Philipp Stelzer: Hello, and welcome to another edition of the RevOps Lab Podcast. I'm here with Janis, and our guest today is Crissy Saunders from CS2. Crissy, very warm welcome.

Crissy Saunders: Thank you for having me. Yeah. For your listeners, you've already heard from my husband, I think. So it's time to have the other side of CS2 on. So happy to be here.

Philipp Stelzer: Yeah. It was like a — it was even, like, a historic episode at this point because it was, like, more than six months ago. We're not that old as a podcast format. So but, yeah, I think it's one of the episodes we're gonna rebroadcast when Christmas season comes.

Crissy Saunders: Yeah. Maybe to get started, Crissy, who are you? What do you do?

Crissy Saunders: Yeah. So I'm Crissy Saunders. I'm the CEO of CS2, like you said. I cofounded our agency who works with fast growing B2B tech companies, mainly in the Bay Area, but all across the US and abroad. We've been running for almost ten years. We're in our tenth year. And I started on the marketing ops side of the world. I worked at Marketo and different startups. Same thing with Charlie, my husband, the co-founder. And together, we joined and started CS2. And since then, we've been working with amazing companies, some of which people know the name like Gong, Outreach, Coursera, and so forth. And just since then, we have expanded on from marketing operations more into what we now call go-to-market operations. We've kinda always been doing it, but before, it was like, we do marketing operations plus sales operations and some RevOps. And we try to be really clear now around what we deliver to clients instead of who we are from an organization standpoint. And so go-to-market operations for us is really around the buyer journey, tracking and executing on the go-to-market motions that support that buyer journey and then using those analytics to improve it as well. So everything from a lead who comes to your website, how you actually market to that person, and then tracking it all the way through to revenue and everything in between that, like the sales process and so forth. So that's what we do. And I think for a lot of our companies, they're fast growing. They come to us. Their operations is usually a mess. It's under resourced, and so we help them make sense of it all, give them a framework they can actually use to get their campaigns and go-to-market strategy off the ground, and also give them the reporting model that they can use to improve it as well as have better planning for the organization.

Janis Zech: Yeah. So you kind of, like, draw the line then at the renewal process. That's where you stop supporting?

Crissy Saunders: Yeah. I would say the cash part is usually where we stop. So even from, like, a renewal or upsell expansion, we'll track that, especially around the marketing that can help support it. But anything around CPQ or the deal desk and so forth, we pretty much stop there. Although we do have experts on our team who have experience in it, but we try and be more focused on anything that kind of involves the buyer journey, including the sales process.

Janis Zech: Got it. Yeah. I mean, during your intro, I already had to think about so many questions. How did you two meet? How is it working together? Maybe, should we do a podcast together? But that's the topic for today. After working with one hundred companies and helping the RevOps teams of one, develop this go-to-market framework. Today, we wanna dissect that go-to-market framework. Why did you develop it?

Crissy Saunders: Yeah. So most of the time when we end up working with a client, we found that we were pulled in for a series of projects. Even from our first few clients that we had almost ten years ago, it was really clear when we came on that they were having trouble figuring out how to take their go-to-market strategy and, like, execute it in a way that's scalable and report on it and then also develop a tracking system for all of their buyers coming through into their funnel and create a sales process around that. So most of the time, like in better words for RevOps people, if you hear like, okay, we're having trouble with tracking our lifecycle in the funnel. We don't have any stages defined. We don't have a sales process defined. We don't even have our campaign channels nailed down and how we actually track those and what's driving conversions to a campaign. And then basically just chaining all of their efforts back to revenue. So we were working on a bunch of those projects and helping our clients. And, of course, there's a lot of different things that come through when we develop a road map. We look at what their pains are and their needs, but we thought, okay. It's better when you have just a more holistic approach in not only how we engage a client to give them the infrastructure they really need. Because oftentimes, they're not thinking about, like, oh, I'm struggling to report on x y z. They're not thinking about, well, there's some big fundamental foundation things that you haven't done, which is why you can't report in that way. They just know their pains. And so a lot of the time, we uncover those pains, and that's how we said, okay. Well, we're gonna take what we do because a lot of the time people thought of us as marketing ops. They'd come to us to help with more traditional marketing ops. Now there's RevOps, but then we even work with clients who have a different definition of RevOps — it's more on the sales side. And so instead of just plugging into, telling the market who we are from an organizational framework, like what people have as far as teams, we try to focus on what we deliver. And so we developed and said, okay. Let's take the things that we know companies need — fast growing B2B tech companies need. Let's develop a framework around it and a story around it. And so anytime a new client comes in, we take them through our roadmap to actually execute against it. So by the end of their first six months or year, they have all of the foundation. They're able to track all of their go-to-market motions as part of their strategy in the right way. And they're actually able to use that data to help their marketers and salespeople be better at the outbound or campaigns that they're executing and also use it for better planning. So goal setting as well and uncovering inefficiencies. So, yeah, basically, instead of taking this world that feels massive — and I think a lot of operators feel this way, especially at startups — it's distilling that down and being like, okay, this is where we need to focus.

