About the speaker

Matt Hadreas is a hands-on RevOps / GTM Leader with 10+ years scaling startups from Series B through C and one successful exit (so far!). Often starting as a team of one, Matt has built RevOps functions and orgs from scratch while designing, building, and operating sustainable revenue models that scale. Currently, Matt is the Director of Revenue Operations at SupportLogic, a Predictive and Generative AI for Customer Support.

Mark Lerner:

Alright everybody, welcome back to the Revamp podcast. I’m your host, Mark Lerner, and I’m really excited today we have Matt with us and we’re going to kind of jam on all things revenue operations and kind of the agile approach to that. But before we jump into it, Matt, why don’t you tell a little bit about yourself, your background, kind of what you’re doing today, and how you got to your current role.

Matt Hadreas:

Yeah. Awesome. So thank you for having me. Excited for the conversation. So, I think I should start; I started as a professional salesperson, my first gig, my first real professional job out of college. And not too long after that, landed at a B2B Tech startup selling SaaS, one of those companies where it was well funded. They wanted to invest in giving people like me the tools that I would need to be successful, which is amazing. But more often than those tools sped me up, which is what they were meant to do. They slowed me down.

I feel like you’re in the jungle with one of those big tactical backpacks, maybe behind enemy lines, and everything that’s in that backpack needs to be there. Otherwise, it’s just dead weight. And so this was 10, 15 years ago; I felt myself just rummaging through the backpack to, like, do I really need this? And so I just couldn’t resist the urge to dive in and start solving problems around data and technology and trying to make sure those things were actually speeding up, me up the way that they were meant to. And so I started managing sales teams, and the same dynamic applied, getting our data to be better and our tools to be better. And obviously processes are wrapped up in that. And eventually, the company I was working for just said, Hey, do that full-time, not just for your team, but for all of the teams, and work with the CFO and the operations team and just help us with that part of our business. And so it just was a natural evolution. It wasn’t something I intended to do. And then, so what I’m doing today is exactly that. I’m at my third early-stage tech startup. I have started as a team of one like I generally do, and just building the function in the organization from scratch, having a lot of fun. Rev ops is changing really quickly right now, especially with AI. And so it’s been interesting to have context with the traditional way to do things and then try to relearn and retrain myself on the newer ways to do things.

Mark Lerner:

What do you think it was about what you were doing in that early role where the company was like, Hey, why don’t you do that as a job and for everybody? What do you think was the thing that caught their eye?

Matt Hadreas:

At the time, I was running an inside sales team. They were mostly just an SDR team, and I had really good data. I actually used my data and inspected it, and it gave me clues about how to manage it. It would give us accurate predictions about results. And I wasn’t doing anything. It wasn’t rocket science; it was just the fundamentals, like meeting with your team, looking at the data in one-on-ones and team meetings when it was wrong, asking them to fix it, making sure that they had processes to do that where they weren’t spending hours a day in the CRM doing data entry. When I would give updates to the leadership team about the status of health and the direction of my team, they were able to make the data very clear and easy to adjust for a busy executive. And that was one aspect of it. I think almost any executive, regardless of what business you’re in, just wants reliably accurate data that tells them real insights about their business. And there’s not this huge gap between data and decision. So often you look at data, and it’s a kaleidoscope, and your i’s crossed, and you’re not sure what to do with it or if it’s even good in the first place.

And so it takes work. And a lot of times that’s the work you do in rev ops is to get from that to, okay, here’s data that you can actually use. It’s maybe not even data; it’s just the insights.

Mark Lerner:

And you, yeah, it’s like if you have too much information, it’s just as bad as not having enough information because it’s all noise, and it’s so hard to sift the signal from the noise. I want to take a step back a little bit and kind of dig into a little bit of your approach and your experience from RevOps starting in a role where maybe you come in and either you’re building RevOps from the ground up, or you’re kind of a lone wolf in the rev ops role. And going forward from that, how do you develop your kind of methodology and process for building out that role, whether it’s kind of defining the processes that are going to be incumbent on that role or deciding on either buying or building tools, what’s your thoughts around that and the methodology that you use?

