In this episode, Sid Kumar, Senior Vice President of Revenue Operations at Hubspot, provides insights into Hubspot's RevOps approach. Leveraging his expertise, he discusses how RevOps can assist businesses in understanding and improving each stage of the customer journey.
This episode features an interview with Sid Kumar, Senior Vice President of Revenue Operations at Hubspot.
In this episode, Sid provides insights into Hubspot's RevOps approach. Leveraging his vast expertise, he discusses how RevOps can assist businesses in understanding and improving each stage of the customer journey.
About Sid:
Sid Kumar is SVP of Revenue Operations at HubSpot, where he leads worldwide go-to-market strategy and operations for the Flywheel organization across Marketing, Sales and Customer Success. Previously, Sid was Head of Field Sales Operations at Amazon Web Services (AWS), where he was COO of Sales for Americas and led the global launch of AWS’s Cloud Sales Centers. Sid is an industry thought leader who has been featured in numerous books as a subject matter expert on high velocity go-to-market models. He has a BA in Economics from Yale and an MBA in Strategic Management from The Wharton School.
About Hubspot:
HubSpot is a leading CRM platform that provides software and support to help businesses grow better. Their platform includes marketing, sales, service, and website management products that start free and scale to meet our customers’ needs at any stage of growth. Today, thousands of customers around the world use Hubspot’s powerful and easy-to-use tools and integrations to attract, engage, and delight customers.
According to Sid:
“RevOps can play a strong role in defining what the buyer's journey looks like. What are the North Star outcomes at each of the different phases? How are you going to measure leading and lagging indicators to different outcomes? RevOps can define the buyer’s journey process to get buy-in across your different teams.”
“RevOps is thinking about the operating system that drives accountability, insights, and supports real time visibility into performance that allows you to see if you are on track. RevOps can help you course-correct. How do you get real-time action on those different areas?”
“I think RevOps plays a really big role in terms of not just driving accountability, but bringing together the data, systems, and clarity across these different stages to help your GTM operating system come together.”
Episode Timestamps:
*(00:48) - Sid’s role at Hubspot
*(02:37) - Traditional CX, service, sales vs. RevOps combo
*(04:56) - HubSpot's current situation and operational elevation plan
*(09:44) - Building a consolidated demand framework
*(14:39) - Managing the integration of strategy with operational execution
*(22:25) - Advice for Revenue Leaders
*(26:20) - Signs indicating a transition to RevOps is needed
*(34:08) - Last advice for businesses looking to transform their RevOps
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Accenture is a leading global professional services company that helps the world’s leading businesses, governments and other organizations build their digital core, optimize their operations, accelerate revenue growth and enhance citizen services—creating tangible value at speed and scale. We are a talent and innovation led company with 738,000 people serving clients in more than 120 countries. Technology is at the core of change today, and we are one of the world’s leaders in helping drive that change, with strong ecosystem relationships. We combine our strength in technology with unmatched industry experience, functional expertise and global delivery capability. We are uniquely able to deliver tangible outcomes because of our broad range of services, solutions and assets across Strategy & Consulting, Technology, Operations, Industry X and Accenture Song. These capabilities, together with our culture of shared success and commitment to creating 360° value, enable us to help our clients succeed and build trusted, lasting relationships. We measure our success by the 360° value we create for our clients, each other, our shareholders, partners and communities. Visit us at www.accenture.com.
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Links & Resources:
Connect with Phil Dillard & Sid Kumar on LinkedIn
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Phil: [00:00:00] Welcome to Revenue Reinvention, the podcast where we get real about transforming business for predictable success. In each episode, we'll embark on a journey of business evolution. We'll discuss how to reshape the way companies approach revenue generation and operational efficiency. On today's episode, we sat down with Sid Kumar, Senior Vice President of Revenue Operations at HubSpot. We dove deep into the end-to-end customer journey and how RevOps can bring clarity to deliver a unified experience. Let's jump right in.
