The Rev Ops Road to Success

Daryl: Ah, folks, how's everybody doing? It's another week here on The Inside Sales Show. I don't know, I've got a little more step, bouncing my step these days. Why is that? Well, it's funny. Why it is because it's the season for deals. Would you not agree with that? Whether it's Black Friday, Cyber Monday, holidays, Christmas, Hanukkah. If you're in countries outside of the US, such as Canada or the UK, you would have Boxing Day. By the way, if you're wondering that's December 26th, theoretically, that's when people would go and collect all the boxes and you got to have a holiday for that, of course. Then, you got new year's. It's the season to be just a buying machine. The reason, I'm a little excited is I've got a new piece of gear, a new piece of kit, I just bought last night. It's interesting because I bought a new camera and a new lens. Not that my mother gear's going to wait, just it's an additional camera because you don't get ever have enough camera when you're filling these things, different angles, different opportunities. It's great. I may have a problem, but that's made me excited and I had to... I'm in Ottawa, Canada, for those who don't know. The only place I could find this camera was in Edmonton, Alberta because it is sold out everywhere. Sony, the manufacturer of the camera has actually suspended production because they just can't find chips anywhere. So, I had to go far and wide to find this camera. That's what I had to do. I am like the dream customer because I just come to you and I'm like," What's your price, baby? Here it is." I was sharing this with one of my colleagues on my team and he went through a similar experience recently, not for cameras, but actually, for a video board, he just built a new and improved gaming machine for himself. We were talking last night about how we just got raped and pillaged and paid full- price or more because supply was so short. He said," Yeah, I only had to pay 20% more over asking. I only had to go up one model from what I really wanted to buy." He went to a more obviously fancy model because that's what was available. What do all the things have in common? All these things have in common is technology, baby. Technology, it can be the bane of your existence. It can suck, it can frustrate the living hell out of you or technology can actually make you way better, way more competitive, way more compelling, way more persuasive, way more strategic. Think about me with my camera gear. Is my message different than what others out there say? Probably not. Maybe, my style's a little different, but the core content you could find on any YouTube, Google Search. Why my content? Well, I like to think a little bit is the production. How I look and feel differs, makes me more persuasive to my audience. That doesn't that apply to you. How you behave, how you engage with your prospects, how you recap a conversation, how you present yourself? The insights and the intelligence, you know about them, the research that's at your fingertips and not just you and your selling, but also you and your personal development. How you know that," Hey, maybe I am really solid at discovery and at negotiation, but I am weak at prospecting", or" Maybe, I'm really good at foam, but I'm weak at social" or" Maybe, my conversion rate from stage- to- stage isn't where it should be, relative to the best in class", or" Maybe, I'm not the best person on the overall team but I'm going to use some different tactics and tools and techniques out there and processes to physically make myself better." Candidly, it's no different than what a professional athlete does. They have trainers, they have technology, slow- motion video, all that kind of stuff. They have best practices. They have doctors and they have physiotherapists, everything else that tells them how the body should move. Think about golfers. How your swing should be, when your hips should go, the placement of your arms should be, to get maximum rotation and torque, and everything else? It's a science. It's all technology, it's all processes. Let me bring this full circle. When I took on the job as CRO, you've heard me share with you, I had a few conditions. One of those conditions being that I had a chance to build a revenue- ops team. To me, that was a secret. That was like," That's how I'm going to be massively successful. I'm going to get all the technology to implement, to equip myself with a repeatable process, to make sure all the reps have all the intelligence that they need to react so they can present themselves better and they can have a higher deal- velocity with a bigger deal- size, and they can become the best fricking reps go on because now they're going to earn way more commission and they're going to be so loyal and they're going to track more people, revenue ops." I had that go ahead. Now, here's what I've learned in the process, revenue ops is a son of a bitch. It's hard. Everybody's got an opinion," I don't like the way the screen looks. I don't like the way this process works. This is really inconvenient for me. There's too much data entry. There's not enough data entry. I don't have enough reports. I don't like the way that report looks. I disagree with the numbers." Or better yet," I as a sales rep, I just never log in to anything because I'm busy." Rev op is a beast and here's the fact, the cold- heart truth, folks. You are missing out on an incredible secret weapon, an incredible advantage to you. I had a conversation with one of my reps. Now, my rap is a great rep. They're hitting phenomenal numbers, but I said to them," Listen, I know you've not signed into X, Y, and Z recently. Now, you're getting away with that because you're hitting your numbers, but have you ever considered how much more your numbers could be and your take- home pay could be if you did utilize this?" What you prioritize to do, has a direct impact in your success. I can only preach so much and eventually I need to bring in the experts. That is exactly what I've done. This lad, you're going to like him. He is prolific on LinkedIn, amongst other social channels. That's how I've gotten to know him, personally. His name's Eddie Reynold. He is the CEO, founder of Union Square Consulting in the area, rev op, and Salesforce Shop. He's seen it all, done it all, experienced it all. He's going to come today and basically have asked him if he wouldn't mind enlightening you on how you should be using rev op and why it's in your best interest. What the mistakes you're probably making and what's the best way to get what you really want of those folks. Maybe, he'll share a few of the things. With that said, Eddie, my friend, welcome to the show.

