Kimberly Deobald, Chief Revenue Officer at Avalara, shares advice for revenue leaders on how to stay ahead in a fast-changing industry. By emphasizing important areas like AI, improving customer experiences, and building a strong team, Kimberly shares her keys to ultimately achieving the maturation of RevOps.
This episode features an interview with Kimberly Deobald, the Chief Revenue Officer at Avalara.
In this episode, Kimberly shares advice for revenue leaders on how to stay ahead in a fast-changing industry. By emphasizing important areas like AI, improving customer experiences, and building a strong team, Kimberly shares her keys to ultimately achieving the maturation of RevOps.
About Kimberly:
Kimberly oversees marketing, revenue operations, and sales performance and strategy at Avalara. With more than 20 years of experience building and leading high-performance sales and operations teams, Kimberly has a track record of scaling sales functions for growth and profitability. Before joining Avalara, Kimberly was responsible for leading Varicent’s revenue intelligence business unit. She also previously held several leadership roles at IBM.
About Avalara:
Avalara makes tax compliance faster, easier, more accurate, and more reliable for 30,000+ business and government customers in over 90 countries. Tax compliance automation software solutions from Avalara leverage 1,200+ signed partner integrations across leading ecommerce, ERP, and other billing systems to power tax calculations, document management, tax return filing, and tax content access. Visit avalara.com to learn more.
According to Kimberly:
“If you have an ARR per customer and if it's growing every year, that means they are really happy with the service that you're providing or adding more services. It tells you so much about your customer engagement.”
“Revenue operations is the the brains of my organization. They are all about making sure that we have the right tools, dashboards, and KPIs so that we're balancing operational effectiveness and hitting the goals for our customers and our net promoter score.”
“Every single touch point in the company, it goes across all these units, right? How do I get the team to make sure we're creating a seamless, frictionless experience for that customer and one that we, as employees, can see their experience as they travel through our company? How can also allow ourselves to have real time data engagement around who needs help, and do it in a proactive way versus a reactive way? To move faster and be more agile, create a collaborative team around those disciplines.”
Episode Timestamps:
*(01:20) - Exploring the Evolution of Revenue Operations
*(07:00) - Staying Ahead in a Dynamic Industry: Strategy and Adaptation
*(11:30) - Operational Efficiency and Maximizing Productivity
*(16:40) - Embracing Change and Innovation for Global Dominance
*(29:05) - Building a Robust Revenue Ops Organization: Tips and Insights
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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.
About Conga
Conga crushes complexity in an increasingly complex world. With our Revenue Lifecycle Management solution, we transform each company’s unique complexities for order configuration, execution, fulfillment, and contract renewal processes with a unified data model that adapts to ever-changing business requirements and aligns the understanding and efforts of every team. Our approach is grounded in the Conga Way, a framework of entrepreneurial spirit and achieving together to champion our 11,000+ customers. We’re committed to our customers and to removing complexity in an increasingly complex world. Our solutions quickly adapt to changing business models so you can normalize your revenue management processes.
Conga has global operations across North America, Europe, and Asia. Learn more at conga.com or follow Conga on Twitter: @congahq.
Links & Resources:
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 Kimberly Deobold, Chief Revenue Officer at Avalara. Our conversation delved into strategies for staying ahead in revenue operations, team readiness, and the importance of market responsiveness. Let's jump right in.
Phil: Well, hello everyone, and welcome to another episode of the Revenue Reinvention Podcast. I'm your host, Phil Dillard, here today with Kimberly Diobald, the Chief Revenue Officer of BDR. Now, Kimberly, I understand that you oversee marketing, revenue operations, sales performance, and strategy. Before joining the company, I understand that you were also [00:01:00] responsible for serious roles at IBM for a good period of time in a number of different departments, as well as leading Verizon's Revenue Intelligence Business Unit. So, If you could, just to give us some context, can you talk a little bit about the lens through which you see revenue operations based on your past experiences and where you are today?
