Channing Ferrer on this episode
Channing Ferrer is Chief Revenue Officer at BuiltIn and brings 22 years of experience in sales leadership and revenue operations, including most recently as VP of Sales Operations, Strategy, and Sales Acceleration at HubSpot. He is also a limited partner at Stage 2 Capital and adjunct professor of revenue operations at Sales Impact Academy.
CROs who excel at leveraging revenue operations think in layers of data and connect operational details to strategic business outcomes. Rather than treating operations and strategy as separate functions, best-in-class leaders integrate them, using data to craft compelling narratives that drive behavior change across their teams. Ferrer outlines a "level one through level four" data framework, where frontline metrics roll up into increasingly sophisticated insights that inform executive decision-making.
The core reframe is that operations exists to enable sales reps to spend 90 percent of their time selling, not administering. This means embedding ops analysts close to teams, blending quantitative metrics with qualitative customer feedback, and running continuous experiments to validate hypotheses about what drives revenue. At BuiltIn, a Series C scale-up, Ferrer applied this playbook by building separate ops analysts assigned to new business, account management, and customer operations teams, and prioritizing career pathing and enablement after a listening tour across the organization.
The conversation covers how to think about testing versus iterating (typically three months to show progress), how to gather voice of the customer and voice of the prospect, and why even early-stage founders should invest in a RevOps hire—not as overhead, but as the key lever to making sales reps more productive and revenue decisions more data-driven.
What we cover in this episode
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2:30
Ferrer's 22-Year Journey From management consulting and Capital IQ to HubSpot, building sales teams and sales operations globally.
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8:45
Ops and Strategy Integration How to blend operational execution with forward-looking strategy using data to drive insights and foresight.
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13:20
Level One Through Level Four Data A pyramid framework for metrics: high-level KPIs roll down to increasingly granular drivers that reveal root causes.
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21:00
Making Metrics Meaningful to Reps Using rep packs and dashboards to show frontline sellers how top performers execute and why their behavior matters.
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28:15
Blending Quantitative and Qualitative Data Embedding analysts in sales teams, leveraging tools like Gong, and hosting voice of customer panels to triangulate insights.
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37:45
Sales Acceleration and Nonlinear Growth How solution engineering, BDRs, and inbound consulting teams create productivity gains without linear hiring.
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46:30
Testing, Iterating, and the Three-Month Window Setting upfront hypotheses, defining evaluation windows, and measuring progress toward end states rather than immediate wins.
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58:20
Scale-up vs. Startup Mindset Series C companies shift from proving value to scaling systems, processes, and hiring; different challenges at each stage.
The lines worth sharing
Strategy really helps drive insights and foresights. You need the ops to kind of facilitate the day-to-day.
Channing Ferrer · 9:30
The differentiator of a decent ops team versus an excellent ops team is really understanding how to convert metrics into a story.
Channing Ferrer · 13:45
If a rep understands the why, your behavior is going to change much more drastically or more effectively.
Channing Ferrer · 23:15
We need to always be testing in sales or always be closing in ops. Always be testing.
Channing Ferrer · 47:00
Common questions from this episode
What is the difference between a startup and a scale-up in terms of revenue strategy?
Startups focus on finding product-market fit and understanding the value proposition. Scale-ups have already proven value and shift to scaling systems, processes, hiring, and operations to support rapid growth while maintaining quality and efficiency.
How should CROs think about connecting operations with strategy?
Integrate both functions using a data-driven framework. Strategy drives forward-looking insights and vision; operations enables day-to-day execution. Use multi-layered metrics (level one through four) to tell a coherent story that connects frontline activity to business outcomes.
How long should you test a hypothesis before deciding to iterate or kill it?
Typically three months is a reasonable window. Define your hypothesis and end state upfront, identify early indicators of progress, and assess whether you are moving in the right direction. If you see momentum toward the end state, iterate; if not, pull the plug.
Why should early-stage startups hire a RevOps person?
A dedicated RevOps resource frees sales leaders to focus on selling and decision-making rather than reporting and data cleanup. Even with three sales reps, RevOps provides the data visibility and operational leverage needed to allocate resources effectively and grow efficiently.
What is the rep pack and how does it drive behavior change?
A rep pack is a dashboard showing 15 to 20 key metrics that all reps can access and compare. By benchmarking against top performers, reps can see what behaviors drive success, making the why clear and enabling them to self-correct without constant management pressure.
How do you gather both quantitative and qualitative customer feedback?
Embed analysts on the sales floor to hear anecdotal feedback naturally. Run voice of customer panels with existing customers monthly. Leverage solution engineers to capture voice of the prospect and assign dollar values to missed features, then feed all insights into product via a shared dashboard.
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Channing Ferrer, CRO at BuiltIn, on how top revenue leaders blend operations with strategy using layered data and storytelling to drive rep productivity.
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CRO revenue operations
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level one level two metrics
voice of customer
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Read the full transcript · 56 KB · Channing Ferrer
SPEAKER_00Welcome to RevOps Corner, where we talk about how B2B SaaS companies scale through revenue operations by interviewing amazing guests and sharing what we see in the trenches every day here at Union Square Consulting. Today, I'm here with Channing Ferrer, Chief Revenue Officer at
EDDIE REYNOLDSBuiltIn to discuss the role of a CRO in tech startups and how and why CROs leverage revenue operations to help them execute. BuiltIn is a Series C scale-up, and we'll get into why it's a scale-up instead of a startup, an online community for startups and tech professionals to learn, grow in their careers, find startup jobs, tech news, and events. Channing is also a limited partner at Stage 2 Capital, an adjunct professor of revenue operations at Sales Impact Academy, and until January of this year, was previously the VP of sales operations, strategy, and sales acceleration at HubSpot. Between HubSpot and previous roles, Channing has spent the last 22 years in sales leadership and sales operations leadership. So I'm excited to dive in. Thank you very much for joining me today, Channing. Definitely. My pleasure, Eddie. Thanks for having me. Yeah. I'm excited to dive into this, and I think for our audience, it would help. If you could start by sharing your backstory and the journey you've taken over the last 22 years, or maybe there's even more that
EDDIE REYNOLDSI didn't see on your LinkedIn profile of your journey with sales leadership and sales operations and now revenue operations.