Eddie: Thank you for having me. I'm excited to jump into this or dive into this.

Daryl: By the way, if you're watching this on video, Eddie's got the best fricking background. It's beautiful. It's all white. It's like an Apple commercial and I am incredibly jealous. There you have it. Eddie, talk to me. You heard by opening rant that was spoken from a personal- bias point of view. That's also spoken as a CRO or maybe a head- of- sales point of view. You understand where I'm coming from? You also heard some of the good comments and complaints I have about how some of my reps or some of reps in the industry, as a whole, actually utilize rev ops. What would you correct about what I said? What did I get wrong? What did I get right? What do you want to build upon? Bam, bring it, open it up.

Eddie: Yeah. There's nothing I would correct about what you would say. I might have a slightly different perspective on the utilization of tools, but we'll get into that later. I think when you invited me to this podcast and you asked me what topic I might want to cover, and we narrowed in on how rev ops could help salespeople. I started thinking a lot about that and I thought about my personal past history. Right now, I run a company that does rev op and Salesforce consulting. That's not my background, historically. I think this is my 20th year in sales. I still spend the majority of my time selling, increasingly marketing, and doing videos like this, opening deals, closing deals. I was doing cold prospecting yesterday. This is what I live and breathe. I know I don't look old enough to have 20 years of experience in sales, but I started at the beginning of college in commission- only sales, where we had a CRM, a really terrible one that had a black screen with green text. I had an Excel sheet that I tried to create so I can understand all of our products and what features they had because our CRM didn't have it. This tried to delegate that to our office admin. It's a whole long story, but when I think about rev ops and how it can benefit salespeople, ignoring how it can benefit management in the company, overall, I think about my personal experience. I think about how I went from a job, working at a Fortune 500 company where I was fortunate enough to be the number- 1 producer in the entire company, in my position, not because I was such a great salesperson, but some things benefited me. Ironically, I had some people that you could call rev ops, giving me lists of prospects that were highly, highly targeted. I could actually dive into that. I started this job and I called a couple of the top reps, the people that were on the leader boards in the state of Colorado, where I was living at the time. This is a Fortune 500 company with people across the United States. I said," What's your secret? What are you doing?" We had 186 different products that we were selling. So, they drilled in and they said," This product, this product, and this product is where we're really, really succeeding. This is how we're upselling this. This is how we're cross- selling this, et cetera." Then, one of them told me," You've got to talk to this guy, named Michael." I'm like," Who's Michael?" Michael is this analyst that's off in some dark room, somewhere, to this day, I don't know where. Somehow, I get his phone number and his email address and I reach out to him and I say," Can I get a list of our customers that meet this exacting criteria?" He gives this list to me and I start just absolutely crushing it. I think finished at 504% of my quota and it wasn't because I was such an incredible salesperson. It was because my colleagues were calling on customers that had 1% of the opportunity, 1% of the chance, in terms of the size of the deal that they could close, in terms of the likelihood and the need for that particular product. I had this secret weapon because I had a guy, who was literally an analyst, looking at all the data for me, slicing and dicing it. I would then call down on that list and then I would give him feedback and say," Can we refine it, even more?" Now, if anybody's seeing Glengarry Glen Ross, I have the gold leads. Now, most of my colleagues are at 50% of their quota and I'm at 500% without necessarily working harder or being smarter. I transitioned from that role into joining a startup as a salesperson, number- 1. I think, okay, this is where my heart lies, as I studied entrepreneurship in college and I want to roll up my sleeves and wear a lot of hats which, to this day, I'm not a big fan of. I get in there and we've got Salesforce, we've got some other tools. This was a Salesforce shop. We were selling a product on the Salesforce platform. Everyone in the company was a Salesforce expert except me. It was new to me. All of a sudden, I'm building prospecting lists. I'm uploading them to Salesforce. I'm building my own demo decks. I'm literally implementing the tool that we use to produce contracts. I'm sitting down and I'm trying to help create marketing copy. I'm hammering 20, 30, 40 phone calls a day. Meanwhile, some of my colleagues are