Janis Zech: Hello and welcome to another episode. Today, we're talking to Stefan Mersch about his journey of building out RevOps from scratch at Sastrify. From tooling to processes and key learnings, Stefan shares many valuable nuggets on how to build a RevOps organization in a high growth SaaS company. Hope you enjoy the show. Welcome Stefan.

Stefan Mersch: Thanks, Janis and Philipp for having me. I'm looking forward to the episode.

Janis Zech: Yeah, super excited about you joining this episode. I'd love to kick off with a quick introduction. Who are you? What do you do?

Stefan Mersch: Happy to do that. So my name is Stefan. I'm located in Hamburg, Northern Germany. And I lead revenue operations and strategy at Sastrify. So in short, what Sastrify does, for everyone who doesn't know the company, we are a SaaS procurement solution. So we help businesses procure their software stack. I'm sure a lot of revenue operations leaders are listening to this. So if you're buying Salesforce, Zendesk, whatever else, that can be done via Sastrify and with the help of our procurement team and our platform. And I'm leading the revenue operations team, which is at the moment a rather small team, but I think we will get to that at a later stage. And I'm in charge of a lot of different things from forecasting to CRM setup and, yeah, headcount planning, these sort of things. So quite a lot of different to dos and tasks as every revenue operations leader out there. So yeah. And overall, I'm working now in the startup industry for about five years and enjoying that quite a bit.

Janis Zech: So you're basically the firefighter, you know, small team, lots of different responsibilities, and probably getting called for all things data from your CEO, founder. But, yeah, maybe to dive in, I mean, I saw that you joined as an AE and then very early on decided or switched into a RevOps role. I'm curious, like, you know, maybe you can share a bit about, like, how big was the company and when did you actually make the decision to initiate that focus on revenue operations and also why?

Stefan Mersch: Yeah. So I'm with the company now for more than two and a half years. When I applied for Sastrify, I was the first salesperson that joined the company. And I made a deal with our CEO, Sven, that as soon as we will start hiring step by step a slightly bigger team of sales reps that I will then slip over into a sales operation slash revenue operations role where I then take over processes, strategy, and forecasting. And, yeah, six months in, we started hiring a slightly bigger team. And as a consequence, I then transitioned slowly from doing sales together with our founder into building out initial processes within our CRM. I back then initiated a switch from Pipedrive, which was the CRM that we used back then, to HubSpot, the tool that we are still using till today. So that was the very first RevOps project kind of. And, yeah, in the end, it was a decision between Sven and myself to say, okay, when I joined the company, I already knew I'm not the best salesperson that he can potentially hire. So we made a small deal here and saying like, hey, there's more potential towards processes and strategy later on. And that's how that came together.

Janis Zech: I mean, that's super interesting that you got the role, although you're not the best salesperson. But I love, you know, founding sales into RevOps transition because obviously you see a lot of the challenges and the problems, right? So you have a very different, let's say, user research start than in most other situations. And usually when a company is small, you're constantly creating new structures and processes and change is the only constant, so it helps probably a lot to be in that role and then transition over. I'm curious, like, is that something you experience and how do you keep tab with the users actually using what you're building today? So you're referring to how users are adapting tools?

Stefan Mersch: Is that yeah.

Janis Zech: And also processes, right? Like, I mean, I think when you're in that role of creating or like actually running sales, right, you know it end to end and you know all the little nitty gritty details and then the company grows, right? It's a lot harder to actually do that research and understand what's going on. Is that something where you've developed specific tactics to, you know, understand how users are using what you're creating in terms of processes?

