Janis Zech: Welcome to another episode of RevOps Lab. I'm here with Alex Müller, the founder of Revenue Enablement. Before this, he had short stints in banking and consulting, and then actually joined Forto, which now is a unicorn, as the first RevOps person and scaled that to twelve people. We'll talk a lot more about this, you know, worked as the VP of RevOps at Cognigy and now started his own company that helps startups and scale ups in software on go to market and RevOps. So, yeah, super excited to have you. Welcome, Alex.

Alexander Müller: Hi. Thanks, Janis, for having me today. I'm very much looking forward to the next thirty minutes.

Janis Zech: Awesome. So, I mean, not everybody's familiar with Forto. Can you maybe give a quick intro? What is Forto? And yeah, let's dive deep into that experience.

Alexander Müller: Sure. So it's been actually a couple of years that I initially joined Forto, that was back in twenty seventeen. The company was just founded about, well, six months before. And it was a very, very small startup back then based here in Berlin, focused on delivering basically logistic services online to their customers. So shipping from China, for instance, over here to Europe. And really with the goal to challenge the big players like Kühne Nagel, like Schenker and so on. By now, Forto is actually a little bit larger. The last valuation was two point one billion, and they're working approximately nine hundred people now.

Janis Zech: Awesome. And so you basically ran the helm of RevOps, but I'm sure, you know, in an early stage startup, that meant a lot of things. So, yeah, curious, like, you know, when you joined, what was your role? And then I'd love to go into, you know, how that team evolved through the different stages. I think that's super interesting to the audience.

Alexander Müller: Yeah, sure. So, you know, back then, I think it was twenty eighteen that we first had this thought about establishing something for revenue operations. And I actually just read a LinkedIn post not too long ago about companies basically stumbling into revenue operations, especially when they are growing. They don't really plan, hey, we need this position. Right? They think, hey, it's just extra headcount. And of course, we also had those thoughts in the beginning. So how it all started off was basically that we implemented Outreach back then in addition to Salesforce, the sales enablement solution or sales acceleration tool actually. And then after a while, you know, the company kept on growing. And when we were roundabout one hundred, one hundred and twenty people, and I usually call this the time when things become complicated, you know, because there is the story of human organisms being or human systems being perfectly around one hundred and thirty people. And then that's also when it starts to get a little complicated. You don't know everyone anymore and so on. And especially as the CEO and also the leaders on the revenue side, you don't really know anymore who is actually doing what here. Right? How are we reaching our targets? Who's actually managing all these systems and processes and whatsoever? So Mickey Wax, the CEO of Forto by now, he called me back then and said, Alex, so I have this idea. Here's what we want to do. We will call it revenue operations. And I was like, okay, very interesting. And to be honest, I've never heard of this before. And I think in Europe, this was also in twenty seventeen still unnamed, but it wasn't really there. Right? And I remember looking also at LinkedIn. There were, I don't know, I think four or five people in Berlin with a similar title. And I said, yeah, actually sounds interesting, like connecting all these dots on the revenue org, connecting our sellers, connecting our systems, thinking of how could we develop that in the future, maybe even a little bit about strategy and stuff. And it just sounded appealing to me. And actually, I think this was probably one of the best decisions in my professional life because ever since then, I really, really enjoyed being in RevOps. I think one thing that I keep on saying, for me, it's the ultimate team sport. There's probably no other role in an org that's as much connected to other teams as revenue operations. And I think if I got it correct, you also wanted to hear a little bit how we built up the org and how it changed throughout the time. Right?

Janis Zech: Yeah, I think team sport is a great point. So I'm super curious, right, Forto grew to nine hundred people. You being in that role that actually didn't exist back then in Europe. You know, how did your RevOps team develop over time? Right? Like, in context of the stage of the company, maybe in context of the size of the revenue teams. We are super curious how you structured that. What kind of roles did you hire? Why?