Well, hello, everybody, and welcome to another episode of Revenue Reinvention. I'm your host, Phil Dillard, here today with Sid Kumar, SVP of Revenue Operations for HubSpot. How are you doing today, Sid?
Sid: Doing great, Phil. How are you?
Phil: I'm doing pretty good, pretty good. I'm very excited to speak with you because there's some really interesting stuff going on in your background. It looks like [00:01:00] you've had a really fun career. For those who haven't already checked the show notes, you know, you started in banking on the finance and development side and then moved into like the operations and the sales side and now have a really interesting track record at a couple of amazing companies and what sounds like an amazing role at HubSpot and a great way to kick us off in the conversation about revenue ops, that combination of sales and operations that enables this, the beautiful flywheel. So I'm really excited to start with this. So can you tell us a little bit about your role at HubSpot? Like how do you describe what you do for a living when people ask you what you do?
Sid: Yeah, no, great question. Yeah, it has been a fun ride over the career and all these different experiences really build off of each other. But if I think about RevOps at HubSpot, we really think about it as the, you know, the go-to-market COO operation, you know, helping partner with our go-to-market teams, sales, marketing, customer [00:02:00] success. But in an integrated way that gives you just integrated view across that customer journey and helps orchestrate, and align the different teams.
So you're solving for customers and really thinking about what are all the elements that make up revenue and how you orchestrate teams, data, systems, processes, and people to deliver the best CX you can. So I view it really as a business partner to our go-to-market organization that helps see around corners, that helps drive a very proactive motion and helps drive those outcomes both for our customers, our partners, and HubSpot.
Phil: And that makes a lot of sense. And, full disclosure, I've been a HubSpot user as a startup, and I can only imagine the broad range of customers that you work with. When you think about the integrated experience that you're talking about. Do you have like a good story that you like to use or an anecdote or a good customer example to [00:03:00] make that really visceral to people? What's the difference between traditional customer experience or traditional customer service or sales that's different when you think about combining that all together in a RevOps lens?
Sid: Yeah, that's a great question. You know, it's natural to want to operate as functions, your marketing, your sales, and your customer success, and there are handoffs between these different teams. And I think it's taking a very different approach to that. It's saying, let's, as a go-to-market organization, as a company, let's really understand how our buyers want to buy and engage with our customers.
With HubSpot, whether it's a prospect, whether it's an existing customer, and really obsess about what that journey looks like? For us, we labeled it Customer Centric Operating Model, CCOM. And that is our way of really looking at what are all those different touchpoints across our different phases of go to market, which we call [00:04:00] Attract, Engage, Delight. And we purposely chose to call our go-to-market organization The Flywheel because it's a closed loop, not a linear model. It's like, you know, you attract customers, you engage them as part of the buyer's journey, and you delight them, make sure they're getting the outcomes that they signed up to get creating that flywheel and really thinking about customer outcomes at every one of those phases. What is the prospect or customer trying to do as they're going along that buyer journey? And then you start to realize that, yes, there are certain functions that play a little bit more in certain parts of that buyer's journey.
It really becomes a team sport is what you realize. So I think it's a reorientation around what go to market looks like as opposed to, you know, here's marketing's role, sales role, and customer success's role. So it's a bit of a paradigm shift, thinking horizontally as opposed to thinking functionally or vertically.
Phil: Now, conceptually, as a customer, I think 00:05:00] that's easy to digest. You say, wherever I come in to meet HubSpot, I expect everybody on the team to know who I am and to be able to serve me. I expect the last person I spoke to, to have informed the next person, like a frictionless experience. I think it's easy from the consumer side because we have some expectations from that.
But it seems like it might be tougher from the company side, especially if you had to make a transition from an old paradigm to a newer one, where you are integrating this all together, and it seems like RevOps role is kind of pulling that together. Can you describe, like, what the situation is, was, or is at HubSpot and where you're elevating it to operationally?
