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Speaker 1: (00:00)
We are gonna go ahead and kick this off. Um, so today we are gonna be talking about, uh, using HubSpot's automation framework to fuel your rev ops strategy. Uh, and we'll also cover what is Rev ops, um, some overview around why we think Rev ops matters, uh, and sort of good content and q and a from you guys as well. Um, so we'll kick it off to intros, uh, and first super excited to have Alison here from HubSpot. Um, Alison, I will let you do your introduction, uh, and then maybe a little bit around your journey. I know you've been at HubSpot a while, uh, and are now leading sort of the, the rev op practice over there as well.

Speaker 2: (00:35)
Yeah, thanks Connor. Excited to be here and chat. Rev ops. Um, I'm Allison Elworthy. I lead our rev ops organization here at HubSpot. And as Connor mentioned, I've been at HubSpot for many years. I think I'm going on either 10 or 11 this summer. Um, so have really gotten, uh, the opportunity to grow and scale with HubSpot, uh, over the years, which has been just a great opportunity. Um, and also I've taken on many different roles at HubSpot. I actually started in operations and marketing ops, then I ran sales ops and then was in a more general ops role. And most recently, for about three or four years, I was leading our customer success organization, so all of our customer facing teams. And, uh, just a couple months ago we decided to unify all of our ops teams under one umbrella called Rev Ops. And I made the transition to lead rev ops. So I am, uh, still early in my rev ops journey, but it's been an exciting ride so far in terms of how we're evolving rev ops as a function at HubSpot and you know, hopefully for others as well.

Speaker 1: (01:41)
Awesome. Uh, super excited to have you. Uh, and I'm Connor, I run UPD today. We are a HubSpot diamond partner focused on rev ops. And I think it's funny cause when I talk to, uh, rev ops folks and, and you're certainly no exception, um, given how new of a term it is, everyone sort of has this really interested storied background of like, I did some sales stuff and I did some marketing stuff, and then we did some CS things and you sort of start to see the glue that holds all of it together, um, as sort of people move to unification. So my background's super similar. Uh, ran growth teams at a bunch of different venture businesses. Um, spent some time in a venture studio in Chicago, uh, as an operating partner and helped build out systems and reporting infrastructure for some of our companies.

Speaker 1: (02:21)
And at the time we didn't have any idea what to call it, um, but as it sort of bloomed, we've seen the growth of rev op overall. Uh, and so it's super exciting to see especially somebody as, as large as HubSpot really have bring rev ops to the forefront of, of how you guys operate. Um, cool. Well let's go ahead and jump into stuff. I think a cool place to start, this is something that, that you had sort of said when we were initially chatting about topics here that I think is really, really interesting. Um, and so I, I'll let you sort of explain what what you mean by this and then we can kind of kind of chat through it.

Speaker 2: (02:52)
Yeah. So this is kind of one of the reasons why we decided to, um, uh, launch rev ops at HubSpot. Uh, we are at a point where, you know, we've, we've been around for close to 15 years and we've, we've had just an incredible growth trajectory over those years. But now as we continue to grow and look at the next phase, we're really focused on scaling. And so I think we're gonna talk about scaling, um, a little bit later in this webinar, but the whole idea is thinking differently about how you grow. And I think traditionally at HubSpot, the way in which we've grown and a lot of companies do, you know, if you're a a SaaS company, is you add more sales reps and your revenue continues to grow as you add more reps, which is great. Um, and it's, it's been a strategy that has worked really well for us at HubSpot.

Speaker 2: (03:40)
I think as we look into the future, oh great. We have a slide here, um, that will, uh, demonstrate it. I think as we look into the future and we think about growth, we wanna do it in a way that's more efficient. And so I think at some point this idea of just adding more heads just doesn't scale anymore and you come to this critical kind of juncture is what you see here is like, how can you actually bend that revenue curve faster than how you grow your headcount? And so that's what we call non-linear growth. How can you grow in a way in which your revenue kind of maybe outpaces the rate at which you're hiring those sales reps, um, and go to market heads. So that's, uh, that's really what we're looking to do as we look forward into the future, um, in this next phase of growth at HubSpot.

Speaker 1: (04:28)
For sure. I think one of the things that we see as well in this, and it's interesting is obviously is exasperated pretty heavily on the go-to-market teams. And I think we see this across, uh, especially in our customer base. We see it across finance teams, we see it across operations teams, and whenever sort of people are managing different processes or trying to get through, uh, a list of tasks that without sort of automation or something that's gonna expand the number of tasks one person can perform, um, you end up just throwing bodies to things and sort of, as you have more people that are doing more things, obviously the, the complexity and the scale of which it operates expands, and all of a sudden you need more management and nor more software and more infrastructure to support those people instead of it being something where as you're adding capacity, you're able to sort of get in economies of scale there to drive that revenue forward with a lower headcount. Um, which I think I think elegantly brings us to kind of the next point here. Um, and maybe defining on, on your end of, we talked a little bit about scale, but maybe like what is scale and and how is that differentiated from just like growing headcount, growing revenue?