SPEAKER_08Definitely. My pleasure. And when you say 22 years, I guess I hadn't counted in a while, but it seems like a
CHANNING FERRERlong time. But to me, it doesn't seem like that long ago when I got started. I'll give you the quick background. So I first came out of school, went to Villanova undergrad in the Northeast here in the Philadelphia area, and went into consulting, doing management and financial consulting. Thought that was what I wanted to do. Thought I wanted to kind of help solve problems, which is what it seems consultants do. Pretty quickly, I decided I wanted to do something different. And I came to kind of a fork in the career road. I was still rather young. I had either the option to join a young tech company called Capital IQ or go into investment banking. I had two different offers on the table. I opted to go down the tech path and didn't really know much about this company. They were brand new, just received some funding, showed up, and I was going to be essentially a solution engineer. And we had no customers yet, though. So I was brought into all of our sales calls, and I was intended to train our customers, essentially. It was a financial services oriented software product. When I started doing that, I
CHANNING FERRERvery quickly realized that I was pretty good at selling because I was asking a lot of really good questions. And I didn't think I wanted to be in sales. But by asking all these questions, I was
CHANNING FERRERfiguring out what the problems were. And once you figure out the problems, then you can ultimately deploy a solution. So I pretty quickly moved into selling, actually, as opposed to being the solution engineer or training consultant that I thought I was going to be. And I built up a team, hired a bunch of folks, and became actually one of the sales leaders at Capital IQ over about a 12-year period. And being in more of a kind of a finance background, though, which is what, again, my consulting experience was and financial software, I actually eventually took over sales ops at Capital IQ, which was bought by Standard & Poor's. So I got this really interesting experience of leading a lot of sales teams, building out this whole international sales team that I ran, and then also running the global sales ops function. And I won't go through the whole, the whole story. But that's
CHANNING FERRERkind of, I think that the early days for my career, and I did that for about 12 years at Capital IQ, and then went into run sales at a couple different places and run sales ops at a couple different places, including most recently HubSpot.
SPEAKER_02It's very cool. I've taken a similar trajectory starting out in finance and my career in a sales role,
EDDIE REYNOLDSmoving into tech sales, and now revenue operations. And so really excited to dive into this. I think one of the first questions I wanted to ask you was about, obviously, the great success you had at HubSpot and all the things you were doing. Specifically, I know you managed strategy and you managed operations. And we don't always see companies tying operations with strategy that well. And I'd love to hear a little bit about how you did that, and where you think some companies sort of fall off in their inability to connect their operations with their strategy.
CHANNING FERRERYeah, it's a great question. So let me first define how I think of strategy. Because I think that's important. Strategy is one of these big, broad words that can mean kind of different things for different people. And when I first built up the ops and strategy team at HubSpot, one of the first things that we looked closely at is what's the strategy? How are we going to help define the strategy? And the ops team was a little more oriented towards traditional operational functions. And I think of that through the lens of how do we help close a deal? How do we help answer questions to a rep using, at the time we were using Salesforce? Of course, that changed over years as HubSpot built out the CRM. But really where we were going to add more value from my standpoint, I think over time we did, was through the strategy lens. And to add value through strategy, you really need to look at data. Data is the key driver to any strategic decision. So as I built up the team, as we thought about the team, we needed to have functions within the ops and strategy team that would help support the operations of the business. How do we keep moving quickly? How do we create more efficiencies for the reps, take those inefficiencies off their plates? And those are operational things that we'll do. And that can be anything from software to more mundane tasks, maybe. But the strategy is how we actually help create vision into the future. And how do we drive the business into the future? And that's where I think strategy and ops. So we kind of need both in an ops world. And again, that's how I always think of it, ops and strategy. Because you need the strategy to help think more forward-looking. You need the ops to kind of facilitate the day-to-day. One of the things that we talked a lot about on the team was the idea of hindsight, insight, and foresight. And strategy really helps drive insights and foresights. And that's the future-looking element to where's the business going. And to make those sort of futuristic decisions, you need historical data, but you need the right data. You need deep data insights to help drive those insights and foresights.
EDDIE REYNOLDSYeah, I think that makes a lot of sense. And that's the way we're thinking about it here as well. And that I think those insights and the data itself is really the glue that ties the strategy and the operations together.
EDDIE REYNOLDSAnd I think what we see oftentimes is that folks will go to implement Salesforce or HubSpot or whatever tools they're using, and they're thinking really granular about, you know, we need these contacts, we need this workflow, we need to hit outbound calls. But the folks that are doing that work are oftentimes not seeing the grander vision of, you know, how the sales team is going to grow, how the marketing team is going to grow, what channels they're tackling, and then looking back at that data to see what's working and what's not, and then providing leadership with real insights, and a story around what's happening. I'd love to dive into this a little bit deeper. And maybe if you could share some examples of some of the things you guys were doing specifically with maybe the metrics you were looking at, and maybe some of the aha moments you had.