Sid: Yeah, I think it's a really good point. It is a bit of a paradigm shift. It's like, it's how do we shift from the functional way of thinking about things to the iterated view, working backward from your customers? I think that's really the crux of the question. I think the first is really having a RevOps that can play a really [00:06:00] strong role in terms of defining what that process looks like, defining what the buyer's journey looks like.
What are the North Star outcomes at each of those different phases? How are you going to measure leading and lagging indicators to those different outcomes? And so I think it's defining that process and getting that buy-in across your different teams. And then it's thinking about what is the operating system that drives the accountability, that drives the insights, that supports real-time visibility into performance that allows you to see, are you on track at each of those different micro steps to where you want to be to deliver that outcome you expected at that stage or not.
And then how do you course correct and how do you really get almost like real-time action on those different areas so I think RevOps plays a really big role in terms of defining that process, driving the accountability, and then bringing together the data, the systems, the role [00:07:00] clarity across these different stages to help really that GTM operating system come together.
Phil: Sure, that makes a ton of sense. I'm reflecting on your background in sales, and I'm wondering, I love asking these questions of salespeople who get deeper into operations, right? A lot of times. In experiences I've had in companies, people on the operations side are like, Oh my god, sales has promised all this stuff, and we have to find a way to deliver and it kind of messes up the engine or causes friction into it. And I think what I'm hearing in this integrated component is that you're trying to break that problem. Can you share a little bit about how your sales background informed how you drive RebOps in this integrated way?
Sid: I've sat in the seat of a leader in marketing, sales, and customer success. So, it's been really interesting to kind of look at this on the other side and how you bring it all together, because I sat on the other side as a frontline [00:08:00] leader for those different teams in my time at CA. And if I think about sales, I'll bring it together with marketing. That typically is where you need the, you know, a very tight alignment, and it's around demand creation. It's always a question of, right, do you get enough leads? Do you have enough pipeline? Whose responsibility is it? And I think the answer is that it's both teams' responsibility for it. One example in this is, and I've done this a number of times at the different companies I've been at, it's taking a step back and saying, what does our joint objective need to look like?
And for us to service our company customers in the way we want to bring our solutions and connect them with our customers. And it starts to give you a sense of what the pie needs to look like. And when you get into that, then you start to say, well, what are all the different sources that contribute to that pie?
Who is accountable to those different sources and who drives the outcome and execution related to those different sources? So your discussion then becomes not how you're carving up the [00:09:00] pie, per se. When you're off or ahead, you can say, maybe I want to double down on a particular source of pipeline. But the other side is, you're jointly working on how do you grow the pie.
And I think that's where, again, the shift is, we're thinking about demand. We're not thinking about leads and opportunities and pipelines in different conversations. We're talking about demand. Which manifests itself in the pipeline and there are a number of different inputs to it that are contributed by different teams. Iit's aligning everybody around a consistent demand framework in this example. So, you have clarity into not just what the solution is, but how you're going to get there. And then what are the metrics you're going to use to measure success? And who are you going to lean on within the organization to go drive that?
Phil: I think that's a really interesting point when you talk about a consolidated or a centralized demand framework, right? If I'm hearing you right, the ability to deliver a customer-centric model means that people need to see and understand the customer from different perspectives. If I'm a marketer, [00:10:00] or a salesperson, or a success person, I might have a different perspective of a customer based on, you know, How I can serve them, but I need to understand them comprehensively. Can you talk a little bit more about how those things combine to flesh out the customer-centric model that you're trying to deliver?
Sid: Yeah, yeah, like if you take, you know, you take a specific example of a part of the journey when, you know, a customer has signed on as a customer, what are you doing between that and making sure they get value for that specific use case? Are they getting value? What they spend all this time in a sales cycle, and are they getting value? So I think it's there in that context, it's obsessing over, are we activating? Are we onboarding? And are we helping the customer drive usage of the key capabilities within the solution that are directly tied to the outcomes that they are going to get the value from?
