Janis Zech: Welcome to another episode of the RevOps Lab. We're here with Tom van Langen. I hope I pronounced this correctly. Tom, welcome on the show.

Tom van Langen: Nice one. Great to be here, Janis.

Janis Zech: Well, it's fantastic. We had a fantastic conversation about all things boards. But before we dive in, who are you? What do you do?

Tom van Langen: Yeah. So I'm Tom van Langen. I'm a vice president of revenue operations at Ontinue. So like continue, but without the c. We're a cybersecurity provider, and I've been in the cyber space for probably about the past six years. But overall, I've had various operations leadership roles across VMware, Autodesk, and Carbon Black, another cybersecurity company, all B2B SaaS companies. For myself and, I guess, for my RevOps bend, I come in from the finance and the analytics background. So that's always the lens that I tend to apply to how you're approaching a problem, how you develop the strategy, and how you put it into practice.

Janis Zech: Awesome. Yeah. Thanks for sharing. And you also wrote a few articles on Decoding Ops in the Substack, which I read and I really like. So little plug here if somebody's interested. I don't know if you still write it, but I think there's some really awesome pieces in there. Are you still actively writing this?

Tom van Langen: I am. I actually love doing it, so I appreciate the plug. Yeah. Check out Decoding Ops on Substack. I love to draw, and my favorite thing is whiteboarding. So I love to kinda distill these frameworks for sales capacity or operating cadences and some of the visuals there. So I hope that they're helpful to anybody that checks it out.

Janis Zech: Awesome. Yeah. Go check them out. They're definitely great resources. And, you know, operating cadence is a great way to lead into our main topic today. So how do you prepare, run, and then also follow up on board meetings from a RevOps perspective? To frame the conversation, we're mostly thinking of scale up companies, VC or PE backed. And yeah, I think maybe first question, what's the kind of role of RevOps in board meetings from your point of view and experience?

Tom van Langen: Absolutely. I think board meetings can be one of these sleepy topics overall. Sometimes it can be extremely painful for the leadership team, you know, a CRO or anybody involved. RevOps is typically behind the scenes where you're helping prepare, sometimes spending several weeks preparing several iterations. So it can be a draining process, but I actually think when it's done right, it can be one of the largest opportunities for RevOps. Majority of time, I think the RevOps team is behind the scenes working and preparing and helping get their CRO or a leadership team ready for the board, but it can also be some of the most visible work that's out there, and it can make a huge impact. I guess some of the ways that I see RevOps deeply being involved is the ability to stitch together the information and the performance to create a story across the organization. And the ability to create the story for the go to market leadership team. I also think that they can really enhance the individual board members' understanding of go to market performance in a really concrete way. And then finally, RevOps work with the board can help change the level of discourse to focus on strategic topics and not just operational reporting. And by really nailing that first part, act one per se, I think it really can help with act two, which is those important conversations that need to be had and can propel the business forward.

Janis Zech: So you already mentioned act one, act two — reporting being the act one, and obviously being the table stakes. Right? It's extremely important to do right. In your mind, how you think about reporting, what is part of that — and then would love to decode that further.

Tom van Langen: Yeah. Absolutely. I think the reporting is important because it's a big part of board meetings — understanding your performance overall, which gets down for RevOps to: what's the analytics backing it? How are you performing against some of your critical metrics? I typically have thought about some of the board metrics. I'd love to boil it down to five, but I've seen kind of five to ten metrics that I regularly use at the board level that keep coming up. Some of them are top line or headline measures. Others look backwards at how you performed, and others provide an indication of what might be happening in the future. So I can break it down, but those are table stakes to get some of those metrics right. And if it's helpful, I'm glad to go through some of those metrics and kind of what I've leaned on before.

Janis Zech: I think it would be great to give some practical examples. Maybe like your top five most common metrics that you typically use in a board meeting would be quite interesting.

