Philipp Stelzer: Hey, Filip.

Janis Zech: Hey, Janus. So what are we talking about with Mallory today?

Philipp Stelzer: Yeah. In today's episode, we talk about the concept of a pipeline council to build alignment, trust, and also fast decision making across sales, marketing, success, product, and, of course, also revenue operations. And Mallory shares what she learned these past years to make it a long lasting success. And what's really cool about this episode is that it's very practical. So after listening to this, you can essentially just go and start your own pipeline council right away. So, yeah, enjoy this episode.

Janis Zech: Super excited to have you on board.

Philipp Stelzer: Yeah. Great to have you on the show.

Mallory Lee: Yeah. Thanks for the invite. Good to see you guys.

Janis Zech: Yeah. So for the audience, like, who are you? What do you do?

Mallory Lee: Sure. My name's Mallory. I am an operations leader at Nylas. Started my career actually on the marketing side. So that was a great foundation for me. Marketing analyst right out of school at ExactTarget, Pardot, Salesforce, sort of journey. And after that, I led marketing teams for a little while, before moving into revenue operations at Terminus. And so Terminus was the first place that I had really seen the unified RevOps model reported to our CFO. And, since then, I've just really enjoyed that. I think it's the best way to organize the team and have kind of a true, cross functional RevOps group. And so I've been at Nylas for about a year now. Started with revenue operations and now doing a little bit of business operations in addition to that.

Janis Zech: That sounds like a great school with a lot of learnings, throughout. I'm curious, like, how does RevOps work at Nylas? How are you set up?

Mallory Lee: Yeah. It's funny that you said school. We used to joke about the ExactTarget MBA because it was just so invaluable, all the different experiences that we had there. Anyway, at Nylas, we have about four people that are dedicated to specific revenue operations, business partners with sales and marketing and customer success, and we work a lot with the product team as well. And then we also have two gentlemen that help us wrangle Salesforce and all the integrated systems there, to keep the lights on for all of our teams.

Janis Zech: Is the Salesforce team part of the RevOps team or its own team?

Mallory Lee: Yeah. We're all together under one roof, and, we have about two stand ups a week just to make sure that we understand, you know, what's going on across the board, prioritize across teams together. Most of us do our own reporting and analysis, and so that's part of the team that we wanna continue to grow out is to make better use of things like Looker, hire a dedicated analyst, and things like that next year. But for now, we're just flinging around Salesforce dashboards and making it work.

Janis Zech: Yeah. That sounds very familiar. You just mentioned, products. That's also part of your team is working with products. Just curious, like, how does that work? Like, why do you have that direct line with product? I think that's not so common, actually.

Mallory Lee: Yeah. You're right. It's not that common. So we do have a product operations person who lives in the product team, but we stay really closely connected with them because we have a PLG motion at Nylas, and you can purchase the tool on the website. So we've got sales led and product led, and our team helps with managing those processes, the data flows, all kinds of great lead scoring stuff, across normal web engagement, but also product engagement. And so we're just kind of always trying to be in lockstep with them to understand what's about to change in the product and that dashboard experience so that we can optimize that, really the lead flow and making sure that we're getting in touch with people at the right time.

Janis Zech: Okay. I love that. And I also think that makes total sense. I mean, if you have, like, a PLG motion, it's kinda, like, necessary that you have somebody who's, like, really closely aligned with the product team. But I don't think it's so common, even though, like, many try to follow the PLG motion, and I think, often, I think it fails exactly at that point. So, yeah, that's really good to hear.

Philipp Stelzer: Yeah. When we prepared for this recording and we talked in advance, you talked about the concept of a pipeline council, and that really struck with us, and we kinda, like, wanted to make that one of the themes in this podcast recording. Could you explain just from your experience and perspective what a pipeline council is and what it does?