Speaker 2: (05:29)
Yeah, I think when you think about scale, it's simple. It's how do you get more out of the investments that you're making? How do you get more customers, more users, more revenue in what you have? And to do that you have to think strategically. It's not just about adding those heads, right? Or adding those managers. Um, how can you get really smart about growth? And um, you know, we can talk a lot about what scale looks like through things like automation, um, for example, like you mentioned Connor. Um, but I think that's, that's what what scale or that's how we define scale at HubSpot, and that's what I challenge my team to think about, um, in everything that we do. And, and you can also find scale in efficiencies, right? You talked about, you know, every team's kind of grow and then you look over and you're like, oh, well that I'm mean sales op and that marketing team is doing, or marketing ops team is doing the exact same thing I do. Why don't we combine forces, have one person do it we'll free up ahead to go and do something else that's going to help us get more, um, as opposed to doing that duplicative work in two parts of the organization. Oh, and by the way, when you do duplicative work, it not just isn't like an efficient way to grow and scale, it starts to create friction within your organization. Um, which I is I think unfortunately another byproduct of, um, growing in that manner.

Speaker 1: (06:49)
I, I think that's definitely true. And I think to take us into sort of the next slide, which I think is a great graphic, um, on your guys' end, but something we see a lot, so one of the service offerings we do with a lot of customers, um, is we do a lot of audits and we'll come in and sort of look at where's your existing tech stack, what's your existing process? And what's so interesting is there's never a time that we do one of these, um, where we go and gather all of our findings, we bring the executives in the room that we don't find out that sales is trying to solve the problem of not knowing enough about the customer when they hand off to CS by having a bunch of required fields. And CS is sending the customer a intro, uh, sort of like intake form asking a bunch of questions about who that person is.

Speaker 1: (07:30)
And then you have the renewals team that's going and trying to create a process to gather information from other people. And you look at this and you're like, wait a minute, all of us are actually trying to solve the same problem. And to your point, not only is it inefficient for all of us to do this in different ways, but it creates a really negative experience for that end customer because instead of interacting with your business, they're now interacting with four different teams and none of them know what the other one is doing. And I think that this really encapsulates it a lot. And so I know that you guys have done a lot of thought in terms of bringing this all under one house, but what might be helpful is not just how you think about this in an aggregated way, but how you guys are doing it at HubSpot.

Speaker 2: (08:06)
Yeah. So you know, there's, there's really two reasons for rev ops and why we're moving to rev ops. One is what we've talked about earlier is this idea of scale and finding efficiencies in a smarter way to grow. The other is from a customer perspective, um, because I truly believe, and, and we believe in HubSpot, the way in which you're organized and operate internally is going to be a direct reflection on what that customer experience is going to feel like. No, no matter how you piece it together, right? And you can say, oh, we're trying to like improve the handoffs between sales and marketing, and if, if, if those teams aren't aligned and working s you know, super closely together, you're gonna create a disjointed customer experience. And so you need to solve that, you know, within the center of your organization. And so the customer experience is the other reason why we're doing it.

Speaker 2: (08:55)
And so, you know, in the old world, you'll see on the left here, this is what we call a function out, um, organization. You know, you've got marketing, you've got sales, you've got services, and then kind of supporting them. You've got marketing ops, sales ops, services ops, and that's one way to serve the customer. It's function out, right? Um, and also the other point on this slide is that, you know, the op the ops teams are kind of outside, right? They're one la they're one layer removed from the customer. And I think it's really important to, to grasp to this concept. Um, you know, typically ops folks, you think about serving, you're gonna market employees, but you know, indirectly you're serving the customers. And I think it's so important and critical to keep the customer, um, you know, kind of top of mind in addition to the go to market employees. So when we think about the new world, when you introduce something like rev ops, it flips that model. And what ends up happening is that you move ops close to the customer. How can you really solve and create strategies from a customer in perspective? So thinking about the end-to-end customer experience, um, versus kind of a, a function out experience. Um, the other thing that that this does is it brings ops closer to the customer, like I mentioned, and, and it gets 'em solving truly for the customer first, um, in that customer experience.

Speaker 1: (10:16)
I think that's so true. And one of the things, and I remember this from, um, when it was one of the inbound, it was, I think it was the last inbound I was actually at, so it would've been the year before last, but I think, uh, Brian had talked a lot about how, you know, how, how can you use your business tools to solve for the customer problem, um, as opposed to managing sort of that internal operations need. And I think that's something that sounds really simple, but I, I actually think is very novel. Um, and most people look at the tools that they select to run the business as serving. What is that internal business need versus what is the customer experience we're trying to create and, and how does our tooling in the way that we operate help support that actual customer need?

