About the speaker

Josh Pudnos is currently the VP, Global Revenue Operations at Exiger, the leading third-party and supply chain risk management SaaS company. With experience in the tech, real estate, and government/policy sectors, Josh has a valuable skill set including strategy, planning, project management, implementation, and leadership.

Mark Lerner:

All right, everybody, welcome back to the Revamp podcast. I am your host, Mark Lerner, and I’m excited, really excited to have a special guest here today, Josh, who I was having a chat with him; I had noticed he was going to be giving a presentation at an upcoming event that we’re all going to called the Revenue Operations Alliance. Super fascinating topic. So we’re going to kind of dig into that. But before we do, Josh, why don’t you introduce yourself to the folks at home, a little bit about your background, where you come from, that kind of thing?

Josh Pudnos:

Yeah, sure. Thanks for having me. My name is Josh Enos. I am the VP of Revenue operations at a company called Exiger. Been there since about January of 2023, so a little more than a year now. So Exiger is a company that provides enterprises and governments with supply chain risk management and third-party risk management software solutions. So yeah, it’s a really good space to be in. You hear about these are major macroeconomic challenges that global companies and governments face all the time, and we are uniquely situated to help those organizations out.

Mark Lerner:

And I think it’s that role, this role that you’re in now, is kind of the focus. So, kind of understanding the topic that I noticed that you were going to be speaking on is this idea of coming into a role and building out a rev ops function from scratch and what you would do the same and what you might not do the same. And I think that’s really interesting because a lot of people find themselves in that position and there isn’t a great kind of rule book for it about what to do in those situations. So maybe we could jump right into what was the context? What was the initial challenge when you stepped into a role where you were tasked with this project of building ops from scratch? What was the lay of the land? What existed already?

Josh Pudnos:

Yeah, so I know a lot of people are in this same or similar situation. I was at this conference last year and ran into a lot of folks. We talked about this and it was a really interesting conversation. So the landscape I stepped into at Exiger was both not that different from others and also had some unique characteristics. Exiger, at the time, was about a 10-year-old company. Initially started as an advisory firm and sold a lot of tech services but was not a software company up until about, not even quite, two years ago, had built some tech and bought some tech. It was really coalescing around needing to develop a modern SaaS go to market strategy starting about a year and a half ago. 

So I hired a few key sales leaders who had that experience, but a lot of the sales folks had been converted into professional services sales folks who had a background much more in financial risk than in this new supply chain risk management area.

And so I was coming into an org that had Salesforce, but there was really no owner of it. And so there was no methodology. Everything was, and not a great state. There was really no sales tech stack to speak of and no processes, and yet had great product-market fit and was growing really considerably year over year, doing so profitably. And so I think one thing that was most exciting to me was this is a company that, with a little bit of help, could really become a great fighter in space and do a lot of great things.

In some respects. I was stepping into very much like a new go go-to-market org, but we had some resources, and we had some wins under our belt that kind of catapulted us into a place that is made more reflective of where our revenue is at today. And so came into the org with the mission of we have a lot of really loft eagles. We had to continue to grow at a pretty rapid rate and I was highly motivated to get us there, and it kind of reflected some of the wins and losses that I had early on.

Mark Lerner:

So you walk into this role; it’s kind of a unique situation. So a company’s been around for a while, but they recently shifted their go-to-market and their offering. So it’s like you can’t boil the ocean. So, what was the first thing you had your eye on? How did you decide that was going to be the first thing to tackle, and what were the main challenges there?

Josh Pudnos:

So, going into this role, I knew that it could be the kind of scenario where we are throwing spaghetti against the wall, or there are a thousand things that need to be fixed immediately. So prioritization really is key. 

I think the best way that I’ve found to approach that properly is by having a mission statement, an anchor statement, or a foundational principle. Our has been, it’s morphed over time. I’ve workshopped it a bit. But today, it’s essentially our mission is to better measure, understand, trust, and drive our go-to-market strategies. And ultimately, we wanted to serve as I wanted my team to serve as revenue architects and anything that didn’t ultimately serve that. There are a lot of things in the revenue operations world that are important functions and needing the business to do. 