Mallory Lee: I will. I will do that. So I wanna start with, like, a really brief story. When I started at ExactTarget as a marketing analyst, I was doing a lot of Salesforce reports all the time, just providing people with data. And I always think back to the first time that I was ever sort of put in front of sales, and, you know, we were pretty darn separate. Like, sales and marketing alignment was not a big thing back then. This is in, like, twenty ten. And my first time presenting to them was coming with a report and a presentation of how much pipeline marketing had delivered to them in that quarter. And so it was the end of the quarter where you're sitting down. I said, hey. Here's what we gave you, and didn't we do great? You know? And thinking back now, that is just unheard of. It's so silly to have that cadence, like, so spread out and not be talking about pipeline all the time. So, you know, the purpose of a pipeline council is really to make sure that you're not in that position. It's a cross functional group of people that needs to get together frequently. Might be weekly. It might be every other week. But either way, the entire purpose is to just talk about the pipeline, where it's at, what you're doing to improve it, if there are any potential gaps, if there's any collaboration needed on a very specific deal. And so I've done the pipeline council at a few companies now. The first company that I learned this from was Cheetah Digital. A guy named Matt Compton was running our pipeline council. And at Cheetah, the marketing ops team was separated from the sales ops team. So it was really important for us to get together more frequently in this pipeline council format. And I just adopted that and started doing it, really everywhere else that I've been. And it's a super helpful way to keep people on the same page. It doesn't mean you're gonna like the data, but at least you're talking about it, you're looking at it, and trying to, you know, do some collaboration around that.

Janis Zech: Yeah. I mean, I think it's always good that, you know, different people come together and actually look at the same data whether you like it or not, and then have a conversation about it. So that's a good starting point. Super curious. Let's go very granular here. Like, how often is that? Who is in the council, and what exactly is the agenda?

Mallory Lee: Yeah. Good question. So today at Nylas, we are every other week. I think that we could meet weekly, but people's schedules are just so insane. So we do an hour every other week. My team provides the majority of the data in the deck. And so, we try to get that done as soon as we can before the meeting. Ideally, you wanna distribute that data to people before you get there so they have some time to look it over. Doesn't always happen that way just with, like, you know, a lot of priorities and a lot of busyness, but RevOps will always kind of bring the data and run the meeting. And the idea is that we kick off by looking at the status of the pipeline and the forecast. Where are we? Do we have a gap versus where we need to be? And if we do, what are we doing to address that? We'll also go into some of the demand gen metrics. We'll talk about marketing, where demand is coming from, are we on track or are we not? And then we start to move into kind of round robin updates from sales and marketing and anybody else that needs to, you know, kind of report out on how things are going. So one really great attendee for this call should be the people that are leading your business development, like SDRs, BDRs, whatever people call it. You know? That group of people that is responsible for putting the opportunities into the pipeline. It's a great time to give feedback. So the main attendees for us are sales, marketing, marketing operations, and sales operations. So the two guys on my team and then myself and even our CRO is there and sales leadership. And so it's a pretty well attended call. We also have product marketing most of the time. So that's helpful to discuss things like messaging or what we're seeing, you know, from conversations just so that they stay on the same page. Right now, we don't always have our partnerships person in the call, but I think in the coming year, that'll become even more important, and he'll be there more often because we're really starting to build up our channel pipeline. So, really, anyone who's contributing pipeline or watching the pipeline or caring about it is kind of on the attendee list. And it's hard to keep it small, but we do try to keep it as small as we can, because you do want it to be a group of people that can be really open with each other. We're not pulling punches. You know? We're just putting everything out there and having very direct and transparent conversations because it's ideally kind of a leadership group that can do that and handle the ambiguity and, you know, getting down to the business there.

Janis Zech: Yeah. I mean, I can imagine that, you know, back in the days at ExactTarget, when you presented, there were a few folks in the room who looked anxious about maybe the numbers that were presented. How do you create that culture of openness, of maybe insights and data driven decision making and conversation that are not, you know, finger pointing and, yeah, essentially create a real team spirit. Like, are there any tips and tricks you've learned throughout the different versions of this?

