Philipp Stelzer: Hello, and welcome to another edition of the RevOps Lab podcast. I'm here together with Janis. Yeah. Janis is, like, a little bit sick. You can hear it, like, a little bit in his voice. So, yeah, I hope you can make it through the podcast. It's, like, it's amazing that you, like, can join, like, even while being sick. And our guest today is Franco Anzini. Franco, hello. Nice to meet you.

Franco Anzini: Hey, guys. Yeah. Hey. Good to meet you.

Philipp Stelzer: And, Franco, who are you and what do you do?

Franco Anzini: Oh, boy. I suppose I would classify myself as a revenue operations professional. I've been living in the revenue operations world for longer than I care to admit ever since way back when it was just called sales ops. And been working at companies various stages of maturity, various industries, various go to market motions, and so have seen all the movies, as they say, around revenue operations, and continuing to help companies scale their go to market motion, once they've found product market fit, then how do we start to get the go to market engine cranking with marketing on the front end, sales in the middle, and then the customer piece post sale. So, been doing that, and outside of that, just a normal person living a normal life, two kids who play a lot of sports, and I get caught up in that a lot.

Philipp Stelzer: Alright. Good. Yeah. Glad to hear we're not talking to an alien today. No. Like — kidding, obviously. Yeah. No. No. It's good. Yeah. And then you're in Southern California. Right? I think.

Franco Anzini: I'm the Bay Area. Yeah. I'm in the Bay Area.

Philipp Stelzer: Bay Area. Bay Area. Yeah. Yeah. Right. That's not that's not that Southern anymore. Alright.

Philipp Stelzer: And our topic today is stay close to where the money changes hands, basically. So we said in advance, which I think is a super interesting topic. But, Franco, do you wanna just, like, sort of, like, give us, like, a perspective on what what do you mean when you say, like, stay close to where the money changed its hand?

Franco Anzini: Yeah. Yeah. It's an interesting topic, because I think more and more with everything happening in the world over the past couple of years, and likely what we're gonna see in the future, the revenue operations profession has largely stayed very data focused, which is great, we need our data, right? But I think there's this movement for revenue operations folks to get a bit out of the data and get their hands dirty, right, roll up their sleeves. I think sometimes when people say, oh, I need you to roll up your sleeves, they're not talking about rolling up your sleeves and changing the code in one of your systems, right, they're talking about learning how the business functions, and I think to do that, I had a manager years ago who was great, and he would always say, if you want to understand how a business works, get close to where the money changes hands, because that's where the transactions are happening, that's where the decisions are made, that's where you're learning why the decisions are made, and that in our world is working with customers, with prospects and with partners, and figuring out what's happening at the ground level with those interactions that are driving decisions that stakeholders are making, and then how those permeate into your go to market motion and some of the operational pieces that you're trying to refine and optimize. So I always like to tell members on my team, go talk to some customers, get out in the field with some sales reps, talk to partners, talk to prospects, listen to a bunch of meetings and calls, and really understand the art in the art and science mix that we know exists in any sort of operational role.

Janis Zech: Yeah. Perfect. I really like it, and I mean, unsurprisingly, for many of our listeners, maybe this resonates really well with me coming more from, like, a product background. But I think it's the exact same thing. Like, you you you don't talk if you you keep developing your product, which basically RevOps — like you also like, you work on a product, like the sales product. And and then if you don't talk to, like, your your customers, the users in the end also, then, like, how would you even know whether it really works and what whether what you are building and developing actually serves any real purpose, gets proper adoption. I take numbers can only tell you that much. And and I think particularly, like, this art piece that is that is super super critical. And I also just just to just to add to that, like, also, like, I've been doing, like, sales for the past two years, which I haven't done before, like, on that scale, at least. Yeah. And, you know, there's just so so many insights and just, like, new experiences that I was able to gather. Yeah. Just, like, being forced in that position of having to to to sell something and then going through the pain of what it means to, you know, write like follow-up emails and back to back meetings. It's just you get like a completely different perspective on the work of salespeople. And just I think understanding the pain, going through the pain. I think there's so much value because that's, I think, where innovation also also comes from. So, yeah, I think I think it's an amazing topic. Like, thing I'd love to dive deeper into is sort of, like, what are some tactics or frameworks that have you seen that work well to, you know, roll up the sleeves and stay close to where the money changes hands?

