do is change management. There’s the technical aspect, but there’s change management. I had a discussion with some of my teammates on this project just a couple of months ago in preparation for this to get us mentally ready. Look, the technical aspect is not going to be the hard part of this. We know how to do that.
We know the best in class practices. We know how the tool works. We are aware we can make these recommendations. It’ll be work, but that’s not going to be the challenging part. The challenging part will be getting this entire division in about 50 or so people to completely change the way they’re doing things, the way they have done things for many years, and to get that buy-in, and with that, I’m going to go back to the empathy part of it, thinking from the perspective listening, the expression, we have two ears and one mouth that really comes into play. Oftentimes, people want to be heard; give them time to talk, give them time to express their concerns because there are often concerns and areas that they might anticipate being an issue with the adoption of a new program, a new process, a new change, and give them time.
Listen, don’t interrupt. Just let ’em talk and come back. You might not have a solution immediately, but you might be able to calm those fears immediately as well. People fear the unknown. People like routine. It’s human nature. I’m guilty of it as well. I like my routine. I like my coffee. I like my shake in the morning. It’s my routine. When I’m off of that for a few days, I like to get back to it. I have a specific routine where it’s human nature smoothing and not over. It’s a big part of change management, and accepting it and mentally being prepared for it, as well as rev ops, you have to account for it.
Mark Lerner:
Yeah, we obviously have all been through some wild experiences over the last four and a half years. One of those was COVID and the trauma that it brought, as well as the complete shift in the way everybody works, so we all went to work from home for some period of time. Some of us are still working from home or partially obviously using communication tools, and there are many of them available to us to do that work, which makes the job of being aware or picking up on signals and communication all that more difficult. Is that a challenge that you’ve seen as well? And B, how do you overcome that when you’re not getting the same kind of body language or inflections in the voice or whatever it is that kind of gives those sense?
Colette Molteni:
Yeah, and I would argue, I mean, this is a challenge even pre-COVID, but it’s definitely more pronounced as we’ve moved into some people being permanently working from home, having a hybrid, and just having more of that blend. Now, post covid, how do we overcome that? Well, there’s a few things. Writing, email, and sending messages, whatever platform you’re using for quick messages. Some people use Slack or Teams or whatever method you’re using. You’re right; I mean the intonation; it gets lost, and the body language is well over half of what we hear. We’re not actually hearing the words. We’re hearing the tone; we’re hearing the body language. We’re seeing somebody lean in, or we’re noticing somebody troll their hair, which I can’t really do, but we are,
Mark Lerner:
At least I have a beard to pull on but no hair, too,
Colette Molteni:
Yeah, yeah, but how do I overcome it? I actually had this just the other day with one of my coworkers on my team, and she had some questions. She was pinging me through the messaging system, and I was getting pulled away from something I was trying to focus on. She was sending me messages like, Hey, can I just call you really quickly? When I call through the system through a platform like Zoom, we don’t use Zoom, but we use a very similar platform. I try to do things on video if I can, and I do that because I want to get the body language, and given picking up the phone, it is something that I’ve really had to push myself to do. I am a stereotypical millennial. I don’t like the phone. I like texting. I like email. I like digital communication when I’m trying to find a service or a restaurant or figure out hours or something.
I like to figure out the digital route first, but it doesn’t always work. It doesn’t. In this case, I was really thankful. This was actually last Friday; I gave her a call. We got it resolved in about three and a half minutes. If we hadn’t done that, we probably would’ve been going back and forth for a lot longer, which wouldn’t have been efficient, and it probably would’ve been frustrating after a while, but we were able to get to it right, and see that body language, have her point to things, show her screen, right. We were able to get through it.