CHANNING FERRERYeah, yeah. And I will say one thing, the idea of a story, like you said, is so important, because looking at metrics only gets you so far, you have to understand how do those metrics
CHANNING FERRERconvert into the story, the story you're trying to tell the story you're trying to build, even. And I do think that's one of the differentiators of a decent ops team versus a excellent ops team is really understanding how to convert it into a story. A lot of the ways we thought about data, and this kind of built over time, I'd say at HubSpot, because we built out the team, we began to think of it as this level one through level four data. And level one is going to be your very basic data. That's how much bookings do we have this month? What was our churn rate this month? Now, those are all your level one metrics and stuff that's pretty easy to see. You may have five different level one metrics. Each level one metric has a series of metrics that drives it. So you've got drivers for that. And those are going to be three to four metrics per level one. So that's your level two. So now let's say you have five level one metrics, you have three per below that. Now you have 15 level two metrics. And those metrics are also fairly easy to see. It's going to be for your monthly bookings. Maybe that's going to be your average sale price, your close rate against the leads. Those are going to be your level two metrics. Level three and level four is where ops and strategy should exist. So your managers need to be living at level one and level two. But level three is harder to see and level four is harder to see. So now we begin to kind of visualize this pyramid, if you will, where you've got these five metrics up top, but then it becomes a huge baseline because each metric at level two might have three to five metrics. So now we do the math, begin to get a lot of metrics at level three. And then once again, the same build out at level four. That's where it gets complicated, but also extremely valuable to understand that driver of your average sale price. Again, that was a level two metric, but the two tiers below that, that could be, you know, the bookings mix, it could be the type of lead flow, the QL type or the conversion rate against a certain lead at a certain point in the, in the leads lifecycle. You know, those are going to be some really important things. And I'd say the aha for us was when we were able to get to that level three and level four. And it took a little while to dig down and better understand what the drivers were, but really going deep to understand that level four metric and how it can impact your churn or your, your bookings number, your ASP was really huge for us. And when we began to transform our QBRs into, and we actually did the monthly, we do monthly KPI meetings and QBRs. So our monthly KPI meetings to be more oriented towards the level three, level four, we could actually help the sales org change their actions more effectively and adapt more quickly to really drive that kind of the foresight that we're providing
SPEAKER_19for the team. That's really interesting. And it's funny, we're thinking about our metrics and the
EDDIE REYNOLDSinsights we bring to our customers in the same way. It's really funny. We were working on it yesterday and I was thinking like, let's look at this as level one, level two, level three. So it's great. You dove into that because I think that when we go to, you know, a CRO, especially if it's a CRO, that's not as ops,
EDDIE REYNOLDSyou know, it doesn't have as much experience in ops as you do. They really want to understand the high level and it's going to be difficult for them to connect how, you know, there's this many comments on LinkedIn or this many downloads of a white paper to driving revenue. But in my mind, and I'm curious on your opinion on this, we want to look at those top metrics like revenue growth, specifically from new customers versus net revenue retention and then drill deeper down there, but then look through it and tell the story and bring that back to the leader and say, well, you know, this is what's happening on our social media platforms. This is what's happening with our email marketing. And when we look at this nuanced detail, we start to see how this is affecting sort of those level one and level two metrics.
CHANNING FERRERYeah, exactly. Exactly. And this goes back to the story. How do you tell the story? Because when you see
CHANNING FERRERthat level three or even level four metric and you realize the impact that it's having up through the chain, how do you then explain that most effectively to the frontline person, that sales rep or that BDR, SDR maybe even? Because they need to understand, I need to change my behavior to increase or improve this particular metric. And I think that goes back to the point you're digging into here is how do you blend the CRO role with the ops role? The ops team needs to be able to understand the details of the metrics and then begin to tell that story. And the CRO, though, needs to be the conduit for that as well. They need to be, I think, the enforcer of that story in a positive way, I'd say enforcer and help people to really understand the impact that these little nuances can have. It's a big sales is a big calculation, really. It's just a matter of how do we improve the calculation? How do we increase the velocity? And it's just a math formula when it really comes down to it.
EDDIE REYNOLDSYeah, but you touched on something I wasn't covering that I wasn't trying to make a point on, which is how these metrics affect people on the frontline. And I think that that's a really incredible thing. Because if you put
EDDIE REYNOLDSyourself in the role of an SDR, BDR account executive, and your boss is telling you, I need you to make more calls, I need you to set up more meetings. I think we all intuitively understand what that means and why they're asking that. But without seeing the numbers, I think it can sometimes be hard to connect the dots. You're sitting here thinking, well, you know, I'm already working as hard as I can. And now you want more calls and more meetings. You know, where does it end? And I think having visibility and understanding the metrics of, you know, what the other folks on the team are doing and how many calls, how many meetings, how many opportunities they're generating, what the close rate is and benchmarking against that. And then using that to create your own plan in conjunction with your manager to really take ownership of it, I think can be a really powerful thing that is oftentimes not delivered to people, especially when you have sort of an organization that's led by people that aren't very ops heavy. And they're just saying, we need more calls, meetings, and pipeline.
CHANNING FERRERYeah. Yeah. And it kind of goes back to the old Simon Sinek, start with the why. Because if a rep, if anyone understands the why, your behavior is going to change much more drastically or more effectively, I might say. So as a rep, if you're being told, make more phone calls, you know, back in the day when people picked up their phone pre-COVID, I don't think anyone picks up their phone now. But that was always the thing. A sales rep would say, I'm sorry, a sales manager would say to the rep, you need to make more phone calls. But why? Why are they making more phone calls? Well, if you have the data that shows that the reps that are making more phone calls are the reps that are hitting their number. And by the way, here's the number of phone calls you need to make. It's not an obscene number, but here's the reasonable number. Now that's, that helps the rep to make that change more actively and see it. So you need to create that visibility for the reps. So one of the things that we used to do was have what we call a rep pack. And the rep pack just shows metrics. You couldn't go too deep on these metrics because we didn't want to have too many metrics. We had a fair amount of them. There was something like 20 metrics. And we'd show, publish it for all of our reps. So all the reps would see it and they could open it up anytime and see the rep pack. And we would give insight to the sales leaders on what metrics to influence, but then we'd also show it to the reps so they could go and look at the top performing rep. And the top performing rep was sending this many emails, making this many phone calls, having this many new meetings being booked. And that would kind of flow into this sort of 150, 200% performance. So now they understand the why let's follow these reps and do what, what they're doing. The top reps are doing. Yeah. You know, and it's interesting
EDDIE REYNOLDSbecause I saw something very similar when I was an account executive at Salesforce, we had a dashboard,
EDDIE REYNOLDSwhich in Salesforce is limited to 20 reports by definition. Um, and one of those reports were, you know, your actual, you know, booked sales as in the sales that went through our ops team and were considered actually booked. And so every time you close a deal, you're looking at that dashboard. It also shows your calls. It shows your meetings. It shows how much pipeline you're generating. So inevitably reps are looking at this a hundred, not a hundred, sorry, 10, 20, 30, 40 times per day. So you start to really own that data. And what I saw ironically is that all of our top performers had the least amount of activity and the least amount of meetings. It was the people struggling that had the most activity and the most meetings, but the nuance was who they were talking to and who they were meeting with. So one of the metrics that Salesforce tracks is call to power versus, I forget what it's called, but just calling anyone else like your Salesforce admin. So the underperforming reps would, you know, make 33, 30 dials a day and talk to the Salesforce admin, somebody else at a junior level, and they were never able to get these transformational deals. Whereas the top reps had less activity, less meetings, maybe even less number of deals in the pipeline, but they were much bigger deals because they were talking to the C suite. And that really made all the difference. And that was something that was very, very clear to everyone, but certain reps just kind of struggled to sort of climb that ladder.