Tom van Langen: Yeah. So I'm gonna try to keep it to not as many. That's always a challenge. But I think there are your top metrics that the board, as investors and representing investors, always are looking at, and that's why I call them the top line metrics. Your ARR, your GRR, your NRR — or gross retention or net retention rates — your LTV to CAC. These are great measures. They're how a lot of investors look at it with a little bit more of a financial bend, important to valuations, so their growth and their performance. The only challenge that I have with these metrics in talking about performance is they're great summary metrics. They compound so many things. So each vertical of your organization or each team contributes differently. So your NRR is a combination of customer success working to make sure the customer is successful, but also maybe account management selling other new products with it. The product team has been developing months to get out. So it's showing the culmination of several different efforts. So it's hard to distill what actually happened with that number, which is why you have to click further down, I think, into some of the performance.

Janis Zech: Yeah. That's one thing that immediately comes to mind when hearing these metrics. I mean, you already said it with top line metrics. Right? They're always a little bit lagging behind, and they're summarizing everything so immensely well also, to be fair. But then at the same time, it's hard to paint a real picture of the maybe underlying business and the problems and the challenges. So do you combine these top line metrics with other more, you know, further down sort of in the data layer metrics to make it more insightful?

Tom van Langen: Precisely what I aim to do. So I use the summary metric typically to start the conversation, and then we'll look at their behavior. So if there's growth in one metric, what is actually behind those metrics that might be driving it? So as we were just talking about NRR, if we use that as a good example, when I go into the next section, I'm trying to understand bookings achievement. So was that actually your renewal bookings or your renewal rate that came in where you expected, or was it your expansion over that period of time that was outperforming that allowed your net retention rate to increase? So explaining it through with a slightly secondary level of metrics. And for that, I'm looking at bookings achievement, your win rate or conversion rate — we can have, I'm sure, a great conversation, I typically don't show both, but there are merits to those depending on what type of business you're in — quota attainment overall to understand how productive your team is, and then pipeline generation. So trying to understand a lot of the performance from those secondary measures helps really understand what's happening.

Janis Zech: So it's funny because this reminds me of a conversation we had with Jakob van der Kooij, the founder of Winning by Design, and he wrote a book, Revenue Architecture, that probably many of our listeners are familiar with. It's a great book. It's a great way of looking at go to market, and they have this financial metrics construct that essentially has multiple layers and essentially ends with ARR, GRR, NRR, LTV to CAC, magic number, rule of forty, all those fun investor metrics that essentially are the basis for valuing especially SaaS companies but many other companies, and then the different hierarchy layers that feed into those. And I think what you just described is a perfect example. So yeah, it's a great way of looking at it. You described a lot of backward looking metrics. What are some of the forward looking metrics you would also report on?

Tom van Langen: So boards are interested in your bookings forecast, typically current quarter and current quarter plus one — top of mind, especially depending on when the meeting's falling in your quarter. And then pipeline coverage, either as a percentage of build towards what pipeline you need or your required conversion rates if you were to have some of that, so representing out quarter pipeline coverage. Those are the metrics that I use for my forecasting. And it's funny because it's very easy to say, oh, my forward looking measure for forecast is just provide your forecast. But I'm typically providing three or four data points in that process. Like, okay, based off of where pipeline is, where do we expect that forecast to fall? What are my sales leaders — what is the sales leadership team calling? What is this great new tool that has AI — whether it's Clari or something else — what is that predicting for the quarter? And then maybe some view of pipeline conversion and what that looks like in the quarter. So building up multiple lenses for that, and it's typically not just one number.

Janis Zech: Best way that we don't script these podcasts — as you just mentioned Clari and not Weflow, but you know, that's totally fine.

Tom van Langen: I know. We stay very true here.

Janis Zech: I know. It's fine. We're not afraid of Clari as a competitor. They should be afraid of us, really. But no — I think this is also what we're seeing when we build out our forecasting solution is you really wanna have these different viewpoints on your forecast. So you take basically like you said the coverage approach and what kind of historic coverage did you need to actually achieve a certain level of bookings or revenue. Then you kinda combine it with the weighted forecast. You can look at historic conversion rates to always update that and get to a good value. Then you have the gut feeling, the team call, the forecast calls from the team. And then of course you can throw some fancy AI on it. And then I think the truth is always somewhere in the middle. So it's always good to look at all these different viewpoints. And I'm sure then there's also the top down forecast that maybe comes more from the finance team — curious if they also chime in and add their own prediction.

