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The Evolution and Challenges of Lead to Cash

Mark Lerner:

All right, everybody, welcome to this episode of the Revamp podcast. Super excited to have today’s guest. We have Mitchell, who is the director of Revenue Operations at Tap Clicks, and we’re going to talk all about stuff around lead to cash and all sorts of other interesting topics. But before we dive into that, why don’t you tell us a little bit about your background, how you got to where you are today, and some of your experiences along the way?

Mitchell Jones:

Yeah, absolutely, and thanks for having me, mark. Happy to be here. Lead to Cash is very encompassing and convoluted, so I feel like that could mean a lot of things. So, putting some clarity on that for people is always a great discussion, in my opinion. Yeah, happy to give a little background. I actually started in ad tech at Operative around 2012. I worked in architecture for many years before that and made a switch, went into Ad Tech, worked up doing a lot of different ad operations, learning different revenue streams for the different verticals and advertising. Also very convoluted when you think about the ecosystem. I think starting with that background really gives you an advantage because there are just so many companies it’s hard for everybody to stay up to date. So I think that experience was really helpful. From there, I actually got recruited by a friend, Christopher Pinos, who worked at Media Spectrum. I got my first taste of an OMS and learned about the lead to cash for the first time.

You’re making massive discoveries, learning about sales staging processes, going into the order management systems and OMSs, and how you’re feeding out to do the reconciliation and automated billing. So to me, that’s sort of the trifecta, which we’re definitely going to get into C-R-M-O-M-S-E-R-P, customer relationship management, order management system, enterprise resource planning, so how you’re doing the billing, A PAR, gl, all of that. So from there, I actually went into programmatic for a little while, and then Chris recruited me back at Indigo Trigger, and I did consulting for a number of years for Lead to Cash, and then about three years ago, I joined Tap Clicks coming in to sort of help fill some of that knowledge and help out some of our enterprise clients as well as take on some of that internally as it is really coming to light as something that helps make companies successful in today’s age. So I know I just sort of word spewed a little there, so I’ll pause, but that’s awesome. Happy to be here.

Mark Lerner:

Yeah, no, it’s awesome. I really appreciate it. And it’s interesting now that I think about it: the transition from architecture, like actual architecture, to something like what you’re doing is kind of similar, right? It’s like building the architecture; it’s kind of outside the scope, but how did that happen? Was there something about having been in architecture that helps you in your current role?

Mitchell Jones:

And I’ll take sort of two parts there. I’m a candid person, so I’m definitely going to be transparent today. It started when I worked in Georgia, and I moved to New York City at the very beginning of January 2012. It was during a recession, and all firms had hiring pauses. So I had a second cousin at operative, and I got an interview, and I started two days later because New York, the nest egg, I had gone away for about three weeks, so I needed to be able to pay rent and everything. It turns out it was a very comparable switch. I think I did a ton of CAD work, right? Computer-animated design. So, any of those programs was very specialized in doing the admin backend, learning all the different specs for it because it has a lot of similarities in the sense of just learning a system inside out.

So, I think it did help with that aspect because I’m naturally curious, and I want to know how things work. So, the architecture side of it, I think, translated into that capacity, gotten actual real-world experience. I don’t think it’s the client relationship or being personable that helped. But the other side of it is just the admin work that you do because in architecture, you spend a lot of time at a computer, especially in school and the earlier years before you get more senior and you can crumple up pieces of paper and say Make this building, but now that’s how I would say it translates. So, a little bit, but looking back, I’m glad I made the switch. There’s just so much curiosity for me out there, and this is really a massive business thing that I feel like I’ve sort of fallen into.

Mark Lerner:

Awesome. I love that context. So yeah, kind of talking a little bit about the lead to cash trifecta that we’re going to talk about; I guess for the folks at home to set the stage here, many people are probably familiar with both concepts, but maybe you can talk a little bit about when you say lead to cash, I think the more well-known quote to cash, what are the differences there? They might seem kind of obvious, but maybe it’ll help to set the groundwork here.

Mitchell Jones:

Yeah, absolutely. And I mean, it’s a great discussion item. Lead to cash is all-encompassing in your entire business organization and operations. You’re thinking to lead; you’re thinking first about touch points and attribution. Did I send an email, or did they see it? Was there a branding campaign, or did they never click it? What was my first touch point? So you’re looking back at these different attribution windows, figuring out how to do your lead source allocation and attribution, and then you’re working through the staging. So once it converts to an opportunity, how do the sales reps work through their different CRM? I’m just going to use Salesforce as a sample for this discussion. The most common one I’ve used, having said that right, HubSpot, there’s a ton of pipe drive ton other solutions for especially s and b businesses, but from there, you get all your staging set up, and you’re doing a ton of different just dimensions and metric reporting and analytics.

