About the speaker

Curerntly the Director of Revenue Operations at Postscript, Shivam Shah is a growth-focused thought leader with expertise spanning data analysis, technology solutions, and project management.

Mark Lerner:

All right, everybody. Welcome back to this episode of the RevAmp podcast. 

Today, I have a very special guest, Shivam Shah from Postscript, who’s going to jam with me about some ideas around adaptability and revenue operations and some of the challenges that I think we all kind of face.

Before we begin, why don’t you introduce yourself to the folks at home, what you do, where you’re from, and how you got to where you’re at?

Shivam Shah:

For sure. Thanks, Mark. I’m excited to be here. I’ve been in rev ops for almost seven years. I started at an early-stage FinTech company in Toronto. 

I started on the post-sale side first, but I was more focused on the expansion side and creating that in the CS world. 

I then quickly realized I had a profound love for sales and made my natural switch over to sales operations. And then here I postscript, I looked, oversee the entire revenue operations team. So for marketing, sales, CS, the entire customer journey, end-to-end, kind of lives under me, and I have a solid team supporting me, and we’ve done some great things, and we have a lot planned for this year. And I, yeah, am excited to be here to chat about some of your topics.

Mark Lerner:

Awesome. 

Yeah, thank you so much. And I think that a thing that probably resonates with pretty much anybody watching or listening is this idea that we were in a time where the mantra was growth at all costs, right? Doesn’t matter; just get the next one. And that very quickly swung to scalable growth or whatever keyword you want to use for budgets are tight, you have to do more with less, that kind of thing. That has been, I think, a challenge for some people. Some companies, I think, washed out as a result; they just couldn’t shift that focus, cut burn, and become more efficient. And I think for the individual operators, the folks on the front line, that has been both a very difficult challenge. 

Still, I also think it is an opportunity to capitalize on certain skills or learn something new. So, I’m interested in hearing your perspective first. Is this a trend that you’ve seen as well? And second, what are some of the challenges, especially from a rev ops perspective, and how have you approached them?

Shivam Shah:

Yeah, good question. So I would say I’m used to coming from that world where we had close to a hundred plus sellers, and the plan always called for more heads and added more sales reps, which was the way for growth. 

In that world, we were okay with the 80% quota attainment rate, and we live with that. We were dying by that. 

And now I think about our planning and working with sales. We want all our reps to be north of a hundred. The plan calls for that. The budget calls for that. There is no room for stragglers and low performers. And it’s been challenging because I think sellers that I’ve experienced in my life and my career, we were at a point where you just had to sell to one person, and we were ready to buy. We didn’t really need approvals. And now it’s like sellers, to your point, need a different skill set.

You need to be able to find multiple contacts. Sometimes, the buying committees consist of 3, 4, 5, and 6 people. 

And sometimes, the final decision maker, who is a CFO, is never in the room. And here I would say we have a very nimble sales team, all high achievers, very well versed in e-commerce. And when I joined, we actually had plans to have close to double our sales team size. Markets shifted, money was tighter, and the plan that we got was like, Hey, you need to do more with what you got. And that’s been the mantra everywhere and everyone. It’s tough, and somehow we’ve done it. But I think part of that has also been because we’ve really focused. We narrowed our focus on where we want to sell, but we really haven’t gone on after everything. We’ve kind of made sure we had the systems and data in place that tell our sellers went to walk away.

And I would say previously; people weren’t really walking away from selling. People were just eager to hit their quota. And now it’s sort of like, Hey, it’s okay to walk away because we can ensure that you’re going to be lined up with the next best deal. And I think part of that has been a lot of the work that Rev Ops has had to do now. We’ve had to become more efficient. You have to make sure you have the best tech stack and my best. It doesn’t mean having a gazillion tools. Are they all working together? Are they actually complimenting each other, or do you have tools that are just kind of siloed out? And that has been a journey for us. It wasn’t easy, and look, we’re not perfect, but I think we’re definitely on the right path forward here.

Mark Lerner:

Yeah, that’s interesting. I kind of want to double-click on that a little bit. I think it was definitely one of the first places people looked to find those efficiencies. One was, unfortunately, headcount. The other was in the tech stack. I think that we were living in a time where everybody got whatever they wanted, their own bespoke tool that was very pinpointed just for their thing. Then, budgets and spending were gone through with the fine tooth comb. 

So, there was a lot of consolidation of tech stacks. It sounds like that was something that happened to you as well. What was that process like? What was your filter or decision rubric for what gets kept, what doesn’t, and how did it end up shaking out?