CHANNING FERRERYeah. So true. The thing that, of course, we always saw the same thing is the higher ACVs,
CHANNING FERRERthe more successful the rep. And how do you get to those higher ACVs? Well, of course, it's getting into the economic decision maker. It's getting to that, you know, the right person. That's really critical. This is why tools like Gong and other call tracking tools are so effective as well, because now we can go beyond just the basics of how many phone calls did you make? Because that's kind of old school, like I was saying, that's a few years ago, people would be thinking about that. Now it's really, what are you saying on that phone call? Who are you talking to? What was your, you know, talk time mix versus their talk time mix? We're just keywords are so critical in Gong actually, and, or just in phone calls in general. So leveraging a tool like Gong or Chorus to do keyword searching, to better understand what are the words that your top performers are using, I've found helps a ton. And the reps really appreciate that too. The ramping reps, the newer reps, because they can go in there and understand
CHANNING FERRERhow do you get to that, that influencer or that key decision maker?
EDDIE REYNOLDSI think what you were sharing about some of the things that you're seeing in Gong to help your sales reps be more effective really led me into one of the questions that I wanted to ask, which is, you know, how do you think about qualitative data? You know, we talked a lot about quantitative data. What are you looking at that's more qualitative in terms of what customers are telling you and other
EDDIE REYNOLDSthings that can't be tied into an actual metric, even things you'll hear in Gong?
SPEAKER_31Sure. So we do have to blend that across. So what we would do, I'll go back to HubSpot, what we would do at
CHANNING FERRERHubSpot often is align our data with the feedback we would hear across the floor, the sales floor. And we would pull together some data, leveraging things like Gong and, and other data insights, you know, we'd look or we would use from a tool standpoint. But then we'd go out to the sales floor. And actually, I embedded the strategy team into the regional sales teams, so they could talk with the reps and talk with the managers more freely, as opposed to having them all sit centralized in one spot. And physically, this was back when we all were in the office, they actually sat close to the sales teams. So they would pull data, have a point of view on it, but then they would talk with those sales reps. And we were trying to facilitate this in a centralized way at one point, but we found by having them physically sit near and be more closely attached to those, those local teams, they would naturally have more dialogue about what's happening and be with the reps, not just the managers. So that, it wasn't as structured, but I found that that unstructured approach actually worked very well for us, so that they could, the analyst and the sales strategy managers could blend the data with just the anecdotal feedback that they were hearing.
EDDIE REYNOLDSThat makes a lot of sense. And my first role in RevOps, I did the same thing, I sat on the floor with the sales team, and it was really eye opening just to hear them talking to people all day, every day, and just see the
EDDIE REYNOLDSnatural flow. And then, of course, you swivel chair around and talk to people that you're sitting next to, you grab lunch with them, and you have this natural dialogue that you might not have if you come in to set up a meeting to interview them about something.
CHANNING FERRERYeah. One of the things also that our sales managers were very good at is they saw the value in this. So they would naturally involve the analysts and the sales strategy managers into things. Like they would do a team dinner. The sales strategy analysts would join them maybe at that team dinner. And it would just create that natural kind of team camaraderie, which, again, turns into the dialogue that would follow, it would happen maybe the following day, whereas an analyst would find something, they'd talk to the person, the rep, maybe that they sat next to a dinner that night, and they would have that very natural banter to help validate the insights, or are they actually looking in the right places even for data? I love that. Are there any other things that you did at HubSpot to try to gather qualitative data,
EDDIE REYNOLDSsuch as speaking to customers or other things where you could capture some data that's not metric driven?
CHANNING FERRERYeah. I mean, one of the things that we did was focused on the voice of the customer. So we had this team that was called voice of the customer. And the voice of the customer, they would, it was a couple people who would bring different themes forward every month, actually, we had a voice of the customer meeting. And those themes would be a variety of inputs we'd be capturing from our customer. And these could be good things or bad things, you know, something that's working or something that's not working. And then we'd have a couple customers come in and talk about that. So we'd actually set up a panel where the customers would come in, talk for 15 minutes about this particular topic.
CHANNING FERRERAnd then we would have a topic. And then we would have a discussion as a follow-on about that across the leadership team. And this was actually beyond just ops. We'd sit across the leadership team to do it. And that worked very well to keep us kind of grounded to what's going on, but make sure we were actually listening to the customer. And again, physically listening to them by having them join, you know, either virtually or some cases in person. There was another thing that we did just to throw on top of that was our solution engineers. And I use my solution engineers. I ran the solution engineering team as well. I use them as a mechanism for us to hear voice of the prospect. So voice of the customer was great because we could hear what's working or not within the product. But the prospect voice was a little different, actually, because the prospect voice is often, what should you do? I'd love it if you built this thing that you don't have, this widget that you don't have. The customer might not think that because they already are using it or they've adapted some way. So blending that voice of the prospect, and they would capture all their feedback. They'd track it in a system. We would put a value dollar associated with, you know, missed opportunity. We don't have this particular feature. We think it could be worth this. We could have upsold this deal or we lost this deal because of, you know, lack of this feature. And therefore we have a dollar associated with it. And that was just an S thing, but it helped us kind of t-shirt size the value of each thing. And we'd have a mix of voice of the prospect features and input from our solution engineering team. We have the voice of the customer input, and then we'd feed all that back to product. And product loved to hear, you know, those two combined talk tracks and stories that we would share.
EDDIE REYNOLDSAnd how would you physically feed it back to product?
