Trey Lockerbie Very thorough. I think that from the outside looking in, there's this mystique about ops, that you're adjacent to sales in a lot of ways. You have a seat at the table to influence strategy. As a former seller, I always felt curious about who are the people that make up the ops team? Where did they come from? What did they study? How did they fall into this career? Because it seems like it has all the fun of being in the war room as you're hatching the strategy without, I mean, being honest, without the volatility or the anxiety of carrying a quota with 50% of your take-home being variable. Help us better understand what are the personas or the prototypical profiles of folks that either want to be an office and get into it straight away out of college or how do they take the right moves and the steps to get to the Promised Land that is offs. Or maybe along the way, is it the Promised Land? The good, the bad, the ugly? Yeah,

I mean, that's a that's a great question. I laugh. I laugh when you say like they don't have the quota piece of it because I, I personally feel like I carry the burden of every salesperson's quota. Right. And like just a key example of it this weekend was one of our cutoffs for, you know, an early order incentive. And was I online all weekend? Yes, I was to make sure that, you know, any of the sales people who needed, needed help closing something before the 15th had the support that they needed, right? And so one of, if you have, if you're an ops person and you don't feel that like, I'm gonna say not accountability or responsibility, but that empathy to help make sure that you're supporting the salesperson, I would say you're probably in the wrong role, right? Cause like at the end of the day, I view revenue operations specifically. And I think I probably get a lot of flack for this, but as a support function, it is operations is a support function. My job is to support the business and help make sure we can achieve our revenue goals. That is what my job is. That's what my team's job is. It's how do we create, you know, the right process, the predictability and where we're going to meet the business needs. It is strategic, but it is also a support role, period. And if you're not, you have ops as a support role, I think you've got a big gap. My stakeholders are the sales people, they're the marketing people, they're the CS people, they're the go-to team. And so I think that is really important. Now, that doesn't mean that you should let every salesperson walk all over you, emboss you around and tell you what to do. You should just do the things for them, trust me. Nine times out of 10, if somebody slacks me, they're getting pointed to a Notion document with an SOP. they're going to go figure it out how to do and self-enable on their own. But my role is to make sure that they have that documentation, they have that information, they have the right training and the right understanding to be able to do their job. In terms of like how do you get into operations, I, so my first, my first job, right, my first internship was for Blue Cross Blue Shield. They asked me if I could run access databases. And I said, sure, I'm a marketing major. I've taken one MIS class. I'm sure I can do this. It was a great experience. And I'm eternally grateful that somebody took a role, a risk on me when I had no idea what I was doing. But, you know, started really working in sales operations at that time, helping them do RFP databases, right? So how do I make a better RFP? How do I make our RFP process more efficient? How do I not answer the same question 100 times because I have this repository of questions that, you know, are getting reviewed by compliance and staying up to date so we know what we're needing to do and like, then into email marketing. And that's like literally how old I am. I was in Silverpop email marketing and I had the joy of going through the email to marketing automation to marketing operations transformation. I worked for Marketo, was on their professional services team, had the opportunity to work for several different companies and understand just how their sales and marketing teams operated. That would be the early 2010-ish timeframe when the whole narrative was like marketing and sales hate each other, which I still think they do. To some extent, they don't really hate each other, right? you're always going to look for somebody to blame. So it's been really interesting then to watch RevOps come into this. I think RevOps was really built off of that point of friction of like, hey, we have these silos. How do you fix silos? How do you break down silos? Well, you build actual authority and accountability. And that was something that like marketing and sales didn't have, they did not have any sort of accountability to have to work together, right? And so if you're setting goals separately, if you're driving towards different in targets, why wouldn't you play together, right? Like why would you? I don't need you, you don't need me. Well, actually we do, but like that's not how we're getting incentivized. So I think you've started to see revenue operations or just even go to market operations, whatever you want to call it, come in to say, help us knock these silos down.

And

I do think it started off as more of a tactical function of like, hey, we're going to bring people together, work out the same systems, help drive things. And now we're seeing it start to become, again, more of the strategic, but also supportive components of this coming together of like, hey, how do we align our resources? How do we do what we need to do for the customer in the right way? How do we look at a go-to scorecard versus just a marketing or a sales scorecard collectively helpful.

You talked about the sacred four five kpis volume velocity conversion aging maybe activities well. what seems to be kind of the height of RevOps. You guys are rock stars and you've got a big nuclear vote when salespeople are trying to push the next thing in an organization's tech stack. What are the messages when I have to think you are bombarded constantly every day by the next Tom Dick or Harry tech vendor and B2B seller? What are the signals when you receive an outbound prospecting message that make you say, huh, I'll take that call. And I guess in the same breath, what makes your skin crawl when you read a message like, oh, God, I would never answer that sales email.

Yeah, I will tell you, like, I generally don't answer sales emails. And like, I hate I hate saying that. So if I'm, you know, generally, I kind of laugh because I'm like, Revups really aren't your buyers, right? Like we are, but we're not, right? Like I'm, you know, if we see a problem, like we're going to go look at the solution. One of the best ways for me to take something seriously from a vendor perspective is the VPS sales or the VP of marketing or like head of CS or somebody comes and says, hey, have you, have you heard of this solution or saw this solution, right? Here's kind of the business need. And they're almost making more of the recommendation. But

you have a nuclear vote, you could totally hijack. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

But I mean, but to me, it's, you know, it's the business coming to me with telling me that, hey, there's this problem that I'm seeing or feeling, and maybe I haven't seen it yet. And then we're looking at where does this fit in within our plan or within our pieces here. And as a rev up leader, one of the things that I do is like, I have a tech stack map. Like, hey, here's our stack. I make sure that it sits in my walk around deck. Everyone in sales knows what we have and how we use it too. Because a lot of times, some of it's just we don't realize we have something that we have and can use. But in terms of the best way for me to probably want to talk to a vendor is having an introduction from somebody on the team or internally that's saying like, hey, have we thought about this? Have we looked at this? Flag those pieces that generally the like, please don't LinkedIn message me. If you LinkedIn message me, I will never see it and it will go far, far away and not be a thing. And it's a lot of times it's like, I know what's out there and I know kind of what a good amount of like the tools in the space are doing and I'm pretty abreast on it. It's like pump out good content, share good information, like have meaningful information out there, good content, good customer stories, like those things. And it's like, when it becomes a need and I realize it, like you're generally a brand that I'm aware of. And it's kind of that whole like timing thing. It's like, I know how to find the tool when I need it, but it's like, if I don't quite need it yet, I want to be respectful of time. I think that's the big thing. If you're going to send cold emails, it's not a bad thing to do. just make sure it's relevant and timely and know that it's good to get your brand out there, understand the value. But don't expect it to be a sale. Don't email me on a cadence every three days at the exact same time. Don't call me after hours, know what time zone I'm in. We have enough of that data. Like those types of things are like, those are the things that will make you make a good product seem really bad.