33 Minutes 
Note: Anyone interested in pre-ordering The Revenue Operations Manual can go here and use the code REVOPS20 for 20% off (or buy from any of your preferred booksellers here)!
Mark Lerner:
All right, everybody. Welcome to today’s very special episode of the Revamp podcast, where we’re going to be having our guests, Sean Lane, and Laura add to Sean’s second time. So he is in the two Timer Club. Laura’s first time, and this is the first time we’re having three folks on here. But I wanted to have you both on the podcast today because you have an upcoming book, the Revenue Operations Manual, and I had the opportunity to go through it and it was really interesting, and so I wanted to dive in to some of that ebook or some of that book. But before we get into that, why don’t you tell the audience a little bit about you both? So Laura, we’ll start with you.
Laura Adint:
Okay. My name is Laura Adint. I am a revenue operations professional for the last 25 years, so I’ve been in a lot of different businesses. Sean and I met at Drift. I was also part of Adaptive Insights, which was a workday company, and I’ve done a lot of different kinds of jobs as many revenue operations people have. Right now I’m in the Bay Area and I work in a financial services firm. Sean, I’ll let you take over with the introductions.
Sean Lane:
Thanks for that, Mark. Thanks for having me back and for having Laura as well. Sean Lane, I’m a founding partner at Beacon GTM. We help CEOs and revenue leaders improved their go-to-market execution. As Laura mentioned, she and I met at Drift. Laura was my boss for a while, mark, and so I was there for about five and a half years building out all of our different Go-to-market operations teams. Spent five and a half years at a restaurant technology company called Upserve before that, working in a bunch of different roles, including rev ops. And so super excited to be here today to talk about this book and all the smart people that we talk to, and hopefully there’ll be something that will be useful to your audience.
Mark Lerner:
Yeah, awesome. And I think that’s a great transition, and really this is kind of me being just curious because I’m sure it’s a difficult process, but what was the motivation behind going ahead and writing the book and working together and how was the process? And I’d love to just hear all about that. Sean, you can start this time.
Sean Lane:
Sure. So first of all, this was something that Laura and I talked about on and off throughout her time at Drift. She had taken a sabbatical right before she started at Drift, and when I first met her, she told me, yeah, one of the things I worked on in between was this idea of whether or not I wanted to write a book. And I just put that in the back of my brain. I was like, that’s a really interesting thing. And then fast forward a few years when she was leaving Drift, I was like, look, we have to work on this thing together if we’re not going to work together every day. She and I developed a really good partnership at Drift and a good working relationship. And so this was an opportunity for us to continue that. And so it started as just kind of this, honestly, a little bit of a pipe dream of an idea and eventually evolved into becoming more and more real.
And so I think for us, we set out with a few goals. One, we wanted to do something that very much celebrated operations folks. It’s a role that has very much always been in the background, and I think that this book very effectively puts operators center stage in the spotlight. Another goal of ours is we didn’t want it to be those business books where you could basically read the first 10 pages and you’ve got the entire book. This thing is a manual. It is very tactical. You could read it from start to finish or you could just open it up and say like, Hey, I have a comp problem today, and flip to the comp chapter and get what you need. So that was a goal of ours as well. And then the last goal was really more of a recognition of the fact that Laura and I do not have all the answers. We know, and I think we are humble enough to recognize that we cannot provide all the answers in the rev ops world. And so we were very methodical in the way that we featured over 50 different operators from very different industries, very different types of companies throughout the book so that we have these real world role models that people can read about and aspire to be like. So it was an amazing process, a ton of work. There’s about 80,000 words worth of content in this thing, but we’re pretty proud of the final outcome.
Mark Lerner:
Yeah, it’s amazing. Yeah, that’s no small feat and gross to both of you for sticking with it, but writing a book was easy. Everyone would do it, and it’s very useful. I think the idea of getting insights, like you said, we don’t know everything, but some of the things that are definitive early on in the book is kind of the definition of rev ops, right? So maybe Laura, we could talk a little bit about how the book defines rev ops and where in a company’s life cycle it suggests considering implementing it.
Laura Adint:
So when it’s early, that’s our particular view on it is early. We think that it’s really important to do that investment early, treating it as a necessity for sustainable growth because then you don’t have to fix the things afterwards how we define it. We think it’s really important to find what we talk about it as revenue operations transforms, siloed, unpredictable businesses into high achieving, predictable and scalable revenue machines. And so all of those we pick apart and talk about it and why each one of them are important, but really thinking through how do we as operations professionals bring forward the best of a company.
