Our host Jeff Ignacio sits down with Jeffrey Serlin, CRO of Revcast to discuss GTM planning. They look into annual planning, creating alignment, and setting OKRs. They also look at how to factor in time scaling and headcount and how to remain data driven. Finally, they delve into the metrics that matter, tracking progress and adjusting when necessary.
The RevOps Review
The RevOps Review - With Jeff Ignacio and Jeffrey Serlin - GTM Planning
[MUSIC] >> This podcast is brought to you by Cognizant. Cognizant helps businesses connect with their dream prospects by providing premium contact, company, and event information, including from a technographics, technographics, intent data, verified business emails, and verified mobile numbers. >> Hey Jeff, how's it going? >> It's going great, Jeff. >> Good to see you. >> Well, I'm glad we could connect, and it's been a while last time I saw you was at the RevOps AF Conference, so it was good to see you. You had an awesome dinner, and you scheduled a bunch of awesome prospects and customers. >> Yeah, well, thanks for co-hosting it with us. San Diego is one of my favorite cities, and this is the first time they put it on, and I thought they did a great job, and had great contact and attendance, and I know they're thinking about where it's going to be next year, and it will be actually been better. >> Amazing. I'm going to introduce you to our audience. I'm joined by Jeff Serlin. He's led and grown RevOps and SalesOps teams at multiple companies, some you may already know, Marketo, Campaign Monitor, Intercom, and Pendo. He's currently the head of strategy, and he calls himself the Chief Revenue Operating Officer at RevCast. >> Yes. >> Did I miss anything? >> You did. No, that was a good high level over me in my career. Just fun fact, before I moved into software RevOps, I was an engineer at General Motors, so I helped build cars. I don't think I was great at it, so if you have a GM car now, I'm no longer there, so it's probably a big thing. >> Amazing. I had no idea about that your background. I wish you had told me that earlier, actually. So you've had the awesome opportunity and experience of building unicorns, and you've probably joined these companies, somebody's come just before they were even unicorns. So I'm thinking about your journey from where you started and where you are today. In your opinion, how do you go from those early stages to quote-unquote, like an experienced RevOps leader? What does that path look like and what did that look like for you specifically? >> Yeah. I'm actually going to go back a little bit further. The first company that I started working at, in Silicon Valley, I raised a bunch of money and thought they were going to go fast. They did it, which was a good lesson learned, but I was initially hired as a business development or alliance manager, creating alliances with consulting partners. It was before Salesforce that even come out, and there was no RevOps certainly, and there wasn't even any sales operations at that time. But just given my background in operations and supply chain of procurement, I just thought to myself, why aren't we tracking our pipeline somewhere? Why have we put together a really good pitch stack? Why have we thought about how we're going to train the few sales reps that we have, and how to talk about our product messaging? Why don't we have a little bit of a prescribed process or sales stages of how we want to address this cycle? So I started just doing these things on the side because I thought they were important. I found myself in a situation where I was not only sitting in but leading the weekly forecast calls because I'm going to add the data and collect it and all unprepared at all. So without even knowing it, I was doing what would be referred to at that time, elements of sales operations. I liked it. I liked it a lot. The next company I liked too, I was a product manager for a little bit. Then I had a marketing role. Salesforce came out. I bought a couple licenses and I taught myself how to configure it and how to use it. And did the same things that he did at the previous company. I managed the pipeline. I tried to document our sales methodology and process. I advocated for bringing in some folks to help train our teams and how to be better at selling. So again, I was really doing sales apps and even though my title was not sales apps, by the time I left that company after four or five years, probably 80% of what I was doing would follow under sales operations. And I think the two things there is that I was self taught. I did not have podcasts like this. I did not have a lot of mentors or other people doing this and I can go ask, how do you think about these things? I really just had to dig in and figure these things out as I go and made a lot of mistakes, but also learned a lot of things along the way. I then went to my next company where I was a team of one and officially a sales apps person working for a CRO who was very operationally oriented. Come from some big companies like PeopleSoft and Oracle and understood that they do some sales operations there or want it, his person. And that's when I really took it to the next level. The CFO there was great. She mentored me at how to build financial models, how to think through plans. He gave me a lot of empowerment to think through territories and how we were going to execute. And I had a great, not team that was mine, but a great team of colleagues there in sales leadership that really looked to me to help solve their problems, make them more efficient and help us and help us grow. And again, a lot of it was self