Betsy Matthies on this episode
Betsy Matthies, VP of Global Revenue Operations and Enablement at GitHub, has built revenue engines at scale across AWS and enterprise organizations by finding hidden dollars inside go-to-market operations. In her previous role at AWS, she managed a 150-person team tasked with helping customers optimize cloud spend—a cost center by definition. But rather than accept that conflict with sales, she saw an opportunity: the same customer conversations surfacing budget constraints could be redirected toward reinvestment in stalled opportunities, turning a revenue-trading cost center into a demand generation engine with 60% average growth.
The core insight Betsy shares across three stories is that revenue operations leaders who think beyond their immediate function—cost reduction, deal management, retention—can unlock substantial hidden revenue by connecting operational data to strategic business outcomes. Her second story demonstrates how forced efficiency through AI-powered RFP scoring increased team productivity by 145% while reducing headcount, enabling the team to influence over $10 billion in annual deal flow. Her third story shows how basic operational rigor—win rooms, churn modeling, and cross-functional partnership—turned a $500 million P&L from bottom performer to number two in the region in just 12 weeks.
Throughout, Matthies emphasizes that these playbooks scale down. Small companies don't need enterprise budgets or massive teams; they need operational discipline, clean data, and the agility to test and iterate. The episode covers the reinvestment model mechanics, how to implement AI without creating reputation risk, the role of monthly and weekly business reviews, and the single biggest mistake smaller companies make: staying locked into "how we've always done it" when their size gives them first-mover advantage in bold, calculated innovation.
What we cover in this episode
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4:00
Turning Cost Centers into Revenue Engines The reinvestment model that flipped AWS optimization from cost reduction to demand generation with 60% growth.
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6:31
Reinvestment Model Mechanics How to identify stalled opportunities, match them against optimization savings, and redirect budget to unblock deals.
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9:53
AI-Powered Opportunity Detection Using AI to surface demand signals in customer calls and help teams identify upsell and training needs in real time.
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18:24
145% Efficiency Gain Through AI Implementing AI-driven RFP scoring to automate low-impact manual work while maintaining human review and quality control.
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27:05
Operational Rigor for Turnarounds Three mechanisms—win rooms, churn modeling, and next-best-action scoring—that took a failing $500M P&L to number two in 12 weeks.
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35:57
Win Rooms and Prospect Prioritization Weekly "Prioritizing Our Prospects" meetings to unblock top deals and remove sales roadblocks with cross-functional support.
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38:03
12-Week Churn Contraction Model Using trailing-window analytics to detect early churn signals and intervene before customers defect.
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40:34
Scaling Operations at $50M-$500M Monthly and weekly business reviews, pipeline councils, and data-driven cadences that small teams can implement without enterprise tooling.
The lines worth sharing
How can we still be customer obsessed and also meet the needs of our sales team? What I came up with was a reinvestment model.
Betsy Matthies · 4:00
We were able to increase productivity by over 145%, and we had the lesser of the headcount than the year before.
Betsy Matthies · 4:09
Small companies have first mover advantage in innovation and risk. Don't do it just because you haven't done it before.
Betsy Matthies · 44:36
If you're working so hard at the top of that funnel and it's just churning out the bottom, you're going to have to work ten times harder.
Betsy Matthies · 39:55
Common questions from this episode
How do you turn a cost center into a demand generation engine?
Identify stalled opportunities in your CRM, calculate optimization savings, and reinvest those dollars to unblock deals rather than returning them. Match customer business goals against available budget to unlock training, POCs, or new workloads without asking for incremental spend.
What's the reinvestment model and how does it work?
Score accounts for optimization opportunities, find blocked deals with financial constraints, then redirect the savings to fund those blocked opportunities. Customers avoid asking for new budget; the company keeps the spend within accounts and drives retention while growing pipeline.
How can AI increase productivity without introducing risk?
Implement AI in low-impact, high-volume tasks where hallucinations don't damage relationships—like scoring or initial triage. Always retain human review before output reaches customers. This cuts manual work while maintaining quality gatekeeping.
What's the fastest way to stop customer churn?
Build a churn model using trailing-window analytics to detect purchase drops early. Monitor at six weeks, intervene immediately, and understand root cause. Remove cross-functional blockers—operations, product, support—not just sales ones.
What operational motions work at $50M-$500M scale?
Monthly business reviews with pipeline pipeline council attendance, weekly business reviews with pipeline and risk review, win rooms for deal unblocking, and basic CRM discipline. Operational rigor beats tooling budget.
What's the biggest mistake smaller companies make?
Staying locked into established processes because they've worked before, missing the agility advantage they have. Smaller companies should test bold, calculated moves faster than enterprises can, before bureaucracy grows.