Mallory Lee: It depends a little bit on if you are already centralized in the way that data gets distributed out to people. So if RevOps already owns the dashboard creation for the go to market teams and already owns a couple scorecards, you might already be looking at the same information across different groups, but that's not always the case. And so, you know, in situations where people are used to bringing their own data to a meeting and putting their own spin on it and defending their department, it is quite different because RevOps will bring the numbers. There's only one set of them. If anything looks funny, we'll definitely double check it, look into it, make sure that it's accurate. But for the most part, we don't spend a lot of time debating the data. And so first, that saves time. Second, I think it frees people up to just, like, take themselves out of their day to day role and think like a business owner and just look at things a little bit more objectively. It's a partnership. Right? And I've seen, you know, I've launched this a couple times now, and the pattern is always the same. It's really funny. So this is kind of like a what to expect. The very first meeting, the energy is really high. You're kind of setting out what you want your agenda to look like. You are making sure that everybody's on the same page about what data needs to be presented and what their role is in the pipeline council. The second meeting, the data comes, the energy is pretty high, everyone's collaborating. It's like, wow. It's so great for all of us to be together. Like, you start to realize how valuable it is. The third meeting is the chasm. Right? The trough of despair in the hype cycle. That is the meeting where you get down to some of the numbers that don't look as good, and you start to talk about some of the issues. And everyone starts to get a little bit more vulnerable. And then by the end of the third call, everyone's like, oh my gosh. This is bad. This is really bad. And you hit that low point, and then from there, you rebound. But funny enough, I think you need to experience that as a group, and you do need this group of leaders to just have, like, the utmost transparency about what's working and what's not. It's a great time to check in on SLAs and keep each other accountable for, you know, is your team doing the right things for me? Am I doing the right things for you? Because if it's the leadership there, then we can really impact the way that those things are working. So it's a fun experience. It's always funny to watch it play out, and you never want it to be the same for, like, five quarters in a row. It'll get boring and stale. So you're always changing things up a little, but it's a great time together.

Janis Zech: Yeah. Like, you know, you talked about, like, the first couple of meetings. So speaking maybe, like, in marketing lingo, but what's sort of, like, the time to value that we're talking about here? Like, when do you typically see, like, a council have, like, a real impact that people notice that, you know, leadership comes by and says, great job, guys. You know? How does that look?

Mallory Lee: I would say it takes a quarter. I think it really does. You know, the tough conversations, they happen pretty soon. And then getting to the solutioning and trying to make sure that you're tackling very specific issues, I think it takes a quarter for that to really come to life and see some progress. The other thing that's pretty nice is you have a block on the calendar with all of these people. And if there's ever a very topical need, for us, it was redefining our MQL process and the definition of a qualified lead. We wanted to do some work on that at Nylas, and so we were able to use that pipeline council time to really progress that project. And it was kind of like the special topic during our meetings because we just happened to have everybody there, and it was all the right people in the room. So that's another benefit. But like anything else, I think you've gotta give it a little bit of time to work out, and people need time to, you know, make sure that they feel comfortable stepping up and talking about their department, how it's going, and what they're doing to change things.

Janis Zech: Oh, that makes total sense. And I think, actually, you know, time to value within a quarter actually sounds pretty good to me. If you think about most tools and processes to implement, right, that's actually, I would say, pretty fast. And, yeah, I mean, curious because you also, you know, set that up multiple times now. I think one important, you know, group sort of, like, to convince about, like, the concept of, like, a pipeline council is definitely, like, the leadership team. How do you typically do that? Because, like, I would think, at least maybe I'm wrong here, but I would think that it's actually very hard to make that measurable in clear KPIs. Right? Like, at least, like, you could also say, like, okay. Like, that improvement in this and this KPI, that it really has something to do with the council, then I would say it's hard to prove because it could just be like, yeah. This is just the work that the marketing team did or customer success team did. It has nothing to do with the council.