taught, although there were people there that were starting to teach me some skills and skillset that I had before. So I think the one I want to make here is my career that evolved to these larger companies, write larger teams of up to 20 or 30 folks at RobOps. But that foundational layer of what I've learned and what I experienced was there. And my advice would be to be well rounded. You might really love data and analytics and reporting where you might really love the enablement part of it, sort of the workflow and process part of it. But be aware of the other elements, a more well-rounded RobOps person who at least understands the basics of these because they all have to fit together in order to be successful. I think the better you are and the brighter chance you have, will eventually leading a bigger and a larger team. So thank you for sharing. I think a lot of operations folks can relate to your story, which is they started, you know, they're probably more inclined to study the business from a process improvement or, you know, numerical efficiency perspective. And I think a lot of the tooling that comes in place makes it, heck, a lot easier to investigate, you know, the things that we put together as initiatives in our go-to-market teams. They can drive those productivity gains. And our job is to help, you know, foster that with our leadership teams. So, you know, you and I spend a lot of time talking about, you know, planning and, you know, we're entering the summer and as summer ends, I think a lot of organizations have, you know, this dual mandate, want to close out the year successfully, then second, to start gearing up for next year. And, you know, a lot of organizations, you know, this is always just a difficult task all around, no matter the size of the organization. I'm curious in your mind, you know, what goes into a plan and why do you plan? Why can't, why can't plans go wrong? Yeah, there's a lot of layers to that question. I'll try to hit a few key ones as they kind of pop into my head. You know, one of the things that we have to accept is that as we're creating a plan, it's really a point in time, right? And things are constantly changing, including for the couple of months gap between when we build a plan and when the year starts. So the idea of building this perfect plan where every kind of driver you have in there, every assumption you've added there is going to be absolutely perfect by the time you get into the year. I think it's something that you should have strived for and we can talk a little bit more of that later as we get into the year. So how do you build a better plan? First, you have to have a calendar and a process. Building a plan is not just sales building a plan. It's the whole goal to marketing building a plan. And what that process, you can call a program, if you want, should do is bring all constituents together within that supply chain. And again, going back to my general supply chain routes, and they need to plan together because everything that they do affects somebody upstream and affects somebody downstream. So the first thing to do is to build that integrated plan, collaborative across all of the members of the go-to-market order and do it in the right order so that you're not planning for something before you plan for something later, which impacts the work that you just did. And part of that is also the decision-making framework. And that is who makes the final decisions? You know, per AC, they see it rapid. Whatever you are, you should understand and document what that framework is. So lack of a planning calendar, lack of a framework for how you're going to organize all of these teams. I think this is value number one. And you come out with a plan for marketing, a plan for sales, and they're just contradictory, or they don't really interact. A plan for customer success and, you know, nothing really works together, by the way, you have to include product because they might be building new modules or brand new products, which also lead to capturing some of the growth that you might want to capture in here. You need to understand what their timelines are while you're delivering as well. The second challenge I think that we have is to why plans are not as accurate. And again, the key is to try to get as accurate as possible without getting perfection is that of the underlying assumptions that go into it. And that is, you know, of course, all of your sales cycle metrics, your velocity, your win rates, your conversion rates throughout the whole funnel, but also your capacity, the people, hiring, attrition, and attrition includes internal promotions, you know, ramping, attainment to three quown and attainment to quota. All of these things drive your success as well. And a number of them are left out of planning. Surprisingly, a webcast has had an opportunity to look at dozens and dozens of plans and some of them don't even have attrition assumptions, which means your years already belong. So they have to be considered and they have to be integrated. And you need the data and history, whatever you have, to be able to analyze them and evaluate them and use them in a way that reflects the real world, which brings me to the third point, because I think a lot of plans are done within a conference room looking at a spreadsheet and you just make the numbers work. The board might say you need to deliver 40% growth. So you play with a combination of numbers and you try to make it work. And it could be that, you know, marketing is saying, no way we can deliver this much more in terms of leads. And so someone's plugging in an assumption that says