Stefan Mersch: Yeah, that's a fair question. So I think overall, the advantage that I had in my role is that I was an account executive myself, right? So I know how sometimes tiresome it can be to update CRM fields only for the sake that someone can build another report on it, or that there is one other extra step that I need to perform in my CRM, or an extra question that I need to ask in order to really give also marketing feedback. One of the things that we like to ask is like, hey, how did you hear about us? Right? So that's feedback that our marketing team also likes to get — this self reported attribution piece. And ultimately, it's yeah. It's always a little bit of a — I wouldn't call it necessarily a fight, but it's, yeah. You have always this trade off for salespeople. Right? They don't want to update a bunch of data fields in your CRM. But if you explain it well to them, especially the why you're launching a specific process and why these fields are there and how they also help them — for example, if you have certain fields, we use MEDDIC as a methodology internally. Right? So a lot of our data fields that they need to fill in are related to MEDDIC, and it also helps them to go back into a deal and immediately understand where did I leave this. And I think that's definitely an advantage. So they can also pick up things quicker. And if you explain that right, then I think the adoption of processes and CRM in general is increasing. Yeah, I think that's the main one. Collection of feedback wise, what we do is that, of course, we are a fully remote company, and we have a channel first policy. So whenever you have feedback, you can put it into our revenue operations channel and you can share like, hey, why was this changed? Can you help me with X, Y and Z? And that feedback that we get, we then also take and try to fuel into our processes and into the CRM. So that's kind of a two way street how I always try to see it. Sometimes, of course, it works better and sometimes the reps are just reps. I think salespeople are not always interested in updating the CRM fields as I explained in the beginning already, and that's just the nature of it. I'm pretty sure everyone who works in revenue operations and or as a Salesforce admin can relate to that. So, yeah, that's how I view this.

Janis Zech: You mentioned one of the first projects that you worked on after, you know, switching to revenue operations was the move from Pipedrive to HubSpot. Now you also talked about processes and MEDDIC and methodology. Other than that, did you have any specific goals or KPIs in mind that you wanted to focus on after making that switch to the revenue operations role at Sastrify? Like, any KPIs that you, you know, kind of like agreed on with your CEO that you would use to measure the success and the impact that revenue operations could have?

Stefan Mersch: Look, I think that especially if you're a very small startup, there are certain things depending on the stage that you are in that you want to understand, right? Initially, I feel like it's always about, who are you selling to? Are you successful in selling to a certain industry or a certain company size or certain buying persona? So initially, I'd say these are mainly a couple of things that our CEO was interested in, but that was not necessarily one of the KPIs that I'm then focused on. To name one of the things that I feel is quite helpful to look at rather early is funnel conversions. So to really build the infrastructure to understand, okay, where are certain funnel break offs and how long does it also take to complete a certain deal stage? Right. So this entire topic of sales and deal velocity, that was one of the things that I really focused on. And till today, it's one of the most looked at reports, both from our CEO, but also from my side in order to identify, okay, where are the current gaps in our pipeline? What should we be focusing on also from an enablement perspective? Right. What should our team leads in the sales department be focusing on? What can we change from an SDR slash marketing perspective, for example, to increase conversion rates from SQL to qualified opportunities? These sort of things that become very easily visible if you start tracking deal velocity and pipeline conversions.

Janis Zech: I think it's a pretty good answer because, like, obviously, right before you can even say, hey, those are the KPIs that we're gonna use to measure success — I mean, like, first step, I think, always should be actually understanding the funnel, start measuring and actually having numbers to then define goals. I think often this is not done in the right order in sequence, but sounds like you definitely did that. And I'm curious, so you mentioned a small team early on. I think Sastrify closed a Series B in twenty twenty three, and within one year, you nearly doubled the headcount. So kind of like how has the RevOps team alongside of that, all these changes, evolved over time?

