Tyler Will, VP of Revenue Operations at Intercom, discusses the transformative power of AI in RevOps, highlighting the shift from seat-based SaaS to AI-driven models and the importance of talent and team development.
This episode features Tyler Will, VP of Revenue Operations at Intercom, where he drives GTM transformation to support Intercom’s AI-first customer support vision.
Tyler discusses the transformative power of AI in RevOps, highlighting the shift from seat-based SaaS to AI-driven models and the importance of talent and team development.
About the Guest:
Tyler Will is the Vice President of Revenue Operations at Intercom. There he oversees Sales and Marketing Operations, go-to-market analytics, and strategy & planning. He is deeply involved in the transformation of the GTM organization to drive Intercom’s AI-first customer support vision. Prior to Intercom, he led several Sales Strategy & Operations teams at LinkedIn and worked with major technology and private equity companies at Bain & Company. In terms of education, Tyler graduated from Duke University and earned his MBA at the Stanford Graduate School of Business.
Guest Highlights:
“ What does AI mean? It’s going back to school in a sense. That starts with marketing—product marketing, creating the right content, the right web pages, and webinars.”
“ Let's accept that humans struggle with change, but not use that as an excuse not to do the things we need to do.”
“ There's more and more data available to us to use in creative ways. I think the only limit on creative use now is our creativity as opposed to the data and the tools.”
Episode Timestamps:
*(02:15) - The Evolution of Operations Team
*(05:00) - AI's Impact on Pricing and Sale
*(07:10) - Navigating Organizational Change
*(25:40) - Talent and Team Development
Links & Resources:
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About Accenture
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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Phil: [00:00:00] Welcome to Revenue Reinvention, the podcast where we get real about transforming business for predictable success. On today's episode, we talk with Tyler Will, Vice President of Revenue Operations at Intercom. With leadership and sales roles at Intercom and LinkedIn, plus a background in management consulting, Tyler brings sales and operational expertise to the revenue operations space. In this episode, we discuss Intercom's pricing strategy AI's role in revenue operations, navigating the team through process changes, tools Tyler's using for success, plus much, much more. Let's dive in. Welcome again, everyone to Revenue Reinvention and thanks for being here. I'm your host, Phil Dillard, founder of ThruLine Networks.
Phil: We're here with Tyler. Thanks so much for joining us today, Tyler. How are you doing? Doing
Tyler: Great. Thanks, Phil. Appreciate the invitation and excited to talk to you today.
Phil: Glad to have you with us. Really excited. So we'll start with some just [00:01:00] basics about you, your, your background and your, your, your revenue journey. I know you were at LinkedIn for a long time and a consultant before that, know those worlds and a lot about the companies and the firms you were with. And now you're, you're at Intercom, you joined 2023 VP of Operations. Can you talk about the transition of sales from sales operations to revenue operations that you're now overseeing?
Tyler: Yeah, absolutely. So we actually didn't have a RevOps leader when I came into Intercom a year and a half ago. And so I was just running the sales ops team and there was a marketing operations leader in seat as well. A great guy, Jeff Shearer, who's out consulting. So if you need somebody to help you through marketing ops, he's, he's out in the world.
Tyler: And we got along really well. We talked about what we were doing and pretty quickly recognized that there were a lot of places where there'd be some good synergies if we were coordinated a little bit better. And so after about 10 months, we had a new, new boss come in who recognized the same thing. And we were able to bring the marketing ops [00:02:00] team.
Tyler: And the sales ops team together to create a proper rev ops function. So that was just a, I think an opportunity where, especially in some of the analytics on some of the technology and tools we were using, places just to get streamlined, consolidate some, some areas of expertise and just go a little bit deeper, which has been great.
Phil: Super. So we see CROs who come from all different types of backgrounds, but the biggest, the biggest shifts are generally from sales to RevOps or operations to RevOps. In a technology company that we've seen over recent years, the development of different types of insert word before ops, sales ops, DevOps, FinOps, whichever.
Phil: Can you talk a little bit about why that's happened? What those different operations teams do, and how bringing them together under the revenue function helps the company execute?
Tyler: Yeah, you know, I think it's, it's really about unity of, of data, of insights, and kind of clarity of vision that is just more important [00:03:00] than probably ever before.
Tyler: Every company defines these things a little differently as to what's, what's under that umbrella and what's not. There are plenty of organizations that have pricing and packaging. They may have enablements within their, you know, within their RevOps or go to market ops function. But I think the goal of that and, you know, one designating all these different ops functions is the sense that as the world has gotten more complicated, as businesses have gotten more complicated, you can't have the expert seller or the expert marketer or the expert, you know, developer not have an operations function, somebody who's working in the background to make sure everything goes along smoothly.