Mark Lerner:
And Sean, I am remembering there were three prerequisites I think that the book listed that you should h85ave in place before implementing product market fit. And I can’t remember the other two, but how did you both come to deciding these as the things that need to be in place in order to really justify the investment?
Sean Lane:
Yeah, so the three things you’re talking about are product market fit. You need to have made the transition away from founder-led sales into having actual salespeople on the team, and then third, some sort of repeatable sales process. And so if you’re still kind of wandering through the darkness of finding product market fit, this might not be something that you necessarily need. But what we found is that once you have that, it’s really time to start thinking about how you’re going to instrument your business, how you’re going to make decisions at your business, how you’re going to think about how systems and being data oriented can be embedded in the DNA of your company. And it might seem early to folks that that’s the time to do it, but what I find, especially now that I’m doing this consulting work at Beacon GTM, is like if you don’t put these foundations in place early, you wake up years later paying the price for that decision.
And so a lot of these, I’m sure you see this all the time with deal hub customers, mark, if this stuff isn’t set up thoughtfully at the beginning or you’re not thinking about, okay, what are the milestones in our customer journey that we absolutely want to instrument, we’re very basically like, what’s the stuff we want to count in our business? Then you’re going to inevitably going to have to tear everything down and build it up from scratch. And so hopefully some of the recommendations in the book can help people move past some of those painful moments and get some of the basics in place. I think we also try to make the book as applicable as possible to any sort of flavor of ops role that you might be in. That definition that Laura said is hard to arrive at because it’s an inherently cross-functional gig. And so even if you only work on sales or you only work on marketing, a lot of the lessons here are very much applicable because at the end of the day, what we’re trying to do is just drive outcomes for the business. You might be trying to make the business more efficient, you might be able to increase productivity per rep, but at the end of the day, having a role like this in place that can have an objective view of your entire customer journey is what’s going to create all those unlocks later on.
Mark Lerner:
One of the things that really struck a chord with me and gave me an aha moment was the analogy made about what someone in operations should be to their company. And you said that you should think of the company as the product and the operations person as a product manager, which I love because I talk about it a lot, you have launching a new internal tool or whatever, getting that adoption is very much like a product launch and your employees are your user base. And so that is a strategic shift in thinking from the way I think a lot of companies handle or envision Rev ops, right? There are still a lot of companies out there where Rev ops is considered is just kind of the CRM admin and they kind of just do whatever they’re told. What is the impact of having that impression of the role, meaning not strategic? What are the negative impacts companies would have if they’re really not letting their rev ops person be strategic in their work? Laura, I’m just going back and forth between you guys.
Laura Adint:
Yeah, yeah. I think you’re losing out on the capabilities of what can be and the ability for rev ops to make a difference and to affect those outcomes that Sean is talking about. So I had a sticky note written on my screen every time we were writing, and one of the things was, who are we writing this for? So I have this little sticky note actually, and it’s for the rev ops leader who believes that operators are key to a company’s success and have to be more than the S ft C admin.
Mark Lerner:
So for people, you’re preaching already sold on the concept. It’s not there to convince you. You really have to get to that point first. Do you think that companies that are in conceiving of this incorrectly that it’s just to their detriment and they’ll just have to either learn the hard way or just fail? Are they beyond convincing?
Laura Adint:
I don’t think they’re beyond convincing because we talk. So one of the things that we really think about is how do you enter in a new organization, even if that organization has a poor impression of what operations can do, or let’s say a limited impression of what operations can do and how do you make a difference? And what we talk about is really thinking about how do you add value? How do you affect the outcome? How do you sit down with your customers? As you talked about it, the internal audiences are the customers of revenue operations. How do you sit down with them and make a difference in their life? And that means sitting down and watching how they do things, how many clicks do they take to do things? What are the stumbling points that they have? What are the stumbling points of the customer? So in understanding that entire journey that a customer takes, how do we take away the as revenue operations people, how do you take away the obstacles, the things that make things not a great experience for internal and external? And so when you approach it like that, and so I don’t think that you don’t have to have a company that believes in operations can make a difference. You have to be the operator that makes the difference.
Sean Lane:
And none of the stuff that Laura is saying, Mark, is easy. It’s really easy to say out loud. It’s way harder to actually pull off. I’m positive that you’ve had a bunch of people on this show before who have said, yeah, ops should be a strategic partner and not a support function. Cool. Everybody says that, but the value that Laura is talking about is how you actually earn that seat at the table and then keep it right. And I think if you were to go around and ask a bunch of sales leaders or ops leaders, tell me about your relationship with your internal partners or your internal customers, you can learn a lot from what those answers sound like. And so if they’re saying, oh man, I just always feel like I’m bottlenecked. I never really know what they’re doing. They have this wiki somewhere that all their Jira boards live in and I don’t really, those are signs of things not going well.
