About this episode
Eddie Reynolds and Rachael Bueckert, practitioners at Union Square Consulting, break down how to correctly hire a VP of RevOps by first understanding what the role actually entails. Most VP of RevOps searches fail because companies try to hire a unicorn who can master Salesforce, HubSpot, Outreach, AI solutions, go-to-market architecture, analytics, deal desk commissions, and respond to every Slack request, all while driving revenue. This person doesn't exist. Reynolds and Bueckert identify that what companies typically call "VP of RevOps" actually encompasses three to four distinct roles: the systems/tools person who manages the CRM stack, the go-to-market architect who designs inbound/outbound/expansion processes and territory plans, and the analyst who reviews metrics to find revenue opportunities and test hypotheses. A fourth emerging role involves AI implementation. The mistake most CROs make is writing a 100-item job description before deciding which motion (inbound, outbound, expansion) needs fixing most and whether they can personally own architecture and analytics work. The reframe is strategic: start by defining your grand plan and revenue goals, identify which go-to-market motion will move the needle most if improved, then hire specifically for that gap. If the CRO can architect and analyze, hire a systems person. If not, hire an architect and ensure someone does the analytics. The episode covers interview questions to separate architects from tool updaters, how AI fits into the hiring decision (rarely as a primary skill), strategies to keep new hires focused on roadmap work instead of ad hoc requests, how fractional RevOps often works better alongside a full-time VP, and why commission planning and deal desk become time-sink traps that derail strategic work.
What we cover in this episode
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1:30
Why VP of RevOps searches fail CROs try to hire one unicorn for a hundred-item job description; hiring settles on resume instead of actual need.
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2:13
Three roles hiding in RevOps Systems/tools admin, go-to-market architect, and analytics role are three distinct jobs wrapped into one job title.
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6:55
Analytics gets neglected Revenue ops analytics requires weekend deep-dives into Salesforce and HubSpot; often never happens because the hire is too busy.
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8:33
The AI unicorn problem Best AI-focused RevOps people are so rare and in such high demand that attracting them is nearly impossible unless you're a top-tier company.
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14:24
What to figure out first CRO must define grand plans, revenue targets, and identify which go-to-market motion needs fixing most before writing a job posting.
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16:25
Interview question: architect vs tool updater Ask candidates to walk through building an inbound engine; separates strategic thinkers from those who only discuss tool configuration.
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23:49
Roadmaps keep focus; Slack derails it RevOps roadmaps tied to quarterly objectives prevent ad hoc requests from consuming 100% of a hire's time on low-impact work.
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48:57
Fractional RevOps alongside full-time hire Fractional RevOps often works better than solo full-time VP; can handle tool gaps, provide architectural guidance, and free hire for core priorities.
The lines worth sharing
Most VP of RevOps searches go wrong before anyone even looks at a resume. A CRO decides they need one person who can do everything.
Rachael Bueckert · 1:30
Walk me through how to build an inbound engine. You really want to dive in and think about what motion we want to improve most.
Eddie Reynolds · 16:25
If the VP of RevOps is not analyzing data and bringing insights about what's working, they're not doing their job. But the CRO isn't either.
Eddie Reynolds · 37:05
It is so incredibly easy to take anybody, even the most strategic leader, and derail them by lobbing random requests at them.
Eddie Reynolds · 26:45
Common questions from this episode
What are the three roles hiding inside a VP of RevOps job description?
Systems/tools administrator managing Salesforce, HubSpot, Outreach; go-to-market architect designing processes, territories, and qualification; and analyst reviewing metrics and finding revenue opportunities. Most unicorn candidates excel at tools but struggle with architecture and analytics.
What should a CRO figure out before writing a VP of RevOps job description?
Define grand plans and revenue targets; identify which go-to-market motion (inbound, outbound, expansion, pipeline management) needs fixing most; determine whether the CRO can personally own architecture and analytics. This focus prevents chasing a unicorn and clarifies which role to hire.
How do you interview candidates to separate architects from tool updaters?
Ask them to walk through building an inbound engine in detail: define MQL, lead routing, capacity planning, qualification criteria. Strategic architects discuss process and revenue outcomes; tool people discuss Salesforce configuration.
How does a CRO keep a new RevOps hire focused instead of drowning in ad hoc requests?
Build a quarterly roadmap tied to revenue goals, work in biweekly sprints, and shield the hire from Slack requests. Unless the house is on fire, push back on random requests that derail strategic priorities like architecture and analytics.
When does hiring fractional RevOps alongside a full-time VP make sense?
When the full-time hire can own core priorities but lacks depth in specific tools, when a CRO needs architectural guidance during the full-time search, or when specialized expertise like NetSuite or Salesforce CPQ is needed part-time only.
Should you hire for AI expertise as a primary RevOps skill?
No. Hire for go-to-market architecture and tools fundamentals; curiosity and the ability to learn AI tools matter more. A competent Salesforce architect can learn Claude or AI native tools quickly. The reverse is rarely true.
SEO meta description
Eddie Reynolds and Rachael Bueckert reveal why most VP of RevOps searches fail and how to hire right: define priorities first, separate tools from architecture, keep new hires focused on revenue impact.
Target keywords
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Revenue operations job description
RevOps architect vs tools
go-to-market architecture
CRO hiring strategy
sales operations roadmap
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Eddie Reynolds
Rachael Bueckert
Union Square Consulting
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EDDIE0:00when I interview folks, one of the things that I'll do is just sit down and ask them,
EDDIE0:04walk me through how to build an inbound
EDDIE0:06engine.
EDDIE0:06how do you determine
EDDIE0:07What an MKL
EDDIE0:08How do you root leads?
EDDIE0:09you really want to dive in and think about like, what is the
EDDIE0:12motion that we want to improve most, and how am I going to find the person that's going to improve
EDDIE0:17Now, if you're, you know, a fifth time CRM and you're like, look, I've built a million outbound engines in my life and I've just
EDDIE0:22this organization and the outbound engine is a mess, but I know exactly how to fix it, and I just need somebody to update the tools then.
EDDIE0:29As long as you've got time to do that,
EDDIE0:30great.
EDDIE0:30That works.
EDDIE0:31I see so many people overlook this. And then really fundamental things like defining the ICP properly,
EDDIE0:37outlining the process, doing capacity plans and territory plans,
EDDIE0:42lead routing, lead response times,
EDDIE0:44basic things that cause us to win or lose, prospects and leads and opportunities. Qualification criteria
EDDIE0:51gets ignored because the Crow is so busy recruiting, hiring and managing the team and helping to close deals and forecast.
EDDIE0:58You've got all these things that are broken in the go to market engine and they're kind of obvious,
EDDIE1:02So these are some, some things that you really want to think about before you think about the type of person you want to hire.
EDDIE1:15actionable playbooks from the trenches working as go to market strategy and rev ops consultants for our clients here at Union Square. Consulting and candid conversations with revenue leaders in the market that have been there. Now let's get into it.