Speaker 1: (10:58)
Um, and I think that's, that is a really different way of looking at things. And I think I'll let you expand on, on this extremely well designed slide that speaks to my soul, uh, which is as somebody with a background in ops, and as somebody who's been running a lot of different ops teams, and I know our team feels this as well, and definitely every clients at ops team is the majority of the time, for most organizations that don't have a dedicated rev ops function, everyone in ops is just, Hey, this is broken, can you fix it? And the backlog of broken stuff just infinitely expands. Um, and no one's ever able to solve the actual problem. Um, all they can do is put out a fire and slap on a bandaid.

Speaker 2: (11:35)
That's exactly right. And I think, you know, and I've been in ops, um, for many years, and it's usually, you know, as companies are grow in scaling, you know, it's a reactive motion. It's a reactive team that you invest in when something's broken or needs fix, oh, let's just hire an ops person or put an ops person on it. So oftentimes ops professionals are set up as a firefighter, they're filling the cracks, they're cleaning up messes, right? They're, they're very reactive, um, and they kind of operate downstream, right? But what you want is to create a proactive ops function in one that is really at the forefront of your go-to-market strategy and is driving that strategy. Your ops folks kind of know how the business works, they know how the leverage work, and you want them to be leading with innovative strategies, strategies that are going to help you scale as an organization and strategies that are truly solving first for the customer.

Speaker 2: (12:28)
Um, and so this is, you know, an evolution that we're going through in HubSpot is how do I bring, bring my team that's been kind of a disjointed ops organization, reactive fighting fires to one that's unified and also one that is operating, you know, way upstream from where they're operating before in terms of fighting those fires or cleaning those up. And instead you wanna create an operational framework and operating system for your organization that doesn't create those downstream messes or fires, right? So that your ops and strategy teams can be, um, operating, operating from a proactive state, one that's gonna help you scale.

Speaker 1: (13:05)
Something that I think is so key about this that we see in our customers is we, we do a lot of implementation work, whether it's on c CRM or marketing or billing systems. And I think what one of the biggest differentiators that I think this really captures is when we work with companies that even if they don't call it rev ops, but they have a operational function that's core to the strategy of the business, um, timelines and planning for implementations is like, we have this, this opportunity or this problem is being created, we have a short term solution in place, let's plan for the longer term solution and let's do things right versus organizations without that central function. It's always a, we need to do this tomorrow, it needs to be on now because we're, we're making these investments, or we're making decisions around processes or technology that we're implementing into our business.

Speaker 1: (13:53)
Not because we think that we're gonna be able to capture an opportunity that's coming up, but because we are in so much pain right now, and if we can't get this out tomorrow, we're all gonna continue to hurt from it. And I think you, you really see, to your point where I think that those two graphs really en encapsulate this, is organizations that embrace this mindset are able to get ahead of those problems. Uh, instead of being in this constant state of just trying to put out the next thing, which I think takes us into the next point here really well, which is something we see a lot, um, around piecemeal progress versus foundation and, and how often are the, the activities and the tasks that your ops team is engaging in just patching a particular problem or getting to the next piece versus creating a foundation they can build on top of. And so I, I'd love to get your perspective on how you think about this and then, and then maybe any anecdotes around how you guys have approached this, uh, with how you build stuff at HubSpot.

Speaker 2: (14:47)
Yeah, so, you know, as you're growing and scaling and, you know, know the business is moving fast, it's hard to take a step back and think about the foundational elements. Um, and it's so easy just to approach this in a piecemeal way and continuing to add, add people, add systems, add processes, right? As a, as a way for a quick fix, which is fine to some extent, but what ends up happening is that you, you continue to build on a shaky foundation or foundation with lots of cracks or maybe a non-existent foundation. And so at some point, all of that building in a piecemeal function, uh, fashion is going to break it, it will break down at some point. I think we've all experienced this, like, you know, when you're kind of in hypergrowth phase and you're trying to build out your systems and all of a sudden you're like, oh my gosh, we're just stucked, we need to start from scratch, right?

Speaker 2: (15:38)
And you, you know, roll out a new CRM or whatever it may be. Um, and it's painful. The longer you wait, the more of a mess you have to clean up from your piecemeal progress. Um, so I think it's really important to take a step back sooner rather than later and do this in a thoughtful way and create a foundation, create a foundation of data, create a foundation of systems, create a foundation of processes that are going to enable you to scale and grow in the right way. Um, it's tempting to go about it in the piecemeal way, but what ends up happening is over time, that's going to break. Um, two, it's gonna create that disjointed customer experience at some point that friction is going to show up. And then three, it's gonna be really tough for your teams as they continue growing scale. And the only way to get yourself out of it is to add more people to it, add more process to it, add more systems to it. And so it's just like continuous cycle. And so it's so critical, you know, there's never a good time to kind of take a step back and build this foundation, um, that you do it as as soon as possible, really.

