#10 Tools you need to grow your company - Chris Mackinnon, RevOps & Strategy at Zeotap
with
Chris Mackinnon
,
RevOps & Strategy at Zeotap
January 2, 2024
·
46
min.
Key Takeaways
- Start with Google Sheets, not a CRM. In the first six to twelve months, founder-led selling doesn't require a system of record — it requires focus on landing logos. Implementing a CRM too early shifts attention from revenue generation to tool configuration and maintenance.
- Resist the urge to over-customize your CRM. Every customization creates dependencies that compound as you scale — breaking native forecasting tools, standard reports, and third-party integrations. Chris's rule: fit your processes to the system, not the system to your processes.
- A single platform like HubSpot beats a HubSpot-Salesforce split for early-stage companies. Running HubSpot for marketing and Salesforce for sales creates attribution gaps because the two systems deliberately don't sync campaigns at a level that enables true marketing attribution — each vendor wants you fully on their platform.
- Measure pipeline coverage by engagement tier, not MQLs. Chris tracks three metrics against a tiered named account list: percentage of accounts with open opportunities, percentage with meetings held, and percentage with any engagement in the past six months. This coverage model surfaces messaging problems and demand gaps faster than funnel conversion rates alone.
- Build your data warehouse ID strategy manually before automating it. When stitching Salesforce, NetSuite, and product data together, Chris's team manually assigned a shared customer ID across all systems in a spreadsheet before writing any automation. Attempting fuzzy matching or automated joins before establishing a clean ID strategy creates compounding data integrity problems downstream.
- Always anchor reporting on a single base query or report. Whether in Salesforce, Tableau, or BigQuery, Chris builds one canonical base report with standard filters, then derives all custom views from it. This prevents stakeholders from inadvertently filtering out data and then reporting that the numbers are wrong.
- Calculate the real ROI of a tool in days, not dollars. Before buying a compensation management system, Chris calculated that manual processing costs him roughly 24 days per year — then honestly assessed whether implementation, model-building, and mid-year plan changes would consume more time than that. The honest answer was yes, making the tool a lower priority than it appeared.
Hosts and Guest

Janis Zech
CEO at Weflow
Janis Zech is Co-founder and CEO of Weflow. He previously scaled a B2B SaaS company from $0 to $76M ARR as CRO, and in this episode he shares what it really takes to build the right revenue stack, from CRM to data warehouse, without adding unnecessary complexity. He also talks about which tools help companies grow and which ones get in the way.

Philipp Stelzer
CPO at Weflow
Philipp Stelzer is Co-founder and CPO of Weflow, where he focuses on how revenue teams capture activity, inspect deals, and forecast inside Salesforce. In this episode, he brings a practical view on the tools that make sense for a RevOps setup, from spreadsheets to CRM and data warehouse, and the pitfalls to avoid. He also discusses how the right stack helps teams grow with less friction.

Chris Mackinnon
RevOps & Strategy at Zeotap
Chris Mackinnon works in RevOps & Strategy at Zeotap. In this episode, he shares best practices for building a RevOps tech stack, from spreadsheets and CRM to data warehouses, and highlights pitfalls to avoid. He also discusses which tools make sense for a RevOps tech stack and how to grow a company with the best possible setup.
Full Transcript
Janis Zech: Hey, Annes. Hey, Filip. So what are we talking about in today's episode?
Philipp Stelzer: Today, we are taking you on a journey to create the RevOps tech stack. From spreadsheet CRM to data warehouse, Chris shares many best practices and which pitfalls to avoid. We hope you enjoy our conversation with Chris McKinnon from Zerotap. Chris, great to have you. Welcome on the show.
Chris McKinnon: Thank you. Thanks very much for the introduction. It's a pleasure to be here. Looking forward to our conversation today.
Janis Zech: Yeah. And today, we'll talk all about tooling. I mean, I think we all agree that tooling follows process, and, you know, we take you on a journey to talk about, you know, the evolution of tooling if we were to set up a new company and then essentially scale that into the growth stage where Zerotap currently is, so all things from nothing to data warehouse. So, Chris, I mean, over to you. I'd love to understand, you know, if there's nothing, right, like, how would you start the tooling of the evolution of the go to market team?