So you’re looking at how many of my opportunities are closing from this stage forward. So you work through getting a weighted weighted pipeline essentially. So what’s coming down, and what do you expect to close in Q2, Q3, Q4? So that’s sort of the front end of lead to cash, and this is where I’m talking about; I sort of call it holy trinity trifecta or whatever it is with the CRM. So when we say lead to cash, the CRM piece is really the lead to quote, and that’s the front end of it is going through all of your different staging, opportunity staging, finding out how you’re going to contract, do the quoting, make sure you go through any mods, you’re getting signature. Once it goes to close one, and some people have email confirmations depending on the scale, most people have some sort of e-sign tool via Salesforce or another CPQ like deal hub.

So we have those different windows for ARC clients to actually come in. It does all the auto-populating from the quote. It allows you to track different iterations and versions. And for us, that was really the key step to being able to automate a lot of our finance reports because now we can segment for, we call it, NLE, a new logo, or expansion revenue. From there, everything’s feeding back in. We can actually segment our data properly with these different contract dimensions, and that’s all automated. It feeds right back into Salesforce, and now we have a ton of Salesforce reports. We actually feed into our own system, and in our tap clicks dashboards, we’re now visualizing doing pipelines, future sort of forecasting, and using it for that full capacity of looking at real breakdowns across product lines all the way down to the line item level, right product or line item feeds through as well, so we can really get some out of box reporting.

So that’s when you get led to a quote. Now, a quote to cash is really the next step, and that’s how all the other work happens. I don’t want to take anything away from sales. There’s certainly some talent that it takes there. I’m not super quiet facing on that sales side. I prefer the solution and help. So once they get the deal done, they hand it off for fulfillment, and that’s the order management system side of things. There’s a lot of OMSs out there, tap clicks. We have our own tap orders and tap workflows for that, a ton of different systems in the realm, but when you compare, you’re really talking about the PIOs, the operatives, the media, spectrums, motions, stuff like that depending on if you’re supplier demand side. From that, you have all your workflows. Okay, I’m going to trigger my email team to build out the C emailer.

I’m making a website for ’em, and I’m going to do SEO; I’m going to do a search. I’m going to do programmatic work through Cheel or Compuls or Trade Desk or a Seller or Simplify. There are millions of these options, but you have to fulfill them specifically. So you’re getting creative, you’re going through QA, and you’re doing every step. Once you get through that, you actually know that every line item has its own fulfillment process. So it’s all got to get forward. Once you have that fulfillment done in the OMS, it typically feeds through to a billing system. Sometimes, all of those are combined, or several companies do all three of them together; Salesforce, NetSuite, and others all have that capability where you can really get all in one, but it feeds through. And most of this in ad tech, you have to do reconciliation, which means you’re having to wait for the end of the month; you’re getting the actuals back.

You probably have a three-day data-settling policy. You might even have a grace period. You have to put in your billing rules where, oh, we miss it by 50,000. We get two days to give those 50,000 impressions, and we’re going to bill you for the whole month. So there are all these rules on reconciliation, partner to partner, and I’ll call it o and o owned and operated inventory, which is unique from all the publisher side of things. So once you get that in, you actually send out an invoice, and that’s the backend of the quote to cash. That’s when you’re actually sending it out, and you have ar, you need to get paid out. And that’s what the ERPs, the enterprise resource planning tools, do where they help you do the reconciliation, automatically set up billing schedules to do the invoicing with those numbers, you’re getting it back, so it’ll feed into all of your general ledgers, there’s our money, this is what we should have. Oh, we have a deferred payment, whatever. All of that is tracked in the ERP. Typically, commissions, payout, and stuff like that are tracked there because you can have better feedback and permissioning. But yeah, again, I did the same thing where I just talked for a minute, so I’ll stop, but that’s great. The gap there really leads to quotes, and the separation of CRM from cash is that you’re already past CRM.

Mark Lerner:

And it sounds like in your world, there’s a ton of variation, which I guess makes your specialization pretty unique because you really have to have a wide scope of experience and understanding. When we spoke earlier, I think you’d mentioned that you were kind of in this lead-to-cash world for quite a while, something close to 10 years or something like that. A lot of things have changed for everybody across everything. But in particular, in your world around that, how have you seen evolution and transformation? How have they impacted the challenges or the opportunities that are available?

