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33 Minutes 
Mark Lerner:
All right, everybody. Welcome to this episode of the Revamp podcast. My name is Mark Lerner. I’m the director of growth marketing here at Deal Hub, and very, very happy to be joined today by Jen. Jen and I have kind of been in touch for a few years now, on and off. I got the opportunity to see her in person recently at a conference, and I’m just really excited to talk about something that I think is super important but often neglected, which is documentation. But before we jump into that, Jen, why don’t you give the folks at home a little bit of context about your history and background in this world of revenue operations and how you became where you are today?
Jen Bergren:
Sure. Thanks for having me, mark. My name is Jen Bergen. I’m in San Diego right now, and I think the best title I have for myself right now is operations educator because I’m working on creating educational resources that I wish I had when I was helping build a new company. I started with courses about documentation to hopefully save people time and stress from trial and error and prevent people from needing to start from scratch. I think your second question mark was about how I got into revenue operations. Yeah, so I was looking for work at the time after getting an MBA and wanted to work more, maybe on the marketing and business side of things. I got a job with Nicole at her previous agency, remote ish, and I started as employee number one, mostly doing the marketing side of things and then also marketing tech.
But then we realized after a while, after growing the team a bit, that we were really doing revenue operations as that term became more popular; we were really helping more than just marketing teams. As I rose throughout that company, from that first employee doing everything to serving clients to being the manager of the client servicing team to being the operations manager of the company, we just got more and more into Rev ops, and I started researching Rev ops more as well because all the information online was contradicting itself. It was really hard to find good information. So that’s when I also started doing research for a book, which I’m finally diving back into, hopefully finishing this year.
Mark Lerner:
Awesome. Yeah, we will touch on the book as well, but that reminds me; I think that’s how we first got in touch. I was at a previous company in the same space, and one of the things that I did was put together a daily newsletter
Jen Bergren:
Email. Yes, it was very helpful.
Mark Lerner:
I had very little expectation of anybody paying attention, but I started getting subscribers, and early on, with every subscriber we got, I got very excited. And I think I reached out to you because you were one of those early subscribers, and I think we may have started our journey in this space around the same time. So it’s fun to catch back up these years later and touch base. So on this topic of, sorry, there’s a fly there on this topic of documentation. So, how did you get attracted to this particular notion, and in the context of ops, what exactly do we mean by documentation?
Jen Bergren:
Yeah, so I’ll start with your second question document: what is the documentation? I would say it’s recording who, why, and how to do everything in your company or your role. And then store that information in one place where everyone can find it. I mean, that’s kind of the knowledge management side, but you can’t really do one without the other. And it’s information that’s not only located in someone’s head; that’s what documentation is. So, if you need to have a meeting to extract that information from someone, it’s probably not documented or not shared. And your other question was, how did I get started? Why am I such a big advocate for documentation?
Mark Lerner:
Yeah,
Jen Bergren:
Looking back on it, of course, I realize that I was doing it throughout even my creative careers in graphic design and photography, especially in how to do things. And then I was often the first person hired into a role, and so my job was being split off from my boss’s job, and when I left, I would want to definitely document at least before I left so I could train the next person so my boss wouldn’t have to take on all that work again. And then I got really into documentation when starting at this accompany remote ish because I knew that we were going to hire people and train people to do the work I was currently doing and also so we could easily improve the processes and make them more efficient as we took on more and more clients.
Mark Lerner:
Yeah, there’s a lot of, what do they call it, tribal knowledge, something like that where it’s kind of learning on the job but not really documented anywhere, and then it’s in someone’s head, and that person leaves, and then everybody’s kind of running around not knowing what to do. So besides that kind of maybe not extreme scenario, what are the primary benefits of a thorough documentation process within a rev ops role and across the company?
Jen Bergren:
Sure. So one of the reasons is having context for the past because if you’re going to make changes, which a lot of revs people are making all the time changes in improvements, you need to know what you are changing and what that is going to affect. What are those changes going to affect upstream or downstream for efficiency? That’s another big goal in ops, which is doing more with less. You don’t want to make the same mistakes that you made last time or that someone else already made doing this type of work. So, having it documented helps you prevent that. And so many other things that I get just my mind just kind of goes blank sometimes. There are just so many things flying around so many benefits, but you can’t scale or grow without documentation. We’ve kind of touched on the training earlier, or if people leave, you have to start from scratch. You can’t make predictable, repeatable processes or forecast anything accurately if everyone’s doing work differently or if it’s not consistent. And again, you can’t improve anything if you don’t know what’s going on. How do you improve it if you don’t know what’s happening now?
