RevOps FM

What does it take to scale a company from $100M to over $1B in ARR? Cody Guymon has taken a journey that most revenue operators could only dream of—helping Qualtrics scale to an $8B acquisition and then a $27B IPO. Now he's back at an earlier stage company, hoping to repeat the trip all over again. We chat through his lessons learned, his forecasting methodology, and how he architected a unified R...

There's a set of skills we rely on everyday at work, often without realizing it: how we think about problems, make decisions, market our ideas, manage up, give feedback...they're all part of the operating system of how we interface with the business world. I’m fascinated by these things both because they have a massive impact on our effectiveness and because they often go unexamined. They’re just...

Running business systems at enterprise scale has some unique challenges—especially when that enterprise is Hubspot. Today we're fortunate to chat with Rich Archbold, whose team supports all GTM systems and automation at Hubspot, including Hubspot's own Hubspot implementation. This is a truly fascinating peek behind the scenes at one of the most iconic tech companies. Rich also shares generously fr...

I'm a really big believer in the idea of a unified RevOps function supporting all the go-to-market teams. But I'll be honest, sometimes it's a little discouraging when I look at how RevOps is done in practice, because outside of a few examples, I usually see essentially a sales ops function with a new name. So I wanted to find people who are actually leading a unified RevOps team in the real world...

Every company pays lip service to privacy. But few seem to really value it in practice. In marketing and sales, we rely on personal and behavioural data for so many commonplace tactics, and this reliance is only increasing. It's a kind of arms race. Even if you wanted to, it feels like you can't afford to give up the perceived advantages of using personal data. And even as we continually hear abou...

Refine Labs has had a seismic impact on B2B marketing. Whether you agree with their philosophy or not, it's hard to deny its influence. They've set the agenda, defined the terms of the debate, and challenged many aspects of the status quo. Former CEO Chris Walker catapulted the agency to prominence with his LinkedIn thought leadership. But behind the scenes, there's also been an intricate operatio...

I think marketing is one of the toughest functions to lead successfully. Your job is part art, part science. You need to hire, coach, and retain talent with a huge range of skillsets that you may even not be master of yourself—from the creative to the analytical to the technical. And then your job is to simultaneously create demand, capture demand, help sales convert that demand, help customer suc...

More and more marketers are embracing demand creation as a strategy, at least in principle. But making a fundamental GTM change is HARD. You need to build executive alignment, define new KPIs, identify how to educate your target audience, fine-tune your content engine, and a whole lot more. As VP of Demand Gen at Refine Labs, Sam Kuehnle has been a big part of the movement evangelizing a shift fro...

I've worked with a bunch of different sellers. Some were good. Some not so much. But one or two were truly next level. They had consistently better results. They brought in bigger deals. They closed accounts no one else could. And they just seemed to "get it" in a different way. They were switched on—you didn't need to tell them what to do. Whatever challenge you threw at them, they found a way. T...

SaaS companies spent the past decade optimizing for growth and customer acquisition at all costs. For many, the plan to actually retain and grow those customers has been foggy. Now with many businesses facing the reality of massive churn, it's become incredibly clear that helping customers succeed is just as important as acquiring them in the first place. So we're here today to discuss the third l...

Prioritization is probably the biggest challenge for ops teams. Say yes to everything—you pretty quickly become a service department. Set your own priorities without input from the business—you can quickly find yourself irrelevant, even out of a job. The best model that I've seen for tackling this problem is what we could call the product management approach to managing MarTech. This is where you...

Every marketing team  wants attribution. But weirdly, it's often not that satisfying when they actually get it. I led many multi-touch attribution projects as a consultant, and we got really good at implementing tools, creating taxonomies, and making sure that data was clean. But I found that when you actually showed these reports to a C-level executive, it was usually kind of underwhelming. The d...

For most of us in B2B, the marketing automation platform - aka "MAP" - is the anchoring piece of technology in the martech stack. When I was first buying a MAP, there were way more options than today, but generally they all bundled a few core features together — sending emails, segmenting audiences, and creating workflows. But is there a reason why you need to do your lifecycle processing in the s...