saying," Why are you calling those folks? Those are not the easiest people to sell to." I'm like," I don't know, this is what my boss told me to target." I was reporting to the CEO and I go through this entire year. We ran an ad campaign. We got hundreds and hundreds of leads. I think we produced about 400 leads in three days. I think I closed one or two of those leads. I don't remember what I closed this day. I think I inflated the number on my resume to go with the total value of the contract, not even the annual recurring revenue, but the total recurring revenue of$ 36,000 in a year. I'm sitting here, thinking," Man, I do not know how to sell software. What is wrong with me?" Then, I go and I interview at Salesforce and I'm trying to explain to them how I'm going to carry a million- dollar quota off the back of closing$ 36,000 in one year. That was a difficult sell. I manage to convince them to hire me and I come in and all of a sudden, it is a night- and- day difference. Salesforce, as you would imagine, has all of this stuff worked out. You walk in on day- 1 and you have somebody training you on all of the systems and the processes, but more specifically, you have people coming to you and saying," Hey, here's this industry SIC Code and NAICS Code." These are the people that are buying Salesforce. You want to call tech companies because they buy Salesforce. You don't necessarily like," If you want to call professional services companies, that's going to be much more difficult to sell Salesforce." These are the people, within the organizations, that make decisions. These are the people, within the organizations, that influence decision. Here's your account and territory, which is already defined for you. Now, there's no bickering and arguing with people over who covers what account, it's very straight and narrow. You've got all of these analytics provided to you. You've got these dashboards and then you log in to the system and you've got really valuable data at the click of a button. You're able to see all of the past histories with prospect accounts. With current accounts, you're able to see everything down to when the invoice was sent and whether or not it was paid. You have this holistic 360- degree view, so that when you're sitting down and thinking," Who do I need to call tomorrow?" You know the best industries, the best companies, the best individuals. You have reports to tell you who you've covered and who you haven't. You can work really, really, efficiently through that process. This, all of a sudden, gives you so much more time in your day to actually spend selling versus doing the admin work or the prep work or the research. Sure enough, I was able to hit my quota and perform in that job. I wasn't a different person from the previous company. I just had very different tools at my disposal.

Daryl: Okay. Let's stop there, for a second. I love what you just said. This hammer at home, he wasn't a different sales rep. His core skills to that point in time were still relatively the same. Yet he's now gone through three different situations where he was 500% because he found this incredible analyst, deep in the bowels of the organization. Then, he went to a startup, where he is doing everything and just doing what he was told, but with no insight or no intelligence, just because the CEO said," You should go after those people." Then, he had Salesforce, where they had all their processes nailed down. This is exactly how we sell. These are all the intelligence, facts and insights, revelations that we can give you on your target accounts. Same dude, different successes, what's common here? What's common here was the information, I would argue, it was the information, and driving the information were the tools. Of course, there's always somebody or a team behind those tools, actually actioning that information. It could be you if you are so inclined. For example, going back with Eddie and his first job, he found the analyst and it was Eddie who said," Help me drill down on this information. Can we refine, can we get the gold leads?" That was Eddie's guidance. He knew as the sales professional, how to shape it and refine it, he just needed somebody to get that data out of the systems. That's the power of rev ops. Now, Eddie, let me share with you, I want to talk about the utilization of tools a little bit because utilization of tools is a big thing for me. But before we get to that, I want to make this really powerful to the reps, who are listening. What's stopping them? Let's say, they have access to all these tools and they're choosing not to leverage them. They're just instead dialing and doing the thing because they think they know better. How would you convince them, that it's in their own selfish, best interests to invest a little time, get familiar with the tools and all the information that's available to you so that when you are making those dials, you're quite informed and the conversations you have, are way more relevant and pertinent and the outcomes are much higher? How would you commit somebody that?