CHANNING FERRERYeah. So on the voice of the prospect side, we would, the, the, the t-shirt sizing, this kind of value sizing they really liked. So we can say, we've heard this particular topic four times, five times. We might've heard it a couple of different ways, but we categorize it as, as, you know, this particular feature, let's say, and we'd say in this particular time, it was a $10,000 loss. This time it was a 20,000. This time it was 5,000. So you add all of that up and we could go to the, to the, um, the product team and saying, here's the 10 different things or 15 different things we've heard this month. We'd have it on the dashboard actually. So there was an input. We, we custom built this tool, this engineering team actually built it solution engineering, and it would be a dashboard that would feed as an output. And they could go in, the product team can go in and look and say, all right, here's what we're hearing. Here's the value associated with all these different features that were being requested and the number of times. So this feature has been talked about, you know, 15 times. Here's the value of it. That's the number one ranking feature right now that's being requested through the prospects. And here's the number two and the number three. And the dashboard is the way that we would share it back. Then what the product team would do is they would see those features. They'd see the number of requests, each request you could kind of source back to the rep. And sometimes the product managers would go talk to the rep to get a little bit more insight even on it. I love that. I absolutely love that. But it begs the question, sales engineers are so central to the actual sales process. I mean, at least in my experience at Salesforce, they're doing the bulk of some of the important discovery and the demonstration and presentation.
EDDIE REYNOLDSSo what led you guys at HubSpot to put sales engineering under ops instead of under sales leadership?
CHANNING FERRERYeah. So I think I had a pretty unique role back at HubSpot, whereas I was blending strategy and ops along with what we called sales acceleration.
CHANNING FERRERAnd sales acceleration was kind of an amalgamation of a couple of different teams. It was solution engineering that sat under me, but it was also the BDR, SDR function that sat under me. So I labeled it sales acceleration because we were essentially trying to find ways to accelerate sales, to create kind of a nonlinear sales motion. Linear sales motion is very much hire one new rep. You're going to get this much quota output from it. So it's just a very straight line kind of visually, whereas that nonlinear motion means we can hire one new rep and we're going to 2x productivity, 3x productivity. And solution engineers are a mechanism to create nonlinear. BDRs are a mechanism to create nonlinear. Another function, ISCs, this inbound consultant team that would do that. So that's sales acceleration. It was how do we accelerate sales? And we kind of brought all these teams together and said, that's the theme. That's what we're trying to do is we're trying to essentially hire less reps every year so that we can sell more. Each rep can actually sell more and be more productive at a lower cost point to us as a business. So that was the thesis behind it. And then as we did this, we also found these opportunities like I just talked about, where as you have an ops team sitting close to an engineering team, you come up with these ideas that allows you to share the product feedback more clearly to the product team.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. And I love the concept that you used thesis, right? I tend to think about things in terms of theses, hypotheses, things like that, which can sound overly complex for some revenue leaders.
EDDIE REYNOLDSI believe Mark Roberge recently talked about, you know, testing hypotheses and like using data to go back. I guess I would just be curious if you think about it that way as well. And specifically, let me be more specific. I think that like if you're a revenue leader and you're not using data, you're coming up with a hypothesis based on sort of gut instinct and personal experience. And the best way to do that is to say, OK, well, let's combine that with the data that we have today. And then let's go forward with this hypothesis and let's test it. Let's see if that works or if it doesn't.
EDDIE REYNOLDSIs this the way that you think about ops as well?
CHANNING FERRERYeah, very, very much so.
CHANNING FERRERI always used to tell a team in ops, we need to always be testing in sales or always, always be closing in ops or always testing. So we have to be running a test that's of something. And that test is based off of a hypothesis or a thesis that we might have. And some of those tests are going to fail and that's OK. And we're going to learn a lot from those and some of those will be successful. And most of those will iterate on is actually how it would play out. But we always want to be testing something and experimenting on something because if we're not, we're not able to move ourselves forward. So that was something that we just had as a mantra kind of across the ops and the acceleration team. And it really led to things like what we're talking about on the product side or this inbound success team that we ended up rolling out.
SPEAKER_02How do you think about the difference between testing something and iterating something? I'll give you a specific example.
EDDIE REYNOLDSWe could say, OK, you know, we're going to launch a podcast and then we don't get any leads in the system in the first month. And so we say, well, we tested it and it failed. So no more podcasts anymore. How do you think about it in that context?
CHANNING FERREROh, that's a great question.
CHANNING FERRERAnd I don't know if there's a black and white answer to this one, but I'll say when I ran tests, we would always define what's our window of time for evaluating. And the first thing that we learned very early on is if you don't define that up front, then you're going to have a knee jerk reaction in the first month. And that first month is probably not going to be that good. And therefore, everyone says, oh, let's give up on the test. So usually we found for most things, this is just a rough rule of thumb, is about three months. You need about three months to get some level of feedback to say, is this moving in the right direction? Now, that doesn't mean that's going to be the end state. That doesn't mean if we think of a podcast, we're going to get to our ultimate leads in three months. It just means we're seeing progress in those three months. We're able to kind of begin to move it in the right direction. And with the test, we had to have a hypothesis of where we want to go. What's the end state of where we think we can get to? And so the key in iteration is, can we make progress towards that end state? And in three months, if we have an ability to make that progress and we see a path to making progress, then great, let's keep it moving. If in three months we're not making any progress or we're making backward progress, then we'll probably pull this and say it's not going to work.
EDDIE REYNOLDSAnd one last question on this topic. How do you define that progress? So let's use podcasting as another example, right? So you can measure how many people are listening to the podcast or views on YouTube, LinkedIn, et cetera.
EDDIE REYNOLDSBut that's not revenue. That's not opportunities. It's not even leads. So if you're talking to a CFO, CEO that really isn't on board with this and they're saying like, where's the money that we're getting? Where's the revenue for all this money and time we're spending here? How do you think about that?
CHANNING FERRERYeah. So I think you have to obviously link what you're doing to revenue upfront. So as you think about any test, you need to build a framework for what's the purpose of this?