Kimberly: Sure, great. Listen, Phil, thank you so much for having me today. It's great to be here with you in the audience. So, you know, my journey has been always, I spent over 25 years in the software industry. A lot of that was with IBM, and I started out at the very bottom and, and kind of built this career, um, in technology and learning many different industries and doing it at different levels from. You know, a regional based, and then a national based, and a global based. And each time as the industry was starting to evolve, I started seeing how data, analytics, [00:02:00] insights, really, revenue intelligence, started to become more relevant to how you run a business efficiently and how you show up in the marketplace and where you kind of put your time and energy.
Kimberly: And so just naturally over time I found that to be super interesting. I have an undergrad degree in mathematics and I have an MBA and so the marriage of like the technology industry with data, with analytics, All just kind of went to an area that is personally just, uh, super interesting to me. And that kind of led me to, you know, having a career and ultimately spending all of my time in revenue intelligence and now as a CRO at Avalara.
Phil: Well, that makes a lot of sense. And those three companies, IBM, Sorry, IBM, Verisign, and Avalara seem to be really different. Can you talk a little bit about the base of customers that you're working with at Avalara and how it's kind of different or similar to things you've seen in the past? [00:03:00]
Kimberly: Sure, absolutely. So, at Avalara, we're, we're a global company and we service all customer sizes. So, we enterprise customers, SMB customers, and ESB customers. So, every size of customer, pretty much. And we do business globally. So, you have to deal with all different kinds of countries and what kind of regulations and compliance issues they have.
Kimberly: I have had the opportunity in my history, both at Verisint and at IBM, um, To run a business that was a global business where you had to manage through all of the variations around around markets and cultures and go to market and pricing and packaging and strategy and all those kinds of things that that you that you have to do. And at Avalara, I'm putting all those things to work. Given that we are over a billion dollar company, we've been in the marketplace for over 20 years, we are a market leader in the industry. This, this segment of Avalara, this chat, we call it the next 20 year chapter of Avalara, [00:04:00] is really all about us.
Kimberly: Accelerating our growth because we've been on a tremendous growth trajectory for 20 years. And we really see that there's a market opportunity that one company will probably be the category winner. We think we're best positioned because of our portfolio, because of our, Skill base, our resources, our technology, and so forth, that we could be the category winner and really be the leader in the marketplace, bringing the end to end tax compliance to all business sizes, small, medium, and large.
Phil: Well, that's a really ambitious goal. And for people who may not know the company extremely well, I looked at it and I see tax compliance. My first thought is, okay, for business tax, as you say in one of your articles, it's not the thing that fast growing companies first think about, especially when you're going from local to regional, regional, national, national to global, but it's a key component of keeping the business aligned and operating efficiently and it seems like [00:05:00] that's the, that's one key component of being in a dynamic industry. So can you talk a little bit about the specifics of tax compliance and then the, generally speaking, being in a dynamic industry, how do you stay ahead of the curve in environments like that? Because they're changing, they seem to be changing at different rates based on wherever you are, and you're dealing with different technologies that you need to bring to the, to the table, including AI, which we'll get to a little bit later.
Kimberly: With the post COVID and post Wayfair versus South Dakota decisions around how all companies have to pay taxes, at least in the U. S., in every jurisdiction that they have either employees or they have products or deliverings or services, they have to figure out and calculate that tax. They have to put it on a return and they have to remit it, and it is incredibly complicated to do, and governments around the globe realize that tax generation of revenue is an important [00:06:00] part of paying government debt, and so what they're starting to figure out is the more complex they make the taxes, they can collect more taxes that way versus doing income tax collection, and so tax compliance being automated is still in the early adoption phase across businesses. Probably about 15 percent of companies actually have an automated tax compliance solution today. We think that everybody will have to have it. And we've built a solution that allows the small, smallest of small businesses to medium size, to affordably easily get a solution that covers the A to Z on everything they need from tax compliance. So that's kind of, it's really exciting. Even though people might not think that tax. Automation and tax compliance for businesses could be interesting. It is a major data problem, and it's a big, um, risk to businesses. If you get, um, audited and you are, you are not in compliance, they could shut your business down.[00:07:00]
Phil: Lots of people don't understand the problem until they have it. And it's one of those things that you know, that an ounce of prevention is better than a pound of cure, but when people really experience the pain, they don't want to experience that again. So those who might want to stay ahead of the pain, or who are just intent on running their businesses extremely well, you're delivering a lot of value. And then, you know, to me, you know, staying ahead of the curve in the dynamic industry is a different challenge, both strategically and both operationally. Can you talk about that a little bit?