Eddie: I might have a bit of a contrarian view on this. I don't like to spend a lot of time thinking about how much and to what percentage people are using tools. I don't really care that," We're only using 1% of Salesforce or this person's logging in or not logging in" because it's a means to an end. I know that I should pitch that because it's what I do. We implement Salesforce for a living.

Daryl: Yep.

Eddie: Of course, we want people to use Salesforce. But ultimately, what we want people to do is to produce revenue. More than that and part of this, it's not all about the sales rep. You also have to take into account the organization as well. You want the organization to grow and succeed. They do pay you a salary. You do owe the company a little bit to create some institutional knowledge and do what's right for the customer, long- term, and for the company. But if we're only focusing on the sales rep, I would really challenge a sales rep that's not using the system and say," Okay." First and foremost, when you're doing prospecting, are you doing it as efficiently as humanly possible? We're no longer in a scenario, where we're only looking at Salesforce. The average sales rep, especially in B2B SaaS, has many, many different tools. You've got Salesforce, you've got VanillaSoft, you've got data tools. You've got all of your marketing insights. You've got all of your customer- service insights. You've got some finances stuff, who's paying invoices, who's not. Are they late? Things that can actually help you as a salesperson to have an informed view of what's going on with your prospect or your customer, not to mention with existing customer's usage data. If you're picking up the phone and you're calling all of these folks with the same messaging," Tell me how you're outperforming. Are you just making more calls than everyone else? You just have the gift of gab." I don't typically see salespeople that are outperforming without doing the research and bringing highly relevant messaging to those prospects. If you're able to do that outside of Salesforce, then I would challenge the rev ops organization and management to ask," Why does this sales rep feel that they are able to have a more efficient and effective process outside of the tools than inside of it?" Because those reps should be logging into these tools and seeing a wealth of information. Now, the other aspect of it is just training. As salespeople, we're action- oriented. So, a lot of us will look at things and say," I could do that but that could take me two, three days to learn. I give up two or three days of productivity." That's a different scenario. That's where you've got a point to salespeople and say," Look at Bob over here, Bob is leveraging the system really well. Here's the value that he's getting out of it. Go, ask Bob yourself." That's my viewpoint on it because ultimately, you want to use the tools to drive the behavior that is going to produce the results in the organization that you're seeking. That's why I'm not a big fan of looking at like," Well, how many accounts were touched or how many activities were logged or how many times in a day, did this person log into the system?" I care about, are they producing results? Then, as an organization, are we able to work together, collaboratively and effectively? As an example, when I was at Salesforce, there was absolutely no excuse to try to loop someone else into your deal, which happened very often and say," Hey, let me explain this to you over the phone or in a meeting." No, that information is in Salesforce or I'm not taking the meeting. You would never get a sales engineer to come to a meeting with a prospect without entering that information, in the way that they can digest it most efficiently.

Daryl: Okay. There's so much what you said. I'm taking notes here because I'm smiling inside because, on one side, you are a contrarian. You're saying, I don't really care how many times you've logged in or whatnot, blah- blah- blah. Then, you're saying, but are they producing results? Are you logging in to get a wealth of information? Because that would then check, that would change how you approach the account and your messaging, which... At the end of the day, what I'm hearing you say is, you value outcomes overactivity. Amen, fully agree with you. On that, we're in line. Where I get frustrated as a sales leader is I've convinced the organization, that the same organization is paying your paycheck to spend a boatload of money in infrastructure tools to give you that intelligence, so that you can have better outcomes with less activity because you're more informed and intelligent and you're personalizing your messaging and your approach, accordingly. That's where it gets into the utilization of tools. I fully agree with your point, it's going to take me two or three days to really master it. That's when I look at penny- wise and pound- poor because you're right, two or three days, you may not be doing a whole, have a lot of activity at all. That may have a small, short- term blip on your pipeline. By the way, I give you an annual contract, I don't give you a daily or a weekly or a monthly contract, long- term, you're going to be way more successful. It's like, me in sales when I advise my colleagues around the executive table and I say," Yeah, the month didn't live up to what it was supposed to be, but don't worry. Because really, what do we care about? We care about the month, but more and importantly, we care about the quarter. The rest of the quarter is looking ballers and we're going to have a great quarter. So, not to worry, we'll make it up, next month." That's the long- term view. That's what reps need to do. But I find some...