Shivam Shah:

The easiest answer could be to start with cost. What are our most expensive tools, and what’s their ROI? How’s it helping us? How’s it helping our ICs and our frontline go to market ics? But I think part of it was also understanding what our goal was, what was our North Star, and what we were trying to get because some tools we’ve had for so long early on in our days, but we aren’t that same company anymore, but we aren’t that same company anymore. And most of our ops professionals, you start to tweak tools, you start to stretch them beyond their limits. And it is because you get comfortable. And I think one thing we’ve really done well here is taking a look at our tech stack to understand, hey, if our goal, for example, is moving more upmarket, is this the right tech stack to support that? And if not, what do we need to get?

And we sort of went through which of the current tech stacks would help us get us there. And right this now is more sort due to or lack of better demand s, tech d, debt and it’s only going to continue. So we mapped everything out by cost first, to be honest, every other company, and then started understanding, hey, will this tech stack help us get us for North Star or not? And if it’s not, then it’s sort of on the cut list and how do we replace it with something better that’s going to help us get us to our goals? That was sort of the path we took. And then, ultimately, it was also great to get us for North Star, but all these targets that we’ve set out for each team can support that, too. So, it was a very long process. We’re not completely done, but it’s been a lot of discovery and a lot of findings for sure.

Mark Lerner:

I’m actually interested to know broadly from other operators as well, but given that there was this kind of great culling of tech tools, has it forced you or your team on the ops side to do more internal tooling or focusing on utilizing more APIs or even low-code kind of thing to build internal tools.

Shivam Shah:

At times? Yeah, I would say I’m kind of against that because that’s sort of how you spiral into tech debt because now you have stuff living out there, you don’t know where the source data’s coming from and you’re just like, well, I can’t validate this when someone else brings it. So don’t get me wrong. We definitely have thousands and millions of Google sheets connected to all these data sources that we’re pulling data from. But I think what we’ve really done, as I said, is just really understanding whether we are the best use of this tool and what it is adding to our members four from a value perspective, sorry. And then kind of going from there, but we really haven’t kind of gone down the path of homegrown tools. If anything, we’ve kind of just, like I said, tweaked or extended tools beyond their existing use cases right now. So it’s been kind of cool because again, a lot of these companies have been now talking to us like, oh, that’s a cool product feature, should we add it? We’re like, well, yeah, it’d be great. We had to do all this customization to make this happen. But I think we’ve just kind of extended tools from their, I guess, main use case to something else versus building our own homegrown solutions.

Mark Lerner:

I mean, it’s quite a similar concept. So you’re basically kind of Frankenstein-ing something new out of an existing thing, but as opposed to building it out of Zapier or whatever. So it sounds like a big piece of this was cutting tool sets and kind of consolidating and squeezing as much value out of each tool as you could. What kind of things had to change on the operational and process side in order to get more with less, right obviously? You went from being comfortable with an 80% quota to requiring a hundred plus per seller. What were the resources that you had to provide to those sellers in order to help them get there?

Shivam Shah:

Yeah, I think it’s something that it’s constantly top of mind do we have the right things in place to help our teams focus? I think, ultimately, it’s like you want your sales rep to be focusing on the right deal at the right time and finding the buyer at the right moment, too. And a lot of this can only be done with the right processes. So I’m a firm believer that we shouldn’t buy tech to solve issues; we should solve the issue with the process first, and then find the tech to support that process. And oftentimes, again, I think when money was free, tools were bought first, and processes were never fixed, and you kind of were stuck in the same below. So I think what we’ve done here and done really well is kind of reevaluate our entire, I would call it, sales process and made sure that, Hey, do we feel that this process currently supports the motion that we’re trying to go after?

And if so, great, what are the improvements that we can make? Whether that’s very tactical in a certain stage for example, or is it from a more enablement perspective and working closely with enablement. But I would say every single process that we’ve had internally went under some sort of rigorous deep dive of like, Hey, is this working? Is it not? Because, like I said, I just believe that if the process is not built correctly, you’re not going to have the right tool, and you just have to trust the process at the end of the day.

Mark Lerner:

Yeah. Did Rev ops as an org have an impact on those decisions of the sales process or was it the sales process was decided and then you had to build kind of the operational piece around it?

Shivam Shah:

Yeah, I would say it was mainly us leading the efforts to actually raise the discussion of, Hey, should we revisit our sales process? And I think it’s something everywhere I’ve been, I always try to revisit it every so often to validate, Hey, we aren’t the same company anymore and our emotions are changing. Does this process support it? Ultimately, so much of our tooling is aligned to this sales process, the way that we’re capturing data, and the way that we’re going to report on this data. It’s all tied to this fundamental sales process. I would say everywhere I’ve been, I’ve always abdicated that, hey, every year or at least every 18 months, let’s revisit it and adjust as needed because, at the end of the day, people want great reporting and to have great reporting, you need a good process. So

Mark Lerner:

I wanted to dive in on one point you were saying that the sales process, now it’s important that the sellers are kind of surfaced the potential sales that are likely to close so they don’t waste their time. So my ears are kind of here; there’s a sense of aligning it with some sort of signal detection data. Also, it’s something I think that a lot of people are exploring, and I don’t know if that’s a relatively new phenomenon, but it seems almost everyone I’ve talked to has kind of said the same thing. How much has that played into how you’re optimizing the quality of the sales prospect that the reps are talking to?

