Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: I can't tell you the number of CRMs that I see where the only thing that matters is closed 1. Everything else is just garbage.
[00:00:05] Speaker B: Yo, Mike check. What's up everybody? You're listening to the Street Pricing Podcast, the only show where proven SaaS leaders share their mindset and mistakes in pricing so we can all stop guessing and start growing. Enjoy, subscribe and tell a friend. Now let's break it down with your host and sought after slayer of bad pricing, Marcos Rivera.
[00:00:29] Speaker C: What's up and welcome to the Street Pricing Podcast. I'm Marcos Rivera, author, founder and CEO of Pricing IO and today's guest is trying to make revops a lot easier for all of us. Today I have James McKay, who's the CEO of Venn. James, welcome to the show.
[00:00:44] Speaker A: Thank you, I appreciate it. And funny, making revops easier like it's supposed to make everything else easier, so it shouldn't be hard to begin with, but people seem to be having trouble with it.
[00:00:53] Speaker C: I think folks are still wrapping their head around it and that's why I'm excited to have you with us today. Man, do me a quick favor, why don't you tell everyone a little bit about you and what you do.
[00:01:01] Speaker A: Yeah, for sure. So I'm running Van. I've been doing it since early 2023, so a little over a year and a half now. I come out of the North American tech scene. I'm based in Toronto, but most of my client base is in Silicon Valley are spread throughout the U.S. yeah, I decided the last, the last full time job I had, I was working for two. Well when I started they were 20, 20 year old founders. So college dropouts went to Y Combinator, the whole like Silicon Valley stereotype. And that was fun. But after that I'm like hell or high water, I am starting my own business. So that was part of what prompted that. Yeah, but, but getting me there like that, that role, I led all finance and operations. Before that I was the VP of biz ops and revops at a big tech unicorn based here in Canada called Clearco or some people know it as ClearBank because we had a, a name change and then the first half of my career was spent in sales. So I was like a ground up seller. Sdr. We didn't call it that then, but that's what I was account executive director of sales before I kind of made this pivot into the rev ops world. So when I started my own business, that's what I know, that's what I started doing.
[00:02:04] Speaker C: Love it, love it. Just take what you know and then scale it, fly it, get people to learn about it. I love it. I think we're going to learn a lot from that piece because this is a big important part. Of course we love talking about pricing, packaging, monetizing, all those key things. But rev ops and go to market and all, all these other areas. Believe it or not, a lot of folks still get wrong and I'd love to dig in and unpack some of that with you today. So are you ready to get street with me?
[00:02:28] Speaker A: Let's do it.
[00:02:29] Speaker C: Let's do it. All right, so quick roadmap for the audience here. If you haven't listened to the show before, this show is based on the book street pricing. And so we like to divide it up into a few sections. The first one is Rewind where we're going to get into a bit of a story in the past. A pricing and packaging or just growth struggle, success. We want to hear about that. What can we learn from it? Then we bring it back to the present day with play. So let's understand a little bit of what's working nowadays and unpack that and then we want to look forward in, fast forward to the future. So let's see where are things going? How are trends changing the way we do things? All right, so that's the layout. I'd love to start digging into a story. So let's go rewind. Let's understand from your point of view, James, a pricing story, struggle or success? Let's hear it from you. Take away.