But ultimately, if a project or an initiative did not serve that mission and didn’t serve us acting as that architect and that really high-level strategic partner to our stakeholders, then we would maybe want to prioritize it or approach it differently.

And so out the gate I came in, I think this is really one of the things that I would maybe advise other people coming into this position. I came in with a lot of assumptions, a lot of hypotheses about the way that business operated or didn’t or things were broken based on my interviewing and the research that I had done. And I think that’s important just because it allows you to operate a lot quicker. And some of those assumptions, I wish I actually recorded what they were, but a lot of ’em were around; this is probably the biggest problem area for X, Y, and Z reason, and these need to be addressed first. And then from there, I was able to very quickly get a reading from folks about whether or not those were true and that agree to which they were true or not true and could then go in and say, all right, to fix those things, we need these tools, or we need to fix Salesforce in these ways.

And those will ultimately serve that mission so that we can understand and trust the data and can never get to that last part about driving our good market strategies without data that we can accurately measure, consistently, measure, trust, and understand. 

And so those first parts of that mission statement were the most important things that we wanted to try to solve for first. And so that led us to overhaul Salesforce in various ways, having opportunity record types that reflected different stages of the customer life cycle, wanted to make sure that we could start at a high level, even if it was unsophisticated at first, and understand how data flowed through the pipeline and throughout the customer stages. And so that was kind of where we focused in Salesforce and revamping that and training on that. 

And then went after looking for what were some tools that were going to help automate some of the data entry that’s never going to happen without automation to help us start gathering a good data set to better understand the way that we work. And so that’s what led us to the sales engagement tool that we landed on conversational intelligence forecasting and ultimately landed our CDQ instance with the DealHub.

Mark Lerner:

So I think you came into this role, it’s really interesting kind of focusing on the mission statement first it me think about how with SpaceX, everything they do is with the focus of colonizing Mars, which seems like a lofty goal, but if you look every single decision they make, does this get us closer or further from colonizing Mars? 

Obviously, your focus is a little different, but it really does help to have that guiding principle as a rubric for a decision. And I think people skip over that. And I also like that you came in with assumptions, but you tested those assumptions before you move forward. So another thing people might skip, which is, oh, I know the problem and we’re just going to go right to it, but you kind of tested your hypotheses or against the people that are in the company. I think those are really important points. It sounds like there was an evaluation and a revamp of the tech stack with Salesforce being in particular. What were the key factors that influenced your decision on the changes that you made?

Josh Pudnos:

Probably the biggest fundamentally was that I did a brief assessment of how data was being entered into Salesforce, understanding just what made sense want to be. Anyone should be able to hop in. Anyone who is familiar with enough with this world, whether it’s somebody from RevOps whether it’s a CRO, should be able to join an organization, go into Salesforce and not a whole lot of time, be able to get a lay of the land, understand what customers looked like, what a CV was, sales cycle, even just as simple as being able to look at a pipeline and that just wasn’t possible when I joined. And so fundamentally, people needed to enter data in the same way and have clear guidelines around really, really basic fundamentals.

And the inverse of that is true where people need to know how not to do certain things, or more often than not, it’s really just that these were people who are not entering any data into Salesforce. So it needs to be consistent and it needs to be fully input into the system. And what were the reasons that they were doing that, were they not? And so, just really establishing key guidelines. And there was a lot of documentation that I did in the first 60 days about what the source of truth is, how to actually do it the right way, and just at the same time, just changing an immense amount of how that thing operated. So yeah, above all is just like I have to be able to understand the basics of Salesforce. Anything else I plugged into it had to support that, but that was the most glaringly obvious thing to me out of the gate.

Mark Lerner:

So yeah, we kind of covered the, let’s say technical debt of an existing Salesforce instance. I wonder, let’s call it organizational debt. There was, in terms of a lot of companies, especially ones that are older or came from a different space, the bane of RevOps existence; we talk about silos, whether those are operational or cultural. What was your experience encountering those organizational silos and how did that impact the effectiveness of the existing kind of go-to-market, and what did you have to do to overcome?