Mark Lerner:
Right. Yeah, and you touched on something; I think that’s sort of the meta-narrative hypothesis that I’ve been going with for this year, which is this idea of change and a lot of change happening right now, and you have to move fast, and you make a good point that in order to change, you kind of have to know what you’re changing from. You have to be able to, especially if you’re doing a test, an AB test, you have to know what the baseline is you’re testing against. So, I guess my question for you is separate from the documentation conversation. Generally, you made the comment that there’s a lot of change; a lot of rev ops people are making a lot of change right now. From your perspective, what do you think is the driving force of that increase in the need for change and adaptability?
Jen Bergren:
I would say the economy is a big factor right now. I don’t know why I’m laughing, but
Mark Lerner:
What else can you do, right?
Jen Bergren:
It’s kind of a dumpster fire right now, but I would say the economy, from what I’ve also been reading, is changing the way companies get investments. They’re not getting investment, or their money used to be easy to get investment, but now it’s not super expert on that. So, I probably shouldn’t be talking too much about that. I’m going to say the wrong things, but it appears that it is harder to get a return on investment now. And so companies are trying all kinds of different things. They’re trying things, making changes at the same time, making changes to their maybe go-to-market model from different selling methods, and there are many different ways to try to get that return on investment. That might not be great to make all those changes at the same time because if you’re changing everything instead of having one variable changing, it’s really hard to tell what is actually working.
Mark Lerner:
For sure. And I think you hit the nail on the head that certainly the way companies are being measured by the market or by venture capital is no longer kind of the growth at all cost model, but much more the kind of efficient, scalable growth, not just net new acquisition but lower churn and increase the lifetime value of specific accounts. And so it’s a different model, and I think there were some companies that adapted to it well and some that didn’t. But in this kind of rapidly evolving environment for go-to-market teams, how do documentation and good documentation support that ability to make those changes? And what are the negatives of not having good and thorough documentation in that kind of environment?
Jen Bergren:
I would say that documentation helps with those changes because, again, you can see what was done in the past if you have that documentation, what worked, what didn’t work, why it didn’t work, why it might work now, and now that it’s a different environment that will also help you, I don’t know if prove is the right word, but prove to leaders like, Hey, we already tried this. Are you sure you want to do it again because maybe that leader is new? Maybe there’s so much employee churn right now that maybe people don’t realize what was done before.
It’s not that you have to keep doing what was done before, not that it won’t work now, but at least you have that context and knowledge that you have documented. Also, having repeatable processes that work is easy and efficient. And so you don’t have to think about it. You can spend all your brainpower and time on the more things that you actually want to change and need to change instead of day-to-day recurring work that may not be the focus of the changes right now. It is always helpful to have documentation to help with that.
People are going to get burnt out because they’re going to be doing things that have already been done that didn’t work before. They’re going to be making a lot of errors that can be prevented by documentation. They’re going to feel like they can’t take any time off, which is going to contribute to more burnout because no one can do their job if there’s no documentation. There’s a lot of things, but those are some good ones. Not good, but good examples.
Mark Lerner:
Right. So yeah, as you said earlier, you’re doing education for other operators, you’re working on a book, so I assume these kinds of things are offered on your mind, you’re reflecting on them, but in your capacity of in your education and in your writing as well, where do you start? What are the things that you focus on in terms of documentation to provide to people taking your course or maybe reading your book on how to kind of get started or maybe change the way they think about documentation? Where do you start?
Jen Bergren:
I think changing the way you think that was a great phrase about that. Changing the way you think would be changing it into living documentation. It’s always improving. It’s not static. You don’t have to be perfect on the first draft; any amount of documentation, if it’s anywhere near accurate, at least it’s going to be helpful, especially if you’re just getting into the habit of creating documentation for the first class in my full course is just about prioritizing where to start. That could be a big hurdle if people just get overwhelmed, or they don’t think anyone’s going to use it, or they can’t get leadership. So, I am getting over that first hurdle of knowing where to start. And I often advise people just to start small, start with their own task, just start building that muscle of doing documentation on a daily basis. And then, of course, getting peer input about whether this is useful. Don’t wait weeks writing a document over and over again before getting input from someone else about whether it is this useful or not. Is it clear? Does it need to be longer? Does it need to be shorter? And just treating it like a continuous improvement project.