Matt Hadreas:

That’s a great question. So I think having been a consultant, just a solo freelance consultant for a period of time, was really helpful for me. What you learn to do as a consultant is you learn to get really good at stakeholder conversations. If I’m starting as a new rev ops hire, especially if I’m a team of one, often that company will give me a charter and they’ll tell me, Matt, we need you to go do X, Y, and Z top priorities for the business, and those might be the right priorities and they might not. And so the right thing for me to do as a professional is to meet with all of the key stakeholders, set the charter aside temporarily, and ask good questions to understand what all of the problems are. Now, one thing that I heard, I don’t know remember when I heard it, but I’ve never forgotten it, which is the textbook definition of product management, and it’s very applicable to rev ops.

And there are three parts of one sentence, and that’s that product management is about defining user problems that are worth solving today. So, not all problems are user problems. Not all user problems are worth solving, and not all problems are worth solving over solving today. And so, kind of applying that to all of the problems that people tell you they have that hold them back, you’re going to get a list that outweighs your capacity to actually address it. And so then it becomes a roadmap exercise. What are the, are the most profitable areas for me to focus on

Mark Lerner:

Who are the users in the ops context?

Matt Hadreas:

Okay, so literally everybody, you have different levels. So you have your actual salespeople that are in the trenches, you have a quota, they feel the weight and pressure of that quota, and they have problems that are holding them back from going as fast as they know that they can. That’s one type of user that’s really important because ultimately if you don’t help that user, you’re dead weight your job, you don’t have a quota. In rev ops, you don’t generate revenue. So if you’re not making the teams that do more efficient, then you can’t justify your expense. And then there are executive users that want data and dashboards, and maybe what they’re asking for is important maybe. Maybe the way they’re asking for it is correct, and maybe it’s not. So it’s really 360 degrees.

Mark Lerner:

Yeah, how do you, especially in a team of one or a small team, an agile team, you probably have requests coming from every angle from all users in this scenario about, and each of them are probably saying, this is the most important thing, so how do you, A, prioritize, and B, how do you deliver without have spending X amount of months on this and leaving that completely to the side.

Matt Hadreas:

So, I had to learn the answer to this question the hard way, and it probably took me way too long to do that. If you’re not intentional and proactive about managing the demand for what you do, then it becomes whack-a-mole. Every time you focus on one thing, you’re not focusing on anything else. And those teams that tell you it’s the top priority feel neglected or let down. And so if you try to have this sort of daily iterative approach where you wake up in the morning, you look at the pile of work, and you say, that’s the most profitable thing for me do today, it’s a mistake. Even if you’re right about what it is, you’re not doing your job, which is managing expectations, setting expectations in the first place, and getting buy-in on what your roadmap is and should be. And so that’s the wrong thing to do.

The right thing to do is to, what I do is on a quarterly basis, I meet with key stakeholders, success, sales, channel finance, I do the whole process over again that if I were starting on day one, I’d be doing and I’d say, Hey, here’s what I have on my list of what’s important that is relevant to you. Help me prioritize that. Is there anything missing? And then I put everything together, and I have a master list of here’s what I’m going to do in Q1, or here’s what I’m going to do in FY 25, and I present that back to the stakeholders because, and this is the most important part, that list is two things. It’s a list of what you’re going to do and it’s a list of what you’re not going to do. And when everybody says yes, and they might not say yes, and if they don’t, it’s a great thing you had the conversation because you want to get it in the right order, but when everybody buys into that, it becomes a lot easier to say, thanks for the request. It’s a great idea. I will put that on the roadmap because right now, I have to focus on what we already agreed is the most important thing for the business, and a lot of it is what I’m describing is just sort of professional maturity that people often start with, but I had to learn the hard way by dealing with the sort of deluge on a daily basis and feeling like I’m never going to get to the bottom of the pile.