Tyler: And so we've had this sort of proliferation of ops functions, And then a recognition that lots of silos is not an efficient way to run a business. And so we've, we've seen the evolution from sales ops to say rev ops, because, you know, on marketing, telling one story with one set of data in one place, and the execs nodding along saying, isn't that great?
Tyler: And then in another place, sales telling a different story with a different set of data that maybe conflicts with that. And so I think rev ops has really [00:04:00] arisen from a need to tell a cohesive story from the very top of funnel, you know, web traffic in a digital business down through your customer success.
Tyler: Story and, and, you know, renewals at the other end.
Phil: So that makes a lot of sense too. Now you, when we started out, you mentioned that it was an intersection between you and a colleague and the, and the addition of a new boss to the team that helped, helped you develop the RevOps function. So why do you think that now is the time that this all came together and what's next for you in the, in the near future?
Phil: Like looking ahead, what's on your, your radar for RevOps at Intercom?
Tyler: Yeah, absolutely. I think part of it coming together was there was a leader, my boss, who owns both marketing and sales, and didn't necessarily want to have two different ops people to deal with. Better to pick one and have that person have kind of remit over all of it.
Tyler: But what, you know, what that's letting us do and it's sort of what's on the radar for us at Intercom is kind of three big things. One, [00:05:00] there's this really exciting time with AI application companies right now. And we're all transitioning from seeds based SaaS, you know, classic model of the last decade or so to AI based activities, which are much more around work being done or outcomes or, you know, sort of answers, engagement, conversations you see pricing intercoms doing, that Salesforce is doing, that plenty of these other application companies are doing, is not a seat based thing, you know, just pay one fee and use the seat as much as you want.
Tyler: And so that has huge implications on roles and responsibilities of sales orgs and success orgs that it has. Implications on the metrics you're measuring and how you're working with your finance partners. It has implications on compensation plans and designs. And so we're in the midst of this big transition right now.
Tyler: And so the thing that takes up the most of my time at Intercom today is helping with this transition and getting us set up to be moved from the old seats world, which still exists and is a large part of the business, into a new world of AI applications and selling [00:06:00] and pricing and packaging and everything in a very different way.
Tyler: So that's one big one is really a big business transformation. The second one is, hey, we still got this business to run. And so we've got to continue to improve our operations. Right data, data quality, people doing the right things, information flowing the right ways, do we have good sales process in place?
Tyler: All that kind of classic work that's existed in any sales model over the years. It's the second one. And the third one, I think, is a place where if I don't spend enough time in the ops functions that surround something like sales, which is continued learning and growing for our team, and every, there's always sales enablement, there's always lots of sales trainings and books written about all of those things, but there aren't really sales ops or rev ops trainings, and nobody pulls us out of the, you know, out of the field for a week to learn.
Tyler: And so I try to create that culture on my team so that we spend time learning, improving our own skills, Sometimes it's fun stuff, general business skills. Other times it's very specific to what we're doing day in and day out, but really try to invest in that. And so that's the third pillar of what's on my [00:07:00] radar for the coming year.
Tyler: It sounds like a pretty busy year ahead. That's for sure. No shortage of things to do. Yeah, that's, that's after we got rid of five other things we could have spent time on.
Phil: I want to dig into both of those areas, you know, where you choose to focus your time and what the opportunity costs. We'll do that a little bit in the next segment.
Phil: But before that, I just want to dig a little into your background. You had an interesting tenure at LinkedIn and as a consultant before, and these are companies of different sizes. different levels and maturities. Can you talk a little bit about what you bring from those backgrounds to the, to your leadership approach to rev ups now?
Tyler: Yeah, different, different things, as you said, in very different environments. I think from, I'm a consultant, you know, sort of at heart, I spent 12 years of my 20 plus year career at this point in consulting roles. And I think, you know, from that has come really what I'd call it, kind of a customer first or a client first orientation.
Tyler: Yeah. You know, you've got to make that person happy. Now, we don't have external clients in [00:08:00] RevOps. We have internal clients, marketing leaders, sales leaders. But, you know, it's our job to make them successful. It's our job to give them the, you know, the truth, to be strategic advisors. And I think, you know, if you're out there reading sales ops literature, every other article seems to be, you know, How to become more strategic and stop being tactical, and I think I can bring a lot of that from the, that experience, and so that's, that's one part of it.
Tyler: There's a lot of kind of analytical rigor and high standards that I try to bring to the team and sort of lead by example. Again, you get thrown out of the room in a board presentation as a consultant if you don't have a really great buttoned up case, and so just try to make sure we're doing that. You know, the, the consulting model is also one where they're pretty transparent that you're going to come in, work there for a few years, grow a bunch of skills, and move on to something else.
Tyler: But that is a place where, you know, I think a lot of corporate environments are less transparent about career aspirations in the sense that people are going to go. And I try to bring a little bit of that consulting [00:09:00] culture, that mindset of like, hey, most people on this team, you're not going to work your entire career on RevOps at Intercom.