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Read the full transcript · 47 KB · Betsy Matthies
BETSY240:22I really had to take a step back and say, okay, how can we still, you know, be customer obsessed and how can we still ensure that we're driving customer retention through these optimization motions,
BETSY240:34also meet the needs of
BETSY240:35our sales team and revenue goals and not be working against that?
BETSY240:39what I ended up coming up with was a reinvestment modeling.
BETSY240:42And what we would do is say, okay,
BETSY240:44customer A, B, C what are your business goals that you really cannot achieve right now,
BETSY240:49if a customer said, oh, well, I'm not sure that my team was ready to be trained on this new workload. That's why the opportunity is not moving. It really isn't a dollar question.
BETSY240:59a that's a signal that we probably have an opportunity to engage training
BETSY241:04And we were actually able to increase productivity by over 145%,
BETSY241:09and we had the
BETSY241:10lesser of the headcount than the year before.
BETSY241:12so in this scenario,
BETSY241:13very glad to see that we were able to do
BETSY241:15that with the resources
BETSY241:16that I had.
RACHAEL241:40Today on Go to Market Science, we're joined by Betsy Matthes, VP of global revenue, operations and enablement at GitHub. Betsy leads a unified Rev ops. Org that covers sales ops, marketing ops, CS, ops and enablement across GitHub's entire go to market engine. Before GitHub, she spent five years at Amazon Web Services, where she ran teams that influenced over $10 billion in new business and turned a cost center team into a demand generation engine that saw 60% average growth.
RACHAEL242:08Today, we're breaking down how she consistently found revenue hiding inside go to market operations and what that looks like at a scale most companies will never reach versus what any ops leader listening to this today can apply right now. Thank you so much, Betsy, for joining me.
BETSY242:24Yes. Thanks so much for having me on. Super excited for this conversation today.
RACHAEL242:30Awesome. So you've spent the last decade plus running rev ops at some of the biggest tech companies on the planet. Before we get into specific stories, what's different about how companies at that scale think about revenue operations versus what you see at companies in the 50 to $500 million range?
BETSY242:50I definitely think having lots of agility because the market moves at such an incredibly fast pace, having the ability to adapt to not just what business needs are, but what customer needs are and being able to. You know, again, just like snap to the business needs and customer needs. And that really starts in rev ops. And we are the the linchpin and the foundation for most of these organizations.
BETSY243:18And so being able to be agile is incredibly important.
RACHAEL243:22Absolutely. So let's start with a story from AWS Amazon Web Services. So you took over team that was calling customers to help them save money on their cloud spend. So that's a cost center function right? You're taking money away from from sales and revenue. But you turned it into a demand generation engine that saw 60% average growth with a full return in five and a half months.
RACHAEL243:44So take us back to the beginning of that. What did you see in that team's customer access that everyone else was missing in the opportunity there?
BETSY243:52Yeah, and a great question. So the team we had this very large team, about 150 team members. And just as you outlined, the team's whole goal was to help save customers money, which is incredibly important in the hyperscale and cloud space. As you know, the competition's rising as customers are moving from on prem to cloud. There's often opportunities to help them optimize their workloads, and with that, they can save money.
BETSY244:19However, that's a revenue trading motion. And so I was asked to take on this this organization. And you know, look, when you're in sales compression and, you know, hyper competitive spaces, your sales team is like, hold on before you go tell my customers how to save money. You know, why don't you look for other opportunities? And I heard that loud and clear in my first few days and months into the position.
BETSY244:46And so I really had to take a step back and say, okay, how can we still, you know, be customer obsessed and how can we still ensure that we're driving customer retention through these optimization motions, but also meet the needs of our sales team and revenue goals and not be working against that? And what I ended up coming up with was a reinvestment modeling.
BETSY245:10So with that being said, we flipped that optimization. We would still help customers save money. And what we would do is say, okay, customer A, B, C what are your business goals that you really cannot achieve right now, whether there's constraints on your IT budget? And we found ways to optimize their workloads and help customers achieve those goals by re and reinvesting those monies back into their business.
BETSY245:36So it was a really great win win for both the company and the customer. The company is, you know, driving retention, reducing, churning, contraction by having those optimization motions. And meanwhile, our customers were very happy that they were able to run POCs on new projects, new workloads, without having to go and ask their coffee for incremental funds that may or may not be available.
BETSY246:02So really great when there. But you know, that took some time. Didn't happen overnight. You know, you're really doing a full enablement motion for your team to look for opportunities to reinvest. And so we did that. We did heavy enablement. I bring it on some specific enablement leaders to that team to help craft out, basically a quasi sales motion to reinvest this in partner and do a quick sell motion with our sellers.
RACHAEL246:31Yeah, absolutely. And how how did you actually structure that reinvestment model? Because you're taking these dollars that, you know, they would save and have back in their pockets and you're saying like, oh, but instead of saving this, like spend it on this and this. So how did you redirect them into those new opportunities? And what was the mechanism.