Speaker 1: (16:42)
I, I think to your point, it's so important also to get this right. I think what we see happen all of the time, and I think this is, and I think it's this, is this was normal for high growth companies for a really long time, which was, let's build a bunch of stuff. Let's keep adding things on top once it hits a certain level of complexity that, you know, teasing it out is too hard, we'll just blow it up, we'll put in something new and we'll just build on top again. Um, and it's, we'll cycle out an executive, we'll bring in something new, we'll build a bunch of stuff. And what ends up happening is, um, every time you have to stop if, I mean, if you have this mentality of, the reason we don't want to build a solid foundation is because slowing down, stopping and really putting in the right tools at the beginning is hard and painful.

Speaker 1: (17:23)
Um, if you look at this from the flip side of if you just keep making piecemeal progress, you're going to have to do that, not when it's convenient and not when you can plan for it. But when everything blows up every year, two years, three years, like your life cycle may change, but every time that you do piecemeal progress and you have to blow it up again, just do it right. And the impact you'll have from a long tail is gonna be so significant. Um, which I think takes us to something that, that you, I know you guys have, have put together and I'll let you sort of lead talking about, cause I, I think the more I look at this, the more insight I gleaned from it, I think it's awesome. Um, so I'll, I'll just let you sort of speak to

Speaker 2: (17:57)
It. Yeah, I love this chart. This is from, uh, one of our VPs in in sales strategy. And it just is, it encapsulates what happens in ops so often, right? And I think if you start in the top left with scale, you know, you, you come or sorry in with invent, like you invent these new processes or things that are gonna help your business grow or, or, and, and continue to grow, and you find ways to scale that, right? And that's what's gonna differentiate you. Um, usually they're mission critical, either processes or systems or data or analysis, whatever it is. And then at some point you just try to optimize it. And usually this optimized phase is a MA is manual process, right? It's, it's, you know, it requires people to, um, continue operating, right? And we never really carve out time within operations to think about automation and maybe outsourcing.

Speaker 2: (18:45)
And so what ends up happening is you create this bottleneck in the top right hand corner with optimize and you have people assigned to that and they're doing these same processes over and over and over again. Um, that ultimately you wanna automate. Because once you can automate that work, it's going to free up the time of your teams and ops and strategy to continue innovating. And the more you innovate, the more you are going to, um, grow, hopefully find ways to differentiate yourself, um, you know, beat your competitors, whatever it may be. And it's just an important cycle to make sure you have and, and to make sure there's kind of this like fluid, you know, cycle happening. But oftentimes you get stuck in that top right hand corner. And I think it's, it's important to take a step back and really understand what those processes are that, um, you know, uh, you're optimizing where they're stopped in that top right hand corner and that you should be automating because you wanna continue to push your team, your ops team to invent and find ways to better scale.

Speaker 1: (19:49)
I think something anecdotally that, uh, is, is a project I love to point to and I think really encapsulates what happens when you don't have a central rev op function and you get stuck in this optimized place is when the pain is distributed. And so each individual group only sees a sliver of it. And so it doesn't look like this big problem that any particular business function wants to go solve. And so a, a project we worked on once and I think is, is really applicable here, was, um, a process where sales reps had complex quoting and, and pricing configurations. Um, they get them wrong really regularly financed up to spend their time going in updating and correcting them and making them work the right way. And then everything has to get routed and approved to the C F O. And then when it gets to the CS team, they find out that, oh, you never sold them the onboarding or training package, so now you need to go back and do this whole thing again.

Speaker 1: (20:42)
And each group felt some pain out of that, but their solution was, let's have our controller review every single s o w that comes through and we can just add more finance people to this problem. Let's have our sales reps not be able to send out any quotes to customers without them going through this approval process. And then let's make sure that CS gets to require tons of information upstream before this can ever get here. And so each, each group had a minor solution, but what it ended up doing is slowing down the whole process, making it harder for sales reps to get sows out the door and holding up finance where they spend every night sitting on the couch approving and augmenting individual sows. And I think with that rev ops function, you can sort of get that holistic view of the problem and say, Hey, we can, we can actually fix this. Like we don't just need to be stuck here and say this is an issue and by implementing processes and automations around this, we can eliminate this friction that happens not only for our internal people, but ends up slowing down deals, slowing down customers and having an impact on how people work with us. And I think that without a central rev op function, you just, you don't get that perspective because everything is stuck in each individual group and and nobody's looking at it holistically.

