About the speaker

Jeff Ignacio currently serves as Head of Revenue Operations at Regrow Ag. He has worked in Go To Market Operations for both large companies (Google, Amazon AWS) and growth companies (Visier – sub $10M to $70M, UpKeep, and Forethought). His deep understanding in aligning both strategy and execution has helped to build teams, infrastructure, and processes needed to unlock growth.

Mark Lerner:

All right. Welcome everybody to RevAmp. I’m your host, Mark Lerner. Really excited to have my friend Jeff with us today. Jeff and I have had, we’ve talked a lot on Zoom over the last few years. I think I came across Jeff from his activity in some of the communities we’re both in as well as some of his content. And we’ve had the opportunity to just chat and I really find him to be a valuable resource, so I’m really looking forward to it. Jeff, I’d love for you to kick things off by giving us some background about who you are and what you do and where you come from.

Jeff Ignacio:

Hey, mark, always a pleasure to just get a chance to talk to you, meet you in person. As always, I think you and I have operated at different levels, right? Professional friendship over the last couple of years, so I really appreciate you in all that you do. Name’s Jeff Nascio. I lead Growth and revenue operations at Regrow Ag. We’re a technology focused company on tracking changes on farm for your Scope three emissions so that companies can meet their 2030 targets to decarbonizing the world. I’ve been in revenue operations for roughly about 10 years now. I develop a bunch of content for revenue operators in the form of courses with the rev ops, co-ops, so sales ops course, a Rev ops course. We do that every quarter. Also the Rev engine newsletter, rev Ops impact, I call it ROI. So how can you get the ROI out of Rev ops? Rev Ops impact, and that’s out of our substack newsletter. And then I also run a podcast myself with Cognizant, and it’s called the Rev Ops Review.

Mark Lerner:

Wow. Yeah, actually I’m looking at the newsletter right now, and I did not put together that acronym as being ROI. So that’s clever. I love a good clever acronym. Yeah, you’re very prolific in helping revenue operators out in the ecosystem. I think it’s been fun to watch because the space has been so dynamic and changing back even only a few years ago, the title rev ops was sort of niche. I mean, it was like people had these sales ops and marketing ops. Now, I think last year it was the most sought after job role in LinkedIn or something along those lines. So I’m interested, I think from your perspective, how has this role of rev ops and the people that you interact with when you’re doing some of your courses, how has that changed over the last few years and what do you think kind of the reasoning behind those changes are?

Jeff Ignacio:

So I think you see a couple of things, right? The term revenue operations doesn’t yet exist in a lot of different companies. It might have also a different naming convention, so go-to market operations. I actually think that’s a better word for it, but rev Ops is the label that’s kind of stuck. It’s catchier because revenue is a lagging indicator at the end of the day. And go-to market is a predictive action that we all take collectively as a group in order to meet our customers and meet with prospects. But rev ops is what stuck. And I think the major changes that we’ve seen are a couple of things. Rev ops tends to lean towards a unifying experience of your operations teams. So a lot of companies have marketing operations, reporting to marketing, sales ops, reporting to sales, and if you’re lucky, you have a support or a CX operations team supporting your customer experience organization.

And the question then is do you unify all of that under one leader or one org chart? And there’s a couple of pros and cons to it. Like anything, it’s never a silver bullet. And so you can unify the company’s organizational operation resources under one banner, and what that would do is you basically create hopefully more alignment upstream, downstream impact on processes and systems would be cleared and discussed right away. But you’ll also now introduce a layer of ticketing and request through essential revenue operations leader. So there are some organizations who experiment with a hybrid org format where you basically have a business partnering function of your CX operations person interfacing with css, but still reporting to rev ops. So now you could feel like you have two bosses instead of one. If you are that CX operations person. Another format is to operate at the higher level with spending more time with a CRO and still having functional operations that gives you some flexibility with speed to deployment for a lot of your projects that you might be thinking of as well as your operating cadences and reporting. So I think a lot has changed, and let’s be frank, this started out in B2B SaaS, so that’s the one sector that’s been hurt quite badly with the economic environment. Other industries probably are still growing, are doing fine shielded from what’s happening in the B2B SaaS space. And I see some companies that are outside of SaaS starting to look at revenue operations as an org chart model for unifying all their org resources. So those are some changes that I’m seeing, and I personally think this will be an ongoing thing for the foreseeable future.