BETSY246:46Yeah, great. Great question there as well. So we did it a couple different ways. So first off we can see all the opportunities that customers had listed in the Crem. And so we would run optimization models which we had full access to do. And look at the total spend that they're spending today versus what they would spend in an optimization optimized environment.
BETSY247:09And we would go look at opportunities to match. So opportunities obviously are things that the customers want to do. They've already had discussions with their organization to implement. However there could be blockers, you know, several different reasons financial. And we would actually go in and look at those and see if we could unblock them through optimization. We would then work with either.
BETSY247:29Sometimes we owned the customer relationship and there was always a seller involved. But if it was, you know, certain types that we could have an easier lift on, our team would just own it end to end and do the opportunity and close out that opportunity as one. However, for more complex, we would bring in accounting sometimes solution architects, you know, depending on the complexity.
BETSY247:53But it was a very big difference. And for our customer optimization specialist they had to learn completely new skills. So number one how to identify those opportunities. And number two you know how to flip it from, you know being the hero. And many of those conversations with our customers you know oh we're going to save you xx million dollars or 100 of hundreds of thousands of dollars to, you know, let let us help you achieve this business goal.
BETSY248:21And so with that, just a new skill. We did lots of sales enablement sessions, product deep dives to get our customer optimization specialists more in tune with product to understand where there could be gaps in a customer's portfolio and workloads to identify those for for purchasing and enablement or activation.
RACHAEL248:45And so what what kind of how did you teach them to see what accounts had these opportunities in them?
BETSY248:53So it was actually pretty simple. We in our customer management system, our CRM, we had all the opportunities we could see globally, you know, on each account and what the opportunities were. And so we would do deep dives. We also had this process that we would score accounts to see their optimization.
BETSY249:17Opportunities, I guess is the best way to say it. So some customers have not optimized their workloads, and so there's greater dollar amount available to the customer upon optimization. And then we would take that and match it against our opportunities. Again I'll just list it out in our CRM. And you know, we would do touch points with the account team to see if those were priorities, you know, for the customer before we would engage in those optimization and reinvestment sessions.
RACHAEL249:44Did you guys use any kind of AI workflows or any programs to help, you know, track or flag signals and stuff like that, or help your teams track?
BETSY249:53Absolutely. And, you know, more and more, we're looking for, you know, AI to be able to get those demand signals and insights for this specific scenario. One of the pieces that we were implementing or I was implementing with the team was AI. So actually when the customer optimization specialist was on an engagement, so video or, you know, a digital call that based on what the customer was saying, we could identify opportunities.
BETSY250:24So if a customer said, oh, well, I'm not sure that my team was ready to be trained on this new workload. That's why the opportunity is not moving. It really isn't a dollar question. That's a that's a signal that we probably have an opportunity to engage training and have training for the customer's team. And that's, you know, an upsell.
BETSY250:44And that was all identified through AI. So really helped a team, especially when it comes to the motion that I was doing, changing their go to market model from just saving to doing a reinvestment motion, AI really was helpful with identifying live on those engagements to the optimization specialist, where they should lean in and upsell.
RACHAEL251:06Awesome. And do you guys enforce any kind of coaching or review of reports and stuff like that to see if your CS teams are actually following up on the stuff in the CRM and following up on the signals and the opportunities.
BETSY251:23So with all things, data helps drive the organization. So we would score each of our customer optimization specialists based on their territory. So they were assigned and deployed very much like AI's or other, you know, revenue generating quota carrying positions. However, they were not but they had territories. And so with that we could score their territories. How well optimizes your territory?
BETSY251:48You know, we could even click down into specific sales territories, how well sellers territories were optimized. And that's a signal for turning contraction to you want to have a better optimization scores than not, because otherwise, you know, you could be seen as speeding in the account. And if a competitor would come in with much lower pricing, you know you're putting yourself at risk by not having well optimized territories.
BETSY252:17So in short, yes, lots of data, more data than you could ever want around tracking and managing their workflow and their optimization of their territories.
RACHAEL252:28And what were what are some examples of these operational opportunities for reinvestment that you were flagging in these accounts?
BETSY252:36Yeah, I will give you a precise one without sharing, you know, proprietary information. But there was one company, a really interesting organization. They did monitoring of.
BETSY252:51You know, elderly, maybe, you know, some other confidential industries, but they did some wearable monitoring and they wanted to implement AI across their their workflows and workloads with their wearables. However, their budget for the year was capped completely. You know, no more, no more dollars to be spent with, you know, my prior organization. And with that, we went and did a full optimization across all of their workloads and found several hundred thousand dollars that we were able to take back to the customer and say, look what we found.