Josh Pudnos:

Yeah, it’s probably truism at this point that somebody coming into this role would encounter some sort of silos. For us in particular, I think it’s sort of a vestige of the type of business we were five, ten years ago. We had different business units with separate go-to-market functions, tools, and duplicative tools owned by each. And there was really no central way of approaching this. We had a government business unit and a commercial business unit. And when I came in, I was really thankful to have the leadership that saw value in me supporting both and also leadership that understood the value of trying as best we could to have consistent approaches to things such as Salesforce and that way. But there were also just a lot of barriers to entry to help support with commercial. I had sort of full reign to make all the changes I needed to and mostly operate within that organization initially, but within the government business unit, there were other changes that were more difficult to make.

And so I think being able to approach the entire go-to-market as one is really helpful. But I think at different organizations that might be it owning certain tech stack tools, it might be finance owning certain elements that might feel a little more rev, a little more natural. And so I think my approach has been generally to push a little on the things that need to become centralized, that need to be owned by revenue operations without ostracizing, without overstepping my reach because this has been somebody’s function for part of their role for eight years. And just because it’s the right thing to do from my perspective isn’t always the best reason or even just because it actually is the best thing to do the right function for my team to own. So I’ve been measured, and for better or worse, my team’s only had so much capacity that we can’t take on all the things. But I think over time, through conversations with other leaders across the org, it’s something we recognize that these silos exist, and it’s probably not the optimal way of working. And over time, I think it makes sense for these functions and these tools and these actions and responsibilities to live with revenue operations.

And since that time in the last couple of months, my team has moved centrally; we now report to the CFO, which is helpful. We have great relationships across the board, but I think that just allows us to more formally support the entire organization. And the organization outside of revenue operations has made some strides in the last couple of months to operate a little more, moving some functions more centrally to support the broader org. But it’s definitely a challenge. And I think we in revenue operations love consistency and love standardization as much as we can, and I’m finding ways to push and get that in the right direction, but I’m also recognizing where the company is at and the history and willingness for change management too. So we have to be respectful of all those things, right?

Mark Lerner:

Yeah, I mean, it’s a challenge. You are coming in as a change agent, right? That’s kind of your purview. And I know from experience that if somebody’s at a company for quite a while and they’re kind of used to, especially in sales where it’s like you have all the things, you have somebody come in and wanting to make these big sweeping changes especially, and it sounds like the company was doing okay, there might be this kind of, Hey broke, don’t fix it mentality. So how do you thread that needle between being the change agent that you need to be, but also getting buy-in from the people that you’re working with that need to kind of change some of the things that they’re used to doing?

Josh Pudnos:

Yeah, I think there’s a number of different approaches that I’ve done. First of all, I feel like I have to be the visionary here, and the vast majority of the changes so far have come from my team, and I’ve been very fortunate to have a leadership group that is supportive of that. Certainly, I do my best to get their buy-in, but I really feel like we are leading the charge on what should be where we’re going, developing a high-level roadmap, getting their buy-in on these things. And I think a big part of what I would definitely recommend to folks in my position is just consistently just reiterating, retelling the story, constantly communicating progress against the strategic objectives that we’ve set out to remind folks of what we’re doing and the value that we’ve wide, we’ve chosen those as priorities and so consistently, I talk about the same things all the time, and no one yet has told me that I’m a broken record. I think that’s a good reminder and it reminds them that they have put into these.

So ultimately, if you are proving to be the visionary and you’re staying true, you’re holding being held accountable, you’re holding yourself accountable, and you consistently show progress, I think that’s one great measure. I think also being able to show to your stakeholders and leadership where others are not falling in line with the vision that’s set out, whether it’s through usually I think that comes in the form of not adopting processes and tools the way that they need to, and then reminding them that you’ve bought into this idea, you leadership have bought into this idea that this is the value that we need to uphold in the process that we need to instill in our folks. And then working with them to provide them the tools to help enforce certain actions and behaviors.