Janis Zech: Yeah. I mean, so the go-to-market framework you all developed is highly visual. You have to really, you know, zoom in if it's on a PDF because there's a lot on it. It's almost like a massive cheat sheet. And so, you know, we'll put a link in the show notes so everybody can look at it. Highly recommend to look at it. I think it's a fantastic framework. We had Jako on the show. Right? Like, and he went through, like, his frameworks. And I think those frameworks, they are always super helpful to, you know, look at the world and actually kind of when you talk to your customers — basically that you speak the same language. And so, you know, maybe let's kick off with the first question. Right? Like, when I ran Fiverr, my previous company, I started in two thousand nine, you know, I chose the CRO title being responsible for product and all things go-to-market back in two thousand ten before this was a thing, and everybody was always looking at me like, what is that weird title? And, you know, a lot of people also joked about it for some reason. But, you know, like, we call it RevOps, actually, business systems and integrations. And it also includes FinOps if you want to. What's the difference in your mind about go-to-market ops versus RevOps? Is there a difference? Is it just a rebrand?

Crissy Saunders: Yeah. So I don't think of it as like a rebrand of RevOps. If anything, I think go-to-market ops can just be, like, a sub team under RevOps or just a focus area. Because when you think about the go-to-market strategy, executing the campaigns underneath it, creating a process for it, then the sales process from SDR to sales leader — there's a lot of key stakeholders and people that own different parts of the customer journey and the sales process. So if anything, for us, the go-to-market ops can be a group that can live under RevOps, but they're so focused on this methodology. And a lot of the time, the people that can focus on that usually maybe have a background in marketing ops just because they're very keen and aware to figure out how to bring marketing and sales campaigns to market and then also the funnel. Like, they're usually very much involved with, okay. How do we track a buyer? What signals are we sending over to sales? How do we score those activities and so forth? But it also has key stakeholders, I think, that maybe would even be traditionally a sales ops person or, you know, still called RevOps where they can help with defining the sales stages, creating the automation around how the data is tracked within, like, CRM and so forth. So we like to think of go-to-market operations less on, like, a team structure, but more around a focus area or for us, like, what we deliver to the client. And so I do think that there's, like, different camps — like, oh, go-to-market ops, it's just a rebranding of RevOps. And it's like, well, I think you can have RevOps, but go-to-market ops should be kind of a focus area, especially for startups where maybe they don't even have finance ops or they don't have business operations or anything like that, but they likely have, you know, sales ops folks, marketing ops folks, an SDR leader, and so forth whose sole job is to focus on the campaigns, the execution of that, the measurement of it, and then the sales process to support it all.

Janis Zech: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, yeah, fully agree and subscribe to it. I think sometimes these discussions around where do you draw the line between this and that and, like, what's the name? Like, how would you call this? Is it RevOps? Is it, like, commercial ops? Something else. Like, does it really matter? I think, like, as long as you have internal agreement, then as long as the organization has internal agreement, I think it doesn't really matter. Maybe like on the job market, then you have the wrong title — that can be a problem at some point. So it's good to adjust it every now and then. Right? But yeah, other than that, really, it's about like, what are you focusing on and what are the needs in your organization? Like you said, right? Like, if you're like a really late stage company, pre-IPO, revenue operations automatically will focus more on the financial side of things. And if you're very, like, scale-up focused, then, of course, your focus is more on go-to-market because you need to scale, and that's, like, your focus.