RACHAEL1:30Most VP of rev up searches go wrong before anyone even looks at a resume. A crow decides they need one person who can do everything. Floods them with 100 requests. And a year later, something hasn't gone to plan. Today, Eddie and I dig into how to actually approach this hire, what to figure out first, and what a company really needs from the role for it to be a success.
RACHAEL1:49Hey, Eddie, how's it going?
EDDIE1:51It's going well. Let me just jump in here when you talk about something. Not going to plan. What do we mean by that? I think like, most importantly, what we mean is we didn't hit our target. We are not, you know, hitting our revenue number and or forecasting accurately and all the downstream or upstream effects of that. Our revenue engine isn't improving.
EDDIE2:13And so I think the mistake that I see so many crows make is they try to hire a VP of robots, or a director or a manager of robots, or even build a team of Rab ops. And we're updating all of these tools and building all these workflows, but it's not actually helping us reach our target. It's not making salespeople more efficient, and it's not helping to turn more marketing demand into actual revenue.
EDDIE2:35And it's not helping to retain and grow our customers. And so I want to dive into this podcast today after writing the article on how to do this, in hopes that it helps people out in the market think about how they want to
EDDIE2:50identify what exactly they needed, the VP of robots role, and how they're going to build the team to do it so we can actually drive revenue and not just have a bunch of people updating tools with no actual impact to revenue from doing that.
RACHAEL3:01So when HRO sets out to hire a VP of Rev Ops, Eddie, what's the person that you that they're commonly picturing in their head? What do they think this person is going to do for them?
EDDIE3:10Yeah. Well, I mean, I don't want to paint every CRO with a broad brush, but I think the common mistake that I see here is that we're looking for this unicorn that almost doesn't exist. So if you ask me, a couple of years ago, I would have said, this is three different roles in one. And now it's kind of for.
EDDIE3:25So let's start with the basics, right. First you have like your Salesforce admin or architect depending on how senior we want to go. And that's somebody who's going to manage Salesforce. They're going to update fields workflows. They're going to build reports. They're going to, you know, upload data. By extension, if we're using HubSpot for marketing, that person likely is going to manage that tool and learn it.
EDDIE3:47Then we've got outreach and zoom info and Gong and all the other tools in our revenue tech stack. That alone is is a job, and there's tons of people out in the market that can do that. And it can be incredibly challenging by itself right now. Let's then add in go to market AI on top of that. So now you're taking somebody who's maybe spent 5 or 10 years mastering Salesforce, and now you're like, hey, I need you to figure out how to use Claude and implement AI native solutions and vibe code tools over the weekend, and we'll talk about that in a bit.
EDDIE4:19That's all well and good, right? And those are really valuable people. But after hiring an dozens of these people and interviewing hundreds of these people, most of them 95% are really good at the tools because that's what they focus on, and that's what they're obsessed about. If you ask them about how they're actually driving revenue, about how much revenue their current company has, about close rates and conversion rates, and how they design territories for outbound and how they define the, you know, the process to convert inbound leads into revenue.
EDDIE4:53Of course, they will tell you about how they built the the lead routing rules in Salesforce or how they updated the scoring model and HubSpot. But when you ask them about fundamentals, when we step away from the tools and you ask, how did you architect this engine to actually drive more revenue? This is where 90% of them really hit a wall, because they've spent so much time in their careers focused on how the tools work, and oftentimes working for people that are not asking those questions that they don't they haven't spent enough time thinking about the answers.
EDDIE5:23Not that this is rocket science, but it's a unique skill set, just like learning how to implement Salesforce is. So I'll call that the architect rule. Not to be confused with a Salesforce architect, which is just a very, very senior person that used to be an admin, but somebody who actually architects out the inbound process, the outbound process, the expansion sales process that determines how do we identify the right ICP and how do we build territory plans that are a fit for the capacity with our team and have the absolute best accounts in those territories?
EDDIE5:52How do we build commission plans that really drive the behaviors that we want? These are more quote unquote strategic initiatives. I hate to use the word strategy, because I think a lot of people think about McKinsey and a bunch of worthless PowerPoints, but building a territory plan is not a worthless exercise. It's something that can determine whether or not your salespeople spend the bulk of their time focused on the highest value accounts, or whether they waste a lot of their time calling low value targets that are less likely to convert into revenue.
EDDIE6:22So who's going to do that work? And then the last piece would be analytics. And the way that I visualize this is let's imagine this unicorn that we've hired and they're doing all these things that we just mentioned. And then when are they going to analyze the data. So imagine that they're so busy during the week. Right. So it's going to be Saturday or Sunday morning when they sit at their desk ignoring their wife and kids, and they have their big cup of coffee and they're going to sit down and pour through Salesforce and HubSpot reports or use AI to do this, which we could get into.
EDDIE6:55And they're going to spend four hours slicing and dicing the data, and they're going to come back to the Crow on Monday morning, and they're going to say, I looked at all the data, and these are the leads that are converting, and these are the ones that are not. These are the deals we're winning and these are the deals we're not.
EDDIE7:09Here's what's going on here. This isn't just surface level information. Here's where the team is not executing. I probably should have started with that. And who's going to find time to do that. And the question that I'll ask is, is that if we're going to hire the systems person, which is totally fine, then the responsibility for the architecture and the analytics falls on the crow.
EDDIE7:31And if you say, look like I can carve out half my time to do that, I can sit down and I can review our ICP and put pen to paper and document out our ICP, and then make sure that gets translated into capacity plans and territory plans and the accounts we upload into Salesforce and who my salespeople are calling on, then that's perfectly fine.
EDDIE7:50But if we don't do that, the tools folks will oftentimes build a really elegant technical solution that doesn't necessarily get us the most efficient path towards revenue.
RACHAEL8:02That is a lot. That is so much to ask of one person, like, what would it take if a crow or a company was to find a person that could do all of this stuff? What would it take to actually land them and keep them?
EDDIE8:13Well, I think that's the other thing that's really hard. Like, let's touch on AI just for a moment. Right? So the absolute best person out there that's just obsessed with AI, that is, you know, building everything in Claude code and they've implemented a bunch of go to market AI solutions, and they're just like working 80 hours a week just deep into it.
EDDIE8:33That person is so rare and in such high demand that if you're not working for, you know, one of the hottest companies on earth, it's going to be really, really hard to hire that person. We had Kyle Norton on the podcast, and he talked about how his team transformed their go to market with AI, and he wrote an article that really resonated with me where he said, look like you're probably not going to find this unicorn.
EDDIE8:53And I'm just talking about the AI unicorn right now. I'm not talking about the do all things unicorn. And he said, look like you're probably better off to just use the team you have and learn these tools, which isn't that difficult. And then you can transform your go to market with AI rather than hoping that you're going to attract this unicorn.
EDDIE9:11Because even if you find them, and even if you can afford them, they can work for anybody. And unless you are running the hottest company on earth, they're probably not going to work for you. But if you can find that person like Lee's, grab them as fast as you can, right? But you're still going to need the person that is going to architect out the solution, and you need somebody to look at the metrics.