Franco Anzini: Yeah. I I think we we have to be cognizant of who the stakeholders are, number one. And I always tell folks on my teams and in my organizations that the revenue operations role, the first word is revenue. So let's not lose sight of that, right? And so when we think about revenue, what brings revenue into an organization? And largely it's your customers are buying a software, a service, a product, right? And so you have to be really cognizant of that. Now, there are sales processes that every company has, and there's associated metrics that flow from that, but what we often lose sight of is the why. So we have this great sales process of qualification and finding pain and so on, but why are people engaging with us? Like, is the underlying reason? What is happening in their business, in their world, that is putting them into our process that we have that we can then gather data, right? So I think you kind of start at the beginning with the why, and that will ultimately dovetail into the value proposition that a company is offering to its customers, and that's your anchor point to, you know, tying it back to a sales process, whether it's MEDDIC or BANT or whatever, like, okay, there's some pain there, and now there's value, and now we can start mapping the two together, right? So I think that would be kind of the umbrella that you would put everything under. In terms of a framework, there's no kind of easy way to this. I know that in RevOps we love to automate things, and whether that is taking call recordings and transcribing them, putting them as notes somewhere in a system and, you know, now running some AI against them, that's all well and good, but there are still some underlying, you know, sentiment and intonation things that happen on calls and interactions, and so the framework is really quite straightforward, which is, don't just rely on the data that's flowing through your system, but go listen to it or see it at the ground level, and so I always encourage folks on my team, go on some sales calls with some sellers, or if you're supporting the partner organization, get involved with, you know, partner meetings, or QBRs that we have with our partner channel and motions. And so that's the roll up your sleeves, is just, gotta get in there, talk to people. Sometimes operation folks, it takes them out of their comfort zone, where, you know, I'm the data person, I don't like talking to people I don't know, right? But, and it's not that you have to, you know, show up on a call and run the thing, like even sometimes if you're just a fly on the wall, and just listening to not only what the customer prospect or partner says, but how they say it. Like that is the piece that our data often doesn't show or shed light on. So getting that context now allows you to start merging the art and the science, right? Really getting smart with the data is showing us something and we know why it's showing us that.

Janis Zech: Yeah. Yeah. No. For sure. Like, I mean, one thing, again, both from a product perspective, but I I think it's comparable. Like, I always found helpful is then talking to the salespeople and like as a as a as a starting point and just like getting an understanding of like how that day actually works, like, you know, what kind of like tasks and jobs to be done they have and how they're currently trying to solve that. And then kind of like trying to categorize and map that sort of like in my head, and then from there, asking them to, hey, you know, would it be okay if I actually joined one of like your next like customer meetings and ideally in person, because then I think it's like even like on another level. And what I found is that salespeople actually, like, they react extremely appreciative to this. So if you go to a salesperson, it's like, hey, I'm really interested in what you're doing. We like to learn more. Could I join you on your next, like, in person meeting with company x y z? They'd like, yeah, man. Like, that would be that actually would be amazing if you joined. Like, I could really use the support. Like — yeah. Yeah. So I I I think you're like, good not to be afraid.

Franco Anzini: Yeah. Sorry. It it it but it's a really good point you make too because the the thing that we often forget about is, depending on the go to market motion, and the personnel and the maturity of the company of course, sometimes the sellers, they're out there on an island, and they're kind of figuring things out as they go sometimes, particularly those that maybe haven't been at the company for a while, or haven't been in the space, I mean, there's enablement and onboarding that happens, but it's like anything else, practical nature, like you have to do it to learn, and they are so appreciative to your point, that there is someone in the organization, whether it's someone who supports me directly or indirectly, right, a RevOps analyst, or a product manager, they're thrilled that they've got the support, and that they're able to brainstorm and work with others in the organization to, you know, solve a customer problem, or figure out what the customer need is, if it's very early stage, and you know, you're building an MVP product, for example. So they're very appreciative, and I think that's the takeaway for people is, like, if you ask, ninety nine percent of the time, they're gonna say, yes, please join me, help me, right? It's very rare when they, you know, give you the Heisman and say, no, no, stay out of my world, right?