Tyler: You know, that's just not the reality. And so one of my big things I try to do with my team is to create a culture of just openness and trust. But if you want to be a people manager, I want you to come tell me that. I want to talk about that so we can have an honest conversation about what does it take to do that?
Tyler: Are there opportunities here at this company to do that? And if not, let's, you know, let's have a plan to get you there in a year, even if that means you leaving, because I'd much rather have a plan and work together on it and know that you're going to leave than you to give me two weeks notice and me to be shocked and have no idea what's going on.
Tyler: And I think that's, It's just better for everybody, it creates a much healthier environment, and so I brought that over from consulting.
Phil: Sure, and is that culture transition something that fits inside of the RevOps team, fits inside of the larger culture at Intercom, or is that actually part of the transformation that you were talking about before?
Tyler: Yeah, [00:10:00] I think it's all of the above, right? It's a great, uh, It's a great mindset to have within your team because you can do it yourself. The rest, you know, the rest of the organization, whether they have an open culture about that stuff or not is, you know, sort of up to them and up to you as a, you know, as a leader to try to influence.
Tyler: But ultimately I can run my team that way if I want to and get people to buy into that. But I think it's the best when it is company wide. I actually had a conversation this morning with somebody who was, you know, He had Intercom interested in another, another job change and we had a great conversation.
Tyler: I think part of his willingness to come and talk to me about that is seeing how I run my team and the culture I'm trying to create on the team. I don't think everybody everywhere in the company would do that. Um, but I hope so. And I hope we're getting there and I hope we can lead by example to make that happen.
Phil: So if we're going to shift gears in there a little bit and talk about the art of finding predictive pathways and new revenue streams. You, you jumped into this already when you started talking about it. The, the end of seat based [00:11:00] SaaS and the evolution of AI, AI results based pricing, which I think is amazing, critically important, and something to understand.
Phil: So can you talk a little bit about how this, how pricing, the identification of value and the capture of value, which is what I call pricing, works for you guys?
Tyler: Yeah. So Intercom has been a SaaS company. It's kind of whole existence. It was always a seat based model with, you know, pretty simple, but a few tiers and then monetization of certain activities in that platform, sending emails or sending messages.
Tyler: And we've had different iterations over the 13 years, I think the company's been around. But we are in the last year as AI becomes not something done in the back end, but really the forefront of the product, needing to find new ways to do that. The cost of delivering AI solutions, the way in which those are useful to our end customers and their end customers, ultimately, is very different from simply having a customer support rep who can sit in a seat, [00:12:00] send emails, send messages, create tickets.
Tyler: And so we are, you know, we are really looking to tie in a way that. I think you frankly never could before the actual outcome of a customer support conversation to what you pay for. So that means, you know, a customer with massive volumes that gets a ton and a ton of value from intercom is going to pay us more, even if they have 10 say, you know, 10 support reps than a customer who has 10 support reps.
Tyler: But it's all very low volume because they're, you know, they don't need to use the seats. They don't have the same outcomes. That they did in the past, whereas two years ago, they both would have paid us for 10 seats, you know, per year kind of situation. So there's much, much greater tie to value. Which I think is good for customers in the end and good for those companies selling that way who can show clearly that their product creates value.
Tyler: And we've all seen the sort of COVID rise of SaaS and the let's buy every tool and try stuff out to the hang on, we really need to understand how these are useful and what value they're creating for our customers. I think this just accelerates that transition even more. [00:13:00]
Phil: So for the different parts of the organization that have to touch the customer for the CRO to be successful, how does this change the selling process, the marketing process, the customer success process for you?
Tyler: Yeah, it's, it's so much, it's going to evolve, you know, over time. Right now AI is still fairly new. It's maybe not, you know, the thing everybody's talking about day in and day out the way it was, you know, a year or so ago, but it's at the forefront. It's real now. It's in the market. Yeah. There's still a ton of education to do.
Tyler: And so for a marketing organization, there's a ton of educating, what does it, what does AI mean? What does a resolution mean in our world? What does a conversation mean with AI? How is that different from what you're accustomed to doing? So there's, there's almost going back to school in a sense, and that's, you know, starts with marketing, product marketing, creating the right content, the right webpages, the webinars, the The content, our company does a lot on sort of thought leadership around AI in the market and what that's going to do.
Tyler: And so there's just a big education [00:14:00] piece and awareness piece that's changing everyone's job in that world. Then there's, hey, we've got to bring that into the sales funnel. Do you need your sales development organization qualifying opportunities differently? What does it, what does it look like when you don't just have to ask how many people do you have working to sell you seats, but you have to ask, How much volume do you have coming through?
Tyler: What types of queries are those? They're, they're things AI does really well. How do I, you know, I've logged, I'm logged out of my system. How do I get back in? What's your return policy? Factual questions are kind of the low hanging fruit. That's different if you're really complicated, you know, questions, medical kind of questions or personal information kind of questions.