Kimberly: Yeah, I mean, Phil, that is so important. So, All of us today, in this iPhone, mobile, global world that we're living in, everything is changing so fast. I mean, you know, often times if you read articles and books, they'll talk about the reordering of the world, right? All of this technology is reordering everything, so it's not just, you know, Artificial intelligence. It's quite frankly, that's one of the elements, [00:08:00] but it's really about the fact that we have these mobile devices that can operate anywhere now. There's really no dead zones almost, and they, you can transact everything off of your cell phone. It's got more power than a, than the, the spaceship that went to the moon. And so there's two things that everybody has to deal with. One is the speed of change around technology. How do you as a business, how do you as an individual keep up with that speed of change? That's one element to it and I have to do that as, as owning, um, part of responsibility on revenue strategy and what we're bringing to market and making sure that we're, we're delivering what the market needs at the right time in the right way. And then there is the whole change around tax. Compliance.
Kimberly: So, in the United States alone, we have about 13, 000 jurisdictions that can put out tax rules and rates that every business that does business in that jurisdiction has to comply with. Now, we as a company that is, is automated and we use AI ourselves, we go out and scrape [00:09:00] all the websites. every single day because what happens is, departments of taxation, they will just put the changes on their website. They, you, you may not know that it happens. So we're out there making sure that we're getting all that data every day. We're using forms of AI to do that, to screen all those changes, and then determine what, with a tax expert, what really needs to be implemented into our engine, our rules engine, our rate engine, so that our customers have the latest and greatest. But you can't do that with a human. The only way of approaching tax compliance anymore. It's too complicated. So the way that you have to think about it is. is we're in this world of great opportunity, but it brings this challenge of speed of change. I'm constantly working on this around our platform, around the customers and partners that we serve, and around my team.
Kimberly: How do I make sure that everybody doesn't get overwhelmed, that we're doing the right things for the [00:10:00] marketplace, and the only thing I can say to you that I've learned over, over the years is that in the, in a moment of unpredictable, unpredictable, ever changing environment, which is what we're in, is you just have to be very, very focused on what you're trying to accomplish. Make sure that you don't get distracted by the noise, that you really understand what I call the big rocks. Like, what are the things that you really need to accomplish on a day to day basis so that you can see progress in things, even though there's a lot of incoming noise and, and, and activity. You can focus on the things that are really going to make a difference.
Kimberly: And then you have to become really data driven and be able to embrace analytics and insights because there are all kinds of signals in the marketplace. There's signals in the data from your customers. There's signals in the data from your partners. There's signals in the data around economic information. So there are always leading and lagging indicators that tell you The [00:11:00] direction that the market is going on, the direction that a industry is going, or whatever is going on, the trends in the marketplace. And so, if you, if you build your business and you're, you're thinking about the, the data and the signals that what it's telling you, and you're taking the time to really learn them, frequently, frequently, frequently take a time out to determine what are those signals telling you? And where should you pivot to? Where should you pull back from? Where do you need to adjust so that you're running an efficient, optimized business that is serving the needs of the market?
Phil: Sure. Wow. So you covered a lot there. And I think it's really helpful, right? Talking a lot about how you prepare your teams, how you listen to and respond to the market and I'm curious if we could dig into that. Actually, even a little deeper, because if you think about it, sometimes people have all the resources that they might want, like inside your team, let's just focus inside your company right now, your team or [00:12:00] your company might have all the resources that they want. But I'm sure you've seen times where there's a significant shift and having less resources than you, then you might want to be able to, to tackle it. So how do you think about how to optimize that? Optimize operational efficiency and maximize productivity during some of those challenging times when you have those resource constraints.