[00:03:09] Speaker A: Yeah, definitely. I think I can tell you about when, when pricing dawned on me as, as something that was really, really intricate because I think folks starting out, I think when I was young and immature, I'm just like whatever's cheapest is best. But that's clearly not true. You quickly learn that there's like a quality angle, can pay more of premiums for quality. But then it was, that's, that's the level of simplicity I was at. But I learned about the many dimensions of it I think back in my days at Clearco. For those who aren't familiar, Clearco is a basically an E commerce funding tech company and, and so what they'll do is they'll plug into your sales systems, read your marketing data, read your sales data, underwrite you and then give you cash. We blew up when we had this marketing campaign, the idea of one of our like mad geniuses called the 20 minute term sheet. We wanted to start like speaking the language of capital with these businesses and we had just a huge influx of people in the door. What I didn't know a lot about at the time was cost of capital. And I learned quickly. And so we had a product that was expensive. It was expensive, like based on traditional cost capital. And so at that time I'm thinking, like, how do we do this? Like, this is, this is rough. Especially because capital is capital, right? It's a commodity. However, what we were able to do was produce capital so fast. Like someone could come in, connect their systems, and we could turn around capital to them in a day or actually, you know, within the day. Um, and what that really showed me was that the flexibility angle was super critical. Some of these businesses just needed money right now because all of a sudden they're selling something, it's a six month old product, and then Black Friday comes and then they realize there's this huge demand. You don't have time to go actually raise traditional forms of capital, whether dilutive or just get loans, go to banks, talk to them. They weren't equipped for that at all. So there were the premium. Like, was it something that they weren't worried about paying at all? The other thing was traditional lenders didn't want to underwrite these types of businesses. Their options were limited. So that was something that really came into play with this pricing. And it was going so well. Like, we grew really, really well for a few years. But then there's this other dimension that came in when we started trying to go out, market and get to bigger companies. The bigger companies had access to other forms of capital, but they also grew their executive teams and brought on CFOs. And then the whole, like the whole conversation changed at that point. Because to get to a cfo, you really understand cost of capital or you should. Then all of a sudden our pricing was being pitted against going to the bank and getting a loan. And if you one to one, it was so much more expensive. But these companies were bigger, they had more options, and they had a different type of like, attitude that comes with maturity. And it became something we had to solve. And that's when like the pricing that was working so well early on became something that became a hindrance as we were trying to hit scale. It was just a really interest thing to watch over the three years that I was there.
[00:06:06] Speaker C: Interesting. I mean, thinking about this, where you found something that worked, it resonated with the audience at that stage, for that type of audience, right? The 20 minute term sheet. I mean, listen, if I was looking for capital and I wanted something Fast and painless. That little one liner which by the way rolls off the tongue is just a fantastic way for, to, to peak interest and for me to want to apply, not to mention tell others about it. Right. It makes super easy on both ends. So I could see why. I just like, just a framing of it worked really well. But then you started running into trouble with bigger, different types of customers that had different options, like you said. And that's where the 20 minute term sheet isn't quite as appealing to them. They wanted something else. And I think a lot of entrepreneurs may realize that if they solve for pricing, they think we hit it. This is it, the holy grail. We got it. All right. And as you expand and by the way, it could be market expansion, could also be product expansion, could be strategy expansion, could a lot of things the pricing may not fit, which goes to show that you have to continue to invest and iterate on the pricing over time.
[00:07:01] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, for sure. And I, I mean in this scenario, changing pricing is one option and we did that. And that didn't work as well as actually articulating what the return would be when you include the process of going and finding other forms of capital. Right. Like if, if, if things are blowing up and I can all of a sudden get capital and throw it on an ad campaign that's doing really, really well. And I can do that today and it's going to cost me $10,000 or I can do it in 45,000 five days and it can cost me $5,000. It's really immature to say, well I'd rather pay 5,000 than $10,000. I think when you can articulate to them, do you know, like, do you understand what's happening here? Right? Like pay the premium in order to throw fuel on the fire while something is working. And we can do that right now. That conversation actually went well a lot at the time. So there's just so many things to, to factor in. Some, some folks we're just, you know, wanted to stick to cost of capital. Others could really see the value proposition on speed.
[00:08:04] Speaker C: Yeah, and speed, by the way, and this is for everyone out there listening, right? You may have a fabulous product, you may have wonderful features, good service and all those things, but I'm telling you, fast makes friends. Fast makes friends, right? Giving money fast, getting to value fast, removing pain fast, whatever that is. So never underestimate the value of speed. And it sounds like that was a really big door opener in closing deals and the way you frame pricing. So I love that if you were to go back and, and kind of do it again, like just relook at all. Right. Maybe we should have, you know, angled it this way or maybe we should have added that. Is there anything different you would have done as you, as you went through that journey?