Shivam Shah:

Yeah, one thing that made a big shift was we kind of relooked at our segmentation policies to rethink how we’re thinking about our prospects and what the value could be. Like most companies, you usually start with either company size or company revenue, which dictates where you go. Right here, we kind of evolved a little bit because, again, e-commerce is so different, and we really kind took a look at our customer base to really kind of inform our ideal customer profile. Everyone always talks about the ideal customer profile, but oftentimes, it’s kind of looked at every now and then and sort of forgotten. And I think we did a really good job working with our product marketing team to think through what this ICP looks like. Because once that is kind of set again, we can then inform all of our systems, Hey, this is what we’re looking for.

And we were also able to cut our territories with the new segmentation model that we came up with that was more aligned with our ICPs. And it doesn’t mean that everything that’s coming inbound or that we’re outbounding to has been perfect. There are always going to be the outliers that trickle in and kind of upset your sellers, but we have a Slack channel with all of our reps. We are definitely getting much less noise made about, oh, this person is not part of the segmentation model, or this person is not going to be the minimum amount that we want them to be buying from us. So I would say we kind of went even farther back than just tools and intent data. It was more so. Hey, we clearly have a lot of customers now, so let’s actually look at them to inform who we want to be going after. And even deeper into what verticals we want to go after. Because the world we live in is e-commerce, there are a lot of verticals, there are a lot of shops in e-commerce, and we realize now who we’re going after and which ones actually are going to be profitable for us versus vice versa. When your early growth, early stage, you’re just kind of going after everything that is raising their hand.

Mark Lerner:

When you were doing that, going back and looking at your existing customers, was there any sort of machine learning applied to that where it was kind of saying this is ideal?

Shivam Shah:

Yeah, I wish we had that. Not going to lie, it was definitely a good partnership with us finance bi and there’s, we are lucky that there’s just a lot of product analytics data that we had that we can absorb that helped with this process. I would say other places I’ve been at; we just didn’t have that. So it was more so looking at just firmographic data, which is helpful, but it is still firmographic. It’s not validated here. We just have so much data that we have access to that it was on us to figure it out, no doubt. But I wish we had some sort of machine learning system to help inform us of our ideal customers.

Mark Lerner:

So I want to shift a little bit because kind of using this word, adaptability from a personal perspective, obviously we’ve kind of weathered several storms over last over many years. Professionally, I think we all experienced it, and then after all the things that happened or are still happening. And I think this adaptability thing is very useful as a personal professional kind of mantra, but for the folks out there listening and watching who are in similar roles, what are some things that you’ve taken away from this on how to approach being adaptable to changes that are happening quickly and how to be flexible around that?

Shivam Shah:

Yeah, it’s a good question. It’s something I think about quite often because, like you said, the landscape keeps changing, and we’ve weathered so many different environments. I think the one thing I’ve really anchored to or realized is that, most often or not, when someone is coming to Rev ops, there is an issue. It’s sort of like when you contact customer support, you’re not contacting customer support happy; you’re contacting, there’s an issue. And I think what that just requires us always to be, to naturally just be more empathetic because they’re in some sort of pain and we are the only solution that they see to help solve them that. It just means we need to have a personality that is adaptable. I don’t think you’re going to succeed in ops if you’re not adaptable because not only do you have those inbound issues coming at you, but you also have the C-suite, the senior leadership team, constantly changing the direction of the company.

Granted, there are also a lot of factors that they’re dealing with and facing and trying to navigate through that. But ultimately it’s like, hey, once a decision is made, they’re coming to you be like, Hey, what do we need to do to change all this and support this? And I would say it’s happened. To your point, a lot more since COVID-19, I would say I was used to a world where annual planning was happening once a year. There was a lot of consistency, and there wasn’t that much of a changing environment. Now it’s like every quarter there’s re-forecasting going on because I’ve been fortunate, I haven’t been around in companies that are in a dire situation, but I’m sure it’s even worse there, where they are literally probably re-forecasting every month based on how results went and what they need to do to change. I think the one thing I believe helps you kind of navigate change and unplanned scenarios is just having solid scenario planning.

Be prepared for the worst case; be prepared for the best case. And it’s something that we try to strive for in our planning process. We’re not always the best at it, but the thing is, when you’re kind of planned for the worst case, you know exactly what you need to do. Hey, this is where you need to start; this is what we need to start cutting. Hey, the best-case scenarios are happening. Okay, cool. Let’s go forward with this. So, having that wide range of options available to you and your go-to-market exec team, you can navigate anything basically.