I think regardless of the maturity of your organization, that’s always going to be a challenge for folks in this role, but we cannot do it alone. We cannot be the forcing mechanism. We’re not their managers either, but we need to be partners. There’s only so much nagging. There’s a little bit of nagging that gets along and helps us progress our initiatives, but we cannot rely on being annoying or nagging alone or selling the value of what we want and why we want it alone. It needs to be a partnership with these folks and constantly keeping tabs on getting feedback from the reps about what’s working, what’s not, where they’re confused, what their knowledge gaps are, but also consistently evaluating where is their tolerance for pain and for change and pushing a little bit, always pushing a little bit, but also respecting their boundaries and understanding what’s going on in their lives and where we are in the sales cycle and other initiatives that are taking place.

Mark Lerner:

You had mentioned you came your role on day one with a set of assumptions and you tested those assumptions out. What were some of the things that you assumed that were actually not high priority as you had assumed and some of the things that you underestimated or didn’t really foresee, like the things that were surprising?

Josh Pudnos:

Yeah, so I think regardless of what position you’re coming into, there’s always a little bit of your former self that you’re bringing to the company, certain assumptions. I came from a really excellent revenue operation shop at a company called Brandwatch. Really grateful to my former manager and mentor. That arena really made me the professional that I am today and learned so much there. And it had a really, really well-run revenue engine. And there were certain pain points that some members of the team there had that I assumed would carry over to this company. And the stage that we were in, one, for example, was around prospecting that the SDRs at that company spent a lot of time consistently prospecting. And a big fallacy that we can all follow track to is assuming that the same pain points carry over pain points or successes or just other ideals that they carry over necessarily to the same company. And so one of the first things that I set out to do was find a way for a very, very new BDR team or outbound team here at Exer to alleviate any sort of pain around prospecting the amount of time that they’re spending on prospecting and bought some tools. I won’t go into the details on those, but we were really, whereas Brandwatch was in a space that is pretty competitive, the competition are other competitors in the space, not the incumbency where competitors, not themselves, not no solution, it often is for Exiger.

So, most of the prospecting ideal customer profiles were people who knew the space really well, there wasn’t a lot of education. We’ve talked to them before; it’s a sort of fine space. We’ve spoken with ’em before and really had already reached after a decade or so of being in the space. I really talked to everyone who there could be and recycling a lot of new leads and stuff like that. So that was much more the workload for those SDRs At Exiger, we were really just, in a lot of ways, speaking to folks for the first time who had never heard of us before. There’s really no end of people that we still have a lot of experimenting to do to figure out the various combinations of company size and industry and customer profile and identifying pain points. So that’s all to say we didn’t quite need to solve yet for the pain of the amount of time prospecting because the tools out of the box were really sufficient.

So that was a mistake. I think that I made one specific mistake: bought some tools that I think maybe were not quite fitting for our use case. And yeah, I think you sort of asked also about things that did work, and I think familiarity with certain tools was a great way to start off on second base, definitely purchased some tools that I was more familiar with. Again, I came in knowing that this is a company with a longer sales cycle. If we can implement changes now in Q1 and Q2, we could actually potentially have a material impact on the ability to hit our very lofty Q4 end-of-year goals. And so I was really motivated to just, even if it wasn’t perfect to get it out the door, get folks trained on it, and start seeing the impact on the pipeline early on so that it would hopefully start, we’d start seeing those close by the end of year.

And in some respects, that worked, and some, it didn’t, but it allowed us to expedite our search for certain tools, and it’s helpful to know the devil and be able to roll that in really much quicker. And I think the value of quick action is, and being able to pivot really quickly and easily is more valuable than studying the market forever and trying to figure out exactly everything has to be perfect. I don’t think I made any missteps along the way. I don’t know if I would’ve done it differently knowing some of those in hindsight.