BETSY253:30Would you like to run some POCs with AI in the wearables with these dollars? And absolutely, unequivocally, they ended up growing over three X with us because, you know, with AI it tends to grow in some scenarios depending on the work was you're you're running. But with that it was so successful they took it to their board. They were ended up getting more dollars to be invested.
BETSY253:55But we we helped feed that foundation with the initial optimized dollars, and they didn't need to go and ask for additional dollars because it was still within their IT spend. So it great example of, you know, driving R&D through existing spent across an organization and and they kept it with us in group.
RACHAEL254:17Yeah. So that's amazing. But like how did you so you knew that that opportunity was there through the calls that you were having with them. They just kind of like brought it up on those calls.
BETSY254:27With it. So for that specific one, it was in our CRM system. So we first off, you know we took data. Data said this customer could and should be optimized. Right. There's an optimization score. We then looked in the CRM and saw that there was several opportunities that had stalled out, one of which was AI. The reason code was financed.
BETSY254:48They did not have financials this year or to make investments in AI. And so a perfect marriage of we found money, they can be optimized and they needed financial dollars. They didn't have incremental. So by bringing those two together, we were able to help the customer pull forward that opportunity and ultimately and end up growing on on our platform.
RACHAEL255:12So what are, I guess, the margins involved. As much as you're able to talk about this, you probably not. Not very much. But just the only question my head now is like, okay, so you're you're you're keeping the money in the company that you would normally like give back to the customer, but then now you're spending like resources to keep that same amount of money is that, you know, like investment wise, the long term ROI on that is that like now they have more projects going.
RACHAEL255:44Now they're able to invest more. So it turns out to be like a net positive overall.
BETSY255:49So yes, net positive overall margins. There is a lot. There are two. Unpack margins can vary based on the AI models being used, the consumption rate of those AI models versus other products that could or would have been consumed. But for this purpose and for the team's purpose, we ended up seeing on average three three months, three months bounce back rate to optimization.
BETSY256:21So what we found is even in a scenario not focused on AI, where and when we did optimization, it took only three months for customers to bounce back to their original spend if they did not do a reinvest motion. And so what's what was nice is it wasn't revenue a trading. And to your point around margin that would have been lost margin if the customer would go somewhere else due to pricing, maybe better pricing with a competitor.
BETSY256:48And so you're really preserving.
BETSY256:53It was more of a churning contraction question versus margin compression, if that makes sense. Now in that scenario, I just shared about the wearables organization very high margin. And obviously they ended up growing three X in a very short time because once they had implemented AI across their product, they had high consumption of it. And so we ended up growing very, very quickly there.
BETSY257:23So, so long term, I guess. In short, to answer like margin has a lot of variability, but it was seen as a win because customers ended up being stickier to the organization by seeing that good faith effort of optimization and helping them achieve their business goals by bringing them dollars to reinvest within their own business.
RACHAEL257:42Absolutely. So this is just a way to keep that in our app and keep churn really low. So important for recurring revenue companies. And I always say that if you're a recurring revenue model, you need that revenue to recur.
BETSY257:54That's that's exactly it. And, you know, it's hard to unwind that once once they're, you know, sticky with the organization. So that's exactly right. That reoccurring revenue you're after year is is the ultimate goal.
RACHAEL258:09All right. So that story is about finding revenue in a place where nobody was looking at all. But your next one is about getting dramatically more out of the resources that you already had. So walk us through your 145% efficiency formula.
BETSY258:24Yeah. And so in this in this scenario that I was in, I had taken over a new position, brand new team. And this team, you know, had very loose KPIs, I should say, wasn't really sure who was who is doing what, where. And after a really intense deep dive, you know, first 90 days getting in, listening, learning, understanding and there was a lot of opportunity to drive efficiency across the way that we were working.
BETSY258:54And so that was through several different pieces, including workflow management, but most importantly, AI implementation. And in short, we were impacted by a reduction in force. And so with that, I was kind of put in a position like the demand for work was continuing to grow. I needed to find a solve for the workflow that was coming in.
BETSY259:20And so the solution there was to implement AI. And fortunately for the work that the type of work that was being done, it was very manual. And it was in short, it was a bit in proposal management team and deal desk type team. And we were doing several tens of billions of dollars, influencing the largest deals at a hyper scaler.
BETSY259:49And with that, here we are. You know, we had some reductions in force. What do we do? Business is still demanding more than ever before. RFQ and RFI. So I implemented and worked with the team on an AI tool. So what this tool would do would come bring the RFPs, RF axes of any type or RFQ, RFI, score them and then help us determine should these be managed by, you know, a human or could they be passed out by this tool that was created and then ultimately shade by a human?
BETSY260:25Final edits touches. And we were actually able to increase productivity by over 145%, literally year over year. How many RF is that? We were able to conduct and and complete year over year massive increase, and we had the lesser of the headcount than the year before. And so I think by, you know, look, is it a forcing function sometimes and very unfortunate to have reduction in force.