EDDIE9:32Otherwise, we're just architecting solutions based on theory and not based on actually looking at what's working and what's not. And that is really, for me, the fundamental difference between a go to market engine that really gets fine tuned and starts to get seriously more efficient, and one that doesn't. And if you look at what Kyle Norton's built over at owner, where they've scaled to, I think they're at a plus $100 million is the last thing I saw.
EDDIE9:55And they've used all these AI tools to like, drastically improve things like close rate from 38% to 53% at the time that you interviewed him on our podcast. I mean, these are phenomenal results. These don't happen by vibe coding something over a weekend. They happen by having a dedicated team that is really thinking hard about this and the analogy that I oftentimes think of.
EDDIE10:15And I got this from Pablo Dominguez and Matt May, who wrote What a Unicorn Knows. Folks at Insight Partners comparing this to an F1 team. And you think about how much an F1 team is, is measuring and iterating every little thing. They've got all these sensors in the cars and all these cameras and wind tunnels and everything. You can imagine they didn't just design the F1 car in a lab over a weekend and set it and forget it.
EDDIE10:40They're constantly improving, and if we want go to market to be a grade, we need to do the same thing.
RACHAEL10:48And this podcast episode isn't meant to be like a plug for our services or anything, and it's not going to be that. But I feel like I would be remiss not mention here that, you know, if you are looking for a VP or Rev ops that can fill all these roles, or you currently have a VP of Reeboks who isn't like the unicorn that can do everything, it needs some help.
RACHAEL11:08This is all essentially what we do here at Union Square Consulting. We have a team of people that can do all of these things for you at a less cost than what full time higher would be. Probably. So I just wanted to put that out there.
EDDIE11:20Yeah, I mean, we'll layer that in and we're going to try our absolute best not to make this just a pitch, but the reason that we exist is because and we'll break each of these roles down is look, if if you're a crow listening to this and you can afford to spend 200 plus 300 plus grand on a, you know, VP of robots to do the architecture and analytics role.
EDDIE11:40Go for it. If you can find, you know, more budget to hire somebody at the same pay grade to do the systems. Great. And then do those people have 40 hours per week of work, then all of a sudden, like, we get into a tool that they're not familiar with. Like, sure, if you're a competent Salesforce person, you can figure out HubSpot, you can figure out outreach, you can figure out zoom info really fast.
EDDIE12:02But what about NetSuite? What about Salesforce? Cpq? There are tools that even we will not touch. Those are two examples where it's just like, you really need to know what you're doing and you need to have specialist expertise at that tool. Otherwise you're going to woefully screw things up. And so the things that I've seen, not just seen but experienced, I've had three jobs myself where this was the case, where I went in there.
EDDIE12:27And keep in mind, anybody listening to this, if you're not familiar with my background, I've spent most of my career in sales, but I kind of moonlit as a Salesforce admin, oftentimes in dual roles. It is so incredibly easy to just burn eight hours a day updating meaningless stuff in Salesforce. I did this in multiple roles first and foremost because I didn't know what I was doing.
EDDIE12:47Secondly, my bosses had no idea what they were doing. Thirdly, I didn't necessarily have enough important things to work on, and it's just really easy to spend all day updating tools like with no rhyme or reason. And we see this all the time in the market where somebody hired a relatively junior person and they built this workflow in Salesforce, and they built this new report and they uploaded this data.
EDDIE13:05And it's like at the end of the day, did we generate or close more pipeline? Did we forecast more accurately? No. So what was the value of doing all of that. And so it's really easy to say, okay, let's go hire a Salesforce manager at 150 K or what have you. And then that person is spending most of their time building stuff that just doesn't need to be built.
EDDIE13:25And so at the risk of just plugging services like the ones that we offer, the real question is like, what's better to have somebody at 150 grand a year that is wasting a lot of time building things that are not important, oftentimes messing that stuff up because they don't have enough experience and they have nobody more senior to, like, guide them or somebody at twice that pay grade on a fractional basis that is building better stuff faster.
EDDIE13:50And at the end of the day, you're spending the same or less. I know that that's a shameless plug, but it is what it is. But anyway, let's get back into the thing so that it's not just a shameless plug. Yeah, my intention for this podcast is if a crow, a CFO, CEO, anybody is listening to this, they want to hire a VP of Reb Ops.
EDDIE14:05I want to give you guys tangible takeaways on how to do this. After me having hired dozens of these people and continue to employ these folks and seeing what works and what doesn't work and how you need to think about this role.
RACHAEL14:17So before anyone writes a single line of a job description for VP of ops, what's the work that they need to be doing first?
EDDIE14:24So I think those are a number of things, right? Because we want to avoid falling into this trap of like just creating this wish list of 100 different things that we want and then trying to find this unicorn because first we're not going to find it. And then secondly, what we're going to do is we're going to end up settling and we're going to settle for whoever gives us the most compelling resume.
EDDIE14:40And that may not be the thing that is actually what we need. So one of the things that I'd start off with of the grand plans, right. So think about what go to market looks like today and what you want it to look like in 12 or 24 months, and what are the most important things that you want to improve?
EDDIE14:56And so instead of saying, look, we need somebody to manage Salesforce and HubSpot and outreach and Claude and these five other tools and vibe code, you know, go to market solutions and also like improve our inbound and outbound and expansion and also do all of our analytics, which is never going to happen. What's the one thing that you need to improve the most?
EDDIE15:20And I'll probably end up skipping ahead here in my answer, Rachel, in terms of like selecting or go to market motions. But the thing I will always push the arrows on is like, what's the one thing that you would improve if you could only improve one thing? Is it your inbound motion? Is it your outbound motion? Is it a all bound?
EDDIE15:39Is it expansion? Is it something else? Is it partners is a plague? If you could only fix one thing in the business, would it be one of those motions or would I oftentimes push even harder on is what about pipeline management and forecasting? What's the point of generating more pipeline if our salespeople are just losing deals in the middle of the sales cycle and wasting most of their time chasing deals that they can never close, and losing deals that they should be able to close because they're not following the right process.
EDDIE16:06So when I interview folks, one of the things that I'll do is just sit down and ask them, like, and this will be like a single question that I'll just follow up on, walk me through how to build an inbound engine. Give them 30 minutes to answer that question. I'll keep asking follow ups like how do you determine like what?
EDDIE16:25What an MKL is? How do you root leads? How do you do capacity planning? And this helps that I have some background in this. Right. And so I think if you know, maybe this is the first time CRO listening to this and you don't understand ops as well as you like, it could be challenging. We've got tons of resources on our website for this kind of stuff, but you really want to dive in and think about like, what is the motion that we want to improve most, and how am I going to find the person that's going to improve that?
EDDIE16:52Now, if you're, you know, a fifth time CRM and you're like, look, I've built a million outbound engines in my life and I've just entered this organization and the outbound engine is a mess, but I know exactly how to fix it, and I just need somebody to update the tools then. Great. As long as you've got time to do that, that's great.