Tom van Langen: Our finance team and the finance teams I typically worked with, they'll provide their type of view of the number less from, you know, this is what you're calling. They're looking for the CRO to provide this information, but more in terms of a sanity check, I find. So they will look at the linearity or they will look at the quarterization within a year and say, like, oh, well, you typically don't do that within this quarter. So I find it's more feedback, typically not getting a number from the finance team. That's only happened in larger organizations where there's a sales finance wing that's almost taking a slightly different point of view.

Janis Zech: Yeah. I just wanna chime in here because I think it's actually a really important topic — like how do finance and the RevOps and go to market teams work together. Right? Finance usually being responsible for the budget and twelve month plan. Right? So the annual plan. And then, you know, I think in the best organizations, you tie those closely together with the input factors that actually drive the revenues but with the leading indicators, not the lagging. Right? And so if you approach this from, okay, this is the year on year growth rate on ARR or on GRR, you actually have no understanding whether that's reality moving forward or not. So I feel like the best organizations actually almost create an FP&A RevOps group that does a constant — has a more dynamic approach to annual planning. Right? And adjust assumptions. But the reality is also when we talk about boards, right, you have your annual plan. If you want to reforecast, you need to get board approval and you need to discuss that. And that often also hits variable compensation, restructuring, a lot of things down the line that play a role here. So maybe let's switch gears, go back to the reporting act. Right? So act one being really good at reporting. So let's assume these metrics are all there. What else is important to make reporting to the board on point?

Tom van Langen: Yeah. So I think the second item there is your template. Keeping it consistent, bringing strong commentary along with it. I think that this area, Janis, is so important. You have board members that likely sat on multiple boards or are the leader of a large other organization that they're very busy with. So when they come into the meeting, when you keep a consistent format, it helps them digest the information in a lot easier way. So creating strong views to begin with, but making sure that they're clear and consistent, not overloading it, not massive data tables, not fifteen slides of data because that's honestly just too much to absorb at that point. But the core set of information nicely presented and consistently presented so that quarter over quarter, they're seeing what that trend is and can quickly recognize it. I definitely think that's important.

Janis Zech: What do you mean with strong commentary?

Tom van Langen: Strong commentary — I actually think that this is probably even a good segue to the third thing that is important — but it's the story around it. So a lot of the times in my templates, I have a visual, whether that's a data table, but it's sometimes a bar chart or a line graph showing different things, heat maps. However you're showing it, it's associated with some commentary, making sure that you're not just repeating what's in the table because they can read the table — don't put it in two different places — but instead tell what actually happened with the performance from something that's not there. So, you know, we were talking about the win rate earlier. Well, what's your win rate in competitive situations overall or for different types of business or different type of product? Don't add another visual to your deck because you're just adding more information. Put it in the commentary. So make the commentary strong is definitely piece number one. But then crafting the story around it that really articulates what that previous quarter — because board meetings are typically quarterly — what's that story that you want to tell the board? Because you're not just reporting out on results. What's been going on and what do you want to take them through? I think that's the second piece, and your commentary is that connective tissue.

Janis Zech: I mean, I think this is such an important point because typically these board meetings are not one dimensional where you are only basically reporting into the board and that's it. But there's also a point to it. Right? Like, you wanna get feedback from them, and you wanna leverage the boards that you have. That's why you try to get all these great people onto a board. Right? It's not only because they have impressive work experience. It's probably also because they have good ideas and opinions. So you need to bring them to the point where they can actually express them and get them out. And I think just the pure numbers, like you said, is probably often not enough. And also, I think it's probably good to get some anecdotes in there and really explain the underlying value and meaning of these numbers.

