About the speaker

Samantha Wagner is a Sales Operations Specialist at AlayaCare with a Graduate Diploma in Business from Queen’s University. She excels in CPQ systems, stakeholder management, and data analysis.

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 DealHub, and I’m your host. I’m joined today by Samantha Wagner. We’re going to have a really interesting discussion about tools and processes and all sorts of fun stuff. But before we jump into that, Samantha, why don’t you go ahead and give us some context and background about what you’re doing today, how you got to where you’re at, the company you work at, and what you guys are doing?

Samantha Wagner:

Yeah, absolutely. Thanks, mark. So I work with a company called Elia Care. We are a health tech company that creates software that supports personal support workers and nurses when they’re doing their job in the home, mainly around scheduling and forms management. I’ve been with the company for about three and a half years now. Time has flown, started as a data entry intern and worked my way up through the ranks of revenue operations, doing stuff like the deal Desk. I was really in the trenches with that one, and then I did our CPQ implementation with DealHub. Now, I’m working as our primary deal hub, admin, and deal strategist on this end.

Mark Lerner:

Yeah, amazing. And it’s fascinating that you have landed in this rev ops role having done deal desk as well, coming in from the data entry, not really much background in sales ops or rev ops, and making your way there. I think that’s really a unique kind of origin story for folks that I speak to. It’s an interesting journey to have gotten there and not have been in a sales role or something like that prior. Often, people take that route, or even customer success, so it’s a fascinating case study on a unique approach to this world.

When we spoke earlier, prior to recording, we talked about a few things that maybe we could discuss, and one of the things you brought up was this idea of when it’s time for a new tool as opposed to it maybe just a broken process. For me, I have the shiny new, shiny object syndrome where I see a tool, and I want it, and sometimes I’ll try to superimpose that tool on a problem that doesn’t exist just so that we can use it. I am very guilty of this very often or that for every problem that pops up, there has to be a tool, whereas often it really starts with the process. Even if the process isn’t the final thing, it’s usually there that needs to start. So, in your experience, this idea of you seeing a problem, do you look for a tool, or do you look at the process? What are some common signs and pain points to give you an idea that maybe there’s a process problem here rather than a technology problem?

Samantha Wagner:

Yeah, so I totally agree. Love a shiny new tool. I’m all in for doing research and trying to find different resources that can make everybody’s life easier in our organization. And I think we did that when we started to implement Deal Hub. We noticed an issue with not enough guardrails, a lack of reportability, and stuff like that. And so, we thought that implementing A CPQ was a fantastic way to move forward and tackle that. So, that’s why we ended up going with Deal Hub. When we were implementing, we didn’t question our process. We thought that this was going to fix all of our problems, we were going to be able to start to do our reporting and so we ended up modeling Deal Hub after our previous processes and systems worked for a short amount of time, but quickly, we started to notice that there were some complexities that weren’t being handled as the primary deal hub admin.

I was getting a lot of little requests for a lot of tweaks, and a lot of my time was spent head down in the trenches trying to fix stuff. And that actually went on for a long time. Probably about a year before my manager and our director of Remy operations were like, Hey, you’re doing a lot of small quick changes. What’s sort of the problem? Let’s take a step back and address and kind of look at what’s actually going on. That’s when we realized that we hadn’t shifted our process when we’d moved to A CPQ in this new system, we found that people were still trying to work in what we like to call the wild west of sales. They were trying to make all of these different modifications and they wanted all this flexibility and all of this creativity and that didn’t match with the reportability and the guardrails that we’d set in place when we moved to the CPQ. So I guess it’s just that constant pain. If you notice that you’re trying to implement the fix and it’s just not quite getting there, you’ve probably taken a step in the wrong direction to start, and that’s when I would recommend taking a step back and looking at it from a larger picture. So it’s definitely those repeated issues, you’re not quite getting where you need to be. That is a big red flag for me.

Mark Lerner:

So it’s kind of like the reactive as opposed to the proactive. If you’re constantly putting duct tape on it, then maybe there’s something deeper going on there. Yeah, I would love to hear a little bit about the Wild West, what that was like, and how it became clear that this potentially is not only a process issue but also a technology need here. How did you come to that conclusion?