Alexander Müller: So we initially started with a team of around about twenty people on the commercial side back then, or AEs and SDRs. And we actually focused really on operational topics. So we pretty early on brought in another person supporting all around project management on the commercial side, ensuring that things keep on going. And we actually somehow, I think, also luckily, looking back, managed that this was never really seen as a support function. But actually, from the beginning, also the people that I was working with directly, VP sales, the c level, our VP growth, they all understood that this is more than in some other companies where RevOps tends to be like, can you help me schedule my call? Can you help me prepare my presentation or my contract? They actually saw in us the value of connecting all these dots. And in terms of hiring, we had something that is very typical for many other companies that caused us to hire in a certain way. And that was our CRM Salesforce. If we wouldn't have had Salesforce at that time already, I think our first hires would have looked maybe a little bit different. But because of that, we had myself, we had another RevOps or sales ops manager, and then we got an engineer actually for Salesforce pretty, pretty early on. And she was doing an amazing job. It was really important for us that she understood the business processes very early on. And we basically had everything on the commercial side built up in Salesforce, including, of course, our reporting as well. And I think we built actually quite a good structure around our CRM with the help of our CRM developer. And eventually, the person that we hired next was somebody who came internally from our sales teams. And she always felt a little bit like he wanted to do more. He doesn't only want to do sales. He was interested in the planning and the tools and that. I think that's actually a really great hire and something that I still look out for in all hires that I do for revenue operations, that they have at some point sold or seen a customer, because that is just so helpful in the early days. And I think that's probably one of the biggest recommendations that I can always give to companies that are establishing RevOps. Try to look out for people who understand your product, who have maybe, if they haven't sold your own product, then at least worked with customers in any type of area. And I think it's so important that RevOps managers have this understanding, this feeling also for what customers want, what sellers need, what everyone on the sales side or on the commercial side wants, right? And I've been talking a lot about sales because that's what we focused on in the beginning. But same for marketing ops, right? You want somebody who has done marketing before, who has kind of suffered from not having somebody in operations.

Janis Zech: Yeah. I think there's a big trend from, you know, like, CX, so customer success people going into RevOps as they typically are very detail oriented and more technical. And I think that's a good skill set for revenue operations. I'm curious, the person you brought on from the sales side, right? Like, what was the main responsibility for that person? Was that also going into enablement? And then how did that org develop further into the twelve people you mentioned initially?

Alexander Müller: So actually, yes. What you just mentioned, enablement was one of the first things that he was responsible for. And more specifically, we started with onboarding, right? So for us, onboarding, we wanted to scale at that time, and you can only really scale if you have a sound onboarding plan. And for me, that's been something that I've seen over and over in companies that they are maybe missing on somewhat a structured onboarding plan. But you need it, especially when times are becoming difficult, when you're hiring a lot. But even if you're not hiring a lot, I've seen people being let go again because they weren't onboarded well. And that's probably the worst spend of your time, right? You hire somebody, takes ages, you try to ramp this person up. And then after three or six months, you find out we didn't really onboard them, we need to let them go again. And then, of course, also a chase of topics. So it was super helpful for us to have this person giving us feedback on sales processes, doing sales project management. And at that time, it was still such a small team that all of us had to do a little bit of everything, operations and enablement and analytics. And analytics at that time was more with me, reporting, board reporting, preparing our numbers as well. And if I would probably hire again or build up a RevOps team again from scratch, I would probably start focusing on operations first, setting up your structures. Right? Don't overcomplicate it. You don't need to have like an approval process for everything, but a sound operational structure will help you down the line when you're growing. Second, look more into analytics, get your numbers, at least those that you need to report on, straight, right, and try not to build your own stuff, but rather use something that's commonly accepted because otherwise you will have problems later on again. And then third, and that's probably something that most companies should be doing rather sooner than later, try to bring in somebody specifically for enablement or at least carve out some time of your RevOps team to also support training, to support onboarding. And, you know, I always compare this to driving in a Formula One car. Right? First, you need to build it, your operations. Then you need to know, okay, how quick are we actually? Are we good enough to compete against the other teams out there? That's your measuring and your analytics. Right? And then when you know, hey, in the second turn, we are actually losing two point one seconds, that's a lot. Right? How can we make that better? Well, maybe just hit the brake a little bit earlier and then try to accelerate when you're still in the turn. Right? And that's enablement for me. Using everything what I've done before, knowing your numbers, showing it to your salespeople, training them on that, and basically by that improving your processes and really coming into a great motion.