Stefan Mersch: It's also an interesting question. So I'm in general a big fan of rather having a lean team. I don't want to have a rather big RevOps team. I think it's important to have a certain, yeah, healthy ratio between individual contributors, SDRs, and account executives and marketing managers or CS persons, and then have a certain number of RevOps folks corresponding. So I think a healthy ratio is somewhere between — so one RevOps person supporting fifteen commercial facing individual contributors. So that's kind of where we are at at the moment. To be fully transparent here as well, I'm not in charge of CS ops, so we have a dedicated CS ops team that is mainly taking care of things around our big customer success tool, which is Gainsight. So we have a dedicated Gainsight admin and they focus way more on that side of the funnel. I'm still in charge of reporting also across the entire funnel, so that's something that I'm trying to accomplish for as well. But my current RevOps team is one senior revenue operations manager, and since the beginning of the year, we have the support of one working student. But over my entire tenure at Sastrify, it was always between one to maybe three people — mainly one full time person and then one additional working student supporting along the way with rather small tasks. And I personally believe that's also a quite good setup if you start building a revenue operations team. I think it's important that when you want to move as a head of revenue operations into the more strategic role that you have someone more senior where you just can, yeah, put that person in charge of a lot of the rather bigger and more strategic projects that you are yourself not going to take care of anymore. And then have one junior person or working student intern, someone who can deal with all the small tasks that come in, right, look into why that automation wasn't working anymore. Hey, can we deep dive into lead routing here? Take rather these recurring topics off our plate, right? And I think that's quite a nice mixture. And then you can think about building a more strategic team over time where probably you can build a data team, you can build a tech focused team like CRM admins, that sort of stuff. And then maybe more project and process oriented folks who are then jumping on specific initiatives and optimize the entire funnel.

Janis Zech: Yeah. I really like this description of you go from a RevOps team of one, right, where you basically have to do the nitty gritty day to day and the strategic part but you feel like it's always too much, to then essentially creating a team where you actually have the time to think, right, and to do your own conclusions by looking at the data while having somebody who keeps the more strategic projects running and the day to day, right? And I think there's a lot of discussion about strategic RevOps but also the small iterative improvements are pretty crucial to ensure that the overall system is becoming better, the processes are becoming better, and also sometimes to get the alignment with the teams because obviously if there are specific things that are fundamentally broken but you can just easily fix them with a small thing, right, like I think it's always worthwhile doing it. So I really love how you described that setup. That makes a ton of sense to me. I'm curious, like, you know, obviously, the last eighteen months, a lot has changed at Sastrify. How big is the company now and how big is the revenue team and the CS team just for context?

Stefan Mersch: We are at the moment around one hundred and forty people. That's how big the company is in total. We have a sales team including SDRs of around twenty folks, including then RevOps, sales enablement, VP of sales and team leads. We are around twenty five, maybe thirty people. And then we have another CS team — purely CS team is probably another twelve to fifteen. And then again, some CS overhead for that as well. And what is quite specific about our business model is that we have a procurement team that is sort of nearly a subsection of the customer success team because they need to work very closely with one another. And we have another probably eight to ten procurement specialists who jump in on negotiations on behalf of our clients and work very closely with our CS team because that's in the end also contributing to the success of our clients.

Janis Zech: Got it. And do you foresee the one to fifteen ratio to stay like this or — yeah, I mean, curious what your thoughts are on ratio in general?

Stefan Mersch: I mean, obviously similar to probably a lot of other companies out there, we at the moment are very cautious how and when we are hiring. I think by nature, you will focus first on adding additional individual contributors and then, at a later stage, add additional RevOps persons. So the answer to that is there might be moments and months where we will need to support way more salespeople and CS people than we currently have from a bandwidth capacity. But then ultimately the goal is still to refill and to start building a RevOps team that can then support also the wider team and the growing sales and CS organization.

Janis Zech: That's a good segue. One question I wanted to ask you is obviously economy, markets, although actually improving in numbers, I think, still feels quite tough. Just wondering how has that impacted the work of the revenue operations team at Sastrify? Are you also more looking to bundle software? Are you kind of like trying to slim down the stack, or in what kind of direction are you leaning there?