Mallory Lee: Yeah. I think the answer is somewhere in the middle. Like, I don't think that I ever try to drill in and find a very specific ROI from something that the council did. I think you're right in that it may not change your tactics at all. It may not change your strategy at all. But what it does is that it makes everybody aware. It makes everybody bought in. Sales actually knows what marketing's working on. Marketing actually knows who all the most important prospects are in the funnel, and you just have better alignment. So the worst thing that can happen between sales and marketing is when one team thinks everything is going great and the other team thinks everything is going terrible. That is really the worst thing. So I think that pipeline council really just prevents that, and it keeps people on the same page so that you don't have one team celebrating and one team, you know, crying in the corner around not hitting quota. Like, we need to be on the same page there. It may not have that much impact on what we decide to do about it, but I think it accelerates the speed with which you get things done, and it keeps people just aligned on where the business is at.

Philipp Stelzer: Yeah. I love this so much because I think about a business where you don't have that group of people coming together on a regular basis and the ripple effects of that. Right? And I think we've all been there and done this. Sales and marketing conflicts, conflicts between product and sales or sales and CS, and no forum where the leadership team can align on how to change things or even just address them and say, well, it's not the hot top priority to act on. But if you don't have it, it's really challenging. And so I think this is, yeah, this is fantastic. I'm curious about a few more things here. Like, so you mentioned you start off with data, right, which is presented by RevOps to make it essentially the facts, not, you know, an opinion. But then there's round robin on the actual leaders in the specific departments, reporting on specific things. What are they typically giving an update on? What would you recommend the topics should be?

Mallory Lee: Yeah. I think the topics will vary a little bit just based on where big projects are for your company. But generally, you know, once we get through the data, people are gonna come and bring their major program updates. So a lot of times marketing has more to present at pipeline council than sales does. My goal is to make sure that sales is feeling heard. So anything that's working really well or anything that feels like a blocker, I want them to get that out there. Any support they need for really big opportunities is a great chance to collaborate. But then marketing is bringing more of the here's what's coming. Here's what our calendar looks like. Here's what we need from you guys to help us support this event, invitations for webinars, and, like, just the stuff that you need them to be aware of and bought in on. And then, talking together about, like, industries that are working well and outbound campaigns and, like, where we're seeing progress and traction. Our team loves trading notes on, like, where are your best conversations happening? Are you having success in conversations in this industry or this industry? And then they try to absorb all of that and use it in content and, like, really, you know, take what's working and put it back out there to get that flywheel kind of going. So I think there are a variety of ways that you could tackle it. When there's a big campaign, it's a great time to check in on progress. So if you've got, like, a brand new piece of content, your goal is a thousand downloads, and you come every week and you've got your little thermometer of how many downloads so far, it's just little things like that, sharing progress, and making sure everybody knows how to support each other.

Philipp Stelzer: Yeah. It sounds to me like information flows a lot faster, and your way of continuous learning is something that is also, yeah, supercharged in that way, especially with regards to probably messaging and ICP, which is always overlapping across the whole go to market motion and something that's also really hard to measure in my mind. So bringing up anecdotes and sharing what marketing is seeing and sales is seeing and potentially also CS, right, is probably really, really useful. So, yeah, sounds great.

Janis Zech: Just jumping in there. I think also, you know, one of the things that really grinds my gears is when you see these posts on LinkedIn from salespeople complaining about, like, oh, MQLs are terrible. Like, marketing never does anything for us. And I think it can go in any direction. Right? And I think the most successful companies, they are built on great culture. And to me, like, the way you talk about this, it really means, like, essentially, like, the pipeline council is a way to, you know, help build a great culture, between the different teams and departments not just, like, for, like, a short amount of time, but, you know, to kinda, like, maintain that and keep it going. And I think that's so important to make that collaboration between marketing and sales a success and not to, you know, the one in that corner and the other one in that corner. And, I mean, obviously, that's the purpose of revenue operations also. Right? But I still think, you know, it's not enough that just one person tries to connect them. Like, having everybody sit in the same room, obviously, you know, can do a lot more. So here's my question. Are you guys doing team events in the pipeline council? Because I think you should.