Janis Zech: Yeah. That's super insightful. Just on the onboarding part, curious, like, how you solved that? Because I think, you know, by this point in time, there are actually quite a few providers for onboarding tools specifically around sales. But I think, like, back in two thousand seventeen, two thousand eighteen, that was probably less so the case. So how did you do that? Did you build internal tools? Did you purchase software? Or just did it completely scrappy?

Alexander Müller: Yeah. Of course, it started with an Excel sheet. Right? So or Google Sheets, everything is starting with that. Right? The cheapest CRM, the cheapest onboarding plan, whatever you wanna get. Excel is the funnest thing to start with. I mean, it's just so everyone knows how to use it. It's so easy to use and to adjust. And actually, I also read this morning an article from Tony Holbein about purchasing tools, and that resonated with me a lot. You first need the process before you buy something, right? You need to know where you want to go. And I think, luckily, that's something that many teams understand now after changes in the economy and the funding structure over the last years, right? You can't buy a tool for everything. But we eventually did. We then purchased a Berlin based tool where we were kind of included in co-development called Wonderway. And we used Wonderway for, yeah, including videos, including best practices, checking if our sellers understood something. We also used it actually for new product rollouts. And that's something where I would recommend most companies actually to also focus on, right? When you're changing, for instance, your ICP, when you're adding a new product, it's important that you think of this enablement at this point again. And that's something that we had to learn. But something that we also at Cognigy, for instance, did way earlier. There we hired an enablement person, and we kind of retrained a former seller into our enablement person when we had roughly one hundred and fifty people overall in the company. And he was the fourth or fifth person on the RevOps team then.

Janis Zech: I mean, I think we could probably spend another thirty minutes talking about onboarding, but I wanna go deeper into the org structure, and I think it's super interesting. So you got the Salesforce engineer. Right? You have the insights piece, the enablement piece. How big was the company back then? How many people in the revenue team? And then how did that develop from there?

Alexander Müller: So I mean, one thing, unfortunately, that I think is often the case for operations is that you're always running behind when it comes to hiring. Right? And I was just attending a conference a couple of weeks back, and I spoke to quite a lot of commercial leaders. And there is actually a broad variety of when they start hiring for operations. I think the latest was a company two hundred and fifty people plus where they said, yeah, our CRM is still split across different teams. We don't really have a dedicated owner for it. They have, of course, all these things, right? They have somebody also looking every now and then after sales processes, but they just have these problems with silos. They told me at this time, we are not really connecting customer success with sales, right? We are not connecting sales and marketing. Total opposite was a company as small as sixteen hires in total. And he said, yeah, of course, I need an operations person. This person can actually help me to make my customer facing teams way more effective. As always, I think the truth is somewhere in between. So how did it change for us? I said, we built up the team at around about one hundred and thirty. We grew it to twelve, and when I left, it was round about eight hundred, eight hundred and fifty people. And we focused in the beginning, as I said, on those generalists, then adding people for data analytics, for sales analytics, that helped us really make the most of our data. And then we had eventually one person for enablement, which, if you bring them in externally into the company, is probably still one of the most difficult hires for me. And in terms of structure, I always try to have one POC for all customer facing teams. So that means even if you don't have a team of twelve people or of thirty, I spoke actually to a customer not too long ago who had thirty people in operations, then you can have at least a dedicated contact for your marketing team, a dedicated contact for your partnerships team, a dedicated contact for your SDR team, right, and so on and so forth. And that helps you ensure that also when it comes to planning, nothing falls between the cracks and you do focus also on the different stakeholders. And I think that's very, very important.