Tom van Langen: I really love how you actually said that. Like, you're trying to get that feedback, and you're trying to have a discussion. And I think so much — Janis, you mentioned this earlier about RevOps being behind the scenes and often not in the room. You're preparing. But when you are in the room, you actually don't want it to be that you're just helping set up a presentation. So you're talking about a discussion, which is ideal. That means you're getting feedback both ways. The board is asking questions. They're trying to understand. You're walking them through it. And that is an ideal situation. And I think when you are preparing your story, you're actually pre-reading them through what you're seeing, and you're creating that environment that afterwards you can come into the room, still walk them through it, but there's much more of a dialogue and you're actually not reliant on slides. They could get the story from the preread. And there is this other way that it can go. Right? Like, let's say you prep some numbers. You don't create that commentary. You don't create that story. You don't kind of push them into that story. And then worst outcome, I think, is the board just creates their own narrative. Like, everybody on the board creates their own narrative from these numbers. And then you have an extremely unproductive meeting where there's lots of different discussions, and you spent the entire meeting just trying to align all the people on the board. You actually don't have any positive outcome. Worse, you could have a negative outcome, and you absolutely don't achieve anything.

Janis Zech: So I think that's also something that you need to be aware of. Right? Like, that can absolutely happen in board meetings, and it does every day.

Tom van Langen: I was just going to say, you know, I think we've all been there. We've all had that time where a metric hasn't gone the way that you had hoped or performance hasn't been as anticipated, bad quarter, bad outcome, and the meeting just gets hijacked. You go in different directions. You end up being on your heels for it either in the room or even in the preparation, you constantly feel like we don't have anything. But instead, if you're proactive with that commentary or if you show that you're double clicking on asking those questions before, you're clearly looking forward to the business. You're not just responding to rigorous Q&A.

Janis Zech: Yeah. Maybe just an additional comment here. I've been on various boards myself both as a founder, but then also as a board member. And I think from the board member perspective, right, it's often — as you mentioned — you spend very little time with the company. You actually don't really understand the details. And so you want — I think the great boards, they want to understand what's basically driving those metrics and essentially understand that, and also want — I mean, most people that are on good boards are fairly smart people. They're not there by accident. And so if they feel they don't get the answer, it's also very dangerous. Right? Because they feel like, okay, actually they're trying to tell me a story here, but I don't believe the story. And then if that comes from the CRO, it's even worse. Right? So I think it's extremely important, and that's why I think the consistency you mentioned and the metrics — right, we also know that sometimes pipeline coverage, how much do you trust it? How good do you know your numbers? How well is the quality of your data in the CRM, and how consistent is the quality of the data, and how trustworthy. And I think that's extremely important because if that fluctuates all the time, it's extremely challenging for the board to understand it, and they suddenly think something is off. Right? And there's one role of the board, which is governance, right, that essentially is also there to ensure that the company is acting in best interest and face of the shareholders. So I think those aspects are extremely important, and the reporting is the basis for that. And then also the way you craft the story is the basis for that. And if you had a bad quarter and you feel like you try to make it look really not that bad, you know, the board will jump on it in a more extreme way, and it will backfire immediately. So my question — long winded way of getting to a question — but my question is, how do you avoid that in the prep? How do you avoid that in your communication with the CRO? How do you do that?

Tom van Langen: Yeah. So I have a cadence that I put into place around board meetings. It's not as clear as what goes on in an operating cadence or rhythm in a quarter, but a practice I got in the habit of is a premortem. So a couple weeks before the end of the quarter, the team — I look broadly to my team as well — we'll start writing up reflections on how their area performed during the quarter. It's not an essay, it's bullet points. And it's amazing. Just writing bullet points helps reduce the number of cycles. And we start circulating these to the go to market leaders. You know, we saw marketing achieve these items or weakness in this area. And the more people that get involved, you start to see the point organically coming up even as you're getting to the end of the quarter. And I think this is a great team building exercise because you are empowering — as a RevOps leader, you can empower a team or a set of individuals to think really big. What did we see? What does the business need to work on? And that's a great way to quickly provide feedback to your go to market leaders about what actually transpired during the quarter. Then once the quarter actually closes, you use QBRs to actually go deeper on those items and say, we saw this happen. Let's try to understand why. So you do deeper analysis or a deeper view. And I think that's the way I piece together the story as best as we can with the leadership team. And that's when I think that relationship — there's the relationship with the CRO, but also with your finance leadership team and your marketing leader — where you can all have this dialogue to understand this is how the top line performed. How do we want to talk about this in a very honest way, but also in a productive way? You don't want to explain away the quarter, but strike that balance of being very honest with where you are and where you need to improve.