[00:08:39] Speaker A: Yeah, for sure. I mean, we had, we had to find this out about the value proposition and the positioning and the types of objections and the types of people who are objecting the hard way. Right. So if I had to do it again, I wouldn't have to do it the hard way. I would know what that conversation was. The second thing that presented a lot of challenges was we at that company were category definers like the. We've invented merchant cash advances and revenue based financing. And so in order to actually run that business, we had to raise capital ourselves. So we had these massive funds of capital that we were paying for and then we were selling. I think it's just basic business motion. I pay less for it here and more for it there. However, over time, once we started establishing this category, those funds were expensive because we got terms that were the terms that you would give to a company that was in a category that was undefined. And then competitors actually were like, hey look, Clerico's killing it with this model. They got better terms, but you're stuck into a fund for a long period of time. So that's one of those things that I don't know if it just wouldn't be a problem now. It was only going to be a problem for the company that came in and figured that out. They worked that out after I left and they're doing great now. But there was a while there where that one was a bit of a tough one.
[00:09:54] Speaker C: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Those. And going back to what I was saying about, you know, TAM or strategy or your products changing competitors and the dynamics around the market, the macro conditions change too. So you get all this stuff changing around you and you can't just leave your pricing and packaging alone all by itself. It'll grow stale and you'll start seeing the friction. And by the way, if you start seeing the longer deal cycles, people saying no more, tougher to upsell, et cetera, et cetera, you, you probably already are leaving money on the table and you should have looked at it a while back. So it's really important to get ahead of it in my view as well. So that's, that's a, that's a super good one, man. I love the 20 minute term sheet. I think will turn on even right now, as I'm speaking to you would probably be a super, super slick pitch for anybody, but for sure, let's move away from the, from the rewind in the past and let's get into the present day, man. And this is the thing that I was so excited to bring you on because of everything you see around RevOps and how companies are doing it really well and companies who are not doing so well. And I think a lot of our listeners are curious, like, what's the right way? When should we even start RevOps? Is it too early when you're a, you know, 2 million ARR startup? Should you start maybe when you're 10 million or 20 million? Does it make sense if you're in a, you know, certain type of business, like a very niche vertical versus a horizontal. So let me ask, let me just start off with this is what does revops actually mean? What does that mean?
[00:11:15] Speaker A: Yeah, it's funny that it's open for debate apparently. But I'll tell you how I define it. You take all elements of the customer cycle and it's the operational layer of that. And what I, what do I mean by all elements of it? From the moment a customer comes into your or a prospect comes into your awareness, which is usually marketing's domain, all the way through whatever your company is doing to retain and keep customers happy, which is usually a CX or CS or a support function. All of these people typically operate out of a CRM or something adjacent and connected to a CRM. But all of the operations and data under those functions RevOps should be responsible for.
[00:11:54] Speaker C: Got it, Got it. So it's the underneath. So there's a life cycle happening here. And RevOps is kind of driving a lot of the data and functions and operations behind that life cycle. Is that how you look at it?
[00:12:04] Speaker A: And systems? A lot of this comes in the form of systems. But yeah, you typically have like functional leads in, you know, your head of marketing, your head of sales, your head of cx, who are really good at getting customers or prospects from one place to the other. But in a world where there's a lot going on in the SMB space, when you can generate a lot of contacts and lists of a lot of people, you have a lot of records, how these things move is really, really can get really, really complicated. And you need to have a plan and you need to have it pinned down and you need to have the data infrastructure to be able to watch these things. You need to have the governance structure to make sure that things are done Right. And so the rev ops person should come in and make sure that all of these great things you're doing in terms of interacting with the customer and with the world, like get reflected, gathered, measured properly.
[00:12:49] Speaker C: Yeah, that's a really interesting way. I never looked at it that way because there's so much. You're right, there's so much in motion back there, right. As the customers move, as monies move, as information moves all around. And RevOps is really, you know, guiding, watching, tracking and ushering that motion back there. All those little mini motions back there that are happening. That's a super interesting way to look at it. So then, then that kind of leads me to my question then, which is when should a company start thinking about being mature around RevOps? Is it day one? Is it when the hit product market fit?