Chris McKinnon: It's super difficult. Right? I mean, back in two thousand ten when I first started this, there were a limited amount of tools that were out in the market and you needed. And now I feel like every day, one must get twenty to twenty five emails of completely distinct tools across forty different categories of tools and knowing what to implement and when is extremely difficult. So I think it's super important that people have a plan in mind when they start out. And I think really one of the biggest things I've learned is to keep it simple. Right? It can be very overwhelming and you can hear everybody in the market telling you, you need this, this is the ROI, this is the benefit that you're gonna bring, without this you're not gonna achieve your revenue goals or your conversion goals or whatever it may be. But the reality is when you first start out, I think you can do most of it in Google Sheets. That's the honest truth. I think the first Google Sheets or Excel, whatever takes your fancy, I think the first six months to a year, really, you're looking at getting your first few logos in the door. You're looking at getting an MVP built and starting to figure out what that product market fit looks like. And if you start trying to implement CRM systems and sales automation systems or marketing automation systems, then all of a sudden your focus changes quite drastically. You spend a lot of time trying to set these things up and maintain them and get it all right and not enough time going out and getting these logos. And all you need is a simple Google Sheet that just says, what's the account you've spoken to? What's the next step with them? What's the potential value? And when do you think it's gonna close? Much more than that, you don't really need to begin with because it's typically, as you guys will know, I think better than a lot of people, it's founder led. So you guys having conversations out with the market and maintaining your own pipeline or maybe one or two salespeople of trust who don't need, you know, a Salesforce or HubSpot or whatever it may be in order to go and manage that. And is that — what do you think about that? Is that how you managed it to begin with? Did you go down the let's put Salesforce in from day one route?
Janis Zech: Well, as you know, we are building a product for Salesforce to make it easier to update Salesforce and then, you know, run deal inspection and forecasting. And so we actually implemented Salesforce from the get go. But I think it's not a typical approach. Right? I think I'm a big fan of eat your own dog food. And so using our product day to day helps you build a better product. But I don't think that's the typical recommendation I'd give a startup founder when below ten people or so. So I fully agree. I think what you just basically outlined is a very simple version of a CRM. Right? I'm curious, like, let's assume we grow to ten, fifteen reps. Right? Like, how do you put more structure in place? How would you go about it?
Chris McKinnon: Right. So that's — I would call that probably year two in a fairly high growth company, ten, fifteen sales reps. Like you said previously, process comes first. You've gotta make sure your ICP is defined. You've gotta make sure that you have some kind of sales process. Gotta make sure that you understand what your territories look like and where you're focusing. But then really in order to support that, I think the first piece of software that you need to implement is a CRM system, because that is when you're gonna start getting to the point where you've got a lot of pipeline, a lot of engagement with the market, a lot of outbound going on, and you need to be able to understand not just what's going on, but what is working and what isn't working. And that becomes a lot easier once you've got a — I like to call it a system of record, which is a CRM system in order to track that in a standardized way. A lot of companies will go straight to a Salesforce and then customize the life out of it. And this is something I've seen all over the place, whether they go into HubSpot or Salesforce or Pipedrive, every company seems to try and reinvent the wheel when it comes to pipeline management and sales management. Go and customize the life out of the CRM system and then end up in this spiral of problems and challenges as they grow because ultimately every customization leads on to dependencies. Right? So if you're customizing how you're gonna go about forecasting, then all of a sudden within different fields, then all of a sudden the Salesforce or HubSpot forecast tool isn't gonna work for you. And whatever other forecast tool you implement isn't gonna work. And then all your reporting needs to change outside the standard reports and outside the standard dashboards, and it just rolls on and on and on the bigger you get and the more customization you do. So I'd say implement a CRM system, take advantage of the billions and billions of dollars of research and development that a HubSpot, a Salesforce, a Pipedrive, whomever else is in the market is doing behind the scenes and follow standard processes, follow best practices. There will be, I would say, configurations that will be specific to you, right? Are you looking at certain industries, certain size of companies? How do you size companies? Is it based on employees? Is it based on revenue? Is it based on ad spend? Is it based on whatever other metric you might have in your given market? But don't go and try and customize the life out of it to the point where you're fitting the system into your processes instead of fitting your processes into the system. So I think that was my biggest learning at least from having implemented and worked with multiple implementations of CRM systems — the more customization, the more problems down the line. So yeah, I would keep that pretty standard, but CRM gives you the ability to obviously track and understand what's going on, what engagement's happening with your prospects, what engagement's happening with your addressable market, see where you're finding results, where