CHANNING FERRERWhat's the end state going to look like? And let's link the money that we're sinking into it to the revenue that we want to get out of it. And then once you draw that connection, and again, in the case of podcasts, we're going to be thinking about probably lead flow at some point. It's visibility, it's lead flow, brand recognition, and all those things are going to tie into revenue. So if we want, and let's just be very specific on it, let's assume we can get lead flow through this podcast we're talking about. If we think we can increase our lead flow, what's our early indicators that that's going to happen? And that might be website traffic. So that might be in three months, if we can begin to increase our traffic, then we're happy that we know traffic converts at a certain rate to leads. Leads, we know, convert a certain rate to closed business. That would be kind of the way, and again, very roughly thinking, the way I would lay it out there is let's go for that top level metric. And we can tell the story because we know historically traffic equates to leads, which equates to revenue.
EDDIE REYNOLDSYeah, that's exactly the way I think about it as well. But one challenge I see is the more innovative the thesis or hypothesis, the more difficult it is to do that math.
EDDIE REYNOLDSAnd then revenue leaders will lean on sort of the old school tactics that have always worked and increasingly work less over time as they become saturated. And it becomes very difficult for revenue leaders to try these new things if they're not able to track it straight to revenue in a very logical and obvious way.
CHANNING FERRERSo true. And this is why I said it's not black or white.
CHANNING FERRERIt's tricky. At some point, you've got to go a little bit with your gut, stick your neck out, and go a little bit with what you believe in as well. So there's a balance there. I think it's easy to say in three months we'll see website traffic increase and leads increase. But I had an example of this where at HubSpot, we didn't see any improvement up front, and we had to keep going with it. And I'd say the fortunate scenario I'm thinking of, we created this inbound solution consulting team, the ISC team. And the ISC team's job was to handle our chat on our website for our free users. So the free users, we were calling into them before. This is our freemium motion. We've been calling them like a BDR, SDR kind of cold call on them. And they didn't really like that, nor they would just ask product questions, and the SDRs would get flustered because they didn't actually know the product as well as maybe they should. So it really wasn't working out all that well. So we said, let's turn this over to be an entirely reactive chat-based conversation. We can let our free users chat with us and see if we can convert them into leads. Fortunately, when setting this up, our CEO was very on board, Brian Halligan, was very on board with it. So we didn't see much progress in the first couple months. But Brian was aligned with the vision, and we kept going, and we kept going. And about six months in, we began to see some real progress. And then eventually, it turned into, frankly, our most productive lead source that we had. But it took us a while to get there.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, that's so often the case. Well, I want to pivot now, and I want to talk about built-in.
EDDIE REYNOLDSSo you've shared some really, really great stories from your time at HubSpot, where you were managing a very large team inside of a much larger team.
EDDIE REYNOLDSNow you move into a scale-up. So let's first talk about that. Why scale-up and not startup?
CHANNING FERRERYeah, I know I mentioned it. I think I see built-in, as a lot of other companies, at a certain stage, they're a scale-up, not a startup.
CHANNING FERRERAnd the difference, I think, there is startup, you're still trying to figure some things out. You're still trying to figure that value, kind of what's your value fit. You're trying to figure out your ideal customer profile. Scale-ups, you've figured a lot of that out. Now you begin to scale. Now you begin to think about, how do we actually sell more of this stuff? Because we see the value, customers understand the value, and they want our product. But scale-up has different challenges. It's no longer figuring out that value fit. Now it's figuring out, how do I hire the right number of people? How do I build the systems, the processes, the operations, to actually allow me to double in size in X number of months, years, whatever it might be? And that's tricky once you begin to think about a couple hundred people of hiring, when you begin to think about more complex systems and all. And I think there is a difference there. There's kind of this turning point with companies. It's often around that Series C, Series D point, where you begin to shift into more of that scale-up mode.
EDDIE REYNOLDSYeah, that makes a lot of sense. Because early stage, you are trying to figure out so many things. And if you don't have product market fit, you don't understand who your customer is, it's really hard to scale anything.
EDDIE REYNOLDSBut once you really land that, then it becomes about, how do we increase this? How do we hire more AEs, more BDRs, more SDRs, more SEs? Invest more in these marketing channels. Invest more in our customer success because we're doing things that are working. How do we do more of those things? And then, in my mind, the challenge becomes, well, how do we do more of those things at scale in the time frame that we have to accomplish them?
CHANNING FERRERExactly. Exactly. And it's a very different challenge than a startup has for a challenge. You just begin to kind of transition into these newer challenges. But they're all fun stages. It's just different challenges.
EDDIE REYNOLDSYeah. So, let's talk about that. What did the company look like the first day you walked in the door, so to speak?
SPEAKER_28I don't know if you're on Zoom every day, but.
CHANNING FERRERYeah. No, I walked in the virtual door. So, I joined back in January. So, it's been a few months now. They look really strong, actually. Built in, had a great brand already, continues to have that. Great team in place. And it just was a question of, we're going to grow quickly, and how do we set ourselves up for growth? Now, one of the first things I saw is there's some operational things we could improve upon. And, of course, with my more recent HubSpot ops background, I think it was kind of very clear for me what to do and how to do it. The harder part was actually prioritizing some of those decisions. But there was a few operational things we kind of leaned into right away and been able to roll out. And then the next thing was, how do I get more involved in the customers? You know, that was a little bit me personally. I need to learn the industry, learn the product.
CHANNING FERRERI need to get more involved with customers. So, those were the two priorities I focused in on out of the gate.
EDDIE REYNOLDSYeah. I want to go into planning. But going back to my question, specifically what I wanted to ask is, what did the team look like?
EDDIE REYNOLDSHow many salespeople? How many marketers? How many in customer success? How many in ops? What did that look like on day one?
CHANNING FERREROh, sure. So, yeah. So, I stepped in. My team is about 100 people on day one. And that was a mix of sales team, about 50 people in sales. I have a team called Brand Studio that does a lot of content creation for our customers. So, that was a team of about 30 folks.
CHANNING FERRERAnd then the other 20 or so are a mix of support and customer success and rev ops.
EDDIE REYNOLDSOkay. Support, customer success, and rev ops. How many people in ops? How many people dedicated to ops?
CHANNING FERRERYeah. So, a team of four on the ops side and one enablement.