Janis Zech: So I wanna switch gears a bit. Like, when you think about, you know, what you just said, how do you, I mean, how do you make sure that you organize your roadmap with a team of twelve people, manage all the day to day requests, you know, the ops stuff, the larger topics that are strategic? How did you do that?

Alexander Müller: So for me, it's always a first question of leadership. And then second, also a question of functional knowledge. Right? And when it comes to leadership, just my personal belief, I love working as a leader to leaders. So that makes my life easier. I don't have to know everything. I don't have to micromanage people out there. And it also makes work way more fun for other people out there. So our typical cadence for planning was three months and then also a year. So for the yearly outlook, we basically prepared a roadmap where we said, hey, that's kind of what we want to tackle by when in the different areas. We always split that again by operations, by analytics, by enablement, and then depending on the setup, either by teams or by geography, if we had to localize something. And then it's super important that you start the discussion very, very early. So planning starts for me as basically connecting to your stakeholders right before, for instance, the quarter starts or before the year starts. I would argue at least six to eight weeks before. And yes, I know that sounds super early. When it comes to annual planning, you need to reach out to the other teams, right? You need to understand what are they focusing on. When it's quarterly planning, I think four to six weeks is helpful that you speak to other stakeholders. And if you now have this point of contact for your marketing team, then I would request this person to speak to the marketing lead and to align with them, hey, what are actually your priorities for this next quarter, for the next year? And then we take all these things back, we try to group them, we try to prioritize them, what's their impact on our revenue? What's their impact on the way that we are working? And with these things in mind, then we try to build out our roadmap, right? We try to understand what our dependencies are, what we see as the biggest lever, and we try to rank them and by that try to understand, okay, how likely is it that we can drive something forward? I think this, to be honest, is very typical to how product teams work. And because you need to consider all the dependencies, right, you need to do a lot of stakeholder management, say no at times, probably the most difficult part. And yeah, find your way there for next year's strategy.

Janis Zech: Yeah. I think it's so important that the stakeholders understand that the roadmap, there are always trade offs. Right? You can't do everything at once and essentially drive alignment. I'm curious, like you had, you know, a specific example, right, like marketing, sales, and CS. Did you have one roadmap and then just by categories? Or did you organize yourself, you know, in different roadmaps? And then how did you model the capacity against that, right, like with regards to execution power? Any insights there?

Alexander Müller: So, of course, if you already have an existing team, you can use something like velocity, right? Then you know how quickly your team will be, especially when it comes to CRM improvements. So that in terms of capacity. But when you don't have that, then of course, it is sometimes a little bit of estimation. You need to look at other projects that are similar. You need to understand also from maybe other people who have done it before or have implemented something similar, how long would something take? But to come back to your question, how we would organize that roadmap, it's basically for me a five step process. Number one is you need to plan. That's everything that we just discussed, get the inputs from the stakeholders. Then second, as you prepare, you look at what can you actually deliver and how long will it take you. Third, as you recommend. So you speak again to your stakeholders, say, this is how I understood the priorities. Shall we do it that way? You then lock it in. That's the fourth part. And then fifth, you keep on tracking it. And that's for me where transparency is super important again, because you need to have this long list. And of course, as companies grow, you won't share everything with anyone anymore because it's just not digestible anymore. But for me, it was always super important to have the transparency in a long list where I could see, okay, are we on track? Why are we not on track? And if you do want to push in something new, what else can we maybe not do at the moment? And actually, that's something that my stakeholders always appreciated when I also shared that with them mid quarter, for instance, right? Where you say, hey, it looks like this project is actually not gonna work out because we had these two other things coming in. We had to prepare for, I don't know, a new product launch which was happening earlier than planned or a change in our environment whatsoever. And I started doing that also very simple, just an overview in slides. What are your priorities? What are kind of the dimensions? Who are the stakeholders who are working on it? Is it marketing? Is it sales? Is it finance maybe even? And then who is responsible on the RevOps side for solving that part?