Tyler: Like, very, very different. And so, a world of just, oh, you have five people, you need five seats, now becomes, what are you using this for, what kind of information, what kind of conversations are you having? And so, now your SDR function has to behave differently. Now you're, Every sales team has to qualify differently and work through.
Tyler: Your success team is now not just, hey, are you set up and you have 10 people in the 10 seats that you bought, [00:15:00] but it's an on, it's almost a constant sale of where can you use this more? How do you get it more involved in more conversations? How do we make sure those conversations are being resolved at a higher rate?
Tyler: And so there's almost a, there's still a contract, but you know, a continual sale of some of these things. And so it's, it's almost every single part of the, The go to market system is either re educating themselves, re educating the market, changing how they do things. For my team, that's, how do you forecast in a much more usage based world?
Tyler: I knew if you had 10 seats for 12 months, that was this much revenue. Well now, your usage is up and down with the seasonality of your business and the demands of their end customers. Forecasting is a totally new ballgame that we have to go, go learn and build new models and new metrics for. So, it's really exciting.
Tyler: No one is working nine to five right now on these problems. These are big, hairy problems, but it's what makes this so much fun.
Phil: Well, I think a key point from what you just said is that Or what I heard is that every part of the organization is doing a consultative sale [00:16:00] with your customer because the more they talk about how are you getting value from this and how could you get more value from it, it's, it's a, it's an ongoing conversation.
Phil: It's not, are you using all your seats, but it's just, are you getting the most out of it? It might not matter one login, 10 logins. It's, it's the, it's the volume and then the, and then the value. So, I mean, I think that's a, it seems to be a strength. Uh, what comes out of your, your background as a consultant, how do you deal with the, well, I should say, how does the flow of revenue change because, you know, 10 seats, predictable number, discounted, so on and so forth, but the usage and the value extraction could be seasonable, could be market driven, there seem to be another, uh, a number of other factors that can influence the flow of revenue.
Phil: Is that accurate?
Tyler: Absolutely accurate. I wish I had a great answer that all the listeners could go, Oh, that's how we do it. But I think we're, we're in the top of the first inning [00:17:00] on figuring out what this thing looks like. And so it's going to change things. I used to read these articles, you know, is ARR a dead metric now?
Tyler: Probably not quite dead, but there is definitely a, a change in what revenue is going to look like. You know, there are models out there, right, that are, that are a bit more like this. You get the AWSs and Azures of the world paying for workloads. You know, they have, they have learned some of these things for us that we can go and find sort of comparable experiences.
Tyler: You've got, uh, you know, ad tech businesses, Googles and Facebooks that, you know, they don't just get paid because you think you might want to spend money on advertising. You get paid when you deliver advertising and that kind of comes and goes. So there, you know, there are some useful analogs out there that we can learn from.
Tyler: Uh, but it is, it is some uncharted territory.
Phil: Well, that's got to be pretty exciting. I mean, your comment about is ARR a dead metric right now and, and considering maybe looking at workloads, that's a very interesting, um, thought [00:18:00] because so many investors, say, well, look, so let's look at the AR, MRR and the ARR and it tells us about the health of the company, but it doesn't necessarily tell us how well they're using the tool or how much they're using the tool or certain solutions.
Phil: So you could either from a, you know, an operational management accounting perspective, or from a financial accounting perspective, kind of try and tie something that really matters in a, in a predictive way. It sounds like that's a cutting edge point too.
Tyler: Yeah. How do you value a company that has mostly revenue that can be turned off next month if the customer is unhappy?
Tyler: Is it, you know, is it a different world than one where, well, at least I know I've sold all these seats for 12 months? So it's, it's going to be a really interesting change for, you know, venture capitalists investing in these companies. What is, you know, what do, what do exits look like? If we ever get back to, you know, good IPOs and exits, what, you know, what does that look like?
Tyler: Even if not, and it's, it's PE buyouts or strategic acquisitions. Yeah. Yeah, how do you [00:19:00] value one of these companies? How can you go, you don't have contracts to go look at, and that, does that just dampen the multiples people are willing to pay? Or do we find new ways of thinking about this and looking at it that sort of overcomes that and we can all do well anyway?
Phil: I'm sure that stopping to think about those things must scare the bejesus out of some people, right? It's got to be really intimidating because Because they say, I don't even know, you know, where to begin, but you guys have begun some already down this path. To the extent that you could talk about it, can we just talk a little bit about some things you have found?
Phil: Like once you found a promising growth model, right, or promising predictive model, how do you go about aligning the teams so that they understand and they know how to execute and support it for however long it works?
Tyler: You know, at the end of the day, all this comes back to humans and how humans react to change.