Eddie: Well, can I interrupt if you will?

Daryl: Yeah. Go ahead, please.

Eddie: First and foremost, you're coming at this from your own perspective and you're a very, tech- oriented talented, experienced sales leader. I'm also speaking to the masses here, where you have a lot of sales leaders that are just... They're hammering on activity levels or they're looking at like," What percentage of Salesforce are we using? How often are people logging in?" I just think those are the wrong things. I think you and I are saying the same thing, but what we're ultimately coming to is, what is the most effective way to build a pipeline? As an example, if you have a sales rep that is building more pipeline than everyone else, let's sit down and ask that person. Let's pretend I'm your rev- ops guy and you're the sales leader. Let's both figure out what that person is doing and how we can replicate that across the organization. Now, granted, it is difficult to do that without any data. If you've got somebody, running rogue, working out of a notepad, then we can't bring any meaningful analytics back to that person to say," Hey, you're crushing it. You're a 200% of your quota, but here's how you can be at 300%."

Daryl: From my point of view, you're 1000% right. Those people, who are so focused in activity, annoyed the living crap out of me. But hear me out, I want to represent their partial interest. If you're not having the outcomes, then all that's left is you need to approach your prospecting better, more intelligently, or it truly is a number's game, you need to do more activity. If you're only converting at 5%, then you may need to double your activity and hold your conversion rate the same, but then you're finally hitting your numbers. It sucks. Or, you can work smarter, not harder, which is where the rev- ops thing comes in with all intelligent information. From my point of view, when I took on the job as CRO, one of the things, I heard over and over again from my reps was," I'm so tired of being held accountable for doing$ 50,$60,$70,$80 a day. I'm not a machine. I'm not a trained monkey. I have skills that's so 1980, that's bullshit." I'm like," You're right. It is bullshit. Let's focus on outcomes overactivity. I'm going to give you the tools you need to equip you to have your amazing outcomes, but now you don't want to utilize the tools. Hence, I knew to get there, eventually. Now, I'm frustrated because you're putting me in a tough spot. You don't want to do the activity, but you don't want to utilize the tools to make your outcomes where they should be. What does that leave us? You're probably not a good fit for this company."

Eddie: Well, let's drill into this. First and foremost, the advice that we always give to sales leaders and leaders, in general, as it comes to the tools is you have to have a minimum set of standards. It has to be a reasonable expectation, which I'm sure that you have, and there's still sales reps that can't do it, but we will run into our customers where they want folks to log 27- data points, every time they get off the phone, that's obviously going to fail.

Daryl: Yeah.

Eddie: But as an example, when I worked at Salesforce, our requirements were... You had to have your opportunity pipeline very up- to- date when it was going to close the dollar amount and just a few key metrics, specifically your next steps. This enabled management to review the pipeline and to dive in and really help sales reps, close deals and drive sales cycles. Separate from that, you would log activities, because activities are so important, but then management wouldn't necessarily manage two activities. If you're crushing quota and you're only logging five calls a day, that's great. Clearly, you're doing something right. If you're nowhere near quota and you're logging five calls a day, what are you doing with your day? But I think that once you get over that minimum hump, whatever that is, and it's a very reasonable expectation of people and that's what you get your salary for. You're part of an organization, you're part of a team. Once you get over that hump, then I've got to ask like," How do we make you more effective?" There's a lot of factors that go into play. It's not just the number of calls, the number of meetings goes into a close rate. It's what's your sales cycle, what's your conversion rate from stage to stage. It's what is your average deal size. I have personally experienced this multiple times where I have literally just looked at a report and gone," Wow. My average deal size is not big enough. Let me try to make my average deal size bigger." Somehow magically, this just happens. Just by constantly thinking about it like," Wow, I don't need to close more deals if I can increase my average deal size by 25% and then focusing your energy on how do I increase my average deal size by 25%." When you run the analytics rep- by- rep, you can see," Okay, this rep is doing too many activities." They're doing a hundred activities a day and the quality of those activities is terrible. This is why they're not getting any meetings. They're not doing enough activities. They're doing the right amount of activities and they're getting meetings, but they're not converting meetings into a meaningful pipeline. Or, they're doing that, but they're not closing enough or they're closing enough, but their deal size isn't large enough or they're doing all of that, but the sales cycle is too long. Then, as we compare them to their peers and say," Look, John, Jane over here is closing her deals in half the time that you're closing your deals, let's see how we can help you here. Here's some best practices." Maybe, Jane is much better at establishing a mutual evaluation plan with her prospect than John is. John can learn from that. Now, all of a sudden, John is closing 10%, 20% more this fiscal year by implementing one single tactic where everything else was great. But the one thing that he could improve the most was brought to him by a combination of rev ops and sales leadership.