Mitchell Jones:

Yeah, great question. Try to be as succinct as I can here. I think the biggest changes are in the past. I think convolution was accepted, everything was segmented, and everybody had their own team, and they would just hand off an email and not really have great accountability for those processes. So, I think efficiency, in a nutshell, is the word for why lead to cash has come around. Everybody’s, the margins are shrinking. Transparency is really popular, so you need to get the most bang for your buck as you can, which means you need to be very efficient with your system architecture. So, data should flow. You should have tracking automatically. You should be able to pull a report right now and look at year-over-year growth or comparisons. This person has completed this many tasks, and it takes six minutes to do something that somebody else can do in three minutes.

So that’s sort of convoluted. Previous workflows were very accepted even ten years ago. I would think that this was starting to kick off when I was coming into the industry. But even then, you were using different Salesforce tables. You didn’t have things that really feed through straight to Google ads. Oh, my campaign’s going to run. I need to do a creative swap here; let me put it in this OMS. It’s going to push out to 10 different systems. That was all just Swivel Chair approaches in the past where you have somebody just constantly having to go in there and make these manual updates and manual tracking. Oh, I forgot I didn’t see this email. Things slipped through the cracks. So you have a ton of leakage and missed revenue because of these inefficiencies. So I really think it comes down to money, which is really why it’s coming back.

And I think the biggest changes I’ve seen is one just technology’s ability where now we have all these integrations, and you just open an API endpoint, and it’s like, here, I’m going to ping that, or here I’m going to send this to you, and you consume it or vice versa. Doing the different unique identifiers to join all that data and everything has just become really more clear to people. But I really do think it comes down to cost efficiency, and if you’re not efficient, you just have missed revenue, right? It’s leakage; call out what you want. But if you’re having to manually do the same thing in four or five systems, then there’s some inefficiency there that you can capitalize and monetize, quite frankly. So that’s why it’s come in.

Mark Lerner:

Yeah, for sure. And I think, especially today, that efficiency is more important because budgets are being gone through with a fine tooth comb, and finance is now even more involved in more and more stuff. Exactly. Because we’ve seen, we were in a period of time where interest rates were essentially zero and budgets that fat and the bazooka on the economy was going, and then we kind of pulled back, and there was a lot of choppiness there for a bit. It seems to hopefully have kind of mellowed out, but we’re still at a point where there was always this idea for many years of growth at all costs. It doesn’t matter how much it costs to acquire a customer; let’s just do it. That’s the only thing people care about out the window, right? It’s about the efficiency. People are looking at numbers like net revenue retention rather than just the net new acquisition. And those are all, I think, themes that are kind of impacting this world. But there are a few different strands I’d love to pull there. One is that there’s been, especially over the last decade, an increase in the number of integrations, like you said, automation, and the ability to connect the dots.

Obviously, there are no code native integrations, and then there are other stuff. In today’s day and age, as someone in a revenue operations role, is there a requirement, and has it increased to be more low code or code than just completely no code? The ability to kind of connect APIs yourself without having to work with a dev team or build some sort of internal tool? Is that something that has become more necessary or not?

Mitchell Jones:

Yeah, and right translation files and just using a Postman or something like that to do your payload building and testing and pushing Q an API endpoint is super common. I would say, especially in rev ops, because you are joining data from so many different systems. So I need to make a query from NetSuite and join it with a ton of other native ones for the actuals to do reconciliation stuff like that. I think it is getting more standardized. I know we have our own model when we’re setting up some integrations, and essentially, you can build out that translation file on the screen, right in the UI, the user interface. So it helps with the user experience X when you have something clean like that, and it helps enable people who may not be as technical because you don’t really need to know how to build a payload and set that up to be in rev ops. In my opinion, that may even be too much.

That’s just sort of my background, but at the same time, I don’t think it’s going to be required in the near future because of those native integrations. You have these other middleware software that essentially do all of that for you, the jitter bits of the world out there like that. And I think it’s going away. So, I think technical skills at the integration level shouldn’t be required at some point because ease of use for religious user experience is getting better now, even in the past two or three years. I can see it simplifying. You used to really have to go in, do some sort of OAuth via Postman, set up a translation file, and do it all in there, and that’s very time-consuming. So automating that is just more efficient, and I don’t see us having to be that technical in the near future, to be honest.

Mark Lerner:

Yeah. So I want to talk a little bit about the push and pull of, let’s say, complexity, the need for flexibility,y and how those two things kind of compete against each other sometimes. So there’s often this idea that the more complex the use case, the less flexible or end user-friendly the solution you implement has to be. Hopefully, that is a conception that people are learning is a false conception, but that balance, is that something that you deal with, and how do you deal with it?