Mallory Lee: Yeah. Yeah. It's a super great idea. So for us, yes, we are. And part of the reason for that is that our CRO has both marketing and sales. And so they're already, like, one go to market unit, and they're already pretty aligned in that way. So, you know, they have, like, go to market off sites where sales and marketing are there. My guys are there kinda, like, supporting being embedded in the team. This past time, I couldn't make it because of just the timing, but normally, would go. And you're right. Like, you need to have drinks with those people and, you know, stay out late with those people and just be friends with them and spend time together. So I do think that's important, and it starts at the top. So for us, it's very simple because there's one leader, and it's his team. For other companies where you might have a CRO and a CMO, that alignment does have to start at the top, and you see those two individuals partnering very closely together. Reminds me that I never fully answered your question around, like, what if you don't have executive support? And so what I would suggest for someone who wants to start a pipeline council, but they're not sure how, is to just go ahead and try it out. If you don't have this big executive sponsorship to make it, you know, a big fancy event right away, then I would go a little bit more grassroots. I would just reach out to a sales director and say, hey. I'm marketing director. You're a sales director. We should meet more often. Let's try out this pipeline thing together. And if we get traction, we'll take it to leadership and show them what we've done. And I think that's a great way to kind of prove it out if you need to, from the bottom up. And just, you know, there's not an exec in the world who's gonna say, you shouldn't have gone and gotten that alignment with that team. You know? It's always welcome.

Janis Zech: No. I that was exactly what I was thinking about while you're talking. Like, you have a CMO, you have a CSO, maybe a CCO or so. I think then a pipeline council kind of in the middle management, VP layer, director layer is maybe even more impactful because the teams are even less aligned. Right? And yeah, I mean, I think if you present that to executive leadership and they say, well, it's a bad idea, then you definitely know that they're definitely not up for the idea of a joint aligned, go to market motion, which tells you a lot, I guess, for your future career and what you should be doing. Just an open question. Like, anything else we forgot to talk about with regards to the pipeline council concept? Anything else that comes to mind?

Mallory Lee: I guess I would say for the RevOps people listening, one thing that I learned the hard way over the course of, you know, doing this a bunch is anytime that you show a chart and the question is, you know, you'll show how things have moved, and it's like, oh, you guys had ten deals pushed at the end of the quarter. And they'll say, well, which deals? If you don't have that, you don't have a productive conversation. So it really does take a lot of preparation. And I am just so grateful to, like, my team and the people who put in the time to get that data prepared. It takes dedicated effort to make sure you're ready. So you wanna be able to answer questions live in the call. You want every slide to be as actionable as possible, and we strive for that. We don't always get it perfect, but the idea is that we want to bring enough to have some really detailed conversations. So I always suggest for people to literally block their calendar to have the time to prep simply so that you can bring as many details as possible. If you happen to not use them, then at least you've learned a lot for yourself. So that's my sort of advice on just taking the time to make it really high value by putting those couple hours in before the call. And it's hard to do because all of us are so busy, and having that, like, dedicated heads down time to look at things is a real luxury these days, but I find that it pays off.

Philipp Stelzer: Yeah. I'm super curious about one more question, which just came to mind. I mean, you're sitting in this meeting. You had them in multiple companies. I'm sure there's specific patterns you're seeing with regards to gaps. Right? Like, what would you say are those, you know, top three gaps you're constantly seeing? And it doesn't need to be three, but, like, you know, what are the top gaps you're seeing?

Mallory Lee: Yeah. That's a good one. Well, I think one of the biggest hurdles to get over is this moment where you identify an issue and you say, well, what are we gonna do about it? And your first instinct is to say, like, oh, well, let us go back and talk about it, and we'll let you know. We're gonna get back to you. We're gonna go back to our marketing cave and discuss it and come back and tell you later. And that is tough because then you stop the progress right there. And so as often as you can bust through that moment and, like, collaborate together and share ideas together on the call, the better it is. And that is hard because you're just not used to necessarily doing that. Right? So truly problem solving and, like, truly sharing ideas and talking about how to fix something is one thing that is hard to really get in the habit of. And then I would say prioritization is typically always the root of any confusion. So, you know, for Nylas, we've got a PLG motion. We have inbound leads that come and ask for a demo. We have an outbound BDR team creating meetings with prospects. We have a channel where partners are sending us opportunities. Like, that's a lot. And so making sure everyone understands how to prioritize their work if they are inheriting opportunities from more than one channel or if they're trying to qualify out of more than one channel, you really wanna be on the same page with that. So there have been times where you don't realize that your priorities are slightly different than someone. And the best thing that can happen is for someone to raise their hand and say, well, my team doesn't get paid for that. We're not incentivized to do that with you. Like, this is a conflict. This is a problem. And so those things get uncovered pretty quickly too. And if you identify something like that in the meeting, then that's just, like, groundbreaking. Like, you can change that. Every person in the room has the power to make the change to get people back aligned. And we have found that a couple times with our BDR team. They didn't have the right incentives. And so, in order to achieve the priority, their incentives needed to change. And those are really cool moments where you start to see how you can make changes to align the business.