EDDIE17:08That works. But I see so many people overlook this. And then really fundamental things like defining the ICP properly, outlining the process, doing capacity plans and territory plans, lead routing, lead response times, basic things that cause us to win or lose, prospects and leads and opportunities. Qualification criteria gets ignored because the Crow is so busy recruiting, hiring and managing the team and helping to close deals and forecast.
EDDIE17:38You've got all these things that are broken in the go to market engine and they're kind of obvious, but this doesn't have enough time to, like, sit down and spend eight hours trying to update the ICP document and then all the additional time to actually take that, like document from being a meaningless document into something that actually drives action to the go to market engine.
EDDIE17:56So these are some, some things that you really want to think about before you think about the type of person you want to hire.
RACHAEL18:01So when we when we tell people that they need to think about which could make a motion to improve proof first, how do you recommend they figure that out? Like what steps should they take to identify and decide which go to market? Motion is the actual number one priority that they need to hire on.
EDDIE18:19I think that there's a lot of gut feel that goes into this because we could do like some deep dive analytics. But if you're hiring your first time VP of ops, there's a good chance that the data is an absolute mess and it's going to be really hard to determine this. So just ask. Like, one way to look at this is what's the thing that's most broken.
EDDIE18:37But another way to look at this is if we fixed it, what would give us the biggest uptick right now? This is a place where benchmarks can come in handy, but we always encourage folks to use band marks with a grain of salt because some other company selling a different product to a different type of buyer at a different price point is not necessarily going to dictate what works for you.
EDDIE18:57Most companies have really bad data, and these are moving targets. And so I have a deep distrust of benchmarks, especially if you look at things like close rates, because it's like closed rates are based on how you define a qualified opportunity. But if you're looking at your close rates and you're saying, okay, like our close rates are 12% right now, that's a good indication that like, it should probably be at least 20%.
EDDIE19:20And what would it do if you got your close rate from 12% to 20%? And how does that compare to the level of effort it would take to I mean, it's almost double, right? So how much easier would it be to do that versus doubling your pipeline? I would argue it's a lot easier to get your close rate from 12%, which is pretty bad, to 20%, which is pretty average sales cycle.
EDDIE19:45Obviously, sales cycles are highly dependent upon the product and specifically the price point. But what if you could get your sales cycle down ten, 20, 30 days? I mean, 30 days is an extra. It's called 36 days for easy math. That means you sell 10% more this year. That's pretty significant. What if we could get our average deal size up by 10%?
EDDIE20:07I would argue that if those things are not already pretty dialed in, that's where you want to focus. If they are and then you say, okay, great. Like we need to like really improve our alpine engine, then that can be a great place to focus. But the question I would ask is, if you put all of the realistic resources that you can put into this and you focus on improving your pipeline management and forecasting versus improving your ability to generate more pipeline, which is going to pay off most and fastest.
EDDIE20:39It's probably going to be pipeline management, unless that's already in a good place. And then when we look at different channels, we probably want to look at the type of customer we're going after and what channels are going to make the most sense. And of course, our historic performance. Right. Like we make this podcast for companies that are well past product market fit.
EDDIE20:55So I would just argue, look at what's been working and form a hypothesis around the thing that, if improved, will have the biggest uptick for revenue production.
RACHAEL21:05And so what about AI? Because boards are pushing everyone to put AI everywhere right now. How should a crow think about that in the context of what they actually need from a VP of Rev Ops?
EDDIE21:18Well, this is a great timing for this question, right? Because we've just talked about the go to market motions and the top priorities. So let me
EDDIE21:25pose a question for any anybody listening to this.
EDDIE21:28There's so much pressure from everybody. And we feel this pressure too. I mean we spend I spend a lot of my time talking to the private equity firms backing the B2B tech companies that we work with, and they're putting all this pressure on us to push AI as well.
EDDIE21:39And we are I mean, we are working on new AI solutions every day. But to what end? If you've determined that closing more deals is your number one priority, then start to ask how AI can help you do that. But even then it becomes kind of a hammer. Looking for a nail? I really want to start with what's the go to market motion I want to fix most, or do I need to fix our pipeline management forecasting?
EDDIE22:07Then what are the things within that that we need to fix? And we have our go to market efficiency pyramid on our website that you can go to. And you can see fine details like bullet point by bullet point, all the different things that need to be fixed for each of these things that we're mentioning. And then you say, okay, like we need to improve our qualification so that we're not chasing deals that have no chance of success.
EDDIE22:29Okay. There are a number of basic things that need to be done to improve qualification, such as sitting down and determine what a qualified deal is before we start implementing AI. In addition to that, if we implement AI, let's say that we want to build an AI tool to help us qualify deals. We have to tell the AI what a qualified deal is.
EDDIE22:49We need to look at our past wins and losses and reverse engineer the deals we are most likely to win, and the signals that give us reasons for optimism or concern. Now we have sales methodologies like medic, Med Pick, Bant, Sandler, all these other things, but they ultimately need to be translated into a sales process. All of these things need to be dialed in alongside our ICP before we can feed any AI tool with any relevant context and expect it to produce any decent output.
EDDIE23:20If we just tell the AI, go look at our pipeline and tell us what deals are good and we're not good, we're going to have a really, really bad output. And so I'm all for AI solutions, but it has to be through the lens of what's the thing that, if improved, will drive revenue the most.
RACHAEL23:36So once we have that dialed in, we know exactly what we want out of this VP of robotics and what we need to improve in go to market. How does the Crow keep a new hire focused on what matters?
EDDIE23:49So we are really, really big fans of Go to Market ops or rev ops roadmap, which is essentially just combine, which is essentially just following OKRs objectives and key results. Right. So let's go back to these grand plans. Let's say that we need to say we're $100 million company, and we need to grow to $120 million this year.
EDDIE24:11And let's say we expect 5% churn. So that's $95 million in retention. And we need to get $25 million from new business and expansion. Okay. How are we going to do that? Well, we have a clear goal of $25 million of new business and expansion. Let's say it's $20 million new business, $5 million of expansion. What does that mean in terms of the pipeline that we need to generate?
EDDIE24:35How many inbound marketing leads do we need? How, how or how much inbound pipeline do we need would probably be a better metric. What do we need in terms of outbound in terms of activities, meetings, pipeline, etc.? What do our historic numbers tell us? And this is one of the chicken and egg things, right? Like this is the kind of work that a strategic ops would do.
EDDIE24:56Sit down and look at all this stuff and help build out the annual plan. And that may be a great place to start with a new competent, strategic VP of Rev Ops. But what that then translates into is a roadmap where we say these are our specific objectives. We want to generate $50 million of qualified pipeline through outbound, for example.
EDDIE25:19In order to do that, we need to improve our ICP and buyer personas. We need to run a capacity plan. We need to build better territories. ET cetera, etc.. Again, we have all this stuff laid out on our website. You can go to Union Square Consulting Frameworks. And then we have a framework that guides our quarter. And this is exactly what we do with our clients.