Mark Lerner:

Yeah, I think it’s really important to, what is it, plan for the worst, hope for the best, plan for the worst thing. Yeah. Always have kind of an exit. Exit,

Shivam Shah:

Exactly.

Mark Lerner:

The break this glass if yeah, which happens a lot lately. So I know, given what we just talked about, how quickly things change, how difficult it is to predict anything, this is kind of a difficult question, but do you see any sort of homeostasis being established where things are starting to slow down a little bit and there’s a more obvious way forward, especially lately?

Shivam Shah:

Yeah, I mean, I feel like 2020 was definitely the roughest year. I think there was a lot of uncertainty, even speaking to other fellow rev ops professionals and folks felt the same way. I think things are tough when CFOs are involved in every deal cycle. And I think we are starting to see that a little bit less across the board when I speak to other people too. And I think that’s a good sign. I still think 2024 is going to be a tough year for a lot of companies, but I don’t want to jinx it. But I do think we are getting to a state of, I don’t think it’s going to be anytime how it used to be when we had free money. I think people have understood that being profitable is definitely more important than growing at all costs. But I do think there will be some sort of healthy mix that people are going to strive for, where as long as you’re within reach of being profitable, but you’re still growing, I think that will probably become the new norm and what people strive towards. Because to my earlier point, you can have a plan that has, hey, plan for being profitable or a plan for growth. And depending on how results come in, you can kind of adjust the plan as needed.

Mark Lerner:

Yeah. Yeah, I think so as well. I mean, I think people were expecting us to go back to normal, which they assumed the zero interest rate times were normal, and that was the anomaly. This is more like what we can maybe bemoan, the loss of the ease that we had previously. But I think it’s a great opportunity to find individually where our skills sharpen our skills. And as companies a new way forward, there’s like if everyone’s kind of dealing with the same challenges, then the deck has been reshuffled and you have a new way forward. That’s kind of how I’ve landed on how to deal with everything. So yeah, I mean as we start to round out the end of this conversation, for the ops professional that’s listening or watching, what’s a takeaway that you could provide to them that if they’re dealing with some of these challenges, maybe a takeaway that they could work with when they start work tomorrow that might help them through?

Shivam Shah:

Yeah, good question. I think you know what, just trust yourself. Trust the skillset that you have. You’ve clearly gotten to wherever you are because of you and the skillset you’ve gained, and lean on your experiences. We all went through probably the craziest five years of most of our careers with ups and downs, going from in-work to remote and leaning on those experiences of what you have to do to kind of get to where you are right now. And I think, especially for rev ops right now, a big challenge is obviously resourcing. And I think a lot of people are just burnt out. There’s just so much work to do, and you don’t have the resources that you’re used to. And I think it’s okay too. It’s a two-letter word; you just have to start saying no. You have to start really prioritizing the value added stuff versus reactive stuff.

Otherwise, the reactive stuff will just take over. And then we kind of lose the value of rev ops at any company. Our goal is to make the company more proactive and kind of keep them on the path. So leverage the two-letter word. No, it is a powerful word. And oftentimes, when stakeholders start hearing it, they realize, oh shit. It makes ’em also validate; hey, was this ask really necessary? Sure. Many of us have been asked at times, Hey, can you run this report for me? And the numbers are never used; they’re just curious. And it’s like, Hey, what are you actually trying to solve here? What’s the actual end question? I can probably help you with that versus this one-off ask. So I think given the climate resourcing constraints, just the environment, just trust yourself and you got to start prioritizing too. And I think that’s key.

Mark Lerner:

Yeah, I think it’s for people, please, like me, that saying no has been a big challenge, but I think if you do it early and often, you kind of establish an expectation where people then will consider twice before asking you, is this really needed? And so exactly the amount of times you have to say no actually decreases over time.

Shivam Shah:

Exactly. I challenge my team and myself to at least say no once a week. And sometimes, it doesn’t happen. To your point, we are naturally on a team that we are trying to please our customers, which is the internal go-to-market team. But it changes to your point. It makes people think about what they’re asking for and what the purpose of that ask is.

Mark Lerner:

Well, this has been a phenomenal conversation. I really appreciate you taking the time to chat with us today. Before we head out, is there anywhere that the folks at home the listeners could learn more about you, about Postscript on the socials elsewhere? Yeah,

Shivam Shah:

Yeah. I mean, check out postscript.io. We are an e-commerce brand that does SMS marketing. And then for myself you can find me on LinkedIn as well. But yeah, this was a lot of fun, and it was a good chat, and it was great meeting you too.

Mark Lerner:

Yes, you as well. And I thank you so much and I’m looking forward to maybe our next follow-up chat sometime soon.

Shivam Shah:

For sure. Thanks, mark. Bye. Bye.