Philipp Stelzer: Yeah. You have an ownership and accountability problem. It immediately becomes obvious, and you have all the people in the room to make the change, which is fantastic. Right? And that's exactly what I think Janis was alluding to earlier, where the best teams are real teams. They work together. They solve these problems. They're almost like a working group. Maybe another question just popped into my mind because that's something I've observed before becoming an entrepreneur. I had a short stint at a consultancy, and I was sitting in big meetings from large corporate executive level. They were talking for ninety minutes to one hundred and eighty minutes. Then everybody left. Meeting probably costs tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, and there was no follow-up. There was no clear priority. There was essentially, like, nothing happening. You know, how do you tackle that? Like, are you explicit, like, hey. We don't even need to do something afterwards. Do you have, like, kind of an outcome and assigned task? Or yeah. Super curious how you do that.

Mallory Lee: Yeah. That's a great follow on. So I normally have a slide for next steps. And I don't know why I ended up in this pattern, but my favorite way to manage, like, weekly cadences like this is to use one deck and just keep adding slides to it so that the past weeks are still in there. You know? And so every week, there's a next steps slide or action items or whatever. And I'll write them down live during the meeting so that people can see what I'm writing and make sure everyone agrees with what it is. And those would be the action items after the call. And then, the very first thing that you would want to do on the next call is review those and see if they're done. So that's a great way to create that accountability. We haven't had quite as many of those with the Nylas group. It was a big thing at Terminus. We had lots of that. I don't know why it's different, but we haven't had quite as many of those, like, action item reviews. But that's a great way to just keep track of things. And then you always have it in the deck. You always have the record of it. So if people do ask you, like, what is this pipeline council doing? You have all the data. You can show them everything that you guys have come up with from an action item perspective, and that's pretty cool too.

Janis Zech: Sounds really good. Mallory, thank you so much for sharing all your insights. I think this is a super practical, you know, podcast episode, like lots of learnings that people can just take and run with now. So, yeah, thanks for sharing. Very insightful.

Philipp Stelzer: Yeah. We always ask, you know, our guests one closing question. And I mean, you mentioned your introduction, right, your original background, marketing, then moving into operations, lots of stops at different, very cool companies. And, you know, looking back, what advice would you give your younger self or people just starting out in their career?

Mallory Lee: My advice is to get an early start to the day. Whether you're actually going into the office or you're remote, getting online before other people is just this, like, superpower. And I imagine that you guys feel that even a little bit more being, like, across the pond and having maybe a little bit of a time zone advantage on certain things. But when I was younger and I had no children, I wasn't married yet, I would get to the office at, like, six AM, and I would go up to the roof, and I would work out there and the sun would rise, and it was so fun. And I just got so much done, and I just felt very on top of it. I just felt like I had, you know, one and a half days when everybody else had one day. So it's not quite as feasible now because I have three children and, you know, lots of obligations in the morning. But early on, that was a real superpower, I think, for myself.

Janis Zech: Yeah. Having that slow time. Love it.

Philipp Stelzer: Mallory, thank you so much. Really enjoyed the episode.

Janis Zech: Yeah. Thank you so much for joining. Enjoyed it too.

Mallory Lee: Thank you. Talk soon. Bye.