Kimberly: You know, I've dealt with it over my career where I've been in moments in the marketplace where we're growing rapidly and moments in the marketplace where we're declining rapidly. So I've seen all the different cycles. What's different about today for every single company over the last two years is The business is no longer solely about top line revenue growth any longer. Every single business has to manage top line revenue growth with profitability. And so when you are in that environment, that is new for everybody. So I spend a lot of my time talking to the organization and my team about What does [00:13:00] that mean? How do we need to think differently about our business? What is profitability?
Kimberly: What is gross margin? What is EBITDA, right? Why does it matter? Because it gives us the ability to have more value in the marketplace and therefore a more stable company that serves our customers. Our partners and our employees. So first of all, I've been educating everybody about what it means to be a efficient, optimized, productive, profitable company with high growth, right? So that's the first thing you have to do. The second thing you have to do is you have to really become maniacal about what you're doing. What it is around your tools, your processes, your, your people, the way you're serving your customer. What are those processes, systems, steps? And are they efficient enough? I mean, you have to like break things apart and look at them and say, How many steps does this take? How much time does that take? Can I automate that? Can I use AI for that? Is that even necessary, right? So, becoming a digital [00:14:00] business, becoming one that's self service, because we all want to kind of, you know, help ourselves to things, where we're leveraging AI for our own internal use, as well as for our customers use, and then doing all of that by measuring the key, really, there's a bunch of SaaS metrics that you want to think about, there's productivity metrics you want to think about, And you need to be able to have them in a dashboard so you can see if, hey, if I'm going to drive 10 percent productivity, this is one of my goals this year, I'm going to drive 10 percent productivity in every single person in my organization.
Kimberly: Now, how am I going to do that? I break that down into things I'm going to improve from a technology and system standpoint, things I'm going to improve from a process standpoint, I'm going to improve maybe their skills, their ability to be more efficient in their learning. I might, I might figure out a way to drive something in the marketplace that takes less lift from people and more, more advantage of digital product-led growth. So there's a whole bunch of things that I can do [00:15:00] and I think about productivity, I break it down to something simple that everybody can think about. I want to run X dollars per headcount for my business. And if I did, you know, say, you know, X dollars last year, I want that to be 10 percent better this year, but I want to keep that productivity with the same level of headcount or less.
Kimberly: So you can, you can grow productivity and then you can extract out expense by reducing the overhead and you could put those people into something else or maybe you just reduce because, you know, you still have always, all of us have to manage through attrition. So I always have, you know, 10 percent of my population turning over. So maybe there's someone who leaves, I don't need to backfill in because I can do the same amount of business or more because I've become more productive in the way that we serve our customers in the marketplace.
Phil: Sounds amazing.
Kimberly: You know, it's a little bit, it's a little bit of art, a little bit of science, but it's really about you, you've [00:16:00] got to set a plan of what you want to drive in efficiency and productivity and optimization and then you have to put those tasks and the tactics in place and the actions, and then you have to measure that you're making progress. You don't go from zero to ten overnight. You're hoping to get one percent improvement, then two percent, then three percent, and so on and so forth. So you're looking to see that you're going to trend the right way. In my experience, nothing is linear. Nothing just goes up, up, up. You run into roadblocks, you run into issues, things don't exactly execute the way you thought they would, and so you're constantly adjusting and pivoting. Again, to learn from the marketplace and then move forward.
Phil: Yeah, that makes a whole lot of sense. It sounds like that discipline, that process is something which not only can help you get a strategic advantage in your, in your market, but also help you to achieve that global perspective, that global [00:17:00] dominance that you're trying to achieve because you believe that there's only one space for one major dominant player in the market. I'm curious about how that. How it runs into, let's say, there are some predictable and there are some unpredictable market conditions where you're going to have that process, you're going to run into it. And I'll give you an example. When I was working for a Fortune 50 corporation, I knew that the executives, regardless of the revenue, target for the year, they carved off 10 percent for regulatory compliance.