Stefan Mersch: I can answer that question in two ways. So I can tell you a little bit about the internal perspective and then I can also tell you a little bit about the external perspective where I'd say like we of course have a lot of clients, right? We have revenue operations teams, go to market teams as well who use tools. So internally, what are we doing? Yes. The year twenty twenty three was definitely challenging from a growth perspective as well for us. I think we still navigated quite well through the rougher times. At the same time, I'm also getting challenged by our VP of finance and our CEO on tool spend, obviously. Right? So we are looking into, hey, can we maybe solve X with tool Y as well? Especially, like, I think, Weflow mainly connects with Salesforce at the moment. Right? But, ultimately, there are a lot of overlaps between a lot of these different tools, right? You can in theory do a lot of things within these two major CRMs, right? HubSpot just recently launched a dedicated prospecting area where you in theory can do the exact same thing that we currently do with SalesLoft. So we are currently using SalesLoft for prospecting, but in theory, we could challenge SalesLoft moving forward by flipping things back to HubSpot. Similar things for CPQ tools, for forecasting and whatnot. And at the moment we still maintain a rather best of breed approach compared to real tool consolidation. But I would lie if I was making a statement to say that's not happening or we are not challenged on our entire tech stack. We see a very similar approach along our clients. We see that there are a couple of tools that sometimes get then canceled out quickly. Call recording is one of them — Gong and Mindtickle and Chorus and whatever they are all called out there. But I feel like that's definitely something where a lot of companies are then rather looking into like, hey, can we do that with SalesLoft? Can we do that with HubSpot instead? And not having a dedicated tool anymore in order to just do call recordings, because let's face it, the number of times an account executive or an SDR is going back and listening to their own calls is rather small. That's something that we see that's getting challenged quite a bit. Yeah, overall tool consolidation among our clients is also definitely top of mind. They are all looking to reduce their software spend. That's definitely a trend that I expect to continue within this year.

Janis Zech: You're perfectly positioned to understand and know the current tech stack of most revenue operations teams. Right? At least those that are using Sastrify. Curious, like, you know, Sastrify itself aside, how do you actually go and choose and implement new tools or technologies? Do you have, like, a specific framework that you follow or is it like, you know, starting from scratch with every new tool and technology that you implement?

Stefan Mersch: I think from a strategic perspective, in the end, a lot is decided by which CRM you're using. Right? So till today, I would say a lot of the revenue tech stack out there is built for Salesforce as a CRM. Right? There are a lot of tools that don't integrate with HubSpot yet. But I think over the past couple of months, HubSpot has launched quite a lot of integrations. So that market is also picking up step by step. And I'm a big fan of at least thinking about like, hey, can I initially solve a problem that I'm facing also directly via HubSpot? Right? Because I think from a data architecture perspective, it's normally easier to have everything happening in one tool and it's also not breaking the day to day flow of, let's say, an SDR or an account executive, right, if they don't need to flip back to another tool just to do X and then they need to flip back to the CRM to do Y. So that's always one of the first thoughts. Hey, can I do that via the CRM? The other one is that I like to talk to a lot of revenue operations leaders out there. I have a couple of people where I have direct Slack channels with and we are in constant exchange about like, hey, I'm currently looking into this specific tool category. What are the tools that you have reviewed when you started looking into that sector? So that's how a lot of things initially get started. I also like to rely on certain communities. I think RevOps Co-op, for example, they are one of the more RevOps really RevOps focused communities out there, and Pavilion as well. So I like using these communities for inspiration, but also for getting recommendations of new tools that are out there, especially because in the US, I think when you're operating as we are mainly in Europe, I don't really always have the best market overview of what is currently new in the US, what are the newer players. And I feel like these communities can definitely help getting a better understanding of what is out there and what is probably hot in the market. So that plays a role as well. And I think ultimately those are also drivers for me personally to really make those decisions. I like to trust what others are using out there. So that's definitely something where I'm then talking to external people. But we also have a very experienced VP of Sales who has a background from DocuSign and Salesforce. And ultimately, I also rely on his expertise quite a lot, like what has he seen in the past working quite well. So he's also one of the ones that I consult frequently on tool decisions ultimately.

Janis Zech: I'm super curious. I mean, I think on the marketing side there's a bunch of tools that, you know, use AI for real use cases. Have you seen anything on the sales side that is really working super well yet, where, you know, AI or Gen AI is applied? Because I've been looking and, you know, thinking about that, and, yeah, I'm not sure, you know, if there's, like, a wide adoption of specific use cases just yet.