And so we literally carved out a whole section of the book about building your internal partnerships, and I think it really does start with just that foundational trust between the team members. I will never forget, I was interviewing for an ops role on my team a few companies ago, and we got to the debrief and the sales leader who was giving feedback about the interviewee was like, you know what I really liked about her? She actually likes salespeople. And the feedback blew me away because it was so abnormal that he found it worthy of remark in the debrief. And so his previous experience was that ops people didn’t like salespeople. And so you have to know the baggage that people are coming to these relationships with in order to make the relationship work. And so whether you are coming into a brand new organization like Laura said, or maybe you’ve inherited a team or you’ve grown up with a new leader, there’s a whole bunch of opportunities there to kind of hit the reset button and try and change the perception of what ops brings to the table within your company.
Mark Lerner:
It’s very interesting you said that. I had someone on the show, there was a string of folks that came on the show. We really went into the more psychological assessment of the ops mindset and how to work within that. And there was a lot of interesting stuff that I hadn’t considered, but this idea, there is this kind of weird inherent adversarial vibe between some of these teams within the go-to-market organization. There’s the traditional marketing sales frenemy enemy challenge. Obviously a sales rep often or historically might’ve had a sales ops person nagging them about notes in the CRM. And so those exist, right? We can’t pretend they don’t. How much of the work of somebody going into this role is navigating that and really emotional IQ being a critical piece of it. I’m going to leave it. It’s whoever wants to take It up.
Sean Lane:
It’s an enormous part of the job. It’s an enormous part of the job, especially the more senior you get. And I do want to be careful here because I think Mark, your point about tension, tension is actually good tension is going to push people forward. It’s going to create a world where there’s accountability, it’s going to set high standards internally. What I think we found, and Laura and I have both struggled and succeeded in setting up these relationships, and especially when you talk about a lot of the operating rhythms and routines that you have between all of these different cross-functional groups, those are rife with potential pitfalls. I think honestly, even if you have the best rev ops person in the whole world, high emotional eq, really organized, really does a great job of alignment. The other people in that equation are what’s going to make or break the actual outcomes.
And so what we have found is that yes, there’s an enormous amount of work for ops people to do there to lay the right foundation, set agendas, set expectations, make sure people know what the benefits are going to be of the work that we’re doing together, but then everybody has to come to the table with an open mind and a collaborative spirit for the work that’s happening. If you just show up and you’re ready to point fingers and question definitions and say, my data’s different than your data and that’s what you’re going to bring to the table every week, great, nothing’s ever going to get done. I don’t care if you’ve got the best ops person in the whole world, but ops people can go a long way in kind of creating that environment and you need leaders to show up and partner with you in creating that environment.
But ops people can go a long way. And I think the flip side of that that I think we see a lot with ops people is they take on this kind of weird policing role and they’re there to be like, Hey, I noticed you didn’t make as many calls yesterday as you were supposed to, and that’s it. As opposed to like, Hey, what came up yesterday that you prioritized over this work? Or what was broken in the system we handed you that stopped you from doing this work? I think we’re all, so I’ve certainly been guilty of this. We all think so highly of the work that we’ve done that well, it couldn’t possibly be that anything I built for them is broken. This is user error. You have to stop and truly empathize. Laura talked before about counting clicks and sitting down with them. You have to truly put yourself in their shoes. And so there’s definitely a balance there between what ops can do and what your partners need to also bring to the table. But I would say starting by looking in the mirror is probably a good first step.
Mark Lerner:
So I wanted to jump into one of the parts that things that we’re talking about in the book that is challenge that I have, which is kind of getting lost in the tech hype and having just tools. And you think that for every tool there’s a problem, and I think this is a challenge that needs to be navigated even more now. There’s been a shift in the way budgets are allocated in which we don’t have the kind of freedom to everybody have their own point solution anymore. There’s a lot more fine tooth comb going through decisions like that. So given the kind of explosion of technological options for rev ops, how can they strategically select and integrate those tools to ensure that it aligns with the customer journey, that it’s not bloat, it doesn’t become shelfware? How do you manage that? And I’ll leave it. I guess Laura’s turn,
Laura Adint:
I’ll start and then Sean, I’ll have you do cleanup. Does that sound good? Great. So I think you mentioned it a little bit, but it is about making sure that you map your customer’s journey. And when you map your customer’s journey and you really understand exactly where the friction points and what the needs are, you then have a lot better ability to even visualize what your systems and your applications, where they lie, where they connect, where there’s going to be problems and where you need to invest. We talk about, we actually have this, we had a great person, which the name is escaping, I’m sure Sean will remember, but he had this wonderful concept of, well, when do you hire a new revenue operations person when what they do is actually worth more to the business than how much they cost? That’s actually true for applications as well.
