About the speaker

Sandy Robinson is currently the SVP of Revenue Operations & Enablement at Patra Corp. Sandy brings over 20 years of experience in sales, leadership, training, enablement, and revenue operations to the industry. Prior to Patra, Sandy led Revenue Operations and Enablement at several SaaS companies, including Web.com, SupplyFrame and Nymbus. As VP of Revenue Operations at Nymbus, a FinTech, she led a team responsible for Revenue Operations and Enablement for the Enterprise SaaS marketing, sales, and customer success teams. 

Mark Lerner:

All right. Welcome everybody back to the Revamp podcast. I’m super excited today. I have a very special guest, Sandy’s here with us, and we’re going to chat about methodologies and processes and technologies and what those are needed in order to scale. But before we jump into it, Sandy, why don’t you tell the folks at home a little bit about yourself, what you do, your background and that kind of thing.

I’m Sandy Robinson. I’m the Senior Vice President of Revenue Operations and Enablement at Patra. I am super stoked to be here today with you, mark, and talk all about enablement and methodologies and all the things that help companies scale.

Yeah, awesome. And I don’t know, I’m going through your bio here looking, because I know you’ll be speaking at the Rev Ops Alliance event that we deal hub will be at as well, and I think we’re going to cover some of the topics. See here that your second degree black belt, is that true?

Sandy Robinson:

Yeah, actually early in my career, I started out teaching martial arts. It was kempo way back in the day, and that’s actually how I got into sales because I ended up running a martial arts school and trained for years and years and years. So just at some point I traded in my pajamas and actually went out and got a real sales job. But I still do kickboxing and all kinds of stuff, fun stuff, and I’m usually like, this is my Joe stuff. I’m usually twirling this around at my desk or something in meetings. But yeah,

Mark Lerner:

Love it. 

Sandy Robinson:

Yeah, I did good catch there.

Mark Lerner:

Yeah, well, I like to do my research and I did a little Krav Maga myself for a little bit until I had kids and it was just too tough to keep with it, which is just

Sandy Robinson:

Excuse. My kid does BJJ. So yeah, and sometimes they have kickboxing class there. Sometimes I’ll do, but yeah, he’s way into BJJ.

Mark Lerner:

Okay, cool. So maybe we’ll find the middle ground here between rev ops and karate, but I think the idea that it looks like you’ll be talking about, and I think you talk about often is this idea of in order to achieve sustainable growth and the infrastructure needed to scale, there needs to be unification for rev ops of methodology process and the systems and the technology. So I guess maybe we could start by defining those three elements and as you see them and what those are.

Sandy Robinson:

So methodology would be anything that you’re trying to roll out. So a lot of times it’s going to be a sales training, so you might have some sort of, I’ll just name a few. There’s spin selling, there’s Challenger, there’s command of the message. We’ve got a lot of methodologies out there. And what happens is companies tend to slap trading on a problem or they say, Hey, we have a new initiative. We’re going to roll out this new product offering and everyone go do the thing. And they just expect it’s going to get done and magically it’s going to happen. And salespeople are sitting there, yeah, okay, whatever. This thing’s going to go away. And so what happens is it just kind of falls on deaf ears. And the reason for that is it’s not ingrained in everything. So there obviously has to be alignment, there has to be leadership support and all of these things, but it has to be integrated into your process.

So whatever your customer buying journey looks like, all the way from the lead generation coming in, so the marketing folks talking about it through customer success, you have to have whatever your methodology is ingrained at every step of the way or people won’t remember. They won’t think about it. They’ll be like, oh, that was a really cool thing I learned with that trainer and I totally forgot everything they said. And the last piece is, so that’s the process side. And then the last piece is the technology. So if you don’t have it embedded into your CRM into your enablement tools, you don’t train people on how to use it, they’re not going to do it. So salespeople, if they don’t find what they’re looking for within 60 seconds, they’re literally not going to use it. So you could have trained ’em all day long and that really cool case study that marketing spent all the time doing, but if they can’t get it, it’s going to be a useless waste of time. So if you don’t have all three of those pieces, you may as well throw your money in the garbage. That’s kind of my opinion on it because it’s just not going to work. So you have to have it all tied together, and that’s where those three elements come into play.

Mark Lerner:

Awesome. And it sounds like, and maybe I’m wrong, that this concept and kind of understanding this problem happened through experience. I mean, have you seen situations where these things were happening in a vacuum and it was just throwing money out the window?