[00:13:19] Speaker A: When you think, well it's funny you say product market fit and that is such a pickle itself. So it's even hard to figure out what that is or when that happens. I think that there's a matrix on this and it depends on a few factors like the complexity of your product, the amount of customers you're going to be dealing with. Like if you're, if you are a low ticket item, high volume type of business, you'll want to do this a lot earlier. If you have a very high complexity product, say you're a financial services product and a lot of there needs to be a lot of governance and data that's really, really well tracked. You probably want to do this super early. If you're selling large enterprise services, that's a lot of interfacing and people stuff and not really a lot of complexity in terms of the number of customers you're going after. I think you can introduce it a little bit later. I would start thinking about it around the time a founder is aware that they are in a place to start transitioning to out of founder led sales. I think when you're in that founder led sales like mentality and in that phase, I wouldn't worry too much about it. Like you're one person, you can keep things kind of organized in your mind. The amount of data you're generating isn't really probably going to be that meaningful later. Just focus on selling is, you know, the YC axiom, build and sell like just focus on that. But once you can start getting this repeatability, think about it as you bring in your first person or two and then depending on the complexity, you know, by the time you have four or five salespeople, you should probably have it already.
[00:14:48] Speaker C: Yeah, that's a really great way to think about it. As you're transitioning out of founder led sales. That's usually the milestone moment for a lot of companies and probably has some correlation or relationship to complexity and meaning that maybe if you're simpler, less complex, you can transition sooner. If you're more complex, you're probably hanging around a little bit more. But that's a really smart way to think about it because that's usually a signal that, all right, we need to get some level of that, of that watching that, tracking that, ushering behind the scenes in order to create the motion. And from, from my perspective, by the way, it's easier to do it sooner than later. So say you've, you, you're like at 50, 20 sales people and you're trying to start implementing, you know, either rebops for the first time and trying to get that motion intact a lot tougher than maybe when you had three or four people for it. So that's, that's my point.
[00:15:32] Speaker A: As soon as so much harder. And also I'm glad people do it because it's part of the reason I have a business. But like I would really advise you not to do that. But that, that's actually, that's the story I see the most. So you get a, a founder who's starting, leading sales, doing really well. You start bringing in a team, you get to the point where you have a couple of cohorts or maybe managers like at two layers and all of a sudden everybody starts complaining about the CRM. You bought it, you didn't set it up properly. Everyone's getting confused. The complexity of the business is growing. And so what do companies do? Well, they take their worst performing salesperson, the one who keeps their records neat and tidy, and they say, you know what, you're Revops now go figure out Salesforce, the just gigantic, notoriously hard to use, extremely technical tool. And then all of a sudden they start building things and then you have a mess and I go clean up that mess a lot of the times. And I advise companies on how we can get to a healthy state, help them do it and then help them figure out who it is that they need to hire. And by the way, we are doing favors to these people that we're putting in this position. Like I think it would be easy to say these, these folks who send into RevOps are set up to fail. They're actually learning a lot and they're becoming a lot better. And I think they, this is How I learned Revops I did a little later in my career. One of the best guys I ever had working for me. We gave him his first Revops job. He was just, he had just come off of a BDR role. These folks turn into really good people, but they are not equipped like from day one to figure out how to organize your entire revenue function.
[00:17:08] Speaker C: I have to admit that there is a little bit of a commonality here because when I hear of new pricing managers or pricing leaders joining, they've picked either some smart person in finance or a high performing PM or product marketing person and they great, you're the new pricing person now. So you're going to be running pricing. And they don't have fully that skill set, right. And so they kind of get thrusted in there and they sort of have to, you know, kind of knock things around and figure things out on their own. Sometimes they do. Many times they don't. But even having someone come in and help lay that good infrastructure, that system, that foundation for them I think would be highly valuable. Right? So I, I see some commonalities there. But when, when you put on that red cape with a big S on your chest and you jump into that company, what are some of the two or three things you see right away? Like, oh, here we go. This is a very common mistake or a common thing that they're doing wrong.