are you generating opportunities, where are you not generating opportunities. That then helps you refine your ICP and feeds back around into generating more revenue at the end. And then as you're growing and you've got more deals coming in, you can start understanding your conversion rates by source, your conversion rate by people, by territory, your win rate, your ACV, what your sales velocity is, all of these fantastic KPIs. But again, the base of it is getting the right system with the right structure in place in order to do that. And then depending on the type of business that you work in, depends on which order you would then go about looking at things. I've worked in many enterprise companies that focus on the enterprise segment. And that typically means very high average ACVs, not small, but longer sales cycles, which means that the first couple of years, you may be doing five million ARR from three companies. In which case your win rate and your average deal size and your sales cycle — you can literally calculate that on a napkin or in your head. You don't need a Tableau or a data warehouse in order to go and figure that out. Right? You just go, oh, yeah, we sold these three companies, three deals last year, this is our average. So you don't need to look at it on a regular basis. Then you can focus on other things. Then it's more important to understand what your pipeline looks like and how does that look with your conversion metrics.
Janis Zech: I just quickly — so I think, like, I fully agree, like, that actually, like, before you even can start customizing your CRM, whatever you choose as a tool, you actually need to understand, like, how the business works. And you need to have a certain number of volume — like, you need to have a certain number of leads. And typically, in the first couple of months — probably like the first couple of years really — you're also adding a lot of new products or you're changing like the setup of your sales team. So meaning that in worst case, every six months, all the data you collected prior basically becomes invalid and you have to start from scratch. So what's even, like, the value of, like, trying to automate and improve the data collection there, you know, to an extent until at least, like, you found sort of, like, the product market fit? At least that, I think, you need to have found before you can actually really customize a CRM. So one thing I'm wondering — in terms of your perspective on this — there's also a lot of, like, marketing tools, and marketing is much more important in the beginning than, you know, like, a good CRM, I think, that also have a CRM component in them. Like, I mean, HubSpot essentially is — that's how it became also a sales CRM nowadays. And ActiveCampaign, Intercom, right, all of these tools, they also have the CRM component in there. Like, do you think that's a viable, like, you know, way to go, or is that something where you're like, oh, no, that's something I wouldn't do?
Chris McKinnon: I think they're fantastic tools, and I think there's a lot of benefits you get from having both the kind of marketing automation and the sales system of record in one tool. And actually, it's a challenge that I've seen multiple businesses now face — having HubSpot as a marketing system, Salesforce as a system of record and a sales management system, and then the whole marketing attribution challenge around it. Because those two, while they synchronize, they don't synchronize campaigns, which is one of the fundamental things in order to understand marketing attribution. They're made not to synchronize to the point where they can work in harmony. They're made to synchronize enough to provide you with what you need at a base level. Right? I think that's always the game because Salesforce wanna sell you marketing automation and their marketing cloud or Pardot or whatever it's called nowadays. And HubSpot want you to go and use HubSpot as a whole for CRM and marketing system. But I think if you're a year, two years into starting a business, you've got ten, fifteen people, HubSpot should be more than sufficient and actually should be extremely good for you as both the CRM and the marketing automation. Again, this comes back to people overcomplicating implementations of CRM systems. People often think they need something more complex than HubSpot because they have multiple territories and they need ten different pipelines that they look at in different ways — and actually you don't, right? If you really boil it down to the day to day, you don't need that much complexity. So putting everything into HubSpot and using their reporting tool and, as we all do, exporting data into Google Sheets or into Excel, which is super easy from any tool nowadays, is more than enough at that point. And you get the added benefit of having all of the marketing automation in there. So your nurture flows and your workflows, you can link it up to LinkedIn ads, Google ads into your website and get feeds of activity across your website. Actually, I'm a big fan of HubSpot. When I first joined Zerotap, I wish they'd have stuck with HubSpot instead of implementing Salesforce because I don't think it was the right time to implement Salesforce. Now we've grown, I think we're getting — we were at that point now because we've integrated a lot of other things. We've also got support who we support through RevOps from a Salesforce administration point of view and various other teams with a couple of customized objects specific for them. But, yeah, I think HubSpot's a fantastic tool, and there are a lot of others out in the market that I personally don't have experience with. And so I could keep talking about HubSpot. But, yeah, I think there's a lot to be said for it. You get a lot of inbuilt analytics. They've grown a lot in the last five, ten years. So people should definitely go back and look at it and really consider how much they need what I would classify as an enterprise grade CRM and marketing automation system compared to more of a growth CRM and marketing automation system, which I would say HubSpot is.