Sandy Robinson:

Oh yeah. Oh yeah. I mean, I’ve been doing this over 20 years, so I’ve definitely had my fair share of programs that have gone in the dumpster and it ends up being where people get super excited about it. And I have been in both the enablement and revenue operations side of things. So typically it’ll come to a team like mine and say, Hey, you’re the pro here, go roll this thing out. And then you have leaders who they think it’s all great and they’re talking the talk, blah, blah, blah, blah. But then they’re not actually doing it. They don’t show up to the sessions. And even with the best intentions, particularly CROs, they get busy, they’re down in the weeds trying to close deals or managing up, managing the board, and they’re like, oh, I’ve got this great enablement leader, this great rev ops leader, Sandy’s going to go make this thing happen.

And at the end of the day, everybody’s got to be doing it. And most importantly, the person at the top of the org, the CRO, the CEO, and really the whole c-suite needs to be kind of talking the talk. So a lot of times these methodologies will introduce new terminology and those things need to be ingrained throughout the company. And for example, command of the message is there’s a mantra that the salespeople talk about. So you talk about a mantra on every deal. So everybody needs to know what a mantra is. If the CEO looks at you and goes, what the F is a mantra, then you’ve totally failed. So yeah, so I’ve learned, I’ve had a few of those and I’ve had experiences that have been phenomenal where all the way down to the product organization is involved in shaping products to fit what you’re trying to do and differentiate in your methodologies.

Mark Lerner:

So let’s say that you’re someone coming into a new company and you’re hired ostensibly to be the change maker, and it’s pretty clear to you that there’s an ingrained silo ness across these things In a given company, is it a lost cause or are there steps that one can take to help the ship to get these things aligned?

Sandy Robinson:

It depends on the people, but every organization, I don’t care if you’re a startup, if you’re a large tenured company, public organization, there’s silos in every organization, even within teams, even within a revenue function, you have silos. Anytime you have a VP who’s in charge of something, you have a little silo and a little mini culture. So coming into an organization trying to make change, I think you have to understand the dynamics and communicating up and out laterally is just so critical. So understanding, I don’t think it’s possible to break down silos. I think silos serve their own purposes. I mean, obviously organizations need to have structure or they wouldn’t have them, but you need to have those communication skills and the internal selling. So that’s why in roles like revenue operations or sales operations or really any enablement role, marketing operations, you need to be able to have those internal selling skills, those collaborative skills to be able to come across as non-threatening as well.

Because you come into an organization, you’re here to make change, everybody hates you at first until you start making these relationships and understanding the whole seek first to understand and be understood type of thing. But it’s difficult and every organization is different, but everybody’s got an ego and you have to be sensitive that people worry about their jobs, they worry about what happens if you are making a change, how does it impact them? So I guess it’s just goes back to basics. Put yourself in their shoes, try to open communication before you come in and make a big splash. And coming new into any organization, but particularly in a role like revenue operations where you’re trying to, when I came to Patra, it’s like, Hey, I just want to understand what is a customer experience all the way through when they reach out to Patra.

So starting with the marketing side and what is that experience like and the BDRs and then going to the sales. And so a great way to start for new folks coming into an organization is to really start with the customer buying journey. So if you’re thinking about the bow tie end to end, and then it really forces you to go with all those stakeholders that you’re going to be working with. And at the same time you’re kind of understanding all the steps in the buying journey, which goes back to how do you lay out whatever initiative methodology to your process. And then through that exploratory process, you’re going to understand what technology each person is responsible for. And does marketing use, I don’t know a calendar tool, do they use Chili Piper, do they use, how’s their inbound process set up? How does that connect over to the sales team? And are they using outreach? What tools are they using the way and just kind of scoping that out and how do they all connect? And those are the keys to connecting any sort of methodology. go-to market plan initiative is kind of having all three of those layers.

Mark Lerner:

Yeah, that’s super interesting. And yeah, I think there is that kind of psychology element to being a change agent that you have to do that internal selling. I think especially in this moment, everybody’s looking over their shoulder a little bit. There’s a lot of turnover, employee-wise companies are doing a lot of downsizing. And one element of that in theory that’s pushing some of that is the introduction of more powerful ais and automation to do some of the more repetitive tasks. You’re quite a prolific speaker at a lot of these rev ops events, so you’ve probably been able to observe the evolution over time. How are you seeing the impact? So AI really only became part of the lexicon in any real way, maybe like a year and change ago. How are you seeing that impact on the way folks in our space are talking and the way organizations are thinking about everything really,

Sandy Robinson:

It’s everywhere. So if you’re not talking about it, you’re not thinking about it, you’re asleep at the wheel for sure. I think as it relates to sales, marketing, revenue operations, I mean, there’s a lot going on. There’s a new tool coming out every day. So I think as leaders, we have to be careful to not jump too quickly. I mean, I’m definitely a fan of being an early adopter of certain things, but there’s a little bit of skepticism that I think is healthy. The way that I’ve approached it so far in our organization has really gone to our existing tech stack and said, Hey, what are you guys doing with AI today? And a lot what you’ll find is some of the bigger companies, I’ll just the call intelligence tools are a great example of this. They’re really embedding, most of them are embedding generative AI right in there.