Speaker 2: (21:53)
Yeah. And I think that's the issue is that everyone and everyone has good intentions to solve it. And so someone

Speaker 1: (21:57)
Absolutely, yeah, everyone's,

Speaker 2: (21:59)
They're trying to solve it and then as they're all trying to cobble it together and solve it their own ways, you create this terrible customer experience cuz it doesn't make sense. And sometimes you create more friction and more work as a byproduct. Finance may do something that then sales is going to have to, you know, adjust to the way that they're, you know, quoting or whatever it may be. Um, and no one's looking at it holistically. And so you, you can, you end up with within another suboptimal, um, you know, output or result, um, you know, if you don't have one team who's looking at that end end experience from a customer perspective, solving it from the customer's perspective, um, in versus just the functions out. And that goes back to, you know, that concept or the slide we had a few moments ago. Um, that's it. And I think what ends up happening, to your point, yeah, it's, it's friction for the customers, for your, for your internal teams. And by the way, those folks in finance don't wanna be clicking through the savings work. The sales reps don't wanna be like doing all the quoting the Cs. Like that's all the work no one wants to do. And you have that unhappy employees if you're not investing here. So, I mean, you know, it's, it's a win-win, win, win, um, if you go, if you look at it through all those lens.

Speaker 1: (23:08)
I think you're right. And I think to jump us to the next point here, um, is we, when we look at sort of the, the robots function, we, we usually break it down as it's, it's people processing tools. And if you look through the lens with only one of these, uh, you're gonna get stuck, right? If you look at everything as a people problem, you're like, okay, we need to cycle out these people. And I think we see this so commonly in really fast growing early stage technology companies on the sales side as they're like, oh, our sales people aren't making things work, so we'll just churn them out and we'll add in new ones and we'll just keep throwing new people at this. And the fundamental problem is we, we just have the wrong people in seat. And then I think on the process side, it's, instead of looking at automation solutions and instead of looking at ways to eliminate some of that friction, we come in and say, let's just build more business process around it.

Speaker 1: (23:54)
We'll have more required fields, we'll have more sheets to fill out, we'll have more rogue spreadsheets. And then we see tool bloat as well, which is, okay, well we can't figure out our process, we don't really know what's going on with the people, so let's just buy more software and just throw more software at this problem. And I think when we really look at row ops is it's, it's really figuring out what the right balance across all these three is. Um, and I'm interested in a a, I have no idea whether or not that's something you agree with. Uh, and then b, how you guys think about this in terms of what falls in your purview and, and how you sort of think about, uh, rev ops type of problems.

Speaker 2: (24:28)
Yeah, it's kind of like the spaghetti and the wall thing, just seeing what sticks and when you have multiple teams doing that in silos, man that is one messy wall, right? So I think it's, I think rev ops just plays a critical function where, you know, it's great with my team is that, you know, I have folks who focus on sales or smart or cs, but we work as a leadership team together to figure out, okay, where can we get better alignment on our tools or simplify our tools, right? And maybe get, you know, right now we have a CS enablement team and a sales enablement team and those teams are actually starting to collaborate more together. And we're getting on a whole new platform, one platform. They're finding ways across the two teams to get more efficient in the content they that they create, which is great.

Speaker 2: (25:11)
So, you know, we're getting aligned on tools, we're getting aligned on process and then, you know, the teams are starting to partner and they're starting to blur the lines in terms of how they work with one another, um, to, to get things done. And they're finding efficiencies and it's also gratifying for them too cause they get to learn about CS or, or for sales. And then what ends up happening, and I love the enablement, you know, um, the enablement concept as an example, is the way in which we are enabling our sales reps is the same way in which we're enabling our CS reps. So as a result, the way that those teams are interacting and working with our prospects and customers is consistent. So we create a really great consistent experience for HubSpot prospects and customers throughout their journey at HubSpot, which I think is pretty cool.

Speaker 1: (26:03)
I think you're right. I think I want to interject quickly and take you to the next slide only cuz I think it does such a good job and I think the way that you guys think about these teams, um, I is really novel and interesting and obviously HubSpot is a large organization, uh, and you guys have a lot of folks, but I think the way that you're sort of looking at this is all being centered around that same mission is is definitely unique.