the win rates are going to increase by 5%. And okay, that closes the gap. So now you don't need to generate as much pipeline, but you've never had a win rate app the one you're using in your plan. You don't have any plan of actually improving those win rates. So again, your plan is wrong as you're creating it. It's not reflective of the real world where the opportunity that you have to actually deliver. And I think those are the three things that cause us to create plans so they're just destined for failure almost from the beginning and the things that we need to keep in mind as we're going through this cycle. That's great. So the first one is really about alignment. You know, there's a lot of folks using okay, our framework, these days. But yeah, I actually really like the V2 mom framework that Benny off uses. It's worth some vision, value, measure, objectives and metrics. Yeah, that's right. So in the whole point of that is because, you know, whatever I have an OK air framework, it's the objective, the key results, but it doesn't go into like initiatives and it doesn't go into like the blockers and the distance test goal to overcome it. Secondly, the underlying assumptions, so the capacity modeling. I'm curious about your thoughts around full-time equivalence versus full-head account, do you find that companies are leaning more towards full-time equivalence versus headcount? And if they are leaning towards full-time equivalent, are they getting those ramp assumptions wrong? Cause it's usually a fractional set of productivity is how they generally do FTE model. Yeah, going back to your comment about the V2 mom, we did that at campaign monitor and it was really great. And personally, I'm not one in any specific framework. I just think you need to use one, right? You know, so don't forget to use one, you know, as you're going through this. The answer to that is, is they need to be. And not all of them are. In fact, I reviewed a plan at that and a company that's over a hundred million dollars a couple months ago. And one, they did not use ramps at all and they did not use any attrition assumptions at all, you know, which to me was a little bit amazing. You have to be able to get to those equivalence. And I'd always call them RSEs. It's just something that stuck in the mind that, you know, that sells equivalents, but same idea. And you get them by understanding what the wrap is. And you get there by understanding what your attrition is. And you get there by understanding what your hiring plan is. People get those wrong. And I think they get them wrong is because they just go with what they've used before to an enterprise team. It should be six months. So let's use six months, but you know, it could be five months. It could be seven months. And I think that if you're not taking a more realistic view of what it takes or someone to ramp, you are going to lead the impression that you have more fully rec wraps and more productive capacity that you actually have. And you're going to see that when you don't get to the attainment levels that you need or you don't have the sales cycles. KPIs sales deals are taking longer and they're not selling for as much as you thought because the wrap, the wraps are still learning or you don't have the quoted team if that you need, therefore your productivity and your efficiency metrics are actually going to decrease. And I think that one of the reasons they get them wrong is, again, they just plug in something that they know and they don't matter it. The second reason they get them wrong is because financial engineering, the longer you have rants, the more headcount you might need to put in the plan, the worse some of your metrics look. And to me, it's OK to have a different ramp length in a comp plan for some of the financial considerations that you actually have in your real plan because your real plan should reflect more accurately how you're going to get there. And the other challenge you have is what ramp do you use? Do you use ramp to full quota, but in the plan, you use an assumption of leaning 80% of three quote. So do you use a rank to that 80% that's in the plan? But your reps are actually performing at 70% of quota. So you do use a ramp in order to get to that 70% so that they're performing at the same level that you're existing. Fully ramped are the reps you consider ramped are performing at. I think people choose the first one or the second one, which also means they're putting the wrong ramp assumptions in the plan as well that they're quite never going to get to which puts that risk in the plan. And the last thing is there's length and their shape, right? It could be six months, but it could be a big hockey stick or it could be a steady climb up to that and those matter as well as you put it in there. I think the net net, whether it's ramp or anything else is. Gather some data, do some analysis, understand what the drivers are, understand why it may be improving or not improving. If you need it to improve, create those initiatives as you mentioned through that framework of the two moms so that you can improve it and then certainly measure it and be as realistic as possible. Don't kid yourself in the thinking that things are going to improve or they're not where they are because you're going to pull your plan to. I think again, that goes for all the tricks that you put into a plan. All the assumptions. So once the plan is set, you know, I've, I've seen many organizations recently go through like a replant, right? You'll see like a July, June replant is because by March, April, the Dias Cabs, they see that their pipeline is anemic to