So those are some quick wins that salespeople can take advantage of. So I think that’s a great way to get started. But I mean, there’s definitely a lot of process optimization and task. I just looked at a tool yesterday that just will look across all of your tools and just kind of see what all the tasks and all the workflows are, and it’s like, ooh, those things are a little bit interesting. So I think they’re worth looking at and it’s going to be really part of our everyday world in revenue operations. But I’m in this mindset of optimize what we have right now. But I’m also in a little bit different place in my company because I have a 17-year-old company who has a ugly mess of data silos in the background that I’m trying to make sense of and bring together. So we’re really trying to focus on what do we have and then trying to sprinkle in little bells and whistles. And one of those right now is the call intelligence functionality that we’re using with some ai. And I won’t name the tools because I think most of them are doing it in some way. I would imagine some do it better than others. But

Mark Lerner:

Yeah, and I think that is kind of one of the most obvious use cases because there’s such a large data set that enables the AI to know and learn and train. The other one that seems very obvious to me is kind of these menial tasks, like updating the CRM with notes like taking

Call, that’s like the meme of sales. Is it in the CRM? Did you update the CRM? And they always hate to do it, get it. Those seem like the obvious quick wins. A lot of very elaborate and almost kind of fanciful ideas I think early on about what AI could do. And I think the gap between the promise and what’s been delivered thus far is pretty big. It does seem like the expectations are being pulled back a little bit, and actually the functionality is actually increasing a little bit. So maybe we’ll find some middle ground there. But from the perspective of the revenue operations professional sales operations professional, do you think that having a working knowledge of leveraging these tools is kind of a critical piece of their tool belt at this point? Or is it something that it’s still kind of in its infancy and isn’t really necessarily something you have to worry about?

Sandy Robinson:

I mean, it’s definitely critical. So you have to be always looking to optimize your tech stack, optimize your budget, and make improvements on efficiencies. So if you’re not doing that, not being proactive, again, it doesn’t mean jump on the bandwagon on every latest tool and sign up for it. But yeah, you have to be thinking about that, especially as we go into 2025, how does this fit into your strategy and where can you get some quick wins from it? So yeah, if you’re not doing it, it’s just like anything else, just keeping up with technology, understanding, doing your research, reading up about it. I mean, I was on a call yesterday just having a discussion all around this, how folks are using ai and just even this idea of the SDR role, what is happening with that and is AI going to replace the SDR? So we just kind of had this whole think tank conversation about it, and people have different opinions, but it’s something to definitely be mindful of and be watching closely for sure. So if you’re not, then you’re missing a boat, you’re going to become stagnant and you may as well start hunting for a different function to work in.

Mark Lerner:

Yeah, I tend to agree. I think it’s going to be like the people who refuse to get a car and we’re like, my horse works just fine. Then they were on their horse and buggy when people were driving by. Maybe kind of going back to the original focus, you had mentioned a good first step is to come in and look at the full customer journey and take stock of everything. So let’s say that you’ve done that and you have a pretty broad view of everybody’s role and where things are happening. What are the next steps in, where do you put your focus next moving pieces?

Sandy Robinson:

Sure. So I think one it needs to align with what are the challenges and what are the priorities at the organizational level. So when I started at Patra last April, it was very clear that it needed some focus in the deal to close to go live type of area. So that’s more around the sales operations function. Marketing operations seemed to be working pretty well. So it was where do I need to focus? You map everything out. I know there are problems over here, but we have bigger problems here and these are going to give me the most impact because close to go live means revenue. So if we’re selling deals and we’re having trouble getting them to go live or they’re taking longer than I think they should, and I’ve identified a number of root causes and that’s where I want to focus. So I think you have to align with what are the priorities, because you can’t fix all the problems at once.

So we’d love to boil the ocean, especially if you come into a new role and you’re like, Ooh, ooh, we can do this. We can do this, and this needs to get fixed, this needs to get fixed. What is the biggest burning priority? But when you map out that tech stack, it becomes pretty clear. I found that we have an enablement tool that literally does not work with HubSpot. It doesn’t want to work with HubSpot, it never will work with HubSpot. They don’t have any plans for it to work with HubSpot, but we are on a two year contract. So I am just counting down the minutes until that contract is up and I will be replacing that tool because it doesn’t make any sort of sense to have something that doesn’t integrate now. So that to me was a really big like, oh, got to fix that, but can’t fix it now because someone signed it to your contract.