Speaker 2: (26:23)
Exactly. And so this is, you know, one way to think about it is how can we find areas to really unify those teams? So I talked about the go-to-market enablement, you know, before we had CS enablement, we had sales enablement, now it's just go-to-market enablement and cool things are opening up for the individuals on those teams to get to simplify our tools that we're using to get alignment on our processes in a better, better customer experience. Um, and we're doing that across the board, you know, looking more broadly at data and analytics, how can we get out of our silos of marketing op sales ops and CS ops and look at data holistically. Um, same thing with like strategy and planning. Um, you know, we're taking a different approach and, um, I'm really excited about what's going to open up for us as a team and as the teams start partnering, collaborating with one another for themselves, for our go-to-market employees and for our customers. Um, so there's a, it's an exciting time. I, I will say, as we transition to this model,

Speaker 1: (27:20)
One of the things that, that I, I'm curious about, only really for my own interest, but I think , I think it'll be interesting for our audience as well. We jumped to the next piece here, which is that, um, where should rev ops set? I think we've talked a lot about if you're adding in rev ops to your organization or you're sort of looking at rev ops as being a problem, is where do you put them when we talk about them spanning across multiple different groups in multiple different teams. And, and I think what functions roll up under them versus sit in the individual business units?

Speaker 2: (27:51)
Yeah, that's a great question. So I think, you know, with the way that we've organized it at HubSpot is that we have a chief customer officer, her name's Yani, she we marketing sales, CS, and Rev op. So, you know, we kinda have four or five leaders that all re report up to her. Um, and I think it's important, I I think it's working really well for us in terms of like how we're aligned, how we're working together. Um, and you know, in rev ops specifically, we have all ops strategy enablement, um, sales acceleration, which we define as kind of our BDR organization and, uh, sales engineers and specialists, um, are within sales acceleration, um, as well as, you know, our strategy and planning teams. So it's a pretty broad organization, but, um, you know, it doesn't mean that everything gets decentralized and that you don't have folks that are dedicated with, you know, working with your sales org.

Speaker 2: (28:48)
I think that's, you know, one of the, the big questions is like, oh, you're gonna pull, you know, sales ops away from sales and everything's gonna break because that is so important. If anything, we're actually finding ways, you know, we're with some roles or teams, like how can we get embedded even more? How can we go deeper in the support that we provide, um, as we sent, you know, maybe more centralized or think more end to end with some of the other teams. Um, so I think it's a process and something we're thinking through is like, what, what areas and teams do we want to keep deeply decentralized because they need that kind of like, domain expertise of sales or marketing or cs and what areas do we wanna think about centralizing, maybe systems or data for example, that makes sense to have one consistent, consistent kind of foundational element.

Speaker 2: (29:35)
Um, but what's great about having all of those teams under rev ops is that the ops folks are working with, with data, the ops folks are working with systems, but they're working off a foundation that supports all of the go-to-market teams. So inherently, you know, the way in which they're working, there isn't a lot of friction because there's kind of one foundation as opposed to, you know, a data foundation for sales, a assistant foundation for, for sales. It's different from the one in cs, it's different from the one in marketing. That's what creates the friction. So how can we find ways to remove friction so that the teams can really focus on, you know, supporting either sales or cs or marketing where it makes sense.

Speaker 1: (30:15)
I think something you touched on there that I, I think is so important is that Rev ops is sitting next to, um, sales and CS and everybody else and not some under function. Um, and they really have a seat at the table when strategic decisions are being made and figuring out how to approach things and how to structure things. And I think everything's sitting under Yemeni who's amazing, by the way, if you've never met Yemeni, she's incredible. Uh, but I think that, um, it rolling up there and if that's a function that, uh, if you're a smaller organization, that's something that your c o owns or if something that your COO owns or it's your c whoever really is going to own go to market, rev op should be a core component of that. And I think one of the things that we see with so many customers, and I think the value that we strive to bring in those examples is that everyone talks about we should have customer-centric user experiences.

Speaker 1: (31:05)
We should have a sales process that automates a whole bunch of these different pieces. But what ends up missing from that conversation is like, how do we actually do that? Um, and that's I think why Rev op seems to be in the room and at the table to say, I can make that happen for you, but here are the things that we need to do in order to deliver on that experience. And I think that's one of the big reasons that we see a lot of sales or marketing leaders have a lot of fatigue because they have these great ideas. They go to the SKO o they say all these cool things they want to do, and then the underlying technology or the process to 'em, how that doesn't exist. And then everyone's frustrated being like, oh yeah, I know we said we do that last quarter, but like maybe this time. Um, and bringing Rev ops into that strategy room really makes sure that you can deliver on those customer experiences, which I think is so important. Um, yeah,

Speaker 2: (31:50)
And, and rev ops is really the glue, right? Rev ops holds it all together and they also know, well, if you do that in sales, it's gonna cause this in cs so they can solve it in a way that's not gonna create, you know, issues down the stream, which I think is so important.

Speaker 1: (32:05)
I, I think that's right. And to to, to dovetail on that one more time, I think that something we always look at and we say to customers or internal teams is like, if you're doing something and it's painful either for you or for your end constituent in the customer, um, you should be able to go and ask the route script, why does this happen? And they should either be able to say, oh, we should remove that and automate it. Like, thank you for bringing that to our attention, or a very good reason on you do have to do this because there's these steps downstream. And without that holistic experience, you sort of get stuck to, I don't know, that's just what we do. Um, and that's never a good answer for anybody.