Mitchell Jones:

Yeah, definitely another great question. And I think again, this actually really should be done with cost analysis, in my opinion, and depending on SMB, you’re going to do some things manually. You’re going to be using G Suite or Excel. You’re not going to want to pay for a more complex ERP because you don’t have to yet, right? One person can handle something. When you start to become more scalable and scale in that capacity, I think the cost analysis is really clear. I have one person, okay? Now, I need two people to automatically make all these invoices and sales orders and make sure everything is added manually. And I’m going into my provisioning system manually. I’m not automating that from whatever order management system it is. So everything’s just swivel chaired around at some point; it’s a pretty clear comparison: oh, this is how many hours, this is how much per hour I pay, this is how much the system costs, and if you should really be doing that sort of right, it’s an X to Y sort of ratio type of thing.

It’s sort of simple cost analysis, I think, because you should always be doing your research knowing best practices, finding out the cost, and when you know that cost and when you surpass that threshold, it’s time to make the change sometimes. I know you talk about efficiency, and unfortunately, some of that does relate to people’s livelihoods, so it is a tough discussion, to be honest. Definitely one with leadership, especially; I’m very personable, so I always want to protect my team’s jobs and anything like that and fight for them to get raises and everything. And that’s how managers should work for sure. But this is when you’re thinking, oh, I’ve got ten people, but I really only need two. And that’s efficiency. Helping people understand and learn the next steps where they can be part of the next step is where you really need to do that, keep moving forward with employee management, and help them learn more. And the AI stuff is super coming in now where it’s going to replace some stuff, but you’re still going to have to do the prompt builder. You’re still going to have to constantly optimize that and actually do some QA quality assurance on that information. So, I’ll pause, but it is a difficult thing for efficiency and cost analysis. That’s how you’ll really successfully become scalable, in my mind.

Mark Lerner:

And you bring up the AI piece, and I think there is a lot of fear. I think you can look at the extremes there. There are people who are like, this is Terminator, this is the matrix. We’re all going to be useless. It’s going to take all of our jobs. There are people who think that’s just complete nonsense. And then I think I have come to a happy medium where I’m pretty sure that AI creates a huge amount of efficiency and probably has enabled a single person to do multiple people’s jobs and, therefore, has probably been some of the reason that there have been headcount cuts in our space. But yeah, I mean from your perspective, A, are you using any AI in your lead to cash workflow at the moment, and B, to somebody who’s getting started in a rev ops role or maybe working across the lead to cash flow there, what can you tell them in terms of what they could do to maybe ensure that they’re able to leverage some of these new tools to make themselves more valuable?

Mitchell Jones:

Yeah, absolutely. And I’ll say in the day-to-day sort of world if you’re not using AI in my world, I think there’s a problem because it’s pretty cheap. Instead of, and this is, I’ll tell you where the most time savings for me are, it’s really reading through knowledge bases. I used to spend hours and hours a week trying to find the right trailhead thing for a Salesforce. Going through and trying to find any sort of specifics about a vendor knowledge base and just that different information is super helpful in that capacity. It automatically reads through ’em quickly, gives you that information, and steps one, two, and three. The other side is formulas I used to have to workshop if they are super complex. They’re this big on your Salesforce screen, looking at different dimensions and segmenting and then making different, if thin, statements based on those different, even role levels or anything.

If you get it started, it is just so good at helping you resolve errors and stuff like that. Super, I recommend people doing that because it’ll give you some time back on just scraping the internet. And it just gives you better responses that are succinct and clear on what you should do for actionable items. The other side of it is using it properly and figuring out where to use it and when to use it. There are a lot of tools in the marketplace, and a lot of different competitors are going into it. I mean, even anybody, right? You’re using Google; there’s a little popup. Now you’re working with basically everybody who is going into AI in some capacity and tap clicks. We have billions and billions of dollars worth of data. So, for us, we’re going to start, and we are doing it now to look at auto-optimization.

We have so much data that people can use for their own instances. Look at it and be like, oh, I’m getting a better response in this vertical or with this behavioral targeting or in this geo and start to funnel it automatically. So you get your best ROI turn-on investment for whatever optimization goal you’re using, the number of impressions, your cost per lead, cost per click, whatever it is, and cost per acquisition. CPAs would be a huge one for that as well, especially for e-commerce, which is really blowing up and stuff like that. So the AI side of things is, I will say, I think it’s starting to plateau in the sense that we’ve really, the bubble burst; everybody needed to be on top of it. Everybody needed to be a part of it or have a partner that does it for them. I think trying not to drink the ocean would be a phrase that comes to mind with this, and make sure; my other favorite phrase is measure twice, cut once.