Crissy Saunders: So yeah. I think that also looking at CS2 and how we even title our teams might be a good representation of what we deliver, which is go-to-market operations. But the way that we structure our team that is supporting every client is we have our leads, which are go-to-market op strategists. We have our technical team who focus more on the CRM side, which is solutions architecture and analytics. It also includes our analysts. We have a marketing ops team who's doing more of the stuff within a marketing automation platform — how the scoring on that works, order of operations, how leads are coming through from the website into the system. And then we have our campaign operations and execution team whose domain is really around actually executing the campaign. So if you look even around our team structure, usually you need someone or a leader or even a structure like that in an organization to actually make this work. Because a lot of the times, a campaign execution operations person, they don't have the time to actually be strategic and think about, you know, the reporting aspects or the sales process and lead those conversations with your key stakeholders. And then the same thing, the go-to-market strategist — yes, they may be a Jack or Jill of all trades. I've been one of those people where I've been like, marketing ops, RevOps, demand gen — but they'll usually still need their counterparts on, like, the CRM side to create flows to help with some of the tracking and also set up, you know, dashboards and so forth. And so I think looking at that structure, we don't say, like, everyone's a go-to-market ops x y z. We still have those different domains, but it's supporting go-to-market ops.

Janis Zech: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. No. I fully agree. Yeah. Like, maybe let's switch back to the framework that you developed. When you start talking to a new prospect or you onboard a new client, sort of, like, where do you start with explaining the framework to them? What's, like, the best sort of, like, pathway into it?

Crissy Saunders: Yeah. So, I mean, the good thing — I will say, kudos to, like, our whole team — a lot of the time, because we do so much content out there, like, we get inbound folks who kind of understand, like, what we do and their pain points and so forth. But when they come to us, like I said, they only know, like, a pain point or they have an idea of, like, what their — you know, a CMO is like, I'm unable to get the reports that I need from my board. I'm unable to see what campaigns are working from my team. It's usually, like, specific pains. And so when we do — even before we even sign a client — we'll usually educate them around the framework and our process and say, you know, you may be doing multiple go-to-market motions, like demand gen, outbound, partner led, like channel expansion, all of that. You need to have a process from campaign execution to, you know, data processing to who you're sending over to sales and how you define that, who is sales ready. You need to have — and the reporting method — it needs to be for all of those go-to-market motions. You can't have — well, one, they don't have the flexibility to have, like, different teams and so forth. You need to get a unified view into what is working. And a lot of the time, that is a key pain point because they may have, like, you know, one of those tracking well. Okay. Anyone that comes to us inbound, we're gonna figure out, okay. Is this person the right fit for us? Should they become a marketing qualified lead? They'll send that over to sales, and then they'll track that funnel all the way through. Well, what about everything else? What about if a salesperson goes outbound and then generates an opportunity? And so they'll have this data that they're like, well, I have all these MQLs. I have, like, way more opportunities that aren't tied to these MQLs. How do I make sense of it all? And so for us, it's like you're missing a huge part of that visibility into all of your go-to-market motions and your go-to-market strategy, and we help build a process to account for everything and be able to do it in a way that scales with them and that they can actually report on it just within their CRM. You can use BI tools, join the data. You can have a data warehouse and so forth, especially if we're pulling in data, say, for PLG or something like that where there's just too much to send to your CRM, but we try to also make everything simplified. It's almost harder to simplify all this stuff and focus on just the key areas and figure out a process that everyone understands and can use rather than build a lot of ad hoc, very complicated things that no one understands how it's working, and that doesn't serve the clients. It's usually what's just been happening to date, really.

Janis Zech: So the way I understand you is like, okay, let's assume you have multiple go-to-market motions — kind of you set a go-to-market foundation where you basically make a decision of like, what do you actually want to be like sales ready? Or like, kind of, what's the process so that something — whether that's inbound, outbound — is actually sales ready? Like, help us understand a bit better what are those steps you typically take to make those decisions? Because obviously, once it's sales ready, basically from a go-to-market efficiency standpoint, a lot of people would spend a lot of time on trying to, you know, convert those either accounts or, you know, contacts leads, like, you track it. And so I'm curious, like, how do you basically take those different go-to-market motions and then build the foundation so to decide what's sales ready? Is that by go-to-market motion or is it unified across all go-to-market motions? How does it specifically work?