Speaker 2: (32:41)
Totally

Speaker 1: (32:43)
Cool. Um, I know we've been talking a lot around HubSpot and how you guys approach this and everything else. Um, something I think could be valuable, I know that we have a lot of folks on the audience side with quite a bit smaller organizations, um, is how to get started. If, if you're really thinking, I, I think rev ops is important, I think it'll add value to my business. Uh, but what do I do to actually get started having an impact on that?

Speaker 2: (33:06)
Yeah. You know, and you don't need to have a 400 person rev ops organization to be ready to make the move to rev ops, right? Rev ops can also just be a mindset in how you think about operations. And so that's what I, you know, it, it could, you could get started on rev ops, you know, after this webinar and just challenging the way in which you think about ops and strategy, um, or, you know, you could do a big organizational change, right? I mean, there's, there's like a spectrum of how you embrace this concept of rev ops, but it's really all about alignment. That's where it starts. How do you align your go-to-market teams, your ops team, supporting those go-to-market teams, um, and create visibility, right? And if it's a small organization, you can just make sure that those folks are all working together and kind of setting those expectations.

Speaker 2: (33:51)
Or you could, you know, change the org if that's what it takes. Um, but it's really important to one, create that alignment, create that transparency, encourage those folks to be collaborating, to work, you know, working together, being clear about what goals they're solving. You know, we want you to solve and create what we call a HubSpot, a disruptive customer experience, a customer experience that is so great, it's going to set us apart from our competitors. And, you know, be clear that that's the end goal. So how should those teams really work together to remove that friction in your customer experience and do that through your systems, your processes, your people, your tools as we discussed earlier.

Speaker 1: (34:30)
Cool. Um, I don't have a a a whole lot to add to that. I think that's absolutely on point, um, to do a, a quick promo and something I'll, I'll let you sort of speak about a little bit. But for anyone on the audience side, um, Alison contributed to the rev ops cookbook. Uh, we have tons of cool rev ops leaders that have contributed things there, but I'll let you speak a little bit around the recipe and, and why you think it's important and then we can jump into, uh, q and a. So while Alison's going through this, um, if you guys have questions, audience side, feel free to throw 'em in the chat or the QA box. Um, and we'll have sort of 15 or 20 minutes or so to be able to answer those for you guys. And I know that we have some that are burning on our end as well. So all you guys are putting those together. Alison, I will go ahead and, uh, and give you the floor.

Speaker 2: (35:09)
This, this was great. This is a lot of fun to put together a, uh, a recipe as part of the cookbook. I logged it and, um, I don't think any of my, anyone in my family would call me a chef, so I'm glad I got that title here in the slide. Um, but you know, I, I won't go into too much detail here. I, you know, I'm sure we can, I'm sure folks have, have access to this in terms of how you can leverage HubSpot, um, to get started on some of the concepts that we talked about, you know, from the systems perspective and to really help, uh, create visibility for your organization, for your sales reps, your CS reps, you know, marketing to get kind of that end-to-end perspective of what's happening with your prospects and customers all in one place. So that's what this is all about, and I think HubSpot is a great tool for you to get started, um, to start, you know, adopting that mindset of rev ops, which is all about, you know, you know, thinking about the customer experience first above all else, and building your tools, processes and, and people on top of that.

Speaker 2: (36:07)
So, um, this is the recipe that's out there, but it goes into a lot more detail in terms of how you can use HubSpot, you know, Gmail zappier to kind of build this internally and get started today, uh, before trying to do a massive reorg, right? To, to create rev ops. So there's a lot that you can do with the tools that you have, um, to create this foundation from the system and tool perspective.

Speaker 1: (36:32)
Cool. Um, I think we'll jump to questions. I have some that we collected prior to, uh, starting that I'll, I'll sort of start with and then if we have live ones from the group, we'd be happy to take them as well. But I think one of the first ones that came in initially is, is what are some of the challenges that, uh, uc businesses face when they're trying to automate some of their systems and processes?

Speaker 2: (36:53)
Yeah, I think one of the biggest challenges is, um, if you are set up kind of within your silos, teams try to solve and automate things, which is great. They have the right intentions, but what ends up happening is you automate one part, you know, something in sales that doesn't then tie through to that workflow or work stream in CS or the data and information isn't, isn't trans transferred from sales to Cs and it works great within kind of your, you know, window that you're working in, you know, during that sales process. But then it stops or it breaks. And, um, like I mentioned before, that creates more work because then someone in CS has to be like, oh, now I gotta figure out how to get at that data and I'm gonna build my own, you know, automation. And then what's end up, what ends up happening is that you start cobbling together these systems and processes, right? To kind of find ways to glue the experience all together and wow, what a mess that is, and a lot of time and energy. And so, you know, that's, that, that's what ends up happening. So I think, you know, when you are looking to automate something, think end to end, you know, think about how you're gonna, you know, receive that data, um, how are you gonna pass that data or information on, and should you extend, you know, the automation that you're implementing beyond sales and do it for marketing and services.