Samantha Wagner:

So this was a little bit before my time, but I can speak from what I’ve heard from people. A lot of it was just realizing that, so we were using HubSpot before and I know HubSpot has made some amazing HubSpot functionality specifically. We’re still with them as our CRM, and they are doing a fantastic job implementing new processes. But at the time when we moved over to Deal Hub, there were just a couple of things that we found reps were adding a little bit too much to they were getting creative with, which is fantastic to an extent, but was a little too much for us. So one of ’em was line items. They were using the renaming option, and we were losing Reportability on our line item names.

We have our revenue amount, our professional services, and stuff like that. And when we had stuff like MRR ramps or free trials involved, there were issues around calculations. We were trying to supplement that with stuff like Excel sheets to do these calculations for people, and there were issues in terms of them not filling out the right sections and just confusion overall. So we found, I think it’s the same thing we did after the implementation of Dea Hub when we had a process issue, which is it was like that duct tape effect when we had that same tool issue where it was like, okay, let me add this Excel sheet, let me add this process, go talk to this person before you do anything. And it was just incredibly manual. So I think we actually ended up swinging from one end to the other where we were all processed with no tool, and then we went, let’s rely completely on a tool and not change our process. And it was just about finding that middle afterward that we had to work towards.

Mark Lerner:

And was there, or is there kind of a telltale sign that you found that middle ground where, I don’t know if there are metrics or if it’s qualitative where you know that you have both the process and the technology in place and you have the right setup that it’s not going to need those super gluing pieces in every once in a while?

Samantha Wagner:

Yeah, I think our pendulum is still swinging at the moment. We’re still in our back and forth and trying to figure out what those metrics are. So, for example, now that we’ve made a slight process adjustment to match the deal hub, we’re looking to add another tool to our tech stack and are starting to look at stuff like subscription management systems to automate the finance end of things. So I really think it’s just that assessment. Do you find that there are a lot of errors? Do you find that there are a lot of pain points? Are people adopting things? I think one of the easiest things that you can do to figure out whether or not your process and your tools are working is talk to your reps and your day-to-day users because I’ve learned, especially salespeople and it’s fantastic, but very opinionated and they’ll tell you if you’re heading in the right direction or not, you have to obviously filter what they’re saying with that reportability aspect in your mind. They may not prioritize that, but what does their day-to-day work look like? Are your tools or your processes slowing them down? Are they feeling those pain points? I think that’s one of the easiest litmus tests for figuring out if you’re going in the right direction,

Mark Lerner:

And that’s a good transition. You had mentioned reporting, right? So moving into that, you have tools and processes, and there are challenges there, but obviously, data integrity is critical from rev ops and then when you’re dealing with a quote to cash stuff, finance, accounting, revenue recognition, all that, the reporting and the data need to be accurate. So it’s vital for decision-making, but sometimes that can come at the expense of, like you said, the sales reps being very opinionated, which can be a challenge for them. So how do you prioritize that balance of what you need from a reporting perspective but also ensure that the user experience from your end user, who’s the sales rep, isn’t that negative? Empire Teddy prioritizes the two.

Samantha Wagner:

Yeah, I sort of mentioned before that we’ve had a lot of conflict between that and trying to figure out the balance. We set up Deal Hub for reportability, but our previous processes were for user experience and stuff like that. And I think this is another case where there’s a pendulum swinging back and forth. We’re still in this process of settling in, but I think one of the biggest things is to sell it to the people who are your users. We talked about the fact that I don’t come from a sales background. I didn’t work my way up into sales operations and revenue operations that way, and I’ve felt it in my career because I’ve forgotten that piece of selling. So a lot of the time, we went, like I said, with Deal Hub, which was very heavy on reporting, and that caused pain points for our users.

And outside of that, it was just an anchor bias from them where they didn’t want to see that change. And they were like, no, we need 100% of what we’re asking. We’re stuck in our ways. We’re at this point. And I think where we missed the mark was sitting down with them and being like, okay, here’s what the reporting will do. Here’s how the reporting will benefit you. Here’s why you should be invested in this. And then work together to find that middle ground. It really is a team effort when you’re working with revenue operations. Revenue operations sit in such a central place between so many different teams, and it’s really easy for us to not work with other people because we’re such data-driven and metrics-driven people that we’re like, oh, we have the numbers, we don’t need anything else in this situation. But I do think that the key to it is a person-to-person interaction, working on that change management and sort of approaching the problem as a business problem, a team problem, and not a revenue operations problem.