Mark Lerner:
So that’s interesting. Yeah, obviously, getting started is always the hardest part, right? It’s like going to, again, the hardest part is getting your sneakers on and going out the door, and I think it’s a really novel approach to say, okay, well, first focus on it in your wheelhouse, get feedback from if this is useful. And then, I assume the next step would be to try to expand it to the rest of the company or maybe piecemeal. So, how does one make that step once you’ve gotten to the practice of documenting for yourself? If you’ve gotten positive feedback and you’re ready to make a bigger impact with it, what next?
Jen Bergren:
Sure. So once you have documentation, I would say a template that works for you for the writing part and then also a system to keep doing it and keep updating it involving communication methods. Maybe you have a Slack channel that’s probably not called documentation because that’s kind of boring, but maybe it’s called processes, changes, improvements, something that people are more likely to pay attention to. As you are working on your own documentation, perhaps you are putting messages in that channel, not about just the documentation itself, but the benefits that you’re seeing starting to get that communication flowing. You’ll also want to get into a project management system so that not only can you keep doing it, but other people can see what’s happening, what’s coming up, and what’s going to be documented. And then when you have that system set up for yourself, you’ve tested it for a while of all those communication, project management, the documentation, storage system, whatever you choose to use, which for all these tools, my best advice is to start with what you have.
And then don’t start with tool research; that’s really just procrastination. But once you have your version, one of your systems for documentation creation and maintenance set up, then you can start rolling it out, starting with users and getting more users involved and getting more feedback from more users and then bringing in editors and creators and approvers. And these are all roles that different people might have. Some people might have all of these roles, and there’s also a role called maybe a knowledge manager, whatever you want to call that, of someone who owns a certain category of documentation. So you’re going to be splitting up all those categories across the company, so it’s not just all reliant on one person documenting everything. A system dependent on one person is more likely to fail. There’s only that one point; I can’t remember what it’s called. It’s kind of like a bottleneck, but there’s a different word for it.
Mark Lerner:
A single point to failure or something
Jen Bergren:
Like that. Yeah, something like that. Yes. So, make sure you’re spreading out the work.
Mark Lerner:
Yeah, Zoom decides to put these weird bubbles out of your mouth every once in a while. I don’t know if you saw it. It showed a thumbs-up coming out of my mouth. It was bizarre. Very strange. So yeah, I think it’s interesting. Your approach almost feels to me like a product launch for an indie entrepreneur, someone who’s launching a small product on a place like Product Hunt or one of these small places where it’s really starting small, getting users as you go along, and then kind of build momentum. Was that consciously kind of the approach that you’ve taken?
Jen Bergren:
It wasn’t the approach I studied, but I do know there are parallels between the two because I know there’s a lot of change management involved in documentation, like a brand-new way of working. It’s not just like one tool’s replacing another tool that does kind of the same thing. It’s a new thing that people are not usually used to doing. It’s not a habit; it’s not in their daily flow of work before this initiative. And so that’s going to take some time, a lot of communication, and a lot of seeing good examples to help people along the way.
Mark Lerner:
So when you’re working with students, I dunno if they call you a professor or how it works,
Jen Bergren:
No.
Mark Lerner:
When you’re working with students, and I think you’ve kind of been through this course a few times, what are the biggest struggles or challenges that you see, especially early on, beyond kind of taking that first step? Where do people get tripped up or have frustrations, whether it’s because of something they’re not understanding or pushback from their organization? Is there a particular issue that comes up more than any other,
Jen Bergren:
I’m not sure it’s more than any other, but getting leadership buy-in, not just peer buy-in, but leadership buy-in on the time it takes to set up this whole documentation system and then the maintenance afterward, which is less time. But that has been a recurring topic because it can be hard to attribute profits or billable work, depending on your type of company, directly to doing documentation, even though there are these huge lists of benefits that we’ve been talking about. But there are some leaders who have taken my course, and they’re like, oh, I didn’t know that other leaders wouldn’t encourage this because I can clearly see all these benefits. And the other one is time itself taking the time. So I have a lot of advice about putting blocks on your calendar, setting up not just having on your calendar but having it emailing you or reminder or having Slack come through with a reminder or just getting those pop-up reminders in front of you that I need to sign up to documentation and not just something general like documentation, but it tells you exactly what you’re doing next. So you don’t have to go search around and spend that whole hour being like, I don’t know what I want to work on next for documentation, but just having your system set up so it’s easy to do it and maybe not easy to do it, but easy to make yourself do it, spend the time to get it done and continue on some progress.