Janis Zech: Yeah. I mean, I think we're seeing this across the board. Right? Like, typically in SaaS or technology companies, most companies start with HubSpot as marketing automation and then either add — I mean, they start with a CRM. Right? Like, and that typically is either HubSpot CRM or Salesforce for different reasons. I mean, I think we could, you know, cut another episode about HubSpot versus Salesforce and the differences. It's a big topic, it's very important. Right? Because in our minds, CRMs are infrastructure. Right? And you anyways need various different tools on top of them that are specialized in creating better experiences. I mean, if you were to now grow to fifty, maybe a hundred people, you have an SDR team, you have an AE team, CSM team. Right? Let's pull this a bit further. Like, what would you add? I mean, I think we have CRM, we have marketing automation. What else are you thinking of in terms of categories? How would you further grow this stack?
Chris McKinnon: Like I said earlier, there are hundreds of different categories. Right? I was sitting and doing a little bit of prep last night thinking about it and I started writing a list and every other minute something else came to mind. I forgot about that. Oh, this. I forgot about that. Content management, things that they need to start thinking about marketing tooling, and they start thinking about customer success tooling and obviously, RevOps being horizontal across sales, account management, customer success, marketing. We also hold partner here. We do a lot of work with solutions engineers and implementation as well because it all ties into the customer journey at the end of the day, helps us make more revenue, make more money and save more money at the end of the day — that's my RevOps team motto.
Janis Zech: That's a great definition by the way, make more money.
Chris McKinnon: Make more money, save more money. It's as simple as that. If I do that, then I'm doing my job well. That's how I think of it. But I think it really depends on your business. Right? If you are in a, let's say, a high volume, low value SaaS business where it's, you know, get them on from a free trial and then convert them — and that happens — then you wanna be looking at something like Intercom. You wanna be looking at analytics for the website and for the platform in order to understand where people are going, where are they getting value. You wanna look at what kind of analysis tools to understand what the customer is using in order to then feed that back into your marketing, right? If you can understand where you're getting the most benefit and where your clients are getting the most benefit from, then you can double down on that from a marketing point of view, increase your conversion rates through that. If you're working in more of a, say, a growth or an enterprise space where it's a higher ACV, lower volume of deals coming in, and you've got an outbound team or you will need an outbound team or an inbound qualification team, then you probably wanna be looking at something like a sales execution system. So an Apollo, SalesLoft and Outreach, which obviously synchronize with Salesforce — Salesforce being the system of record, pushing everything back into there — but allowing your team to start having a little bit more of a structured outreach to the market and then follow-up of both the leads that are coming in and of the kind of intent that we're detecting in the market as well. So, again, there's a million and one things you can do with SalesLoft and Outreach and Apollo, right, everything from cadences and simply setting up email cadences to multi touch, multi tool engagements where you're going through emails, phone calls, LinkedIn, events, whatever else it might be, ads, right? All the way to conversation intelligence and meeting analysis where it will record you and understand what keywords and buzzwords have been used. And if the client says pricing, then all of a sudden there's fifteen people in your company that get an email saying, hey, this person just said the word pricing, now we should be really interested. There's a lot of stuff that it can do. A lot of internal dangers with it as well, depending on how you have it set up. So, I mean, that's where we went. We've had both Outreach and SalesLoft in house. So I've worked with both of those in the past. I've worked with Apollo in the past as well. And they are great tools. They provide increased efficiency for your inbound qualification or your outbound BDRs, SDRs, inside sales, whatever acronym you might wanna use for them. They provide increased efficiency and increased visibility. Right? And essentially, the way I measure it, at least in house, is we segment our data using whatever segmentation makes sense to you. We use very simple revenue, industry, geography. We don't need anything more than that right now, and we will refine that as we go. But right now, we segment our data like that. So we have the key accounts, which are handpicked key accounts, tier one, two, and three. Super simple, no crazy naming conventions. And what I look at is what is our engagement across those different tiers from a few different perspectives. So the first thing I wanna know is how many opportunities do we have. Right? What's the percentage of accounts in a given tier that we have opportunities with? Then what's the percentage of accounts in a given tier that we've had meetings with? And what's the percentage of accounts in a given tier that we have engaged with in some way in the past six months. Right? And that will essentially extend a coverage model. So it tells me, hey, if we've got no opportunities but we're having loads of meetings, then we've got a problem. If we're having loads of engagement and no meetings, then we've got a problem with our messaging, or there's just no demand in the market for it or we're in the wrong markets, and you can start digging into that.