Mark Lerner:

Yeah, I agree. And it’s interesting to hear from that perspective. Some of the things that stuck out in how you were kind of talking about the evolution, silos alignment, those are kind of the keywords, right? It’s this idea of instead of people working independently in all of these roles that all touch this end goal of revenue, as you said, it’s a lagging indicator, but that touch the go-to market motion instead of having them kind of exist separately to combine them into some sort of well-oiled unified machine, which I think might’ve been an ideal previously but possible that the technology to support that, which wasn’t there. But do you think that how quickly everyone had to figure out how to do work from home and go remote and support all of these remote tools in the sales process, do you think that was a forcing function to really kind of move rev ops into a more marquee role than it was previously? Do you think covid benefited for Rev ops?

Jeff Ignacio:

I’m not quite sure. I have a different theory of why revenue operations came into Vogue. And so we go back to the history of all these tooling. We went from on-prem to cloud-based software. And so you can miniaturize different point solutions for different functions, different groups within the business. And so now you can build these specific point tools within the org sales tools, marketing tools, CSS tools, move it onto the cloud, and you actually can shift the resourcing to administer and design these tools away from business systems and IT to the functions themselves. So then sales marketing and CSS had to look for resources that could really match their business processes and flush it out into these systems and hence the role of the systems administrator. And so now you have these technical resources who are also go to market minded, quite frankly, a lot of go-to-market.

Folks who dabble in these tools end up becoming administrators unto themselves. And then eventually you create a cacophony of different folks in silos and companies themselves wanted a unified leadership. So the chief revenue officer became a role that was kind of growing in fashion first, and then the revenue operations leader was a fast follow onto the CRO. So you needed to bring in A COO to the revenue that its chief revenue officer and that COO to the CRO was the rev ops leader. And so that’s why you were able to see certain businesses unify their end-to-end customer experience by bringing it under one leader, but then to make their vision reality, you had to bring in that rev ops leader. So I think that’s what pushed it. Covid changed the business landscape tremendously. We moved to working from home. You saw a rise of digital tools.

You saw the outside sales model turning into an inside sales model. So folks who were selling to the enterprise accustomed to traveling and meeting clients in person had to do all that work virtually. And so you had the rise of these cloud-based tool, cloud-based tools, sales automation, so outreach, the sales loss of the world, then you start looking at better demo tools, better product onboarding tools. And so it really created an opportunity for folks to create a better working from home selling experience because quite frankly, a lot of businesses were used to selling in person or over the phone. The reality of this also, it’s not all just pros, right? The cons, people don’t pick up their phone anymore because they’re not at the office, there’s no office phone, and if people don’t want to pick up their mobile phone, like spam likely, or I dunno who this person is, you’re just not going to pick it up. And then you’ll also see emails like everyone’s inboxes are a disaster now because we couldn’t reach you with phone calling, so we’re going to try emailing you. So now you’re getting blown up on your email. And then I’m now seeing companies, SMS hit me up via text. So one channel gets shut down, another just expands in terms of the spam. And so I am seeing Covid really transformed how we go to market.

Mark Lerner:

Yeah, actually this is kind of a non-sequitur, but are you an inbox zero kind of guy or is your inbox just a total disaster? Yeah, I can’t go to sleep at night unless there’s zero. It’ll keep me up. So I am militantly inbox zero to the point where I miss a whole bunch of emails because I just have to not have them. I can’t see that number. People who have, they’ll show me their phone, it says 3000 unwritten. I’m like, how do you survive?

Jeff Ignacio:

I’m not a zero inbox guy, I’m an inbox a hundred guy, so I’ll probably have a hundred unopened emails. I try not to let them H out too long. I will get to them, but quite frankly, most of the emails that come in my inbox are not top priority. They’re very few things that top priority. Most of the time it’s a shoulder tap via Slack or a meeting on my calendar and I actually say yes to, I’m going to join that meeting. That is what is probably top priority.

Mark Lerner:

Yeah, I agree. I mean there is a lot of noise and usually around holidays is when I have the opportunity to unsubscribe from all the junk that I’ve been subscribed to because I get all those emails. But kind of back to what we were talking about, I think your hypothesis about ops being a fast follow from the CRO role I think is super interesting on one, I hadn’t quite thought through a bit, but it makes sense because organizationally that is the shifting of the mindset from having a chief sales officer and a chief, whatever, a chief revenue officer is kind of over the entire revenue organization and that person needs their general in the field. So that makes a lot of sense. I want to shift, we talked about the things that have happened so far right now we’re in early December of 2023. So 2024 is just around the corner. Obviously it feels like every year for the last three or four years has been a decade. So much has changed and it’s been so hard to foresee some of these changes like who could have really foreseen covid or the things that happened as a result, but we can try to put on our profit P-R-O-P-H-E-T hat and look into the future over the next 12 months.