So for us, that looked like, okay, we have all of this setup. We’re reporting what we want. What do you not like about the user experience? Tell us why this is a pain point. We need this, and we’ll tell them exactly what we need. If there’s a pain point that somebody has come to us about, we’re like, well, this is why we have it this way. Tell me what you think about that and get people’s actual direct opinions. So it’s really been about finding that balance between people and numbers that directly translates to reportability and user experience.

Mark Lerner:

This idea of internal selling comes up a lot. And I think that there’s an aspect of psychology and influencing people and getting into someone’s shoes to understand their experience that often I think it’s overlooked. You can have all the quantitative information and say, well, if X and Y are done, then we’ll get Z output. However, the variables that often get overlooked are the things you can’t really quantify, such as human behavior and individual human behavior. So you talked about it a little bit, but how do you go about trying to put yourself into the shoes of a rep in order to understand if it is this adding complexity where it’s not needed or if it is this a benefit to them and is it going to be something that’s going to be useful?

Samantha Wagner:

Yeah, I think the biggest thing for me is one, like you said, putting myself in their shoes and actually going. I like to go through, look at our past deals, and try and replicate them whenever I make a change to our current system. Is this taking me extra time? Is this a clunky process? How many clicks do I have to do to replicate what we’ve already been doing? Once I’m satisfied with that, I’ll usually pick one of our stakeholders, some of our front-end users, and walk them through it. Now that usually comes with me being like, you figure this out first. Here is the update I’ve made. Try and do what you need to do. Let me know if that’s a problem. And then, if it is, we’ll walk them through and say, okay, now that we’ve done a little, we’ll say light training, is the process still clunky to you, or is there that level of understanding?

So just that, making sure to test even small things. I think for a long time, I did updates that I thought were just minor changes. I’m just going to throw it out there and throw the update into the production environment. But I’ve learned those have their effects as well. So, making sure to follow that process and just spot-check with the people who are going to be using it on a daily basis is the best thing you can do. To me, even the first iteration of what I put together was super easy to use because I knew how everything connected, I knew the workflows, I knew all of that, and I’m never going to be able to remove my own bias in terms of the user experience. So there’s no better place to get it than straight from the horse’s mouth, go straight to our frontline reps, and get that data from them.

Mark Lerner:

Yeah, that’s an awesome kind of acid test to redo deals from the past and see how many clicks it takes and kind of do a comparison. That’s like a really good rubric, I think for a lot of people, that can be replicable. I also love the idea of having internal beta testers, as it were, and testing it on them. So if they’re, as long as you have a sample size big enough or they’re representative enough, then that gives you a good idea. If it really fails miserably and they hate it, then maybe it’s not even worth pushing forward. I think those things, people talk about those things, I’m not sure how often they’re either, especially as the company gets larger and more complex, like you said, if you remove one field that you think no one’s using, you’ll get a bunch of angry emails, where did it go? It happens, and that’s why you really need a test.

So moving over from the technology aspect of things, and the other really important job of rev ops, which is in effect breaking down silos between departments. That was kind of the original idea behind it, which was that as a company got bigger sales, lived over here, marketing lived over there, and had success over there, they had never passed each other two shifts in the night. They had differing incentives, different goals, and different metrics sometimes, and that didn’t work. And so a lot of what’s involved now is working on cross-departmental projects, ensuring that there’s data integrity throughout. So, as you have done several kinds of operations-related roles within Elia Care, what are some of the strategies that you use or you’ve used to kind of ensure collaboration, especially when it comes to the deal desk, which is a highly collaborative interdepartmental job?

Samantha Wagner:

Yeah, for sure. So, I’ve seen a whole bunch of different levels of collaboration throughout my time here. Revenue operations, when I joined AlayaCare, was relatively new. So I thought signup kind of grew from simple CRM management and basic reporting to involving enablement and some overall strategy across the business. So we’ve definitely seen a journey for those, and I’ve experienced them in my role as well. And I think the best way that I’ve heard it described is that we, as revenue operations, are the wranglers we guide, but we aren’t necessarily; we will never be the only ones involved in a decision or in a project or anything like that. And I think it’s really important to keep that in mind as we’re going forward. So with some of the projects that I’ve been doing recently, I’ve had involvement with any team from, like you said, marketing, our revenue, legal.