[00:17:58] Speaker A: Stages. Stages is the first thing. So look, you have your customer, right? Your customer is out there in the world and there is a very natural motion that they are going to take from never having heard of you, to coming into your orbit, to considering you, to evaluating you and to becoming a customer and then becoming retained. Your job as a company that's trying to generate revenue and grow is to control that to some degree, but also acknowledge that it's a very natural motion. Those are real stages that happen in real life, right? I don't know about you now I do know about you. I wasn't considering you. Now I'm actually considering you. Like all of that needs to be reflected in the objects that you use in your CRM and that needs to be understood super well. So in Salesforce you have your lead object and then when you qualify an opportunity, if you're using it right, you create an opportunity objects and an account and a contact in HubSpot. If you're a HubSpot user, your contact goes all the way through. You have your company and your deal. Every stage or status, map that out right from the beginning so that anytime anyone's using the system, they know what stage or status they're supposed to be in, what it means, what the criteria is to get to the next one. If you don't have that, you just have a bunch of records and objects and people are organizing them the way they want to, or not organizing them at all, or confused about what they need to do, that customer journey has to be reflected in those objects. Everyone has to know it. Then all of a sudden you have a system that you can start working with.
[00:19:26] Speaker C: So that's surprising to me because I thought the customer journey stuff, usually when you put in a HubSpot or salesforce or something like that, don't you have to put stages and that journey in there anyway?
[00:19:39] Speaker A: They're there like it's, it's there. They're there natively. The whole, those systems operate off that logic. However, if they're not defined and they're not, they don't have to be customized. But if they're not customized, they're usually, it's usually because they're not defined or not thought about. And if then people aren't using them like the. I can't tell you the number of CRMs that I see where the only thing that matters is closed 1. Right. Everything else is just garbage. So everyone knows what closed one means. Right. But you need to know the other things too. And you need to start actually developing the logic of how you move customers through this. And it needs to correspond with the customer journey. And if it doesn't, you're going to have a mess.
[00:20:15] Speaker C: So everybody listening right now, if you only have close one as your only stage in your CRM, wake up, get in there and start cleaning that up and start developing that journey from the get go. Right. Uh, just curious is there's a second thing. So after you say, you say, okay, fine, we got some stages, we got the journey mapped out here. I don't know. Here are all the different stages, what they mean, you know, entrance, exit criteria, all that stuff, Right? So that stuff is good. What's the next big thing that people are missing out on?
[00:20:40] Speaker A: So I could take this two directions. What's the next big, like big thing that people screw up or what should you do from there? Well, once you have these stages, all of a sudden you can start architecting all of your data. And it's really, really simple. You want to measure the amount of inputs or like leads or contacts that come in, how fast they move to the next stage, and what percentage of the move to the next stage. Volume, speed, conversion rate, all the way through the funnel, see where it's slower, where it drops off, then all of a sudden you can assess, oh, this is where we're weak. Right. Or this is where we need work, or this is where a tool might help us, or this is where some automation might speed us up, that that's what you can do. I think if in a lot of cases when I come into a company, we'll do the staging exercise, but then what we'll also have to do, which is, does not follow any order, is there's typically a lot of automation built that is nonsensical and that was done to serve like a very, very small need that is amongst a series of other needs that were not considered. So often I have to go undo all of that and like kind of reestablish how that flow is going to go and help make sure that it's like as user friendly as possible.
[00:21:47] Speaker C: Yeah. And once it's set up and tweaking it, maintaining it going forward a lot easier than I think that beginning early lift. Right. It sound like they need that big push in the beginning all around to define those things. And what you just said really resonated because if you can't see the problem, you can't fix the problem. Right. So you don't have the stages mapped out. If you don't have those rates, the volume and the conversion, et cetera, you can't see where you're struggling and then makes it really hard to hone in and fix that problem. Right. Once you get that habit moving now, you'd be able to identify where things are falling short and fix it. And that's what starts to create momentum and scale over time.
[00:22:20] Speaker A: Absolutely. It also starts to create adoption too. Like one of the big debates my people get into with each other is like, how, how hard do you lock down these systems? Like validation rules are a fancy way of us saying I don't let you change stages unless you put this field in.
[00:22:35] Speaker C: Right, Right. Okay.
[00:22:36] Speaker A: And this is controversial because you. If you put in too much of this and people can't move the CRM, they get mad. And if they get mad, they stop using it. One of the pieces of advice I give to people when they're kind of asking this question of like, how much do we lock down these systems in order to pres. Or data integrity, is how much value are the people who are using it getting out of the data. And if the answer is a lot, then those people want to put the data in. The incentive is there. Right. So if you can actually build a system that enriches people's sort of selling experience or marketing experience or CS experience as a, as a doer of the job. All of a sudden your data integrity becomes less of a problem. Still needed to some extent, but when people can get the benefit of it, they'll do it.