How do you think someone in a rev ops role, how do you think the expectations on that role will shift and evolve and change over the course of the next 12 months?

Jeff Ignacio:

So in 2024, I think you’ll see we followed a lot of the macro trends. And the macro trends take time for its way to work its way through the economy and what we’ve seen in the last three or four years, if you’ve been in the startup world, every year, like you said, has felt like a decade. We’ve had to tap dance and dodge a lot of different challenges out there. Covid the end of ERP zero interest rate policies, and then now you’re seeing probably a repricing as multiple assets and businesses that are out there. I was just looking at a couple of LinkedIn posts talking about net recurring revenue. And in the sales tech space, ZoomInfo was kind of a big story, and you can see that their NRR was south of 90%, meaning that their ending a RR or MRR plus expansion minus churn should technically be over a dollar.

That’s how you grow in a subscription based business. But now that they’re under 90 cents, you’re actually seeing probably competitive erosion in terms of pricing in their core segments. And then also customers are either not renewing, going out of business or they’re downgrading. And you’re quite frankly seeing that in a lot of B2B SaaS because the number one customer, if you look at the industry flag within a lot of these customers companies, you’ll find that they’re selling to other B2B SaaS companies. So you’re seeing this shrinkage of the entire space. So where do I think it’s going to change? And I think it’s be very specific around which segments of the market. If we’re talking about startups, I think you’re going to have to operate with a do more with less environment, the headcount that you’re requesting. You’re not going to get all the headcount you’re asking for.

In fact, you might not get any headcount. So you’re going to have to buckle up and think through what does duct tape and bubble gum look like? Well, you’re probably going to have to operate with duct tape of bubblegum next year, right? Rather than buy, you’re going to have to think about build building options are going to be prevalent. You should also plan for trying to build simple. Don’t build complex. If you build simple, you’re incurring less technical debt by definition, and you’ll have to pay that back with very little fanfare down the road. But if you’re going with a very complex solution, you could be finding yourself in a world hurt in 20 25, 20 26 if the market shifts. Another thing we want to look for is the tooling. A lot of people have already rationalized a lot of their tooling. They’ve already dumped 10, 20 points on their dollar that they spent for tech tooling, and a lot of folks have been shopping for bundles.

I expect that to continue. I expect renewals to also be renewal is going to be a conversation. It’s not going to be an autorenew. So if you’re in a rev ops role and you’re working with your finance person, you should know exactly when you’re going to renew on specific tools. You should be working backwards 60 to 90 days having a conversation whether or not you’re going to renew, double down or spend less. And I guess you’re probably going to want the same product for less. You’re also going to probably want to negotiate your payment terms. You’re probably, instead of paying annual upfront, you’re probably going to play hardball and go quarterly, monthly. It’s just the way the game is played because now we have new mandates to preserve cash and increase our cash flow. Other areas where I think, I personally don’t think revenue operators are going to get a lot of help in terms of learning development from their teams, especially at the startups.

So I expect your working hours probably to tick up a little bit. And so what I would say is invest the time, especially during the holiday season, during December, when times are a little bit slow, go learn something new. Go learn a new skill. That skill hopefully on the backend is going to save you some time. Learn how to automate something. The first time I ever learned how to automate something was reading, automate the Boring Stuff as a Python book, and I learned how to use automation to quickly shape time off my day. Also leverage the AI tools that are out there. I think they’re super powerful. Folks get stuck on a lot of things, and I think the old way was try to hammer away at it all night. Second way was looking at it up on YouTube or Stack Overflow, but third was going to communities and hopefully someone was generous enough to give you the answer. And fourth is now using these AI tools. I think they’re pretty powerful to helping you become a four x five x operator. That’s what I expect for next year. I don’t think it’s going to be a rosy picture. I think it is. You’re going to do more with less. You’re not going to get your headcount. It’s going to be a build versus buy year, and you’re going to have to invest in yourself and pick yourself up from the bootstraps.

Mark Lerner:

So a very not much light at the end of the tunnel. On the macro picture.

Jeff Ignacio:

Yeah, a bit of sombering. Sorry.

