Philipp Stelzer: Hello, and welcome to another edition of the RevOps Lab Podcast. Our guest today is Alexandra Schimpf. Hello, Alexandra. Welcome.

Alexandra Schimpf: Hi, Philipp.

Philipp Stelzer: Yeah. Alexandra, we met at the RevOps meetup in London that Weflow organized together with Crowplugs earlier this year. I think it was beginning of June, if I remember correctly, and we got talking. And you're actually from Germany, but you live in London right now. What do you do in London?

Alexandra Schimpf: I have been here for eight years now, originally from Germany, and all I've been doing is working and partially studying. So, yeah, I have been in sales operations, revenue operations my whole adult career, really. And, yeah, really enjoyed living in the city. It's an amazing city for everyone who wants to come and visit. A lot of things to do, but also, like, on the job market, a lot of possibilities, and it's always very exciting to look into different companies and what they do. So, yeah, excited to live here.

Philipp Stelzer: Yeah. Great. I think I was very lucky when I came to London earlier this year because it was, the sun was shining. Everybody was smiling. I mean, I would say it's one of the maybe maybe a bit of a rarer thing in London. I don't know.

Alexandra Schimpf: It depends where you live. I also lived in Berlin and studied there, so Berlin also has its gray sides, I would say. But this week is very nice in London. So, yeah, everybody's enjoying the sunshine.

Philipp Stelzer: Yeah. That's good. Great. So you worked at — I think there's two major career stops that I wanna talk about as part of this recording today. One was at WP Engine, which is, if I remember correctly, sort of like a hosting provider for particularly WordPress environments. And now currently, you work at Causaly, which is something completely different. I'm not even going to attempt to explain it, but I would love if you could kind of, like, maybe draw some clear distinction between WP Engine, your previous company, and now Causaly and, yeah, just explain it.

Alexandra Schimpf: Yeah. Of course. Yeah. So WP Engine was basically a lot of customers. So this is like, we had a very, very huge volume on deals, whereas here now, Causaly, a biotech company. I also don't wanna go in too much into the product because I just don't know myself. We are an AI company and we work with big pharma. So there is a lot of changes. It's very different because we do have a target market. So we are actually only focused on a specific number of customers. Whereas my previous company, it was kind of like a free fall. It could be one person who wants to host their website. It could be a huge company who wants to host their website. So it is very, very different. Both sides have their pros and cons, I would say, but it was a very big change. And maybe also, like, just a little background. I've been five years at WP Engine, so I've seen the company grow quite a bit as well. At the beginning, we had, like, five hundred people, and now they're probably at thousand five hundred people. So it was quite a rapid growth. And now here, it's like hundred and twenty people. Very, very early stage, but a lot of impact which I can have, which is super exciting. So I think what I've seen at WP Engine at the beginning, I'm kind of like experiencing it now a little bit. So it was nice to just like think back and just realize, okay, what did I do back then versus how did it grow? So, it would be nice to see exactly the same growth and, like, a similar growth at this company here now.

Philipp Stelzer: Yeah. With one hundred and twenty people, I think you're still at that sweet spot where you basically know everybody by name or you can if you want to, and everybody knows you. And I don't know. It's just, like, very — it's a bit easier with, like, the flow of information and knowledge. And then with five hundred people, it's basically impossible to, you know, know everyone and what they're doing, and there's a lot of, like, just unknowns, I would say, in the organizational structure.

Alexandra Schimpf: Yeah. I think communication is key. And, I mean, now I can just, like, go to the other desk and just ask questions. And then, obviously, we have some people based in the US, so that's not that possible. But, yeah, if it gets to, like, thousand five hundred people, you don't know anyone by name. But it was interesting to just go back to that state. And I think also, like, on the customer side, so looking at the customer basis, we had way more customers at WP Engine. It was a huge amount. We sometimes didn't even know our customers because they could just self serve and sign up on our website. And here, it is very different because it's huge companies. We do know them. I think the whole world probably knows them, and it is a very different approach. So you have to treat your customers differently because the ACV is way higher. You have to understand how exactly, like, what do they want? How do we need to make sure that we have a little bit of a different approach? Like, we call it white glove approach, where we're trying to understand how we can support our customer the best way. Not saying that WP Engine did not do that. Obviously, they also wanted to make sure the customers are satisfied and we retained them. But it was a different situation just based on the value, volume of the customer base.