I’ve reached into customer success. I’ve talked with our product team engineering. I’ve had a far further reach than I ever expected, and I think what I’ve learned is always try and overestimate if you think who’s involved, there’s another person who’s affected and who’s connected. I mean, if you think about it from a business perspective, every single department is going to be connected. You’re going to go from product development to engineering to our product marketing team, which is then going to evolve sales and marketing. It’s a flow through the whole way, and you’re going to feel any changes along that flow. So I always make sure, one of the things that I do is always making a RACI chart, really trying to understand not just who’s directly involved, who’s responsible or accountable, but who’s invested, who needs to know, who would be interested in knowing it doesn’t even need to be a need.

I find there’s an amazing amount of benefit in keeping people informed who may not have a direct investment in this project but may know something parallel to it and stuff like that. So, usually, I’ll do my initial assessment of who’s involved in a project. I’ll put it away if I have the time to do it and come back a day or two later and be like, okay, did I miss anybody? And if I’m unsure, I’ll message them and I’ll be like, listen, this is the project I’m looking at. Here’s a high-level overview. Do you have an interest in being informed, or are you just staying in the loop? And that obviously comes with its own cons. You have a lot of voices and a lot of cooks in the kitchen. But I think our job as revenue operations is to filter through that feedback and make sure we’re taking what’s most important and most prominent and is going to have the most direct effect on the business. So my strategy is always go wide, cast a wide net, and you can always filter out stuff that you don’t need, but if you move forward with a project and somebody who needs to be involved or who has a key piece of information isn’t involved, you’re doubling your work when you have to come back and redo all of this project and retouch your requirements and all of that. Again, the more, the merrier in this; our job is to be the siv, and we go from there.

Mark Lerner:

Yeah, I love that casting as wide of a net as possible covers all your bases, but you alluded to it: Rev Ops is an inherent change agent. You’re there to be the herald of people through change, and change is painful. People don’t like change, and salespeople don’t like change, especially salespeople. Obviously, not only are you managing the change, but there’s also probably a cultural influence that needs to happen across these multiple departments that previously lived very separate lives. How do you see that rev ops role influencing the company culture around change, especially when working in those cross-departmental, cross-functional projects?

Samantha Wagner:

Yeah, I think that’s when we go back to our roots in data and metrics, because honestly, when you need to do a culture change across the company, it’s not coming from revenue operations, at least not directly. We’ve tried that, and people will listen to it to a certain extent, but there’s always going to be that you’re not like my boss. You’re not exactly

Mark Lerner:

Right.

Samantha Wagner:

Yeah. So you got to go to the C-suite, the C-suite. For us, we’re a very short organization, I think in our organization, but overall, just upper management, you need their buy-in and where our frontline reps and our sales reps, like I said, they need to be sold to, and they like, what can we do for you? I think that upper management is the people who appreciate those numbers the same way that we have revenue operations. So again, taking those numbers, proving the benefit, why we’re doing it, and giving that to our upper management to then disseminate down their teams. Who’s going to know our frontline reps better than their direct managers and the people they’re talking with on a regular basis? So, just make sure that that flow comes from somebody they trust and respect. Honestly,

Mark Lerner:

Those are, I think, really useful insights because I’m surely a challenge. I know I’m not the only one that has this challenge. I’m sure it’s seen across companies moving towards the future. The last three to five years have been a crazy rollercoaster for everyone, I think, right? There was a big shock, there was covid that changed everything, and there was a huge influence on companies and technology, and rev ops became even more important. Then, we had the tide going back out with inflation and interest rates, so there were budget cuts, headcount reductions, and challenges around there. And then, smack in the middle of both of those things, AI popped up as a revolutionary change. So, looking forward, as we get out of this summer and go into the fall and towards 2025 and beyond, how do you see the future of this role, of the role you play, or the role that people in operations play? How do you see it evolving? How much more do you see technology being involved as opposed to process? What do you see coming down the line?