Mark Lerner:
Yeah, so it’s interesting. I feel like we’re at a point where documentation, especially very robust, interconnected documentation and internal documentation with the advent of AI, probably increases a lot of their value. I mean, if you have a really robust internal knowledge base, being able to leverage AI to retrieve that information for anyone is probably a huge value, maybe even an underappreciated value. Are you seeing any of that kind of play out yet, or is it still in its infancy?
Jen Bergren:
I have heard someone who has made a chatbot or a question bot based on their knowledge base, and I think some of the tools will do that as well. Or you can just ask it a question, and it will pull from the knowledge base. However, the key thing is that you have to have a knowledge base with documentation. It’s not going to extract it from your head. It might help you write a first draft and clean up your work, and there are ways to use it throughout the process, but it’s not going to extract the process information from your head.
Mark Lerner:
Yeah, that’s the problem, right? AI really only has the ability to work with the knowledge it has, and it’s not going to be able to read your mind, at least not yet. Not until we all have brain implants.
Jen Bergren:
The context also wouldn’t have the context and the history it might have where you click around on the screen, that kind of software information, but more of the context and history is going to be hard for AI to extract.
Mark Lerner:
Yeah. Is there a particular model or system that you advise for the structure of these documents or articles? Is it different for everyone? Is it different for different types of documentation, or is there a hard and fast structure that people can follow that makes it streamlined and easier?
Jen Bergren:
I do have a suggested template. Again, that fear of the blank page can be one of those blockers to starting. So, filling in a template can be easier for people to do. It starts with, of course, the title, and then there’s what I call a table of contents, where it has links down to the different sections. Because once someone is done training on the process, they’ve already read the whole document through once. They might need to refer to just one part, but I don’t remember how this part works. I’m going to go there instead of spending all this time scrolling. That helps bring people back to documentation again and again because it is easy to get the information they need. Some tools also let you provide links if you do that kind of heading table of contents where you can just link people from Slack into one specific part of the document.
After that, I suggest having the date that it was modified, who changed it, who owns this, and who people go with questions if they have a question on this process so people can trust that it’s up to date. And again, know who to go with questions, then I suggest a history or context, or you want to give that a fun name, give it a fun name, but have a section that explains maybe what you’ve tried before. Why is this important for their job? Why is this important for the company? Kind of explains the why and what we’ve tried before, so you don’t keep getting a lot of questions. Why don’t we try this? Why don’t we try this? And my questions are good, but maybe not the same ones over and over again. Then, of course, the process steps are broken down into probably either depending on the role or depending on the stage of the process, and at the bottom, depending on your tool, might do this, but recommended next readings related links to case people’s questions were not answered.
Mark Lerner:
Super interesting. So, I want to jump into it. You mentioned you were writing a book, and you have been for a while. I saw you posted
Jen Bergren:
On and off. Yes,
Mark Lerner:
Right. You posted a draft of one of the chapters today. I didn’t have the chance to check it out, but maybe you can tell us a little bit about what you’re writing. What inspired you to get started? What have you learned so far, or what are the challenges in writing? Yeah,
Jen Bergren:
Sure. So the book, it started off it was going to be more like profiles of all these people in doing rev ops and just with their answers to these how many questions that I had, maybe we’ll say 15, it was probably more than that, 15 standard questions I asked everybody, but then I thought I should try to make it more cohesive instead of just publishing everyone’s interviews into a book that is currently called What is Rev ops, which you would think it’s actually been four years sort of embarrassing since I did the research, but four years later wouldn’t still be a question, but it kind of is still a question. Some of the people who have been deep in the industry for a long time might think, oh, that topic is over; we don’t need it anymore. But again, there are many more people in the world who have not heard of it.