EDDIE25:40Right. So now we say okay, this is our top priority. We want to generate $50 million from outbound. In order to do that. These are the two, three four, five things we need to do. Obviously, we also need to get our team to actually execute the outbound process, make the call, set the meetings, build the pipeline. And that's a really important thing.
EDDIE25:56And I'm going to glaze over that. And so we've got this all on a document somewhere. And the crow sits down with the VP of ops. They discuss it. The crow provides feedback. And then there's finally a document that gets signed off on. Then for us at least, and this isn't the only way work, but for us, we work in bio weekly sprints.
EDDIE26:12So now we say, okay, great, we got our quarterly plan. What are we going to do over the next two weeks? And then we say, okay, over the next two weeks we're going to really dial in ICP and buyer personas, for example. You could probably do more than that in two weeks. But just as an example, this is how you get folks focused.
EDDIE26:27The way you get them unfocused is to say, okay, we're going to add you to slack, and everyone across the team is just going to ping you with whatever random requests they can possibly think of. Hey, like, we need you to jump in and approve this deal via deal desk. We need you to build this commission plan. We need you to update this workflow.
EDDIE26:45ET cetera, etc.. It is so incredibly easy to take anybody, even the most strategic leader, and derail them by just lobbing these random requests at them. And the onus is on the crow to sit down and say, like, assuming you've hired the right person, that can be strategic. We're going to build a roadmap and we're going to stick to it.
EDDIE27:07And if some new request comes in, unless the house is on fire,
EDDIE27:12we're not going to delay the things that we have to do in order to generate that $50 million of pipeline from outbound, for example. And this is one of the hardest things for people to do. It's really, really hard to find people that are good at pushing back, because everybody wants to just make people happy and keep their jobs.
EDDIE27:29And it's also really hard for The Crow is they're running around from deal to deal, rap to rap interview to interview, to take a step back and say, hold on a second. I need to think long and hard about like, what are the most important things for us to accomplish in operations? But this is what the best teams do.
RACHAEL27:42And says, I think it'd be especially important for a new VP of Rev who wants to look good and make their new company happy and make their new coworkers happy, so they field all the incoming requests that come in and they want to do everything for everybody. I think it's just it's so important to have those guardrails and have that that like coverage from their bosses and CRO to be like, no, you need to focus on these things specifically, it's okay to turn down these other ad hoc requests and fire drills.
EDDIE28:11But it's also something to think through, right? Like we spend a lot of time talking about the work that we do and the work that makes sense for us. Commissions calculations is an example of something that we've done a couple of times. We don't want to do it again, and it's a really slippery slope for a VP of Rev ops to fall into because it can consume most or all of their time.
EDDIE28:32It's also really easy to upset people when things don't get calculated correctly, and oftentimes commission plans can be overly complex and problematic, which is a topic for another day. And, you know, between that deal desk, like the ad hoc request for field updates and uploading data into Salesforce, it's so easy to just consume 100% of the VP of Rev ops time, or even if we're not consuming all of their time, it's like, oh, congratulations, you have a half an hour between meetings.
EDDIE29:03Go update ICP. It's like people need
EDDIE29:07protected time for deep work. If you want someone to be strategic, it is not going to happen in 30 minute windows between meetings in the middle of the day. Like they have to be able to sit down and focus for a few hours on things, or these strategic things will never get done.
RACHAEL29:25Absolutely. You and I both know that more than anyone.
EDDIE29:29Yeah. And I mean, for me, like I do all of my best strategic work early in the morning, a lot of times I start at seven and I work through 9 or 10, and then after a certain hour of the day, like I'm just spent and I can jump on infinite numbers of zoom calls. But if I'm really trying to get like strategic work done after a certain hour, like it's just impossible.
EDDIE29:52And I have the benefit of not getting like hammered by a bunch of people on slack all day long. Partially. And this is just like a little plug for cross out there. Part of the reason for that is because I've designed a system for this company, not just in go to market, but across the entire company where I don't have people slacking me all day with every little request, because we've defined processes and we've built systems, and this can be so incredibly liberating.
EDDIE30:15And so I think for crows out there, hiring a competent VP of Rub ops can be absolutely game changing if you hire the right person and empower them. But so many crows are like victims of like, I've got 18 months to save my job and I've got to hit this number and I've got to hustle and hire people and manage them and close deals and forecast accurately.
EDDIE30:36And I just need this field updated in Salesforce. And it's like, okay, fine, I get it. But if you never take a step back and improve the engine, then you're always going to be a victim of
RACHAEL30:45Quick 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.
RACHAEL31:08All right. Back to the episode.
RACHAEL31:10And this probably segways in pretty well. To this next question, I wanted to talk more about architecting go to market. And you mentioned it in the beginning of the podcast. And you're saying all the different, you know, jobs of VP of robots, one of them was architecting go to market. So walk me through what architecting go to market actually involves, say the priority is outbound.
RACHAEL31:33What has to get thought through with that? And what does that mean for
RACHAEL31:38who you choose to be VP of ops, and what kind of skills and experience they need to be able to do this?
EDDIE31:44Sure. So again, we have all this mapped out in our go to market efficiency pyramid and all of like the specific pyramids for each motion that we've built out. And get that on our website at Union Square Consulting backslash frameworks link will be in the show notes. But what that means, like in a nutshell, or like the short version is you're going to sit down and you're going to map out into in the definitions and process for how the team does outbound or inbound or partners or plug or expansion sales, what have you, as well as of course, like qualifying, working and forecasting deals.
EDDIE32:22So let's just talk about pipeline management for a moment. And I'll try not to give every example. Right. Because it's all right on our website. Well, how do we like, improve our pipeline management? Well, first we need to make sure we've got the right ICP and buyer personas. Next, we need to sit down and think about what is our qualification criteria.
EDDIE32:40When does the deal move into pipeline? What steps do we need to follow? What are the stages, what stage? Entry and exit criteria? What questions do reps need to ask? What do they actually need to do before they can move a deal from stage 1 to 2, 2 to 3, etc.? And then how do we forecast right now, even for me this is a little bit confusing because what is the difference between that and just implementing Salesforce?
EDDIE33:05Because any competent Salesforce architect and this is where it's even more confusing. We're using the word architect for two very different things, right. And Salesforce Architect is like a common term out in the market. Like there's certifications like Certified Technical Architect, etc.. Like I didn't just make this stuff up. Any competent like Salesforce Architect is going to ask you, like, what stages do you have in your sales process?
EDDIE33:32Like they might they might ask, what's your entry and exit criteria? They're going to want to know about validation rules and workflows and things in Salesforce that are going to guide that. But where things sort of like fall off is the more how do I say this? Like they're not necessarily going to write up a document that says, this is our sales process, that then informs how we train reps.