[00:23:19] Speaker C: So you're saying if the data really matters, it's okay to put some controls in there. Validates basically annoy them a little bit as they're running through the system. Because it's worth it. Right? I think is what you're saying.
[00:23:28] Speaker A: There are things the business sometimes really needs. So you just have to say like, I don't care if you want to do this or not, we need it, so you have to do that. Then there are certain types of businesses out there that are dealing with a lot of data in the sales cycle that's really sensitive, personally protected information. If you're dealing with people's bank card numbers and stuff, you need to be really, really careful about how you handle that sort of data. But if we're talking about just kind of basic things about, you know, I'm going to track what typ of company this is or I'm going to track how large they are or I'm going to track where they are in the, in the country or the world. Well, I don't feel like it. Okay, but you will feel like it once you see the reports and you can actually get a lot of intelligence on it. You don't want to lock down all that stuff because then you'll create a terrible experience. But when you show them the value, they'll do it.
[00:24:08] Speaker C: Nice. Nice. Yeah, I think you're right. Once they see what's, what's in it for them.
[00:24:11] Speaker A: Right.
[00:24:11] Speaker C: The old fashioned adage there. So let me ask you this question then. If, if you were, if you were sitting with a founder of a company, say they're you know, rocking and rolling 5, 10 million or something. ARR, they're growing. They're about to trans position out of founder led sales. They got their first AES coming in and all that stuff and that person sitting in front of you. What are the like the first two or so questions you want to ask about their rev ops to dig in and figure out what's going on. What are two common things you ask them?
[00:24:38] Speaker A: Well first I think probably if I ever got to that point I would know if they had a CRM and what it was. But that, that's what I would figure out and then I would ask how much thought and effort has been put into it and whether or not they say lots or little, I can tell by the way they answer the question. I think what I would be driving at is early on, you still need at least a little bit of structure, right? So let's establish a little bit of structure so that you can get out of this cycle what you want and you can measure it to some degree. So anything to get like a founder to the point where they know that some level of like, defined process and some level of sales data will become really, really helpful to them, even if it's early.
[00:25:21] Speaker C: Got it. So quick, win something early to build up maybe just confidence in it and being able to pay more attention.
[00:25:27] Speaker A: Yeah, I mean, just, just focusing on like getting people started with the basics. Like, I think these are the things that if you don't get them to do, then they will have to fight through later. And so I think if you can sort of guide them to more or less an MVP or like the, the bare minimum of tracking their sales process, then later when they need more sophistication, it won't be so hard to figure out.
[00:25:50] Speaker C: I get it, man. An ounce of prevention. That makes a lot of sense to me. And getting it up front, man. Listen, before we move on to fast forward, there's one, one thing that you, you posted about, which I was. I started laughing when I read it, which was about what do you call this thing, right? Rev ops, Sales ops, GTM ops, Growth ops, right? You're like, who cares? Like, if you're really into that stuff, then you're not asking the right questions, right? So there's. There is a bit of a, of a, of a title or label medley going on out there and folks calling different things. Well, it's actually this and not that and the difference between this and that and yeah, minutia, it's, you know, whatever, different forms of jargon. But in your mind, right, you've stayed true to revops. And I'm, I'm curious, is there. Is there some either term or something that's emerging that's actually a better, more suitable name for what this is or you like, are you still in the camp of so what? Shut up and move on?