So I’m stuck waiting and I don’t have additional budget to fix it, so now I’m going to go fix other things. So I refined some integrations that were not set up super well, got rid of the tool and made the ones that we had work. So really dialed in our call intelligence tool to allow people to those tools, especially if you’re looking at the pipeline aspect, allow you to really aggregate the data in one place. So it was a real quick win to get in there and say, Hey, you can look at your pipeline here. You can see all your calls in one place. You can see some of your fields you have to update. And just built them a nice little fund dashboard while I went and worked on the other things. So that’s how I approach getting started. But I have this other list of stuff that I’m working on and I start vetting for the third quarter and fourth quarter to be able to get it to a more optimal place. But that’s exactly how I did it. I just started with each area, talk to them, here are the tools, and then just looked at the pipeline and the problems. Pulled a few analytics out of HubSpot, which there’s a lot of really great data in there you can pull without really knowing anything too much about what you’re doing and just kind of see quickly what is bubbling up as something scary and ugly that you want to deal with that can have a big impact fast.

Mark Lerner:

Yeah, that sparked a question that I often have, which is how important is it for someone in an operations role today to have some level of ability in low code, let’s say, being able to work on an integration with an API without needing to pull a developer in? Is that a prerequisite or is it okay to just understand the structure and be able to delegate?

Sandy Robinson:

I mean, I definitely am not any sort of coding professional, but I think understanding how it works, understanding the architecture, to me, if it requires a developer, I’m not going to do it, period. That’s a rule. So there are plenty of tools out there that work out of the box and snap into the tools without sitting, running around, creating custom hooks and going in and hiring people that are developers are borrowing them in your company. So that’s the way that I operate. I like to be agile. I can be flexible. Obviously, larger organizations and more complex enterprise, we’re talking billion dollar companies or they may have different setup. They may have a developer team and you may need to get into that. So it just really depends on the organization, but I like to really keep it clean and simple because if you want to make a change, you don’t want to have to get into a developer’s sprint cycle to be able to get that change in place.

And then you’re kind of stuck with the thing. And I’ve been in companies where it’s been like that, and it’s a whole, it is a lot of work to really make changes and it’s slow and you can’t operate that way in today’s landscape. If you need to make a change, you need to be able to be agile. So anything that, my recommendation is anything that you are setting up is you set it up knowing that you’re going to iterate on it, you are going to change it, you’re going to change it. Maybe tomorrow you may change it. So set it up that way so you don’t kind of pigeonhole yourself and stuck with something that you have to now spend more money and more resources and hire more people that are smarter than you to fix.

Mark Lerner:

Yeah. Yeah, I agree. I mean, I think these tools are made now that as long as you kind of understand the structure, you should be able to do them. And if it really has that barrier where it’s like you really need a developer to make any changes, it really doesn’t allow you to evolve with a very fluid changing market that we’re in. The macro situation is very unstable, I think, or not unstable, but just very fluid and always changing. 

Sandy Robinson:

It’s not scalable either. So we started talking about at the beginning, it’s not scalable, but you may join a company where you’re already there. So you have to figure out, okay, well how do I either untangle it or optimize it or rip and replace, or maybe it’s easier to go with the devil. I mean, obviously every situation is different, but if you’re having the opportunity to set something up from the beginning or to come in and reevaluate and retool the way that you are putting together your tech stack, I think especially if you have Salesforce, I mean there’s a gazillion apps on the app exchange that you can work with that might serve your needs versus having to hire developers to create something custom.

Mark Lerner:

Well, Sandy, this has been fascinating. I really appreciate your time. We’re now down to our last few minutes here. But before we head out, maybe let the folks at home know where they can learn a little bit more about you, some of the content you’re writing where they can maybe see you speak, things like that.

Sandy Robinson:

Yeah, I am out there in LinkedIn. I’m pretty active on LinkedIn, so I think my handle is just Sandy Robinson. I’m out there all the time posting things. I like to contribute to the revenue operations in enablement communities. I don’t know when this is going to air, but I am going to be in New York next week at the Alliance, the Sales Enablement Collective and the Revenue Operations Alliance. I also have a podcast, it’s called Rev Ops Unboxed. So you can see me there and try to talk to just other ops, anybody that touches some sort of revenue operations. I’ve even had enablement folks on there, just real practitioners getting out there doing the thing, just talking about, it’s just kind of fun. So it’s a fun thing for me.

Mark Lerner:

Awesome. Yes, we’re going to try to get this out before Thursday. So Sandy, thank you so much for taking the time today, and I look forward to seeing you in New York next week.

Sandy Robinson:

Awesome. Thanks a lot. Appreciate it. Bye.