Janis Zech: I understand. I think it's very interesting because like, when you think about the customer journey, it often starts a lot earlier, right, like kind of in the awareness stage. And so obviously, your positioning and messaging frames that quite a bit. And understanding that is actually really an art. It is very hard to test. You can run experiments, but it's really difficult to do. Understanding the messaging positioning, the awareness stages, the different channels that drive pipeline. And then what we see a lot, and I think that has changed a lot, is that before people start booking demos or starting to talk to sales, they already are very educated. They already know a lot. They've done their research. They go into chat based systems and figure out what's going on, right? So this actually frames a lot of the journey already there, that is often very hidden, and is not quantifiable very much. So like, that's the initial framework with top of funnel. Then you get into the conversation. I think there's this tendency right now that with AI, you can even operationalize or automate the intake process for RevOps, which means basically I have a service desk and the service desk has now AI, so I don't need to talk to more folks, which I fully understand because I understand that we are all getting bombarded with so many different requests that also don't really make sense. I think everybody knows this, and everybody is suffering from that, but at the same time, to go into the field and really understand whether your sales process is mirroring the customer journey, sales process is increasing the win rate, your sales process is increasing the chance of renewal and expansion. That cannot be forgotten. Right? And this is also like what drives revenue significantly. And I think we have this notion of like, how do you become a COO? Right? You've been a COO. How do you become a CRO as a RevOps person? Right? If you don't understand this, there's no way that you get there. Right? There's no way that you get that. This is fundamentally important. And, yeah, I'm curious what what you think about that.

Franco Anzini: Yeah. You're you're right on. I I think particularly when we talk about career pathing, the path from revenue operations to a broader operational role, whether it's a COO or a general manager or something like that, is becoming more prevalent, and I think it's because there are some really good operational people that are expanding the breadth of their knowledge of the company's, not only their sales cycle, but their post sales cycle, right? Like getting a customer in the door is one thing, keeping them is a whole other thing, and those two have to come together, right? And I think for operational folks that understand the whys and the early stage of, you know, exactly to your point, the customer is more educated than ever. So why are they talking to us, like in spite of all this education? Are they further down the process? Are we not doing a good job communicating it? And then flip it to the post sales world, where why should this customer remain a customer? Why do they want to remain a customer? Why do we want them to remain a customer? Like the two don't always mesh. And so understanding that thread that goes all the way through a process and an organization is key, and you're right, from a broader operational capacity, like that's what RevOps people specifically can bring to COO roles and so on, right? Because they understand more than just what the data or the systems are telling them. They've got the context at both ends, the front end and the back end.

Philipp Stelzer: Do you have, like, any specific examples where this is, you know, where, basically, you can look at data, but the reality looks different, like anything that you've seen in your career?

Franco Anzini: Yeah, there's a bunch of examples. I think the one that might resonate with the audience is what most of us lived through in the SaaS world here the past couple of years, where there was just unexpected churn coming out of nowhere, right? And a lot of us, if you were just focused on the dashboards and the metrics, you saw customers that had adopted your product, that were very engaged with your product, but they churned, right? And without going to where the money changes hands and talking with customers and prospects, you would have never gotten the context of what was happening in their world, where they might have been being asked to cut costs, and it was hard decisions on their side where they had a bunch of tools and platforms that they were using and were critical to their business, but they were being asked by their management or their executives to rethink the business. And I understand we have a lot of great tools, we've got twelve tools that are critical, but if you can only have eight of them, which eight are you gonna use? Or whatever the example is. So I think having those conversations earlier, having them with customers in person, online, would have revealed that context, and that would have allowed us, I think, to be a bit more proactive. If it was a cost issue, great, we've got playbooks to get ahead of that, right? If it was a business process transformation issue, great, we've got a playbook that we can leverage. And certainly not to say that all of the unexpected churn would have been saved, because that's not the way the world works, but if you could have saved twenty percent more, thirty percent more than you did, like that, it makes a meaningful difference. So I think that's the one that comes to mind. The other very practical one, and our product expert on the call here can certainly weigh in, where you build a product, and you take it to market, and you don't see the traction on it, because you kind of haven't built what the customer really wanted, you built something, but it's not addressing maybe one of their key pain points for a certain use case, and so you're not getting that uptick, and it's not driving the revenue curve in the way you predicted, all because you didn't take the time to go talk to people and ask them and say, here's what we're doing, does this match with what you're trying to solve, or the pain that you have, right? So those are two examples kind of on two different worlds, but the same premise holds, ask the question, get in front of people, listen to not what they're saying, but how they're saying it.