[00:26:39] Speaker A: I'm mostly shut up and move on. So I'll tell. There was a transition before where I wouldn't say that. So I think that a lot of folks who've been around the block still call it sales ops, and I think that was just inaccurate. Your CRM at least will run across multiple teams, if you're doing it correctly. And as soon as it does that, you are not just answering to sales. All of a sudden, the reporting lines become really important, your stakeholders diversify. It's just not accurate. However, there becomes this like next level of hair splitting that I think it goes on. And I think this happens with just language in general all the time, where I feel like insiders having annoying circular conversations with themselves when what is really happening is they're just ignoring the fact that anyone outside of that circle doesn't care. And if you're talking to them about it, you're not actually solving any problems. You're just splitting hairs on definitions. So one of the things I think is happening in RevOps is that advocates for it are trying to expand the scope of it so that it includes a lot of like back end, back office financial operations sort of stuff. And I think that's fine. At any given company. You can call that RevOps, you can call it FinOps, you can call it whatever you want, right? But if you enter into a company and you're talking to a CEO or a leader and you are engaging with them on the nuances of what you think things should be called, I think you're kind of wasting everybody's time.
[00:28:04] Speaker C: I kind of see it that way. I see it as talking around the problem instead of sitting down and staring at it, you know, directly and solving it. Right? No, I'm with you there, man. I think just call it whatever. As long as you do it, it's fine, right? At the end of the day, that's fantastic, man. I wanted to maybe transition a little bit to where things are going and fast forward because do you feel, and this might get a little uncomfortable and that's okay, right? But do you feel that you're under attack by AI? Do you think some folks are coming out saying, you know what, all this data and tracking and stuff behind the scenes can be done with some type of AI or AI agent and we don't need web ops people anymore. The system should do it.
[00:28:39] Speaker A: I absolutely do not feel under attack. I do feel that that is happening. So I actually had a great conversation yesterday with, with someone I really trust who he's the CFO of a 250 million ARR company and I. He was confiding in me about how his RevOps function was going and he kind of asked me what, like, what is it about RevOps people that like sometimes can be hard and I say they like to dither around in tools too much and that, that is true. This function can be highly, highly strategic. And I actually think that the more time you spend in tools and data infrastructure and basic workflows, the less time you're spending in the actual strategic elements of the job. If AI can come in and take some of that lower level work out of the way, then I think the more strategic people and the people who are more valuable to organizations will have more time to spend on the good stuff. And I think that a lot of people who aren't good at it will be out of a job. And I actually think that's happening in every industry. And I think it's good. I think it's good for us. The most common example I think is copywriting right out of the gate. People are like, oh, GPT can can copyright for you? And the answer is no, it can't. But what it can do is make a really good copywriter better. The worst ones will either avoid using tools that make them more efficient or just try and get the tool to do their job so they don't have to do anything. And both of those things will not work.
[00:30:03] Speaker C: Agreed. Yep. I, I think that, I think there is a, a spectrum there where the highest skilled would use it as an enhancer and the low skilled not going to work out too well. Right. It kind of exposes some things. Right. Speaking of fiddling and tools you mentioned a minute ago, is there like a stack or something besides the CRM that you think makes revops just a ton more effective?
[00:30:22] Speaker A: I don't, I don't. I think there's so much time and effort being put against this problem and I actually think the reason why it's being put against this problem is because it's not, it's not being approached with the actual simplicity that it should like, it's not, it shouldn't be that hard to figure out how to get your company to just like organize their flows from end to end. I think tools can come in and be really, really helpful depending on the type of company you are and the type of work you're doing, perhaps the type of outreach you're doing. But there's not one that I prefer over the other. I think just getting your stuff in order, get your process in order, then get your CRM to, to actually reflect that once you do that, I don't think it really matters.
[00:31:03] Speaker C: I love that answer. Mainly because I was hoping you would say you don't even need one if it's actually done right. Right. Which I think typically some people use tools as crutches I've seen in a lot of contexts as well. And you know what you'll find is this weird proliferation of tools in a company. You'll have like 45 different things floating around and now you're back to the same problem which you don't know where data is because it's sitting in five different places and you can pull it together and make it sense or it just takes a lot more work to do it. But yeah, I do think there's a, a bit of over, over reliance or over indexing on too many tools these days. Stop. You know, get the, you know, stick with the simple and the basics first I think is kind of where, where from a pricing perspective I always like to start. You don't want to get too fancy fancy with models. If we could just do something simple and basic first to get going.