Philipp Stelzer: Yeah. I mean, so, basically, with WP Engine, the market was huge. Basically, anyone who's interested in hosting a website. Could even be that they're not even thinking about WordPress yet. They are just, like, exploring different options, and then WP Engine just makes it look super easy to get started with WordPress, or maybe they are, like, WordPress aficionados, and they're looking for a particular solution. While with Causaly, I think, like you said, right, like, there's a few big pharma companies, and then it's about the projects that are started within those companies. And you try to get into those, I don't know, clinical studies, I think, somewhere in that area.

Alexandra Schimpf: Clinical. Exactly. Yeah. It's like the research bit which we're trying to cover. And, yeah, I mean, it is a different approach, but the same way I think, like, sales — I was before that, I was also in sales operations. Now I'm in revenue operations. But the beauty was because I was the first sales operations person in the EMEA team, I kind of, like, did a little bit of everything. So, like, now coming here, I am now actually officially responsible for the little bit of everything, which is exciting. So I'm working with the marketing team, with the sales team and the customer success team, but not even just those three teams. And I feel like this might be something which we will see in future more often, because the sales cycle is so complex, and you have legal involved, you have product involved, you're trying to understand — is it kind of like, do we have the value for the company, for our customer? What is the value for our customer? How can they then go back to their internal stakeholders and present Causaly in front of their stakeholders? So working on all of those little bits and creating a sales process around that is quite an important piece, but also not make it too complex because the product is already complex. The sales cycle is complex, but making sure that you have a way to create something like a baseline foundation, which is literally like a tick box exercise. That was like my first job here was, okay, let's make ourselves process consistent, which sounds very easy, but it really wasn't. Because at the end, like, the outcome should be something which we can apply to all the deals, which isn't really possible because they are quite unique, and also make sure that the adoption is there so that our sales guys are actually following those sales processes. So what we did is we really cut it down to this is the foundation. And then if there is something which we need to customize, that kinda goes on top. So I think what we tried to create was consistency, making sure we can track something. So having something afterwards which we can go back to and see, okay, is this successful? Is this not successful? And then, like, the consistent maintenance. Like, you have to make sure you are going back to the sales process and understand, okay, is it still applicable? Has anything changed, especially in a super, super fast paced business like Causaly is? Do we see, like, different trends? Do we need to adjust anything? Having those relationships to AEs as well, because this is the person who is using that sales process. So what I usually do is making sure I have catch ups with them, understand their pain points. I mean, nobody likes to do admin, so they also don't like to do admin. So I'm kinda like the person who is the balanced act of not too much admin for the AEs, but enough information for the business, and that is usually a little bit of a difficult situation. But if you have the right relationships, and that's maybe like one thing which I learned at WP Engine is to create solid relationships and to make sure that the RevOps organization is like a trustworthy partner in the business so that people can actually rely on their team, come if they have any issues, and also have someone who they can trust. So you have, like, a trustworthy persona or, like, team. And I'm trying to do that here. So I'm trying to create a team which is looked up to, and all the leaders just know, okay — it's kinda like when we call a CRM as our source of truth, so it's like the team of truth, I would say. It would be nice to have a team which is well connected to the different teams that they actually understand the business very well.

Philipp Stelzer: Yeah. Okay. Great. So maybe if I can just recap that briefly. So, basically, WP Engine, it was, like, you know, high volume, but probably a lot lower ACV than at Causaly, then sort of, like, low touch, a lot of self-service, but very clear processes, probably, like, also a bigger sales team. And so I think, like, it was probably much more possible to really create, like, a from start to end sales process that is, like, clearly trackable and also pretty consistent over time, I would assume, in, like, a mature market like web hosting is. I think, like, the things that you do as a customer and, like, how you go into a product like that, I think are relatively defined versus that. Causaly, it's actually quite hard to do that. So is that because you have this white glove approach that you mentioned and every kind of customer is a bit different? Also, the projects that they think about working with you guys. And so what you try to do there is really just have, like, a sort of, like, a foundational level of process that is somewhat comparable between the different customers and customer journeys, but only to, like, a certain extent because the rest is anyway so custom that it's hard to standardize. Is that a fair summary?