Tyler: And there's a, I don't know if this is a real quote or one that I half made up, but you know, it's everybody wants everything to get better and nothing to change. [00:20:00] And I think we're, we're, we're a little bit in that world of like, I, you know, I've got to be convinced that this is good. I've got to put a lot of effort into it.
Tyler: I need to understand it. And so we're spending a lot of time internally on just kind of back to basics. Let's walk, let's bring people along on this journey. Don't show up at the beginning of next fiscal year and, you know, on February 1st for us with new comp plans that incorporate all this AI stuff and usage based stuff.
Tyler: Like, let's, this last quarter, we dipped our toes into the water and started paying on, you know, parts of the business not under contract that, you know, accounts that reps managed. We're going to sort of extend that more. We're putting accelerators in certain places in different ways. And so we're really trying to make the journey to this, not a big abrupt, like, oh, we missed the boat.
Tyler: Now we got to slam on the brakes and do a 180. B. I. Let's get ourselves there gradually because these are, at the end of the day, a bunch of humans who are, need to pay their rent and put food on the table and, you know, take care of their families and themselves and let's make this as minimally [00:21:00] jarring as we can while also moving fast enough and, you know, being responsive to the market.
Tyler: So that's part of it is just, I think, being really empathetic to the degree of change we're talking about. But then it's, you know, You know, good project management, we're really lucky at Intercom, we have a great project management or program management function that will come in and just help coordinate against groups that might not be used to talking to each other or working together.
Tyler: So we've done that, I think, really thoughtfully. We are, uh, we're sort of a Google Docs and Share organization. And so there's lots of just, you know, Hey, does the exec team agree to this? What feedback do we have? What are we missing? Because the right voice wasn't in the room when we started thinking about it.
Tyler: How do we cascade that down? Then it becomes, you know, it gets to my team. Do we have the right metrics? Do we have the right operations in place? And we understand why, you know, why are we doing those things? And can we monitor this? Can we track it? Can we measure it? We're going to get stuff wrong. We probably already have gotten things wrong, and let's not find out too late that we've done that.
Tyler: So we're, [00:22:00] we're just trying to be transparent, um, we're trying to be as collaborative as we can. It's sort of like patiently impatient, you know, let's, let's accept that humans struggle with change, but not use that as an excuse not to do the things we need to do.
Phil: You covered a lot of really good items right there and actually also jammed along and jumped ahead to a question that I was going to dig into and that's really about strategies, tools and methodologies, right?
Tyler: Yeah.
Phil: Project and program management sounds really important. The shareability or collaboration you can do through a Google, Google Docs or G Suite sounds really important. You talked a little bit about data and, and metrics. Can you talk a little bit about. Any particular tools that you use for data or for measurements or that you found might be helpful for people who are trying to start down this journey?
Phil: Yeah, I
Tyler: had to think about this. Yeah, there's some, some things out there are maybe a little more technical and foundational. So we use Snowflake as our data [00:23:00] warehouse. I think a lot of companies are doing that. And that's, you know, that's enabled us to give access to, say, people on my analytics team to not just, you know, That's the stuff that's in the CRM, which is sort of the typical remit of our organization, but, but product usage data, other information about customers that we might not have just sitting in the CRM.
Tyler: And so that's been a big piece. We then often do data visualization, data analysis in Tableau. So great, great product that Salesforce owns now, so we're reliable users of that. We have forecasting tool, use Clary, that helps sort of make this all consumable at the rep level. And for, for forecasting, so that's a, that's been a really useful tool for us.
Tyler: Uh, of course, I'm a, 20 years ago, all you had was Excel, so I'm a, you know, old habits die hard, uh, dump it into Excel and play around with it kind of person. But, you know, we've also, I think, tried to build some, some cadences around some of these things. So, we spent a lot of time with, with my code work analytics leaders on, how do we want to bring this to the fore and not just expect everybody to be able to self serve?
Tyler: So we've, [00:24:00] we've set up a pretty clear monthly cadence of a series of readouts that we put in. They have different audiences. They have different purposes, but we do, I kind of talk about each one, we call it the end to end funnel meeting, that's sort of a marketing and sales combined effort to tell the story of how things are going from the web down to creating pipeline.
Tyler: And so we make sure as we change what the experience looks like and where we want people to go self serve in sales, that we have a better understanding of what trade offs we're making and how we're performing at that piece. That's one audience. There's another then that says, hey, great, we made all this pipeline within sales org, how's it converting?
Tyler: How's it performing? Is it enough? Again, a different audience, different stakeholders, different actions coming out of it. We do an existing business review, and then we do one that's sort of like the grab bag. What's interesting going on? We call it sales insights, and we pick three to five kind of hot topics every month and just dig into those, and the analytics team does that.