Mark Lerner:
Yeah, I totally agree. I guess I fall on the millennial spectrum of, I think they call it, geriatric millennials, which is a fun name,
More Generation X, closer to Generation X than not, but I am the same. The phone is a hundred-pound weight. I do find it easier to have video calls than only voice calls. Perhaps it’s because the body language is there. I feel like I have a better handle on what’s going on, but it’s good to know that I’m not the only one who struggles with that. So, unfortunately, I didn’t have the chance to join the session at the event that you ran, but is there anything that we haven’t brought up here that seemed like it really resonated with the audience that maybe would make sense to cover before we finish things up?
Colette Molteni:
Yeah. Well, we talked through the entire session. We actually, we made the full time because we had engaging questions come up. We had people asking. One of the key points was about eq. I think I mentioned it just a little bit earlier. Sometimes I feel like I have good eq. Sometimes I feel like I don’t and somebody else raise their hand. Yeah, me too.
Mark Lerner:
Me three.
Colette Molteni:
Yes, same. Me too. I mean, I feel like I have developed quite a bit. I’m constantly learning, but I’m not perfect by any means, and I don’t pretend to be, but one of the concluding areas of the talk and something I wanted to leave the audience with as I was preparing for the talk, a really good friend of mine was giving me some feedback. I put ’em in the hot seat to give him some feedback. I’m like, look, you’ve known me for a long time. I’m doing this thing for my own career development. What feedback do you have for me personally? You’ve known me for so long, and he posed a question to me, Colette, how long does it take for a plant to germinate? And I said it depends exactly, Colette. That’s exactly right. I’m like, so who cares? The whole point was to get away from black-and-white thinking, which is in Rev ops, and this came up actually as a theme last week in some other sessions; we can fall into black-and-white thinking because we are so data-oriented. We want exact results. We want to have this nice, pretty flow chart. We want to have this process worked out, and sometimes we think very linearly, and the same thing can apply when we’re learning eq, even that question, right? Well, sometimes I am, sometimes I’m not. Exactly. Everyone’s going to be different. We’re going to have various levels of learning. It depends on our life experience, our upbringing, even our genetic makeup, how much we feel, and how much we sense.
There are so many different factors. It’s so nuanced, and the key thing is just that mindset. It depends. It’s variable. We’re all learning. It’s okay. It is great. It depends, so thinking of it like gardening, which I actually have just started my garden, so I started a few days ago. A new plant or box. Watching these little seedlings spread up, it is all going to vary. It takes time, and you build it, and you grow it.
Mark Lerner:
Yeah, I love that. I’m not much of a green thumb myself, but my wife has been much more successful at getting stuff to grow in and around our house, and she gets a lot of gratification out of that. Before we wrap things up, I’m going to give you the opportunity to tell the folks at home where they can learn more about you and some of the other work you’re doing both professionally and then some of the other stuff you’re doing on the side and where they can read more about your background and follow you.
Colette Molteni:
Yeah, absolutely. Thanks, mark. You can find me on LinkedIn. Of course, you can find me at Colette Malini. I believe I’m the only Colette Molteni in the United States, so it shouldn’t be too hard to find me.
Mark Lerner:
Really?
Colette Molteni:
Yes, I have to be able to find another one. There are other colabs, but I haven’t heard that exact combination, so you can find me on LinkedIn. I work full-time at ResMed, so you’ll find that there is a sales ops sales process; what I do on the side, and I’m building, is that I also do speaking engagements. I spoke last week at the Rev Ops AF conference. I focus on the topic of EQ and empathy in particular. You can go to my website @empathyelevated.com. I actually have a free resource there for you to build your EQ, specifically for Rev ops folks, so go ahead and check it out for free. Put that guide together for everybody, and you can find me there to find more information.
Mark Lerner:
Awesome. We’ll put that in the bio on our episode page as well so they can get right to it. Colette, thank you so much for taking the time to chat with me today. This was super interesting, super fascinating, and looking forward to seeing you at the next event.
Colette Molteni:
All right, mark, it’s been a pleasure. Thanks for having me on today.
Mark Lerner:
Bye-Bye
Colette Molteni:
Bye.