Alexandra Schimpf: Yeah. I'd say so. And it's also, I think, enablement and adoption is, like, a bigger piece as well because if you make it too customized, people won't use it. And I've learned that in the past as well, that you need to make it as simple as — I can explain it to you, and I can explain it to someone who's not like a person who's into the product, so that people will adopt to it and will actually — we can get the kinda like the insights we want out of it.

Philipp Stelzer: Right. Right. And probably it's like also, like, the product marketing element, I would assume, also plays a bigger role in a company because you need to explain the product. It's not that straightforward, probably. Maybe it's a bit of a new category. I don't know, but I would assume it's like it requires more explanation than, oh, you can buy, like, a domain name and host your website here.

Alexandra Schimpf: Hundred percent. Yes. This is where then I think that cross functional piece is coming more and more in because you do have to make sure the product team is involved. Like, can they articulate everything what's coming up? Can our AEs articulate it? If not, they need to have some support. Putting that all into a system, like actually understanding, do we know that this deal had all of that support, or do we know that this deal had kind of like our science team? We have a lot of different teams who are supporting a deal. And actually putting it into — we have HubSpot. Putting it into HubSpot and understanding what happened to a certain deal was not existent when I came. It was just like, okay. We are having this deal, and we are kind of tracking it. But having, like, earlier indicators than just it's closed on revenue or it's a created deal, but, like, understanding, okay, this is a person we've spoken to about the product. We've spoken to about our roadmap. We've spoken to about all different things. And now we are at a point where we think we can create a deal, but that is usually not really tracked anywhere. So we try to make sure that we find those indicators and track those indicators and have different KPIs around that and not just create a deal, and then we are looking at it from there, which we did have at WP Engine, and it was a bit different where we just looked at, okay, what is the inbound channels we have? And I actually created like, worked on a project which was looking at the different drivers. So we were looking at our inbound drivers and try to understand this is deal creation. It's coming from, I don't know, this website campaign. It's coming from that campaign. Then this is how many deals we've closed. What is the win rate? What is the average contract value? And looking at all of those indicators. And because the deal cycle was quite short, whatever we did today or whatever we changed today, you could see the impact in two weeks' time. Whereas now, whatever we do today is probably going to be an impact in six months' time, which makes it a huge difference and also, like, something which I had to get used to because I was quite used to, okay, we're seeing a trend. We need to make some changes. We need to make sure we hit our targets for this quarter or this month. Whereas now it's a little bit, what are the earlier trends which we can see, and what can be impacted at the earlier stages so that we can see an impact kind of, like, quicker. I could see that's being, like, a very, very big change between the two companies.

Philipp Stelzer: Yeah. Okay. Like, was that the biggest challenge for you, switching from WP Engine to Causaly, or was it something else?

Alexandra Schimpf: I think it's a few things because I have been at WP Engine for five years. I was, like, a subject matter expert for a lot of things. So people would usually come to me and just, like, ask me for literally sometimes even IT questions. Whereas now it was — it took me a while to just understand how the business works. What do we try to achieve? How can I have a bigger impact? Because obviously, revenue operations, especially at this stage of a company, is usually the team with the biggest impact because they see the trends and they can action on them, and they can educate kind of, like, the different stakeholders and are also that red line between the different stakeholders, I would say, but also just creating relationships. So you have to have relationships with the stakeholders, with the different VPs, with finance, with products, and I had to be very patient here to make sure that I create those relationships, and it just takes time. So I think at any company you go to, it will take you probably up to a year to get used to not just the different changes within your actual job, but also making sure that you have relationships, that you create relationships, which will then end up in being that trustworthy partner for that stakeholder.

Philipp Stelzer: Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Got it. And were there any transferable skills as well? Like, was there something you could just, like, okay. This is basically the same even though, like, business motion, go to market motion is very different. I can totally take that from WP Engine to Causaly.