EDDIE33:54So there's a big difference between saying, okay, like we need to create a field in Salesforce that says, give me the name of the decision maker and a validation rule that says, we can't move from stage two to stage three until we've entered that decision maker. That's a technical thing. And a strategic thing is to say we're going to use med pick, and this is how we're going to use, and these are the questions that reps need to ask.
EDDIE34:17And this is what it means for a deal to be qualified. And this is what they have to do before we get to stage two and stage three. Now some of that will then translate into Salesforce. We can still ask who the decision maker is and what their decision making criteria is, and all the other things that come out of that sales methodology or whatever one we we subscribe to.
EDDIE34:35But it's a different person that thinks about how we're going to translate that sales methodology into a sales process and qualify deals and run the process, and how we're going to spot deals that probably need to move out of the pipeline versus the person that thinks, like, here's the workflows and validation rules and fields that I need to build in Salesforce.
EDDIE34:55Those are two very different roles. And I'll just add that you have to have the strategic stuff first in order to inform how to build the tools. Otherwise, like you just end up building the tools. And this is why salespeople complain like Salesforce is so annoying. Like it's all these fields I have to update and it doesn't help me sell well.
EDDIE35:12When I actually worked for Salesforce, the stuff I had to update were the things that actually helped me close deals. Asking who the decision maker is is a perfectly reasonable question to ask a sales rep, but we've had other companies that ask like 35 other questions that aren't that important. And like the rep is like, every time I get off the phone, the phone, I have to update 8 million fields and it doesn't actually help me sell.
RACHAEL35:33And can a Crow Owen go to market architecture themselves.
EDDIE35:37If they have time? I mean, they ultimately need to own it at the end of the day. But I think the difference is, is like, it's one thing for a crow to say, hey, I'm stepping into a new organization. I know the ICP, for example, is outdated. We're going to sit down and we're going to update it. It is another thing for them to say, I'm personally going to go and run the reports in Salesforce, run the reports in HubSpot.
EDDIE36:00I'm going to look at all the leads that converted and didn't convert, all the outbound meetings that converted and didn't convert pipeline, closed one customers LTV, etc., etc. and then I'm going to put pen to paper and in detail I'm going to write down. And by the way, this is fresh because Jerry and I just worked on this again for like the umpteenth time, and I'm going to put pen to paper and define who our ICP is, and then translate that into like how we do outbound territory planning and how we, you know, qualify inbound leads.
EDDIE36:30It's one thing to sit down and spend hours and hours of your own time as a crow doing that. And it's another thing to delegate that to a competent VP of robots and help them bring something back and then give feedback on it.
RACHAEL36:41So who should be looking at the go to market metrics regularly? And what does looking at them actually mean beyond the top line numbers.
EDDIE36:47Yeah. So I thought this was really interesting. I interviewed Tim Strickland, the former CRO of zoom Info, as well as Scott Sutton, who was one of his VP's of Rev ops. They had two separate teams that did very different things, and they both reported to the president of the company, which was like a whole different topic and very interesting.
EDDIE37:05And I asked him this exact question, and I understand that like many people listening to this are not zoom info, nor are we, but I wanted to just use this to paint a picture. And what he said is, is that if the VP of Rev Ops is not analyzing data and bringing insights about what's working and what's not working in the business, then they're not doing their job.
EDDIE37:23But if he doesn't do that as Crow, he's also not doing his job. So it's a two way street right now. He obviously had a lot of resources, both on the rev side as well as the sales management or revenue management side to help him. And he wasn't running around like a chicken with his head cut off, as you might do in a much smaller company with less resources.
EDDIE37:44So let's be fair to that. But I think that it is the job of the crow to not only look at the dashboard, but to look deeper and slice and dice the data at different reps, different teams, different segments, different types of customers, etc. and look at what's working and what's not working, and try to form hypotheses about areas to double down on, places to cut back, and areas where we want to improve the model so that maybe, maybe what we're doing is not producing the desired outcome, but it's because there's something broken that we could fix.
EDDIE38:15At the end of the day, though, like The Crow only has so much time to do that, and the VP of Rev Ops in my mind, or either should do this work or have somebody under them. If we have a big enough team, we can have a dedicated analyst or team of analysts, of course, to do this work.
EDDIE38:31And I think that is one of the most valuable things that we can do in rev ops. And oftentimes one of the most, I don't want to say overlooked because I think this is obvious for everybody, but just neglected. And then what I would add is there are incredible things that you can do with AI. This is one of the first things that we built here at USC was an engine built on Claude to do two things.
EDDIE38:53One, to give us a dashboard that is way more robust than what we could build in Salesforce and HubSpot, because those are two main like, you know, sales and marketing tools and also a tool that we can ask questions of. Right. And so just to kind of harp on this for a moment, we've got a tool that is giving us all of the go to market metrics in the exact format we want in ways that were impossible in Salesforce.
EDDIE39:17And then on top of that, we have a chatbot where we can ask all these questions not just of Salesforce and HubSpot, but all of our other data sources like Google Analytics, and then other things that are maybe not relevant for other folks, like our podcast platform, LinkedIn. What am I missing, our newsletter, etc., which I guess is powered by HubSpot and the ability to have access to all that data right there to see it, to slice and dice that data really quickly in ways we couldn't in Salesforce.
EDDIE39:46And also to then ask questions is incredibly valuable. But at the end of the day, it's only as valuable as our willingness and ability to go and look at that data. So I think this is an incredibly important thing, and I think a competent architect could certainly do the job. I'm surprised at how many folks I meet that either struggle with this or just don't like doing it, but it's not such a distinct skill set like being able to, you know, implement Salesforce.
EDDIE40:15I think that the strategic person that's doing the architecture can totally do the the analytics, whereas the tools person usually doesn't have as firm a grip on the metrics analytics as as you would want. And there's obviously exceptions.
RACHAEL40:33Yeah. And I was going to ask this before, but I just remembered and I guess it's it goes in line with what you're just saying here as well. How do we incorporate these needs for the VP of Roll into things like the job description and the kinds of questions we ask when we're interviewing, to make sure that we're hiring somebody who is capable of doing these things and has experience with these things.
EDDIE40:54Well, first I'll just say, and this is like a general hiring thing, this is not even specific to rev or go to market, but like one of the after having read like the top three books on hiring, my big takeaway was like, the biggest problem with job descriptions is it's really an advertisement for the job, and you're telling the candidate like what they would want and what the requirements are.
EDDIE41:11It's not really the thing that you should start with. It's like the last thing that you should write. So before writing a job description for any role in this company, I always write a job scorecard, which is one of the things that I want this person to accomplish. And so this goes back into the grand plans and then go to market motions.
EDDIE41:26If my grand plan is I want to grow from 100 million to 120 million, and I want to do that by dramatically improving our ability to close deals and forecast accurately, and then build an outbound engine that's far more efficient at generating pipeline, then I need to interview somebody around that. If I need somebody that's actually going to architect that solution, not just in the tools but the actual definitions and process, then I'm going to need to go and interview people for those things.