Phil: And then some percentage of that regulatory compliance might be applied to tax, right? So, from their perspective, we're delivering a significant amount of our top-line revenue. Or of our annual budget to compliance, and that's going to work, right? It's going to pass muster with the regulations and their customers. That was their philosophy. Well, let's say that that's, that's the case. In your, in your model, if that number goes [00:18:00] down by 10, 20, 50 percent, it's going to have a significant impact. Impacts on the revenue of your business and an external shock to your company. Can you share a story where you've seen something like that? Whether it was a customer, a change in the industry, or a macroeconomic change that hit your company, and because of it, you, because of your approach, you're actually prepared. To respond, you actually, instead of, you know, instead of taking a hit, you took advantage of a strategic opportunity.
Kimberly: I would say one of the things that we're, we're kind of, you know, we're always learning real time, like right now, what's going on about what we're learning in the marketplace and what, what had we, we had seen some things, we spent some time on strategy, we spent some time on market dynamics, market competitors. We did some studies around what businesses are, are faced with when we started to realize is that customers don't just need the basic [00:19:00] tax compliance, which is calculation of sales and use tax and then fill out the returns and remit the returns. That's kind of been our, our core business as well as, uh, exemption certificate management. That's kind of been our core business for a long time. But what we really think is that. The compliance needs, because businesses are becoming much more global because there are just no borders any longer, they really need an end-to-end compliance offering. And so we have, over the last five years or so, bought a lot of companies, and we've also delivered a lot of organic new offerings into the marketplace that opens up other compliance areas that maybe A basic company may not need.
Kimberly: So example might be cross-border. If you're doing business globally, you have to pay customs and duties depending on where you're going in the globe. And so, you know, you might be doing business in the U. S., but, you know, if you're going to do it globally, you're going to have cross border. Another example might be property tax. So, property tax is [00:20:00] different than sales and use tax, but every business has to deal with property tax, whether it's real property tax or it's personal property tax. So, we, you know, threw an acquisition, bought a company, developed it, and so over the years, we have actually filled out some of these. Six more solution areas. We now can give our customers a full end-to-end experience from one platform. So they can start with whatever their current pain is. And then over time, as their business grows, as they, you know, expand their horizons, they're going to need other compliance and they can get all of this with one platform.
Kimberly: So, These are just things like it's evolving tax complexity and so we, we saw that those things are coming down the road. So we made investments, we built them out organically, and now they're ready for real-time. And we're so excited because we're really seeing the explosion internationally and we saw it coming. We put the [00:21:00] investment there to get ourselves ready so that we have the products when I call. our growth portfolio. So we have a portfolio called run the business, which is our core business. And then we have a portfolio that's called our growth portfolio. That's all the new stuff that we're bringing online that that can work.
Kimberly: And then the other third of it is what I would consider to be transformation activities. So we're constantly looking at How we optimize, improve, enhance, you know, not only our solutions, our services, our experience, but everything we're doing in the company, right? So having those three things as a revenue leader, I spent a part of my day in each of those buckets. How are we doing to run the business? How are we doing to grow the business? How are we doing to transform the business? And I have to make sure with my leaders that I'm balancing these things so that I don't disrupt You know, business, the flow of business, but I'm yet [00:22:00] doing a fast enough pace of change that I'm getting us ahead of the wave. I want to be the first market with the, the, you know, leading solution for tax compliance that leverages AI. And so you have to constantly be innovating for that.
Phil: Well, that sounds like it inherently creates a challenge, right? Because operating the business has different Success metrics than growing the business or disrupting the business. I think the good side of it is that you get to sit in the center of that and figure out how to move those things around. But can you talk a little bit about how that drives predictability of revenue streams or changes of revenue models, both inside of the company from what you're seeing, like, what are you able to lead To optimize for the company versus meeting for the clients to optimize for the, for so many different types of companies you're trying to serve. How do you balance that?