BETSY260:54You know, it can sometimes force your hand in implementing and looking for creative ways so that your teams don't burn out and that you're still able to deliver to deliver for your customers. And you know, your sales organization because business doesn't stop. And so in this scenario, very,
BETSY261:13very glad to see that we were able to do that with the resources that I had.
RACHAEL261:19And that's so important these days, too, because everyone is using AI. Efficiency has been the expectations for efficiency has been pushed just so far beyond what the average human being can sit down at their desk and do every day. So that's really interesting. What what kind of data did you have to have together and make, and how did you make sure it was accurate enough to scale this in a way where you know, you're not losing out on a ton of opportunities because AI gets stuff wrong all the time?
BETSY261:48Absolutely. And you know, when this occurred, these this was early days of AI too. So, you know, hallucinations were more common than not. And so what I did was look at where can I implement it to, to lift the workflow off the team, where it won't be a one way door, very damaging the reputation if something happened, you know, data impacts.
BETSY262:14And that obviously up front is a scoring right. Early end customers don't know that we're scoring. You know, in a good way to understand the level of detail needed on an X. And so that's a very that's a very easy place to implement it versus having a dedicated person read through several pages and sometimes several hundred of pages of X is to understand, you know, the lift of the response.
BETSY262:43And so again, that was like an easy place. Oh, and by the way, the team didn't like doing that in particular. So it really helped despite all of the other challenges that we had. It helps us morale taking off this very manual, redundant tactical task from the team and putting that on AI. So that was like a that was a bonus that there was one.
BETSY263:06And so with that, but that was the data that was used, low impact, you know, and we still had humans and our team members reviewing the end product to make sure it was a very high bar and high quality product.
RACHAEL263:21That is such an important part of this whole thing. I see so many companies implementing AI and, you know, if they're not falling for like the one biggest problem, which is poor processes as a foundation and you're feeding the AI completely incorrect or inaccurate data, and it's just scaling horrible things that don't work. The next one is not having any human in the mix at all to check the work and make sure that it's accurate and do those little, you know, manual tweaks that only a human with the right business context can do.
BETSY263:54And I, I'm the biggest fan of AI. I use it every day throughout. You know, my my workflow helped me be more productive. However, when I allow it to do everything on its own at this point. No,
BETSY264:07no.
RACHAEL264:07Absolutely not. So with that 145% efficiency increase, are you able to talk about, you know, like revenue increases that were also tied to that? Like obviously, you know, you can imagine being able to do more. You're going to make more. Was it, you know, a kind of around the number that you expected it to be, or was it over and above or where was that?
BETSY264:29Yeah. Without giving too much detail, it ended up enabling us to influence and impact over $10 billion in that year after the 145% efficiency gain, where prior to obviously, if you do reverse math there we were in single digits. So and and several
BETSY264:53single digits billions. So massive impact. You know we were able to do more you know cliche here more with less.
BETSY265:00But that it ended up to be, you know, a very, very good for the team. And the team felt really good to like that. They were able to be more productive on the folks that they were working and not having to spend, you know, manual and redundant time on parsing out RRF axes.
RACHAEL265:19how well do you think that, you know, this kind of AI usage could translate over to smaller companies that are, you know, they've got smaller deals, they probably have like a smaller volume of things that they need or data that they need to sift through to decide who gets the human touch, who gets the AI touch.
BETSY265:36I actually think in this specific scenario, this this can AI can enable small companies to act and operate as larger enterprise organizations, particularly because there's a lot less bureaucracy and declining tooling. And so, you know, find the tool that works for your organization. And what's great is you can now have and team or a bid and management, bid management and proposal management team without hiring 25 people.
BETSY266:05Right. You can, you know, have have access to the same outputs as large organizations with one of the great tooling that's out there now. So I actually think it puts small medium businesses in a really great competitive position. It gives more accessibility to some of the tools and skill sets that prior to AI had to be hired and was the spoken and sometimes even accessed and only available to, you know, large enterprises.
RACHAEL266:36Quick pause. Everything we talk about on this show. Diagnosing go to market ops. Prioritizing projects for revenue. Impact processes. Metrics. Insights. Building a predictable go to market engine. We've built frameworks for all of it. They're free and undated on our website. Union square consulting frameworks. The link will also be in the show notes, so make sure you check that out.
RACHAEL266:59All right. Back to the episode.
RACHAEL267:02All right. So we're good transition to the next story here.
RACHAEL267:05So we've talked about, you know, turning that card center into a pipeline source, getting dramatically more efficient with the resources you have. The next one is about walking into something that's outright broken. So you took $500 million and L from bottom performing in its region to number two.
RACHAEL267:22That's crazy. What was the diagnosis when you walked in? So what was actually failing falling apart.