Janis Zech: Yeah. So let me just play this back to you because I think this resonates really well with me. I think the churn example is great because basically you're looking at metrics. You have a health score. You basically have certain understanding of this is health, but actually the assumption is wrong. You can maybe measure the usage data, you can measure the touch points, right? That's all fairly easy. What you cannot measure is the context. And the context currently is changing drastically, right? So the context of the company, the reality, right? So I think we lived through this SaaS era, right, like into efficient growth. And I think now we're basically hitting a new era, which is basically the AI first era where suddenly, right, like, although the companies, the SaaS companies are growing crazy, their valuation is getting hammered. Right? And this is like, whether that's right or wrong, it's this is a reality. And it is a changing market environment that is like, three months old. If you don't start seeing that in the calls, if you don't start listening to that, you might have completely wrong assumptions of the business, which essentially leads to, you know, like significant revenue loss. And so I think, like what you're suggesting here is essentially, how do you get closer to where the money changes hands or, you know, where kind of you see the art but also you understand the business on a deeper level and on a more strategic level. I think that is something that is really profound to me because I've been founding a company since twenty twenty three and I lived through so many pivots and dreadful periods where, you know, it's kind of a sometimes I feel like, you know, you listen, you talk, you look at data and at some point it's very clear and you need to make a strategic decision. Yeah. But it's like it might take a while to get to that point. And so if you're in RevOps, you know, like I think it's a it's this very like we've never talked about this at this podcast. I've actually never talked to anyone about it, but I think it's so true because it's like like go to market systems are very very complex. And the reason might be not that, you know, the environment changes might be that actually the way you tell the story is not the best story or the way you do value creation is not the right way. And this is all one. And so if you want to be strategic in RevOps, if you really want to change the fate of the company, right? Like those are all aspects that are worth learning and fighting for and getting into. Now I'm rambling, like going all phases, but it just really resonates with me.

Franco Anzini: You're right on. Folks that are clearly, you know, in the more traditional RevOps audience, when I talk to people who are in RevOps, and we have career discussions, the one thing that everyone says is, I want to be more strategic, right? They understand there's a strategic part to advancing their careers, and the strategic part doesn't, you know, birth from dashboards and metrics. Like the strategic part is what we're talking about, going and understanding the business, and if you bring those two together, well now you've got a complete picture, and you mix the art and the science, and so from a career perspective, there's a ton to be gained, and it's exactly what you were saying, it takes people down the I'm more strategic because I now have this context path.

Janis Zech: Yeah. Yeah. Hundred percent. Really, really, really like it. One thing I think would maybe also be interesting for the audience is just like to think a bit about signals. Like, what is a moment in time where I should actually roll up my sleeves? And what is a moment in time where I should roll the sleeves back down? And or how we wanna put it. And so because I think that's that's that's also relevant. Right? Because I think what we're saying here is, like, not to, like, you know, become like a sales rep, like like, six months of the year. That's that's definitely not what we're saying. Yeah. But, like, it's it's about, like, a short period of time, and it's not always needed. Right? Like, sometimes you have, like, a very big picture of the market and, like yeah. You know, there's not really any benefit to, like, you know, shadowing somebody or joining, like, a a sales call. And then there are other moments where it's urgently needed. So I'm curious whether you are aware of any signals that you would recommend people to look out for.

Franco Anzini: Yeah. So so the answer is it depends. There there are some natural collaboration points that exist in organizations, whether it's a beginning of year sales kickoff, or revenue kickoff, or quarterly reviews, where you're face to face with the sellers, sometimes you've got customers and partners and prospects as part of those, so there's some natural things. But I think it depends on the territory or the region that's being supported, it depends on the go to market motion, but I would say it's a regular cadence, and regular means different things, right? Sometimes it's quarterly, twice a year, certainly at least once a year. If there's new product launches that are being planned for, if there's territory expansion, that could be an area to say, oh, let me get smart, and get some context around that. So it depends, but you raise a good point, like we're not saying go spend six months of the year hanging out with sellers out in the field, right? There's certainly judicious ways to do it. I think there's still a lot that can be gleaned with content around call interactions, call transcriptions, right? Like we can gain a bunch from that, but to fill in the blanks, that's where you wanna make sure you get that context with the sellers.