Crissy Saunders: Yeah. So I think the easiest way to think about this is kind of splitting out what is kind of the demand that is coming through from marketing and you need to like kind of figure out who is sales ready. And then there are also cases where a go-to-market motion is maybe leaning more toward, you know, middle of the funnel or bottom of the funnel. So some channels like that would be, like, partner or channel led. And then from the inbound side, it can be — you know, say you run an event or someone comes to your website. And then from an outbound perspective, there's just like people on your sales team are deciding who they should follow up with. It could be signal based. It could be tied to a campaign, or it could literally just be them saying, I have this target account. I'm just gonna go start calling and reaching out to them. And so when you think about it, like, that's — I think first looking at, well, how are our journeys starting or when is someone entering the funnel and then working backward from that. So a demand gen or inbound led — we'll use that as an example. And, actually, for anyone who's interested, on our YouTube channel, I have a video that actually shows examples of this type of reporting by these different examples. So if you just search unified go-to-market data model, it'll be there. But I'll send you the link so you can put it in the show notes. So when it's inbound, it's usually there's more process around it. You need to try and figure out who this person is. Do they match your ICP? How much intent? Or is this a signal that's strong enough to send over to sales? For some organizations, that might literally just be a demo request or someone that came through and said, I wanna be contacted. Then, you know, most of the time, there'd be an attributional MQL, but we call it sales ready. Anything that is ready for sales, whether marketing has deemed it that way — which in this case it is, if they meet the criteria, say, like, lead scoring — that's your example. Like, okay. I'm gonna do lead scoring there. I don't wanna go too in the weeds, though, but we just call it, like, buyer data processing in this case and ICP scoring. So that is more traditional, and you attract those sales ready, and we create in our reporting model — we'd start tracking the lifecycle for that even down to that channel. So if it was a contact us, where did it come from? Did it come from Google? And then so that would be a paid search. And then we track that all the way through on that lifecycle to revenue so we can actually see what channels and campaigns or offers are working. Now the other things that are harder to track are, like, things like a partner led go-to-market motion or even outbound. So when you think about when you get deals from partners, it's very rare that you're just starting out like, hey. Here's some loads of leads from a co-event. That could happen. But a lot of the time, what happens from a channel or partner is, hey. We have this company who is interested. It's literally like an opportunity. We still want to be able to track that. So we work with the org to figure out how those opportunities are getting created, and that will backdate the stages that they missed. So it's still sales ready. It would have been tracked back to that, but then it'll go into an opportunity. So we still, on that lifecycle record, are able to see it came from partner, what partner it was, and, like, was there a corresponding partner campaign or something like that. But it'll still backdate those stages so we're able to track that all the way through. So the same way a demand gen inbound lead became sales ready, and then you track their stages through your funnel, we would still do that with, say, a partner opportunity that gets created but then backdate those stages. The velocity is quicker, obviously, so that can impact some of your conversion reporting, but you can still compare the different channels or your go-to-market motions. And then the same thing for sales outbound. If someone — say a salesperson — we'll use the most basic thing — they see someone, maybe they're using de-anonymization. They see an account came to their site. They go and try and find the right person to reach out to at that account. We will track that. If there's no marketing campaign that happened within a certain time frame, we'll track that back as sales and sales outbound, and then that would be the source and campaign that's tied to that funnel and still track it as sales ready, you know, the working stage, and then all the way through. So the key here is, like, you wanna be able to have the same type of lifecycle or funnel journey that you're tracking, but have the right data on that record and be able to track it all the way through so you're not missing out. And also, you wanna backdate your stages so you don't have lumpy reporting. Like, how many times have people gone and done some funnel reporting? They're like, well, we have, like, eighty opportunities, but then we're trying to track it back to MQLs. And it's crazy what you see today still. Like, some people are like, yeah. Let's just create a report of MQLs that generated this quarter and then how many opportunities we generated this quarter and then create a conversion rate out of it. It's like, that's not cohorted. All those MQLs actually are likely not the ones that turned into those opportunities, but yet I think people are still thinking about reporting that way. And then it's disjointed. You're missing out on some of those people that entered your funnel outside of just your normal traditional inbound efforts.