BETSY267:28Oh my goodness. This this is probably like one of the highlights, one of my proudest professional accomplishments. Teed it up perfectly. It was absolutely a failing business. The prior VP's of sales prior to me had been, you know, exited the business. And so, you know, coming in, I think it was up front. It's like, okay, a really big challenge.
BETSY267:55It's very clear the market was so bad. We were on a CEO level review every month. Wow. And so a lot of just inspection for my initial diagnosis, I kind of took it a couple different pieces here I'll walk through. So number one, we didn't have a very strong leadership presence in the market. So in the first 100 days that I was there, I met with our top 100 customers and any customers that were flagged for churning contraction because I wanted to stop the bleeding.
BETSY268:28So that was number one is like rebuild our presence in the market. You know, get in a room with customers here and understand what they needed, what they wanted, and why we were in this position. So that was number one. Number two was like rigor, a sales ops rigor, and we lacked it. I had blind spots everywhere.
BETSY268:50I didn't know who was churning, who was growing, what my top sellers were able to accomplish and how, who my bottom sellers were. So really doing a full revamp of the sales operation motions and implementing things such as wind rooms to remove roadblocks from our from my district sales manager and my sellers, obstacles and paths to get deals done.
BETSY269:15We did top deals, reviewing the absolute top deals, what we needed to close those out. I ended up doing as shown in Contraction Weekly Call because it was so bad. We were bleeding customers at a very rapid rate, and so understanding where the bleed was coming from and helping stop that as well as putting together. Actually this is pre language learning models, but ended up having our finance team put together a really great model to understand when customers stop purchasing it that it would flag us.
BETSY269:49And some of that was seasonal and we would walk through those. And then I think the other piece that we were able to build out at my request, was like a next best action. So, for example, if let's just say there's a customer that is a breakfast restaurant and they were only purchasing eggs, we knew that there was an opportunity to sell in milk and bacon and pancake mix and other things, and then taking those next best actions and product upsells and assigning those to the sellers to go sell against.
BETSY270:23And again, if we got feedback that there was pricing issues or things like that, we would address those as they came up. But really a deep dive in into the the operational rigor of the business to help feed us more data and insights to for me to be able to drive and steer that business. So actually it was just over call it 12 weeks that I was able to turn it to get positive growth.
BETSY270:46So again, I came in negative double digits. And so I ended up coming off of that monthly CEO read review. And from there it was like really great success. The team felt good. Lots of lots of great wins after that.
RACHAEL271:02Yeah. And we have many peaks of stats, say 12.
BETSY271:06It was about 12 way three months for a. Yeah.
RACHAEL271:09That's interesting.
BETSY271:11To see. Yeah. But I think it was you know it was a lot of things. So by meeting with the customers for example, those top 100 customers on 100 days, I was able to get renegotiated opportunities, referrals because people saw faith in leadership. I was able to get a couple large.
BETSY271:31Large enterprises signed as well. And so by starting there and like getting some some wins or really put some wind in our sales to move forward and stop the bleeding and all that.
RACHAEL271:43Yeah, yeah. I have so many questions on this. Okay. First, so you said you came in and like, the data was just not there. Like, you could not trust it. You could not see anything. What specifically was missing or what? Why was it so bad? Why were there so many gaps in your data?
BETSY271:59That's a great question. I think some of it was it just hadn't been built or asked for. And I think, you know, maybe prior leaders were okay flying blind and, you know, just go more off of gut feel and feedback from the field. There was basic data available around, okay, you're down 12%. Like we knew that. However, you know, we could break it down by account.
BETSY272:24But there was nothing like very directional. It was look in the rearview mirror. This is what you've already lost versus looking forward, having, you know, signals and insights and leveraging those to give the field something to go execute against to win. And so by building out those mechanisms and and operational rigor, I was able to to take that and have something tangible to action against which then equated to results and impact.
RACHAEL272:53Yeah. And that's crazy because like that's essentially what we do. And Square Consulting is, you know, take companies from that place and bring them to what you need in 12 weeks. And it can't happen that quickly. Yeah, I always think because we work mostly with the 5 or 50 to $500 million range companies, I always imagine these like much bigger companies as having at least the foundations together to have this data.
RACHAEL273:19So it's always kind of jarring to hear these like really, really big companies that still don't have that. Maybe, maybe we should look up market more. I don't know.
BETSY273:29I think, you know, it's not out of mal intent. I think it's.
RACHAEL273:33Oh yeah.
BETSY273:34They grow so fast and you know within that sometimes you're, you're trapped in like doing the day to day the tactical. And there's no time to kind of look up, breathe and understand like what is going to get us to the next $10 million in the next $20 million. And I also think sometimes you get stasis in a business where it's like, this is what's always worked for us.