Mark Lerner:

Yeah. Do you do it in a sprint model or is it just quarterly? These are all the tasks we’re going to knock out. These are the things that we’re not touching this quarter. Excuse me.

Matt Hadreas:

I try to have plans that I am able to commit to as often as that’s possible. It’s rarely. I try to have plans as often as I can, but when you’re a startup, especially I work for early-stage startups, things change quickly, and priorities change. You want to change direction, you need to iterate or pivot, and so you have to have an agile approach to keeping your roadmap. I’ve never worked for big enough companies where you’re able to do planning in quarters and years, and then the quarter ends, and the year ends, and you stuck to it and you set out to do something, got it done.

Mark Lerner:

How do you juggle? You have your roadmap of things, but obviously, like you said, you’re in a startup, emergencies, fires, whatever pop up. How do you juggle those or how critical those might be with your roadmap and where to fit it in?

Matt Hadreas:

There are a couple of ways to do it. One of them is to map urgency and importance. And so there’s these traditional classic matrixes, I think, matrices. I think Warren Buffet had one where it’s about urgency, importance, and if it’s urgent and important, you do it today. If it’s not urgent and not important, you delete it. And then there’s what if it’s urgent and not important, et cetera. Those are helpful in determining what the priorities should be in the first place. And if you need to really set something important aside to do something that’s urgent, it’s easy to get caught in what I’ve called the tyranny of the urgent, which, if that’s what you let dictate your workload and how you spend your time on a daily basis, you can justify it. You can say, Hey, this is a customer issue. I’m going to do it today because it’s urgent, but over time, if it means you’re neglecting important work, then it was a mistake. And so it goes back to how developed your skills are at saying no. It takes skill and experience, I think to do that, especially when it’s an executive at the company or even every executive of the company that’s saying, Hey, this is what matters most right now.

You have to grow into being able to challenge that.

Mark Lerner:

Yeah, I mean, that’s tough. I think I suffer from it. I’m sure a lot of people suffer from it wanting to please people. And part of that is saying yes to things, even if you don’t necessarily think you can deliver on it or if that is really the highest priority. It sounds like with your ability to have a feel for or map out the urgency and when to say no and the comfort in doing that was probably developed over time and maybe through some blood, sweat, and tears, I would imagine. So what would you say to someone, maybe earlier in their career, that’s struggling with that, especially the idea of saying no to potentially their boss or their boss’s boss?

Matt Hadreas:

First of all, I definitely haven’t mastered this skill set. I’m able to talk about it a lot because I think about it all the time because I know I still have more to do there, and until I get it right, I’m going to continue to struggle with prioritization and just workload management burnout. You have too much on your plate, and if you say yes to all of it, you’re going to burn out. It’s almost inevitable. That said, I’ve gotten better at it over time, and if I were talking to the V one of me in RevOps 10 years ago and trying to give myself some advice, the first thing I would say is to have a roadmap. Just have one and make it yours, not something that somebody else gives you. If you have to own your own roadmap, especially if it’s your team, I have yet to experience being a resource on somebody else’s rep ops team. I’ve always run the team or been the team myself, so it’s easy for me to say that that’s what you should do.

I also think there are a couple of tactical skills that are helpful. One of them is when data is being requested, just always ask the question, why do we need this? What does it tell us about our business? If you let people tell you what to build and how to build it without telling you why, then it’s going to ping pong back and forth. You’re going to go build what you think is being asked for, you’re going to deliver it, and whoever’s asking for it will say, that’s not really it because you’re letting a lawyer design a bridge. And so focusing on the why in those conversations is really helpful just to make sure that you’re doing it right the first time as much as possible. And I think having an agile approach works really well in situations like that where you’re trying to move quickly versus you don’t want to take a request, go into a hole for two weeks and build something and find out you built the thing wrong or you built the wrong thing and it was a waste of two weeks when you should have built an MVPA prototype, gotten feedback, feedback on it directionally make sure that you’re on the right track and that should ideally be part of your process.