And really thinking about what application is that? What is it solving, how much does that problem cost? And then thinking about doing the benefits, the pros and cons of it, and really the numbers of it. So in thinking through how do you make sure that you don’t have bloat? Well, you’ve got to be very clear on what problems are you solving, how do they connect and making sure you don’t have overlap. So in thinking through that streamline process and thinking through how much does this problem solve, how much is that problem worth to solve and is it worth the money? I’ll let Sean do cleanup on that and maybe he’ll remember the name of the person that gave us that great sort of rule of thumb of figuring out when to hire and when to buy.
Sean Lane:
Yeah, Laura’s talking about Pete Kazanjy from Atrium, Mark, who I’m sure you’ve come across. He’s got plenty of good nuggets like that. I
Mark Lerner:
Former guest to the podcast.
Sean Lane:
Perfect. Follow Pete. He’s got a lot of smart stuff to say. So I think Laura nailed it. I think the only thing that I would add is as she’s talking about reevaluating where things overlap, there’s just as much work for off people to do around culling the tech stack and bringing things down, finding places where you could potentially consolidate, which is where the market is right now. But I also think there’s this whole other category of just experimentation that ops people can be on the front lines of, right? Especially right now, right? There’s this explosion of brand new technology. We can do things that we’ve never been able to do before with all these AI powered tools. There is definitely, to your point, mark, a hype part of that, but we have already started to transition to the proven use cases, versions of that technology that is very exciting.
By the way, try writing a book while this explosion of technology is happening, truly impossible, you can’t possibly keep up. But I think what we tried to do is really focus on those core tenets that Laura was talking about as opposed to specific logos. And so I think more and more, especially now with a lot of these AI powered tools that have come out, ops people, and I’m admittedly biased here, are going to be the ones who are going to be able to actually inject the creativity into how to leverage these to create better outcomes in the business, not just to use ’em. So you can say you use this new tool or not just to use your friend told you this is the hot new thing, but because okay, this is our problem and this tool is going to help us create better outcomes or drive new efficiencies. And so I think a lot of the goals are not going to change for these teams. A lot of the outcomes are not going to change, but the means to get to them absolutely are changing. And so if you’re in ops, you need to somehow someway through Mark’s podcast or somewhere else stay on top of what is possible so you can bring those things back inside your organizations.
Mark Lerner:
That’s a super interesting note. I assume you started writing this a while ago and it took some time. And like you said, if you start writing about AI innovation, by the time you finish that page, it’s already changed. What you wrote doesn’t really relate. And so that must have been a challenge and you probably didn’t have much reference material from the podcast or whatever to go on. But in thinking about, so lemme take it a step back. As somebody who drank the AI Kool-Aid like hook line and sinker, I still do truly believe it’s complete game changer. I have yet to really see a use case, at least in the rev ops where it seems like it’s found, it has whatever the equivalent of product market fit is, like the problem solution fit within Rev ops. In working on the book, did you notice areas where AI in particular has value in rev ops that is tangible
Sean Lane:
For sure. So I think Laura’s point from before was we started by mapping out the customer journey and then looking for places in that customer journey where technology might make you more efficient or create better outcomes that we were describing. And so I think that should be the starting point regardless of which technology is available to you, I think a few hyper-specific use cases that we found, one, I think everyone’s been doing call recording stuff for a while, but very few people are taking the information you get from call recordings and using the AI summaries to pass that information back into their CRM instead of asking the rep to manually update the notes on their deal. That is a win for everybody. Think about your post-sale team who chases reps to say, Hey, what happened on this deal? Why did they buy, what was the issue they had with their previous CPQ mark that made them want to buy deal hub?
And instead of going on their kickoff call and asking all those discovery questions all over again, you have the real source of truth, not what the rep heard, not what their version of their notes were, but what actually was said on the call that is really quite compelling. And if you’re an ONBOARDER or A CSM, once you get that version of it, one time you’re telling me you’re going to want to go back. Absolutely not. And so that’s one very specific version that I think takes the call recording thing that everybody does and takes it a little bit further. And then I also think there’s some awesome stuff being done at the top of the funnel around defining your ICP and picking your target accounts. That’s a place where you can really lean in and lean on these models to help you identify the lookalike accounts.