Janis Zech: Just one thing I wanna mention, like, because I mean, we've got this, like, conversation intelligence, right, like, one of the number one use cases that I hear, in calls right now is, like, people just want to have, like, raw data access to the transcript because they want to push it into other systems. Right? Like like clean, lean data. And and or they wanna use our own AI to just, like, make sure, like, that they can really source through all of the transcripts in bulk and then, you know, do things like just just just ask like, for AI, like, hey, you know, like, give me a summary of all the objections raised, like, in the last three days during sales meetings. And I mean, it's possible nowadays, so I think it makes total sense to to to really take advantage of it. But I think it's still like there's still like this you you don't have the personal connection in there, and I think it's easy to miss things. Like, one one thing I think to to fast track that if relevant for people, in my experience was just joining salespeople at conferences because if they are at conferences regularly then you can actually join like, I don't know, thirty sales conversations. Like at least like the discovery and qualification piece, take very well, and then sometimes even, like, a deeper dive. You just stand with them at the booth. I mean, like, what does it cost you? Like, you know, like, one or two days short business trip and go to a new city. Might actually be, like, you know, quite fun. And you meet you meet you meet like a lot of people, can dive into like, you know, how are the conversations go, what's the vibe, and all of this. So I think conferences are like also like just so it's like a —

Franco Anzini: Yeah. There's there's there's there's nothing better than meeting with people, whether they are internal to your company or external in person, and conferences, great place to do it.

Janis Zech: Yeah, yeah. I mean, I think a lot of teams we currently talk to feel like really underwater. Right? Like, it's a bit like, okay, like, everybody cuts, so teams are getting smaller, you know, responsibilities grow with suddenly, you know, RevOps also being kind of the AI transformation team or orchestrators. Right? So so, you know, obviously, it's not not easy to make that time and and and so on. I mean, you know, if at all, right, like, just, you know, find some some top sellers in the organization, just sit down with them for coffee, you know, every other week or so just to be closer to the to the field. Right? I think that's that's also something. And I think maybe one, you know, one signal that, you know, you should do this on maybe also like broader scale, not just RevOps, but also the executives. I've been on a bunch of boards throughout the last fifteen years. And what I saw is sometimes there's growth stalling and the executives actually don't know why. And it actually happens quite often that like at some point, you know, something like inbound stalls or outbound doesn't work as well, you know, kind of the the win rate goes down. And actually, the answer isn't clear. And I think that's always a good sign to say, hey, look, we don't know. So we need to learn why. And you know, if you present that to an executive and say, look, I observed this is a problem. I don't have the answer. Yeah, but you know, I want to explore that because I think that's strategic to the business, right? Like I think you'll see a lot of support and then you can also rally people around and try to basically find out. Right? So this might be something that that's worth considering when we create launch.

Franco Anzini: Agreed.

Philipp Stelzer: Nice. Alright. Okay. I think we are, like, at thirty minutes. You know, I think, Philipp, you're getting sick. I'm sick. Franco, I hope you're not sick. You know? I don't know. We had this last night week here in Barcelona and it was just too much fun. So we are all a bit sick. But before you go, one last question. Any book or research report you would recommend? Doesn't need to be business. It can be anything. Super curious what to say.

Franco Anzini: Oh yeah, yeah, I won't bore you with, you know, business book or, you know, think tank research report, there's plenty of those out there, but a book I recently read, was a fun book and very practical, it's called Legacy, it's by James Kerr, and it's the story of the All Blacks rugby team, and how they foster success, how they scale success, how they ensure success, like day to day, week to week, season to season, and it's a fun book, it speaks to culture that's very relevant to what we do in our world. It's a quick read, it's a fun read, and I really enjoyed it as a non business book, but kind of half business book. So Legacy by James Kerr.

Janis Zech: I mean, everybody knows the All Blacks and they are fantastic, you know, and their performance is in a whole other world than the one we live in, right? Yeah. Yeah. It's super cool, actually.

Philipp Stelzer: Awesome. Franco, thank you so much for coming on. This was awesome.

Franco Anzini: Much appreciated. Having me.