Alexandra Schimpf: I think the approach of having a foundation, that was something I loved at WP Engine. Just being able to cut down a task and just say, okay. In order to achieve this, I don't know, increase conversion rates — which is what even starts, like, what am I supposed to do there if I just have to increase conversion rates? Sounds easy, but it's not that easy. But being able to actually cut it down into actionable tasks, I've learned that very early because this is what you kind of, like, do. I think, like, I also want to become a teacher. I think this is a good solution. You should find me for a problem. So that was something I could adopt in — I mean, can adopt that in any job, but I think it's driving your patience to make sure that you also have a way to prioritize things because it is quite a lot of — like, have a lot of tasks on a daily basis, and you could literally work twenty four seven probably without stopping. And then also having, like, maybe some time to step back and oversee, okay, what are we trying to achieve here? Is this the right approach? And then being very honest to yourself and to the business and just say, actually, we might do something completely different now because this is not the outcome which we wanted to see. So having those, I would say, like, most strategic ways of looking at things. Yeah. I could adopt that here very well.

Philipp Stelzer: Okay. I'm curious with Causaly. I think, obviously, you have less deals, but then each deal is probably a lot more important than at WP Engine. So it really matters if a deal goes kind of, like, to closed won or not. And, yeah, the pain probably is, like, very — you can really feel it, if it doesn't work out. So I'm curious sort of, like, what kind of, like, strategies Causaly or you specifically are applying to manage these larger contract deals, how to get them over the finish line?

Alexandra Schimpf: There's a few things. So in order to be not just dependent on two main deals, I actually am a big believer to still have kind of like a mid market bucket where you do have some smaller deals. You have to have an understanding of how much money and time will that cost us and if it's actually — if the cost is just too high or if we get something out of it. So that is a very, very important piece. But in order to cover what we are forecasting and to cover kind of, like, our targets and our plan numbers, that is valuable — like, it is valuable to have that bucket and just to understand, okay. For this deal, we actually have five other deals which could cover it. Could be an approach. What we also do, which is — I think I see that being kind of, like, more and more important in the future is that you don't have just an AE working on a deal. We have a team working on a deal. So it is a team effort. We have somebody from the customer success team. We have the actual AE. The VP is usually also involved. There's, like, also seniority kind of, like, trends and, or horizontal trends, which is great because this is how you win deals. It has to be a team effort. You have to be able to discuss things and bring them up very quickly because if there is something which is already, like, an issue which we can see at the beginning, that will just increase towards the middle, I guess.

Philipp Stelzer: Yep. So working in teams is super useful, and I think that is also probably the future of working on larger deals. I mean, like just from a personal experience, I also just think it's super good if — especially if it's a technical product and, like, you know, okay, you're interested. The AE understands you're a valid opportunity. The next thing that happens, actually, that a solution engineer or, you know, someone with, like, a focus like that or a customer success manager or, you know, something like this, just to stick with B2B SaaS terminology here, just joins the next meeting and, you know, allows, like, the conversation to go a lot deeper into the technical details and start building trust. Like, I think, like, the earlier you meet your customer success partner for the future, I think the better for a deal to actually really be successful because it, like, shows the company cares and you can already start building a relationship with that person. And, yeah, I think you can only benefit from that. Obviously, super hard to achieve if you have high volume, low ACV, but I think in your market, obviously, this feels like super, super important and very crucial.

Alexandra Schimpf: I think it brings up also a question around where do renewals live? Like, do they live with sales, or do they live with customer success? Because what sometimes happens is, yes, we have a deal. It goes to customer success. Sales never gets involved afterwards, and it's now just a customer success piece. And then if there is an upgrade potential, it kinda goes to sales, and then sales doesn't really know what happened to that customer, which I think is the most horrible approach. So it should be kind of like throughout the whole life cycle, there needs to be some updates or, like, some communication using different tools to create that transparency and making sure they talk to each other. The tools do and the people do so that you have an understanding of, okay, this customer — because there aren't that many customers, it's easier. If it's obviously a company with, like, thousands of customers, it's a different approach. But we do have the beauty — we do have that opportunity to do that. So you have an understanding on the sales side, what happened to a customer on the customer success side, what happened to a customer. We also have science, like a science team because our product is that technical. So, like, our solution engineers are actually scientists usually who are trying to make sure that the product is valuable for our customers. So their team is also involved. So it's literally making sure that we have the right information flowing throughout the whole teams and also understanding if the customer still has value in the tool and tracking that.

Philipp Stelzer: I think you brought up a few very interesting things. Forecasting was one of them, but I wanna put that on hold for a second. And the other thing that you mentioned was just indicators. So curious, like, what kind of, like, KPIs you are using to understand, you know, is that, like, a valid deal? Is that deal going in the right direction? Or, you know, is this deal at risk of stalling?