Mark Lerner:

What does that look like, the building an MVP internally? How do you define the minimum viable features or functionality that would be involved in something like that?

Matt Hadreas:

So there’s an agile definition of done, which is the first time it actually functionally does the thing being asked for. Even if the design isn’t there, the usability isn’t there. You haven’t trained anybody on it. It’s sort of done when it does the thing. And so that’s ultimately the goal of building a prototype. And another thing I’ve learned is when you are, it’s really easy to ask for directional feedback the wrong way. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve shown a prototype to a team of people or an executive, and I said, Hey, here’s what HAPS 40 thinks. And then they inevitably criticize it for not being a finished product. And so I’ve just learned expectation management is super important when you do this. It’s just a conversational detail, but making sure that you label things as work in progress, make sure that you preface those conversations by saying, Hey, there’s a lot to do, and here’s what I have left to do, but for now in this conversation, I’m asking for directional feedback so that when it is finished, it’s finished the right way. Again, I’m just talking about things I’ve learned the hard way by making lots and lots of mistakes throughout my career.

Mark Lerner:

Yeah, I think sometimes we’re hardwired to provide criticism to something we’re shown as if it’s the final product. I think it’s hard to get people to fully understand that this is a work in progress. I want to make sure that I get buy-in from you all before I do all this other stuff. Then I’m just going to deliver something that you don’t need. I think everyone has kind of had that experience a little bit. How do you make the decision of whether to build something internally, some sort of internal tool, connecting existing systems or using code, low code, no code, whatever, APIs or actually going out and purchasing a tool? What’s your rubric for that decision-making process? I assume you’ve probably done both. Yeah,

Matt Hadreas:

So it’s a great question. I think it’s actually the most important factor when you’re evaluating either should build or buy, or even if you’ve decided you’re going to buy something, evaluating a vendor, and that factor is the operational weight of the decision. Way too often, I see companies make those decisions by evaluating the functional requirements and technical capabilities of the thing. And so if I were to go out and evaluate a CPQ, I might say, okay, the most important things for me are, can it do multicurrency, advanced configuration, CLM, and subscription management? I’m going to go out and I’m going to find all the vendors that do all those things and then pick the one that does it the best. And you’ve completely failed to factor in the operational weight of that solution. And it might be that you picked that vendor and now you’re married to a consulting group that has all the domain knowledge about how to make changes or implement it in the first place.

And for every dollar you’re spending on the solution itself, you’re spending five or ten on services just trying to get it up and running or manage it over time as your business changes the same. I think the criteria applies to building. If you build something yourself, yes, it’s the free puppy syndrome, like hooray, we got the puppy for free, but you’re not factoring in all the dog food, and maybe it’s allergic to kibble, and now you’re at this specialized dog food joint, and there’s a vet bill and just your time. There’s all these other kinds of hidden expenses where if you build something that is a solved problem in the market and there are vendors out there that do it and they care about it, and that’s their reason for existence, and they have developer teams that are updating it, Hey, why would you want to build it to save yourself this much money? And maybe I’m just speaking from my experience as very often a team of one, the finite resource, yes, obviously budget, but really it’s operational bandwidth to support things. I guess that’s most of my answer. Even that being said, I build probably more than I should. I customize more than I should because it’s fun and because I can. And there’s always a philosophical debate like, okay, is now the time to take all of that customization and replace it with something native that somebody else has built? Or should I just do one more workaround?