Janis Zech: Coming from a product management background, fully, fully understand. And also there's, of course, a lot of pain, particularly around prioritizing things. And then, yeah, like you said, stakeholder management, managing expectations, right, and getting buy in is so crucial if you want your role to be successful long term in an organization. And on that note, I was wondering, like, did your reporting structure change at any point, like with the RevOps team? So, you know, did you report initially to more like the CEO, later to more like a CRO? Like, how did that develop over time?

Alexander Müller: Yeah. Very, very interesting question. And I think a question that also very much defines what the teams look like. So for me, there are three potential reporting lines. Number one is you report to a functional lead within the commercial org. Most often that happens to be the sales leader or VP sales. Second is you report to the CEO, when the company is larger, to the CRO. And third, you report to the CFO. And all of these areas have, of course, a lot of pros and cons. And we started off reporting back then to our VP growth, who was also responsible for part of the sales strategy. And then very quickly at Forto switched to the CRO. And actually, for the last four years, I think I've only reported to C level directly. And so I've seen now myself reporting to CEO, reporting to CRO, reporting to CFO. At one point, we also switched it at Cognigy to the CFO. And I think why it shouldn't be with sales only, that has been often discussed, right, pure focus on sales and not focusing on other teams. Being with the CEO or a CRO, I think, really makes sense because you have this holistic view over the overall revenue engine. You can also drive projects forward end to end. And then there is the CFO, and that has also something very remarkable for me because for me, it's the only way that RevOps can truly stay neutral to the revenue function. And the downside is that there is a tendency that you're becoming more the reporting team than actually also doing the operations end to end. You're maybe missing connection to the sales teams. But I would advocate that either you report to the CRO, CEO, or to the CFO. I think that makes more sense. That's most typical also what I see and something that works out pretty well, at least for me.

Janis Zech: Yeah. Fantastic. I think that's such an interesting topic. We should probably spend another episode on that one. I wanna switch gears again. I mean, you touched on planning cycles. Right? I think a lot of companies are in annual planning mode right now. Q four always fun, short, and a lot of stuff going on. So yeah, I'm curious, you know, what's your approach to annual planning? I mean, I know it needs to start super early, right? But from a RevOps perspective, you know, from a general company perspective, how do you approach that? What are your views on that?

Alexander Müller: So annual planning, I think, is kind of the necessary evil, right, that we all have to go through at some point. And knowing that there are probably companies out there who just started with annual planning, like in terms of they haven't done it before, and companies where they have already a very, very rigorous process around planning. There are so many facets of it. And I think one thing that's very common is that in terms of timeline, you cannot start too early with a v one, right? And that often starts with either the business plan or the budget received from finance. And the way I see this is finance with the budget is basically telling you, hey, this is where we want to be. Right? That's kind of the peak of the mountain, and we want to go there. How do we get there? We don't know. Right? We can maybe make some assumptions. We could say, hey, some revenue should come from enterprise, some should come from mid market, some should come from small customers, if that's your split, or maybe also different geographies. But for me, that's always a little bit like building castles in the sky. And I think it can be a very interesting exercise for RevOps to get or to become also part of annual planning. So if you're not part of it and you're driving RevOps, then this is actually a very good way for you to show your importance. And there are two reasons for it. Number one is annual planning and setting targets defines success for the company. Right? So it's such a crucial exercise to define where the focus should be for the next year. And by defining that, you can use your own knowledge from the past and whatever you've seen. And number two is you, as RevOps, are probably that team that is the closest both to finance and to your customer facing teams, to your revenue generating teams. And connecting these two dots, really the finance world, the model world with the real world out there with what customers are actually doing, I think that's a unique ability that the RevOps team has. And if you do this correctly, then you really can leverage yourself. You can step up to be an actually strategic counterpart for your finance team and become really strategic RevOps, show relevance to the overall company and especially pull out of that corner where you're often seen as pure system admins or pure support teams, right, and really become an important part of the overall company management.