Alexandra Schimpf: Yep. I think it's even like before the deal exists, there is a few indicators which I like to track because we don't create deals on a daily basis currently. It's not just like a weekly update which we will see like a trend to. So I usually like to go back to kind of, like, the steps until I can see a weekly update. So let's say we have a lead come in. How many leads do we have come in? Did we have the right outreach to those people? What was the outreach you ask to the people? How many did we get into a meeting? How was that meeting? Was it a potential? Like, was it a qualification, a disqualification? So actually creating a process around all of that before the deal even exists was super like — that's what I did here as well when I joined. But that was super valuable, and I think a lot of AEs found it valuable because they could actually see — and again, I'm not gonna use that word again — there was transparency there, and they could actually see and understand what am I supposed to do and have some clarity, which sometimes doesn't happen between marketing and sales because marketing can, like, has their KPIs, and they tick all the boxes and say, well, we created five hundred MQLs. We're good. But then if sales doesn't know what to do with them, that's not gonna ever impact your deals on the other side. Right? So making sure that we have that communication again — we have x MQLs, we have y SALs, and then did we create deals? If not, why didn't we? Having a cycle back and actually giving that feedback back to marketing. And then if we did create a deal, great. Why did we create that deal? So again, having that cycle back and creating like a loop of feedback, and then even like just sticking to the feedback loops for a bit. Once it is a customer, what is the customer doing? What is the customer interested in? And actually having then also another cycle to kind of like, the marketing team and the sales team. So creating those feedback loops is super important, which I think that usually is then, again, like, a supporter of the cross functional communication and so on. Again, other tools which can help here, like, we have Gong, which is super useful because we have the conversations. We created, like, different flows, which are actually giving us all the information in, like, our Slack channels where we can see, okay, they've mentioned this product feedback here. Customer success team has this conversation with them because they are the closest to the customer usually at the end. And then marketing can also have a look at it and see, oh, okay, this is what the customer is currently interested in. Let's make sure our content is aligned with that. Right? So having all of that in place — yes, initial question was KPIs, so tracking kind of like that lead flow. Then where we have a deal, trying to understand what is happening. So we have like, as I said at the beginning, we have a checkbox. And the checkbox is we spoke to that person. Is it a champion? Is it a coach? And having like that sort of methodology, but we don't really stick to one methodology. We kind of, like, have multiple methodologies in that. And also, like, demos — what we look at is have we actually shown them the product? Who has shown them the product? Was it somebody from science or was it somebody from presales? So looking at kind of, like, the demos we have, and that is usually a very good indicator. And the more you get into the deal stages, the kind of like high value our demos are. So you can see if somebody is already at a stage where they've spoken to presales, they've spoken to sales, they've spoken to our scientists, that is already a way higher conversion rate than we created a deal, and the person doesn't contact us anymore because something happened. So we're currently trying to understand what is happening throughout the deal and what does that communication look like between the coach or the champion.

Philipp Stelzer: Yeah. So it sounds to me like it's very activity heavy. So, basically, understanding, okay, how many meetings were scheduled? What was, like, the no show rate? Essentially, like, how many emails did we send? What was the reply rate? How long did it take them to reply? And then looking at the meetings themselves. I mean, like, I think, fully get it. Right? This is, like, shameless plug, but, I mean, this is the number one reason why we built also meeting and email tracking into Weflow because we really find that this is such a strong indicator of understanding what actually the conversations are and how fast they are, how fluent they are, in order to understand whether this is a real deal or not and whether it's stalling. And I think if you then add in the conversation intelligence piece and you have these keyword trackers included in there and, of course, Gong is like a category leader here, no question, then, yeah, it I think it just becomes extremely valuable. But do I get you right that you're not using then, like, a specific sales methodology, or do you use that as well, like MEDDIC or MEDDPICC or something like this?