Stefan Mersch: I think from what I've seen so far, the initial use cases mainly circle around helping SDRs writing better emails. And I think they're very much questioning whether or not it makes sense to really go for, like, a best of breed solution, and there are a couple of tools out there no matter if they're called Lavender or whatever else. They are all moving into that direction. But I feel like still till today, I don't really see an investment case, at least from our perspective, to say like, okay, we're going to buy a dedicated tool for that, because SalesLoft, HubSpot, we have a tool called Surf, which is particularly used for LinkedIn messages — all of them, they are also building AI based solutions to write emails. And as a consequence, I don't really see a point yet to add an additional tool for that, but it's the most frequent one that I come across from a pure RevOps perspective or sales tool perspective. Nothing that really surprised me yet in a way where I would say, okay, this is really unique in its approach. I mean, Gong and all of these tools, they are definitely moving into the direction of using AI in order to generate transcripts or to — I think there was one tool from Berlin. They do, they have a tool called CoachAI. They do automated call scoring. Basically, they apply a scorecard. And so all the calls get scored no matter if SDR lead or AE lead listened to them. I think that's quite helpful. I think one thing that I believe is particularly helpful when we are talking about the field of coaching, and you touched on sales, is a tool called Mojo AI. They're again very similar to Jiminy and Gong out there. And what they do quite well is they provide subtitles in English even if a call happened, for example, in German. So what it allows us — for example, our team leads, our sales team leads, they need to coach people in different languages. In theory, at least they have reps that work in different markets. So what they struggle with is as long as the conversation is not happening in their native language, they struggle to identify, okay, was this actually a good call? Was that person, that SDR, handling all the objections well? Yes or no? And I think Mojo did a quite, yeah, intelligent step to simply say, okay, we translate everything and provide subtitles in English, so the coaching gets opened to folks who are not speaking that language natively. So I think that was one that stood out a little bit to me at least.

Janis Zech: I want to share an observation. I really like what you just said because I think there's essentially the tendency towards building end to end solutions for specific roles. Right? Essentially, if you think about the outbound stack, it's a tool where most of the SDRs and BDRs spend their whole day in, and they don't have to switch. The same is true for what we are building with Weflow, you know, the AEs and CSM folks managing their pipeline forecast. They don't need to switch between Salesforce and Weflow. They can do everything in Weflow. Same is true for Gainsight or the next gen platforms on the customer success side, right? And I think these are all consolidated plays. Yet AI then comes in very narrow often and just offers one specific use case. And my expectation towards the future is that those, let's say, horizontal platforms will incorporate all those use cases that AI offers, and then you have completely different solutions that might be API based where they help those platforms do specific things better, like, for example, call recording, email integration, CRM integrations, things like that. But that's then more like the developer tool stack. But I think it's super interesting what you just outlined because we look at it very similarly, and it's a fascinating world. And I'm actually really excited about the potential of AI, but I think last year was huge buzz, but very little real, you know, use cases that were adopted and then also prove the ROI. Right? The email case is a great example, I think, where is it really writing better emails that then create more meetings or, you know, replies? Well, you know, to be seen. And some, you know, companies that use statistical models rebranding them as AI — also something that happened quite a bit, I'd say. But I want to maybe switch gears a bit. Like, when you look at, you know, today, like, RevOps at Sastrify, you know, are there specific goals or KPIs or, you know, kind of, yeah, kind of investment cases you look at to prove the value of RevOps? Is that something, or like, how do you think about that topic in general?

Stefan Mersch: Proving the value of revenue operations. Yeah.

Janis Zech: And proving, you know, like, if you take a project, right, like, I mean, there's obviously cost to it. Right? Like, how long does it take to execute it? You know, how complicated is it — do we wanna prioritize it? But then also what's the ROI, you know, specifically, you know, is there an overarching, you know, guiding principle like, you know, productivity, efficiency, you know, predictability that, you know, is guiding your work? And then, you know, is there specific things you're measuring, or is that still too early for the stage you're in?