Speaker 1: (38:15)
I think that's still right. And I think one of the things that we, uh, we see so often is, uh, redirecting labor to just other people that aren't in the room or a part of the team, and everyone's like, oh, well, we'll just make the, the AEs fill out more fields or have more steps that they have to go through and we'll just make it harder for other people. And I think where that gets really scary is when people are solving not for, uh, the end customer experience, but instead, what's gonna make it easiest for us to get through this? And they actually make it harder to be a customer. Um, which, which is the worst. Like, everyone hates that. And I think one of the things that we're seeing is a, just a global trend that I think you guys are far ahead of, um, is that you really need to be focusing on how you can deliver this very personalized and unique customer experience.

Speaker 1: (39:06)
And when a person interacts with your company, the person interacting with them should have a good idea of who they are, what do they subscribe to, what's the last interaction that they had? Like, nothing is worse. And if you think about this from just being a customer, if, if you ever submit a support ticket or you get transferred and all of a sudden you're like, okay, now I need to explain this whole problem over again, and they don't know what products I have, and now they're asking me for this verification information, and it's so painful. And you have to put your, sort of your yourself in the seat of your customer and how are you with your business in the way that you operate, making it easy to work with you.

Speaker 2: (39:42)
Exactly. Isn't that the worst? Having to reexplain yourself and you've been on hold for like a half an hour and it's like, oh my God, you've gotta be kidding me. It is the worst customer experience. And I think the customer experience is so critical in this day and age. And, and the i part of creating a disruptive or a great customer experience is a personalized one. It's like you and, and you make it easy, right? And you already know everything about me, and then there's a solution. Wow. That was incredible. And I think now, you know what's happening, you see this with a lot of B2C brands. Like, you know, Casper for example, is a great example. How, how to buy a mattress. I'm not sure we have a Casper mattress. I'm not sure if if it's better than my Sealy mattress, but the experience of buying that mattress was 10 times better than the Sealy experience of having going to the store. I know I could return the Casper mattress pretty easily. Like, man, just that experience makes me wanna buy Casper again. Even if the mattress, you know, isn't that much better than a, you know, ceiling mattress or for example. So, you know, it's that, and that's what's gonna happen in b2b. And I think that's what, you know, companies need to think about is how do I create a really disruptive, delightful customer experience? I say disruptive in a way that, you know, it's, it's, you know, revolutionary or so much better, not

Speaker 1: (40:54)
Disruptive, not,

Speaker 2: (40:55)
Not like a bad customer experience. I know that can be confusing, but a truly delightful customer experience that you're gonna go back to, you know, they're they're gonna come back to you versus going to a competitor.

Speaker 1: (41:07)
I, I think that's absolutely right. I think something that, uh, I see sort of q and a question on is, is where do you think that automation should happen versus where it shouldn't? And, and I don't know if, and maybe your answer is automate everything and everything should be done, but of, of where you're sort of, if you start to apply the automation solution to something you, you actually might get a negative result.

Speaker 2: (41:29)
Yeah. I think, you know, what's interesting is you, what the areas where I love to see automation is where there's a win-win. Where's there win for your internal teams and also win for your customers? What we're real, real, what we are realizing at HubSpot is there's some like things that customers don't wanna have to pick up the phone and call us for, right? They just wanna do in app and they don't wanna have to talk to a human being, and I don't blame them. And so what are the areas of our product or interactions that we can automate that remove work from our internal team so they can be doing truly value add work and also areas where customers don't expect or don't want to have to talk to a human being. So those, that's like a win-win scenario where those opportunities to automate work that helps your customers and also your internal teams, that's where we start. And that's where I get so excited when a team comes to me. It's like, oh, we think we wanna automate this. And it's like, oh yes. Cause like our customers are telling us that they wanna talk to, to, to our teams. And by the way, this is bogging down, you know, the support organization and you know, we could be freeing up our time to be delivering or working with customers in a more personalized way. Um, so that's one way to think about it.

Speaker 1: (42:39)
Awesome. I think that wraps for questions that we have. Um, thank you so, so much for joining us, Alison. This was a delight. Uh, and as always, uh, we, we appreciate and value anytime you give us. So thank you so much for coming.

Speaker 2: (42:55)
Of course. Thanks for having me. This was fun.

Speaker 1: (42:58)
Thanks everybody.