Mark Lerner:

Yeah. I know this is kind of an esoteric question, but if you could go back to yourself in January of 2023 and say give advice about what to do or to somebody who’s starting in a similar role, what would be your simple takeaway message that they could in a short encapsulation of the thing that they should really keep in mind?

Josh Pudnos:

Yeah, I think everyone’s going to come to such different situations that it’s hard to say necessarily do this tool or this process differently. But I think one thing that if I’m ever to build out a new revenue operations team, again, I will definitely, it’ll be my North star, is just around communication and being that visionary, having those, that foundational mission and repeating it over and over again in every way that we work. It allows us to first of all overcome the barrier that a lot of folks in revenue operations or sales ops run into, which is just being seen as Salesforce jockeys. That’s not what we are. We are a much more strategic role in the company and setting out, especially in a arena where you’re teaching a lot of people what the dysfunction is for the first time in their entire careers, starting out strategically having a vision and being able to constantly tell the story of why we’re prioritizing, what we’re prioritizing, how that fits into that vision and how that will allow us to be better and stronger in the long run. It gives you the ability to make big changes, make little changes that hopefully scale a little bit better down the line and also build hopefully the credibility that I think I have at the company. Build the rapport that you have with the reps and position the team to grow along with the organization for a long, long time.

Mark Lerner:

So we’re now a year and change after you’ve stepped into this challenge of building rev ops from scratch. Looking ahead, do the challenges and tasks differ going forward now than they did when you first started and how so?

Josh Pudnos:

Yeah, I think so. I mean, really, I would still say, in a lot of ways, we are still building the foundation of those things. For example, we’ve really tackled a lot of the pipeline developments, top-of-the-funnel, part of the sales cycle, and the motions for our AEs and our AMs. A frontier that we haven’t yet tackled that I still think is super foundational is customer success, and those data points and feeding that into the system, the better forecast risk for churn against renewals, and that’s still a very foundational thing that we’re still building. Meanwhile, within this year, in the last couple of months, we were recently acquired by some really fantastic private equity groups, and we are a growth investment for them, and we’re likely going to continue to face an area encounter, new go-to-market challenges, good challenges from introducing much more of an investment around partnerships with no information at all.

I’m sure acquisitions must could be on the roadmap for us, and that’s going to introduce all new challenges of bringing orgs together in operationalizing pricing and other flows. So, we now need to continue to build a foundation continue to start. We’ve now built a muscle for operational execution on pipeline inspection and forecasting, still in the early days, but that’s running now more efficiently while also improving and clarifying data flows within our systems and understanding ’em, building analyses, and also being able to pivot to accommodate massive changes in our going to market strategy. So yeah, things are more sophisticated, things are more complex, but it’s fun, it’s good challenges.

Mark Lerner:

That’s the most important thing, having fun. Right. Josh, thank you so much for taking the time to chat today. You can; Josh will be giving a session at the upcoming Revenue Operations Summit in New York. I don’t know if your presentation is on the 21st or the 22nd.

Josh Pudnos:

I think I’m on the 22nd. Yeah, 22nd.

Mark Lerner:

And so everybody out there in podcast land, if you’re in New York and you’re interested in rev ops, you head on down, you can come see us at DealHub, we will be an exhibitor there as well. Josh, before we head out, where can the folks at home learn more about you or follow you on socials, or learn more about Exiger?

Josh Pudnos:

Yeah, I don’t do a whole lot of posting, but LinkedIn’s probably the best place. I’m the only Josh Ponos in the world, so shouldn’t have a hard time finding me there. And Exiger is also quite active on LinkedIn. We have a lot of great articles about understanding supply chain risk management, very relevant things within the news, and the value that we can add with challenges like what’s going on in the Middle East and how that’s disrupted, supply chain issues, the war in Ukraine, Russian sanctions, new regulations around carbon emissions, lots of great relevant stuff. We are absolutely at the forefront of this. So do check us out some really great content there.

Mark Lerner:

Alright, Josh, thank you so much, and I’m looking forward to seeing you in person in later this month,

Josh Pudnos:

A couple of weeks. Looking forward to it. Thank you. Bye.