Stefan Mersch: Lots to unpack here. The first one I think is what is my guiding principle or our guiding principle. I think that's for me the definition that we apply to revenue operations at Sastrify, and that is ultimately to make revenue scalable, predictable, and repeatable. That's what it's really about. So that's what our core initiatives circle around as well. And that is basically what I try to map all our initiatives to as well. At the moment, I don't think that I personally connect revenue operations purely with — at least I understood your question a lot in the way that revenue operations is per se connected with setting up the correct tech stack, and that's where an investment is required. I personally think that at the moment, what we do internally quite a lot is we are the devil's advocates in a lot of different ways. Like, we are challenging the status quo. We are the ones that are digging into numbers like no one else is in order to bring bottlenecks or just poor performance to light. And I feel like because we have that role, it's not necessarily that we need to show that this is generating a positive return on investment. I think ultimately what it comes down to is are we able to identify these bottlenecks and where maybe our funnel is breaking and whatnot, and then come up with guidelines towards our C level, but also to our department leads like to our VP of sales, for example, to say like, hey, this is where your current funnel is broken. These are a couple of recommendations that we can give to you in order to fix them. Let's work on fixing them and holding them accountable to it. I think if we do that, then there will ultimately also be some sort of positive return on investment. And I think that is how we currently measure our performance within revenue operations at Sastrify.

Janis Zech: In your mind, what were kind of like the top three things that had the biggest impact on the operational efficiency of Sastrify's revenue motion? What are the top three things?

Stefan Mersch: I think one thing that really helped quite significantly was really the first time that we started providing our C level and our VP of sales with a report on funnel break offs. Right? So that was the first time where we really said like, okay, now we have full transparency, not only what the specific funnel conversions look like, but also we connected that to the closed lost reasons. So we built a model where we can say after stage two, these are the top three close lost reasons. And that really helped to bring transparency into why we see certain reps succeed and why maybe certain reps are not succeeding. Right. So that opened an entire door for enablement and coaching initiatives, also for the VP of Sales and their respective team leads. So I think that was one of the core initiatives. I think the other one that we are currently working on — we have not perfected that yet — is we have recently launched a new pricing model with the ultimate goal to improve net dollar retention and prevent churn and so on and so forth. And it's definitely one of the most exciting projects that we have been working on. We launched the new pricing beginning of September, and it would be too early to say now and definitely also a false statement to say like we got it right in the first try. No. So especially if you redo your pricing model, you need a couple of iterations and that feedback collection and whatnot is definitely something that is still work in progress. And at the same time, I foresee that this is going to have a major impact on a lot of the classic revenue KPIs such as net dollar retention, churn rate going down and so on and so forth. I think that is why we are remodeling the pricing and focusing our energy quite a bit into that. The last one — it's not per se a KPI, but one of the initiatives that looks at the moment also very promising to yield success is that we started focusing our marketing and sales initiatives under an ABX campaign. So we are running ABM on the marketing side and we are focusing on specific accounts from a sales perspective. And now we are bringing these two together. So our SDRs are reaching out to the exact same accounts as marketing is targeting. And as a consequence, we can see efficiency gains between marketing and sales because the account is seeing a lot of our marketing ads and gets additional phone calls and emails and LinkedIn messages sent from our SDRs and AEs. So that's the last one that I would like to point out. We are seeing now quite some success with that. And, yeah, I'm looking forward to how we can scale that.

Janis Zech: Awesome. Thanks for joining. We always ask podcast guests one final question, and that is, like, looking back at the last couple of years in your career, what advice would you give to people just starting out or your younger self?

Stefan Mersch: To revenue operations per se? Or —

Janis Zech: It can be revenue operations. You can also just go wild and, I don't know, say, don't get drunk at your first company party or, you know, whatever comes to your mind.

Stefan Mersch: Yeah. I think if you want to become a great revenue operations leader or also specialist, I think one of the core things I would protect is curiosity. I am always thinking about great revenue operations people — they are just like children. They like asking a lot of questions and they want to understand the root cause of something. And I think that is definitely something to maintain and to develop initially. Right. You need to have that intrinsic motivation to go one level deeper. Like, is this KPI presented in that way? What are the root causes of data flows? What are the root causes of why this automation is going wrong and whatnot? And for that, you need to have a certain level of curiosity. And I think that's definitely something that I would like to give to everyone as an advice. If you want to start in that field, maintain a level of curiosity. I think it's a well needed one.

Janis Zech: Great. Thank you for joining. Thank you for being part of the podcast. And have a great rest of the day.

Stefan Mersch: Thank you so much. Thank you, Philipp.