[00:31:47] Speaker A: I actually I. There's. There's an example. I'm sorry, I have to. I'm sorry to interrupt, but I have to talk about. Because I've seen it at more. More than two companies. So many companies buy big expensive business intelligence tools because they, they feel that they are running into limits on what their CRM can do. And I've seen at least three stacks where they purchased. Why is the name escaping me? I hate it so much. The big Salesforce reporting tool Tableau, where they purchased Tableau because of the limits they feel that they're running into with Salesforce Reporting. When I ask what that limit is, I always get the same answer, which is it's because they don't have the time stamping on the fields that they want. And my response to that is that's basic infrastructure. Like you just have to. You actually just go into the backend and click on field history and what you will save is a very expensive tool. However, that tool itself requires data engineers because it's so old and crappy and big and complex that you all of a sudden not only have created a huge line item expense on the tool, but you've started to build a whole function around something that was actually probably just clicking a few boxes in Salesforce when you started wanting these reports and figuring out how to use it. That is not a good use of time or money and it happens a lot.
[00:33:04] Speaker C: That is a big one. That is a good example to lay out because I bet you there's more than one company out there that that either is doing that or has done that in the past. Good, good one to leave a lot of folks on here. And so just in, in, you know, wrapping up in retrospect to thinking through about this arc right. With. With RevOps and where companies get started and applying it. And if. If I had to think about. We talked a lot about the mistakes here, but maybe give an example of. You don't have to name names. Right. But a company who just does it super well and it could be like a model for how to approach RevOps and how to make it. Make it work for you. Is there some. Someone that comes to mind?
[00:33:37] Speaker A: I'm not sure how to answer the question without naming names. Fine. You know what? Honestly, I don't. I don't know if I have a good. If I have a good answer to that question. I think that the companies that have good rev ops have someone in charge of it. They have it written down. It's simple. And they have a simple system that's easy to use and it has tools added onto it some, but not a lot. And I think that's the profile of a company that's usually doing it. Well, the thing is, I don't see companies who are doing rev Ops really well very often.
[00:34:05] Speaker C: Right. When you come in here.
[00:34:07] Speaker A: Yeah. Like call me because they need me.
[00:34:09] Speaker C: That's right. That's right. No, it makes. Makes tons of sense there. But if as long as you have somebody in charge of it, it's documented, it's improving all those key things, that's kind of the model. Right. To get going.
[00:34:19] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:34:20] Speaker C: Yep. Super easy to follow. Super easy. Excellent. Well, James, thank you for coming in today and dropping some major knowledge bombs for our SaaS community. Man. Did you have fun?
[00:34:27] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. I love talking about this stuff. I really appreciate it.
[00:34:30] Speaker C: Terrific, man. We'd love to bring you back to the future. Give us some updates as you continue expanding and growing and seeing more things we can jam about RevOps again down the road. Excellent, man. Cool. All right, James, thanks again. I do have one more question for you. My favorite one of all, which is what was your favorite jam or song growing up?
[00:34:48] Speaker A: I think I'll go back to my. My very first cd. Wait, does that. That might date me, but I think.
[00:34:55] Speaker C: We'Ll go back to my disc for those who don't know what the hell that is. Right?
[00:34:58] Speaker A: All right. Yeah, a little circle donut thing. But my first one was Wonderwall by Oasis, and I think my favorite song on that album was Champagne Supernova.
[00:35:07] Speaker C: Oh, very nice, Very nice. Easy to sing along, lots of fun. Excellent. Excellent choice, my friend, man. No, thanks for doing that. Appreciate it a lot. And it reveals a little bit about you. Right whenever you hear what somebody listens to, man, cool team. That was James McKay. He's the CEO and founder of Venn, and he comes in from a really, I think, healthy and pragmatic angle to revops. And I think you should think about that. And if you're 6, 7, 8, 10 salespeople deep and you're not really focusing on that revops and capturing that journey, take this advice and bring it home to heart. So don't ignore what you're hearing today. Go back Monday, get 1% better. Try to move away from that guesswork. And remember, stop guessing and start growing.
[00:35:52] Speaker B: Until next time, thank you and much love for listening to the Street Pricing podcast with Marcos Rivera. We hope you enjoyed this episode. And don't forget to like and subscribe. If you want to learn more about capturing value, pick up a copy of Street Pricing on Amazon. Until next time.