Samantha Wagner:

Yeah, that’s a really big question, right? So much has changed over the past little while. I think obviously AI is going to be a massive thing. As you said, I think we’re going to see an explosion in tools, which is putting revenue operations in a candy. It’s like a kid, a candy shop. I’m like, oh, all of these new things that are coming. But I think there’ll be some pain with that as well. I think a lot of people are pushing their boundaries, and it will work out fantastically for some people. I think of Gong and a lot of their new AI features. They’ve done a fantastic job and I think of really earned a spot in a lot of people’s tech stacks and front of mind and stuff like that. And then I think there’s going to be people who try to keep up with the speed of things that are developing and are going to feel the pain of it.

So it’ll be an interesting next five to 10 years as we adjust to the rapid change of tech. I think we’re always going to be at a lag behind that, whether it’s through the assessment process of new tools and stuff like that. We’re going to be six, ten months behind what people can provide us. But I think taking that time is important. I think as everything moves forward, incredibly fast revenue operations people should remember to slow down. It’s something that I’ve struggled with a lot, but I think when everything’s moving at the pace that it is everything that’s changing at the pace that it is, you need to apply what we do on a micro level to a macro level. So, where in revenue operations and in Elia Care do I think you need to take your time and do your testing before you push an update live?

I think you need to do the same thing with the tools in your tech stack. You need to really make sure you’re assessing it and assessing your process alongside it. We sort of discussed that you need to really assess what you have, and then when you’re ready and secure, take that step and try to keep up with tech. I think it’s going to keep going. I think with the rate at which we’re exploding with AI coming out; we’re not going to slow down anytime soon in terms of new inventions and innovation. So, just making sure that you’re set and you have a strong foundation to assess that and make the best use of that is incredibly important.

Mark Lerner:

As we round out the episode here, we ended up getting into the AI topic, which I always find myself in, but there are, I think, two schools of people or maybe three. One is the Terminator. They’re going to take us over the end of the world. And then there are people on the other extreme where it’s like, this is the best thing that ever happened. It’s going to solve all of our problems. Where on that spectrum do you fall? Do you foresee that the increase in usability of automation and AI will empower rev ops to require less headcount so that a single operator can do more? How do you see that playing out?

Samantha Wagner:

Yeah, I fall pretty in the middle of the spectrum on that. I think AI is a fantastic creation. I think I like to use it as a support rather than rely on it completely. I think it’s great for giving suggestions, recommending ideas, doing call summaries, and stuff like that. But I think we always have to take what it gives us with a grain of salt. We need to remember to spot-check and go back to the testing I talked about. It’s the same sort of thing. You need to make sure that if you’re relying on it, you are making sure that it’s doing its job and it’s doing it.

So I think that it’ll be great for revenue operations. I think we do a lot of tedious tasks. I think we have to do a lot of creative thinking and have our hands in a lot of different pos. I think we have to keep a lot of information about different things. As we said, with cross-departmental work, you have to know a lot of things about a lot of different departments. And I think something like AI is fantastic for keeping us up with all that, leading us in the right direction, and sort of giving us those hints. But I think there’s a danger of relying on it too much. As we go forward, you have to make sure that you are moving forward with a cautious approach to what AI is feeding you, but it is absolutely beneficial in the long run. Just make sure you’re using it right.

Mark Lerner:

Yeah, I think anybody that’s gotten some of these cold emails lately, they’re trying to get you to buy a McDonald’s franchise or something, knows that if you’re relying on AI without really spot-checking, you can have some pretty bad assumptions and outcomes. So before we end the episodes, why don’t you tell the folks at home maybe where they can learn more about you or Elia Care or some of the interesting stuff that you all are doing?

Samantha Wagner:

Yeah, absolutely. So, I’m available on LinkedIn. Samantha Wagner should be pretty easy to find. And then, for Elia Care, we’re all over the place. If you’re looking at any health tech conferences or stuff across the US or Canada, we’re usually at those. But a lot of care.com will give you a wonderful overview of what we do and the resources that we offer. And feel free to reach out to me or anyone at the company for any more information if there’s interest. Everybody’s happy to chat or give anybody a demo.

Mark Lerner:

And we’ll put some links in the show notes for everybody. Samantha, thank you so much for joining us today.