EDDIE41:54I'm going to want to look at somebody that's actually built and outbound engine before. I'm going to want to look at somebody that has real experience forecasting and helping to improve deals. Being closed. One, I'm going to want to ask about specific tangible outcomes they've achieved in past roles, because it's really easy for somebody to say, oh yeah, I worked in the outbound engine and we we implemented outreach.
EDDIE42:14We did all these things. I built the entire reporting engine and you're like, great. Like, well, how much pipeline did your team generate? Oh, I don't know that off the top of my head. Well, if you don't know that off the top of your head, then you probably weren't that focused on it.
EDDIE42:27Awesome.
RACHAEL42:28Something on to planning how to manage go to market tech. And I know, I know, we covered a little bit of this, a little bit like throughout the rest of the episode. But specifically I wanted to ask how often have you seen one VP of Rev Ops do both the tools job and the architecture. Go to market architecture and analytics job both really well.
EDDIE42:51I can't think of anybody that I've seen do that, and there's a simple reason for that, right? Like
EDDIE42:56it just takes a certain amount of time to get really good at one thing versus the other.
EDDIE43:00And the people that are really good at one thing versus the other have spent X number of years focus solely on it. And I've just it just would take twice as much time to learn both.
EDDIE43:10Right. So and I and I, I've worked with people that have learned some level of both. But I think that like I'll take myself as an example. Right. Like I have three different certifications on Salesforce. So you could argue that, like, I know what I'm doing in Salesforce and also part of it, and if I took the time, I could probably learn HubSpot pretty quickly and easily, and I'd be like, I'd know enough to be dangerous.
EDDIE43:35But when I compare myself against the folks on our team, it's like night and day difference, right? Despite the fact that I've spent like been building and implementing Salesforce for like 15 years. Not that I spend any of my time doing that today, but it's like 15 years ago that I started learning, that I spend most of my time thinking about the strategic stuff.
EDDIE43:51Right. And that just took a certain amount of time and effort. And having been a sales rep was really helpful to that. Having been a sales rep at Salesforce was really helpful to that. Whereas somebody who spent their entire career building workflows in Salesforce will have learned a lot of things that I didn't learn by not spending time doing that and will have not learned all the things that I learned, like sitting in forecasting meetings and actually closing deals and thinking about how to architect outbound processes and inbounds and following up with these leads myself.
EDDIE44:25I mean, I will say it's an interesting thing to me. Like there's a lot of folks in Rev ops, I have never been in sales, but there's real value in somebody who's carried it back for at least a short period of time, especially in that strategic role. But we've hired people that have MBAs, we've hired people that just come from like a more mathematical analytics background, and it's just a different skill set.
EDDIE44:45And it's like, sure, you probably want your strategic VP to learn how to build a basic report in Salesforce, how to export data, maybe import data, building a field, little things like that, like these don't take that long to to learn. But the other stuff, I mean, you can spend years and years getting really good at tools and that time you're spending, you're not learning about how do we like improve outbound, how do we improve our pipeline management?
EDDIE45:11What are the best forecasting methodologies? There's just a difference between how you configure the tool and how you think about it strategically.
RACHAEL45:18And on the AI side, does does a team need somebody who's obsessed with AI and like knows how to build all these things really, really well? Or is that the wrong thing to hire for?
EDDIE45:28I personally think it's the wrong thing to hire for. I mean, look like if you're anthropic and you've got the money to hire dozens of people at multiple hundreds of thousands of dollars a year, and you can attract that talent, then by all means, like, why would you not do that? Right? But I think if we go back to like where we started with, okay, like our grand plan is to grow from 100 million to 120 million, and we want to improve pipeline management and outbound.
EDDIE45:53And here's all the specific things that we need to improve it. Like if somebody is a really competent Salesforce architect to go and learn how to implement the new AI native tool or how to build something in Claude. I mean, I've seen this firsthand, watching Jerry build a lot of this stuff and implement a lot of the stuff that we've been doing over the last year.
EDDIE46:14It's not rocket science. And sure, it would be nice if Jerry just lived and breathed go to market AI. But what I will say is, like the folks that don't understand Salesforce architecture, that don't understand the other fundamentals, first of all, they might try to like vibe code Salesforce, which I just think is the dumbest thing anybody could do.
EDDIE46:38As much as I actually don't love Salesforce, replacing like a truly enterprise tool, something you vibe coded and the things that have taken them billions of dollars to develop the security model, the, you know, the data model, etc. if you just let loose with somebody that doesn't know what they're doing, like you can create some really serious problems and now your data is at risk and you have all these other, other, other issues versus somebody that says, look, I'm going to figure out how to MCP Salesforce into Claude.
EDDIE47:10Like it's not rocket science. So I personally would over index some of the people that understand the basic tools and are curious and are going to focus on solving the problem that's going to actually help us drive revenue versus the person that's like, look at all the cool things I built with Claude code, and look at all the cool things I can do.
EDDIE47:29And now you're a hammer looking for a nail.
RACHAEL47:31That's totally fair. Yeah, I think so much of AI and what's come out with AI has been a lot of hammers looking for nails. It's like, we can do this really cool thing now let's find problems for it to solve, which has worked a lot of the times, like the AI has helped a lot of issues. But yeah.
EDDIE47:47Well, let's just think about like some, some of like the best use cases for AI just for a moment. Right. Like
EDDIE47:52I think the analytics piece is really, really,
EDDIE47:54really big. Specifically, I've seen a number of reports where campaign analytics are one of the most valuable, like Rois that companies have actually achieved with AI on a more consistent basis.
EDDIE48:09Right? Well, what does it take in order to build an AI tool to analyze campaign analytics? Well, you have to have, like all your foundational data in place. And for that, you need somebody that understands the marketing tool at a deep level, probably your Salesforce tool as well. And then to take that and figure out how are we going to put that into Claude, or how are we going to implement some other AI native analytics tool is not rocket science, but the contrary, somebody who just happens to be like geeking out on AI for the last two years and doesn't understand sales and marketing tools, doesn't understand the data architecture.
EDDIE48:44You could create real problems there.
RACHAEL48:46So, Eddie, you've had crows hire you while they were actively searching or hire us as a company? Well, they're actively searching for a full time VP of Rev. How do those engagements usually play out?
EDDIE48:57Yeah, I'm going to try really hard to avoid like the shameless plug here because this surprised me. I would have thought that we would always get hired or any. And this is like a plug for fractional, not just for us, right? I would think that it wouldn't make any sense to hire a fractional if you're going to hire a full time VP of Rev ops, like we should only be working with companies that are too small to hire VP of Rev Ops.
EDDIE49:18But here's what I've seen in reality over the last number of years. First, a lot of folks are looking for some kind of a stopgap. CRO has come into a new organization. They need to get their head around everything. They don't want to be digging through Salesforce reports and doing all the things that we've talked about here, and they want somebody to start working tomorrow.