Also, the second premise of the book is if we can agree, it doesn’t have to be my definition, but if we can agree on a definition, then Rev Ops can get a better understanding, and we can get better career paths. It won’t be easier to get resources for teams. Everybody will be respected more. It won’t be just confusion of people thinking it’s sales ops or just having no idea what it’s, and so I interviewed 35 people. Some of them phone interviews were like this, but some of them replied with email answers, and I kind of collated, I think that’s the right word, their responses and tried to categorize and come up with good answers and tie them together into a book. And I discovered that a very hard way to write is the opposite of my usual form of writing, which is my thoughts. And then finding research to either support or go against those thoughts, trying to correlate everyone’s expert opinions. But it’s been super interesting to see the similarities and differences between some of the answers to all these questions. And you probably have other questions.
Mark Lerner:
So I think having you working on this over the course of these many years, very, very critical years. I would be interested to know if there are changes in the way people answered those questions four years ago compared to today. I mean, four years ago, we were maybe just not even starting with Covid, right? And so it might’ve been a thousand years ago at this point. And so a lot has changed. So, have you noticed any changes in the responses you were getting over the course of that time?
Jen Bergren:
I did all the research over all the interviews. It’s like two months at the end of 2020, so I haven’t, and I haven’t added more research because I love research, and I’ll just research forever instead of actually putting it together and publishing. So, I had to give myself a cutoff. But of course, I’ve been reading things throughout the time since then, and there haven’t been a lot of changes. People have just mostly wanted to change the name of Rev ops, but not really the whole message. And sometimes, yeah, I can’t think of how to answer that, but there haven’t been a ton of changes other than what we call it. I’m like, that’s not really the key point. But
Mark Lerner:
It’s funny. So when I started years back at the previous role that we had first interacted with, I was, like many people, probably Googled what rev ops is. And I similarly got answers that didn’t. They were just very vague and didn’t quite make sense. I think now, all these years later, if you do that same Google search, something I wrote may come up on the first page, at least it did a couple of months ago, which is wild. But obviously, everything evolves. But it’s true. We don’t really have a shared kind of model. Unfortunately, there are some people in rev ops who just kind of give that name, but they’re kind of glorified CRM admins. They don’t have the strategic influence that they should have. Hopefully, the work you’re doing will bring more clarity and power to those folks.
Jen Bergren:
I hope so. I did try to focus some of my questions on more of the people side of things, not just because that’s what I’m interested in, but because I saw a lot of tools and tech conversations, but I’m pretty sure that’s because most of the software companies were writing about Revs and it served them to talk about, oh, revs are mostly technology based. So I’m like, oh, we’re missing content on the people side, the process side. Lemme make sure I have some questions for people about those topics specifically.
Mark Lerner:
So, as we round out things here in the last five minutes, is there anything regarding documentation or anything else that we didn’t cover that you think is important for the folks at home as a takeaway they should know?
Jen Bergren:
I think just getting started, again, as we talked about getting started, is the hardest part. Even just documenting one process, just choose one that maybe you’re doing weekly that you just don’t want to think about anymore. You don’t want to use your brainpower to think about it. How do I remember how to do this? Just write it down, get it out of your brain. Use your brainpower for something more important, something fun, new, and creative if you’re making a new process.
Mark Lerner:
Yeah. Great. So before we round things up here, why don’t you tell the folks at home where they can maybe learn more about you, take the course you’re talking about, maybe learn more about the book or any of the other content that you work on?
Jen Bergren:
Sure. I have a website that’s my name, which is hard to spell, but hopefully, it will be somewhere in the show notes that people can copy. I’m also on LinkedIn a lot every day. I also have a version of the course now on marketing ops.com, which is easy to spell. So you can find the on-demand version there. And we’re working out some dates for a live version as well.
Mark Lerner:
Very exciting. Okay. Well, Jen, it’s been a pleasure. This was really fun. I’m glad we got the opportunity to do this, and looking forward to more draft chapters of the book and getting to read the actual thing when the day comes. Thank you so much.
Jen Bergren:
Thank you, mark.
Mark Lerner:
Yes, have a great day.
Jen Bergren:
You too.