Kimberly: Yeah, it is definitely a balancing act. One of the things I do as a [00:23:00] leader is I'm constantly looking at my Schedule to see if am I spending a third of my time in each of these buckets. And so your calendar tells you a lot about that. And so that's kind of one of the ways that I balance it Um, but you know really that the changes we've seen at least in the software industry, you know, we went from a transactional on-prem environment as that's how we sold and Delivered services to our co clients to a fully SaaS environment. Now we are fortunate enough, when we were founded in 2004, um, our CEO today, Scott McFarland, who was one of the co-founders, one of three co-founders, they, they envisioned and they imagined that they would deliver tax compliance in the cloud from day one. Hmm. So they were like doing SaaS and having that whole model before it really became a thing in 2004. So we were born in the cloud, built in a SaaS environment. But over the years, what we've done is we've started to transform, which is a [00:24:00] process we're going through right now, is we move from kind of a bookings financial model of measuring bookings, both, you know, new bookings and existing bookings and renewal bookings, to being a full ARR model. Right, so annual recurring revenue and the whole business is going to be measured on that and it's so important that you get to that because if you have an ARR per customer and if it's growing every year that means they are really happy with the service that you're providing or adding more services and so it tells you so much about your customer engagement.
Kimberly: If that customer declines over time, it likely is an indicator to say, I don't want to give you my money, right? I don't want to do more business with you. So, the transition we're making is, that we've always been a SaaS business, we were born in the cloud, but we're moving to an ARR model because it allows us to then be maniacally focused on what's most important every day as you get up into how [00:25:00] you're going to service that customer. How you're going to drive value for them, how you're going to give them an exceptional experience. In our case, we service both. Clients and partners because we're a partner-led organization. And so that's the way that I kind of think about it around what's been transforming in the business and then how you go about managing that from an operations standpoint. You know, my organization, I have All of the sales organization globally, which is the new business team, as well as the existing business team, which has customer success and customer account manager. I have all of the marketing organization, all of the partner organization, and I have a really important team called Revenue Operations.
Kimberly: Revenue Operations is the brains, okay, the brains of my organization. They are all about how we make sure that we have the right, tools, we have the right dashboards, we have the right KPIs, we've got the right things that we're measuring so that we're balancing efficiency, operations, you know, operational [00:26:00] effectiveness, productivity, and we're hitting those types of things. The goals that we have both for servicing our customers, like are we hitting our net promoter score? Are they renewing because they're so happy with us? Are they growing? Do we have lower support tickets coming in, right? So we have all kinds of metrics around how we're servicing the customer, and then we have all kinds of metrics on the health of And then metrics on how we drive that, that transformation productivity piece. And so you're going to have to live in those three worlds across and you know, my business is those, those, those business units. But I spent a lot of my time working across the organization of Avalara to make sure that I'm, Working closely with the engineering team and they know what my customers are saying they need.
Kimberly: I'm working with the product team about, Hey, we need to make this, this user experience so much easier. So, people who get hired in our companies that use our platform, they don't need a week of training, which we don't really have. [00:27:00] Requirement for but that they can it's so intuitive they can get up and running with Avalara immediately like that's a value to our customers like can I deliver them a service that's seamless it's easy to get up and running that you know is intuitive that you can manage it digitally that you can do self-service so that you're just getting the value without all of the overhead of having to learn something super complicated I mean that was our goal from the beginning is could we build task compliance for Avalara. Small to medium-sized businesses. People didn't think it could be done and we did it. We were the first one in the marketplace to do it and that learning has enabled us to build a billion-dollar business because everyone realized that they don't want all that complexity. They just want to take care of the business. Get their responsibility done, make sure they pay, you know, they're, they're charging taxes to an end customer in most cases for sales tax and other taxes and collecting it and passing it on. They don't want to collect too much or too little. They just want to make [00:28:00] sure it's just about right, right? Accuracy is important and it's important for them servicing their customers or even paying their own bills. They have to pay. Use taxes themselves in some businesses around the globe.
Phil: And if you make that service easy, and you make it right, then you make it easy for them to stay because even if they were to do the cost analysis of trying to do it themselves, there would be so much value that they would identify that it's a no brainer to stick with you, right? And it seems like we have a motto. We have a motto in our company, Phil, that, that our CEO is always asking everybody if they know, you know, what, what is our value proposition? Is it, are we, we are easy, we are fast, we are affordable, we are accurate, and we are reliable. And so everything we do in our company is about delivering that value proposition to our customers, whether it is the way that they onboard with us or they engage with us for support. But, you know It sounds like something simple, five simple words. It's [00:29:00] really hard to do. How do we make it faster? How do we make it easier? And reliable, affordable, and scalable, and accurate, rather, is really important.