Mark Lerner:

Yeah, I actually, I’ve heard that a lot, but I’m, to me, that makes me more bullish. If the market is negative than any sort of positive sentiment that pops up, it has a greater impact. But that’s more of an investor mentality.

Jeff Ignacio:

Investing yourself if investors are investing in the business, investing yourself is what I say.

Mark Lerner:

Yeah, I’m totally on board with that. So you approach, you were approaching that from the perspective of the revenue operator within their organization in terms of what they can expect in terms of resources and expectations upon themselves in terms of making more with less looking at the larger picture and multiplying that across all the customers. Right? So that’s going to happen in every B2B SaaS, meaning that the company that this person works at is going to be suffering from having their customers being told they have to cut their budgets and have less resources. And what that says to me is that being able to help operationalize the renewal process, the upsell and opportunity, taking advantage of those opportunities and finding those opportunities, kind of operationalizing and facilitating that for the internal team is going to be a more important task. Is that something that you’re seeing Rev ops folks put effort towards today? Enough effort? Is it something that it seems like the net new acquired customer tends to get the lion’s share, but is that existing customer expansion opportunity getting enough attention from rev ops and will it require more?

Jeff Ignacio:

The answer is no. I would think that sales operations is primarily the first place where operations tends to invest. It’s also, there’s a feeling that rev ops is just sales ops in disguise or sales ops rebranded. You’ll hear that quite a bit. And then we hear this all the time. I always post this that CX operations is the underfunded child in the house. They’re the ones who don’t get the allowance, and that’s totally fair and true in a lot of companies. You ask folks, what’s the first headcount you’re going to hire? They’re going to tell you sales. Then when do you hire CS? Well, we hire when the customer gets here as opposed to, Hey, let’s hire instead of just in time CSM hiring. Why don’t we hire the CSMs ahead of time? Especially if you’re going to bank on growth numbers from your existing book of business.

But if we’re shifting our attention to growth next year, there’s a couple of ways that I’ve seen this, and I’ve seen this at the go-to market 2023 conference that pavilion hosted insights partner was on stage, and Jeremy Donovan showed this chart where sales and marketing expense as a percentage of revenue has actually stayed flat year on year. So obviously you have an envelope that you’re right sizing and you’re trying to stay within that 40% range. But the customer acquisition cost to cac, that’s your total sales and marketing expense divided by the number of new customers that you’re acquiring. That number has exploded. It’s actually increased upwards up into the right. And that’s very dangerous. And the reason that is, is even though you’re spending the same amount on sales and marketing, you’re actually acquiring fewer customers. So your CAC is now increasing, and to pay yourself back over time, you’re going to have to have either a lower return rate, that means that the customers with you for a number of more years, or you’re going to have to slap price increases on them over the long term.

I think you can do both. But with the CSM, the focus is going to be let’s preserve and protect our current balance sheet with our current customers. Let’s make sure that they’re getting the value that they expected when they first signed up with us, and that if we find a path to expansion, we know early and can develop a play or a series of conversations with that prospect that’s going to say, we’re your partner for this specific space. We are not a nice to have. We are a need to have. And you cannot operate that well without us. And so what we’d like to do is make sure that we’ve locked you in for a couple of years and we cosol whatever you’re going through and finding that true value and then making sure that we’re collecting the right amount of value in terms of a RR or revenue with you, but just making it a shared conversation. So I do think we’re going to start shifting our resources as a business to looking at protection of that revenue, making sure that our net recurring revenues over a hundred percent and that we still try to bring in the growth. But the reality is if you average it out across the landscape, metrics don’t look so rosy on new acquisition.

Mark Lerner:

Yeah, that is a scary thought. I hadn’t seen that metric though. I intuitively knew it was there. I think anyone that’s in a company that has a view of pipelines and quarterly productivity and things like that kind of understands intuitively that those things are true. So we’re just about one year out from the introduction of chat GPT to the masses in terms of the actual chat interface. OpenAI had an API apparently well before that, but most of us, at least myself, didn’t really know anything about it. And obviously that was a huge inflection point for everybody. The world changed and continues to change there. A lot of people maybe scoff and say it’s just a parlor trick. It can write maybe generic sounding content. But from your perspective, does this democratizing of access to ai, are there ways in which rev ops can leverage that and are there low hanging fruit that isn’t being utilized by some today?