EDDIE REYNOLDSOkay. So, five in total. What do those people do? You have one in enablement. What are the other four people focused on?
CHANNING FERRERYeah. So, the others are a mix of helping our different sales, account management, and customer operations teams.
CHANNING FERRERWe've got three different buckets, if you will, within my org. And we have an analyst assigned to each team. So, one analyst is working closely with them on the new business side. They're helping them do a mix of operational work and strategy work, as we talked about earlier, kind of mixing those two things together. Same thing on account management and same thing within ops, customer ops.
EDDIE REYNOLDSThat's really helpful background. So, you touched on planning. How do you go about planning and prioritizing in a new role like this, being CRO of a scale-up on day one or week one, month one?
SPEAKER_40Yeah. So, prioritizing, I found, to be one of the trickier things because there's so many things that we could tackle.
CHANNING FERRERAnd, again, coming from a place like HubSpot, where we were fairly mature, I had an opportunity to have visibility very easily into what the options would look like. It's just what do I want to tackle first? So, what I did was, in terms of planning, was went around and really did a listening tour, talked with all the reps, talked with all the individual contributors, the managers as well. Did a lot of one-on-ones, a lot of roundtable discussions. And out of all those conversations, themes were popping up. So, I began to kind of categorize those themes of the talk tracks. And the question I would ask, and it's just a very simple question, it's, what's working, what's not working, and what ideas do you have? And I used to do these same roundtables at HubSpot. So, we'd always default is what's not working. So, I forced everyone to start with what's working. And what's working is really important because we want to double down on what's working. That's the stuff that's working well. We can do that, actually. It's a lot easier to double down, usually, on what's working. Then we'd get into the what's not working. And great, we'll solve some of this. Some of it we may not solve. That's all right. And then the what ideas do you have. And what ideas do you have is always interesting because usually, especially individual contributors, have some really good ideas. And it's sometimes hard for them to voice those ideas or find the right path to voice those ideas. So, capturing all that information, I categorized it. And at the end of kind of my first roughly 60 days, put together a plan with priorities. And one of the top priorities in there was career pathing. Reps want to have a career path. They want to know, how do I make that next step? Not just how do I get to my number, but I want to be a better rep. I want to maybe be a manager or do something else. And I want to have visibility to how I do that. So, that was very clear feedback that I was hearing in these roundtables.
EDDIE REYNOLDSThat's really great. I would say I would personally identify with both of those things in the sense that if you're working in an org, especially a big org, if my boss's boss's boss comes to meet with me, the last thing I'm going to do is go complain about all the things I don't like in Salesforce or HubSpot or anything operational.
EDDIE REYNOLDSEven your own manager, it can tend to feel like you're whining, right? Your job is to go out and produce. So, go produce. Whatever the problems are, just deal with it. Make the call. Set up the meetings. Close deals. And so, having a forum where you can provide that feedback, yeah, I don't think a lot of sales reps, especially the go-getters out there, are going to take time to voice those opinions unless they're explicitly asked.
CHANNING FERRERYeah, exactly.
CHANNING FERRERAnd that's why I would just have those three simple questions as well. And I'd tell them ahead of time to bring some thoughts on each one of these topics so that we can talk through them. And the smaller groups, the better. So, I tried to avoid too large of groups, and I still carry these forward, and I open it up even to one-on-one conversations so that everyone has a forum to voice their feedback, and I want it voiced directly to me. That's the one thing that I really do multiple things. I love about built-in, but one of the things I do really enjoy is the size difference from HubSpot, because HubSpot's a great business. But being able to go down to a company where I've got 100 people on the team, it's much more manageable to actually get in touch with everyone at a personal level and hear the detailed feedback.
EDDIE REYNOLDSYeah. And then I'll just say, I think, from the career perspective, especially being in my 20s, as much as I wanted to hit quota, it's really interesting.
EDDIE REYNOLDSI can't tell you how many times I would do something that was in the best interest of my career over the best interest of performance quota commission, right? Because you're thinking, do I want the paycheck next month, or do I want the paycheck in 10 years? Not everyone thinks that way, but I was a big believer in learning your 20s and earning your 30s. And I was always trying to think through the lens of, how can I grow into the role that I want to be in in five or 10 years, rather than just look for the short-term payoff. And I think that now that I've transitioned into managing people, sometimes I think, well, yeah, okay, like how do they maximize their income, how do they hit their short-term performance metrics, but we really need to take a step back and think about the career path this individual wants to take and how we can provide that.
CHANNING FERRERYeah, yeah, it's so true. And it's also one of, leads to, I think, one of the areas that often gets overlooked as a revenue leader is enablement, because people want to have the career path, then you have to give them the mechanism of how to develop that career, develop on that career path.
CHANNING FERRERAnd enablement is something that can be done internally, it can be done externally. You can bring in resources externally to do it, but I think it's very important to give your individual contributors the options and opportunity to develop once they have the visibility to where they want to go.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, absolutely. So let me ask you this, I'm curious, because even your current organization is a big organization in startup land, hence the designation between startup and scale-up.
EDDIE REYNOLDSIf you were to join a startup and you just had, I don't know, zero to five sales reps, a couple marketers, a couple customer success, maybe nobody in ops on day one, how would you approach it?
CHANNING FERRERYeah, so I did do a lot of advisory work, I'd say, back in HubSpot. We have a lot of young, smaller companies, and I was able to talk with a lot of them. So I'd talk a lot about these scenarios. The first thing I would do, and everything, Eddie, you just said, is I would hire a VP of RevOps or director of RevOps. I would hire a RevOps person, because I think that's such a critical part of growing a revenue organization. It's the underlying, the underpinnings of the organization is the data. And understanding that data helps you to figure out how best to grow, where to lean in and invest further. And you need that right-hand, or I'm left-handed, that left-hand person to help you make those sort of decisions and, again, bring data-driven decisions into the fold. So that would be the first step, is bring in that RevOps person, someone with a data skill set as well, who can dig into some of the data. And then once you have that, you can begin to make data-driven decisions. We can begin to have more visibility into why is something working, why is something not working. Let's begin to look at our level three metrics, maybe, and make some calls on how do we invest, and where can we go faster.