Alexandra Schimpf: Yeah. I think we kind of, like, put together a few methodologies because MEDDIC would be too — I don't wanna say simple, but it would be too much of a checkbox exercise. So we have some sort of metrics which we want to track, which we kind of, like, put into the different deal stages and what needs to happen throughout the deal stage in order to move forward. But there is also, like, kind of, like, a split between who needs to be involved at what stage, like from our side, and then from their side, so from our customer side, what kind of persona do we need to speak to at what stage. So there is a little bit more of a, like, complexity around personas as well, which I don't know if MEDDIC is a great methodology to actually cover that. So we had to, in yeah, just have, like, our own little bit of customized — again, shows how complex the product is — to have, like, a more customized and, yeah, put a little bit more complexity into the methodology. But just like going back to what you just said, like having — I would love to have a tool which tells me or gives me updates whenever a deal moves the stage and actually checks those checkboxes itself. So I was just thinking about, like, Gong is great, but at the same time, there's still so much we can do and so much Gong will probably do and probably Weflow will do because it would be great. And I think that is the number one question which AEs get is give me an update on your deal. And there is already options to give an update on your deal without having, like, a human actually explaining the update, but it would be amazing to actually see, okay, those five boxes have been checked because the AI has checked it. So I'm waiting until the day comes where there is a tool like that, which actually provides us kind of, like, with our information that we could double check that with the AEs and say, okay. Great. It's aligned. Or, if it's not aligned, why it isn't aligned and having those discussions in the future.

Philipp Stelzer: Yep. Yeah. For sure. For sure. I mean, it's also something we are working on, and I think solving to some extent. But I hear you. This definitely would be — maybe I'll add this to the product backlog. Why not? We'll explore it. We'll explore it more. One thing also that you mentioned was forecasting. Definitely wanna talk about that as well because, yeah. I mean, like, we have a couple of customers who also work more on the enterprise level, and for them, forecasting is quite hard. I always feel like for the mid tier, like mid market companies that are our customers, it's easier for them to do proper forecasting and build a good forecasting process because, yes, they also have these super big deals, but then very often, they just don't forecast on them. So they focus more on the bulk of, like, larger deals, like or, like, basically, like, the large amount of deals with a medium sized ACV because that's easier to forecast on with a bottom up approach, while these enterprise deals often require sort of like a top down forecast, but really could go either way. So, yeah, curious how you do it at Causaly and what your approach there is to forecasting.

Alexandra Schimpf: Yeah. I think that is something which we can definitely improve on. But because we do have just a handful of deals and there isn't that much movement usually, like, probably it's a — this happened. Now we think it will probably close or this happened. We think the probability is a bit smaller. So there's, like, a probability aspect of it. And, also, currently, it is not really our sales team — like you said, it is more the top down approach, so our VPs are involved in that as well. So I think moving forward, it would be great to have a way to kind of, like, forecast on those mid deals like this, the mid market deals, which we also have. It's not just the one million deals. But because the higher ACV deals are just so important and so impactful, there isn't necessarily, like, a methodology we currently have, and there isn't also necessarily a proper process other than we have a spreadsheet and we put it onto a spreadsheet. And this is one thing which I also wanted to bring up is, like, spreadsheets, revenue operations, and spreadsheets is kind of like there is a love hate relationship, sometimes more hate than not, unfortunately. And I think also, like, moving forward, it can't just live in spreadsheets. But again, there is complexity to it. There is so much which is customized to what each company does and how they do it. It's very difficult to have it all in one tool because it will be at the end, it will be a tool and a spreadsheet. It will never be just a tool. There is always going to be a spreadsheet. But then it's like one thing which I've seen here. It's very spreadsheet heavy at the moment on the forecasting side. And because it is like, our senior leadership team who is kind of like making those decisions, what are we forecasting? How does it look like? Having, like, weekly meetings where we just last discussed that. I would say we can improve it, and I like your kind of, like, thinking of that mid market is usually a good, like, a good team which probably uses your solution the most as well. We tried to do it in Gong as well. I could not get that much adoption on it. People did just not really see it as priority yet, but I see it in future. So I think that will be something which we'll definitely do in a few months' time because we will have like, I can see it in the pipeline kind of, like, we will have a few deals which will kind of, like, have that approach instead of just having a handful of bigger deals. So definitely something to improve on going away from spreadsheets. And at WP Engine, it was very different, I have to say. Maybe, like, that's a bit of an easier example because we had Clari where we did everything, really. And we actually bought Clari while I was there. So at the beginning, it was also very spreadsheet heavy. And people like AEs would just put in their forecast into Google Forms, and then that would be in a spreadsheet. And then we kind of tracked what happened and who is forecasting how much, and then we use that