Hey, I’ve got these 20 customers, go find me a hundred other companies that look like this and gets us out of just the very basic point systems of firmographic scores. So scoring, putting information in the CRM or just like the tip of the iceberg in my opinion. I think eventually people are going to actually be able to converse with their CRM and be able to ask it questions. And so that’s where, I mean, operators are going to be able to inject their creativity. You got to find these use cases. You have to do it in a secure way, which is super important and something a lot of people want to skip over, but there’s a lot to be had there.
Mark Lerner:
Yeah, don’t test in production folks. I think we all or
Sean Lane:
In a place where other people have access to your data also bad.
Mark Lerner:
Yeah, don’t do that. So I wanted to talk a little bit about one of, I think the most interesting aspects of the challenges that someone that revenue operations folks have, especially now, which is change management and how, because the pace of change is so rapid and continues to increase in speed, it seems like. How often did that challenge come up in going over your notes that as you were writing the book, and what were some of the learnings that came out of the book or out of your research in working on the book around change management and handling one change after another? We had covid and then we had interest rates up and down and all these things. So Laura, why don’t we jump to you for this one?
Laura Adint:
Yeah, it actually became a motto for us in particular at Drift. There is a motto that is actually shared by a couple of different groups. Navy Seals have it and race car drivers have it, and it is slow is smooth, smooth is fast. And so what does that mean in the rev ops world? It does mean that sometimes you may need to slow it down enough to make it smooth, make that process smooth. And once you get that process smooth, you can then launch and go very quickly. So details of how that works out in a change management effort, we talk about the importance of pilot groups and in engaging your key people, your key influencers within your organization in a new application tool or a new process, whichever it is, you have your pilot group and you get that input from that pilot group and you make sure that you really work it out.
You take real feedback, you make sure you work out the kinks there. And then when you launch with the rest of the team, you have experts that are already built in. You don’t have to be the experts. You also have champions who can talk to others about what the difference it made for their process or their life or how much time it took to do the things. So in thinking about how do you accomplish so much change, one is making sure that you’re very careful about which change you choose to take because I think making sure that you say no to the wrong things and staying on course of what’s going to make the biggest difference for the business. And then when you make that change, make it deliberately, sometimes you have to go a little bit slower in the beginning so that you can launch very quickly. And so you launch a new tool. If you don’t do your homework upfront, that tool stumbles and has issues and has problems and maybe never actually gets fully adopted. You may spend a little bit more time upfront, but then when you launch, you’ve got 80, 90, 90 5% adoption in a very short period of time. Which one of those is more successful? It’s the one that has the adoption, the one that’s built into. And because you learned all your little lessons early, you built it in and nice and smooth.
Sean Lane:
I think to your question too, mark, just how big of the gig this is. We literally have a whole chapter on goal setting, a whole chapter on how to say no, a whole chapter on making changes that stick. And so this is a big part of the job. And I think what makes it really hard to say no in the situations that Laura is describing is there’s often this imbalance power dynamic where you’ve got a very opinionated VP of sales talking to a junior individual contributor who’s on the ops team, and they’re just like, go do this. And it’s very difficult in that moment to say no. And so they go and do it, and then you wake up six months later and everyone’s gone in seven different directions and you’ve got in a few things done, but they’re probably not the right things and they’re probably not the things that are actually going to make that person’s team better.
And so I think viewing it through the lens of our job is to make you better at your job, but we’re also going to push back when we think that the priorities are not actually set up to accomplish that. And so a lot of what we think about, and you mentioned it before, but we have this thing that we codify in the book about the revenue operations mindset is you need a partner who’s going to go toe to toe with you. If you as a sales leader or a marketing leader or a customer leader, whatever, have someone who just says yes to everything that you’re asking, you might think that that’s great, but I promise you it is not. You need to be able to have someone who’s going to push back on you, challenge you, proactively bring you ideas. And so that I think is the difference there because it’s really hard to manage those relationships and say no, but if you don’t have that in your partnership, then it’s probably not working the way it potentially could.
Mark Lerner:
And I think that’s just a super important point to drive home. We are out of time here, so I feel like we could probably do a part two of this episode at some point. But before we end, Laura, why don’t you tell the folks at home when the book’s coming out, how they could maybe get it when it does and whatever other details there are.
Laura Adint:
So we come out in Europe in September 4th, and then, is that right, Sean? Did I do that right? Yeah. And then September 24th in the us so it’s available for pre-order right now on Amazon.
Mark Lerner:
And we’ll put a link in the show notes.
Laura Adint:
Yeah,
Mark Lerner:
Yeah. Alright, great. Thank you so much both of you for chatting and appreciate it.