Janis Zech: I really love this meeting part because I think there's a lot — the old world measures everything in MQLs. Right? And I think that is often a very interesting kind of fuzzy metric. And I think, essentially, it's about the first — especially in enterprise, right — it's about the first meeting and then, obviously, all the follow on meetings from there. So I really like that, you know, kind of simplicity of just looking at, okay, meetings, opportunities, and the territories against a named account list, right, to understand, okay, how well are you doing? Because these are the things that actually move the needle. There's somebody just downloading a gated content piece probably not being really deep down in the awareness funnel.
Chris McKinnon: Yep. Exactly. And then nowadays, you have these funnels that have evolved from, let's say, a tofu, mofu, bofu model in the past, and now we're talking about demand creation, demand capture, and demand conversion. It's basically the same thing with a different set of acronyms tied to it. Right? But ultimately, what's important to me is are we having meetings with people, right? MQL is great, but once we're talking to people, that's when we can actually start understanding why things are converting, why things are not converting because we can get contextual feedback. The MQL part, we obviously look at. It exists. But at the end of the day, in year two, three of a SaaS company at least, and the SaaS companies I've worked in, you're not talking about hundreds of thousands of MQLs. And the quality of those MQLs, you can measure quite easily to understand, right, how many of them just get flat out rejected and how many of them get through. Then you can continue tweaking and understand where they're coming from and go back up the funnel to say, okay, look, this particular source doesn't provide MQLs that convert, or these MQLs convert at five percent, these MQLs convert at fifteen percent. But in the world that I've worked in at least, we're talking for the first few years about quite low volumes. Therefore, your sample size is a little bit skewed. You tend to end up doing a lot of events, which naturally have really high conversion rates and don't necessarily provide MQLs. They go straight into SQL, SAL, whatever we wanna call it, straight to meeting or pre-pipe opportunity, right, a stage zero opportunity depending on the conversation that's been had. So then that takes out a whole chunk of analysis that you can do to say, okay, these guys, how did they get to that event? Well, they go every year. It's nothing to do with that marketing.
Janis Zech: Stage zero opportunity. There's another one. That's a big — a big debate. You know, that's an internal debate that I'm having not with myself but with the company as well right now.
Chris McKinnon: Because we — one of the first things I did when I joined Zerotap was actually remove stage zero, and we've gone back to put it in place again in the last couple of months. So, you know, no matter how much experience you have, you're always learning. You never get everything right. I think we've implemented it with a difference this time. We've been very strict on what a stage zero looks like. Historically, it was just a dumping ground where basically we went, oh, that account could be a good client for us, put it in stage zero, which then ended up just with a gigantic kind of lake of account names sat in stage zero opportunities with nobody doing anything on them and nobody assigned to them, nobody taking ownership. So we've gone back and revisited it, and now we have very clear separation. The minute it goes into a stage zero, it's owned by the account executive or the partner manager, and they're the ones accountable for moving that forwards. And we have pipeline reviews on those as well to make sure things are actually moving, and I'm extremely strict in terms of telling people, right, let's get rid of that, let's push that back to a BDR and see if we can get another meeting with them and see where it goes from there.