Janis Zech: Yeah. I mean, I think you're basically explaining the complexity of multi-touch, right? And what you actually can control and what you can't control. And I think partner is a great example where there's a lot of stuff happening that the partners are doing, but you actually don't have any control over it. You don't track it. You don't know it. And then partners sometimes are incentivized to even hold back and just bring it into the mix very late, which is obviously a huge challenge. But I think, obviously, you want to avoid that. You want to have rules in place that sales teams can't access the partner funnel. But you as a company from an ops perspective can do that and track it so that you have better reporting on that or better data on that to then lead to better reporting. But I think on the inbound versus outbound side, you actually control your destiny. So it's really a question like how well is it set up. You said something that I find really interesting and that is the aspect of — back in the days, MQL definition was very wide, I would say. Like some had like kind of MQL is kind of who signs up for something on the website with some sort of intent related to the — and then, you know, suddenly salespeople start calling and conversion rates were really low, but a lot of people actually spent a lot of money on that. It's obviously changing now with de-anonymization on websites. Do you think — because those folks who visit the website but maybe are not in your CRM, they actually come from somewhere. So what do you think? How is that changing the attribution? Because they don't land on your website without marketing doing something. They're not there accidentally. How do you make sense of that? That's a big, like, question in my mind.

Crissy Saunders: Yeah. So we like to think of there's the reporting on signals that you're sending to sales, and then there's attribution that is, you know, helpful for marketing and sales teams. Attribution is more helpful to try and figure out, like, of all the touch points that are hitting your buyer, which ones are they actually engaging with, which ones have more influence on the opportunity, and so forth. A multi-touch attribution model is great for that, but also just, like, anecdotal data is good for that, self-reported data. So attribution is a bit hairier because you have to, like, look at the data, maybe look at multiple forms of attribution data, and then make sense of it all. And we still help do that. But when it comes to the funnel tracking and why we tie that back to the campaign, the medium of which they got there — say, you know, the most basic example was, like, Google and then paid search and being able to slice on all those three things as, like, what was the last touch that made them sales ready? So drawing that line in the sand. Because what is better at telling you is what signals that we're sending to sales — or sales is even seeing themselves, or partners — as what should go to a salesperson and then trying to figure out, out of those sources, which ones have a better likelihood to convert to an opportunity in revenue, the velocity around it, and then being able to even separate out. Like, for some of our clients, we take all those journeys and the funnel data, and we'll even slice it by inbound versus outbound versus partner. Because all of those are even gonna have different conversion rates, and rightfully so. But it's good to actually compare them — not apples to apples or put it all together sometimes — because you will see inefficiencies like, hey. Maybe our inbound criteria for who's sales ready needs to be tightened up. And maybe it's seen, like, even by channel — okay. We're seeing actually only demo requests that are people in this size of company are actually converting, and then you can make adjustments. And then on the outbound side, maybe you find that when marketing gets involved and are actually saying who the sales team should follow up with based on a signal is more likely to convert rather than a salesperson just taking any de-anonymized web traffic and reaching out to all those companies. So I think attribution is separate where you have that separate source of data that is really useful for marketing and salespeople to figure out how can we improve things. I also say, like, not trying to prove, but improve. We say that a lot at CS2 around attribution data. And like you're mentioning, there's so many touch points that can't even be tracked. And so in some ways, marketers need to take a breath. And I try and tell CEOs this and CMOs this, like, your team is smart. Help them make their best ideas on, like, what is actually working. But in terms of what you're actually sending to a salesperson and who you're saying to follow up with, that is black and white most of the time. Of course, they could have done a bunch of things before that, but at least you can actually make efficiencies there and also see where there's breaking points in your funnel. So if you have a low conversion rate from even meeting booked to opportunity, those are quick wins and quick changes that you can easily use data to support. Attribution is more art and, you know, looking at the data, where the signal and funnel data is more science. You can literally, like, kinda take it for what it is and still make changes that are worthwhile. And attribution's tough, honestly. Like, so having something that you can draw lines in the sand and also get a team to rally around is important. And look, I run an agency. I look at people coming inbound. I can see they said, like, how they heard about us, and I still use that data. But if I was gonna send it to a salesperson, it would still just be part of that conversation. But I'm gonna know, okay. Sometimes we've had people say, oh, I Googled you. You get on a call with them. They're like, oh, I've actually been following your podcast for years. You know? So I think that's all making deductions ourselves. And so you know when your marketing's working. And sometimes this is where I feel like people are just, like, trying to be told instead of, like, using their noggins. You know?