Daryl: So many places I can go with this one. Your conversation with the pipeline management and how that was so important at Salesforce and what the defined next step was and how to have it daily. I literally had that conversation with my entire team, this week. By the way, every company goes through this. There's a reason why Salesforce focuses on that because one of the last things, we end up doing is maintaining our own data entry, on our own, next steps, and whatnot. We don't have enough conversations. We're always surprised when we thought that it was going to close next week and now it's been pushed out 30 days, et cetera. So, you got to do that. That's the bare minimum. One of the things that I love about the data, I know I can look at my reps and I can say," Here's the data, guys." When you focus on this ICP, you convert way higher than you focus on this ICP. When you focus on account and defined accounts, so using Eddie's point of going to the analyst and finding out what were the gold leads, when you focus on those, so those who use the gold leads, usually become your named accounts in an ABM strategy. When you focus on those leads, your deal size more than doubles versus inbound leads. When you build out the buying committee, your deal size doubles again, then when you only ride one horse to the finish line, because you're going to risk losing it. I get so many reps are saying," Yeah, I can see the behaviors that you default to the inbound leads quite often as opposed to targeting your accounts because that's easier because they're coming to you." Those are bad behaviors. All of this is designed to do... It's a two- way street and Eddie's touching a bit on this. One way it's designed, rev op is there to make you way more successful. It's there to make you a rockstar. That's why the company first and foremost invests in it. But the other way, it's there to help us in leadership to know who's truly successful and has a long- term plan in the future with us and we should develop versus who needs coaching. Maybe, you're a B- player, but you can be made into an A- player versus who is that bottom 20% that probably isn't going to be a success here. Our goal, I want to be really clear in this, is two things. We want you to scale because we want to make more money. Second thing is if you scale, you're going to earn more money and we're happy to pay you more money. I want to pay you more money. That's part of why we invest in rev ops. Now, if you don't utilize the rev ops, what you're sending is a message to everybody saying either you don't believe in yourself or you don't believe in the company and their vision or you're scared or a combination, thereof. Anyway, I don't know what the net from this is. This is more of an honest come- to- Jesus conversation. When Eddie suggested rev ops, I'm like," Oh dude, we've never talked about this before. This keeps me up at night as a leader" because I see these amazing reps and I'm like," Did you know that if you were to use, you could use Gong to write your recap emails that includes little soundbites of the key salient points that Gong's going to tell you." I'm busy taking notes, because Gong's going to give you the salient points, and then you could CC the very important, top officer, who wasn't at that meeting, but knows you have your shit together and they can listen to the soundbites and go," Yep, that's good." Then, later on, you can reach out to them because they would never take your call before, but because you've included them on the CC's because you gave them the soundbites because they can see you're talking about the right stuff because you come across looking like a pro, they'll take your call. Now, all of a sudden, you're getting a bigger picture of their strategic goals. They're going to introduce you to other people in the buying committee to expand the scope of the deal, all because of using the technology and it's all right there, it's like idiot- proof.