That was part of the business case to get to the spot purchase in the first place. I think you could, in a linear world, where you think of it [00:11:00] as, okay, that would traditionally be the world of customer success. And you say, all right, sales are sort of out of that discussion, and it's now customer success's world. Instead, if you say, I want to obsess about customer value via adoption, activation, and usage, it suddenly starts to say, Oh, wait, well, what role can sales play in that? What role can marketing play in that? What role can product play in that? So you start to, that's the customer centricity part of it is what is the customer outcome you're trying to drive at that particular phase. And then what are the different teams that work together to make that outcome as compelling and, you know, an excellent customer experience as possible? There's just one example there.
Phil: Sure. Um, so how do you address some of the inherent challenges in that from the sake of, you know, if I'm sales, I might be compensated one way. Or I might have like, I might have historically been used to splitting revenue or attribution between different parts of a sales team. But in this model, [00:12:00] it might be somebody who is a success person, a service person, an administrative person saying, you know, there's underutilization of X, we should talk to them about this benefit.
So different parts of the team can drive attribution towards a better customer experience and thus more revenue and more loyalty. Like, how do you get people from Fighting, in a way, over what slice of the pie they own and show how well they did, versus attributing it to the benefit of the whole organization?
Sid: That's a great question. I think this is where RevOps, again, plays a really important role of, you know, this is why it's not marketing strategy and ops, sales strategy and ops, CS strategy, and ops. I mean, that's how we evolved from there, and I can get into that a little bit later on what our evolution has been.
How do I make sure from an incentive standpoint, that I'm driving the message from what the incentive plan is, is driving an indication of what are the behaviors you want to [00:13:00] be driving? And I think being able to look at, you know, rep incentives across the board and saying, are these aligned in, in, in terms of the customer outcomes we're trying to drive and the roles we believe that are best suited to go drive them?
What it does is it forces you to really think about, okay, what is the role of a support rep in the context of helping with this particular outcome, usage, and thinking about what is that behavior I wanna drive? And then how do I not just incent that behavior? How do I actually measure that and make it very clear what our measurement of success is.
Then you can have, you know, different measures for different roles on how are they contributing to that. And again, I don't think you're going to be in a situation where every role is, is equally suited to focus on a particular aspect of that buyer's journey, but it really forces you to step back and say, do we have clarity on the outcomes we're trying to drive?
Do we then have [00:14:00] further clarity on which roles within the organization are best suited to work together and deliver that outcome? And then the other side of it is, you know, we haven't used the word AI yet, you know, AI and automation. It's also thinking about where are there roles and opportunities for, well, you know what, we could create an excellent digital customer experience and, and, and not have somebody involved.
And the bar needs to be, it's, you know, more efficient. It's, it's going to help, you know, these, these humans spend more time on higher value-added activities, helping advance customer outcomes and more. More intentional way, I would say.
Yeah, that takes it from the strategy and the customer engagement to a lot more of the operational execution component. Like, it slides into the theme where you talk about in terms of elevate, innovate, and reinvent, right? I think of that in what you just described as you know, the people, the processes, and the systems. The right people in the right [00:15:00] places. And you have to figure out the processes But it's this system, this operational component that I think is another, another layer.
Phil: So it seems like you have to tie in with the internal operational systems and the data structures and the, whether it's to enable a human. through tech or enabling the AI to release the human. It seems like there's a lot of work there. How do you wrap your arms around that? Because it seems like another big part of the organization that you have to fix for this to all work smoothly.
Sid: It's a great point. I think the way I think about RevOps as well is connective tissue within the organization and the ability to really think what are all of the components that generate revenue. What are the building blocks? What are the different teams that contribute to it? And how do you bring them all together in the way, you know, mechanisms and processes are essential for that?
To give, you know, different teams clarity into, okay, what are the priorities? How do we [00:16:00] jointly develop a roadmap? But in your specific example, like teams, we work super closely. Worked very closely with our data team. Worked very closely with our internal systems team that partners with us around the go-to-market technology stack that says, okay, here's how we're going to go improve rep productivity, or here's how we're going to really continue to up-level customer experience.