So make sure you’re using it right. Make sure you’re not trying to make rash, quick decisions, in my opinion, because AI is limited right now, no matter what anyone says. I think machine learning ML AI is really, really here right now. And I think it helps people be more efficient in their day-to-day and get time back and a lot of it, but be a little wary. Don’t replace full teams, for sure. Yeah, there’s a lot of stuff it can’t do, and there’s a lot of stuff we should be a little hesitant to use it for, in my opinion. But I think it’s going to be part of analytics and insights, especially. That’s what we’re able to do now, pulling through and writing a very clear, succinct prompt to give you the top five reasons and what has happened week over week or month over month for this campaign. Clicks went up by 1%. That’s attributed to you adding this other geo, or this other demographic targeting dimension is helping yours and then making recommendations from that. So, take the analytics and then be able to use them for insights for your future optimization and campaign work.

Mark Lerner:

Yeah, awesome. And I also have, when there was a phase where I, like everybody else, may have imbued to the AI more power than it actually has, but I think anyone who uses these tools often enough realizes that there’s something missing. I can’t really articulate it, but it’s not going to become sentient tomorrow morning. There is a piece missing there where you often come up against its limits and realize, oh, this is a machine. This is not a sentient being, and it’s wrong oftentimes, right? I mean, it’s just honestly,

Mitchell Jones:

Yeah, sometimes you hear a response, and you’re like, what are you talking about? This is definitely wrong. I’m totally aligned with that.

Mark Lerner:

And I think for me, and kind of similar to what I brought up earlier, one of the things that had been huge because I’m not a background in tech stuff, development, anything like that, but having AI able to walk me through, Hey, how do I connect this to this API? That kind of thing has saved me an amazing amount of time that instead of having to pull in a dev person or write, I an able to do those things on my own, and I think I often tell other people it is democratizing a lot of this stuff that was way out of reach for regular humans. But we’re coming to the end here. So before we close, for somebody who’s maybe just kind of earlier on in their rev ops career, you’ve been in this space for quite a while, what’s a good takeaway for someone to, things they can learn or maybe kind of one strategy they can implement that’ll help them both survive and move up thrive?

Mitchell Jones:

Yeah, it’s a tough one because it is a little bit of a; it’s just such a wide realm for that ops side of things right now. Rev ops may be actually more focused than what I’m necessarily talking about, which in turn leads to cash system architecture and ecosystem discussion. I mean, what I would give advice for is just to keep learning as much as you can. I’m constantly reading articles and trying to listen to podcasts about stuff like this. A perfect example of this is your podcast, but keep educating yourself. If you get behind, it’s really hard to catch up. So work with your companies. Most companies today are able to be like, oh, there’s a Tuesday afternoon rev ops course that you can take weekly. We will pay for it. Take advantage of those opportunities from your companies. I would highly recommend that you have some sort of paid program with your company to take advantage of that and really get a certification.

Keep getting certified, and keep adding it to your resume to enhance your knowledge and skills. And that would be the number one. Two is to reach out to people and talk to someone. If you know somebody more senior, I certainly have a couple of my own mentors in the realm. I’m fortunate to have an uncle that’s pretty senior in business that helps. And then I mentioned Chris Renos, who honestly has taught me a lot about whiteboarding. He taught me everything about leading to cash, to be honest. But you find somebody who cares and wants to work with you, get some mentors, somebody who can help you, and somebody you can ask questions to. And I’m fortunate to have those. But that would be the two things. Find somebody to work with and keep educating yourself.

Mark Lerner:

Awesome. And then the last minute or two here, before we close things up, is there anywhere people can go to learn more about you or about clicks and kind of the interesting stuff you’re doing that

Mitchell Jones:

Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, my marketing team is probably listening to this and

Mark Lerner:

I had ’em in mind.

Mitchell Jones:

Yeah, no, I mean TaoClicks.com, please, please TapClicks.com. We have a lot of different revenue streams. We’re really opening up a lot of different stuff with AI, which, for us, is very helpful because we have so much data. So tap clicks.com; we are on all social channels. Just search, tap clicks, and feel free to reach out. I’m always happy to connect on LinkedIn. If you have any questions, comments, concerns, or anything at all, I’d always be happy to discuss them with people. So Awesome. That’s my plug for tap clicks there.

Mark Lerner:

Yeah. Cool. And we’ll put both the link to tap clicks as well as your LinkedIn on the show notes. Mitchell, thank you so much for taking the time to chat with me today. Really appreciate it. And hopefully we’ll get to do a round two sometime soon in the future.

Mitchell Jones:

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. It was great to talk to you, mark. Looking forward to connecting again at some point.

Mark Lerner:

Okay, Bye-Bye.

Mitchell Jones:

Alright.