Eddie: Let's not put too much on the sales rep here. I'm want to push back on this and let's put some onus on rev ops. I think that one of the biggest things that you see in the public conversation around rev op is this problem of being too tactical and being too much around systems admin and tools admin and not enough of this. Let's put the onus on rev op as well, to bring tangible insights. Let's take your example and let's say, we go back to our example of John and Jane. Let's say that Jane is crushing her quota and John's not. Now, imagine, you have this philosophical conversation with John and John's sitting here thinking," Hey, that's great, Mr./ Ms. manager that hasn't carried a bag in 20 years or Mr./ Ms. Rev- ops person that's never carried a bag in your life." But when you turn that into a tangible story, it can be different to say," Hey, look at Jane, Jane just crushed her quota because she closed this huge deal for 50% of her quota, in addition to everything else she closed. How did she get that deal? She sent this email and this email had really detailed information that she covered in her research or had these snippets from Gong or what have you and look at how effective that was. By the way, take a look at this. Jane is actually logging less activity than you are but creating double the pipeline." Why is that? Let me give you a tangible example from my past experience, one of the things that we saw at Salesforce consistently, because they created the reporting structure around, it was calling into power. New sales reps would be afraid to call executives or senior leadership in the organization. So, they would call the Salesforce admin. They call the service manager and they wouldn't get big deals because those folks don't have the power in the organization to do transformational projects. Another example is that we learned that trying to sell service cloud to customer- service managers was a really uphill battle. You call the COO and now you've got buy- in from the executive team. Now, this is where you get these big transformational deals. We were able to see this because they literally created a field in Salesforce on the call activity as to whether or not you were discussed it like speaking to power or speaking with, I don't remember it was, but somebody else in the organization and you could just see that top reps were only five activities today, all calls to power and bottom reps were 30 activities, zero calls to power.

Daryl: All right. We're going to wrap this up because Eddie and I can do this all day. A couple of things here, Eddie's really viewing this as a practitioner and an expert in rev ops, Salesforce, all the tools, all the processes. Again, if you don't believe me, just go to their website unionsquareconsulting. com. He goes right into it about sales process optimization, service process optimization, marketing automation, cleansing integrations, et cetera. By the way, we didn't talk about integrations. Integrations is a whole another level on rev ops. Where I'm talking at it often as both your advocate, your sales manager, your sales leader, I'm advocating for you, but also the person, who's going to be fired first. If we don't hit our numbers and therefore I'm using these as tools to make you some more successful, which will make me more successful. But I'm also representing the company because I'm an executive officer and that's my job. I have a fiduciary responsibility to them as well as to you. Two different points of you, the sales rep is the person in- between. You need to understand where rev ops are coming from. You need to understand where your sales manager is coming from, but more than anything, you need to look at the opportunity in front of you. How did this begin? It began with Eddie talking about, he found the secret analyst that allowed him to get the gold leads. That's when he started to clue in, was early now the power of rev ops, his first kind of foray into this rev ops world and how would we end it. We're talking about calling into the power and holding rev ops responsible as well as you. It's not just you in sales, he shows a 1000% spot on that. I've done my job. I got the money to pay for the Eddie's of the world and the tools that are out there. You're hopefully doing your job. That's part of, most of, our conversation today is that we want you as sales professionals to leverage this resort and embrace it because it's going to benefit you by understanding why we're doing it. But the third leg on that stool is, rev op has to do their job. They need to proactively provide insights and intelligence and observations. For example, in Eddie's example, he talked about... We started adding this field. We added a field called talking to power. Then also, because of that, they were able to do their analysis and understand the impact of talking to power, which then the rev ops people would say," This is a good thing. Look at the results we're getting. Everybody should do the same thing." Lesson learned. Now, we can all benefit together. Anyway, there you go, rev ops. It can be the difference between a good year and a fricking incredible year. It can be the difference between an okay career and a fricking amazing career. It's powerful. Too many of you are just choosing to ignore it. I want Eddie to come on here and basically bitch sloppy and say," Wake up because this is a fricking incredible and it's just waiting for you to happen." It's just waiting for you to use, that's it. Eddie, best way to get ahold of you, my friend.

Eddie: Unionsquareconsulting. com. My phone number and our email is right on the website. Or, you can reach out to me via LinkedIn.

Daryl: You need to follow him at LinkedIn. He embarrasses me in how active he is versus I'm not. At least, the good thing about him being active is I read his stuff and it forces me to engage in his comments, which keeps me active. So, I owe him, a big thank you because of that. There you have it. Folks, we went a little long today. I apologize about that, but the conversation was great. I think what made the conversation great was that Eddie would consistently say," Let me be contrarian. Let me push back. Let me challenge that assertion." You know what? That's what you should be doing. That's what sales is all about. Challenging the assumptions to get to the right answer. That's Eddie, I'm Daryl. This, my friends, is The Inside Sales Show. You take care.