We have to clarify around what those objectives are, at which stage, and then say, okay, what are the different teams that we need to go orchestrate and bring together to go make sure that that experience is as, as delightful as it is. The other side is we, we, we are HubSpot, you know, we are a customer-connected customer platform.
We run on HubSpot and that gives us an integrated, you know, visibility into our customers. gives us the ability to understand what that customer journey looks like. So, between solving for the customer, which is, you know, saying we always have SFTC, which is solved for the customer, that guides and directs [00:17:00] a ton of the energy in terms of where to go focus.
The other side is, how do we continue leveling our reps? Enablement is another team that we spend, you know, a lot of time with to really understand. Where across that buyer's journey, can the rep be most helpful and most impactful in terms of helping them move through the journey?
Phil: Sounds like a heck of a journey and you know, one of the things that came to mind while you were talking was just the question of why now? Why do you think now RevOps is evolving, you know, so important? There's revenue reinvention for a reason, right? But I'll admit it, five to 10 years ago, I was ignorant of terms like RevOps and DevOps. I don't think that they were as prevalent or as important to an organization as they are now. What do you think that's changed that's driving this change in how companies operate?
Sid: Yeah, I think it's a lot of it is, you know, market conditions have changed quite a bit, [00:18:00] right? Between COVID and post-COVID, I think the expectations for what good looks like have changed. And it's not, you know, growth at all costs. It's really that Emphasis on how are you going to go do things efficiently and grow in a durable, sustainable manner. I think interest rates had a lot to do with that, which then, you know, had that big impact on valuation. So I think just the backdrop. The macro-environment has just changed, and that's changed what investor expectations and so forth have pivoted over that time.
Sid: And I think it's really a sense of, you know, you're building for the long term. And if you're building for the long term, you need to really take a step back and say, are you doing it in a scalable, efficient, durable way that is just intentional and It's not about just, you know, raising rounds of money as a, as a private company at any valuation and then putting it all [00:19:00] into top line, but then not spending enough time putting it into top of funnel and then not thinking about the obsessing over the, whether the customer is getting value for it.
Phil: That's a really good point, right? Because if you go back to that old adage of it costs a certain amount of money to acquire a customer, but you can get a lot more benefit, revenue, and long lifetime value from an existing customer over acquiring a new one. This actually leads me to another question, have you noticed any differences between the stage of or size of the company that you're dealing with in the demands that they have? Or their response to the revenue operations model?
Sid: I would say it's not, it is not SalesOps 2. 0. And that's really important to, to understand. And what I mean by that is I think SalesOps 2. 0, or SalesOps 1. 0 was a support for a sales leader. And some, some sales ops leaders were more proactive, more, you know, driving the, being a [00:20:00] co-pilot with that sales leader and played a more strategic role.
But I wouldn't say that was necessarily how the role was defined or what was, what was defined as good for that role. I think as you shift into RevOps, it's how you help the organization see around corners and take that integrated view across the revenue engine. Because we sort of talked about it earlier, there are going to be puts and takes between functions, and if you plan for each of these in a silo, you then get siloed execution.
So when you think about the building blocks of that operating system we were talking about, There's the people side of it, there's the process and mechanisms, there's data, there's systems, and I think you really have to look at where do you get started, and what would you be remiss if you did not start early, like if you think about your data strategy early on in the formation of your company, you're probably going to benefit from the fact that you don't have to go [00:21:00] try to re-engineer it, Completely later.
So think about where are there areas of technical debt you could incur later as you start to scale. What are the foundational elements you need to start putting in now? How are you thinking about data definitions? Are they consistent? Is there a single, you know, source of truth for that across the company?
So I think there are things you could look at from a much more mature, later-stage company and say, Hey, What elements of that, uh, equation do I need to start thinking about now? That doesn't mean I'm going to invest at the same level as a company that's, you know, you know, public and, you know, at a different stage, but it starts to give you a real sense of across these different building blocks, where do you need to get started?