Mark Lerner:

I’m laughing. I can identify. And you mentioned early at the beginning there was some interesting introduction of AI into the world, and from a RevOps perspective has kind of added a new interesting layer and made things more exciting. I’m always interested to know from in your day-to-day, has AI been part of your workflow? Has it made things different, and more efficient, or is it still just kind of like a parlor trick to write your kids at night, a bedtime story really quickly? Because what I’ve used it for as well,

Matt Hadreas:

It’s definitely not a parlor trick. I dunno; if you’d asked me several years ago, I would’ve been much more skeptical, but on a daily basis, I can go to chat GPT and ask it questions about how to do things in Salesforce, and it’ll give me the right answer. And maybe I already know 90% of the answers you need. The other 10, maybe I only know 10% of the answer, and it gives me the 90, but it’s this Oracle that you can consult and get good information from today even if you don’t really know what the question should be.

So that’s sort of the most obvious layer of how AI is changing ops. Beyond that, I don’t think I’ve worked for companies that are able to benefit from the type of AI that has been around, I think, the longest or the use case for AI. That’s the most established on our revenue team, which is, Hey, we’re going to find the needle in the haystack in your revenue data when your pipeline is hundreds of thousands of opportunities and you can’t realistically manually go through them, then yeah, ai, what a great way to pick out the highest potential accounts or the most meaningful opportunities and make sure that those are resourced the way that they should be.

So that’s one use case that’s been around for a while and I don’t have a lot as much experience in that, but I understand the value. The one that does, I think, have a sort of universal applicability is conversational AI. So language models are getting sophisticated enough that they’re very accurate in their transcriptions, that they’re very accurate in being able to summarize. And you’re able to start doing summarization across not just your single call recording from Gong, but you can open up an account and say, okay, across all of my interactions, emails, chat messages, recorded Zoom calls and phone calls, have we ever talked about pricing with this account or what is this account’s pain points, the account executive left, we’re reassigning it to somebody new, and they need to get up to speed and they probably don’t want to listen to 12 different hour-long recorded gone calls. They just want to consult the Oracle and say, Hey, bring me up to speed. What’s the situation? And there are so many use cases for that, and all of them are, they’re not black magic, they’re very concrete, easy to understand the value for how you should, going back to bridging the gap between data and decision, there’s a very small gap there. It’s like it’s telling you what decisions to make, what the best next actions are and who to engage and how. So there’s a lot of use cases there.

And that’s not really as much about revenue operations, it’s not about how I do my job, but it’s all inter to mind.

Mark Lerner:

Yeah, I mean, to me that seems like the lowest-hanging fruit of AI for this kind of role. The thing that people and salespeople always get hammered for is like, did you update the CRM? Did you update the notes? And there’s a perfect use case for AI, right? I think Hong is doing it pretty well, but it’s very kind of hard to say simply, but in the context of AI, it’s dead on. And I think that actually helps a huge amount of filling a gap and saves time and data, like you said, finding that hidden signal in the noise of your data. I think we’re all kind of hoping, looking for that. And I test, I play around with AI a lot to do similar things, but yeah, it’s tough. I think that the copilot use case where it’s like I need to figure out how to use this API, and I kind of know, but I just need that 10% extra and not having to slack a guy on the dev team, but being able to just interact with check CBT, I think that’s actually more impactful than people realize in terms of efficiency.

So yeah, I’m just fascinated by it because it seems like there are a few camps. They’re the people that are afraid the machines are going to take over, and we’re going to turn into just batteries for the machine or whatever, like the matrix and that won’t use these tools on principle. I fear for the people in terms of that fear for professionally. It’s like I refuse to drive a motorcar. I’m going to ride my horse everywhere. And then there are the people who think that AI is going to solve everything right now. And I think a lot of us, I dunno, I fall somewhere in the middle. It sounds like you do as well. But I guess to close things up, we’re kind of in the early innings of 2024 here, 2023, the years prior was a huge revolution, especially AI was kind of the forefront of that. There were a lot of macroeconomic challenges. What do you think 2024 is going to shake out? What’s going to be the thing, the AI moment that we had in 2023? What do you think that’s going to look like in 2024?