where they need to get to for the end of the year or their assumptions and their model are not playing out, whether it's win rate. Yeah, sales cycle length, a team that's average sales price. A lot of those factors. So I'm curious, you know, once the plan is set, how do you stay on top of execution throughout the year? Yeah, it isn't an amazing act. Like by the end of the first quarter, you already know that you have to replant, which I think goes back to the, you know, things that we do in planning that are looking internal and trying to make numbers work as opposed to assessing the real world. And I would say in most cases, it's like not a surprise that some things aren't working out where they're working out because it's just, you know, steady state and you haven't done anything, actually improve them. You have to constantly stay on top of the plan. The plan, in my opinion, is one way of getting to your number. And there's many ways that you can eventually get to your number once you get into the year. Um, so the first thing I'll say is you have to be flexible. You have to be agile. You are able and you should be able to make adjustments along the way and let's separate adjustments against a full replay. For example, um, and I mentioned to, to, you know, this to you earlier, if your mid market organization is not performing, but your enterprise organization is killing it, you know, that segments do really well and you're supposed to hire zero enterprise reps next quarter and supposed to hire six mid market reps, you should move some of those hires from the market and enterprise. I'm not suggesting moving them all, but to hire zero enterprise reps and not mean into that opportunity into higher six mid market reps when you know it's not performing is just not the smartest thing to do. And that isn't going to change the number overall. You can, you know, figure out how to shift it and make, make the managers and those teams whole, but you should constantly continuously be looking for the signals that say, maybe I should do this. Maybe I should move this. Maybe I shouldn't do this. And if you do that throughout the year, you're going to be able to start closing that gap and all those little things that you do add up to something that could be pretty material by the end of the year of closing that gap to performance. So that's one of the, the first things that you should stick about, when you get to replying, of course, that means the whole thing is blown and you've got to start thinking about how you create that again. But how do you get to that point? I talked about signals on you have to measure. We've all heard it's, yeah, don't measure. You don't know where you are. You can't make decisions and you can't make adjustments. You should start from the first week with a scorecard. Create it with the metrics and the measures that are important to your business. You have a small, you know, if you're high velocity, have the metrics that matter to that, if you're more enterprise, have the metrics that matter to that and keeping track of them and putting a scorecard against that is going to give you the signals as to where to look for the risks that are going to impact the future, but also those opportunities. Again, hiring is pretty important. So start looking at the hiring and not just how you're doing against the plan, but how many bucks you should have in C. If you have a lot more attrition in the first month of the year, then you plan for that's going to be a problem. Know that as soon as you can. If you have the metrics that you just mentioned, where velocity is taking longer and ASPs are where you thought they would be, understand your plan and create a plan in order to close that gap, generate more pipeline. And the sooner you can get these signals, the sooner you can react to them and the more chance you have to impact your current fiscal year, waiting for a QBR is waiting too long, waiting for there to actually be a problem of, okay, we had great metrics, but we just need it. Five more reps in C is too reactive and too long. So you have to measure, build scorecards, look for the signals, do it often, make adjustments and get to the mindset and going to be agile, I think helps to keep you on track to get your number. So there are a couple of things I want to extract away from that. One is, you know, folks use dashboards and one of you, but I think a scorecard is a little bit more holistic than that, right? Because scorecards are in your CRM or they're inside a visualization tool, a scorecard can not be in both, but obviously it goes beyond just, you know, certain metrics, it's an integrated look across the entire business, right? Health of your sentiment, employee and PS, and then pipeline forecasting execution, we go to market side, looking for the signals, an interesting thing, because, you know, you have all hands on deck, you have your sales leaders who should be autonomously running their own units, you have the revenue operations leaders that have the opportunity to look across the full spectrum of the lifecycle. Doing it often to me refers to the operating cadences, like when do you sit down with your stakeholders to have a frank discussion around the performance of the business, current state and future state identifying opportunities or risk. And then the adjustments, the adjustments are generally decisions that need to be made at the leadership level. And those those meetings are, you know, you have your weekly all hands or your pipeline council, go to market leader meetings. And these adjustments are there. And I guess that what makes the difference between