And I think some of these are going to obviously require investment, certainly on the data and system side, but I think a really, great place to start is process. As you start to think about those other elements and what your investment time frame looks like, because the process is the least costly of these, and [00:22:00] it's around, you know, alignment and collaboration and communication.
So if you have one RevOps person or two RevOps people, and that's how you define RevOps, what role can that individual or set of individuals play? In driving a common language between the different functional teams, I think that's the start of it. As you start to think about it, okay, this is what my data investment strategy is going to look like. This is what my systems roadmap looks like.
Phil: Sure. I mean, you said something about if you plan for a siloed system, you get a siloed outcome. And that was kind of sticking in my, in my brain. And regardless of how small you are, you could be a five-person shop. 10 person, 40, 50, 100, but I mean, let's say you're a 10-person shop and everything goes through the CEO or everything goes through one person and people operate in their little groups, especially if you're a remote or distributed team.
It's very easy to limit your performance by being siloed and thinking that you're actually operating as a team. What [00:23:00] I'm hearing you say is thinking about this. Mindset early on, you're saying, when do we get to the point where we're not a few people in a room talking about everything, where we need someone to pull that glue together, and then how do we put it on a foundation that's the strength of the company, right?
The core thing that we do best and do differently, like, alright, let's build on that, but make sure we grow. As we grow, we're like, we're growing and leveraging all the strengths to move in the right direction. So, as we talk about the maturity. maturation of revenue operations. I'm thinking now about like what other advice can we have for the listeners.
What sort of tips do you have for CFO, CEO, RevOps leaders around strategy or where to start or where you've found that you've run into problems that were expected or unexpected that they can give them a means to benefiting from some of your lessons learned?
Sid: The first thing I would say is to keep it simple and start small. [00:24:00] It's, you know, RevOps is, you could define it as, as narrowly as you want, or you could define it as, as broadly as you want. And I think it's understanding where are you from a stage standpoint and asking even just basic questions. How do I have alignment between my marketing and sales teams? Do I have alignment on the core processes that require collaboration between different parts of the organization to deliver that customer outcome we talked about?
Do we have the right communication, collaboration, and joint view of what it takes? And you really, I think, should also think about the change management is a really big piece of this. It's co-opting and bringing in the teams that are ultimately going to be Responsible for driving these outcomes, bringing them in as part of the process early and often, and then honing in on a couple of areas of that process that are particularly broken or could use some work.
You solve those and show improvement. You then win credibility. You earn that, you know, [00:25:00] you earn that trust to go say, okay, now let's go look at the next, you know, next two and you're never going to be done, right? It's one of these that's like, you're always going to be iterating and finding ways to continually improve.
But if you can keep that Continuous improvement mindset and constantly look for like, where is it that you should be dedicating time and it's worth the worth, you know, the calories too up-level execution. So it's trying not to do too much at once. It's trying to stay focused. What are the two to three bigger, big, you know, areas that you want to go hone in on?
Sid: What are the teams involved? How do you get common, you know, as I said, language and a shared understanding of the problem? And then how are you going to keep that team together and accountable? against specific milestones. So it sounds simple, but like, I, but there's a lot more complexity that you can add to it, but you need to get, you know, the ball rolling, I think. And that's how you start to build that trust. The trust is so important here, because I talked about sales [00:26:00] ops 1. 0 and 2. 0, like rev ops and the, the, the business partnership is such a critical element of this. It's, you know, are you, you know, a co-pilot with this go-to market leader? Or are you really just, really just providing reporting and things that could over time get automated, right?
Phil: Well, it sounds like a pretty engaged and special team when you pull it all together. As we round out the part where we talk about the maturation of revenue operations, I want to start a little bit at the beginning and a little bit at the mature end. Because if you're, if you're listening to this and you're new, you're like, wow, this is a lot. Where do I start? Oh, you talk about how. to get started. I'm curious about when someone knows that they need to. So can you suggest maybe what some of the signals are that an organization probably needs to think about making this transition?