EDDIE49:35Meanwhile, they're going to launch a search and hire a VP of Rev Ops and hope to have somebody in C in three months. I've seen this so many times. Right. And so we say look like you can have an out at three months. Like no problem. Just cancel your contract at three months and we're all good. And we'll do all these things to set them up for success.
EDDIE49:51And what inevitably happens is, is the person gets hired in three months, they come in, they're trying to meet everybody, get the lay of the land, understand the organization, all the things that you do when you start a new full time job. Meanwhile, we're like heads down trying to define qualification criteria for pipeline and update Salesforce and figure out how to get the reps to, you know, qualify out all the deals in their pipeline that aren't real.
EDDIE50:15And all this is doing is setting up a foundation of quality data and process and execution for that VP of Rev to walk into. But then what happens most of the time is that VP of Rev Ops comes in and sees a bunch of problems, some of which we're working on, some of which were not. They have a bunch of recurring daily things that they need to work on, like deal desk and commissions and updating Salesforce and all these other things.
EDDIE50:40And they're looking around and they're saying, so you guys are laser focused and trying to fix the outbound engine. I've got these million other things that I need to do. Why don't we continue to partner together? And I know this sounds like a shameless plug, but it is something to think about, especially when organizations are hiring that one and only VP of Rev ops that can't do everything.
EDDIE50:59They're like, okay, I'm a strategic person. I definitely need help with the tools. But also you're already halfway through improving the outbound engine. So like, why don't you keep doing that and I'll work on this other thing. And it's been a pretty good partnership for us. And what we've found working with companies is that whether they have a VP of Rev ops or not is kind of irrelevant to our ability to add value and for our ability to, like, keep the customer and make them happy.
EDDIE51:23Right? Because they can just cancel the contract up to three months, they weren't happy and that almost never happens. And so that's been like an interesting eye opening thing for me. And I think it just speaks to the thing that you see on LinkedIn every day, which is just how incredibly overwhelmed any person in Rev Ops is. I have everyone I talk to says they're just flooded with more work than they can possibly do, and it's just never the case that I hear from anybody in Rev ops that they're just sitting around with nothing worth working on.
EDDIE51:52Unless of course, you're me. And I worked in like really small organizations, like 3 or 5 salespeople like 15 years ago where it was like, okay, yeah, there's only so much rev ops for a team of that size. But the larger organizations that we work with, they just have this endless roadmap of stuff to do. And the hardest thing is just prioritizing it and finding the person that actually knows what they're doing, whether it's the strategic thing, the analytics thing, or the tools thing that needs to get done.
RACHAEL52:18So if you're advising a crow on where to start building that team, what are the rules that you point to first?
EDDIE52:25Well, I think the first thing is you've got to have somebody thinking strategically, right? Because otherwise you're going to end up building systems that don't do the right things, that don't actually help you drive revenue. And this is such a slippery slope, it is so easy to just grab all these ad hoc requests and update this field and this workflow and load this data and run this report.
EDDIE52:47I mean, there is an endless opportunity in most organizations to do this. And then you wake up a year or two years later and nothing about the go to market engine is actually improved. And there's no tangible impact on revenue. So if the crow or someone else is going to play that role, fine, that's great. And we're just going to delegate the tools updates to somebody and they are going to be that reactive, ad hoc.
EDDIE53:10Let me build something in Salesforce to the snap of a finger person. That's totally fine. But somebody has to own the architecture. Next is the analytics. And even if it's just an hour or two a week, I strongly advise somebody have someone looking at the analytics on a regular basis. Otherwise, everything's just theory, right? And the slower that you are to look at the analytics, the slower you are to identify something that is not working or that could be improved, that could help you hit your number.
EDDIE53:36And so that's why I think analytics are so incredibly important. The other thing I'll even mention is with analytics, if you ever spend any real time looking at analytics, and I've done this with so many of our customers, the first thing that you always see is a lack of execution. You see that the pipeline is a mess because reps chase deals that they shouldn't be chasing and don't qualify them out.
EDDIE53:59You see leads that don't convert because we didn't follow up enough or we didn't follow up fast enough. You see outbound accounts that didn't convert because we didn't multi thread or we didn't, you know, reach out via multiple channels or we didn't reach out enough times. And these are basic things that like the data is a mess and the results are poor due to a simple lack of execution.
EDDIE54:23Then you also see all these opportunities where you could automate a lot of that data and save everybody a lot of time. That's why I say like, there's limitless opportunities to do this work, but you've got to think first and foremost about like, what's the thing that's going to move the needle for revenue? Did I answer your question?
RACHAEL54:40Yeah. Yeah, I think so. And so I just have one more question left for us today. If a company can't afford to or more people at the VP level for Redbox, what should they be thinking through about finding that one person?
EDDIE54:57So like I said, if the crow can play the role of the architect, that's that's fine. You can hire somebody mid-level, maybe even a little bit junior, just depending on the size and complexity of the organization. And the text is the tech stack. Just know that you get what you pay for. And if the crow is not a technical person, then it's going to be hard to manage the technical person and know whether they're doing the right thing or not.
EDDIE55:18Right? Obviously shameless plug here. This is the exact problem that we solve for. And most of our customers. What we're doing is we're combining somebody at the strategic level and also the systems level that is like well over like the 200 K mark. We don't have a ton of junior resources, but we do have some mid-level resources that we can plug in under those folks.
EDDIE55:41And then of course we're looking like tool by tool at what different skill sets people have and what tools our customers need. And so like it might be that they don't need anywhere near 40 hours a week of work on the systems, but they've got multiple systems that take more than one person, because you can't easily find a person with the skill set across all those tools.
EDDIE56:01And so that's what we attempt to do for folks. But again, I don't want to make this a shameless plug. It's a zero. Or someone else has time to, like, sit down and really think through the architecture and then delegate that down to somebody to build into the tools and then analyze the reports and the metrics themselves, then that can definitely work.
EDDIE56:17But just know that you're signing up for a significant commitment. And even if that commitment is only ten hours a week, that's a lot of time for many crows that are trying to figure out how to hit their number and save their jobs.
RACHAEL56:29Well, that is all the time we have today for this topic, but I hope it was insightful for anybody looking to hire VP or Rev ops, or even if they just hired a VP of ops, and they want to know, like what that person should be working on focusing on and how to keep them accountable to those initiatives.
RACHAEL56:46And thank you so much, Eddie, for getting the the right up of the newsletter that you drafted together. That was very helpful creating this topic.
EDDIE56:55Absolutely. I have interviewed and hired so many VP's of robots, so I hope this is helpful for folks listening, because I think
EDDIE57:02I've probably interviewed and hired more of rev ops than almost any CRO out there, so I hope that the experience is helpful.
EDDIE57:11Thanks for listening to the episode. If this resonated. Please give us a five star rating and a follow. It helps us reach more people, and you get our latest and greatest content without having to search for it. And if you're looking for hands on help and go to market strategy and or rev ops, please reach out to us.
EDDIE57:25We 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.