Jeff Ignacio:

Oh, a hundred percent. If you think about the, I listened to the All In podcast and they published, they were talking about a study, I don’t know the study myself, so this is secondhand knowledge, but they were showing that the companies with software developers who were using the GitHub co-pilot versus companies who weren’t using it, they found that the companies who were using the copilot were 55% more productive. So there’s this argument that’s out there that you become a 10 x developer, kind of like a Mecca soldier wearing a suit of armor on top of you. I find that to be true even with revenue operations, right? So if we’re thinking about the system administration layer, if we’re thinking at the SQL data warehousing, data visualization layer, for example, I run the executive dashboard at my company reporting on finance metrics, and we’re doing a bunch of time series and cross joins in that.

One thing that I’m doing is I write the query myself and damn year came to about 130 lines of code. And guess what? I tried to run it, it wouldn’t run. There are some sort of errors. The error, the compiler is telling me where the issue is, but it doesn’t tell me how to fix it. And so I’m going into chat GBT, and I’m saying, Hey, can you fix this piece of code that I wrote? Comes back to me and says, yeah, not only here’s the issue, but here’s how I can shrink your code by 30 lines. I’m like, oh my goodness. Alright, so showed me a new tip, a way of becoming more productive. So do I think we can reach 55% gains like the software developers are? I think so. I think we could probably crush that. I think we’ll have better gains.

What that means for businesses is you can operate with fewer resources. And I know people are talking about AI is coming for our jobs, it probably is. So let’s be real chat. GBT is an AI use these different models. I know they’re LLMs, they tend to hallucinate and become wrong, but at some point, that solution, that problem is going to be solved, right? You’re going to pair the discreet model on top of these LLMs and you’re going to bake in these capabilities all across all of our tooling at different areas, and it’s just going to make you 55% more productive at the minimum.

Mark Lerner:

Yeah, I think, I don’t know if it was Steve Jobs or he’s the one who’s credited with it, or maybe it was someone else. Bill Gates, someone like that said that when good software or a good product really works, it’s akin to the feeling you have when you experience magic. And that’s the initial reaction I had to chat GPT and the reaction I often have with it. But I agree with you, I think it’s kind of democratized a certain level of knowledge around development and coding that even if you had some knowledge, there was always a little gap and you would need to kind of, like you said, go into a community or stack overflow or ask a coworker. And that was always a friction point. And now those of us who aren’t educated in that world are able to bridge that gap and do things independently.

And I have very little background in code, and I’ve been able to do some of those automating things myself and really scale that up from little internal projects to company-wide workflows and automation. So I agree with you. So I guess as we wrap this up, I want, let’s say that we’re December 6th, 2024. We have our follow up of this episode, Jeff Ignacio 2.0. How do you think some of the projections we talked about, how do you think we’ll look back on this conversation. Will it be like, oh, that was cute and naive, or do you think, yeah,

Jeff Ignacio:

Predictions are always meant to be wrong. I always feel like, but let’s play this out a little bit. People that know this about me, but I studied economics and other grads, so I’ve always been enamored by macro. And then how that plays out to the system is always a wild unknown. But I personally think as a country, people are talking about soft landing and people were thinking about that we were going to land without a recession, but the folks are now guessing that we probably are seeing signs of weakness in the consumer. We saw weakness in the enterprise, the B2B, and now it’s moving into the consumer space. Credit card utilizations are at an all time high, et cetera, et cetera. Federal student payments are coming back. So what does that mean? If we go through a recession, you’ll probably see the fed cut rates.

That’ll be good because cost of capital will be lower. And in venture backed businesses, that’s always a good sign. Does that mean that we’re going to turn the money spot on? No, I don’t think so. But I think you’ve had a number of different revenue operators out there who’ve gone through four years of hell with covid, with erp, and then now maybe a hard landing. You’ll probably see some battle tested veterans out of the revenue operation space. I think whoever grabs these names, these people are going to be valuable, are going to have some extreme value from these operators. So what I’d like to see is probably some of these folks in B2B SaaS that are unemployed right now, and I know quite a few people have been posting, I want to see them remove those green banners on LinkedIn, get great jobs, and be the operators that are probably 10 x more valuable because they’ve gone through some tough times. They have tools like Chat GBT to help them. And so I think a year from now, we’ll probably tee us up for a great 2025.

Mark Lerner:

Awesome. I really appreciate your time today, Jeff, and looking forward to checking in again soon.

Jeff Ignacio:

Always. You’re rolling, mark. Yep.

Mark Lerner:

Bye-Bye.