Janis Zech: Yeah. I have a love and hate experience with annual planning. I think that most companies start the annual planning process way too late. Right? They start in Q four, then have initial board discussions between CEO, CFO and the board, and then present the revenue team with a plan. I think that is a fundamentally broken process. It should be a joint plan, right? It should be, you know, a bottom up and top down plan together. Because, like, it's great if you build a castle in the sky, but it's just not realistic. Right? And so I fully subscribe to what you're saying with regards to RevOps. It's, you know, it's another way of being strategic. And typically, I think there's a big motion on the CFO side to become more go to market focused, to become more strategic also from a revenue generation standpoint. And I think that's a great movement, especially in software. But, you know, I think it's really, really fundamentally important to combine those efforts, you know, start in Q three, combine those efforts, have a general committee of doing that FP&A and RevOps together, and then come to the board and the CEO with something that is aligned bottom up and top down and then yields a higher likelihood of success, because I think the ripple effects of this are also massive, right? If you as a revenue team always are behind goals, the whole commission structure is problematic. I mean, there are so many ripple effects on the equity value. So yeah, I think it's a really, really good point you're making here. And I really love the strategic dimension that RevOps can play here.

Alexander Müller: Yeah, I think one thing that I just want to mention that's often overlooked, right, if you just touch it briefly, but the effects of annual planning down the line, they are so enormous, and they will just make it also difficult for RevOps if they are not participating in this discussion from the beginning. And I'm speaking of things like territory planning, compensation planning, go to market strategy, right? All that depends on how you do your planning, how you combine top down and the bottom up view. And yeah, you can set yourself in a very unique position by being a part of this discussion early on.

Janis Zech: Yeah, I think it's a great point. I mean, I think, you know, my takeaway from that is like, that's one angle, you know, to be more strategic, you know, as a revenue operations leader. I think the second you actually touched is the org design, right, like being in the executive suite, you know, making sure that you have an end to end view on all things go to market from marketing to sales to CS, right, that all plays a role and actually having strategic initiatives, whether that's going upmarket, you know, internationalization, right, like fundamentals that are completely changing the trajectory of companies. I really love all your views. I want you to come back to this. I think we have a lot more topics we can discuss here. Thank you so much for sharing this. I would love to ask you one final closing question we ask all our guests, and that's now if you were to start out in RevOps again, you know, what would you tell your younger self? What are the key learnings you've had so far?

Alexander Müller: So I think there's one single thing that I could recommend, and that's look out for a mentor. Right? And that's your boss who has been in RevOps who is somewhat having this strategic holistic view, be it somebody on LinkedIn that you maybe just messaged and who every now and then, maybe once a month, every two weeks, whatsoever, spent some time with you discussing your views, your roadmap with you maybe. And there are also professional services out there that offer that right now for RevOps. And I think that really helps you to build up a team quicker, to not dwell on your thoughts for too long, to rather learn from a community around you. And that's something that I would definitely recommend everyone starting in RevOps again, look for a community, look for a mentor for you. And then I think you will have a very, very interesting time, you will have an amazing job. And it will never really get boring. Sometimes also, unfortunately.

Janis Zech: Yeah. I think particularly for roles like, you know, RevOps, similar to product management also, like, you never have a huge org in your company. So it's always good to have mentors that are inside the company, just to put you on the map also. Because sometimes it's actually not so easy, particularly if your own team is quite small. So I just wanna double down on that. I think it's like really one of the most important career advisors you can get. Alex, great. Awesome. I think this was fantastic. Love the level of detail. And yeah, I hope we can have you back one day. Thank you so much for your time. Great to have you.

Alexander Müller: Janis, Philipp, thank you so much as well. It was really a pleasure. I'm very, very much looking forward to our next discussion. Thank you. Talk to you soon. Bye bye.