Kyle Coleman is one of the most prominent revenue leaders on LinkedIn and a long-time champion of sales development. So there was no one better to chat with about the future of the SDR function, which some claim is facing imminent demise... Spoiler alert: Kyle doesn't share that view. But he DOES think that it needs to change. We look at how sales development will evolve in 2024 and beyond, discus...

There comes a time in every marketing ops professional's life when they wonder if the grind of an in-house job is worth it after all. Whether it's politics, overwork, lack of resources, lack of respect, a toxic boss, or one of a million other things...it might make you think, "maybe I'd be happier as a consultant." But is the grass actually greener? What does it take to get started in consulting?...

B2B communities are everywhere these days. It's easy to forget that 10 years ago, it wasn't nearly so easy to connect with peers, ask for unfiltered recommendations, celebrate wins, and commiserate about dumpster fires. Mike Rizzo has made community his career - both in developing B2B customer communities and in building the top community of practice for marketing operations. In this episode, we e...

Every B2B company has a funnel tracking process. And quite often, that process is seriously limited or broken. Leads get lost, data is inaccurate, and businesses struggle to produce insights and accurate reporting. I've seen this first hand, and so has this week's guest - Charlie Saunders. We've both spent years as consultants fixing broken funnels. In this episode, we talk about the many reasons...

Many entrepreneurs dream of creating categories. But few have actually done it - much less built a category worth billions of dollars. Mark Organ is one of those rare few. As founding CEO of Eloqua, he pioneered marketing automation in the early 2000s, paving the way for other players and selling to Oracle for nearly $900 million. Mark and I chat through how he co-founded Eloqua, the pivots and ex...

Historically, Product-led Growth (PLG) companies have been underserved. Marketing automation platforms, growth playbooks, reporting frameworks, and “best practices” have been largely designed around the needs of their sales-led cousins. But PLG has had a renaissance in the past few years, and all that's changed. PLG now has its own communities, methodologies, frameworks, and tools. Today's guest,...

Martech continues to expand and shift at breakneck speed. Hot startups from five years ago have become legacy incumbents. Some platforms consolidate into monolithic suites while other categories break apart into specialized point solutions. AI looms over everything, with potential to disrupt virtually every established paradigm. Who better to guide us through this landscape than Phil Gamache, one...

If you're looking to transition from a technical MOPS expert to a leader - or if you're an existing MOPS leader who wants to up their game - Jessica Kao is the person to learn from. She built a career as an expert MOPS consultant before becoming an enterprise marketing ops leader. Listen to this conversation and you'll quickly see: she's ridiculously good at the business side of marketing operatio...

Everyone is talking about how transformative AI is, but the information is still very piecemeal. There are tons of app focused listicles or cool tricks for ChatGPT, but if you're like me, you don't have time to go looking for ways to put apps to work. So I set out to take a comprehensive look at the business of marketing, breaking it down into the fundamental jobs to be done and creating practical...

I follow the attribution software category pretty closely, and sometime in the last 6-12 months it felt like I started seeing HockeyStack everywhere in my LinkedIn feed. They have multiple team members and executives posting regularly, producing unique and engaging content, and they are building in public, sharing tons of juicy details about their GTM strategy. How did a relatively young startup c...

Jill Rowley is a legend in SaaS, with early tenures at Salesforce and Eloqua. As one of Eloqua's first salespeople, she helped shape the category of marketing automation and was also an early pioneer of social selling. Today she is helping evangelize a new perspective on partner-led growth, which she calls "nearbound." Jill and I talk about what it was like selling cloud-based software in the earl...

Your GTM message has an incredibly difficult task: to speak to the people who will love your product and take them from a place of disinterest and zero context to a place of understanding and excitement. When done well, it’s pure magic. I think that every GTM and ops professional should be familiar with how to do this, and so I asked my old boss, Mitch Solway, to join me for a masterclass in messa...