BETSY273:55We're just going to continue to do this. And so by having the right leadership to, you know, understand and identify and think more strategically beyond just what works today, I think is incredibly important when you're driving and trying to scale a large organization to growth.
RACHAEL274:12Absolutely. And that's, you know, the position that most of our prospects and clients are in. You know, they've there's they spend all of their time like fixing these ad hoc fire drills or just trying to grow the company, get the next new business contract signed. You know, they don't have the time to work in the business. It's too much or I guess, working on the business.
RACHAEL274:31Yeah, they're spending too much time, like in the business, not enough time on the business. But yeah, there's so, so, so much revenue that is, you know, can be captured if you just have these fundamentals in place, have these processes in place, have a system where you can actually pull up a report and see what's going on and be able to make decisions off of that.
RACHAEL274:51We're very passionate about that, as you can tell.
BETSY274:54As you should be. Because really, you know, it's about investing in your future organization. And, you know, if you could snap to five years in the future, you will thank your future self. If you have those systems and that operational rigor, because you won't have to build it when you're much bigger, you know, it's what page the path to grows.
RACHAEL275:15Absolutely. And it's funny you said 12 weeks because like yeah like three months is all it it not always but three months is all it can really take to get to that place where you're starting to scale from there. And I'm not saying this to try and plug what we do or anything, but that's why we have like our three month like, like a forget what we're calling it, a three month geared t, I suppose you can like sign up us for three months.
RACHAEL275:38And if you're not seeing anything in that time because it takes like just about that much time to actually see stuff move, I think a lot of people imagine it being this like huge, huge undertaking and well, it is it is a big undertaking, but it's not something that's going to take five years to see results from, like you can see results from it within a quarter.
RACHAEL275:57So let's break down what you, what you actually built. So let's start with the win rooms. What did that actually look like and how did you put that together.
BETSY276:06Yeah. So win rooms. It was every Friday. And what we would do is we would ask or I would ask the sales leaders to bring me top deals from each of their teams. And so I would expect one deal from every team because they hopefully have at least one deal per every team every week. And we would go through one of the block blockers and in the specific meeting was actually called Pop prioritizing our prospects.
BETSY276:33And it was, in short, in one room. And it was a very detailed overview. Just a quick one pager from the sale, from the actual seller on where they were at, who was their stakeholder, what they were dealing with, what was what they thought was needed to close the deal. And sometimes it was just very basic things like, oh, if we bought two hockey tickets and kept this customer, I mean, that's just one example.
BETSY277:00Sometimes it was we needed upfront dollars and incentives and we needed to work through the mechanics of that. But I cannot recall one deal where we did not come to a yes, and we want this business and we turned anything down. So so when I think about when we when we're about to go into like all these mechanisms.
BETSY277:22I think a sales as a funnel. Right. So you have your new business going in the top of the funnel. You have your current business and product penetrations in the middle, and then you have at the bottom of this funnel your contraction. And so if you can control two of three of those, hopefully all of them. But if you can control and outweigh two of the three, you can be very successful.
BETSY277:46And so through the outline of the mechanisms that we're about to talk to, I'll share to where each of those are in that funnel. That pop was to put new business in the
RACHAEL277:56So what were the other mechanisms and processes that you had to put into place to to do this, make this turn around?
BETSY278:03So the other one I, I'm happy to share on, and I think is applicable to any business is to churn and contraction model. So I ended up having our finance team build out where we were bleeding and looking for trends, and it ended up being a very sophisticated Excel spreadsheet. This is again prior to LMS that can now look at trends and tell you where your your churn is, but with that, we would look at a 12 trailing week and see when customers started to dip off.
BETSY278:34And it was very true once we nailed and locked the model, basically the macros in the model, you could see when a customer was getting ready to churn. And so if we started monitoring that customer at about six weeks, sometimes even sooner, if there was dramatic drop off, we would go and intervene, you know Mr. or Mrs. Customer, what's going on here?
BETSY278:57I see you no longer purchase XYZ product from us. You know, where did that go. So we could intervene much sooner. And it helped us really prevent further loss of the customer base. And again, back to that funnel. It stopped the bleed in the turn coming out of the bottom of the sales funnel. Yeah. So very, very helpful to understand where you're turning your business.
RACHAEL279:20Absolutely. Especially if you're really, really focused on bringing more into the pipeline and trying to like, sell more businesses, like you're saying before, if those customers churn within like six months or a year, you know, you're losing out on so much money.
BETSY279:37And it's a lot harder to win a customer. Now. It's a lot harder to get new business. And so, you know, if you're working so hard at the top of that sales cycle and funnel to bring on new business and is just churning out of the bottom of the funnel, you're going to have to work ten times harder.
BETSY279:55It's so you know where you can control that. It's just well worth the time spent.