Janis Zech: One step back, I think, would be super interesting just to kind of, like, you know, give our listeners a perspective on how RevOps works at Zerotap because I think that definitely also, like, shapes this conversation a little bit. Like, the way you talk about it is analytics is also part of revenue operations. Is that correct? Like, so do you have, like, your own, like, data science people? Like, how do you cover that part? Because I think that is also its own category that we have not talked about so much about yet. Is that fully taken care of? Is there even, like, a MarOps team or, like, a data science team at Zerotap, or is this all RevOps?
Chris McKinnon: That's a good question. So I have a team of three. And so that consists of a RevOps manager, my guy Rayson, who is fantastic — systems admin. You guys know him. He's done all the work on Weflow, which I will talk about in a little while as well because it's a big part of our tech stack. We've got Alexandra who heads up operations for the business. And then we've got a RevOps coordinator, Ashwit, who deals with everything from helping manage our QBRs to building our playbooks to updating our master slide decks. And as a team, we hold the responsibility for BI data analytics for all of the go to market side of things, processes, strategy, reporting, dashboarding, education enablement, compensation plans, all of those other fun things that you have to deal with as well as tools, buying, implementation, maintenance, and evolution. So it's a lot. I mean, it's a lot across two business units. We have both a SaaS business unit and a transactional data business unit within Zerotap. So we have two different go to market functions — essentially two different businesses — both working in Salesforce, both using Tableau for reporting, both using our data warehouse. So we're kind of managing it. We're managing it.
Janis Zech: Yeah. I think it's super interesting because, like, to some extent, you could also argue, right, like, you buy all these tools, you put all these tools together. Sometimes also hiring a person can just mean replacing a couple of tools or, like, one or two tools. Depends. Right? You always have to kinda, like, weigh the cost against each other, but, like, a very common argument that a SaaS solution will give you is like, oh, if you buy our tool, you'll save x amount of hours every month, and this means you need like two people less in headcount, and that's why spending like two hundred k on us per year is totally fine.
Chris McKinnon: Oh, absolutely. I've got so many examples of where I've joined a business and there has been a tool that's been implemented or paid for where I have replaced it or removed it as soon as possible. I'm not gonna name any company's names, right? I don't think any of those tools were bad tools. I think they were purchased at the wrong point, right? So a great example of that is that we had an enterprise grade content management system implemented to an extent. We'd signed up for a three year contract and it was a tool that we had zero adoption on. We didn't have enough content to really need a content management system. It was almost a full time job to maintain and keep updated with everything that was being created or was being changed. And ultimately, it was more complex than just using Google Slides and Google Docs, which the team just continued to do regardless of how you train them. So we ended up using that as our internal playbook system where we would just write out our playbook, we'd have our sales process, our sales methodology, we'd have discovery questions and links to all of the training sessions that we do on a weekly basis, links to every other piece of content internal and external that we had. And we basically used it like I will be using Confluence when we replace it because Confluence just does that. And it comes filled in with Jira, and we have it in house. It's simpler to use. Everybody knows it. It just looks like a simple web page. So we're gonna be moving across to that. But it's a great example of where we have spent a decent amount of money on a tool that wouldn't have been required until probably four years, five years into the future, I would say.
Janis Zech: Yeah, love this description of when is the right time to buy a tool. What else are you looking at if you think about your tech stack? I mean, any other things that you're using?