these adjustments is the speed of the adjustments. Yeah, right, because you can wait too long. And you run out of runway for the remainder of the year. But if you move too fast, you may not have, you know, you may not have the right data, right? You're moving up the instinct. So somewhere in between, I think is probably the right model for adjustments. Um, I totally agree. And, um, you know, there's a couple things that that you mentioned, there's one is the cadences is, um, define those going into the air on a weekly basis, we're going to include this at no, for example, with our weekly forecast call. Um, I had a team that was fortunately, um, why I was able to sign a single person on my team to partner with a single segment. So they were very much embedded into that segment and really understood everything that was going on. As part of the weekly forecast call, the leader of that segment had to provide, um, their street quota and that trend and, um, you know, how they were doing on, on hiring and, and have enough people to see. And that was a thing that I thought was important weekly and recruiting was on that call too, because if you get behind in that, that's the hardest thing to make up. Now, on a monthly basis, you're going to review some other things. It doesn't make sense to review win rates, for example, on a weekly basis. Um, and maybe it doesn't in enterprise either, right? But it certainly does in the high velocity business. So know what that one fully cadence of those set of KPIs or that scorecard that you're going to view and then know quarterly as well. So I think combining those two things, the cadences with what you're going to review at each one and then the potential decisions are to make, um, help you get into that right sort of, um, um, way to which you can best manage that business, get the right signals in the right cadence with the right scorecard, um, and make those decisions faster, um, so that you can actually impact here. I think the other thing you talked about too was, um, the reason I like scorecards is I think that you can look at a lot of dashboards and I've looked at a lot and they have so many things on them and they don't make sense. You know, you can look, you can look at a single metric and they're all not going to be performing, but it might not be a problem because something might be offsetting it. So I think you have to look in organized view of them in order to make an overall sort of macro decision or get a macro understanding of how the health of that segment is performing. For example, you might be really good in the bottom of the funnel, you know, pipeline creation to close, but you might see downward trends in SCR productivity and, you know, MQ owls and, you know, middle top of the funnel. That's a signal that you should start looking at because you're not going to see the problem in, you know, revenue attainment this quarter, you're probably going to see an export or it could be the complete reverse, right? So that's why I think the framework of the scorecard or organized set of KPIs as opposed to just here's a win rate dashboard. I were incredibly important. You certainly then drilled out a look at the details, you know, depending on what you're seeing on that scorecard. But that's why I like to go with that concept. That makes sense. So I asked this of all my guests, the last question in the show. It's, you know, if you think of a moment of impact that someone's had on you or you've had on someone that, you know, particularly comes to mind. Yeah, it I'm going to go with like mentorship and we talk about that a lot. The company I was at, well, actually two companies, I was at offshore Marketo, I worked for the same person first, he was the CRO and first he was and then he was the CEO. He became a mentor. And we developed a really good relationship, a trusting relationship, what you have to do for someone to be a real mentor just asking someone to spend some time with you and share a few things doesn't necessarily mean they're a mentor. He taught me how to think like a leader. He brought me into the meetings and interactions including board meetings. So I was an observer. So he gave me that sort of exposure. He gave me the coaching on how you pitch ideas and how you keep it at the right level and how you handle conflict. And he more than anything helped me to learn the softer skills of how you can move from being an individual contributor to a middle manager or capture being a leader in an organization. So that was probably the biggest impact on me. Another leader I worked for Bill Lynch. He was a CRO at Mercado. And then, I know after that, you know, he is this phrase of you learn it, you earn it and you return it. So, you know, I learned how to do RevOps. I, I learned the positions I had. And, you know, later in my career, you know, I started getting back in terms of mentoring and helping to develop people, you know, that worked for me. And, you know, I've seen some people, especially at Mercado, who are not leading their own RevOps teams. And, you know, hopefully I had a small part to play in that. But that makes me very, very proud and honored to see it. Amazing. Now, for those who were listening who want to connect with you on LinkedIn, can you give them your handle so that they can connect deep? Sure, it is the linkedin.com. And that slash in that slash Jeffrey Serlin backslash. And that's J-E-F-F-R-E-Y S-E-R L-I-N. Amazing. Jeff, as always, so glad you were able to join us. And I hope I get to see you at another conference soon. Absolutely. Great seeing you. Have a wonderful weekend. And thanks for inviting me, Jeff.