Tyler: And that cadence, that's not driven by the tools or the data availability, but that's driven by what we think is important to talk about and to do it [00:25:00] in a way that, you know, most RevOps people will come and tell you, well, the biggest problem I have is all the ad hoc requests. And by setting up this cadence and being really proactive about it, I think it's helped us, it's not eliminated the problem, but it's helped us tamp down some of the, hey, what's going on with Python, what's going on in existing business and, you know, churning contract, like, They know there's either the report they could go look at from a couple weeks ago or there's one coming out the next week and that's, I think that's helped us get organized and really raise the quality of what we're doing.
Tyler: I
Phil: really appreciate that. It sounds like there is a lot of communication going on in the organization. You gave us a great number of tools and processes that I think are going to be really helpful, so thanks very much for that. And I want to double click down into that a little bit and talk a little bit about the talent and the human component of it.
Phil: Because, you know, If you're, if you're an Excel person, one of the great things about building your model when you have no tools to do some of the thinking and having work for you is that you think through how it works. You do work out the math, you figure out some [00:26:00] components and you go, Oh, oh, you know what?
Phil: I thought about that the wrong way. And you have to think of that in another way. See, in doing the math with your hands, they're intrinsically, you understand components of the model that someone who walks into the model can't see. So. Now, if I'm going to expend this to a team, they're going to be, might be very knowledgeable about where things are going, but not have the, the hands on expertise to really feel and understand and develop the intuition with the numbers.
Phil: Can you talk a little bit about how you get closer, get people closer to really understanding and being intimate with the data, whether it's through hiring or it's through training and development?
Tyler: Yeah, this is a great question, and I'm not going to profess to have cracked this code at all. It's, it's something I think we, we frankly struggle with a little bit in my team now, which is we've got a bunch of specialist sort of functions within RevOps, and they all know their business, that part of the business [00:27:00] deeply and really well.
Tyler: But if they have to get out of that, they may be unfamiliar with things. And so we're, you know, trying, and I would not even begin to use the word succeeding, but we are trying to create. Uh, one, just the, the sort of expectation that at least as leaders, that they need to have functioning awareness of what's going on somewhere else.
Tyler: And so that's one piece, but, but also like encouragement and permission to go interact with each other. I think there's too often a sense of like, I better own my little world and kind of not keep my head down in a bad way, but like, this is my remit. I'm going to be an expert in my remit and solve the problems within that.
Tyler: But what I really want is my, you know, strategy and planning team to be talking to the analytics team to get. You know, better data to answer their questions, or the core sales ops team that's running the deal desk and doing the forecasting should also be going to the analytics team saying, hey, help us bring some top down metrics to pressure test the forecast.
Tyler: We're getting bottoms up from the reps. Help us understand [00:28:00] and use more intelligence in what discounts we approve or don't approve instead of, hey, we're going to try to in our, you know, in our little, you know, house over here, we're going to try to build the perfect system ourselves. And so I think that encouragement, that, that permission is really important.
Tyler: But it also, as you said, comes back down to who you hire, you know, what are their profiles and where do you, you know, you as an organization decide do we want, do we want a bunch of sort of generalists who can, we think are smart and, and can go solve a lot of problems, but no one has ever done it before or they've all done little bits and pieces of things or do you bring in new sort of deep expertise who've, I've seen this 10 times, I know exactly what to do, but they've never thought about another thing and I don't, if there were a perfect answer to that, everyone would do.
Tyler: Everyone would do the exact same thing. And there's a reason there's dozens and dozens of different sales ops and rev ops models out on the world. But people who are curious, people who are willing to ask questions, people who just like solving problems, are, I think, the folks who function best in these kind of roles because [00:29:00] at the end of this if this were, Run the same playbook we've run for 15 years, it wouldn't be a very exciting job, at least to me.
Tyler: And so trying to find other folks who just want to go explore, try stuff, willing to fail. Yeah, we thought that was gonna be a great readout. We thought that was gonna be the right pilot we ran. It wasn't. Okay, what do we learn and how do we take something away from that that's valuable in the business?
Tyler: Those kind of people, that mindset I think is key.
Phil: We have to realize that it's on us to embrace that change if we're at that, if we're going to be in a certain types of environments and that we're really at a cutting edge of this transition. So, last question I have in this segment before we talk about the future of revenue operations.
Phil: If you're an organization looking at this, look at this world. Regardless of your size, or maybe, maybe even if size is specific, when do you start? Is there a certain trigger in your, in your market, and the maturity of the company, the size of the teams, the size of the revenues, something else? When do you think people should start?
Tyler: Yeah, you know, I've never done [00:30:00] the zero to one startup, so this is one man's guess at the answer to this, but I think it's probably like a complexity question as much as anything else. You know, once you're at the point where it doesn't make sense for the sales manager to set quotas, to build territories, to report on things because the business is starting to get, I'll say, more interesting, but just, you know, harder to understand with a simple Salesforce report.