Sid: I would say get started when you are really building out go to market. So, you know, after [00:27:00] product market fit, and you're starting to build out your go-to market team, you might start with just a head of sales, for example, and, and then it becomes, it's a sales ops role to start with. But as you start to say, okay, I need to go specialize marketing, or I need to now think about have customers, I need to have a team to, to, to service and engage with them on, on the post-sales side.
You start to get functional specialization. I think that's the signal to me that when you're, you're starting to achieve that go-to-market fit and the early stages of that, you don't need to over rotate and build out a huge team, but starting to think about these different elements that we talked about, like, well, what Do I have a common definition of what a customer is between marketing and sales?
Does support think of the customer in the same way that marketing thinks about them? So it's, it's asking questions. The answer may not be yes, but you may be okay with that. But it's asking the right questions at that point and saying, Okay, if I truly want this [00:28:00] customer, Prospect that becomes a customer to have a single experience from this company, what's getting in the way of having a great, great experience, right?
And those are some of the signals. It's like you start to differentiate functionally, and it's no longer, as you said before, a few folks in a room that can just say, Oh, here's what I did with this customer yesterday. Can you now take the, you know, onboarding on it? It's no longer the word of mouth. It's that you're starting to see early signs of, you know, go-to-market fit and you're starting to think about how you go after the market. So, yeah.
Phil: I bet you could find some passionate teams who are having heated debates about who the customer is what they want and what's the best way to serve them. And, that might be one of those, you know, passing moments as an executive in the hallway being like, okay, these are spilling out of just one on ones, but good indicators, right? Yeah. That people are really trying [00:29:00] and struggling against the constraints of the existing system. Exactly right.
Sid: Exactly right.
Phil: All right, let's go to the tougher part, I think, which is how do you future-proof this, right? How do you build a system that finds that Goldilocks amount of innovation? You said don't do too much, right? Do a little bit at a time, but you might be behind the competition or behind customer expectations, or better yet, setting industry expectations of what some product or service in your sector should be able to do. So if you think about, you know, future-proofing, building better strategies, how do you think about that? How do you try to capture that in some systematic way?
Sid: The data will, will be an indication of pattern, really looking at patterns and trends in data, I think, is a starting point around where, where to go look and say, are there things that are actually changing from a systematic standpoint? And understanding that from a, through a data-driven lens. I think the other side of it, which we, we really obsess about is [00:30:00] listening mechanisms from our customers, listening mechanisms from our partners. And then, as I said, staying very close to your, your front line and understanding like what, What are, what are they hearing?
The qualitative side of it is all of the inputs that give you a sense of what signals you see here in the data, and is that corroborated by what's happening in the broader environment with your customers and what your reps are hearing. I think that's how you understand whether you, something is afoot, that you need to think about how to adapt to it or stay the course, and the sooner, the closer to that truth you could be, the faster you're going to recognize those signals. And some of them you just have to let play out for a little bit. Great example, generative AI, right? And, you know, two years ago, that was like a part of what we did with RevOps. But like, since the middle of last year, it's become a huge focus for us around how do we think about rep and customer experience in the context of how does [00:31:00] generative AI and automation come together to rethink that. So here's an example of new technology, new capabilities that now have become much more widely available that causes you to rethink how are you going about solving some of those existing problems. And you're still anchoring it on that customer journey. And you're saying, where in that customer journey am I trying to solve a problem with the technology or the capabilities?
So it's not doing it for, you know, technology's sake or having fun with AI, although AI is a lot of fun. It's doing it for a purpose, right? And understanding what are you trying to change. And as I said, it's either customer experience, partner experience, rep experience, or productivity that typically will drive that.
Phil: It might be that doing the technology, doing the AI, learning how to use it as part of the whole experience is because, for the employee, it helps you capture that data. It helps you secure the insights, because like if you're breaking [00:32:00] from a siloed organization. And, you know, the sales team would talk inside amongst each other about problems, but somebody would syndicate that information and share it back to RevOps. You don't want to have to feel like you're reaching into kind of pull it out. You want this system to organically flow and, and, and draw it to you. Now, I get the feeling that you guys might be at an advantage at doing that because if you're operating on HubSpot, you can build, into the system, the ability for your team to have that. But I guess it leads to two questions. One, how do you optimize kind of extracting the insights from your own team? And two, have you found that led to other product solutions that have improved the business overall because of the way you're working better together?