Matt Hadreas:

Man, I haven’t thought about it. I like the question. I wish I had a good answer for you. I’ll tell you what we are navigating right now is having looked at our revenue engine, and we always try to isolate the primary constraint. And I think right now what we need more than anything else is to just find ways to do better at generating a pipeline that is being massively disrupted right now by AI. And so one of the options on the table is, oh, let’s build an in-house STR team, let’s give them the traditional ZoomInfo or Apollo or whoever, plus outreach or some Gale’s sales engagement technology. And then they’ll be putting those together, building sequences, and reaching out. And it feels like we would be going backward if we were to take that traditional approach. And if we got great people and gave them those tools, they could produce a result, no doubt about it. But is it the most efficient way to do it, especially outbound? If you have a high degree of inbound, then yeah, you need good people to make sure that the customers that are coming to you, they’re interested are getting service the way that they should be. But for outbound, I’m not sure; I know that I’m not enthusiastic about investing in it in the traditional model there.

And part of the problem is because of AI because it’s so easy to generate content, and it’s so easy to simulate personalization at scale. And it’s so easy to send a massive amount of emails and LinkedIn messages from bots that aren’t even real, that have their own LinkedIn profile. And it’s, there’s so much more noise than there ever has been that I’m picturing myself as an STR in today’s world; I’m competing with that and trying to cut through the noise and get just that much attention from somebody. I feel like I’d be doing it wrong. And so I think there’s definitely a scramble right now for companies to solve that problem and to say, we are the solution for AI outbound. And we’ve talked to a lot of companies out there that are doing it. They’re all taking very different approaches, ultimately trying to achieve the same result.

Some of them are the copilot where it’s like, Hey, we’ll be an extension of your existing team. We’ll help them with personalization, we’ll help them with research and outreach, and we’ll just amplify them. And then others are taking, no, we’re going to be the autopilot. We’re fully autonomous, and we’re basically giving you, we’re doing 99% of it and giving it to you to do the last mile. And so I’m very interested to see how that part of the industry evolves. And it’s an arms race; whatever works doesn’t work forever because then companies will develop some way to filter out the noise, and then there’s a new way to get through the filter, and it’s kind of fun to watch. But I dunno. There are probably a lot of other things that are going to be happening, but that’s the one I’ll be paying the closest attention to.

Mark Lerner:

Yeah, definitely the challenge of noise and going outbound is huge. I was at a sales leader dinner the other week, and it was kind of universal around the table that A, they’re going more aggressively outbound, and B, it’s a challenge.

Matt Hadreas:

You have to think about it from the buyer’s perspective, too. Buyers are more inundated than ever, and there’s been this trend of who do they listen to. They used to listen to companies and what companies said about themselves, what marketers you would put on the website, and what SDRs would say over the phone. And I don’t think they’re as willing to listen to anybody else but possibly their own peers. People that they have actually met before ideally and know are real people and have had similar experiences. And so I am expecting for there to be more sort of communities of people in leadership roles that want to network with each other so that they can just have a place to go for good information. Whereas otherwise, if you go to LinkedIn and say, Hey, I’m looking for an X, Y, Z solution, it’s like you’re dangling a piece of meat in front of a piranha-infested pool. And so I’ve seen that happen a lot. There are even communities for revenue operations that I’m a part of. I think that’s how we met in the first place, and I expect it to keep happening.

Mark Lerner:

Awesome. Well, time flies when you’re having fun. We’re at the last 30 seconds here, but before we head out, why don’t you tell the folks at home where they could maybe learn a little bit more about you or Support Logic get a little bit more information?

Matt Hadreas:

Oh, okay. I’d say LinkedIn. I have a name that is unique enough that you can find me when you look for me. I like to network with people and share ideas and experiences, and I definitely don’t have any answers. And so, I’ve had a lot of help throughout my career, and I’m happy to participate in that and give back as often as I can. And yeah, support logic. I love working here. We have an awesome product and really great customers. What we do is help our customers understand and analyze their postell interactions so that they can extract signals from those conversations. They can understand the voice of the customer, they can know and what the sentiment is. And if customers are frustrated or happy or at risk of churning or want to buy more.