Tyler: I think it's probably when you need your first person to come in and exactly what you need to maybe just a Salesforce admin to help set things up and get you up kind of up and running in that way. It may be, Hey, that's actually not our problem. We've got a lot of that built in product or we don't have something.
Tyler: We don't have anybody who's deeply analytical who can think about the data that way. It might be, Oh gosh, we, you know, our operations are so clunky. We need a great process optimization person. But I think it's when you've sort of find yourself where people are really outside of their comfort zones who are already there.
Tyler: Yeah. You know, your rev ops person, your sales ops [00:31:00] person, isn't your first hire. So you need a manager who can, you know, do some of that. But all of a sudden, their time is going to get taken up. The deal volumes, hopefully, are picking up. The size of that team is picking up. And now you're in a world where, Hey, I'm outside of my comfort zone.
Tyler: Let's, let's go solve that. Bring somebody in.
Phil: Awesome. So we're going to switch into the, into the next section where we talk about the maturation of revenue operations. And we agree that people hate change. Thank you. But they love stories. Yeah. So can you share a little bit of a story about how one of the integrations, one of the actions you guys have taken has positively impacted your revenue or customer experience?
Tyler: Yeah, we, we've done, we've done a lot and I'll, I'll pick two. One is more of a tool integration and kind of how we're using that. And then one is, is more of a project we worked on. So we, Intercom had kind of gone through a long history of being really a product led, self serve motion, then really a sales led motion.
Tyler: And we were trying to figure out kind of what the right balance was. And so, you know, we had [00:32:00] to, to really rethink like what experience we wanted customers to have. And so we brought together our growth team, our, you know, our UX team, the sales development organization. Sales leaders, marketing ops, sales ops, to really like map that whole process.
Tyler: And so it was sort of this interesting, like, no one had ever actually written down on a digital sheet of paper, like, what happened? You're a customer, you show up on the web page, like, where do you go? And what metrics do we care about at different stages of the journey? And so just the exercise, I mean, that sort of made a guy internally famous.
Tyler: It was, you know, his, his chart, everybody like, Oh yeah, that one, I know what it is. Um, but that was just an incredibly powerful tool because then everybody could go and kind of poke at, What are we doing here? Who owns this? How do we think about this? And so, you know, that's a, that's a place where it, it probably only occurs in a bigger organization.
Tyler: It probably only occurs where you've got, you know, more sophisticated sales ops. marketing ops growth type organization that has the ability to sort of see that [00:33:00] picture, understand the metrics that are sitting behind the different parts of the journey and can kind of analytically model out what happens if we change this.
Tyler: What does that do? Is that good or bad? That was, that was really fun. We spent kind of the early part of this last, this last year working on that, you know, and then you're, then you're really changing the business and doing it in a way that everybody can quickly see, like, that is a better trial experience.
Tyler: That is a better handoff from a trial to a salesperson that. You know, is well qualified and really meets the sales, sales help, human intervention. That's one fun one. Happy to talk more about that if you want to dig into it. The other is that I think is some great stories around is, is our use of Gong, which I think most SaaS people are familiar with, but it started out as a call intelligence platform and it has continued to evolve and that I guess forecasting and some other like, I found Kate and stuff.
Tyler: But we've actually brought that in, we used it for sort of typical original use case for a long time. But in the last year or so. We actually brought the product organization into it so that the product team in a way they, you know, they couldn't shadow [00:34:00] calls and sit there for hours hoping they might get an interesting tidbit about feedback about the product or, you know, happy or unhappy customer, or about our pricing and packaging.
Tyler: Using Gong, we've been able to pull all that out and synthesize that and create really interesting reports and data on health of customer over time, health of, you know, customer after certain interactions and certain experiences in the product. Match that data in with other product usage data and renewal dates and other things and create these really interesting pictures of different parts of that customer journey and the revenue outcomes.
Tyler: And so that's been a, I think, a huge place. We took a tool that was kind of being used so so and we're continuing to just double down and use it more and more. And it's been, it's been fun to see what people can come up with, both in our team and without it, here outside of it. to find ways just to use data in more intelligent ways and more predictive ways, not just diagnosing what happened that was bad in the past, but starting to like turn that around and go, hey, when these three things happen [00:35:00] historically, Good outcome or bad outcome or whatever it is.
Tyler: And how do we now predict that, right? Two of those three things have happened with this customer. Sales rack, CSM, go have X conversation. So we're trying to get more forward looking based on some of the insights we can get there.
Phil: Well, it seems like you guys have come a long way and there's so much you're working, working on right now.
Phil: I almost feel bad asking this question, but as you're looking ahead, Yeah. Are there any emerging technologies or trends that you're excited about looking to tackle? You know, maybe what's your, what's your ready, what's, what's next or is it, are you fully consumed with what you got right now?
Tyler: We are, we are more than fully consumed, but that doesn't mean you don't reprioritize and deprioritize things as new, bigger, more exciting opportunities come up on it.