Janis Zech: Well, you could also do implied attribution, which I'm a big fan of. Rand Fishkin talks about a lot of this. Like, you know, you have a billboard during a large event. You have a huge influx of traffic that week. You could probably figure out, like, that's probably because of that. It doesn't always have to be so black and white. And I think if marketers are only investing in those channels that are gonna come through in their reports, they're gonna do shitty marketing, in my opinion. I mean, like, that's how you do TV attribution. Right? You basically look at — you know the time stamp of when the TV ad started on which channel, you know the time stamp when it ended, and then you look at the uplift because, like, at least for many products, you do have, like, an immediate impact. I mean, obviously not maybe, like, for, I don't know, like, washing powder. I don't know. Probably not. No one's gonna jump on their mobile phone and order your brand immediately. But, like, for many, many products, it's possible. And I think also, like, you scale marketing. Right? Like, you sort of, like, you try out a lot of stuff in the beginning. It's messy. Then one thing works, and then you start to create this baseline, and then you add stuff to it, and then, you know, the baseline increases. So you know when your baseline increases, it doesn't need to be perfect in terms of attribution. So yeah. One thing I wanted to just also quickly mention is, like, on the signals. Right? I think that's — I mean, Weflow, we have activity capture. It's a big part of our suite, and it's essentially about this — like, people come to us and say, like, hey. We need more signals around email and meetings, and we can't get them into Salesforce. Einstein Activity Capture is not doing that for us. We cannot fully report on it. So, yeah, email and meeting — like, we basically see it every day. We talk to people who are struggling with turning that into a valuable signal that really helps them understand deal velocity and whether that is, like, a deal that is likely to close. And, yeah, one question I had top of mind for you specifically is sort of, like, you know, outside of meetings and emails, like, is there, like, you know, one thing where you would say this is, like, across most of our customers — this is, like, one of the most important signals you can have in order to judge an opportunity?

Crissy Saunders: I say it all depends on the client in some ways. But I think one of the things that I would say that would just give better ideas into the data — and like I said, you can't track everything, but the more you can figure out what are the best things to track, you can. Because we still see clients who barely — when they come on board with us — they're not even, like, using UTMs. Okay. Well, how are you even able to track things that are coming from a certain channel or, you know, campaign and so forth, even email? You can even do that for sales. So one thing that we do is for our lifecycle records, even for outbound, we'll even look at, like, what sequence they were in and the sequence step. And sometimes once they're, say, moving to a certain stage or even when they first start working it, we can stamp that data on the lifecycle record as well. Then we can actually see, okay, what types of, you know, outbound sequences and emailing actually performs better. And so I think it kind of always depends on the client. But I will say another thing that just works really well is when there's just, like, deep orchestration when it comes to how you wanna get into a certain account, and that requires a lot of alignment. So like I said, some people will say they wanna do ABM, but they're not actually doing, like, true ABM. One, I think it requires — if you are trying to get into a large account, and that's gonna be a deal breaker for your business — say you're trying to get into, like, Adobe or Microsoft or something like that — it's gonna be different in terms of how you would approach that account. And it's gonna require a lot of touch points, a lot of people involved, marketing and sales, and a lot of collaboration. And that works really well for ABM. But if you even take it a step back and even just from simple outbound, the more data that you can use to see, like, what signals are working even from an outbound perspective and create campaigns around those. So for some of our clients, they might find, hey, we actually find that we have a very strong conversion around a compelling event. Like if a grant gets created for our product or if a customer moves to a new company — it's very basic. But for some clients, if they time it well and have good messaging, that's a really strong signal for them. And it could be other, like, competitive signals. So when they're using a competitor, but that competitor's maybe incumbent or, like, just not great, you know, that's a good signal for them too. And being able to run kind of campaigns that you can track and marketing orchestrating who they should go after because sales is too busy and doesn't have the tools to help them figure that out. So the more that even marketing can help orchestrate these signals for sales that are outside of just people coming to them inbound, I think that's when things become more effective. And having tight alignment. I think a lot of companies will give goals to teams that are very