Phil: And it's because you're doing it for so many different types of organizations globally, and with dynamic change. And it seems like, in my impression, that you're definitely on the high end of the maturity scale of the RevOps organization. And you've already talked a little bit about how you use technology and AI to enhance people. So that the people can do more, the people can be better positioned to deliver the experience that your clients are anticipating. So with that in mind, and given the fact that we only have a few more minutes left, though, I feel like we could go on for much longer, digging deeper into this. I'm eager to hear a little bit about tips, advice, and tips you have for people to excel in building a revenue ops organization. And, you know, Whether it's as aspirational as this one, [00:30:00] or if it's something just there in their very earlier stages, what sort of tips or insights would you share for people who are, who are starting out or trying to take the next step to the next level?
Kimberly: Yeah, what's great about thinking about being a revenue organization is that Every single business can and should do it. So, wherever you are on the journey of becoming data-driven, the sooner you get started, the better off you're going to be. The first thing that you have to do is you must find the strongest candidate that you can to be your revenue operations leader. Somebody experienced, somebody who's, who understands what it means to think about, you These dimensions of the business, right? And how you begin to assess the current systems and tools and data that's in place. And then you start to figure out how you organize that data, how you analyze that data, how you get that to be unlocked to provide the insights so that the entire organization can start to make better business decisions.
Kimberly: So the first thing [00:31:00] I'd say to everybody is whatever you do, if you're going to take on a revenue leadership role, Get yourself a really strong revenue operations leader. That operations leader is in charge of making sure your business is running, it's pipeline, it's forecast, it's business closes, it's making sure that the invoices get, you know, booked in the system, all that stuff. And it's all about managing the sales organization to make sure they have everything they need from a tools standpoint. There's so much software, so, so many different kinds of software tools that drive productivity for sales teams today, but they're not all equal and they're not all the best fit. So you actually need. A tech team within revenue operations that says, listen, we need a tool like, like we did this past year. We needed a tool that allowed us to help our team learn and how to coach them. So, you know, so getting, getting that in order is really important. And then the other thing is, is the revenue organization needs to [00:32:00] be able to go across multiple units.
Kimberly: So having it under one umbrella where you have all of the sales, teaming closely with marketing, teaming closely with partners, teaming closely with relevant operations, we're all one team. We all have one goal, which is servicing our clients with the most exceptional experience from the minute they come to us on the website. Through the entire end-to-end journey, every single touchpoint in the company, it goes across all these units, right? And so, how do I get the team to make sure we're creating a seamless, frictionless experience for that customer? And one that we as employees can see their experience as they travel through our company? And that we can also allow ourselves to have real-time data engagement around Who needs help? When? And do it in a proactive way versus a reactive way. So having it all together, I know some companies don't have a chief revenue officer, [00:33:00] they have the individual units. I think to move faster, to be more agile, to get things done quicker is creating a collaborative team, um, around those disciplines allows you to move much faster. And then also just, I do a lot of Cross training fill. So, somebody in my sales organization may go over to my partner organization. Someone in partners may go over to revenue operations. So, I'm always cross-training people, and the more somebody knows about the entire business experience, then the customer gets the value day in and day out because of that.
Phil: Well, that sounds like some really great advice. Thank you so very much for sharing that. I really appreciate you sharing the insights on this because I think it's given a really clear picture of what a solidly integrated Chief Revenue Officer role requires, the skills that it requires, and the touches that you need to have in all the different parts of the organization, [00:34:00] showcasing how and why that needs to be integrated in a really tangible way. So, thank you so very much for sharing that with us. I know we're out of time. I hope we can do this again sometime and, and, um, learn a little more of as you guys go to be a two or 10 billion company.
Kimberly: Oh, we will be Phil, but thank you so much for having me on today. Your program's fantastic. And I look forward to coming back.
Phil: Yeah, thanks. Thanks so much. And thanks everybody for joining us on this episode of Revenue Reinvention. We'll see you next time.
Outro: 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. They're engineering it. Join them in this journey towards sustainable [00:35:00] and scalable growth.