SPEAKER_21I'd love to play devil's advocate there, because I agree with you.
EDDIE REYNOLDSAnd you're going to hear a lot of revenue leaders that would push back on that and say, look, I've got three salespeople.
EDDIE REYNOLDSWe've got one marketer. Sure, I can have our Salesforce admin, our office manager run some reports for me. Why do I need to hire a dedicated person to RevOps, and especially, why do I need to hire a VP?
EDDIE REYNOLDSI mean, we've got three salespeople.
SPEAKER_40Yeah, fair enough.
CHANNING FERRERAnd that's why I think I tried to modify there to director quickly. But nonetheless, I do think bringing in a sales ops, RevOps profile person is going to be really important. They're going to have to be what I would call an athlete. They're going to be your Salesforce admin to a degree. You may outsource some of that, by the way, for more technical work. But I really do think, even at three sales reps, it's important to have that eyes and ears sitting next to you, working with you. They don't probably need to be the VP when it's that small of an organization yet. But a resource who's capable, I think, makes you as a sales leader, as a revenue leader, that much more effective, so you can make those right decisions. And the decisions that you're going to need to make are going to be, do I invest in account management right now? Or do I invest in customer success? Or do I invest in another sales rep? Do I go up market or do I go down market? Do I need more leads or invest more in marketing, let's say, or not? And those are all really important decisions as you begin to kind of think about growth. And I think it's important to have a resource there to help you to make those decisions.
EDDIE REYNOLDSYeah, I couldn't agree more. And the lens that I look through it is just, you know, all the sales jobs I had until I joined Salesforce. I was always spending time running Salesforce reports, not to mention like uploading data and updating Salesforce and all of these things, but also just running reports and trying to figure out what's working and what's not.
EDDIE REYNOLDSYou know, anytime that I've ever led a team, it's the same thing. Every manager of a manager I've ever worked for has always spent a lot of time looking at data, whatever data they had and trying to figure out what's working and what's not. And what we oftentimes see in these organizations that neglect RevOps is they have a really limited set of meaningful data. So they want to look at what's happening here and there, but they can't because either the data is not there or it's not reliable because nobody's sort of like, you know, monitoring things. And so I think that that's a big piece of it. And inevitably you end up having the sales leader and or the sales reps doing that work anyway, pulling them away from the work of managing and selling.
CHANNING FERRERRight, exactly. And this goes back to, again, just a reference for a second, what I was doing at HubSpot with this, the sales acceleration function.
CHANNING FERRERIt's how do you create that more efficient rep? And as you get more sophisticated and get bigger, you know, it becomes more complex. But even at a very young stage, when you're thinking you have three sales reps, how do I get the most out of those three sales reps? How do I have them focus, you know, 90 plus percent of the time on closing deals, on sourcing and closing and not get caught up in other minutia that may occur? And again, that's where I think a resource can be extremely valuable to help facilitate that. Yeah, and I think that's what's kind of crazy to me that you'll hire an account executive and give them a half a million, million dollar quota, maybe three of them.
EDDIE REYNOLDSSo we're talking 1.5 to 3 million in sort of opportunity cost, but then not bulk at having them spend a big chunk of their time doing something.
EDDIE REYNOLDSYou can hire somebody else to do it better and faster.
CHANNING FERRERYeah. Yeah. One of the things that I've done in the past is ask people to kind of time box the day and ask a rep to do this.
CHANNING FERRERAnd I think it's a great exercise at any stage of company. It's a simple thing to go ask your rep, say, look at your week, go back the past couple of weeks and spend, by the way, spend an hour, a half hour doing this. Look over and just begin to track it in a spreadsheet is how have you spent your day and put it into categories. And those categories are going to be customer facing calls, prospecting maybe. So you've got kind of someone you already engaged with versus prospecting work, admin, operational admin work and internal meetings, you know, and whatever else the category. But those four categories are usually pretty good at catching most things. How much time are you spending? If you use those four categories, are you spending on each one of those things? So prospecting, engagement with either current customers or current prospects, internal meetings and admin. And the key bucket there is going to be the internal meeting, the two buckets of internal meetings and the admin work. And you really don't want them spending a lot of time on either one of those things. It's important to have some time on internal meetings, by the way, because you need to have alignment with them and how they're operating, what they're doing. So you don't want you don't want those going down to zero, specifically the internal meetings. But again, you want to minimize, you want to maximize the prospecting and the customer engagement. And depending on the seniority of the rep, you might actually want to minimize prospecting to a degree even. So it depends a little bit on what they're doing and where you want them to spend time. Can you have an SDR do that function? Less time, a very expensive rep doing that function. So I love that because then it tells me, you know, where do I want them to spend time and how are they spending their time right now?
EDDIE REYNOLDSAnd then once you have that insight, how do you think about driving it into increased rep productivity?
EDDIE REYNOLDSSo obviously you're going to take some things off of their plate and give them more time. But what else do you do to make them more productive?
CHANNING FERRERYeah. So it's how do we improve across those four buckets, of course.
CHANNING FERRERYou know, how do we shift our time across those four buckets, like you said, as a starting point. After that, it's going to be how do we we have to go a layer deeper. Those four buckets are pretty high level. So as we think about, all right, let's shift more time into customer engagement. Let's maybe shift more time into or out of the prospecting bucket. We need to go a layer deeper on what are you doing with customer engagement? How are you spending time with the customers and is that going to be demos? Is that negotiation? Is that, you know, I don't know, like multi-threading with the customer? And is this the time we want spent? So, for example, if they're spending a lot of time on demo work, maybe a solution engineer is the right solve there. Maybe you want a solution engineer to be doing that demo work and not the rep. So, again, it's that layer deeper, though, to understand, I think, some of the details because you want to think about that conversion rate throughout the prospecting cycle.
CHANNING FERRERAnd how can I improve that conversion rate with also the right resources at each stage of the sales cycle?
SPEAKER_02That makes a lot of sense. Well, I think you've answered all of my questions. So this has been really fun.
SPEAKER_05Cool. Eddie, this was great. I really enjoyed it.