Chris McKinnon: Yeah, I mean, like I say, there's a billion and one things. There are things that I would like that internally, let's say they're not our number one priority, right? So things like compensation management systems. That's a tool that I think is super important for a scaling business to have — selfishly because it's gonna save me loads of time in doing calculations on a deal by deal basis — but a team of sixty plus go to market members. But the benefit to the business is that each individual would get their visibility of what their potential earnings are on a given deal on a live basis, right? Which I currently have to do manually. I'll have a meeting with people, I'll tell them, I'll send them emails, and I'll send all those updated emails at the end of the month and tell people this is your earnings and make sure everything's calculated right and spend several days trying to get it all perfect in order to do it. But then it's a balance right now of how much time are we gonna spend to implement and maintain that tool. Right? If it takes me two days a month, even two full days a month — which most months it doesn't — two full days a month, then we're talking about twenty four days a year. Right? If we're gonna implement a tool and then train everybody on it, it's gonna take me probably that long, if not longer, over the course of a year in order to build in each of the individual models, check each of them work correctly. Then halfway through the year, we might decide we're gonna change the compensation structure for a couple of teams because that's what happens sometimes. Try and avoid it as much as possible, but it happens, right? Business grows and changes and team structures change. So then you've gotta change those models. And you'll probably have to pay for that, or you're gonna have to wait for their customer success team to help you out or figure it out by trial and error. And then all of a sudden, you've spent more time and effort than just building it in Google Sheets, right, and just taking the time to do it. Or getting a working student or a coordinator to help you out and go, okay, look, I've done calculations, I need you to send these emails out to people. So again, comes back to figuring out what the real return on investment is and being really honest with yourself about the benefit that it's gonna bring to the business. But I think I only really learned that through making those mistakes in the first place.
Janis Zech: Yeah. I think it's a great way of looking at it. Right? Like, how much time do you actually spend? How do you drive adoption? How do you make sure that it's really like a strong ROI versus just a nice to have? Right? I think these are all questions that are fundamentally important, especially, you know, with the move to kind of being more efficient in a different funding environment. Yeah, so now we have a bunch of tools, right? So we have CRM, marketing automation, prospecting outbound, you mentioned CDP, right, product analytics, business intelligence. Obviously, they all — and always loved G Sheets and Excel. Anything else that you do that is worth noting here?
Chris McKinnon: Yes. Absolutely. Actually, it's your tool at Weflow, and I can explain exactly why. And to the audience that are listening, I've been a client of Weflow's now for coming up to twelve months. Actually, I think our renewal's due, so we should probably talk about that after the podcast.
Janis Zech: Fantastic success. This is not scripted. This is not scripted, by the way. Just wanna put it out there.
Chris McKinnon: Hey, competitors. You know, here you go. They've got no chance. Don't worry. Weflow, honestly, is something that I've been looking for for quite a while. I didn't know I was looking for exactly that, but I knew I wanted a lot of the functionality that you can provide within a tool for many, many years now. I think the two main things that it's driven for us from a return on investment point of view is one, massively increased efficiency in the entry of data for our sales team and therefore adoption of CRM, right? Weflow sits obviously on top of our Salesforce, reads the data out of the API and provides a phenomenal way of us, both as managers and as individual contributors, incorporating insights and data into our CRM in a really fluid, quick way. Right? So an increased adoption of our CRM gave us much better data quality and gives us much better understanding about pipeline and the ability to manage. And then I think this is a kind of a byproduct of that and kind of part of the forecasting side of what you do — is much better forecasting. Because we've got better clarity and quality of data in there and more recency and accuracy in our data, we've got much, much better forecasting now than we have done since I began at the business, right? And it continues to improve month over month as we tweak and enhance the process. Now there is a forecasting module as well that you guys will know well, and I'm looking to move the team into using that more and more. I look at it on a regular basis, and that's gonna give us the ability to not just look at what our forecast is, but what it was and see what's coming, what's come out, look at the pacing of it, look at net new opportunities, changes to amount, changes to close date, and then really have that granular understanding of what's going on. So I'm super excited about implementing that. But I think that's just to summarize — because I know this is not an advert — but just to summarize the benefit that we've truly had out of it, right, is I've never seen a team adopt a Salesforce system outside of a big enterprise where it is kind of structured and trained from day one and standardized as part of the business — in startups and scale ups, I've never seen Salesforce adopted like it has been here through the use of Weflow. So that's been absolutely phenomenal.
Janis Zech: And just curious from your perspective, when do you think would be a good time to implement a tool like Weflow?
Chris McKinnon: That really depends on the kind of people that you've got in the business, the speed at which your business is growing. I don't think it can ever be too early, to be honest, because I think if you could implement it alongside Salesforce, then you're almost creating an integrated system and an integrated process then, right, where you say to the account executive, look, this is where you go update your information, this is how you add new information, all through Weflow. And then you have all the kind of dashboard side of it and the system of record in Salesforce where your managers can go and look at the dashboards. Or you can then push it out into a data warehouse. So if you can do it right from the beginning, I think it'd be great because then
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