Sid: Yeah, it's a good question. I think, you know, the underpinning of AI and automation is you have good data or great data, right? And I think that's a combination of the data we have about, you know, what we know about [00:33:00] a prospect or so forth. And how can we Think about a guided go-to-market motion? That's how we think about it. It's what are the different steps of that journey, and how do we think about guiding the rep in terms of what is the next best action, whether it's across the sales journey, whether it's across the delight journey, the engaged journey, or the delight journey?
And how are you leveraging the data and the insights to help go empower those different capabilities? And then how are you leveraging data with automation to help a rep? Pre-sales, post-sales to say, here is the right engagement with the right customer or prospect at the right time. And then curate that with, okay, and here's how to make that a great engagement.
Here's the playbook. That's the threading. I think, you know, RevOps can really play a big role. a big role in because you're seeing how all you don't want to think about these again in pockets. It's like, what is the outcome you're trying to drive? I want to create a [00:34:00] great rep experience so they can deliver a great experience to our customers. And then what does it take to go do that? So it's again, working backward from that.
Phil: That's super. I'm glad this is being recorded cause I'm going to go through that section a couple of times and break it down a little bit. I think there's some real, real, real gold in there. I know we could do this for quite some time, but we have to kind of wrap up. So as we get into our like, what's next takeaways, I guess there are two questions. One is, any other last advice for businesses who are looking to transform their revenue operations that you would reflect on and share in conclusion?
Sid: I would encourage, you know, folks that are at a stage of maturity, go talk to other companies, maybe at a similar stage, maybe some that are a little ahead of you, and talk about what they're doing, or how are they, maybe there's an industry angle to it that you can, you can really understand how are you leveraging RevOps across your organization, how are you defining it, and how are you operationalizing it.
Phil: Alright, the last one, and we've touched on a lot of this before, so it's kind of one of those in [00:35:00] conclusion comments, what do you think is the single most important thing that RevOps will do to continue changing business in the future.
Sid: It's really helping to proactively drive the business. It's, it's helping the business understand where it needs to go. That's where I get into leading versus lagging indicators. I think there's a, there's a tendency to measure things in the rearview mirror. And, you know, it's, you know, last month's data is last month's data. It's really thinking about the here and now. What are you doing to drive the future outcome? So I think about it as there's hindsight, there's insight, there's foresight. How do you get to foresight? I think we've made, you know, I think historically it's been a very hindsight-driven, sales ops 1.0 kind of world, getting much more to a focus on data, analytics, and insights on why things happen the way they happened, right? Yeah. The foresight is how you help predict the future and then create. And I think that's a role that, you know, RevOps sitting on top of [00:36:00] all of these different areas is just uniquely qualified to, to help be a great business partner to the go to market teams and help guide that journey. That's outstanding.
Phil: Yeah, you said it before, looking around the corner, right? Looking around the corner, anticipating what's going to be there.
Sid: What's going to happen and how do you get out ahead of it? Exactly.
Phil: Yeah, and I think it's beautiful. I think it's awesome. Yeah. Well, thank you very much for your time today. It was really great to have a conversation with you and I'm sure that our listeners will enjoy it and really appreciate having you.
Sid: Likewise. Great conversation.
Phil: And thanks everybody for joining us. We'll see you again next time.
Phil: Revenue Reinvention is brought to you by Accenture in partnership with Conga. Discover how Accenture and Conga are reshaping the landscape of revenue reinvention. Their unique collaboration merges Accenture's deep transformation expertise with Conga's market-leading technology solutions to redefine effective revenue lifecycle management. Together, they're not just facilitating growth, [00:37:00] they're engineering it. Join them in this journey towards sustainable and scalable growth.