Tyler: And that's one of the biggest, for, for people out there in my world, the skills to be a leader. I think in this organization is that ability to like. Yes, have a plan and a roadmap, but to constantly be willing to, like, size and drop things and change, change course without [00:36:00] just, you know, the whim of the moment kind of a thing.
Tyler: So it's that balance. But at any rate, I think, you know, sort of maybe beating a dead horse here, but the evolution of AI is obviously going to be big. And we're starting to see that in our own product, certainly at Intercom. But we've, in the last month, trained our AI agent, Finn, to start answering internal Then sales.
Tyler: So instead of having to ping my team and say, I don't understand my comp plan. What are the rules of engagement about this, that, or the other thing? We've been feeding our own product all of the information. And hopefully, one that makes people who are asking questions more aware, because it's, relatively speaking, costless to do that.
Tyler: Nobody reads FAQ to host. FAQ number 57. Like, thanks for, you know, thanks for writing that down, but you can just ask the chatbot, the AI agent, explain to me why my split was calculated this way or whatever it is. And so that's really exciting because I think that, that's like a win win, right? Pure questions to my team and it's better [00:37:00] information and clearer answers, hopefully, to the sales reps and other folks.
Tyler: So AI being used that way, certainly Gen AI and helping us, I mentioned that kind of series of reports that we produce. I think one of the, one of the big challenges analytics teams often have is, one, it can be just hard to get the data. What are the facts? Another, you know, the next step is like, what's interesting about those facts?
Tyler: What are the actual insights? And the even harder step is, now that we have those insights, what should we go do? And the more AI and the availability of more data and the ability to process that effectively and sort of the democratization of some of that processing, I think that hopefully, and I think we're starting to see it in certain places, Make that first step easier and easier.
Tyler: And if your team can stop spending 60 percent of its time just trying to find out what the facts are. And 20, 30, 40 percent of the time, why are they interesting, what should we do? And flip that completely around so it's 20 percent of the time, what's the data we need, where [00:38:00] is it, what are the facts? And 80 percent of the time is, why is that interesting?
Tyler: Your ability to find opportunity is just so much greater. And the work is more interesting. People get less burned out, they, I've always found it much easier to work hard and work extra when it's exciting, engaging work than when it's tedious, like, wait for the report to run, hope it has the right data, oh, spot checks and stuff.
Tyler: You know, that's fairly excruciating, and so I think that can be a big, a big win win for us. So that, that's one clear technology kind of coming change. And then just, you know, the, the bit underlying all of that is just, there's just more and more data. And there's more and more data available to us to use in creative ways.
Tyler: I think the only limit on creative use now is, is now our creativity as opposed to the data and the tools. So that's just a really scary, but also really exciting evolution for us.
Phil: Well, you've given people a lot to think about. You've given me a lot to think about, but I have to say, I really appreciate everything you've had to share with us, Tyler.
Phil: You're consistently, like, a little bit ahead of the curve and leading us into the next, the [00:39:00] next converse, next point of the conversation. So I'm guessing, if that's any indication of what it's like working with you and your team, you're, you're a great communicator of the, the vision and exciting people to, to listen to.
Phil: to move into a difficult and uncertain future. So I really, really appreciate that. And thank you very much for sharing your wisdom with us. I appreciate it. As a parting shot, cause we're just about out of time, where can people find you? And is there anything that you would like to plug or share with us before you go?
Tyler: Yeah. So best place to find me LinkedIn, a loyalist to the end from my time working there. So yeah, connect with me, shoot me a message. Happy to talk to people and talk shop. It's always fun to meet up and. Learn from others and share where I can be useful for folks. And then, you know, my big plug for everybody out there running a business, check out Intercom.
Tyler: I think it's, it's a place that's maybe flown under the radar for a little while and we're doing truly awesome stuff with AI. I think really at the forefront of this evolution that's going to change the way customer service is delivered. So, come check it out. I usually don't go out of my way to be [00:40:00] effusive with praise of technology products, but I'm really proud of what we're doing.
Tyler: The results are there now, it's an awesome product, so, you know, join us on, on this journey as we see what the next five years of an AI led world look like.
Phil: Well, if it's any consolation, I've used your last product pretty much every day for more years than I could, would like to say out loud, but the thanks a lot has been adding a lot of value, so I, for one, will dig more into Intercom and recommend it to others.
Phil: And thank you again so much, Tyler, for joining us today. Thank you, listeners, for tuning in to another episode of Revenue Reinvention. You can always watch these episodes on YouTube. You can find us on Revenue Reinvention. Subscribed on your favorite podcast platform. And until then, we'll see you the next time.
Phil: Thanks, Tyler. And hope to hear more great things coming out of this podcast. You and your awesome team.
Tyler: Thanks, Phil. Appreciate the opportunity to chat today.
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