Janis Zech: I think this cadence approach is super interesting, and I think it's a great takeaway also for our listeners. So when do you basically start that cadence? Is it before the board meeting, after the board meeting, before the next board meeting, or how long in advance do you actually start the whole process? I'm curious — just for listeners — three months in advance, two months in advance, one month in advance, like what are the things that you're trying to take control on?

Tom van Langen: So most of the time I see board meetings happen about a month to month and a half after the quarter ends. That's typically when they schedule them. It gives some time and flexibility. Obviously, schedules can dictate it. But I will start preparing before a quarter ends — about a week to two before, that's when I start summarizing these talking points for how you're landing the quarter. That rolls out. The quarter ends — it takes typically most companies a week for one reason or another. Like, everybody get off my back. RevOps, finance needs to close the books. Don't ask me what ARR is. We have fifteen numbers moving. And I set that expectation. Like, we finish a quarter and then you move on to the next busy activity, which is figuring out all of these numbers. So the QBRs should not be that first Friday after a quarter ends because no number is set. So I will typically do sales QBRs about two weeks after the end of the quarter. There's typically company QBRs three weeks after, and that all builds up towards that board meeting because what slowly is happening is materials are actually collapsing into a more and more consolidated set of material. So that's a little bit of how I approach that timing. And I work on that timing with the leadership team, chief of staff, or others to make sure that we have enough time between those to prepare. So it's around six to eight weeks to kick off the process and starting with the observations, which I absolutely love. It can be about a six week process leading into the board meeting. And prereads, always. Like, I'm sure that everybody does it, but you're always getting a preread out a couple days notice to a board. So that's even why you need a little bit more time.

Janis Zech: Yeah. I mean, I think what you just alluded to is a great way of RevOps really being in the executive dialogue, really touching the points, but also sharing the observations from a different standpoint than maybe the VPs, frontline managers, or marketing execs, right, with very close eyes on the numbers, which often explain some of the reality. Right? If you can track the number correctly, you trust the number, and you can interpret the number very well, then you actually know a lot about what's going on in the go to market area. And you can point to these areas and outside of the board meeting, right, help the company to become better. Is there a problem with hiring? Is there a problem with onboarding? Is there a problem with discovery? Is there a problem with churn? And so on and so on. Right? These are all things where RevOps fundamentally can impact revenue by essentially surfacing that and then having the dialogue and then also essentially getting to a few priorities that the executive team — including the CFO, including the CEO, and if you have a CMO or a CPO — take and essentially execute on. Right? And that, I think, is so important. It's just not like we said — there's a lot of stuff that happens in the dark that takes a lot of time and is almost taken for granted, but it's the basis. It's the infrastructure for this to actually happen and extremely important. And so I absolutely love how you outlined the whole story here today. I think we started saying RevOps is behind the scenes, but can make such a significant impact in this.

Tom van Langen: And your RevOps as a team, you're up leveling how you engage with a leadership team, I think, in this way and can make a huge impact. That knowledge of the business drivers — you know, like I said, I approach this from an analytics perspective. Like, what are these drivers? What are the levers you can push? When you get that type of insight, you can start to work with those leaders about what do we want to push and pull from quarter to quarter or month to month to improve that? And work with them on their priorities because then they're naturally including you and want you a part of that decision making.