RACHAEL280:01The longer they're actually a customer of yours, the higher the lifetime value. And it even out that. So your LTV much healthier ratio. Again like recurring revenue businesses your revenue needs to occur. You got to like stop these leaks. It means great to focus on the top of the funnel. It's great to like get new logos and get new business and pipeline generation.
RACHAEL280:23But man, if it's all leaking out everywhere, you're not really doing much good.
BETSY280:28That's right. Yeah, very much a grave so very successful for
RACHAEL280:34All right. So we've talked a lot about, you know, these playbooks that big massive companies with big data infrastructures and tooling budgets and deep teams for the ops leader or CRO, that's maybe $100 million company around there listening right now with five people on their team in Salesforce or whatever they've got. When you look at what you just walked us through, what translates to their world and what doesn't.
BETSY280:59you know, if I was at a much smaller organization with, with maybe, you know, smaller team or limited resources, the things that translate is just understanding your business and whether that's all of these mechanisms that I just shared, which can be complex to stand up. And you do need some resourcing. However, I think the first and most important piece that can translate to any organization is just understanding your business through data.
BETSY281:25So having, you know, very strong cadences around I am a big believer in monthly business reviews, weekly business reviews to some extent, depending on the level of audience that's in those. But those are basics. Like I think those are absolute table stakes to any size organization. So, you know, in an MBA or even a Weber, a weekly business review can have elements of some of those things that I share, like who are your customers?
BETSY281:54You know, what's the next opportunity with those high level pipeline review, understanding churn, contraction and potentially risk? Those are all like table stakes to any organization, no matter what your thighs. So I would say, you know, adapt to the size of your organization and into the resourcing and the data that you have available to you, but definitely have some sort of, again, I'll say operational rigor to how you run your business because it's so important to take time, pause, look up, see what the data is telling you, and signaling and flagging to you so you know what to action on versus flying blind and not knowing.
RACHAEL282:34Absolutely. And we we call these kinds of reviews pipeline councils or go to market review councils. So just having everybody in on this meeting who has anything to do with revenue. So even like product, you know, customer success. Absolutely. Like all the head people, you know go to market ops or run ops rev ops is running it and just talk about, you know, any issues that you have in your own department that is affecting revenue.
RACHAEL283:03And it's not like a meeting to be patting each other on the back and being like, oh yes, we, we made we made money. It's like, hold no punches, you know, really bring up these issues and hash them out and find actual solutions on these meetings that everyone has action plan going forward to put it all into place and find and like put that solution to place.
BETSY283:26I that resonates so well with me. And not to go back to the prior example, but when I was doing those 1212 week run rate trend in contraction modeling, I actually would bring in my stakeholders from across the business. So the VP of Transportation and Operations would sit in on those, because sometimes we were churning because of operational things, not even sales related, and we had to remove those blockers and we were going to lose business.
BETSY283:53And so, you know what? We would deploy him to go and meet with customers sometimes. And so it takes a team. Everybody needs to help support our customers. They're never my customers. And so I think that's very, very important is to have cross-functional partnership and relationships and any of these mechanisms.
RACHAEL284:16Absolutely. And we're starting to come up on time here. So I just have one more question for you. And I really like this one.
RACHAEL284:23What's the most common operational mistake that you've seen at companies in this smaller range? 100 million, 50 million, $500 million range that wouldn't survive at the scale that you've operated at.
BETSY284:36I would definitely say being stuck in doing things the way that they are doing today, even for this, you know, it's it's harder to move and pivot as a large enterprise in organization. However, smaller companies have first mover advantage when it comes to innovation and risk. Calculate taking calculated risks. And so do it just because you haven't done it before, or this is the way you've done things for the last 20 years and it's driven, you know, wildly successful impact doesn't mean it should be the way that you move forward in perpetuity.
BETSY285:13And so just know you have first mover advantage when you're smaller and more agile and less bureaucracy and red tape. So take advantage of that to to be bold and make bold, calculated moves.
RACHAEL285:28I love that. That's a great response. All right. Well thank you so much Betsy. This has been amazing. And where can people find you if they want to, you know, see what you're doing or follow your journey?
BETSY285:40Yeah. Thanks. This is the fantastic. So thank you for the invitation. Feel free to send me LinkedIn. I'm very active on LinkedIn and lots of great engagements coming here in the next few months. So happy to engage at any of those.
RACHAEL285:55To hell yeah, I'm excited to see what you do.
BETSY285:58Awesome. Well, thank you so much.
RACHAEL286:00Thank you.
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EDDIE286:15We help our clients with everything from annual planning to improving processes and go to market, implementing systems to support those processes and go to market AI. We're always happy to offer a free consultation to help you identify the best opportunities to improve your go to market engine, with or without our help. You can find us at Union Square consulting.com and the info will be in our show notes.