Janis Zech: Yeah. This is the way to become strategic in RevOps. Right? I think this is — so we organize these RevOps meetups all across Europe. And also when we visited the RevOps AF conference in San Diego earlier this year, it's such a common theme. RevOps wanting to become more strategic, being stuck in this very operational hands on role. Yeah. I mean, for sure, that's often the case. There's a lot of fires to put out. But yeah, this is a really, really good opportunity to get into a very strategic position and really drive the business strategy of the company. Right? Like, the whole story that you tell, the whole story you come up with and how you tell it — that's a great lever to achieve that. I just wanna add one thing because I've run a company that was around three hundred fifty people. Not massive, but still. And I think at a certain size, right, when you scale up, you know, you cross a hundred fifty, two hundred people mark. The reality is that you actually don't know why things happen as an executive team. Right? You need to figure out why are certain things happening. And so if you get asked more and more often to provide an opinion, to share an observation, that essentially means you are getting more and more into the leadership circle. And I don't like this word strategic, personally. I think it's a bit like fluff. In my mind, it's like, okay, how do you have real business impact? Right? How do you have impact that really changes something? And that can be strategic initiatives. And I think RevOps is so well positioned to have these viewpoints and to diagnose really in-depth because often the finance organization is very far removed from the drivers that drive the business. And I think there's a shift in finance where they become a lot more go to market finance. There's a big discussion with go to market CFOs, which I think is a good thing, to be honest. Because in the end, the whole executive team should understand this, including CFO, including the board. The reality is also many boards don't. Right? Like, many boards don't really have the background of go to market metrics and really understanding the leading indicators rather than the lagging indicators. But I think it's such a good way — if you get asked more often to provide an opinion, if you're proactive with things that really change the business and the executives don't listen, you might have the wrong executives. Right? Because it's really important stuff, and the good companies, they then try to get more of that. And that is the way how you grow your career. That's the way how you get more responsibilities. Right? That's the way how you can go into — I mean, whatever the path is, right, whether it's COO or CFO or CRO, I think that's all possible. But obviously then there's other things you also need to do. Right? So that's also a reality for sure.

Tom van Langen: I think that it's RevOps using that operational nature. You've mentioned that sometimes reactive nature because fires need to be put out, but actually positioning it as a strength, which is you've now received that. How do you actually — I love the way that you referred to the realized impact of that earlier. It's forget about the strategy. How do you make that impact, that significant impact? And it's a great pivot point with boards. Also, I keep thinking about this. You mentioned this earlier about the CFO and the CRO relationship. I've come across this, and I think it resonates so much. You're seeing successful leaders that are the growth minded CFO and the financial minded CRO. And that pairing is actually — especially in this environment where so many businesses are trying to achieve both scale and profitability — I think that pairing is where it's matching up. And this is easy for me because I come from a finance background, but I probably talk as frequently with the sales leaders as I do the FP&A team. I'm hitting both sides because we're both constantly understanding budget and where we are for the quarter and their financial models, but also trying to understand how do we drive upside. The difference between me and a VP of FP&A, though, is they're looking at the financial metrics of the business. I'm steeped in the go to market metrics. They don't spend as much time on pipeline conversion and using great tools like Weflow to understand what's going on in the business. Right? And a RevOps leader is. So I think that's a little bit of the difference between the —

Janis Zech: We're definitely gonna cut that and put it in front of the episode.

Tom van Langen: I know. That's just — I know. See, I get better in time. I learn.

Janis Zech: Awesome. Look, I think we could probably continue and continue and continue. I very much enjoyed this conversation. Yeah. The closing question that we ask our guests is, what is the kindest thing someone has done for you in your career so far?

Tom van Langen: The kindest thing. It's giving me the opportunity. So after I got my MBA, in my internship at Autodesk when I was there, I actually had a leader just bring me into a random, extremely strategic project. And it was the type of thing where we met in the cafeteria. They bought me lunch, and then we were just chatting, and they said, hey, why don't you come and join this? And I had no qualification to actually be a part of that strategic project, but that at a high level was probably one of the kindest things — just the level of generosity and giving an opportunity that I'll never forget.

Janis Zech: You mean the lunch. Right? The paid lunch.

Tom van Langen: Both the lunch and the opportunity. Both were awesome. I don't wanna say that the lunch was the kindest thing. But I could name numerous things where also leaders have just — they're just thoughtful of the people that they're working with. I always appreciate that, but that opportunity for me is the kindest.

Janis Zech: I love that. Thank you so much. Awesome. Thank you so much.